It was a rough year for Homo sapiens. The coronavirus epidemic highlighted our vulnerabilities in the natural world that are constantly changing. Many were forced to find a new level of determination and creativity to survive.
While humans are isolated, birds, bugs, fish and mammals put their own ingenuity on display. The year 2020 was the year when homicide scandals appeared in the United States, scientists introduced us to beautiful octopuses like emojis and researchers discovered that Platypus shone under black light.
Below are some articles about animals – and humans that study them – that surprise or delight Readers of most times.
The longest year, the longest animal
In many ways, 2020 has felt like the longest year. That year, too, scientists discovered a potentially long creature in the ocean: a 150-foot-long siphonophore found in the deep sea of Western Australia.
“It looked like an incredible UFO,” said Dr. Nerida Wilson, a senior research scientist at the Western Australian Museum.
Each siphonophore is a colony of individual zoids, clusters of cells that clone themselves thousands of times to form an elaborate, string-like body. When some of his colleagues compared the siphonophore to a silly string, Dr. Wilson said the organism is more organized than that.
With the world on the break, Sunderland owners own the road
This year, amphibian migration to the northeastern United States is consistent with the coronavirus epidemic. Social distance and shelter-in-order reduced vehicle traffic, which turned this spring into an unintentional, large-scale experiment.
Greg Lecler, a graduate herpetology student at the University of Maine, said: “It doesn’t often happen that we have to cross a road There is an opportunity to discover the true effects. “.
It was a stick, it was a leaf; Together they made history
It was a century-old leaf insect mystery: what happened to the nanophilium woman?
In the spring of 2018 at the Montreal Insectarium, Stephanie Le Tarant got a clutch of 13 eggs, which she hopes will land in the leaves. The eggs were not oval, but the premise, brown paper lanterns were even smaller than chia seeds.
They were kept by the wild-caught female Philium ki saccians, a leaf moth of Papua New Guinea, belonging to a group called Frondosum, known only by female specimens.
After the eggs hatched, the two grew thin and sticky and also spread a pair of wings. They had a strange resemblance to the leaf-bearing insects of the nanophilium, a completely different genus, six species of which were described only from male specimens. The conclusion was clear: in fact the two species were one and the same, and they were given a new name, Nanophilium ascians.
“Since 1906, we’ve only ever met males,” said Royce Cumming, a graduate student at City University of New York. “And now we have the final, solid proof.”
An octopus as beautiful as an emoji
In the Coral Sea, what is Australia on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia? The region was largely obscure and unbearable until a recent expedition discovered its dark waters, exposing the abundance of life, exotic geographical features, and stunning deep ravines.
In a campaign organized by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, remote beaches were mapped by sound beams and tethered and autonomous robots were arranged to capture images close to the royal depots.
His work captures a video of a dumbo octopus – a striking resemblance to a top octopus emoji – and the region’s alluvial nautilus population. The team found the hardest living corals living in the waters of eastern Australia and discovered about 10 new species of fish, snails and sponges.
Time to hibernate like a hummingbird
It looks like a sack that encloses with a drawstring. Flying creatures are famously the fastest metabolites in vertebrates, and to stimulate their zippy lifestyle, they drink their body weight in nectar every day.
To save their energy, hummingbirds have been found to go into exceptionally cold torpedoes in the Essendis Mountains of South America, a physical state similar to hibernation, with body temperature dropping as low as 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
As the year draws to a close, we will have the opportunity to learn from these little birds and slow them down.
Shine like platypus
When we last checked on the platypus, it confused the expectations of the mammals with its webbed legs, duck-like bill and egg-laying. More than that, it was producing toxins.
Now it turns out that even his tight-looking coat is hiding a secret: when you turn on the black light, it starts to shine.
Ultraviolet light on the platypus turns the animal’s fur fluorescence into a greenish-blue color. Platypus is one of the few features that is known to display this feature. And we’re still in the dark about why they do it – if there’s a reason. Scientists have also discovered that they cannot be alone in secret glowing mammals.
Bat, a potential source of coronavirus
An international team of scientists, including a leading researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, analyzed all known coronaviruses in the Chinese bat and performed genetic analysis to find the possible origin of the novel coronavirus in the horse.
Researchers, mostly Chinese and Americans, have conducted a thorough search for coronavirus in bats to identify hot spots for possible spillovers of the virus in humans, and consequently epidemic outbreaks.
The genetic evidence for the origin of the virus from bats was already overwhelming. Horse bats, in particular, were considered potential hosts because other spillover diseases, such as the SARS outbreak in 2003, came from a virus that originated from these bats.
No bat virus is so close to the novel coronavirus that it indicates that it has jumped directly from bats to humans. The immediate ancestor of the new virus has not been found, and it may be in bats or other animals.
Kenya has its worst locust outbreak in 70 years
“It was like an umbrella that covered the sky,” said Joseph Keaton Laprole, a pastoralist in Wamba, Kenya, who has lived there for most of his 68 years.
A swarm of desert locusts swept across Kenya in June. The villagers were stunned by the sheer size of the jigri. They initially thought it was a cloud filled with cold rain.
Absolutely mobile creatures can travel more than 80 miles a day. Their swarms, which can contain 80 million locust adults per square kilometer, feed about 35,000 people every day.
While spraying of chemicals may prove effective in controlling pests, locals worry that these chemicals will contaminate the water supply used for drinking and washing as well as watering crops.
The spread of locusts is expected to become more frequent and more intense due to climate change.
Slaughtered millions of mink to prevent the spread of coronavirus
The Danish government slaughtered millions of mink on more than 1,000 farms earlier this year, citing concerns that mutations in the novel coronavirus that infected mink could potentially interfere with the effectiveness of the vaccine for humans.
Scientists say there are several reasons for Denmark’s work beyond this particular mutable virus. The mink farm has been shown to be a hotbed for coronavirus, and is capable of transmitting the mink virus to humans. They are the only animals known to do so.
This set of mutations may not be harmful to humans, but the virus will undoubtedly continue to transform into mink as it occurs in humans, and crowded conditions on mink farms can put evolutionary pressure on different viruses than the human population. The virus can also jump from mink to other animals.
Murder Hornet is here for your honeybees
The arrival of the “Hornets of Murder” in the United States has certainly managed to get the world’s attention this spring.
Asian giant horns are known for their ability to clean a beehive in hours, bees scattering and raising the buttocks of victims. For larger targets, the powerful venom of the horns and the stinger – long enough to puncture a beekeeping suit – create a stimulating combination that victims liken to driving hot metal into their skin.
This fall, after some views of the Pacific Northwest, Washington State officials reported that they had discovered and eliminated the first known murder horn structure in the country. The structure of the invading hornets was removed in the same way that they were going to enter their “slaughter phase”.
Even if no other hurricanes are found in the area in the future, officials will continue to use traps for at least three years to keep the area free of hurricanes.
