Nature: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 3

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WonderNature

In 1925 relay teams of sled dogs carried diphtheria antitoxin 1,085 km across Alaska to save the town of Nome, cut off by winter ice. Twenty mushers and about 150 dogs made the run in five and a half days, in temperatures near −50°C.

Diphtheria is a bacterial throat infection that can suffocate children; the antitoxin neutralises the poison the bacteria make. Nome's doctor, Curtis Welch, had only an expired supply, and the open-cockpit aircraft of the day could not fly safely in such cold, so the serum went by train to Nenana and then by dog sled. The hardest leg fell to Leonhard Seppala and his twelve-year-old lead dog Togo, whose team covered about 420 km, including a crossing of the sea ice of Norton Sound in a gale. Balto led Gunnar Kaasen's team over the last 89 km into Nome, became famous, and has a statue in New York's Central Park. The Iditarod sled race commemorates the run.

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WonderNature

Hachikō, an Akita dog, met his owner at Shibuya Station in Tokyo every evening. After the professor died suddenly at work in 1925, Hachikō kept returning to the station at the same time almost every day for nearly ten years.

His owner, Hidesaburō Ueno, taught agriculture at Tokyo Imperial University. He died suddenly in May 1925 in a colleague's office, not during a lecture as is often said. Hachikō was passed between several homes but kept going back to Shibuya. Many commuters took him for a stray until a 1932 article in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper told his story, and he became a national symbol of loyalty. A bronze statue was unveiled at the station in 1934 with Hachikō present. He died in March 1935. The statue was melted down for its metal during the Second World War; the replacement, put up in 1948, is still one of Tokyo's best-known meeting points.

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WonderNature

A ship's cat known as Unsinkable Sam is said to have survived three sinkings in 1941: the German battleship Bismarck, the British destroyer HMS Cossack and the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal. He was then retired to a sailors' home in Belfast.

According to the story, a black-and-white cat, said to have been called Oscar, was found clinging to floating wreckage after the Bismarck sank in May 1941 and was taken aboard HMS Cossack. Cossack was torpedoed in October; the cat was moved to HMS Ark Royal, which was torpedoed and sank in November. The tale rests on sailors' accounts rather than official records, and historians think it was at least embellished: ships' cats were common, and a good story travelled fast between ports. A pastel portrait of the cat by Georgina Shaw-Baker is in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Sam is said to have lived in Belfast until 1955.

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WonderNature

Old Tjikko, a small Norway spruce on Fulufjället mountain in Sweden, grows from a root system radiocarbon-dated to about 9,550 years old. That makes it the oldest known Norway spruce and one of the oldest known living trees.

The trunk you can see is only a few centuries old; the organism beneath it is far older. Norway spruce can clone itself: a low branch touching the ground takes root and grows into a new stem with the same genes, so when an old trunk dies a new one replaces it. For thousands of years the tree survived as a low, wind-bent shrub and only grew an upright trunk during the warmer twentieth century. Leif Kullman of Umeå University and his wife, Lisa Öberg, found it in 2004 and named it after their late dog. The radiocarbon dating of wood beneath it was announced in 2008.

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WonderHistory

In February 1959 nine experienced Soviet hikers died at what is now called the Dyatlov Pass in the northern Ural Mountains. They had cut open their tent from the inside and fled into −25°C, many without shoes, and the case fuelled decades of theories.

The group, mostly students and graduates of the Ural Polytechnic Institute, was led by Igor Dyatlov, after whom the pass is named. Searchers found the bodies over several months: six had died of hypothermia, while three had severe chest or skull injuries with little outward damage. Traces of radiation on some clothing fed theories ranging from weapons tests to attacks. In 2020 Russian prosecutors named an avalanche as the most likely cause. In 2021 Johan Gaume and Alexander Puzrin, using snow-simulation methods first developed for the animated film Frozen, showed how a small slab avalanche could have forced the group out of the tent. Not everyone accepts this explanation.

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WonderNature

Mike the Headless Chicken lived for 18 months after a Colorado farmer cut off his head for dinner in 1945. The bird got up and walked away, was fed through a dropper and was taken on tour across the United States.

The farmer, Lloyd Olsen of Fruita, swung the axe at a five-and-a-half-month-old Wyandotte cockerel. The blade removed most of the head but missed the jugular vein, and a blood clot stopped him bleeding to death. Most of the brain stem, which controls breathing, heartbeat and many reflexes, was left intact, along with one ear. Olsen fed him milk and water with an eyedropper, and crowds paid to see him on tour. In March 1947 Mike choked during the night in a motel in Phoenix, Arizona; the Olsens had left behind the syringe they used to clear his airway and could not save him. Fruita still holds a yearly festival in his honour.

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WonderEvolution

Darwin's finches, more than a dozen bird species of the Galápagos Islands, all descend from a single ancestor. Their beaks range from thick nutcrackers for hard seeds to fine tweezers for insects, each suited to the food on its island.

Darwin collected some of these birds in 1835 during the voyage of HMS Beagle but did not realise at the time how closely related they were; the ornithologist John Gould pointed it out after the voyage. Today they are a textbook case of adaptive radiation, in which one ancestral species splits into many, each suited to a different way of life. Despite the name, they are not true finches but belong to the tanager family. Since 1973 Peter and Rosemary Grant have studied them on the small island of Daphne Major. After a severe drought in 1977 left mostly large, hard seeds, birds with bigger beaks survived better, and the next generation's beaks were measurably larger: evolution seen within a few years.

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WonderMigration

Eastern monarch butterflies fly up to 4,800 kilometres from Canada and the United States to the mountains of central Mexico each autumn, yet no single butterfly makes the whole round trip: the yearly cycle takes about four generations.

The butterflies that fly south in late summer are a special generation: they live about eight months, while the summer generations before them live less than two. They spend the winter packed by the million on oyamel fir trees in the mountains of Michoacán and the State of Mexico, then start north in spring, lay eggs on milkweed in the southern United States and die. Milkweed is the only food their caterpillars eat. Their children and grandchildren carry on northwards. Where the monarchs wintered was a mystery until January 1975, when Kenneth Brugger and Catalina Aguado (later Trail), volunteers helping the Canadian zoologist Fred Urquhart, found the first colony.

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StillnessOcean

Mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass meadows draw carbon dioxide from the air and lock it away in waterlogged coastal mud, often for centuries. Scientists call this stored carbon 'blue carbon'.

The term was popularised by a 2009 United Nations report. Coastal mud holds so little oxygen that dead roots and leaves rot very slowly, so carbon keeps building up in the soil instead of returning to the air. These habitats cover only a small fraction of the seabed, yet they are thought to account for about half of all the carbon buried in ocean sediments. Mangroves also break waves, trap sediment and shelter young fish and crabs among their roots. When the wetlands are drained or cleared for shrimp farms or building, the stored carbon can escape back into the atmosphere.

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WonderMigration

Every year more than a million wildebeest, joined by hundreds of thousands of zebras and gazelles, walk a great loop through Tanzania's Serengeti and Kenya's Maasai Mara, following the rains to fresh grass.

The herds have no fixed route; their path shifts each year with the rain. Early in the year hundreds of thousands of calves are born within a few weeks in the southern Serengeti. As the plains dry out the herds move north and west, reach Kenya's Mara in the middle of the year and return south when the short rains begin. The most dangerous moment is crossing the Mara River. A 2017 study found that on average about 6,250 wildebeest drown there each year, and their carcasses, some 1,100 tonnes, feed fish, crocodiles and vultures and fertilise the river for years. Grazing herds also keep the grasslands healthy.

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WonderMigration

Pronghorn from Grand Teton National Park travel up to about 240 km (150 miles) between their summer range and their winter range in Wyoming's Upper Green River Basin. Roads, fences and new building now cut across this ancient route.

Pronghorn look like antelopes but are the last surviving members of a family found only in North America. They can reach about 88 km/h, a speed beaten on land only by the cheetah, yet they rarely jump: faced with a fence, they look for a gap to crawl under, so tight wire fencing can block a route completely. At Trappers Point, a narrow bottleneck on the route, archaeologists found remains of pronghorn hunts about 6,000 years old. In 2008 the US Forest Service designated the Path of the Pronghorn, the first federally protected wildlife migration corridor in the United States. In 2012, overpasses and underpasses built on US Highway 191 near Pinedale gave the herds a safe way across the road.

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WonderNature

Welwitschia, a plant of the Namib Desert in Namibia and Angola, grows only two leaves in its whole life. They keep growing from their base for centuries, and some plants are thought to be more than a thousand years old.

The Austrian botanist Friedrich Welwitsch came across the plant in southern Angola in 1859; he wrote that he knelt and gazed at it, half afraid that touching it would prove it imaginary. It is a gymnosperm, like conifers, which means its seeds form in cones rather than inside fruit, and male and female cones grow on separate plants. Over the years the wind tears the two leaves into many ribbons, so an old plant looks like a heap of leaves. The Namib is one of the driest places on Earth. The leaves catch fog and dew, which drip onto shallow roots, although a 2019 study suggests that rain soaking into the ground is its main water source. The plant appears on Namibia's coat of arms.

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WonderNature

The saiga, an antelope of the Central Asian steppes, has an enlarged, flexible nose that filters out dust in summer and warms and moistens freezing air in winter before it reaches the lungs.

Saigas live on the dry grasslands of Kazakhstan, Russia, Uzbekistan and Mongolia, and herds migrate hundreds of kilometres between summer and winter pastures. Their numbers collapsed after the Soviet Union broke up: poaching of males for their horns, used in traditional Chinese medicine, cut the population by about 95 per cent. In May 2015, during unusually warm, humid weather, a bacterium the animals normally carry harmlessly, Pasteurella multocida, caused a blood infection that killed about 200,000 saigas in Kazakhstan within a few weeks, more than half of all saigas then alive. Protection from poaching has since let the Kazakh herds recover so strongly that in 2023 the International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the species from Critically Endangered to Near Threatened.

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WonderNature

The kākāpō, a flightless, night-active parrot of New Zealand, courts with sound: in the rare years when it breeds, males dig shallow bowls in the ground and boom from them through the night, a deep call that can carry for more than a kilometre.

The kākāpō is the world's only flightless parrot and the heaviest, with males weighing up to about 4 kilograms. It once lived across New Zealand, but hunting and the dogs and rats brought by Polynesian settlers, then the cats, stoats and rats that came with Europeans, drove it close to extinction. Today every surviving bird has a name and lives on predator-free islands or in fenced sanctuaries, watched over by the Kākāpō Recovery programme. Females breed only in years when rimu and some other native trees produce a huge crop of fruit, known as masting, which comes every two to four years. In those seasons rangers check nests closely and sometimes raise chicks by hand.

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WonderNature

Great frigatebirds can sleep while soaring over the ocean, sometimes with one half of the brain and sometimes with both. In flight, though, they sleep only about 40 minutes a day, against more than 12 hours a day on land.

The finding comes from a 2016 study led by Niels Rattenborg of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany. His team fitted great frigatebirds nesting in the Galápagos Islands with small devices that recorded brain activity during flights lasting up to ten days. Most sleep came in bursts of about twelve seconds, often while the birds circled upward in rising warm air. When only one half of the brain slept, the eye linked to the awake half usually looked in the direction of flight. Frigatebirds hunt far out at sea, yet their feathers are not waterproof, so they cannot rest on the water. How they cope with so little sleep is still not known.

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WonderNature

Leafcutter ants do not eat most of the leaves they harvest; they process them into a growing medium for a domesticated fungus that feeds the colony.

Leafcutter ants grow a single fungus, Leucoagaricus gongylophorus, which is not known to live anywhere outside their nests. Ants began farming fungi around 50 to 60 million years ago; leafcutters are a much younger branch of that lineage, and their crop is passed from nest to nest rather than gathered from the wild. A young queen leaving to found a colony carries a small pellet of it in a pouch inside her mouth. Many colonies also have a third partner: bacteria called Pseudonocardia, grown on the ants' bodies, make antibiotics that help keep down Escovopsis, a mould that can wipe out the fungus garden. A mature nest of Atta leafcutters can house several million ants in chambers reaching several metres underground.

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StillnessNature

Biological soil crusts are living communities of cyanobacteria, lichens, fungi, mosses and algae that bind dryland soil and influence water and nutrient cycles.

Scientists often call these crusts biocrusts. The cyanobacterium Microcoleus vaginatus is usually among the first to settle: its sticky filaments glue sand grains together and prepare the ground for the lichens, mosses and algae that follow. Some crust organisms also fix nitrogen, taking it from the air and turning it into a form plants can use, which matters in poor desert soils. Growth is slow in dry ground, so a crushed crust can take years to regain its first layer and decades or even centuries to rebuild fully. In US national parks on the Colorado Plateau, such as Arches and Canyonlands, signs ask visitors to stay on the trails with the slogan 'Don't bust the crust'.

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StillnessNature

Cloud forests catch water straight from passing cloud: tiny droplets collect on leaves, mosses and branches, then drip to the ground, adding a significant share of the forest's water.

Scientists call this fog drip or horizontal precipitation, because the water arrives sideways on the wind rather than falling as rain. Epiphytes, plants such as mosses, ferns and orchids that grow on other plants instead of in soil, are especially good at it: their tangled surfaces multiply the area that catches droplets. In some cloud forests, fog supplies a significant share of the water that reaches the ground in the dry season, when rain is scarce. Monteverde in Costa Rica is one of the best-studied examples, and research published there in 1999 linked warming seas to clouds forming higher up the mountains, leaving less fog in the forest. Clearing the trees removes this water catcher along with the forest.

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WonderNature

Some lodgepole pines keep their seeds inside cones sealed shut with resin. The heat of a forest fire melts the seal and releases the seeds onto freshly cleared, ash-rich ground.

Botanists call this trait serotiny, from a Latin word meaning 'late': the cones open late, once heat has melted their resin, typically at around 45 to 60 degrees Celsius. Sealed cones can keep seeds alive on the branches for many years, so a stand carries its own seed bank long before any fire arrives. The strategy became famous after the Yellowstone fires of 1988, when many burnt slopes filled with young lodgepole pines within a few years. Not every tree does it. In some populations most cones stay sealed, while in others most open each year like ordinary cones, a mix that tends to follow how often fire has struck the area.

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WonderNature

Rafflesia arnoldii lives almost entirely inside a tropical vine as a parasite, emerging briefly to produce a vast carrion-scented flower.

Rafflesia arnoldii grows in the rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo. It is named after Sir Stamford Raffles and the surgeon and naturalist Joseph Arnold, who recorded it in Sumatra in 1818; local people knew it long before. It is a holoparasite: it has no green tissue at all and takes all its water and food from its host, a Tetrastigma vine of the grape family, living as threads of cells inside the vine's stem. A bud swells for many months before opening into a flower up to about a metre across and weighing several kilograms, the largest single flower of any plant. Its smell of rotting meat draws the carrion flies that pollinate it, and the bloom lasts only about a week. Several Rafflesia species are threatened as forests are cleared.

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WonderNature

Elephants generate and detect low-frequency ground vibrations, using sensitive feet and trunks to receive seismic information carried through soil.

The biologist Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell began studying this in African elephants in Namibia in the 1990s. Her team found that an elephant's low rumbles and stamps also send vibrations through the ground, and that other elephants react when such signals are played back through the soil. Researchers estimate that these ground waves may carry for several kilometres, in some conditions further than the same call through the air. Elephants seem to pick them up in two ways: through pressure-sensitive nerve endings called Pacinian corpuscles in the feet and trunk, and through vibration travelling up the leg bones to the inner ear. Elephants have been seen leaning forward or lifting a foot as if listening. How much the ground channel can carry is still being studied.

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WonderNature

Common vampire bats form enduring social bonds and may regurgitate blood meals to hungry roost-mates, including non-relatives who have shared before.

A vampire bat that fails to feed can starve within about two to three nights, so a shared meal can be the difference between life and death. The biologist Gerald Wilkinson described the sharing in detail in 1984, from wild bats in Costa Rica, and showed that bats tend to feed those that have fed them before, a rare mammal example of reciprocal help between non-relatives. Later studies led by Gerald Carter found that new partnerships grow step by step, starting with grooming before any blood is shared. In a 2019 study, bats that had formed bonds while housed together in captivity kept many of those bonds after release into the wild, where they were tracked with tiny proximity sensors.

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WonderNature

The leaf-eating hoatzin relies on microbes in an enlarged foregut to ferment tough vegetation, an unusual digestive strategy among birds.

The hoatzin lives in swampy forests along rivers in the Amazon and Orinoco basins of South America. It is the only bird known to digest leaves mainly by fermentation at the front of its gut, much as a cow does in its rumen. Bacteria in its huge crop and lower oesophagus break down tough plant fibre before food reaches the stomach. The fermenting crop gives the bird a manure-like smell, which earned it the English nickname 'stinkbird' and means it is seldom hunted for food. The oversized crop also leaves little room for flight muscles, so hoatzins are clumsy fliers. Chicks have two claws on each wing, which help them climb back into the branches after dropping into the water to escape a predator.

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WonderNature

The hooded pitohui, a songbird of New Guinea, can carry batrachotoxin, a nerve poison also found in some poison frogs, in its skin and feathers. Levels vary from bird to bird and are thought to come from its diet.

People in New Guinea have long known the bird is unpleasant to eat, and Western naturalists recorded this as early as 1895; 'pitohui' is said to be a Papuan term for 'rubbish bird'. Its poison drew scientific attention in 1990, when researchers preparing the birds' skins for museum collections felt numbness and burning in their hands. In 1992 a team including the ornithologist Jack Dumbacher reported homobatrachotoxin, a close relative of batrachotoxin, in the skin and feathers, making pitohuis among the first poisonous birds documented by science. The likely source was later traced to small Choresine beetles, found in pitohuis' stomachs and carrying the same family of toxins. The poison probably helps deter predators and parasites such as feather lice.

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