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All in The Natural World
It’s that time of year when residents of Iceland’s Westman Islands gather thousands of baby puffins and heave them off a cliff. The chicks not only survive the strange annual intervention, it’s crucial to their survival.
Certain small mammal species – shrews, voles, stoats, weasels – shrink their brains and other organs in wintertime, a strategy that helps them conserve energy when food is scarce. Now the European mole (Talpa europaea) has been found to deploy this same weird adaptation.
The CV for Sylvia Earle, who turns 87 today, is long, varied, and deep. The marine biologist, oceanographer, explorer, author, and science communicator has won a UN Lifetime Achievement Award, the Walter Cronkite Award, the Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science, and so many more.
A brown bear got into some hallucinogenic honey in Turkey’s northwestern Duzce province this week. It didn’t go well. The Guardian reported that the female brown bear was found wobbling and whining in the forest, where some good Samaritans rescued her. She had got into some mad honey, or “deli bal” in Turkish, produced by beekeepers who feed their honeymakers a kind of rhododendron nectar that packs a potent neurotoxin.
Long-tailed macaque monkeys at the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary in Bali have a lot of time on their hands and they’re not wasting it. Apparently the animals, male and female, are using stone tools as masturbatory aids.
Today we remember Henry David Thoreau, America’s original environmentalist. Born on July 12, 1817, Thoreau came of age in the thick of the Industrial Revolution, as machines transformed the lives of humans – for good or ill.
