“They are part of our landscape,” says Miner. “They belong there. We need the cattle [so we can] survive, but we need the pronghorn because they are a natural part of the landscape … In some ways they belong here more than we do.”

Miner is one of 38 private landowners across New Mexico who participated in the state’s Pronghorn Conservation Recognition Program in 2021 to help increase pronghorn numbers. The state provides landowners with expert guidance on how to improve habitat. In return, landowners are allowed to extend the hunting season, which allows some of them to earn additional income. But that isn’t Miner’s main motivation.

Instead, supporting pronghorn is just one part of a larger goal to be a better steward of the land. “It can never be what it was,” says Miner of the landscape. “But I’d like to see it recover to a point where it is more resilient than it is now; where our [cattle] herds and wildlife herds, the grass and ground are more resilient. How we graze and how we deal with wildlife are parts of that.”

Miner’s family has ranched in this spot since the nineteenth century. But it is an admittedly damaged landscape, degraded by decades of activity at nearby Fort Union (which served as a U.S. Army supply depot for the Southwest between 1851 and 1891 and is now a National Monument) and the wagon wheels of the historic Santa Fe Trail which ran right through it. About 25 years ago Miner began noticing other threats, including a drier climate due to climate change. So he’s been shifting management of the ranch slowly over time. He now rotates his cattle among 25 different pastures to maintain healthy forage. Each pasture has a water source for cattle. Yet even when cattle have moved on to greener pastures, Miner maintains the water for wildlife, which includes not only pronghorn but bears, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, elk, and even beaver.

Still, 25 pastures on 100,000 acres means “hundreds and hundreds of miles” of fencing, according to Miner. And fences are the pronghorns’ nemesis. Before European settlement, millions of pronghorn roamed the West from Canada to Mexico, according to Anthony Patz, State Pronghorn Biologist for New Mexico. By the turn of the twentieth century those numbers had plummeted to around 13,000. Why? Cattle ranchers had put up fences to keep cattle in; something pronghorn had never encountered before.

Pronghorn are excellent runners – the fastest in North America in fact. But fences seem to baffle them: they simply don’t jump over them. It was decades before scientists discovered that pronghorn prefer to crawl under fences, and need at least 18 inches of clearance to squeeze through. Typically, fences don’t have that clearance. Thousands of miles of fencing across the West disrupted pronghorns’ migration routes as well as their daily search for food and water. Moreover, early settlers hunted pronghorn indiscriminately, even during fawning season when females were giving birth. “It was kind of a free-for-all,” Patz says. Hunting now is tightly regulated, and as old fences fall into disrepair, landowners like Miner are replacing them with pronghorn-friendly fencing. By 2019, public and private lands in New Mexico supported 60,000 pronghorn.

Pronghorn aren’t really antelope. Instead, they are the only species left from a group of antelope-like grazers that roamed North America before the ice age. Their ancient lineage could explain why they are so fast. Many scientists have speculated that pronghorn evolved speed to escape now-extinct predators that thrived millions of years ago. But the fossil record is unclear. With unusually large eyes and lung capacity, light bones and long limbs, pronghorn clearly have evolved to spot predators from a distance and outrace them, reaching 60 miles per hour for short distances. Only the African cheetah is faster, sprinting 70 miles per hour for up to 30 seconds. But unlike the cheetah, pronghorn can maintain speeds of up to 45 miles per hour for miles. Today, pronghorns’ main predator is coyotes, which are ubiquitous in the American West. Coyotes don’t outrun pronghorn but instead outsmart them, backing them up against fences or corralling them in groups according to Patz. “It’s kind of like a game of chess.”

Human hunters are also predators, taking about 4,600 of New Mexico’s pronghorn in 2019. Matt Christmas’ family has ranched in New Mexico for generations, and many are avid hunters. Christmas participates in the state’s pronghorn protection program and proudly notes that he has replaced about 80 percent of his ranch’s boundary fencing with pronghorn friendly fences. “We’ve had no antelope deaths in our new fences,” he says. Like Miner, he carefully manages his cattle pastures so they aren’t overgrazed. He also provides salt and minerals at water sources and removes pinyon and juniper that take over grassland, leaving just the right amount for pronghorn to take cover. For Christmas, the pronghorn and elk on his property are a significant source of income. He runs Christmas Ranch Hunting, a full service outfitting company. He culls his herd to produce record-setting bucks for his clients, which means killing pronghorn he considers inferior and controlling predators like coyotes.

Hunting can be controversial to some wildlife lovers. But Patz and many historians maintain that hunters were actually the initial drivers of conservation – including that famous hunter and former U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt. A recent review of 1,000 scientific studies on the impacts of recreational hunting in North America, Europe, and Africa by researchers at the University of Helsinki found that the impacts on species, ecosystems, and local economies varies. In most cases, regulated hunting did not threaten species populations and in some cases the revenue and management improved ecosystems. (The most common exception was when carnivores, such as lions, are hunted. In addition, some studies suggest that killing coyotes doesn’t effectively control populations – instead, it encourages them to breed even more.)

Although ranchers might have varied reasons for joining the state’s protection program “all people in the program care about pronghorn,” according to Patz. “All of it boils down to [people] really really liking pronghorn and having respect for the animal. My job is to reward these landowners.”

Davidson was on safari with a group of guests when a fellow guide radioed in the unusual sighting. "We were a few minutes’ drive away, and my initial thought was that we’re going to miss the action," Davidson told Latest Sightings. "As we approached the area, we spotted the lioness stalking through the khanna bushes on a deeply eroded channel. Further south along the opposite channel we saw the hyena sniffing, walking, and foraging. It had no idea that the lioness was nearby!"

Hyenas aren't typical prey for lions, but the big cats will readily stalk and even kill hyenas, either opportunistically or in a concerted effort to eliminate any predatory competition. This particular lioness is around five or six years old and is a loner, unattached to any particular pride. I's unclear what her intentions were when approaching the hyena, but it's possible her behaviour was a mixture of curiosity, playfulness and an actual eagerness to dispatch the rival predator.

The frigid morning air and overcast conditions help explain why the normally nocturnal brown hyena was out foraging in the daylight hours. "I quickly managed to pull up alongside to where the hyena was situated and waited. It didn’t take long for the action to unfold," Davidson recalls. From some distance away, the lioness stalked closer. Eventually, she committed to a charge, sending the hyena scuttling in the opposite direction while sounding a slew of distressed wails.

Strangely, the lioness abandoned the hunt as soon as she got close enough to take the hyena down. "She was possibly in a playful mood," Davidson guesses. "Or the hyena's strange noises put her off; or it could even have been that the long fur allowed the hyena to slip through her claws and confuse[d] her.”

Whatever the reason, the hyena lived to forage another day and the lion provided Davidson and his guests with a thrilling encounter.

It was February 2021, and the crew aboard research vessel the RV Polarstern were carrying out routine work on mooring lines fixed with sensors. This provided Autun an opportunity to drop his ocean floor observation and bathymetry system into the murky deep. The hefty camera device is designed to be towed behind the vessel in order to record photos and videos and capture measurements of deep-sea habitats. At the time, the seafloor topography in the area they were working in looked a little "boring" – just the edge of a trough nowhere near an intersection with the continental shelf, miles from any area where ecosystems come together. It didn't look like the sort of spot that could yield deep-sea secrets.

Nonetheless, the team launched the camera and were instantly rewarded with the sight of a cluster of circular nests, many of them guarded by an adult icefish. These nests were nothing new and had been documented before but as the camera drifted on, visuals of the stone-lined circles kept coming. "Such huge densities in one place were never envisioned," Purser told us via email. For four hours, the team watched nothing but fish nests. The shallow indentations, spaced about 25 centimetres (10 inches) apart dotted the seafloor in every direction and stretched out over an area the size of the United Kingdom. An estimated 60 million nests were recorded, each with an average of 1,735 eggs cradled inside.

"I’d never seen anything like it in 15 years of being an ocean scientist," Autun Purser, of the Wegener Helmholtz Center in Marine and Polar Research in Germany and lead author of a study on the discovery, told CNN.

Icefish belong to a peculiar clade of deep-sea dwellers that have developed unusual physiological traits in response to the frigid waters they call home. Most curious is their colourless blood, which is void of the hemoglobin that gives our 'lifejuice' its crimson hue. They are the only known vertebrates to lack this oxygen-binding protein as adults. To compensate for the strange adaptation, icefish have extra large hearts and wider capillaries to better move oxygen through their bodies. Given the chilly conditions in which they live, their translucent blood also contains anti-freeze proteins to avoid ice crystals forming in their veins. 

While there is still much to learn about the ecology of these notothenioid fish and their en-masse breeding behaviour, the recent discovery suggests that ocean temperatures may play a role in their nesting habits. The clusters of nests "happened to correspond spatially with a tongue of warm water that’s pushed up from the deeper area in the Weddell Sea," Purser explained to Science Friday. "We found that this tongue of warm water matched exactly where the fish nests were. So you were in the zero degrees Antarctic water, and then at two degrees, as soon as you went into this tongue of water, the fish nests started."

Previous research shows that icefish typically swim to the surface after they hatch to feed on zooplankton that survive below the ice on a diet of photosynthetic algae. Purser and his team hypothesise that the icefish are meeting at the breeding site, reproducing and then millions of freshly hatched fish rise to the surface. 

As the fish grow bigger they will become attractive to predators like Weddell seals eager to take advantage of the considerable bounty. Intel from tagged seals shows that the animals are active in the area where the icefish are breeding and have been diving these waters for at least the last decade.

Researchers like Purser are hoping to learn more about the complex web of life that exists below Antarctica's ice floes. The recent discovery "means the food webs for this bit of Antarctica need to be rewritten," Purser explains. Cameras have been put in place to monitor the breeding site over the next years and researchers have laid plan to return in April 2022 to survey the surrounding waters. "We would like to know what happens when the eggs hatch. Do they all hatch? Do some juveniles eat the rest? Do all the adults die? And what happens next year? Do fish return to the same nests?" 

Demand for rhino horn in Asian markets, especially Vietnam and China, has pushed the remaining rhino populations to the brink of extinction. In the past decade, nearly 10,000 rhinos were killed by poachers in Africa. The remaining rhino populations in Africa and Asia are steadily declining, with fewer than 30,000 animals left in 2020 from a population of 500,000 at the beginning of the 20th century.

Rhino horn is coveted for rumoured medicinal properties and as a status symbol. To stop the rhino poaching crisis, it has been suggested that horns sustainably harvested from live rhinos can be sold in a legal trade to international buyers to meet demand. At the same time, this may generate income to fund anti-poaching activities, create jobs for local people, discourage poachers and encourage private rhino owners to conserve rhinos.

In an international, legal trade, rhino horns can be micro-chipped, and a certification and permit system put in place to prevent laundering.

But whether legalising the international trade in rhino horn can contribute to conserve rhinos is a hotly debated question in conservation circles. Opponents argue that a legal trade will remove the stigma associated with using rhino horn and thus increase demand to a dangerous level.

We’ve published a new study that addresses this conundrum through an experiment with 345 rhino horn consumers in Vietnam to generate insights into their choices about purchasing rhino horn.

We found that a legal trade in rhino horn would not eliminate a parallel black market, but it would likely reduce it. Our insights can be used to evaluate the likely consequences of a legal trade and to develop policies and interventions to manage demand for rhino horn.

Preference for wild rhinos

The trade in rhino horn is highly lucrative. In the black market, rhino horn prices can fetch up to US$400,000 per kg for Asian rhino horns and US$20,000 per kg for African rhino horns.

While rhino horn is mostly used as a traditional medicine in Vietnam to reduce hangovers, detoxify the body, and reduce high fever (despite no scientific evidence supporting these benefits), a large quantity of rhino horn is supplied to the art and antiques market in China.

Only by interviewing actual consumers of this product can we generate insights into motivations for purchase and rhino horn preferences. However, because rhino horn is so expensive, rhino horn consumers are mostly senior and very wealthy individuals who are notoriously averse to investigations of their illegal behaviours.

They generally do not want to talk to researchers they do not trust about their purchase and use of rhino horn. Nor are they motivated to participate in interviews by small gifts or abstract reasons, like conserving rhinos. This poses a major challenge for studying the impact of a legal trade on consumer demand.

To interview a large number of rhino horn consumers, we hired a team of research assistants with a winning sense of humour, colourful life experience, and true grit. With a rented Porsche and a Rolex watch borrowed from friends, we reached out to various networks and clubs where wealthy consumers often gather, such as golf and tennis clubs, and established a network of key informants who helped introduce us to potential respondents.

In the interviews, we showed them choice cards and kindly asked them to make choices about purchasing rhino horn for medical use in different scenarios including an international, legal trade in rhino horn.

Our study shows that consumers do not want captive-bred rhinos who are perceived as “farmed”, like cattle or horses. They prefer, and are willing, to pay more for horns from rhinos living in the wild or semi-wild environments – like private ranches where they need to find food and water themselves but receive supplemental feeding at some times of the year. This is because the consumers believe that wild rhino horns have better medicinal efficacy than farmed ones being exposed to naturally occurring medicinal herbs.

Consumers preferred a legal trade. However those with higher incomes were less concerned about legality. Hence, if the legal supply of wild rhino horns is not enough, they will likely buy poached or stolen horns from illegal suppliers.

Conservation implications

Our results show some support for the argument that a legal trade could shift the preference of a large proportion of consumers to legally supplied horns.

However, the strong preference for wild rhino horns is a major concern. As a consequence, a legal trade would likely continue to face competition from a parallel black market.

This means that the extent to which poaching would be reduced would depend on the legal supply of wild and semi-wild rhino horns, on campaigns’ ability to change consumer preferences, to what extent the legal trade would reduce stigma and increase demand, and on enforcement efforts in both supply and demand countries.

Our results suggest that basing campaigns on the influence of peer reference could be a viable strategy to reduce demand by encouraging people who have experienced no or negative effects of using rhino horn to step forward in the debate. Rhino horn consumers often listen to their peers when considering to buy or use this product. We found that the more peers used rhino horn with no, or negative, effects, the less likely consumers were to buy rhino horn.

Unanswered questions

Some important questions remain unanswered by the study. These include; to what extent legal supplies can meet potentially rising market demand and whether consumers can be convinced that less wild rhino horn has similar health benefits, if any, as those of wild rhino horn.

Furthermore, the aggregated international demand for rhino horn is unknown if the rhino horn trade was legalised, and there is no guarantee that legal horns can meet this demand. More importantly, consumers show a strong preference for wild rhinos, and do not believe that horns from semi-wild or farmed rhinos have the same medicinal effects.

Finally, our study only generates insights into Vietnamese consumers, while Chinese tourists visiting Hanoi to purchase rhino horn and the mainland Chinese market remain mostly unstudied. While more evidence is needed to confirm whether a legal trade will contribute to rhino conservation or not, demand reduction campaigns should continue.

_The study received ethical approval from the Research Ethics Committee for SCIENCE and SUND at the University of Copenhagen and the Ethical Review Board at the Hanoi University of Public Health. Respondents were informed of the study purposes, potential benefits and risks of being enrolled in the study and that they could withdraw from the interview at any point in time. _

Vu Hoai Nam Dang, PhD Fellow, University of Copenhagen and Martin Reinhardt Nielsen, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It was late afternoon and the duo were on their way out of the reserve when the telltale alarm call of a squirrel suggested the presence of a predator nearby. After some time searching for the animal, Moosa spotted a leopard lazing on a low branch and positioned their vehicle for prime viewing. Leopards often seek refuge in the treetops during the heat of the day where they can safely sleep while also watching for any threats or a potential meal.

When a warthog family sauntered down the road, "the leopard instantly lifted her head and had her eye on them," Varachia and Human explained to Latest Sightings. Eager to take advantage of an easy meal, the leopard slinked out of the tree and concealed itself in the tall grass in anticipation of the approaching prey. Perhaps sensing the danger, the warthogs appeared confused and inadvertently ambled directly towards the prone leopard.

Once within striking distance, the big cat pounced from the grass, missing Moosa and Human's vehicle by centimetres as it sprinted after one of the piglets. The warthogs bolted down the road and just managed to outpace the leopard which gave up the chase after a short while.

Moosa and Human were left reeling after the exciting encounter: "Sightings like this are what makes it all worth it!"

Much of what we know about the blanket octopus comes from captive animals or long-expired museum specimens, but on very rare occasions these caped crusaders of the open water make an appearance, as if to remind us that they are still out there. Marine biologist and reef guide Jacinta Shackleton was lucky enough to share the water with a blanket octopus recently off the coast of Lady Elliot Island on the Great Barrier Reef, and captured some stunning footage to prove it:

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"When I first saw it, I thought it could have been a juvenile fish with long fins," Shackleton told The Guardian. "But as it came closer, I realised it was a female blanket octopus and I had this overwhelming sense of joy and excitement." 

Sightings of these bright-red cephalopods – named for the iridescent sheet of flesh that encloses their tentacles like a cape – are very rare and, according to Shackleton, there have only been three other records of the animals in the area where this one was spotted.

Only female blanket octopuses sport the mesmerising 'cape' that gives the species its extra-special allure. If the octopuses are under threat, the wavy attachment can be shed in an effort to elude predators. 

Females are believed to grow to around 2 metres in length while the males on record max out at just 2.4 centimetres, which illustrates the "most extreme example of sexual size-dimorphism in a non-microscopic animal," according to a study published in the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research. This radical difference in size may be linked to the blanket octopus's nifty habit of carrying around sections of stinging tentacles from jellyfish as a means of self-defence. Both females and males have been observed wielding nematocysts (the stingy parts of jellyfish), but the strategy is only effective for smaller animals – larger individuals are unable to carry enough tentacles to defend themselves fully. So while the females outgrow the tactic as they get older, males stick with it. Their smaller size also allows males to mature more quickly which may help them get a jump on the competition.

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Shackleton described the experience of spotting one of these unique animals in the wild as a "once-in-a-lifetime encounter" for which she is very grateful. "Seeing one in real life is indescribable," she told The Guardian. "I was so captivated by its movements, it was as if it was dancing through the water with a flowing cape. The vibrant colours are just so incredible, you can’t take your eyes off it ... I’ve truly never seen anything like it before and don’t think I ever will again in my life."

Top header image: Jacinta Shackleton

Story by Stephen Ornes

One bright morning in November 2018, state biologists in Louisiana loaded three dead and toothy alligators, each more than five feet long and weighing hundreds of pounds, into the back of a pickup. The biologists bumped along Louisiana State Route 56, driving the carcasses as far south as one can go before plunging into the marsh at the outer mouth of the Mississippi River.

Waiting at the end of the road was Craig McClain, a tall, bald, and bearded marine biologist who studies how living things get food at the bottom of the ocean. McClain leads a coastal research institute called the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, or LUMCON, that explores life at the interface of land and sea. Its main building hovers over the wetlands on big concrete pilings, driven deep into the muck.

Coastal Louisiana teems with alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) – more than a million of them. They sit, mouths agape, on riverbanks and roadsides; they’re crushed by cars; they swim in canals and bask in the sun on nearby barrier islands. McClain can look out the window at work and sometimes see them swim by. He wondered: What happens when they die? If they died at sea, or were washed out, might they provide food to the strange things that dwell in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico? Are they an important part of deep-sea energy cycles? He conjured up a plan to find out, but to carry it out, he would need dead alligators.

When big alligators threaten pets, livestock, or humans – charging, biting, eating – the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries considers them “nuisance animals,” and sends out hunters to remove them. In October 2018, McClain had asked the department if they could provide him with a few dead gators for an unusual research project. That November morning, he’d gotten the call.

“They said, ‘hey, we have three alligators for you. Are you prepared for them?’” McClain says.

McClain’s group unloaded the alligators, wrapped them in thick plastic sheets, and stashed them in a large freezer. They stayed there until February 2019, when the biologists transferred the alligators into another freezer on board the R/V Pelican, LUMCON’s 116-foot research vessel, which houses four laboratories and can support 14 scientists for up to three weeks at sea. McClain’s plan was to motor out into the Gulf to sink the alligators at various ocean locations and depths, to study what happens to their carcasses – a kind of crocodilian burial at sea.

The idea driving the experiment was simple: If you feed them, they will come. In this case, “they” were the scavengers that float, swim, burrow, and crawl in the muck at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. These scavengers can’t live without food, but because plants and phytoplankton cannot grow in the deepest ocean where there is no light, biologists believe that the organisms found there largely subsist on “food falls” that drift down in the form of kelp or dead fish and other animals. McClain suspected that decomposing alligators might play a role in feeding the invertebrates that dwell at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Understanding the fate of dead creatures – like alligators – on the seafloor would help to fill gaps in knowledge about both the food chain and the carbon cycle in the ocean depths.

McClain’s group was the first in the world, as far as he knows, to sink dead reptiles for research – but not the first to study sunken carrion in the sea. In recent years, biologists have sunk whale carcasses, turkeys, shark craniums, pig carcasses, fish bones, and cow bones – in waters deep and shallow, warm and cold, from California to the Mediterranean, Japan to Antarctica – in order to draw out the exotic scavengers that hide in the deepest ocean and can’t be studied in any other way. “It’s mind-boggling,” says McClain. “You can be two or three kilometers deep, and there’s this whole set of animals that are just made to eat whatever carbon comes down.”

It’s not just a quest for novelty that drives such research. Precise studies of the lives and genes of exotic worms, crustaceans, and other deep-sea denizens have expanded biologists’ ideas about the diversity of marine life and how life evolves in the depths. Recent research, for example, indicates that such scavengers emerged as far back as 100 million years ago, during the time of the dinosaurs, likely feasting on the remains of giant marine reptiles like plesiosaurs.

Findings from food-fall experiments have also supported new hypotheses about how species that live in resource poor environments, like the deep ocean, evolve as their food sources change. Such research, McClain says, may ultimately help scientists better predict how deep marine life will respond to changes in carbon levels due to climate change. “If we give a little food, what happens? And then we give a little more, what happens then?” he says. “Hopefully, we can predict what the losers and winners will be in future oceans.”

A Waste of Utter Darkness

The deep ocean is the largest ecosystem on the planet, with more than half of Earth’s surface submerged beneath at least two kilometers of water. It’s also among the least hospitable to life.

Indeed, until the mid-19th century, scientists believed that no life could survive at all below a certain depth. There was, they maintained, a “bathymetrical limit to life,” below which “the conditions became so peculiar ... as to preclude any other idea than that of a waste of utter darkness, subjected to such stupendous pressure as to make life of any kind impossible,” as Scottish zoologist and explorer Charles Wyvile Thomson explained in his 1873 book The Depths of the Sea. That limit, according to 19th-century biologist Edward Forbes, resided at precisely 550 meters (1,804 feet) beneath the surface.

But even back then, there were clues to the contrary. In 1810, for instance, French naturalist Antoine Risso identified and named a number of new fish species pulled from the bottom of the Mediterranean, including a boa dragonfish (Stomias boa boa) caught on a line dropped 1,500 meters (nearly 5,000 feet) down. Based on this and other new finds, Risso introduced the idea of underwater zones, defined by depth, where different creatures flourished. In 1818, explorer John Ross, while scouting the Northwest Passage, found a brittle star wrapped around a kilometer-long sounding line – the first evidence of deep-sea life in the colder North Atlantic Ocean. In the 1860s, engineers retrieved a broken North Atlantic telegraph line from a depth of 2 kilometers (6,562 feet) and found colorful corals, brittle stars, and other unusual invertebrates attached, further refuting the idea that life stopped at some set distance below the surface.

It was Thomson, however, who is generally credited with disproving the notion of a sterile, lifeless ocean bottom. From 1872 to 1876, he led an expedition on the HMS Challenger, a British warship whose guns had been replaced with laboratories and workrooms. From the boat’s deck, Thomson and his colleagues sank small traps attached to a rope 4.8 kilometers (3 miles) long and pulled up creatures that were, he wrote, “exquisitely beautiful in their soft shades of colouring and in the rainbow-tints of their wonderful phosphorescence” – every bit as diverse and exquisite as fauna found in shallower waters. He dared future scientists to enhance our understanding of these creatures: “Their mode of life, and their relations to other organisms,” he wrote, “and the phenomena and law of their geographical distribution, must be worked out.”

The Secret Taxonomy of the Deep

In the subsequent 150 years, oceanographers have endeavored to answer Thomson’s challenge. Using increasingly sophisticated technologies, they have unearthed a vast diversity of species and begun to learn how energy moves in the deepest seas. They have learned that sunlight can usually penetrate only a few hundred meters below the ocean surface, which means that nothing living a mile underwater can use photosynthesis to turn sunlight into life. They have come to understand that while some surface-dwelling fish, kelp, and zooplankton do die and sink to the bottom, such “marine showers” provide insufficient nourishment to support the wild diversity of life there. This suggests there must be other pathways for food to travel from the surface to the bottom, which is what experiments based on artificial food falls – like McClain’s alligators – are designed to explore.

Artificial food falls owe their origin, in large part, to another marine biologist named Craig – Craig Smith, now at the University of Hawaii. In the 1980s, when Smith was a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, he found himself frustrated with how little scientists knew about life in the deep sea. They had discovered a growing catalogue of wild species there, but had generated few ideas about how life could subsist in such an inhospitable environment. “We already recognized that [the ocean bottom] has high diversity, but ecological theory couldn’t explain why,”he says.

A few years earlier, a Navy bathyscaphe – a bulky, self-propelled submersible built to withstand tremendous pressures – had stumbled across a well-preserved whale skeleton off the coast of California, near Santa Catalina Island. Smith speculated that such whale falls might serve as living laboratories that could unlock the secret taxonomy of the deep, and in 1987, he had the good fortune to find one. He was exploring a 1,200-meter- (3,937-feet-) deep undersea canyon with an ROV – a remotely-operated vehicle – when he encountered a 20-meter- (65-foot-) long whale carcass. Over five dives the following November, Smith and his colleagues identified an assemblage of bacteria, snails, clams, and other fauna, many of which hadn’t been found in the area before or had never been known to science at all. His analysis, published in Nature in 1989, jumpstarted a new effort among marine biologists to document and analyze the ecosystems around fallen sea creatures.

Smith knew he was fortunate to have stumbled upon the whale. While hundreds of thousands of whales and other marine food falls likely litter the world’s seafloors, “it’s hard to find them by luck,” he says. So when it was time to find another fallen whale to study, he decided to sink his own. In 1992, he set up an experimental agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Mammal Stranding Network: When a whale washed up on a California shore, NOAA would call Smith, who would bring boats and scientists to tow the carcass back into the ocean and sink it using thousands of pounds of retired railroad cogs and wheels as ballast. (On occasion, his team had to resort to poking holes in the carcasses – with arrows, harpoons, or bullets – to release the gases that can keep them afloat.)

Smith’s group sank and studied three gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) in 1992, 1996, and 1998, at depths of between 1,200 and 2,000 meters (3,937 and 6,562 feet), tracking their decay over a decade. Whales, they learned, decompose in several stages in the deepest oceans. First on the scene are necrophages that feed on soft tissue – hagfish, ratfish, sharks, amphipods, even octopuses. Crustaceans and snails arrive next, nibbling on leftover blubber and picking the bones clean. Then come even smaller creatures – an intermingling of worms, mollusks, bacteria, and crabs – that turn the skeleton to dust. The entire process can take between a year and a decade, depending on the depth of the carcass. The deeper the fall, the fewer the scavengers, the longer the decay.

Bone Eaters

In 2002, around the same time Smith was studying his artificial whale falls, a marine biologist named Robert Vrijenhoek was using an ROV to explore another whale carcass – one his team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) had stumbled upon a month earlier. Vrijenhoek's group was looking for a particular species of clam he believed might be found on whale remains. Instead, they spied big patches of red on the whale bone. From a distance, it looked like a rash. A closer inspection of specimens brought up from the site revealed a forest of tiny tubes extruding from the bones. “It was like a red shag carpet,” says Vrijenhoek.

They were tubular worms that scientists had never before identified, and they were bizarre. The females are about as long as a finger and half a millimeter in diameter – narrower than most splinters. They have enormous ovaries in relation to their body size, and spawn hundreds of eggs per day. The males are typically microscopic, living inside the females’ oviducts. Lacking both mouths and guts, the worms burrow into bone by excreting an acid and sending root-like tendrils within, relying on symbiotic bacteria to digest the lipids and collagens from the center of the bones and produce nutrients. The team named them Osedax – Latin for “bone-eaters” – though they go by other names as well: snotworms, boneworms, zombie worms.

The worms’ novelty and bizarre appearance made Osedax a celebrity among biologists. Their efficient means of absorbing nutrition from whale bones suggested that they had evolved with decomposing whales. What wasn’t clear was their role in the carbon pathways that connected air, land, and ocean surface to the invertebrates that live far below. Did Osedax thrive only on the bones of certain whales, or only in some oceans? Was there a depth at which they could no longer survive? Or a temperature? It was hard to know, without first knowing how ubiquitous they might be in the oceans.

The first step would be to study whether Osedax lived only on whalebones, or if they could also be found on other decaying carcasses, like seals, fish, and seabirds – and perhaps McClain’s alligators, too – which were even more difficult to find on the ocean’s bottom, because smaller creatures typically degrade faster.

Thanks to Smith’s pioneering whale work, however, scientists had a method for studying deep-water food falls: dropping lots of different bones in lots of different places. In 2005, Vrijenhoek’s group sunk a series of slivered cow femurs, hung on a PVC “bone tree” and anchored in concrete-filled buckets, near whale falls off the California coast. When they returned to retrieve the tree just two months later, they found a shag carpet of Osedax on the bones. In 2010, Vrijenhoek and his team sank assemblages of cow bones and calcified shark cartilage in Monterey Bay. Five months later, they not only confirmed colonies of known Osedax species, but also identified a few new ones.

In 2012, they even sunk a holiday turkey. “It was Thanksgiving, and we were at sea,” says Vrijenhoek’s colleague and frequent collaborator, Scripps Institution of Oceanography biologist Greg Rouse. The worms colonized the bird bones, too. “The bone worms didn’t care,” Vrijenhoek says. Osedax, it seems, does not discriminate.

Since then, artificial food-fall experiments around the world have continued to fill gaps in the Osedax story. “Many people were skeptical they could live in shallow waters,” says marine biologist Sergi Taboada, now at the Complutense University of Madrid, but in 2012, he and his colleagues sank the de-fleshed bones of a beached minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) along with a collection of pig and cow bones in the Mediterranean off the coast of northern Spain. They found no evidence of Osedax worms in warm water at a depth of 20 meters (65 feet), suggesting that the creatures might indeed be limited to colder environs. Two years later, though, Taboada’s group dropped a similar cache of bones at a lower depth, in a nearby undersea canyon 53 meters (174 feet) down, and identified a new species which they named Osedax mediterranea.

More recent studies have also explored not only where the scavengers feed, but also how long they’ve been around. In 2010, researchers found telltale boreholes in whale fossils from the Pacific Ocean dating back about 30 million years, around the time whales evolved – leading scientists to speculate that Osedax likely emerged with whales. But in 2015, researchers at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom identified Osedax boreholes in fossil remains of plesiosaurs and sea turtles stored at the University of Cambridge. Those fossils dated back 100 million years – meaning that the worms have been around since at least the late Cretaceous period. Osedax evolved to eat whatever bones drifted down into the dark, including, perhaps, the bones of prehistoric ichthyosaurs.

By sinking carcasses (and studying some natural food falls as well), scientists have now identified dozens of new species of Osedax in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Southern Oceans, in the Arctic Sea, and in the Mediterranean. They’ve found other new critters, as well: In May 2020, scientists at the University of California, San Diego even reported finding a new kind of worm, covered in dazzling scales that look “like sequins from an Elvis costume,” says Rouse, a coauthor on the ZooKeys paper that reported the discovery. The researchers named the species Peinaleopolynoe elvesi, after the singer.

Alligator Number Three

Thanks to McClain’s alligators, we now know that Osedax worms reside in the Gulf of Mexico, as well. The experiment marked McClain’s first foray into sunken animal carcasses, though not his first effort at submerging items in the name of science. Before arriving in Louisiana to lead LUMCON in 2016, he had worked with Monterey biologist Jim Barry on a 2006 experiment to study underwater snails and slugs on sunken logs. “I’ve always been interested in how biological systems are tied to the energy that’s available to them,” he says. Plenty of energy could be found in the alligators that roamed all along the Louisiana coast: “I've seen more alligators in the state than I have squirrels,” he says. One day at LUMCON, while leading a discussion of a recent paper Rouse had written about artificial food falls, one of his students asked, “What if we sank an alligator?” McClain warmed to the idea: Perhaps the reptiles filled a similar niche along the Gulf coastline as sunken whales off the coast of California. Which is how, one crisp morning in February 2019, he found himself on a research boat with a freezer full of dead alligators, motoring out to sea.

McClain and his group dropped the first alligator about 24 kilometers (15 miles) from shore, securing the animal in a sturdy basket attached to 45-pound weights and using a system of pullies – like a deep-sea dumbwaiter – to lower it 2,181 meters (7,156 feet) beneath the water’s surface. The next day, they lowered a 1,585-kilogram (3,500-pound) ROV to examine the gator. The goal was to study what happens in the very early stages of a food fall.

McClain suspected that the reptiles’ tough hide might deter would-be scavengers, but video footage revealed eight giant isopods – Bathynomus giganteus, which look like pillbugs but are pink and as large as armadillos – gnawing on the creature’s leathery flesh. A day later, the rover recorded even more of the creatures; some had already burrowed inside the carcass.

The crew then motored 80 kilometers (50 miles) east to sink the second alligator at a depth of 2,034 meters (6,673 feet). They planned to give this one more time to decompose – and headed back to shore. Six weeks later, they motored back to the site with the rover and observed that the animal’s flesh was nearly gone. Small crustaceans called amphipods darted in and out of the remains. All manner of octopuses, crabs, snails, and others gnawed on the scraps and bones. And a reddish carpet of Osedax now covered the bones – the first ever identified in the Gulf of Mexico. These worms belonged to the same genus as the ones found on whales, turkey bones, and all the rest, but they were a brand-new, as-yet unnamed species.

McClain’s team sank the third and final alligator at around the same depth about 105 kilometers (65 miles) northeast of the second. Eight days later, they returned, expecting to find another partially devoured carcass. Instead, they discovered that the beast had vanished. “We were like, are we in the right place? Did we mess this up?” says LUMCON graduate student River Dixon, who watched the rover feed from a cabin on the Pelican. Video images showed an alligator-shaped depression in the sediment – but, says Dixon, “it was completely gone.”

The rover scoured the area for clues, and about 6 meters (20 feet) away, came across the discarded weight and a severed rope. “Something was big enough to haul it away,” says McClain. Even at such great depths, fallen carcasses feed other, larger creatures as well.

McClain’s experiment showed that dead alligators and other large reptiles such as crocodiles or pythons, when they die at sea or are washed out by the tides, likely serve as meaningful food sources in the Gulf, and further expanded scientists’ knowledge of the diversity and reach of Osedax. In only 16 years, scientists have found 26 species – suggesting that they’ve only just begun to chart the biodiversity of the weird little worms. We now know that they live in most of the world’s oceans and have been there for many millions of years, feasting on the dead as an integral part of the complex energy web of the deepest seas.

Continuing to study them may help answer one of the most important questions driving deep-sea research today: How will the recycling of carbon from land to water respond to a rapidly-warming, acidifying, ocean? Models suggest that deep-sea ecosystems are particularly sensitive to change. Studies of the diversity and evolution of Osedax may show how, in the past, organisms have adapted and thrived – or not – as new pressures bring changes to the food web.

The missing alligator, meanwhile, illustrates just how much we still have to learn about deepwater ecosystems and the way energy moves through them. McClain still wonders what hungry creature might have been able, at a depth of 2,000 meters, to dispatch with his alligator so quickly. “Maybe it was a big shark. Or maybe a bunch of sharks, working together, ”McClain says.

But he doesn’t know – and in this uncertainty, he is in good company. Scientists have only just begun to understand the complex intricacies of what happens in the ocean dark, and in the deep.

A short clip, captured from a second vehicle some distance away, shows the elephant tilting the vehicle up with its tusks before rolling it onto its roof. The occupants – two adults and two children – did not suffer any major injuries.

It’s unclear what triggered the elephant to go on the offensive, but it’s possible that the aggressor in this case was a male in “musth”. When in this heightened hormonal state, bulls can become highly aggressive, and have been responsible for similar car-crushing behaviour in the past.

The iSimangaliso Wetland Park website reports that in 2018 there were over 200 elephants spread out across the Western Shores, Eastern Shores and uMkhuze sections of the reserve.

“Although such incidents are not a common occurrence in iSimangaliso, we wish to caution our visitors to always remain vigilant and keep to a distance of at least 50 metres from wildlife, particularly the big five,” the park authorities urged in a statement.

As this is an isolated incident, the elephant will not be relocated or euthanized.

Top header image: Brittany H., Flickr

When siblings Kaydn and Reef Persidok took to the waves at a popular surf spot off San Diego County recently, they had no idea they weren't the only ones catching air. Footage of Reef riding a wave shows a juvenile great white shark in the background launching itself out of the water in typically dramatic fashion.

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A post shared by Kaydn Persidok (@liitlesurfergirl)

"Anybody else feel a little sharky vibe yesterday out in the lineup?" Kaydn Persidok wrote on Instagram. The clip was filmed at Seaside Reef in Encinitas along North America's southwestern coastline where white sharks are known to hang out. "A little while before we saw the shark breach, my friend said she saw something that looked like a shark swim right under her, and right then it got suspicious," Persidok told The CW San Diego. "Then as we saw it breach my heart raced and I was amazed and stunned but also a bit scared because it wasn’t too far away from us!"

Acoording to Dr Chris Lowe, who heads up the Shark Lab at California State University in Long Beach, a number of white shark nursery aggregation sites have been identified around San Diego beaches, so juveniles are sporadically seen in the area. Although breaching behaviour in sharks is not fully understood, there are a number of theories. "Many of these young sharks are covered with parasitic copepods that move along the skin – this could cause irritation ... so the sharks may breach to try to dislodge these itchy parasites." Dr Lowe explains. Another explanation could be that the sharks launch themselves out of the water when chasing schooling fish like anchovy, sardine or topsmelt, however, breaching has been recorded even in the absence of these prey species. It's also possible that great whites simply "jump because they can," Dr Lowe adds.

Despite the close proximity of the breaching shark, the surfing siblings did not have any further encounters with the predator. "I respect the ocean and all the wildlife and creatures in it," Kaydn said. "I think it’s really cool to see a shark breach while a surfer is riding a wave! I’ve never seen that before."

Top header image: David Remsen/Flickr

Faro was filming views of the lake and its surrounding landscapes while jogging along a trail when a young mountain lion burst from the bushes and made a beeline in his direction. Initially uncertain of what was bounding his way, Faro explained to Backpacker, he continued at pace down the path before switching tactics and turning to face the big cat, shouting loudly in an effort to halt the puma's charge. The plan worked and the mountain lion retreated to the safety of a nearby bush. Faro wisely kept an eye on the cat as he slowly backed away.

Justin Dellinger, a large carnivore researcher for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, explained to Backpacker that the animal looks to be no older than two years and was “likely less experienced in hunting and procuring food.” Although mountain lions are one of California's largest terrestrial predators, close encounters are rare and it's possible that this inexperienced cat was triggered by the fact that Faro was jogging at the time.

Mountain lions, also known as pumas or cougars, are famously elusive and prefer to remain far out of view. They may be rarely seen, but these apex predators fulfill an important role in local ecosystems by keeping the numbers of other mammals, especially deer, in check.

While some experts argue that it's unwise to charge at a mountain lion and suggest backing away slowly as a more appropriate tactic, Dellinger believes that Faro did the right thing by standing his ground and shouting, making himself as intimidating as possible.

Top header image: Angell Williams, Flickr

It was two o'clock in the morning when Zelenka was awoken by loud noises outside his home in Glenwood Canyon. He flicked on the porch light to see a female elk flailing on his porch, and his initial suspicions were that the animal had been struck by a car on the nearby Interstate 70 and stumbled into his yard. Zelenka was on the cusp of opening his porch door to investigate the bizarre scene when a mountain lion surfaced from behind the elk. The footage above was captured on Zelenka's phone as he watched the encounter through his bathroom window.

Cougars are active elk hunters across western North America and, in some areas, these massive ungulates are their favoured prey, along with other deer species. Although hunts are rarely witnessed, mountain lions are believed to be primarily ambush hunters that will stalk their prey from a concealed spot. The cats often stash their kills and return to feed on them for a period of days – something the mountain lion on Zelenka's property tried to do the following evening (at this point the carcass had already been removed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife):

Top header image: Kristen Ortwerth-Jewell, Flickr

How's this for a handicap 🦀🦀🦀

A group of golfers on Christmas Island have clashed with a GIANT 'robber' crab. Footage from the course shows the crab hanging onto a golf bag before it snaps a club in half. #9News pic.twitter.com/Zr08iX50he

— 9News Australia (@9NewsAUS) January 3, 2022

The footage – captured and narrated by Buhner back in 2020 and recently reshared online – shows a golfer attempting to prise a coconut crab from the top of his bag. Unwilling to relinquish its perch, the crab clutches on to the clubs and refuses to let go, resulting in an admittedly chortle-worthy exchange between frustrated golfer and obstinate crustacean.

Coconut crabs, or robber crabs as they are sometimes called on Christmas Island because of their tendency to steal everything they can wrap their pincers around – are the planet's largest land-dwelling arthropods, a group of invertebrates that includes spiders, centipedes and insects. The monumental crabs are found across the Indo-Pacific where they hang out in rock crevices or spend their time clambering up trees in search of – you guessed it – coconuts, which they crack open using their powerful pincers.

The giant crustaceans are one of around a dozen species of land crab that can be found scuttling around Christmas Island, an area that's famous for its annual migration of red crabs which blanket the island at the start of the rainy season when they begin their journey to the coast to spawn.

After a significant tussle with the club-snapping crab, the golfers eventually gave up trying to retrieve the last of their gear. "You know what, just let him have it, mate. He’s won the victory – he’s beaten us" quipped Buhner.

Header image: Anne Sheppard

Recently, scientists in Hornsund, Svalbard – a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic ocean – witnessed a polar bear pursuing a reindeer into the sea before killing it, dragging it ashore and eating it. The video that they captured was widely shared on news and social media platforms. Then, two days later, they saw the same bear beside a second fresh reindeer kill.

Their observations are the first detailed account of a complete and successful polar bear hunt of a Svalbard reindeer. But they follow 13 previous reports of polar bears preying and scavenging on reindeer on the same archipelago between 1983 and 1999.

These are far from the first accounts of polar bears varying their diets. Normally, in the months when the sea is frozen, they enjoy a diet of offshore seals. But their use of supplementary food sources in the leaner summer months has been known for decades, with bears gorging on seabird eggs as well as feeding at the Churchill dump (a rubbish and recycling facility) in Hudson Bay. Yet, similar reports of terrestrial feeding have become more frequent in recent years.

From stalking and chasing Canadian caribou, fishing for Arctic char and catching geese and rodents to grazing on vegetation and patrolling human refuse sites, polar bears can eat, have eaten and have tried to eat many things.

But the viability of these onshore food sources is doubtful as a long-term strategy. In their study of foraging on the eider duck nests of Mitvik island, Canada, researchers found polar bears to be inefficient predators of seabird eggs, such that the energy an individual bear gains from eggs may be less than previously thought. That’s because they may use more energy to find the eggs than they get from eating them. Equally, other studies have found that the consumption of terrestrial food by polar bears has been insufficient to compensate for reduced hunting opportunities out on the ice.

The climate change threat

Polar bears have evolved to be highly efficient predators of marine mammals. They support themselves on a fat-heavy diet and rely on ice-based prey, primarily ringed and bearded seals. As a result, they are profoundly threatened by a warming climate.

With rising global temperatures, Arctic sea ice is melting earlier in summer and refreezing later in winter. And as the ice-free periods become longer, polar bears are spending more time on land without access to their primary food.

Their situation is being made worse by other factors, too. A recent study found the energy demands of polar bears to be higher than previously assumed. With less time on the sea ice, and less seal fat to consume, polar bears will find it more difficult to meet their energy needs – leading to higher death rates. At the same time, higher Arctic wind speeds may make hunting seals harder still.

Therefore, increasing reports of summer scavenging, foraging and terrestrial hunting are unsurprising in the context of climate change, high energy stress and the resulting effect on their bodies.

Burdened by publicity

The proliferation of digital platforms plays a part in this story, too. As Andrew Derocher, a professor of biology at the University of Alberta and longtime polar bear expert, explained: “Everyone has a camera” and “‘news’ spreads fast”. He rightly pointed out that if the same phenomenon was happening in the 1950s and 1960s, no one would likely have seen it.

Over the past few years, photos and videos of polar bears have garnered enormous online attention. From 56 bears besieging a Russian town, to tragic sequences of emaciated individuals, polar bears are being used as the face of our climate catastrophe.

While the broad relationship here is undeniable – a sea ice species cannot live in an above freezing future – polar bears now inhabit a world where their every action is viewed as evidence in a wider climate change context. Amplified in our digital age, we see bears as the embodiment of our worsening global condition.

While their plight is rightly brought to our attention, online content can be misdirecting. A focus on individual bears to illustrate climate issues risks shifting the burden of proof away from overwhelming scientific evidence and onto the lives of single animals.

Therefore, observations like those in Hornsund reinforce the need for further peer-reviewed research on the future of this iconic species. This single event should not be seen as definitive proof of shifting diets in a warmer world, but as a reminder of the spectacular creatures we stand to lose. A species whose fate, even in the distant reaches of their Arctic landscape, is inexorably bound to our own.

Henry Anderson-Elliott, PhD, University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Top header image: foilistpeter, Flickr

Skunks doing handstands

Okay, we know this handstand routine is supposed to strike fear into the hearts of skunk enemies, but come on ...

This adorable acrobat was caught on a remote camera trap in Florida earlier this year putting on a terrific threat display. Spotted skunks perform these splayed-tail handstand walks as a warning to their enemies to back off. Ignoring the upside-down dance can earn you a dose of signature skunk scent.

Flying rhinos

Each year, science humor magazine the Annals of Improbable Research dishes out awards for seemingly strange and oftentimes pointless scientific experiments in an attempt to honor projects that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”. The 2021 Ig-Nobel Transportation Prize went to a study that explored the impacts of dangling rhinos upside-down by their ankles from helicopters – a concept that’s certainly bizarre enough to make the cut, but underlies a vital need to better understand rhino translocation and to determine the safest methods for transporting these behemoths. As Africa’s rhinos continue to suffer from rampant poaching, this kind of research adds to a wealth of knowledge that may help save the imperiled animals.

A wandering walrus

😌Wally has finally found a good place to rest 😌

⛵️After a few turned over boats we and the locals on the Isles of Scilly are happy Wally the Walrus has found a floating pontoon to rest on instead.

👏🏼Hopefully he continues to take advantage of the pontoon. pic.twitter.com/MSp1GonOjD

— Seaquest Southwest (@CWTSeaquestSW) July 1, 2021

Wally the walrus captured the hearts of global audiences earlier this year when the lovable mammal undertook an extended tour of Europe, turning up on boats and jetties across the UK, Ireland, France and Spain. Walruses usually spend their time in the Arctic, making Wally’s appearance in warmer climes unusual. He soon gained celebrity status as word spread of his antics, which included sinking several boats in Ireland and the Isles of Scilly as well as being struck by a vessel in France. Wally was last spotted on a pier in Iceland, a lot closer to his normal stomping grounds.

Golfing bear cubs

Good morning to these baby bears playing on the green and to these baby bears only. pic.twitter.com/at64chSGjd

— Danny Deraney (@DannyDeraney) August 9, 2021

We’re suckers for a good tale of animals turning up in an unexpected places, and golf courses often play host to an array of wildlife. Earlier this year, a trio of black-bear cubs were out and about – and apparently very much ready to rumble – on a golf course at Lake Toxaway in western North Carolina. One full-of-moxie cub engaged in mock battle with a flagstick: tackling and wrestling it, spurred on, it seems, by its opponent’s dogged springiness. Its two littermates, meanwhile, aimed the same kind of pugilistic spirit at one another in the background. All three of them showed plenty of devil-may-care spunk out there on the course, but were presumably being watched over by mama bear somewhere off-camera.

Kung fu kangaroos

We’ve all had our struggles this year. For this kangaroo, a hammock provided a significant challenge. South Australian resident Karen Wishart captured footage of a particularly pugnacious marsupial 'sparring' with a hammock-style swing hanging in her backyard. The young roo can be seen dancing around the dangling fabric, dishing out vicious jabs and kicks (and getting its feet tangling up in the process).

Singing lemurs

A team of researchers from Italy have been listening to the calls of Indri lemurs for the last twelve years in an attempt to figure out if the primates share our sense of musical rhythm, and in 2021 they published a paper that shows Indris know how to boogie. The researchers set out to investigate whether Indris – social primates that often sing together in harmonized duets – make use of a universal form of rhythm that’s common across human musical cultures, but largely absent in the animal kingdom. The finding helps scientists gain a better understanding of the origins of musical traits and how they may have evolved.

A Bodybuilding squirrel

Do you even lift, bro? We’re used to seeing kangaroos putting on a “gun show” for the camera, but a squirrel flexing its pecks is a rarer sight. Scottish resident David Roberts captured this shot of a particularly buff grey squirrel posing on a windowsill at his home in Glasgow earlier this year. He shared the image to Facebook where it quickly gained popularity. The squirrel has since been dubbed Arnold Squirrelzenegger and if it’s not one of the greatest things to come out of 2021 well then we just don’t know anymore.

Traveling elephants

Shhhh, the elephants are sleeping. This herd of wild Asian elephants was spotted taking a group nap as they migrated across southwest China. Scientists have been tracking them for hundreds of miles as a recent population boom resulted in the animals expanding their territory 🐘 pic.twitter.com/kkQtKUbXmI

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) June 9, 2021

Wally the walrus wasn’t the only travelling animal to gain notoriety this year. A herd of elephants in China made global headlines when they undertook an unprecedented journey hundreds of miles across southern China. Along the way, the elephants plundered crops and wowed locals as amateur footage and drones tracked their trail of trouble. Although their trek captured the imaginations of millions, the reason for their journey highlights China’s struggle to strike a balance between wildlife conservation and human development. Much of the elephants’ historical range has been lost to infrastructure and commercial farmland forcing the animals to go on the move in search of food. Thankfully, this herd seems to have returned to the nature reserve they originally strayed from, but this likely won’t be the last elephant trek we’ll see.

A celebrity sea duo

*laugh* I normally avoid these refs..but WOW. REAL LIFE Sponge bob and Patrick! #Okeanos Retreiver seamount 1885 m pic.twitter.com/fffKNKMFjP

— Christopher Mah (@echinoblog) July 27, 2021

Who doesn’t love a bit of life imitating art (or is it the other way around)? Earlier this year, a remote-controlled submersible operating in the Atlantic Ocean captured a pinkish starfish lying beside a yellow sea sponge in a scene that’s about as close to a live action remake from SpongeBob Squarepants as you’re likely to find. Marine biologist Christopher Mah, who tweeted the image and made the comparison to the animated show's titular character and quirky sidekick, explained to Insider that the sponge belongs to the Hertwigia genus (they aren’t usually this square) and the sea star is a Chondraster.

A Paddleboarding seal

In case you require further proof that seals are really just dogs of the sea, take a look at this cheeky hitchhiker that was filmed in May this year soaking up some sun after climbing atop a paddleboard that was clearly already occupied. Cenk Albayrak-Touye was enjoying a causal paddle around Poole Harbour in Dorset, England when an inquisitive seal swam over and plonked itself purposefully on the front of his paddleboard. The pinniped is apparently known to locals and regularly "hitchhikes" – sometimes falling asleep on paddleboards and rarely paying too much heed to the humans from whom it commandeers its vessels. 

Story and visuals by Lauren Owens Lambert

Sea turtles appear to fly as they swim beneath ocean waves. With long, gray-green flippers that move like slow wingbeats, they glide through the water as birds do through the sky. Actually flying through the air, though, at 10,000 feet above the ground, the reptiles seem anything but graceful.

Inside the airplane, 120 sea turtles, 118 of which are juvenile Kemp’s ridleys (Lepidochelys kempii), shift uncomfortably among beach towels inside stacked Chiquita banana boxes, their crusty eyes and curved pearlescent beaks peeking through slot handles. The windowless metal cabin vibrates with the sound of propellers as the pilots work to keep the plane aloft and the internal air temperature at a turtle-friendly 22 degrees Celsius (72 degrees Fahrenheit). It’s December 2020, and outside, the cold air above New England slowly gives way to balmier southern temperatures. The pilots are taking the turtles on a 2,900-kilometer (1,800-mile) trip from Massachusetts to Texas’s Gulf Coast.

Eight hours later, they’re nearly there. “We’re coming into Corpus Christi,” says Mike Looby, a pilot with a sea turtle rescue organization called Turtles Fly Too, as airport runways come into view among the sprawling buildings below. Looby and co-pilot Bill Gisler, both from Ohio, will visit four different locations in Texas to offload the animals. This is the largest number of turtles the organization has transported to date.

Once the plane is on the tarmac, staff and volunteers from several aquariums and marine rescue facilities crowd around. The pilots gently slide each box of turtles toward the cargo door and the group lines up to carry them to vans parked nearby. “What happened to these guys?” someone asks. “They were found stranded on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts,” says Donna Shaver, Chief of the Division of Sea Turtle Science and Recovery at Padre Island National Seashore, as she grabs a box.

In summer months, the waters in the Gulf of Maine where Cape Cod is located are warm, calm, and full of food, serving as a natural nursery for 2-to 4-year-old Kemp’s ridleys, the smallest and most endangered sea turtle in the world. Migrating loggerheads (Caretta caretta), green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas), and the occasional leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) also visit Cape Cod Bay. But as water temperatures plummet in November, December, and January, the cold-blooded turtles must migrate out or perish. Many lose their way and wash up, cold-stunned, on the inside edge of the hook-shaped Cape, which curls into the ocean like a flexing arm, forming what some locals call “the deadly bucket.”

The phenomenon is the largest recurring sea turtle stranding event in the world. While it’s natural—local records of sea turtle bones date back centuries—the scale is new and may, paradoxically, be a product of successful efforts to recover Kemp’s ridley populations, in addition to the effects of climate change. “This area is increasing in water temperature faster than 99 percent of water bodies in the world,” says Kate Sampson, Sea Turtle Stranding and Disentanglement Coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who helps coordinate turtle transport. “Because of that, it seems like it's drawing more sea turtles.”

Fortunately for the turtles, hundreds of volunteers and several staff members organized by the non-profit Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary stand at the ready to patrol every inch of the 105-kilometer (65-mile) stretch of beach lining the inner Cape, twice a day, from November through December, no matter the weather. When they find a turtle, the animal begins a logistically complex journey from rescue to rehabilitation and, eventually, to release. Saving each flight’s worth of little lives involves approximately five vans, a thousand miles, four organizations, and 50 people. Without this monumental collaboration across North America’s eastern seaboard, other efforts to save the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle from extinction might be futile.

Three weeks before Looby and Gisler’s departure with their precious herpetological cargo, Nancy Braun and her border collie Halo walked a stretch of Great Hollow Beach, near Cape Cod’s outermost tip. The unrelenting wind blew hard, and Braun's cheeks were rosy with cold, her hair franticly trying to escape from beneath a fuzzy winter hat. Every so often, she raised binoculars to her eyes to scan the sand and any promising-looking lump of seaweed. A resident of nearby Truro and a Mass Audubon volunteer, Braun was on the lookout for turtles.

Walking quickly, she passed small cottages in the dunes with window shutters closed tightly against the elements. Brightly colored beach chairs lined the shore like memorials to summers past. Along the way, Braun saw a group of people gathered around something in the distance and she broke into a run in their direction, Halo bounding by her side. When she arrived, there they were: four sea turtles, clearly in need of care. As the group waited for the arrival of a Mass Audubon vehicle to take the turtles for initial processing, Braun and the others covered them with seaweed to protect against the wind chill.

“This is so cool,” said Richard Lammert, a visitor from New York. “We were just walking the beach and came across these turtles. I had no idea that sea turtles even came up this far. I’ve never seen one up close, let alone helped to rescue it.”

While the mood was light, there was also a sense of urgency among the group. “I called Mass Audubon to let them know what we found,” said Michael Weinstein, another Truro resident. That’s exactly the type of response turtle rescuers hope for, and why rescuers prioritize educating the community in addition to recruiting and training volunteers, according to Carol “Krill” Carson, President and Founder of the New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance and volunteer with Mass Audubon. Without a clear understanding of why the turtles are stranded in the first place, some well-intentioned people might think they should throw the animals back into the ocean. “Anyone can walk the beach and find a sea turtle,” Carson says. “It’s what that person does when they find a turtle that is critical.”

Former director of Mass Audubon Bob Prescott started the sea turtle rescue program back in 1979. At the time, Prescott says he would find only a handful of turtles each year. The number has since skyrocketed. In 2014, volunteers found a record-breaking 1,242 turtles stranded on Cape Cod beaches. In 2020, there were 1,045, the second highest number on record. The most common species found is the Kemp’s ridley, which nests in only two places in the world: a stretch of beach in Mexico and one in Texas. Between the late 1940s and the mid-80s, Kemp’s ridley populations plummeted from more than 40,000 nesting females to fewer than 300, due to entanglement in fishing gear and the harvesting of adults and eggs for human consumption. Today, Kemp’s ridleys still face a wide variety of threats including habitat loss, coastal development, ship strikes, plastic waste, and climate change. With so few ridleys left, “every life counts in the survival of this species,” says Prescott, which makes the turtle rescue effort that much more important. “It’s all hands on deck.”

Connie Merigo, executive director of the National Marine Life Center, in Bourne, Massachusetts, agrees. “You hear a lot in biology, 'Why are you interfering? Shouldn’t you just let nature run its course?’ In this case, a lot of these threats are not under control. So, if we let thousands of these turtles die every year in a cold-stunning event, the population is that much smaller."

Interestingly, though, the success of ongoing conservation efforts is likely one of the factors driving the increased need for rescues. That’s because there are simply more turtles around to strand. Conservation efforts on nesting beaches in Mexico, strict regulations on pollution, and new technological advancements in fishing equipment have all helped, as have new nest sites developed in Texas since the 1970s. Today, there are an estimated 5,500 Kemp’s ridley females nesting in Mexico and 55 in Texas. Although this is a good sign, the current population is still critically low. According to NOAA, the number of nests grew steadily until 2009, but has fluctuated since then, underscoring the importance of ongoing monitoring and conservation. “Endangered species recovery is the long game,” says Shaver, who leads the Kemp’s ridley nesting program in Texas. “It's so heartwarming to work with people who have the same mission at heart to try and give back to preserve and sustain this population.”

The other likely factor contributing to turtle strandings is the warming of the Gulf of Maine. Climate change has caused the water here to warm earlier each year and to stay warm for longer, keeping young Kemp’s ridleys in the fertile shallows of Cape Cod Bay later each fall. But the temperatures of the outer Cape and the North Atlantic still plunge as summer comes to a close. When fall arrives and the turtles attempt to navigate northward around the cape’s hook, they hit a disorienting wall of cold and turn around in search of the warmer water of their southerly ocean habitats. This leads them back to the shallow flats inside the bay, where they encounter land instead of open ocean. When the waters inside the cape reach a consistent 50 degrees Fahrenheit, any turtles still there will become hypothermic and eventually die unless they get help. Given the compounding factors, there’s no obvious end in sight to the trend. “We are going to continue to see an increase of cold-stuns on Cape Cod,” says NOAA’s Kate Sampson.

That increase has only heightened the need for collaboration. In 2010, the New England Aquarium built a sea turtle rehabilitation facility in Quincy, Massachusetts to meet demand. And with the high stranding numbers in 2020, breaking the record for live admitted turtles at 754, and limited staff due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Marine Life Center in Bourne, Massachusetts also opened its doors to help with triage of incoming turtles, on top of the rehab services it already provided.

In addition to being hypothermic, Kemp’s ridleys usually arrive at these facilities with pneumonia or develop the condition within the first week or two of their arrival. Turtles also sometimes show up with traumatic injuries like broken bones and cracked shells from ocean waves tossing their bodies repeatedly into rocks, jetties, and seawalls when the animals are too cold to swim out of the surf.

Initially when the turtles arrive, the goal is simply to assess their injuries through physical examinations and X-rays, and to stabilize them. Rehabilitation staff give the turtles fluids to rehydrate them and antibiotics to treat infections. They also work to slowly bring the animals’ internal body temperatures back up.

Still, the two Massachusetts facilities can only care for so many turtles. At some point, the animals, including those that Braun and the others found on Great Hollow Beach, must be transported to other aquariums and facilities to complete their rehabilitation and ready them for release back into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. In total, 29 additional rehab facilities are prepared to take in sea turtles for long-term rehabilitation. And flying, it turns out, is the fastest, least stressful, and safest way to transport the animals. That's where Turtles Fly Too and its team of dedicated volunteer pilots comes in.

On a frigid, clear December day, the early morning sun peeks over the horizon as four vans pull onto the tarmac at Hanscom Field in Bedford, Massachusetts. Yawning, their breath turning into clouds before them, Kate Sampson of NOAA, Connie Merigo of the Marine Life Center, and a handful of other turtle rescuers from the New England Aquarium, pour out of the vehicles to meet with pilots Looby and Gisler. They strategize about the loading process to get dozens of turtles into the air as quickly and safely as possible. And that’s just one phase of the process. Among the myriad details that must be worked out are how many turtles the rehabilitation facilities need to move, what planes are available and their capacity, where the pilots are coming from, where they’re going, and who will be on hand for pick up—all right up to the moment when the turtles arrive at their destination.

The service that Turtles Fly Too provides is unique. Besides the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has the authority to move any endangered animal, “we have the first and only permits in the nation to fly sea turtles,” says Leslie Weinstein the organization’s president. Turtles Fly Too got its start in 2014, the record-breaking year of strandings. Weinstein was running an aviation parts manufacturing company full-time, and had just transported a green sea turtle successfully to a facility in Dubuque, Iowa that summer. In November, when cold-stranded sea turtles began washing up, turtle rescuers put Weinstein in touch with Sampson and Merigo, who was then directing the New England Aquarium's Rescue Rehab Program. And thus, Turtles Fly Too was born.

Weinstein found the organization’s first pilot through a volunteer group called Pilots N Paws that transports domestic animals. A full-time dentist in New York, Ed Filangeri’s assignment was to fly eight turtles from Massachusetts to Baltimore, Maryland. Filangeri was immediately hooked and the two joined forces. These days, Filangeri doesn’t hesitate to cancel dental appointments, because, he says, “the turtles can’t wait” and the clients understand. The organization now counts more than 350 pilots among its ranks, and provides emergency transport to other species too, including sea otters, pelicans, and seals.

The flights vary in cost from $1,500 to $100,000 depending on the plane used, the number of drop locations, and the number of turtles on board. According to Weinstein, the average ticket price comes in at about $1,000 per turtle. Public contributions to Turtles Fly Too help cover that, as do airfields that waive landing fees or provide discounts on fuel. One Christmas Eve, when Filangeri had a mission to Virginia, he showed up in a Santa hat and he and the crew named each of the eight traveling turtles after a flying reindeer. "I thought it was funny that they were flying with a man with a white beard on Christmas Eve,” Filangeri laughs. But, joking aside, “We do what’s necessary. We are the turtle movers,” adds Weinstein. “You can’t put a value on one Kemp’s life.”

After months spent healing from injuries, being treated for their illnesses, and regaining their strength, the turtles that Looby and Gisler transported in December are ready for release. “These guys come in chronically ill and it takes time to get them healed,” says Joe Flanagan, senior veterinarian at the Houston Zoo. On the appointed day in March 2021, the beaches of Galveston, Texas are warm and the spring sun reflects off the light-colored sand. Boxes filled with Kemp’s ridley sea turtles gathered from the New England coastline sit in the shade of a small tent. Several beach-goers line up behind strips of bright pink tape wafting in the wind, marking a safe corridor for the turtle parade. Aquariums and rehabilitation centers coordinate with each other to combine their releases, and allow the public to attend. “We’ll probably not see these guys ever again, I hope. But if we do it would be nice to see them nesting,” says Flanagan.

Staff and volunteers carefully grasp the small Kemp’s ridleys just behind their front flippers and carry them one by one down the sandy strip toward the ocean. The people gathered to watch cheer, clap, take selfies, smile, and wave as the animals complete the final leg of their strange, human-assisted migration. “Goodbye little one! Good luck!” someone yells. “Look at how cute they are,” says another bystander. The sea turtles seem equally enthusiastic, waving their flippers wildly as if in anticipation of the swim, as if longing for the embrace of warm water, at last, eager to once again fly beneath the waves.

“Oh my god, he is so ready to go!” says one of the turtle rehabilitators as she places a small pale-green Kemp’s, named Hagrid, slowly into the water. With several fast pumps of his flippers, the young turtle disappears into the Gulf of Mexico.

Australia is a pretty reliable source for exciting suburban animal sightings. The latest clip doing the rounds shows a particularly determined brushturkey pecking at a python as the snake slithers across a driveway in search of safety.

Snaek in the yard yesterday. But the bush turkey saw it off. She patrolled in front of the tree for about 20mins just to make sure it didn’t come back for her babies. pic.twitter.com/W5PeJUK2og

— Kate Carruthers 😷🧤🦠💉 (@kcarruthers) December 17, 2021

According to Kate Carruthers who filmed the encounter, the python was likely in search of the brushturkey's nesting mound – a mass of organic material that the males of the species scrape together to provide a natural incubator for the female to lay her eggs in. In addition to creating the mound, the male Australian brushturkeys will also diligently protect it from predators until the eggs hatch, at which point the youngsters are on their own. It can take several months for a male to complete construction on their all-important heaps which contain a significant amount of organic material.

Brushturkeys are common in rainforest and scrub along the east coast of Australia, where their range overlaps with that of the diamond python – a sizeable constrictor known to frequent suburban areas. Although the snakes prefer a diet of small mammals which they catch by ambush, this brushturkey was not taking any chances and made sure to see off the potential threat. 

Header image: JJ Harrison

"The cats were peering into the tree and my wife said 'there's probably a mouse in there somewhere,'" homeowner Rob Wild told CNN, recounting the incident. Rob and his wife Marcela soon discovered that the tree-dweller was of a more serpentine variety. "I didn't know what it was at the time but then I Googled what snakes are in our area and it came up immediately as a boomslang."

The boomslang – easily recognisable by its huge eye and short snout – is at home in the branches. In fact, it derives its common name from the Afrikaans words for tree (boom) and snake (slang), so it's hardly surprising to see one retreat to the safety of the leaves. It carries a highly potent haemotoxic venom that can be fatal to humans if injected but, thankfully, the snakes are shy and rarely go on the offensive. It's likely this home invader slithered into the synthetic tree in an attempt to hide away – which is usually the boomslang's first option when faced with a potential threat.

Snake catcher Gerrie Heyns was certain he was dealing with a hoax when he first got word of the Christmas-tree snake, but after receiving photos from the Wilds to confirm the validity of the sighting he rushed out to help. 

"The snake stayed in the tree for two hours until I got there," Heyns told CNN, having already instructed the family to stay away from the tree and keep their eyes on the boomslang. Using snake tongs, the experienced handler removed the boomslang from its hiding spot and wrangled it into a "snake tube". It was temporarily housed in an enclosure that evening and released back into the wild the following day.

"Once I had it under control the family came right up to see the snake. It didn't try to bite or be defensive because I gave it no reason to. A scary moment turned into an exciting moment for the children," Heyns explained.

This is not the first time a snake has taken refuge in a Christmas tree. A photo shared in the comments thread of one of Heyns's Facebook posts showed a non-venomous spotted bush snake taking up position at the top of a decorated tree, and back in 2019, a coastal carpet python was found coiled up in an outside tree at a home in Brisbane, Australia:

So before you unwrap your presents this year, you might want to check for snakes ...

Header image: Dick Culbert

But attacking large mammals is risky – for grizzlies as for any other carnivore. A few months ago a griz in the Canadian Rockies suffered the consequences of predatory ambition (or desperation) in the form of a defensive counterattack by a mountain goat.

Earlier this year, a hiker in British Columbia’s Yoho National Park came upon a grizzly carcass – a female, or sow, weighing only some 70 kilograms (154 pounds). A subsequent necropsy revealed stab wounds at the bear’s armpits and throat which Parks Canada attributed to the dagger-like horns of a mountain goat, a band of which was seen in the general vicinity of the dead griz. The location of those wounds, and the determination that they were received before the bear’s death, suggested a botched predation attempt.

“When grizzly bears attack,” Parks Canada wildlife ecologist David Laskin told Rocky Mountain Outlook Today, “they tend to focus on the head, back of the head, and the shoulders of prey, and it’s usually from above, so in turn the defensive response of the mountain goat would be to protect itself using its sharp horns.”

Indeed, Laskin further noted that this wasn’t the first case of this variety that he’d heard of. “Though rare, other cases of mountain goats defensively killing bears have been reported in the past,” he told the paper. “This is not completely surprising since mountain goats are strong animals that are well equipped to defend themselves.”

Mountain goats are stocky, snow-white, black-horned ungulates – not true goats, by the way – native to the high country of northwestern North America. Across a goodly portion of that range, they overlap with mountain sheep: Dall, Stone, and bighorn sheep, only distantly related caprine cousins. Whereas mountain-sheep rams square off with dramatic head-on clashes – loud, shuddering, but generally more ritualised than injurious combat – goat billies confront one another broadside, and if intimidation doesn’t work they jab fiercely at their rival’s hindquarters. Though said rear ends are protected by thickened hide, the curved, keen-pointed design of the goat’s horns makes these rut rumbles dicier affairs than the boss-to-boss collision of mountain sheep.

Mountain-goat nannies are notably aggressive toward other goats, quick to deploy a horn slash or two to clarify the social hierarchy. Bighorn sheep on Caw Ridge – a long-standing bighorn and mountain-goat research site along the front of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains – tend to yield to testy goats, surely out of respect for those skull-spikes of theirs.

On occasion, mountain goats may even turn those horns on human beings. A few years back, a man in Utah escaped a tense encounter with a billy unscathed; a 2010 hiker in Washington State’s Olympic National Park was less fortunate.

But wielding dagger horns, useful as they can be for sorting out intra-group dynamics, aren’t a mountain goat’s primary means of eluding predators. It’s their exceptional skills navigating steep cliffs and razor-thin ledges, which gives them a natural advantage over grizzlies and other carnivores in rugged mountainscapes.

Kevin White, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish & Game who’s closely studied the species in the burly coastal mountains of that state’s southeast, noted via email that survival rates among mountain-goat kids in “intact, predator-rich ecosystems” tend to be notably higher than those of deer and moose neonates – evidence of the effectiveness of the goat’s anti-predator strategies.

Goats, however, must often forage away from the sheer “escape terrain” that gives them a leg-up, and in at least some goat-roamed landscapes those kinds of gravity-defying refuges are a limited resource. Grazing gentler alpine slopes or browsing subalpine parkland, mountain goats are more vulnerable to carnivores: not only grizzlies, but also wolves (for which goats may be a significant food source in, for example, parts of southeastern Alaska) and cougars, and potentially also black bears and wolverines.

In many cases, goats caught out in such precarious settings will flee to the nearest escape terrain, scrambling up outcrops and rock faces as quickly as they can. But if such terrain is not available, or goats are overtaken before reaching it, they may resort to active defense.

“In most instances,” White told me, “mountain goats respond to threats by running to cliffs/refugia and then climbing into difficult-to-access spots. Yet, when no other options exist, they clearly exhibit defensive behavior, including incredibly quick and dangerous horn-stabbing movements.”

He highlighted the following footage of a goat attacked by a cougar (not taken in Alaska) as illustrative of how effective those horn-thrusts can be:

Sandra Hamel of Quebec’s Université Laval, who’s logged many hours studying goats at Caw Ridge, concurred with White in terms of mountain goats – not least mother goats with especially vulnerable young – favouring flight over fight against predators in most cases. “Defense is more an exception and when it seems feasible to win for the nanny,” she said via email. “I have seen a nanny run to defend her kid from a yearling bear that had taken it, but as soon as the mother bear arrived in sight, the nanny just abandoned immediately the chase and almost ‘flew’ while running away.”

Steeve Côté, another leading mountain-goat authority, and one of Hamel’s colleagues at Université Laval, echoed that point regarding threatened nannies with kids. “They can either escape and not consider their kids,” he emailed, “but they can also defend the kids. I’ve seen them attacking predators, jumping off cliffs to go defend their kid, etc., but this is mainly for wolves, probably less likely with bears, and overall not that common. Overall, the best defense by far is going to a cliff and staying there – that’s what they normally do.”

Whether goats choose to go on the offense or not when faced with predators can make a big difference. In a 1997 paper, Côté and his co-authors described an extended interaction between a band of goats on Caw Ridge and a pair of wolves. One wolf ended up grabbing a three-month-old kid, only to be set upon by its mother, who leapt down from the cliff where the goats had taken refuge and charged the attacker. After a few jabs from the nanny, the wolf released the kid, which escaped; three other adult goats then chased the canid off.

Later that same day, however, after the goats had returned to the slope on which they’d first been attacked, the same wolf reappeared and chased the band. Several goats veered away from the cliff and ran instead (unwisely?) toward a nearby wood, pursued by the wolf. It ended up catching a yearling female, which it soon killed; eventually, it dragged the carcass into the trees. In this case, the mother of the yearling, present in the band, did not attempt to defend her offspring, though this nanny, the study authors observed, “looked for several minutes at the site where the wolf had disappeared and was the last goat to bed.”

Hamel notes that nannies with kids threatened by grizzlies may retreat to ledges and stamp their hooves aggressively, a behavior she and Côté have also documented when goats shield youngsters from swooping golden eagles. A video captured in 2018 shows this foot-stamping behavior in action, as performed by a female goat protecting a kid from a grizzly in the Canadian Rockies:

The Caw Ridge researchers have also seen a nanny run off a wolverine. According to Marco Festa-Bianchet of the Université de Sherbrooke – and co-author, with Côté, of the seminal Mountain Goats: Ecology, Behavior, and Conservation of an Alpine Ungulate – the wolverine “hightailed it out of there.” (Sounds like a smart move.)

“So they are aggressive and showing it to predators,” Hamel noted, “but I feel they will only attack if they stand a good chance at the predator or have no other alternative than to fight for their life, for example if they are ambushed.”

The threat of ambush is a real one for goats that stray from cliffs into parkland or forest. Goats crossing through timber – to reach mineral licks, say, or en route between seasonal ranges – have been seen running along habitual trails, as if to minimise their time in this riskier habitat. In a Caw Ridge study looking at the survival of young goats to breeding age between 1989 and 1993, all except two of the confirmed and suspected predation events took place in forest or krummholz (contorted, weather-beaten timberline stands). In what appeared to be an unsuccessful attempt at snatching a goat from a group amid timber, a grizzly bear observed by the researchers “seemed to detect the goats by scent, then rushed in their direction, possibly attempting an ambush.”

In some areas, nannies and young goats seem to assiduously hug cliffs and stay above timberline, while adult males (billies) are more likely to forage lower down in conifer stands. This may potentially put male goats at risk of predatory ambush more frequently; Côté notes the Caw Ridge study has documented numerous instances of successful attacks by grizzlies on billies.

That said, Hamel emphasizes the researchers have also seen plenty of attacks on nannies and kids. “Except for the kidding season, most females and young goats form larger groups than males, so this might help to detect a predator more rapidly to escape (‘many-eyes’ hypothesis,” she wrote by email.) “It might also make them more detectable by predators than smaller groups or individual males.”

In the mountains of coastal Alaska, Kevin White said there’s not strong evidence for sex-based habitat segregation, though adult males and females may use different areas at different times of year. He also pointed out that a large billy – in his study area, he’s weighed male goats as heavy as 175 kilograms (385 pounds) – is “a formidable opponent” even for brown bears.

Among the successful grizzly attacks on mountain goats that Hamel has seen at Caw Ridge was an intriguing predation involving not one but two young bears. The pair had been observed earlier one particular summer “almost searching systematically for cliffs in the kidding season,” managing to take a few kids. Then, in midsummer, the two grizzlies attacked a large group of goats. One of the bears flushed the goats, which ran to the other side of some escape terrain, only to be met by the second bear. That griz ended up killing an adult nanny.

The bears went out of view, but shortly thereafter one was seen leaving the vicinity, and the pair wasn’t observed together again for the rest of the summer. Hamel said tracks near the goat kill suggested the two grizzlies may have squabbled over the carcass.

Attaining escape terrain – or, more rarely, counter-attacking – may see a mountain goat out of immediate trouble when it comes to grizzly bears and other potential predators. But it’s important to note that there may be secondary or residual impacts to a local goat population from a carnivore encounter. A Caw Ridge study Côté worked on suggested that even unsuccessful attacks by grizzlies on goat bands may – especially when played out in mountain forests, where visibility is limited – lead to nanny-kid separations by scattering goats this way and that. That could conceivably result in higher mortality among pint-sized goats. “Lone kids are probably at high risk of predation, being small and inexperienced in escaping predators,” the study authors wrote in a Mammalia paper. “Lone kids also appear to have limited knowledge of the location of travel routes and of habitats regularly used in their home range.”

Furthermore, a recent study out of Caw Ridge suggests that the mere presence of predators may have a long-term impact on mountain goats. A bear, wolf or cougar on the scene – even if no attacks result – can elevate stress hormones (glucocorticoids) in goats, in turn lowering the proportion of reproductive nannies in the population.

The superior traction of goats on dicey alpine topography is likely one reason why your average grizzly, wolf, or cougar is likely to treat them as more of an incidental prey source. (Though Hamel—a rock-climber herself – notes that grizzlies can be impressively adept at scaling “areas that are difficult to climb for most humans.”) So is the fact that, within a given landscape, mountain goats often exist in lower numbers and densities than other ungulates.

But the relatively small sizes of typical goat populations could also heighten the impact of predation in certain cases. There is evidence that, at least occasionally, particular carnivores may “specialize” to one degree or another in hunting goats. The Caw Ridge project, Festa-Bianchet told me, identified a “goat-specialist cougar [...] that wrecked the population” for a spell. And the aforementioned Caw Ridge research on kid survival from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s identified at least five grizzlies in the area, but suggested just one bear – perhaps a specialist – carried out all the recorded predation events on goats during the study period.

We’ll close out, just for novelty’s sake, with a goat/bear saga recorded in southeastern Alaska by Kevin White that ultimately is a fair bit odder than a goat-stabbed grizzly. A GPS-collared mountain goat died in the vicinity of the Juneau Icefield’s Meade Glacier during the winter of 2006-2007. Deep snow hampered efforts to retrieve the collar. By the following fall, though, the collar’s signal was, strangely, mobile again. It was eventually revealed that the dead goat’s tracking device was now around the neck of a black bear, which apparently in its enthusiastic scavenging of the ungulate had managed to slip the thing over its head.

Rhino translocations have become a critical tool in the arsenal for the protection of these endangered animals. Recently, 30 white rhinos were flown into Rwanda from South Africa and introduced into the Akagera National Park, in what was the single largest rhino translocation. It was carried out through a collaboration between the Rwanda Development Board, African Parks and tourism agency, andBeyond, and the South African private reserve, with funding provided by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

But moving rhinos to new landscapes and countries is complicated and expensive. Mike Knight, Chair of the African Rhino Specialist Group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has been involved in many translocations over 20 years. He spoke to Moina Spooner, from The Conversation Africa, about what it takes.

How many white rhinos are there in Africa? And why are they so special?

Well, let’s start off with why rhinos are so special.

Rhinos play a fundamental role in transforming the natural environment. If you take white rhinos out of the system, it changes.

When you compare white and black rhinos, they’re very different. At 1,500kg, white rhinos are a much larger species. They move in small groups and are grazers. They are considered ecological engineers, altering the habitat by creating grazing lawns, pushing back bush encroachment. By contrast, the smaller bodied (800-1200kg) black rhinos are browsers. They operate more often on their own, are far more picky in what they eat, altering the environment in different ways.

There are two subspecies of white rhino; southern and northern whites. Between 40 and 50 years ago, there were more northern whites than southern whites, and that’s reversed entirely. We’re now down to just two northern whites, housed on a private reserve in Kenya.

In the late 19th century, southern white rhinos were almost on the brink of extinction. This was due to poaching and hunting. But in 1895 a small population of fewer than 100 individuals was discovered in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. After more than a century of protection and good management, there are now around 17,600 white rhinos (as of 2018) living in protected areas and private game reserves. This figure is based upon continental estimates that we, as the IUCN’s rhino specialist group, pull together every two to three years.

However, this success story is being threatened by the illegal trade in horn. Between 2006 and 2020, 10,600 rhinos across the continent have been lost. With the exception of a few areas, rhinos are surviving in well-protected, smaller national parks and reserves.

Why were these rhinos translocated to Rwanda?

The recovery of the white rhino is a fantastic conservation success. This is where the recent introduction of white rhinos to Rwanda fits in. Having a population in a Rwanda could create a secure new breeding stronghold in East Africa and help ensure the long-term survival of the species in the wild.

For Rwanda and Rwandans, the translocation will enhance Akagera’s appeal, contributing to Rwanda’s wildlife economy.

What factors have to be taken into account when moving rhinos to a different country?

Before introducing a species you need to run through a hierarchical checklist of issues from historical distribution, habitat suitability, disease, law enforcement, sustainability, threats and political support, to name a number.

Understanding the habitat that the animals are going into and whether it suits them is critical. There’s no recent recorded history record of white rhinos in Rwanda. However, southern white rhinos were recorded south of the Zambezi River and Northern Whites in Uganda, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. So it’s essentially like a novel species being introduced into very good habitat.

Akagera national park has been assessed to be able to support a sizeable population of about 120 white rhinos and could play an important role in conserving the species, especially in East Africa.

Given the threats from poaching, addressing security issues remains paramount as it can undermine all the best introductions. African Parks – a non-profit conservation organisation that manages protected areas, including Akagera – haven’t lost an animal to poaching over the last decade. The introduction of black rhinos to the park in 2017 has given the park authorities time to prove they are well-equipped to secure white rhinos too.

Then we need a suitable number. It’s not Noah’s Ark, you need more than two – we ideally recommend at least 25 unrelated animals to get a population going. This reduces potential social problems and also provides the budding population with greater genetic diversity to adapt to the new conditions.

On the disease front there were a number of concerns especially from trypanosomiasis, or tryps, as we call it. We know from some past failed introductions, that tryps can have disastrous consequences for white rhinos that remain naive to tryps. In the case of this introduction, the parks officials under expert veterinary advice have been reducing the challenge posed by tryps through the erection of more than 800 tsetse fly traps and dosing the rhinos with a prophylaxis. The intention is not to eradicate tryps but rather for the rhinos to slowly grow their immunity to the disease.

Any international translocation requires political support from national governments and conservation authorities and should be in full compliance with international agreements, such as CITES. Both the South African and Rwandan governments are in full support of this translocation as its covered by the general MOU between the two countries that covers all matters associated with biodiversity conservation. Because the white rhino is an IUCN regulated species, this introduction had all the required export and import permits from CITES.

Sourcing the animals is also an important aspect. Who’s going to make those animals available? Are they being acquired, or have they to be donated? South Africa has a vibrant wildlife industry based upon the buying and selling of wildlife. Sourcing from one site (as in this case) was ideal from a logistical and animal management perspective.

Then you have to catch them and translocate them. A lot of time is spent on planning for this and ensuring the animals are treated as well as possible. Moving animals over thousands of kilometres is a serious endeavour. With 30 animals, chartered jumbo jets are the best way. This requires considerable veterinary and logistical coordination to capture the animals, load into crates, transport to the aircraft, load as quickly as possible, unload similarly, transport to the site and release into well-sited and secure bomas. Documentation needs to be in order with customs and immigration officials on both ends to make it as smooth as possible.

Upon arrival, animals are put into holding bomas to get them adjusted to the local different foods that they’ll encounter. What often happens at this stage, because the rhinos aren’t familiar with the surroundings or new diet, is that the animals can lose condition. The boma programme could take up to seven weeks.

Once they’re in the new habitat, the next concern is security and making sure people can take care of them and monitor them.

Should rhino translocations to other countries in Africa be encouraged?

As a rhino specialist, I advocate translocation. Translocation has been one of the most important tools in our conservation box of tricks as it allows us to spread our eggs into multiple baskets nationally and internationally. It's been one of the factors behind the success of the rhino conservation efforts in Africa thus far.

Mike Knight, Chair IUCN rhino specialist group and Research Associate, Nelson Mandela University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Top header image: Matthew Rogers, Flickr

Rich German and Matthew Wheaton suspect that the ocean behemoth they found drifting near the surface is one of the largest on record. "We didn’t have a measuring tape but Matt’s board is 14 foot long and the fish sure looked a solid 9 ft+," German wrote on Instagram.

The ocean sunfish is the heaviest known bony fish in the world and can tip the scales at over 5,000 pounds (2.26 tonnes). An adaptable species, these giants can be found across the globe, but prefer to spend their time in the open ocean, making encounters like this quite rare.

Their monumental size may help the animals thermoregulate in the depths of the sea. Molas have been recorded 2,600 feet below the surface where they hunt prey like siphonophores. Their size helps ensure that they retain their heat for longer and can remain in the depths for some time before returning to the surface to "sunbathe" and increase their body temperature.

German has come across these pelagic heavyweights in the past so he instantly knew what he was looking at, however, this particular fish was the biggest he'd ever seen. "This thing was just massive," he said in an interview with KTLA. 

The paddleboarder and marine advocate, who runs ocean conservation organisation Project O and has his own podcast dedicated to marine life, is thrilled that the clip is receiving so much attention: "I think it's just a testament to how much people really love the ocean and the life that lives in it."

The latest sighting also highlights the importance of marine conservation areas, as the mola was filmed in the Laguna Beach State Marine Reserve –a roughly six-mile-squared area in which fishing is prohibited.

Header image: Eric Chan