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daily Nature News with me, Ross one. You might have seen a number of viral videos showing cats being startled by cucumbers. I don't think they're frightened of the cucumber themselves, but by the sudden appearance of an object that might be a snake. But have you heard about mice being frightened by bananas? It's a real thing, but only for male mice. Researchers from university in Canada have been looking into chemical signaling within mouse populations, although we think that is, making squeaky noises might have a very rich language of smell is what's called olfactory signaling pregnant and lactating females producer, which ward males to keep your distance or they will be attacked. After analyzing these compounds, the scientists isolated one in particular. It's called N a chemical, which also happens to be responsible for the unique smell of bananas. Upon learning this, one of the research is Lucas Lima popped down to the local supermarket for a bottle of banana oil. They found it induced exactly the same stress response and males, as did the smell of a mother protecting her. Babies Sciences Sciences previously recorded male or female factories signaling and mice, but very few instances like this of female to mail. I won't be back with the news tomorrow as that's the end of my contract. It has been a real pleasure talking to these last few months. My name is Ron. Goodbye.
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daily Nature News with me Roast swan. We already know that dolphins are clever, but we didn't know that they use medicine. Indo Pacific bottlenose dolphins have been seen rubbing themselves against coral in the northern Red Sea off the coast of Egypt. Scientists including Angela Sultana at the University of Zurich in Switzerland notice that the dolphins are very selective about which corals to rub against and even lined up nose to tail to take their terms at the best locations. They carefully observed which corals were being used and took samples for analysis back in the lab. What they found was intriguing. Two species of coral and one type of sponge were found to produce no fewer than 17 different compounds that have beneficial effects on skin. They found that when the animals rub against them, the coral and sponge polyps released mucus containing a range of active metabolites with antibacterial, anti oxidative hormonal and toxic qualities. They reckon the dolphins are using these skincare products to treat infections and maybe even as a precautionary treatment against parasites and fungal infection can't be long before some enterprising cosmetics manufacturer finds a way to get this miracle goo into jars at your local supermarket as used by Red Sea dolphins. More nature news tomorrow
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daily Nature News With me, Russ Swan. It's a tough life for turtle hatchlings who have to break out of their egg, climb to the surface and make their way to the sea, trying to avoid getting eaten on the way. It's even tougher for leatherbacks, who have more difficulty finding their direction than other turtles. Only between one and 1000 and one in 10,000 actually make it to adulthood. Leatherbacks are the only turtles without a hard shell, which means they have less defence against the birds and crabs that might predict them. They're also the species most likely to be found circling on the beach. Trying to find the relative safety of the ocean. Scientists at Florida Atlantic University have discovered that leatherbacks have really poor vision, with light sensitively only between one and 10% of their relatives that loggerhead. They also lacked any adaptation to dim lighting conditions, which might help them at night, which is when they tend to hatch. They were found a circle more on moonless nights than under the full moon. That, perhaps, is not so surprising, but this obvious evolutionary handicap is something of a mystery. If you can't see the see, you're less likely to survive. And that could be bad for the species. Other turtles have evolved better eyesight. So why haven't leatherbacks? The answer may be the difference in that adult habitat. Loggerheads and green turtles live in shallow coastal waters while leatherbacks go to the open ocean. Perhaps the eyesight that is so poor on land is actually better for hunting at sea. Morning news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Roast swan. You've maybe heard of flying fish and even flying lizards, but have you ever heard of flying salamanders? Salamanders are amphibians, usually found in or near water. They have moist skin and need to take care to avoid drying out. But one species, the wandering salamander, likes to climb trees. It goes up at night to feed on insects and snails and then hides by day at ground level. It's also one of the few animals that might estimate in summer. This is a bit like hibernation. They become dormant and lower their metabolism. But in summer, not winter. Now, just to confuse things in some places, the wandering salamander might hibernate. Instead. It's an adaptable creature, and it has a rare trick among its kind. It doesn't exactly fly, but it will leap from a tree and control its descent in a kind of parachute fashion. This previously unknown behaviour has just been reported by Christian Brown at the University of South Florida. Having noticed the way they jump in the wild, he tested them in a vertical wind tunnel. Back in the lab, he found that the animals would instinctively adopt a skydiving posture and could control their rate of descent and make fine adjustments to pitch, roll and yaw. They would make banking terms and could even glide horizontally. The scientists think that further research is needed to work out just how they do this as they lack any of the usual control services that other aviators use. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With me, Ross, Juan It's World Bee Day, as in a day about bees, Not that porcelain thing you might find in a hotel bathroom. It's no secret that around the world bees are in trouble. The growing use of agrochemicals and particularly insecticides and the devastation to be colony is caused by the parasitic varroa mite have set alarm bells ringing. Bees pollinate about 70% of our crops. You may have heard a quote attributed to Einstein that if bees went extinct, humans would follow three or four years later. Yeah, he never said that, and it isn't true. But these little guys are our friends, and we really should cherish and protect them. Samuel, both at the Julius Maximilian University inverts Berg Germany has just discovered a mechanism by which fungicides are affecting be reproduction. He found that female Mason bees assess their male partners with two quality signals. One is his odour, and the other is his thoracic vibrations. In other words, he's got to smell good, and he's got to have the right moves. Even low toxicity fungicides such as venue Connors all have negative effect on both of these signals. Males exposed to the chemical, vibrate their thoracic muscles less and have a different odour composition, leading to their rejection by females. Writing in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the researchers say there's previously unknown issue could explain some of the decline in bee populations in agricultural landscapes. More nature news tomorrow.
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really nature news with me. Ross Swan. Does Personality Affect learning ability? Well, it seems that for marmoset monkeys, yes, it does. New research in the journal Scientific Reports by Vedran a slightly Bigger and colleagues from the University of Vienna show that more extrovert monkeys learn faster. The researchers first individually assessed the personalities of marmosets by recording their reactions to various tasks. They presented them with a range of unknown objects and with new types of food, and they even try to trick them with a toy snake to see which animals approached it first, some monkeys prove themselves to be quite outgoing, exploring confidently, while others were more likely to keep a distance. They then assessed their learning performance with tasks involving standing on a weighing scale and using a stick to touch a distant point. What they learned was interesting. The more extrovert the monkey, the faster it learned. They also found that females on the whole learned faster than males. They say that these findings support what is known as the speed, accuracy, tradeoff framework, where, in this case, speed predicts personality or personality, predicts speed. They also found that members of some families were quicker to learn than others. Now, if anything that suggests that we're really not all that different, more in ancient is tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Ross Swan. If I mentioned the Komodo National Park in Indonesia, you'll probably immediately think of the Komodo Dragon, a huge and fearsome lizard that lives there. But the waters around Komodo have now been recognised as one of the most important habitats of the Manta Ray reef. Mantas are the smaller of the two mentor. Species only grow to about 5.5 metres across its cousin. The oceanic manta gets up to seven metres because they live in shallow waters around the island and do so audio around Reef managers are very popular with wildlife tourists and with divers, and that brings both benefits and challenges enlisting the support of local dive operators, a team of scientists from the Marine Megafauna Foundation. Now there's a cool name and Murdoch University in Australia have been crowdsourcing data to help them study these beautiful animals. From nearly 4000 photographs, they have identified over 1000 individual mentors using their belly markings to tell them apart. Fishing has been officially banned in the area for 38 years, which has really helped protect the species well done, Indonesia. But the growth in tourism is putting pressure on the environment as well as providing more pictures for scientists. So swings and roundabouts. The pictures can be seen at manta macha dot org, which regular listeners may recall We first mentioned in February in Connexion with the Wild Book Project Cheque It Out Morning after News Tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me, Russ Swan Dragonflies are probably the most aromatic creatures that have ever lived. They can fly fast or slow, hover, fly sideways and backwards. They're good at it because they've been practising for so long. There were some of the very first animals ever to discover flight on planet Earth. One of the secrets that uncanny manoeuvring ability has just been uncovered. Jane Wang, a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at Cornell University in the USA, has been studying Dragonflies. Flight patterns, she says. They're writing ability is a bit like a cat, which, when dropped upside down, will always land on its feet. Her team devised an experiment in which Dragonflies were dropped while being filmed at 4000 frames per second. Cats and humans have an inertial sense that tells when they are falling. But Dragonflies have five eyes to huge compound eyes, providing all round vision and three additional quite simple eyes called us a li. Now, if you've ever tried to sneak up on a dragon fly, as I have for photography, you'll appreciate how good their vision is. Wang's experiments showed that this visual power is the key to their writing ability. Reflexes send correcting signals to each of the animals four wings independently to correct their attitude. And with just three or four wing strokes, it can roll 100 and 80 degrees and resume flying shiny side up. The entire process takes just 200 milliseconds. Morning news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Russ Swan. If you thought you were about to die, what would be your instinctive reaction? Well, if you were a fruit fly, chances are you use your dying breath to try and get laid. Researchers at the University of Birmingham, UK have found that even when infected with deadly pathogens that reduce their energy, fruit flies will prioritise mating over any other activity. It doesn't even matter to them whether their partner is healthy or also infected. Dr. Kalina Reserve all explains that animals have limited energy resources and have to decide what actions to spend these on, including finding food, their immune response, fighting off the disease and mating by infecting both male and female flies with a variety of pathogens, including some severe infections, they found that courtship and mating behaviours always took priority. What's more, some animals actually invested more energy into getting laid than they did when they were healthy. It seems like they make a last, desperate attempt to pass on their genes to the next generation, which, after all, is the only kind of immortality any of us can attempt. Morning news tomorrow
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daily Nature News with me. Russ Swan. Here's one for movie fans. Indiana Jones was right all along in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, everybody's favorite screen archaeologist claimed that smaller scorpions were more dangerous, more venomous than bigger ones. This made up fact has entered into popular law, with any number of armchair experts prepared to explain it to anybody who will listen. But it turns out it's true. Scientists at Nui Galway in Ireland analysed 36 species of scorpion and have just published their results in the journal Toxins. Yes, there is an international scientific journal called Toxins. They found that the smallest species, such as the Brazilian yellow, have venom over 100 times as potent as the largest, such as the Rock Scorpion. They also found that scorpions with smaller pence's had more powerful stings than those with large. The South African thick tail has tiny claws and his 10 times as venomous as the Israeli gold, which has big, robust fences. More than a million people are stung by scorpions each year, and thousands die. There's a major global health issue, and most of those hospitalised are Children under 15. Even being able to describe the size of the Scorpion may help clinical staff apply appropriate treatment. And the most venomous scorpion of all. It's called the Death Stalker. One engine is tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Russ Swan. You might be familiar with the idea of mimicry in the animal world, where one species puts on the appearance of another in order to deter predators. We see it in hover flies, which are stainless but have yellow and black stripes like wasps and bees and in some snakes. Now a new kind of mimicry has been discovered in bats. It's not visual mimicry, but acoustic. Some bats will buzz like a wasp or hornet when captured, prompting an owl, their main predator, to hesitate. This might be just enough for the bat to escape. Researcher Daniela Russo of the University Delhi Studi di Napoli, Federico due in part, it immediately made the discovery while doing field research involving catching bats in mist nets. When they handled the bats to remove them from the nets, they invariably buzzed like wasps, he reports in the journal Current Biology. Mm. Later, he played these sounds to captive owls to see their reactions. The buzz of the greater mouse eared bat My Otis, My Otis made both barn owls and tawny owls move away from the source of the noise, while sounds of potential prey made them move closer. It's the first time in two species mimicry between mammals and insects has been recorded and one of the very few examples of acoustic memory ever found, thanks to Mike Koenig on Sound Bible for the for the WASP recording.
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daily Nature News with me Roast swan. We tend to think of spiders as predators, but like a lot of links in the food chain, there also pray, and a favourite way to avoid becoming lunch is to hide the tropical trek earlier. Spider, which lives in Central America, has found an unusual place to do that. It hides underwater, and it can stay submerged for about half an hour. It's a rare trick for Spider, which normally wants to stay warm and dry rather than get cold and wet. The secret to its survival is its small size, and it's all over. Covering of fuzzy hairs. These hydrophobic hairs trap a film of air over the spiders whole body, preventing water from entering its with spiritual openings and acting as insulation to keep it warm. It's a bit like a dry suit used by scuba divers, and this behaviour has never been seen before, at least not in this spider. But the same researcher who discovered it has a bit of a track record. Lindsay Swick, a professor at Binghampton State University of New York, was the first to observe a species of lizard doing pretty much the same thing. The water. Finally, Latin name analysts Aquatic asse can breathe underwater for up to 16 minutes, thanks to an air bubble it traps on its head. She published those results three years ago. So my question is this. Scuba diving lizards and dry suited spiders. What's next? Professor Swick? Morning agent is tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With Me, Ross Swan. A glimmer of hope for the critically endangered vaquita porpoise You may remember we talked about this animal. It's the smallest of all the whales and dolphins about three weeks ago. It lives in the Gulf of California, and there are thought to be only 10 individuals alive today. Illegal netting of totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is valuable for bogus Chinese medicine, has meant vaquita are also being caught and killed. The chances of its recovery might be limited by what's called inbreeding depression. With a small gene pool, each generation is less likely to produce viable offspring. But this is not necessarily the case for the vaquita, according to research just published in the journal Science. Jacqueline Robinson at UC San Francisco says their genetic studies indicate the porpoises retain enough genetic diversity to allow them to thrive, but only if the gill netting is immediately stopped. Now there is a precedent for species recovery from very low numbers. The Mauritius Kestral was very close to extinction in 1974 with only one remaining females and three males. After very careful conservation efforts today, there are around 400 birds. The Kestral narrowly escaped the fate of that other famous bird from Mauritius, the dodo. Thanks to that one fertile female A Falcon Eve. The vaquita is not saved, But it may still just be saleable. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Roast Swan. Some of the most extraordinary colours in the animal kingdom are found on the carapace is of beetles such as rosemary beetles and Rose chafer, which exhibits startling metallic green blue iridescence. They're like little living jewels, and their colouring is so vivid you might think it was artificial. The secret is what is known as structural colour, which is a physical property of the carapace and has nothing to do with pigment. Microscopically, tiny ridges and grooves generate interference patterns with light to create the appearance of colour. It's the same trick used in peacock feathers. But what is the advantage to the Beetle from having such a vivid appearance? A team of researchers from Bristol University's Camel lab has previously established that such iridescence could be a highly effective form of camouflage. They now reckon there's a second advantage. Being brilliantly colourful and shiny makes predators less likely to attack, even after the Beatles have been detected By presenting birds with glossy and matte and iridescent and non iridescent versions of Beatles, they found that both glossy nous and iridescence significantly reduced the attack willingness of the birds. So these beetles not only look fabulous, they live to be a fabulous another day. More nature news tomorrow
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daily Nature News with me. Roast swan, octopus, squid and cuttlefish are so strange that there was recently a bit of a social media meme claiming they were actually from another planet. Well, they're not, as a new study of their DNA confirms, but they are really pretty amazing animals known as the soft bodied or coal Lloyd cephalopods, they have the largest nervous systems of any invertebrate. And get this. The squid has a genome 50% bigger than a human and the octopus only a little bit smaller. These are not simple creatures but highly evolved in intelligent animals with a range of unique abilities. A major new project coordinated by the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts as she's completed the genetic sequencing of three cephalopod species. It's a tour de force of scientific investigation, which occupied several labs around the world for several years. They sequenced the Atlantic long fin inshore squid, the Hawaiian bobtail squid and the California two spot octopus. What they found is that their genomes are as strange as the animals. There's evidence of massive reorganisation of their genetic material early in their history. This led to them developing large and elaborate brains completely independently of vertebrates. What this means is that big brains have evolved twice on Planet Earth, and that's really quite a discovery. One agent is tomorrow.
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Daily Nature News with me, Russ Swan. A lot of us humans worry about putting on weight, but if you're a squirrel monkey on the pull, well, it might help you get lucky. Squirrel monkeys live in the tropical forests of Central and South America. They're small, intelligent and undeniably cute animals that are sometimes kept as pets. They make terrible pets, and they belong in the wild. Put in your home. Don't do that During their mating season, male squirrel monkeys put on quite a lot of weight, and nobody is entirely sure why. It could be that the ones that put on the most weight will have the most success with the ladies. It might be something to do with their hormones, getting them ready for mating. But with weight gain as a side effect, it could be to help them establish seniority between the males to win access to the females. Or it could be something entirely coincidental. Maybe there's more rich fruit around at that time of year. For instance, to answer the question, biology professor J. C. Buckner from the University of Texas at Arlington is embarking on a four year study. Her lab will perform DNA analysis to see if the females preferentially choose heavier partners to give them healthier offspring. They will also look at other possible causes of weight gain. Team members will spend months in the forest making observations and will perform paternity tests in newborns to establish their parentage. At the end of all of this, we should finally know whether the females think that a chunky monkey is hunky more nature news tomorrow.
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Hey, everybody. Special Bonus episode. Yesterday I visited a local woods. Now it's not a big area, just a few hectares, but it is quite special. It's a rare surviving fragment of the original Sherwood Forest, which once covered half of northern England. I don't usually posted the hand, but I really wanted to share this with you. So for the next minute herself, close your eyes and come with me to experience the soundscape of an ancient English woodland in the springtime. I'll be back next week.
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daily Nature News with Me, Ross Swan. A funny fact about the common seal is that it is less common than the Grey Seal go figure. It's also known as the Harbour Seal. It can be found around the coast of Europe and North America, and it presents something of an audio enigma. Its call is quite low for an animal of its size. What you can hear in the background are three juvenile common seals and a rescue centre in Peterburg in the Netherlands. To investigate the mystery of the seal call Cone Dareus and Andrea Rob Ignani from the Max Planck Institute for Psycho Linguistics tried to match the depth of the seals sound to the size of their vocal tract, using young animals that had died for their measurements. What they found was that the anatomy of the animals matched their physical size, even though the pitch of their call did not. In other words, they sound bigger than they are. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Biology, they concluded that the explanation must be vocal learning. There are advantages to sounding bigger, and it seems the seals learn to deliberately lower their voice to impress rivals or to get attention from their mothers. Ooh, more nature news tomorrow Oh oh,
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daily Nature News with me, Ross Swan Elephants have the longest gestation period of any animal, with females being pregnant for 22 months. Now that's pretty impressive by itself. But new research shows that giving birth does not slow down an elephant. Mother elephants live in strongly bonded female lead herds and are constantly on the move in search of food and water and newborns. Ants will usually help the mother protect and rear it. But giving birth is still a major event, and you might think it would slow them down a little. Scientists from the University of Oxford, working with the charity Save the Elephants, fitted GPS trackers to pregnant elephants in the African savannah. What they found was a surprise. The average speed of a new mother did not change significantly during pregnancy, and their speed on the day before and the day after giving birth was the same as their average speed. Even the oldest females, the matriarch of the herd, can give birth and continue to lead the group. Dr. Lucy Taylor, from Oxford, thinks this provides a clue to their very long pregnancies. Spending so long in the womb means baby elephants are already quite mature when they are born and so they can keep up with the normal herd migrations just about as soon as they can stand and their mothers don't even get a day off for maternity leave one extra news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With Me, Ross Swan. It sounds like a monster from science fiction. A vampire worm with fangs made of metal, the blood worm glycerin Daybreak yacht lives in the mud on the coast of California and Florida. It's about 10 centimetres or four inches long, and it has biting parts made of copper. The beast has four fangs arranged symmetrically around its mouth, and it uses these to bite and inject venom into its prey. Really, this is an actual animal here on planet Earth. Scientists at the University of Santa Barbara in California have finally worked out just how it manufactures its fearsome dentition. It uses a protein to harvest and concentrate copper from sediments. This is combined with melanin to create a kind of co polymer alloy containing up to 10% copper. For comparison commercial grade copper or can have as little as 0.5% copper. This little worm has found a way to synthesise a material which in the laboratory would be a multi stage process involving lots of equipment, solvents and temperature cycles. And it does it while wriggling through the mud. Understanding this unique biochemistry might lead to new ways for US humans to make new materials, such as the conductors on computer chips. As for the worm itself, I think I'll keep my distance. Biochemist Herbert Wait describes them as very disagreeable, ill tempered and easily provoked. Don't have nightmares. Morning to news tomorrow.
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Daily Nation News with me. Roth Swan What do you do when you finished making love? Whatever your bedroom habits are there. Not as dramatic as some spiders. Female Philip Panella Spiders like to have a postcoital snack, and they're like nothing better to eat than their male partner. This means that the males, once their work is done, make their escape as quickly as possible. It's very much wampum. Thank you, ma'am. For them, what is astonishing is the speed they do this at considering that they're only a centimetre so long the males propel themselves away at up to 88 centimetres per second. They accelerate and over 200 metres per second squared, which by my calculations equates to about 20 times the force of gravity. 20 g astronauts only experience about three g get into space and fighter pilots trained to a maximum of about nine g considered to be extreme stress. The mechanism by which the spiders do this has just been described for the first time. She Xiangxiang of Hubei University in China found that the male spiders build up hydraulic pressure in the tibia metatarsals, joint of their first pair of legs and Then they released this pressure. When they, you know, release spiders that failed catapult out of danger would be killed and eaten. Every time When the researchers prevented the mail from escaping, he would be killed and eaten every time they suggest. This might even be a way for the females to judge a male's fitness to mate. If they can escape, their sperm will be accepted. But if they can't get away quickly enough, they're just lunch. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily nature news with me, ross swan. We've all heard the song of the humpback whale, a haunting and ethereal refrain that has entered the popular consciousness. It even formed a plot point in one of the star trek movies, but not one of the good ones. The whales don't just sing. They also make other non song calls and a new one has just been heard for the first time. Scientists from the universities of stellenbosch in the Netherlands, Exeter in the UK and Greenpeace Laboratories recorded these noises at a location known as the VM. A seamount in the south atlantic 600 miles west of South Africa. It's a submerged plateau where the water can be as little as 26 m deep because it's so shallow. It has an abundance of life humpbacks frequent the area on their migrations. The sounds that we've got the scientists so excited have been labeled as a whop a call known to be used to maintain contact between mothers and calves. Yeah. And the new one described as an impulsive sound or gunshot. Let's hear that again. Actually they recorded a number of gunshot sounds similar but different. The discovery came while they were surveying the area as part of a project to protect this rare and fragile ecosystem. My thanks to dr kristen Tomans, Thompson at Exeter for the audio clips more nature news tomorrow
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daily Nature News with me. Rashwan Wolves are an apex predator at the very top of the natural food chain and were once one of the most widely distributed animals on Earth. Decades of habitat destruction and persecution has reduced their range, but this magnificent animal is now making a comeback. Now that brings with it some issues. Not all humans are happy about it as it presents threats to both pets and livestock and prey. Animal populations might prefer there to be fewer rather than more predators. A new report reinforces the idea that a healthy population of predators is important for the general health of an ecosystem. Wolves keep animals such as deer, elk and moose in check, and that, in turn, benefits vegetation. Carcasses left behind provide food for scavengers. Everybody wins everybody, including the prey animals. Writing in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Dr Sarah Hoye of Michigan Technological University says that the way wolves are selective in their hunting makes whole populations of moose healthier. It's well understood that predators target old, young and sick animals. They're easier to kill, and they present fewer risks of injury. This new research shows that wolves also target prime aged moose suffering from osteoarthritis. Doctor who We found that a year with a higher kill rate was followed by a year with a lower incidence of osteoarthritis. In other words, predation makes most populations healthier for nature news tomorrow.
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Daily nature News with me, Russ swan. It's quite an accolade to have an animal named after you. But not everybody would be delighted if that creature was a tiny and obscure invertebrate which makes its living at the bottom of the compost heap. Derek Hennen and colleagues at Virginia Tech have been cataloging millipedes in the eastern Usa, collecting them in the field and studying exhibits preserved in museums. They were looking in particular at a group known as the twisted claw millipedes of the genus Gonorrhea. After studying 1800 specimens, they found that 17 of them were new to science. Now, if you're a scientist who discovers a new species, you get to choose its name. It's a perk of the job and dr Henan is a bit of a taylor swift super fan. And so he named one of these millipedes after the singing and songwriting. Megastar, nan aria swift I is found only in three counties of Tennessee. Which is appropriate as that's where the star first found fame. Although she is originally from pennsylvania as well as her music. Taylor swift is known for having great legs but just the two of them, Her namesake has 68 legs. It's not known how she reacted to the news that a little brown leaf munching bug was named after her. But we do know that dr Henan also named a species after his wife, Maria. No, I think that was probably quite a good tactical idea. Morning to news tomorrow
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daily Nature News with me, Ross one. It's an Easter miracle on organism. Back from the dead. When scientists catalogued wildflowers from the cloud forests of Ecuador, they worked with specimens collected 15 years earlier. In the meantime, the first itself was largely destroyed, and they thought these old samples were the only ones that would ever be found. The bright orange castor ranters comes from the foothills of the Andes. The name is from the Greek for belly flower, a reference to its shape with a large patch bit like a pot belly. This particular species was named gas Drenthe's extinct US because it was assumed to be extinct by the time it was named. That was in 2000, from examples collected in 1985. Fast forward to the present and guess what? Extinct is extinct no more. After using satellite images to identify remaining patches of wilderness, not easy as cloud forest is cloudy, Nigel Pittman and Dawson White from the Field Museum in Chicago mounted an expedition within a couple of hours of entering the forest. There, search was over. The scientists report that the bright orange flowers lit up the undergrowth as if wanting to be discovered, so that's great news. But what about that name? Could it now be gas? Toronto resurrected. Yeah, well, it's not that easy. And once the name is attached to an organism is actually quite hard to get changed. So remains extinct. This but happily in name only. Morning news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With me, Ross Swan. It's Good Friday and the start of the Great Feast of ST Chocolate. Other deities are available, so let's talk about the Easter Bunny. We have good news for the Snowshoe Hare, a North American animal famous for its hilariously big feet. As the name suggests, these allow it to move around on the surface of deep snow. This is also an animal that changes colour brown in summer, white and winter for camouflage. In other words, it doesn't sink in, and it doesn't stand out. Scientists at Washington State University wanted to keep track of hair numbers at a number of remote sites. This is normally done by live trapping, but that's difficult and expensive, and it isn't really great for the animals. Camera traps are the obvious alternative, but they have limitations. Hairs don't have distinguishing features to tell individuals apart. If you get 40 sightings, you don't know if it's 40 different animals or the same 1 40 times. The scientists developed new analytical models that extract more information from photographs, including things like speed and location, and went into the field to see if it worked after catching 770 hairs in live traps and nearly 14,000 in photographs. They crunched the numbers and found the cameras were 86% accurate at estimating hare populations. That's good enough Now, before I go, please tell your friends how much you love daily nature news and what a great platform beams is. Thank you. I'll be back with more next week.
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daily Nature News with me. Ross Swan. The black rhinoceros is one of those rare conservation success stories that we really love. It's the smaller of the two African rhinos, only weighing up to 1.3 tonnes. I mean, what a lightweight. It usually has two horns, but sometimes it grows a third, smaller one as well. So despite having three horns and a prehistoric appearance, it really isn't triceratops. It's pronounced rhinoceros, not rhino saurus. In the second half of the 20th century, the black rhino population crashed by 98% and there were fewer than 2500 remaining. But conservation, work and enforcement of anti poaching laws is having a positive effect. The population has more than doubled from the historic low with around 5600 today. Celebrate that it's still on the critically endangered list. And a new report from the University of Manchester has found an unrecognised vulnerability. It seems the chances of the species continuing to increase will depend on a very few fertile individuals. Some animals have more babies than others. It's called reproductive variants because poaching is indiscriminate. If a small number of the more productive females happen to be taken, the entire species could be at risk. This just makes the enforcement of anti poaching all the more important. Every animal that's killed might have been like a rhino version of Eve. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily nature news with me, ross swan. The lionfish is a striking and familiar animal that's becoming rather more familiar than it ought to be Native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It's increasingly being found in places it really shouldn't be in the waters of Florida. A popular myth is that an aquarium containing lionfish was smashed during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the escaping fish established a colony. That's probably not true, but accidental or deliberate releases by humans do explain their presence Colonizing lionfish found their way into the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal. They took the time as the canal opened in 1869 and they weren't seen until 2012. But now there are a problem. They're predatory, feeding on unsuspecting indigenous fish and upsetting the natural balance. For some reason, the sharks in the med don't go for lionfish, they either don't recognize them as food or they're wary of the venomous spines that make the fish so spectacular. Now, researchers at the University of Plymouth UK have published their guide to lionfish management in the mediterranean after a four year project funded by the Eu it's a nine point plan, but I think it can be summarized in three. Kill them, Kill them and eat them. Stop anymore. Getting in. I haven't tried one myself, but I'm told they make good eating and I look forward to doing a little marine conservation as soon as possible with french fries and a glass of beer one. HR News tomorrow
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daily Nature News with me. The swan, the smallest cetacean, the whales, dolphins and porpoises is in big trouble. The vaquita porpoise lives only in a small area at the northern end of the Gulf of California. It's truly tiny, up to 1.5 metres in length and 55 kilogrammes in weight. It's also quite photogenic, with dark rings around its eyes, making it look a little like a giant panda. But your chances of photographing one are pretty low. The vaquita was only discovered in 1958 and it is now on the very brink of extinction. The main danger is the use of gill nets by fishermen hunting the totoaba fish, another endangered species, which is about twice the size of the vaquita. Fishing for them was outlawed in 1975 but the law is poorly enforced. The swim bladder of the totoaba is worth somewhere between 10 and $20,000 each in China, where it is in demand for bogus ancient medicine. So Chinese so called traditional medicine is driving Mexican poachers to catch an endangered fish and as a result, make the vaquita extinct. In 2017, it was estimated that There were 30 living vaquita today. There are thought to be only 10 10, 10 examples remaining of a beautiful marine mammal. Mexican and Chinese governments Hang your heads in shame. Enforce this law vigorously. Now, more nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With me. Russ Swan. You might not immediately think of vampire bats as being the friendliest of animals, but new research shows that they make buddies easily and retain friendship for quite a long time. Scientists at Ohio State University in the USA are looking into the process of how social bonds form. They collected a total of 21 vampire bats or females from three different locations in Panama. The bats were then mingled freely for six weeks, basically getting to know each other. The animals were split into seven groups of three, with one from each of the three original locations. These trios then lived together for just one week. The full group was reassembled and their social interactions were carefully monitored. Vampire bats, like many other social animal species, groom each other. Presumably they do this quite carefully, being, you know, vampires. The researchers found that pairs of bats that have been forced into close proximity would groom each other more frequently and for longer than random pairs. Within the group, they even groomed their new friends more than their old friends from their original home. More surprising was that this behaviour persisted for at least nine weeks after only one week of being confined together, they say this is a bit like the way humans form bonds. In college dorms. Strangers are forced together at random and form friendships that can last a lifetime. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with Me, Ross Swan. The ability to change colour is a rare animal superpower. Chameleons, of course, are the most famous example. Some types of octopus and cuttlefish are also known to change colour rapidly, matching the background to escape predators or to ambush prey. There are several upon relative. The oval squid had never been seen to have this ability until now. Living in the open ocean around Okinawa, Japan, it was assumed they had no need to change colour because they had no background to blend into just the ocean. And because they live in the open ocean, there were a lot harder to study than octopus and cuttlefish. They are notoriously difficult to keep in captivity. Now, scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have for the first time seeing them changing colour, and they made the discovery by accident. They had managed to keep some of the squid known locally as Shiro Ika in a tank. After a while, they needed to clean algae from the tank bottom. When the squid were over the clean part of the tank, they became light coloured, and when they were over the unclean section they promptly became darker. The scientists did some controlled experiments and confirmed that the animals really were changing colour. They said it was a surprise that this had happened and just as much of a surprise that nobody had ever noticed it before. So that's two cephalopods stories in two days, you lucky people, more nature needs tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with Me. Roast Swan. The issue of whether invertebrate animals experience emotion is a long and troubled matter. In science, octopuses are remarkably intelligent and can solve complex problems. They also demonstrate individual personalities, such as showing preference for certain individuals. Yes, octopuses have best friends. A report just published by the London School of Economics, commissioned by the UK government, found strong evidence that deck apart crustaceans that lobsters and crabs and settle upon mollusks, Octopuses and squid are, in fact, sentient. Professor Christine Andrews at York University in Toronto, writing in the journal Science, points out that Western culture had long assumed that other animals don't feel pain or have emotions. But medical science also believed that human babies could not feel pain until as recently as the 19 eighties. Invertebrates, like other animals, learn to avoid dangerous locations. They also show signs of empathy, becoming distressed when another is in pain, and they demonstrate curiosity and exploration and affection for individuals and excitement in anticipation of a future reward. All of this suggests sentience. The United Kingdom is considering amendments to its animal welfare legislation that would recognise this. If they do it, it will be a world first more nature news tomorrow
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daily nature news with me, Russ swan. The monarch butterfly is one of the most recognized and spectacular insects on the planet, but it could be in danger because of a parasite plague monarchs are large and powerful butterflies with striking orange and black wings with white highlights. Each year they undertake one of the most amazing migrations of any creature traveling from their wintering grounds in Mexico and southern California as far north as Canada and back again. It's quite a journey for an insect that only weighs as much as a paper clip. Multiply this by a few 100 million and you begin to appreciate what a spectacle this really is. The danger comes from alfredo size, this electro syrah or O. E. This protozoan parasite infected just 1% of the monarch population 50 years ago, but 10% today it invades the gut of caterpillars and stays with them through to adulthood. An adult with a severe infection will begin oozing fluid and will die. Even minor infections, limit flying ability and shortens their life. Professor Yap the road at Emory University in Atlanta usa reckons that tens of millions of butterflies are dying each year because of the way the root cause might be the loss of habitat in their wintering grounds, forcing the animals even closer together and allowing infection to spread more. Nature news tomorrow
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daily nature news with me, ross swan, Which is the cleverer kind of fish, the cyclades or the stingrays. Well, it turns out that both can add and subtract numbers from 1-5. Research just published in the journal Scientific reports says that the numerical abilities of fish are on a par with those of other vertebrate and invertebrate species. There was no discussion of whether par, another kind of fish are on a par with them vera Schlissel at the University of bonn, Germany trained eight zebra and bunas and eight freshwater stingrays to recognize the color blue as the symbol for addition and yellow for subtraction, blue and yellow Ukrainian. The fish were shown colored cards and won a reward if they swam through a gate corresponding to the correct answer. Six of the eight Zebra and Bunas learned to consistently do the sums, but only three of the eight stingrays. The Zebra amb una also learned more quickly, taking 28 training sessions instead of 68. Both species were better at addition than subtraction. So it looks like the zebra and buna are better at arithmetic. But the stingrays that did learn got much better scores. They got addition right, 94% of the time compared to 78 for the zebra and buna and for subtraction, they scored 89% compared to 2, 69. So the six kids are smarter, but the stingrays are smarter, simple questions. Don't always have simple answers, more Nature news tomorrow
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daily Nature News with me. Rough swan Spiders don't have ears, but it turns out they don't need them because they can use their webs instead. Until a few years ago, it was thought that spiders relied almost entirely on sight and touch to find their way around the world. Then it was discovered that tiny hairs on their legs are so sensitive to vibrations in the air they provide a kind of audio signal to the spider's brain. Well, if that wasn't enough, we now learned that the animals can use their webs as huge microphones to detect and localise sounds. John Zoo and colleagues at Binghampton University in the USA tested the wispy web of orb weaving spiders and found the animals detected and responded to tones emitted from up to three metres away. The animals rapidly turned towards the source of the sound. The scientists also used to Doppler Vibram, a tree to measure the Web's motion and discovered that this microphone has both high fidelity and high efficiency, exceeding the acoustic responsiveness of ear drums. They described this detection technique unknown until now, as outsourcing and supersising of hearing so spiders can not only hear you they can hear you really well. Your ears are what, maybe 1% of your body area. By using its Web and all weaving, Spider has a sound sensitive surface 10,000 times greater than its own body. It's a super power. It's a real life Spidey sense. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with Me, Ross Swan With some good news about coral reefs, these extraordinary marine habitats are in big danger because of the climate emergency. But some research just published shows that they can recover rather more quickly than was thought. Coral is a complex form of life with the coral polyps, which are technically animals, and their symbiotic algae. Together they build sometimes enormous reefs of carbonate material, which provides habitat for all manner of fishes and other life aquatic. When the sea warms up, the coral gets stressed and begins to eject algae, turning the previously colourful reef white. This is coral bleaching. Scientists from the University of Exeter in the UK have been studying reefs in the check goes islands in the Indian Ocean, which suffered catastrophic bleaching in 2015 and 16. A couple of years later, the reefs were shrinking, with more carbonate material being lost to erosion that was being built by coral. The carbonate budget, as they called it, was negative. But just three years after that, in 2021 all the reefs they looked at we're on a trajectory of recovery. Dr. Dennis Lange, the lead researcher, thinks that a full recovery across the Chagos archipelago is likely over the next few years if the region is spared from recurring marine heating events. Morning news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With Me, Ross Swan. It's spring in the Northern Hemisphere, autumn in the southern and all over the globe. Migrating creatures are making their way over what can be vast distances. But how do they know where to go? In the case of the Caspian tern, they learn from their fathers. Turns are quite amazing, bones looking superficially like goals but really quite different. Some of them are a little bigger than a swallow, while the Caspian is the largest tern species, or the wing span of up to 1.4 metres. It's named after the Caspian Sea but is quite widespread and is found on every continent except South America and Antarctica. Scientists led by Patrick by home at the University of Helsinki in Finland used tiny GPS devices to track a number of Caspian tern families as they migrated to West Africa. The birds migrate by one of three routes. Some travelled along the Atlantic coast of Europe and across the Straits of Gibraltar. Some went to the Black Sea, turned right and cross the Mediterranean, passing over Greece and Sicily, while others went to Turkey and crossed the sea, heading for Suez. They found that young birds always stayed close to an adult, and those that didn't would not survive the journey. They also found that it was the adult males who carry the responsibility for teaching the young ones the secrets of migration. This was usually the biological father, although in one case it was a foster father. They don't know why this is, but it sounds familiar to me. Perhaps Mansplaining is not exclusively human after all, more nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Russ Swan. I've never thought about this before, but boa constrictors have a problem. They subdue their prey by wrapping themselves around it and slowly squeezing the breath out of it. So why doesn't the bowler squeeze the breath out of itself at the same time? Can you imagine how useless that would be as a hunting technique to animals locked in a deathly embrace? And the one that faints first probably dies? The answer we learned from the Journal of Experimental Biology is that the snakes can control different sections of their ribcage independently. John Capano and Elizabeth Brainard at Brown University studied the snakes using X rays and tiny metal markers. They found that when the front part of the body was constrained, the ribs at the back would expand to draw air into the lungs. When the rear part was constrained, their front ribs expanded. Snakes don't have a diaphragm and rely on a rib expansion alone in order to breathe, but it's not quite so simple. The rear part of the snakes lungs have a very poor blood supply and aren't very good at oxygenating the body. When the front is constricted. The rear expands acts like a bellows, drawing air into the front part where it does provide oxygen. One question remains. How did the researchers constrict of the constrictor? How did they apply pressure to the snake To simulate the embrace of death? They used an ordinary blood pressure cuff just like the one the doctor puts on your arm. Clever stuff, more nature news tomorrow.
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daily nature news with me, ross swan. Today we have a story linking Australian Wales, antarctic sea ice populations of krill, the la nina weather pattern and climate change all through the information embedded in Berlin billing is the array of plates in the mouths of filter feeding whales like humpbacks or right whales, which they use to strain food from the sea water. They've taken scientists at the University of New South Wales, that's the part of Australia. Not the animals have discovered that baleen plates hold a chemical record of the whale's diet. They compared the chemical signatures with climate data going back decades and found a strong correlation with the La nina weather pattern. This periodic phenomenon brings cooler waters to the eastern pacific and warmer water to the western side around Australia, whales that migrate past Australia in the southern hemisphere. Spring are heading for their feeding grounds off Antarctica, where they've taken tons and tons of yummy krill. But that krill only thrives underneath sea ice and that sea ice is being reduced by the climate emergency. And this is even worse during La nina years information from Berlin shows whales are nutritionally stressed during la nina. And the researchers led by Adelaide didn think this explains the increased frequency of whale strandings in those years. It's not all bad news though, whales on the other side of Australia in the indian ocean tend to do rather better than average during La nina season. More nature news tomorrow
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daily nature news with me, ross swan. Have you ever wondered what a fish sounds like? Well, wonder no more. Because the world's first online interactive repository of fish noises is now available on your connected device. It might be surprised to learn that fish make sounds at all. But they do. And then a huge range sound is a great way to communicate underwater because it travels fast and far through sometimes murky environments. Until now there was little audio information available about these noises. So Audrey Luby at the University of florida created a website. It's at fish sounds dot net. Well, it would be dot net, wouldn't it? Fish net as well as the challenge of collecting the data and the recordings of the website. Looby found that there was no standard way of describing fish stands. So they're making it up as they go along. The broken toadfish says boop and the red piranha makes a kind of swamp. Mhm. Mhm, mhm, mhm, mm hmm. Others are described as, thump knock, scratch, boom bark, burst and snitch. Now, let's think about this. There's a fish called a drum and there's a fish called a base while it's a bass. But you get my point. Drum and bass, add a few wimps and boobs and put the enchanting melody of the gray garnered on lead. And I think we've got a hit record more nature news tomorrow
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Daleen. Ancient. Who's With me? Rashwan. The polls have closed. The votes have been counted and verified. The winner of the mollusc of the Year competition 2022 is It's the Painted snail. We talked about this brilliant competition about three weeks ago, and I don't know about you, but I've hardly slept with anticipation. The Cuban painted snail is startlingly colourful, with swirls of red and orange and green and black and white. They're collected and sold to tourists as souvenirs, and this, combined with habitat loss, is making them endangered. They're only found in a small area of eastern Cuba. Don't be misled by their prettiness, though An unusual feature of the snail is it's Love Dart. This is a rigid spike made of calcium or cheatin, which erupts from near the animal's head to spear a mate. It's more of a harpoon, really. Snails are hermaphrodites being both male and female, and a pair of mating snails will harpoon each other before doing their business. If it sounds grisly, well, it can be. Injuries can be caused by the dart or gypsy. Belem and promiscuous snails live only about three quarters, as long as they're more demure cousins. Being pretty has its price. The contest produced a clear winner, with the painted snails scoring over 10,000 of the 16,000 votes cast. That's 62% making the victory something of a walkover. Well, slime over more nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me Roast swan. I really feel I should start this episode with a trigger warning. Spiders are very cool and amazing creatures, but some people have a bit of a phobia that's fine. That can't be helped. But even an Iraqna file like myself might get a case of the jitters when the subject moved to spiders hunting in packs. This isn't some fantasy scenario from Harry Potter Middle Earth. It's a real thing. Most spiders are solitary hunters, either building webs to trap prey or actively hunting them down like some miniature panther. But some are social hunters gathering in packs, which can number thousands in order to bring down and consume large prey. New research from Rafael Jennison and colleagues at the University of To Lose has revealed a not at all creepy mechanism used by pack hunting spiders in French Guiana, South America. To coordinate their attacks. They built a communal web and sense the vibrations from a victim before moving in, but they don't just rush in at once. They coordinate their attack, closing in and then pausing and then moving closer and then pausing again. Don't have nightmares. The spider doesn't seem to have a common name, and it's probably just a coincidence that its Latin name sounds exactly like a spell from the Harry Potter franchise. Angeles Imus Maximus More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Ross Swan. The shape of an animal's teeth are a really good clue to the sort of diet it has. Carnivores have points. Herbivores have flat grinders. Omnivores, that's you and me have a combination of types. Well, it turns out that the same is true for grasshoppers. Now it might surprise you to know that grasshoppers don't just eat grass. Different types of grasshopper will also chow down on things like fungi and moss and vegetables. Some have a taste for dengue. Some even eat meat, worms and insects and carrion Attack of the vampire grasshoppers. If you're a scientist who studies grasshoppers, knowing what they eat could be an important part of your research. But it's not always easy to find out. Making field observations is tricky. It's hard work. The conventional approach is to catch them and cut them open. But that isn't ideal either, especially for the grasshopper. Now a PhD researcher, Chris, stocky at the University of Leicester UK, has come up with a new nondestructive approach. He found that the shape of a grasshoppers mandibles correlates very closely with tired in exactly the same way that a mammal's teeth too. Grasshoppers that eat tough plant material, like grass have complex, undulating shapes, while those that eat soft flesh have steep slopes and sharp cliff edges. He refers to these shapes as mandible landscapes and says that the discovery could reveal diet information for thousands of species preserved in museums decades after they were collected. Morning agent is tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me while swan. Today we're talking about talking plants and why plants living in cities are getting lazy. It might be a surprise to learn that plants have any defences, but some do. They can respond to an attack from insects or other herbivores by releasing chemicals that make them taste nasty. The idea, of course, is that the predator will go yuck and move on to some other poor vegetable nearby. Now this is where it gets clever because that neighbouring plant may have already built up its own defences. A study from Tokyo University of Science showed that soybean and field mustard plants rapidly raised their own defences when nearby mint plants were getting chewed on by moths. Because mint has a very high aromatic content, that's why it smells so great. It's what attracts the moths in the first place, and it's what alerts and neighbouring plants of completely different species to the danger nearby. The work by Professor Gen. Ichiro Imura found the genetic mechanisms behind this response. Meanwhile, Mark Johnson at the University of Toronto has been studying white clover plants in a number of cities around the world, and he found that they're producing less of their anti herbivore defence chemicals than those in the countryside. Urban plants seem to be adapting to the reduced likelihood of becoming some animals lunch, saving their energy by not making weapons they won't need. But what are those Defence chemicals? Well, for white clover, it's hydrogen cyanide. Foreign agent is tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With me. Russ Swan, a new bird from New Caledonia announcing the arrival of the New Caledonia storm petrel, an enigmatic little creature that, it turns out, has been lurking in museums for over a century. Storm petrels are pretty amazing. They are tiny. Little bird is just about the size of a swallow. Yet they live most of their lives out at sea, where they survive extreme weather conditions all year round that accounts for the storm part of their name. They can appear to walk on the surface of the water, dipping their feet while flapping, which accounts for petrol, a reference to the Christian figure ST Peter. They only come ashore to nest, and they do that at night. So it's no surprise that these small, dark and secretive birds are actually quite hard to study. Ornithologists from the French National Centre for Scientific Research and La Rochelle University have been tracking down this new species since 2000 and eight, and have finally confirmed that it is different to other storm petrels. The distinctive feature is a streaked underbelly, unlike the plain white bellies of other petrels, and then they found three specimens that also had strict valleys preserved in different museums around the world. So it seems that this species have been found lost, forgotten about and only now rediscovered, but it still keeps its mysteries. It breeds somewhere in New Caledonia. But despite searching all the islets of the southern lagoon of the archipelago, the scientists still don't know where they want to find the breeding ground so it can be protected. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Rough swan Albinism is a rare condition, causing a lack of pigmentation. Now Japanese scientists have discovered a genetic mechanism behind this disorder by studying an albino wallaby. Wallabies are very similar to kangaroos, but a bit smaller the native to Australia and Tasmania, but are quite adaptable animals. And we know of at least two feral populations here in the U. K. One in Scotland and one in the peak district of central England, which happens to be less than an hour from daily Nature News headquarters. The pale skinned Wallaby understudy was born in 2015 at night, which is due in Coach E Japan to a mother with natural coloration. The scientists, led by Akihiko Koga at Kyoto University, who are investigating whether albinism is inherited or a random mutation. They examined its genes looking for an enzyme called tyrosine kinase, which controls the production of melanin, the natural skin payment and what they found was interesting. The gene didn't have a piece missing, but in fact contained an extra fragment of DNA. This extra fragment effectively pushed some information off the end of the gene. They say it's like pasting an extra word into the middle of a tweet, pushing the last word off the end so it looks like albinism is not inherited because the mutant genes tend to remove themselves from the family tree. This is a good thing for the animal. Survival as a white wallaby would make a pretty obvious target for predators. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Swan, Have you ever been offended by the name of an animal? Well, you might have been if you're a member of the Roma community. That's why the entomological Society of America has decided to rename a species of moth. What used to be known as the gypsy moth is now in North America, at least the spongy mouth. It's native to Europe, parts of Asia and North Africa, and has become a damaging pest in North American forests. Now many of us might think of the word Gypsy is meaning a wanderer, perhaps a bit romantic, maybe even a bit mystical. But for the Roma people, it's an offensive racial slur when attached to a species that is an invasive pest. Well, you get the picture. The change of name is part of a wider programme to a more enlightened system of naming species. We no longer name new strains of covid after the places they were first identified. We don't want to bring stigma onto innocent people in places, felt someone. You come from a village called Ebola, and what's their reaction? Think of Japanese knotweed or the Asian Murder Hornet, and you realise this is a widespread issue. American entomologists have launched the better names project to try and put some of these things right. The new name for the moth, which remains scientifically limb entry at disbar, comes because it lays its eggs in spongy masses. We've reached out to the UK equivalent the Royal Entomological Society to see if the name change might be reflected more widespread. So far, we haven't heard back from them. Morning news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me Roast swan. We love it when a new species is announced and this one's a bit special. Not only is the fairy wrasse a stunningly beautiful and colourful fish, it's the first whose discovery and scientific description is credited to a scientist from the Maldives where the fish was found. Science has sometimes been a little imperialistic, with great brains from the Western universities, descending on exotic locations and snagging the credit for discovering things that the locals knew about all along. This new to science species is the Rose veiled fairy wrasse, and it's a multicoloured marvel. The second part of its Latin name, Sir Telebras Finney fan Mark is the word for Rose in the developed language of the Maldives, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean. The scientific paper announcing the discovery in the journal Suzuki's gives credit to Ahmed Najib, a researcher at the Maldives Marine Research Institute. Najib is the first Maldivian scientist to have such a citation in an international journal, and that's great, except for one thing. In scientific literature. The order in which authors names appear on a paper is of huge importance. The first author gets the real glory. In this case, that lead author is one of the world's best known theology ists. An Australian national ticket is also known as Kai the Fish Guy or Lemon T. Y. K, and is a mover and shaker in the world of fishes. But he isn't Maldivian. More nature news tomorrow.
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Deli Nature News With Me, Russ Swan. It's International Women's Day, and we have an interesting observation about female sensibilities in our closest living relatives. The chimpanzees. Studies by scientists from the University of Exeter in the UK and the Berlin de Chimpanzee and Community Project in Uganda found that the size of a gathering of chimps was smaller, the closer it was to an area used by humans. The difference is because females are more wary of approaching these areas, especially if they have youngsters, until chimpanzees frequently encountered people, their domestic livestock and even their dogs, while foraging on crops such as jackfruit. The males are typically unperturbed about this and will even engage in confrontations with villages. Females, on the other hand, are more wary and will remain in the forest instead. The study is the first to examine how a landscape dominated by humans affects the social lives of chimpanzees. It highlights how male and female chimpanzees are adapting differently to human encroachment and points to a difference in risk perception between the sexes. The researchers say that the effect is the disruption of the animals, networks and information flow, which is important in such a social species. Morning news tomorrow
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daily Nature News with me. Russ Swan. One of the problems in protecting wildlife is knowing what wildlife exists at a given location. You need to know what's there before you can protect it. And if the animals that you want to identify, our small aquatic and mostly nocturnal well, you've got a challenge. Amphibians are tricky to find, and the young the tadpoles and efs often live in different places than the adults. What's an eft? It's the stage of a new development in between a lava and an adult. Now a new approach from Japan could make things a lot simpler and more accurate. Scientists, led by Dr Masaaki Sakata at Kobe University, have developed a DNA based wide area surveying system. They realised that amphibians are continually expelling DNA into the environment through the mucus that covers their bodies. So they developed some clever laboratory techniques to isolate and amplify the minute traces of DNA recovered from water downstream of paddy fields. They were able to identify animals from all three orders of amphibians. These are the core data that's the newts and salamanders. The Anura, which is frogs and toads, and a third order called the gym? No, Fiona or the Sicilians. These are probably the least familiar of the amphibians and look a little bit like snakes or wounds. They're mostly found in the tropics. This simultaneous detection of multiple species is known as DNA. Meta barcoding. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Russ Swan. Some people have a phobia over bats. Some people have a phobia about spiders. So what happens when spiders start preying on bats? All it might seem like an unlikely thing to happen. Or if it does, it must be in some remote rainforest with exotic species that you wouldn't come across an ordinary life. Well, news has reached us of a spider catching and killing bats in the rural English county of Shropshire. The bats in question are Australia's, the smallest and the most common bats in the UK. The spider is a false widow, originally native to the Canary Islands but recorded in Britain for 100 and 50 years, it probably arrived as a stowaway on cargo ships. The false widow is so named because it looks a bit like the infamous black widow that can be harmful, occasionally even deadly. To humans. The bite of the false widow is probably no worse than a bee sting. There are six species of false widow spider in the UK, the most common of the rabbit touch spider and the cupboard spider, named for the places they like to look, and the species implicated in these Shropshire back killings. The noble false widow, the Bat killer, was discovered by a wildlife artist called Ben Wadhams, who found first a young bat pop tangled in a Web and the next day, an adult bat. Similarly, court people are a protected species in the UK, and harming them is a criminal offence. Somebody please go tell that to the spiders. More nature use tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Russ Swan, Do you have a favourite mollusk? If not, now is the time to get off the fence and make your selection. The Lowy Centre for Translational Biodiversity Genomics has shortlisted five species for its prestigious Mollusk of the year competition. I'm not making this up. Last year's winner was the Greater Argonaut, a kind of oceangoing octopus. One of 2021 runners up is back in the competition for 2022. It's the painted snail from eastern Cuba, exquisitely colourful and widely reckoned the world's most beautiful snail. Its beauty is its downfall, as it is highly prized by collectors. Also in the mix is the barge Put a scaffold pod with a shell that looks like a tusk, not to be confused with the horn, snail or telescopes nail, which has, I think, the best Latin name telescope, IEM Telescope E Um, the naval ship worm seems unlikely to win the popular vote, but what do I know? This is actually a clam and is the animal responsible for stranding Columbus in Jamaica when it ate all his ships? Last but certainly not least, the sea butterfly is a small oceanic terra pod with a transparent gelatinous shell and a foot that has evolved into wings. Have you ever seen the movie The abyss? Yeah, like that. The winner will have his whole genome sequenced, paving the way for new scientific discoveries. Votes are open to the public until the 15th of March. Search for mollusc of the Year 2022 More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With Me, Ross Swan. Most nations on Earth have a national animal in Ukraine. It is the nightingale where it is known as the stolen vehicle. It's a small pass urine bird a little bigger than the European Robin and is famous for its beautiful song. It's one of the few birds that sing at night, right? Mhm, yes, According to Ukrainian folklore, Nightingales only lived in India until one adventurous individual visited Ukraine. It was distressed to hear the people singing only sad songs, and so it began to sing its own happy tunes to cheer them up. The people listened and learned and responded with happy songs of their own. Since then, the Nightingale has been a regular feature of Ukrainian folk song, typically being admired not just for its own beautiful music but also as a builder of homes and as a harbinger of spring, a time of regrowth and happiness. The word stole a vehicle is often used as a term of endearment between people. There's one more thing you need to know about nightingales. Bears don't eat them. They can't catch them. More nature news tomorrow big, big, big
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daily Nature News with me who trust Swan. Leatherbacks are the largest and one of the most endangered turtle species and face a particular hazard of entanglement in fishing gear. These living dinosaurs are huge, getting on for two metres in length and weighing almost half a tonne. The chances of survival, if tangled in rope, depend on the skill of the humans who released them, and this really is a job for the professionals. A survey of 280 sea Turtle Tambling's over a 15 year period in the waters off Massachusetts showed that almost all of them involved leatherbacks with rope wrapped around their heads and front flippers. Nearly all were caught in actively used commercial fishing gear. Rather than debris or ghost get fishing. Tackle has been abandoned. The boy lines of lobster and crab pots, known as fixed gear fishing, were a typical issue. Researchers led by DR Carried on at the New England Aquarium reported their findings and noted the importance of the sea turtle has been completely and safely disentangled. Those that were had a very good chance of survival, while those released with any rope still attached were unlikely to live long. The aquarium has a mobile veterinary team on standby to rush to any local tangling incidents. They say that well intentioned voters who try to release the animals themselves may actually do more harm than good. The advent of ruthless fishing offers hope for the future. This has boy lines stored on the seabed and remotely released when the pots are to be recovered. So remember, a turtle that's tangled is in trouble, but a liberated leatherback should live more nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me, ross swan. If you ever go wildlife spotting and upload your pictures to social media, you might, without knowing it be helping scientists gather information about endangered species. There are 142,000 species on the red list according to the International Union for the conservation of nature. For more than half of those, there just isn't enough data to know if their situation is getting better or worse. Well this is where a combination of social media and artificial intelligence comes to the rescue. A project led by Professor Tania Berga Wolf at Ohio State University has developed an AI and computer vision algorithms that automatically search publicly shared social media for photographs of wildlife. The tech analyzes the images and can use distinctive features to identify individual animals together with date and location information. This provides a powerful database for conservation monitoring. The system is called Wild book, a bit like facebook for wildlife and is available online at wild me dot org. Within it are a number of platforms for different animals such as fluke book, for whale sightings, manta match for manta rays and the internet of turtles for turtles. This new branch of science is called Image Comics. So take your pics upload them and become part of the crowdsourced science revolution. More nature news tomorrow
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daily Nature News with me. Roast Swan Evolution It's a slow process taking place over millions of years by which one species gradually changes to the point where it becomes another completely different species. Or is it? In the case of the Colorado Blue Columbine, it seems that evolution can happen in a single generation. These tall, herbaceous plants members of the Aqua Leisure family, are native to the Rocky Mountains and are noted for the distinctive nectar spurs. These are long tubes leading to their nectar, which grow to various lengths according to which animal is pollinating them. It might be bumble bees, hawk moths or hummingbirds. Scientists from the University of California have identified a case of sudden evolutionary change in these columbines. Doctoral student Zachary Cabin and colleagues reported population that has lost its white petals and the characteristic nectar spurs altogether, leaving the blue samples that give them their name. This sort of thing has been seen before, but only for a single generation, and next year's flowers would revert to standard. This time it seems to have stuck, and about a quarter of the plants in this population had become permanently altered. Captain says that If these plants were preserved in the fossil record, they are so different they would be described as belonging to different species. It seems that even the evolution can sometimes happen in the blink of an eye. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily nature news with me, ross swan. There are something like 20 or 25,000 species of bee in the world, but only eight of them are honeybees. So the discovery of another honey bee species until now thought to be extinct is making quite a buzz in the beekeeping world. I'm sorry At least 90% of bee species are what are known as solitary bees, such as the Mason bee and the carpenter bee. Of the social bees. The ones that live in swarms and hives, most are either sting less bees or bumblebees. Of the eight honeybee species, only two are domesticated to produce honey and pollinate crops for us humans, the Karnak A. B. Or western honeybee and you guessed it, the eastern honey bee, which is restricted to South asia. So for most of us there really is only one species of honeybee. Now, researchers from Julius maximilian University in Wurzburg Germany have discovered an ancient species of wild honey bee in Galicia in the far northwest of Spain. They found 29 colonies of the bees all living inside Hollow electricity poles and apparently thriving there. The bees were identified as belonging to the species of Iberian be rather than the Carnac aby by the pattern of veins in their wings. They also found that bee colonies in areas of natural heath and shrub land were more likely to survive the winter than those in cultivated areas. Wild honeybees still exist in europe, but they need wilderness to survive more Nature news tomorrow
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daily Nature News with me. Rough swan, self awareness and animals is a bit controversial among scientists being described to US humans and some of our near relatives, but not universally acknowledged in other species. Now, some experiments in Japan indicate that it may be present in some kind of fish. One test used is called Mirror Self Recognition, or MSR. Basically, doesn't animal understand that its reflection in the mirror is actually itself and not somebody else? The trick is to place a mark on the animal in a place that can only be seen in a mirror and observe whether they respond by touching or scraping that spot on their bodies. Massimo Coda, from Osaka City University conducted research on a type of cleaner fish live brides, Dimitri artists involving placing a brown spot on their chin. 17 out of 18 test subjects demonstrated MSR behaviour, a success rate of 94%. Brown spots are thought to be recognised by the fish as a potential parasite, which they would want to remove and eat. These are cleaner fish. After all, that's what they do know. Fish responded to a blue or green mark before starting the experiments the fish had to be mirror trained, its a three stage process that seems reminiscent of any number of comedy sketches. When first shown themselves in a mirror, the animals respond aggressively, then switched to non aggressive but unnatural movements, as if testing the mirror is really them. Then they go into vanity mode. Admiring themselves over and over like some aquatic narcissus seems like self awareness to me. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With me, Ross Swan. Today we have a dark tale of parasites preying on parasites and a surprising twist when it turns out that a single species of wasp is actually lots of different species. Quite a lot of insects lay their eggs on plants, and when these hatch, the larvae induce the plant to create a protective shield around them. This is a goal. Are swelling or an abnormal growth a bit like a war to a tur. These insects are, rather than larvae are parasites. The plant gains no benefit from their presence. The larvae induce the goal to protect themselves against predators. But as is the way of things in the natural world, other parasites evolved to get around that protection. One such is a tiny parasite, oId wasp called or Miroslav Otis, which lays its eggs in these larvae. The eggs hatch and the wasp larvae then eat their prey from the inside before escaping to the wider world. I did say it was a dark tale parasite. OId wasps are usually specialists, each having a particular target species of victim. But O'Meara's is a generalist and lays its eggs in at least 65 different species. At least that's what we thought. A report just published by Andrew Forbes at the University of Iowa found that this one species is actually at least 16 different species. They all look almost identical, and they have similar lifestyles. And they are just a couple of millimetres long, which perhaps explains why they have gone unnoticed for so long. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With me. Ross Juan. One of the most unlikely ways for an animal to make a living is the one used by the Archer fish. These small, mostly freshwater fish live in rivers and pools and mangroves in Southeast Asia and hunt insects and other small animals by squirting jets of water to knock them off an overhanging branch or leaf. It's like a well aimed water pistol. It's a clever trick and understanding just how it works presents scientists with a number of questions or one of those questions may now have been answered. How does an archerfish know what targets are worth? Shooting at runnin Segev and Svetlana Beletski of Ben Gurion University of the Negev trained Archerfish by showing them pictures of spiders on a computer screen. When they took a shot, the fish were rewarded with a food pellet. They then showed images of unknown insects while trying to distract the fish by waving leaves and bits of plant, they found that the fish were able to generalise what was edible from what was not the key. Features that identify lunch from leaf include the outline shape and how jagged or smooth the object was writing in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The scientists say that this is more or less the same strategy humans use to recognise each other's faces. So the fish are clever enough to tell an image of food from an image of something that's not food but not clever enough to tell a picture on a computer screen from the real thing. More election news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Ross, Juan, Do you ever visit a different city and feel like you just don't fit in your clothes and hair? Maybe the height of fashion at home, but here somehow you just aren't quite getting it right. While you're not alone, this sort of situation occurs in the natural world as well. In the case of the common Yellow Throat, a small songbird from North America wearing the wrong style will reduce your chances of finding a mate. As with many birds, the females of the species of warblers are less ostentatious than the males, and they choose their mates at least partly on their plumage. The males have bright yellow bibs and distinctive black band across the eyes. They're sometimes known as yellow bandits. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Skidmore College in upstate New York tracked female preferences for males in their two regions, and they found, to their surprise that fashions are different in the two states. In Wisconsin, a larger and more prominent black mask is more likely to win a mate. What in New York, it's all about the bright yellow bib. By linking this with genetic information, the scientists found that the different ornamentation indicates males with superior genes and better survival of their offspring. Other studies have shown that female swallows in some areas prefer males with longer tails, while elsewhere a browner belly wins favour. This is the first time such preferences have been shown to have a genetic basis. So if you're a yellow throat on the pull where your mask in Wisconsin and your bib in New York, more nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me rough sawn. The most venomous snakes in the world are the kids found throughout the tropics. They're characterized by having fixed Fang's at the front of their mouths. Unlike, say, rattlesnakes, which have hinged things, elephants can be proper, deadly. There's enough venom in a single inland type on to kill at least 100 adult humans. This next can be just a few centimeters long or, in the case of the king, cobras reach nearly six m. The family includes terrestrial snakes living on land and the sea snakes found in the Indian and Pacific Ocean's new research has shown a surprising evolutionary lineage for the sea snakes and the terrestrial elements living in Australia. Genetics researchers at the University of Adelaide knew that all the world's sea snakes were descended from a common Australian land-based ancestor. So they looked at what are known as jumping jeans to determine where that grandmother of all these most deadly snake had herself come from. They found that this ancestor had acquired genes that didn't come from any land-based relative but had come from a marine ancestor. Australia's famously venomous land snakes did not arrive by land but came by C. And it means that all the world's sea snakes came from a land snake that in turn evolved from a totally different kind of see snake where they came from. We suggest you keep us safe distance, more nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me, ross swan. A plague of Locusts is both an ancient curse and a modern agricultural catastrophe. These grasshoppers are usually solitary animals but can aggregate into enormous swarms of as many as 18 million individuals devastating crops in the areas they occur. The reason for their swarming behavior has been a bit of a mystery, but new research suggests it might be because of a bizarre bacterial infection in the insect's gut. Our locust swarm seems to offer no advantage to the Locusts, like any animal they need to get together to reproduce, but that doesn't require such huge gatherings. It had been thought that perhaps a swarm of protection against predators, but that's also a bit questionable. A swarm presents a large and attractive target after all. Professor Amir, ideally at tel Aviv University has a new idea and it's all to do with the bacteria in the Locusts gut specifically a bacterium called vice seller, which is almost completely absent in solitary Locusts. Strangely, it becomes the dominant bacterium. When a locust joins a group of more than about 200 others, it seems that the bacteria may induce a change in the behavior of the Locusts to make them want to congregate in swarms. It's of no benefit to the Locusts and certainly not to the plants on which they feed all the farmers whose crops are ruined, but it's of great help to the bacteria helping them to multiply exponentially. So a locust swarm may actually be caused by the insects being taken over by a stomach bug. More Nature news tomorrow
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daily nature news with me, ross swan. The ability to use tools is a rare skill in the animal world, with most examples being in the primates such as humans and chimpanzees and some birds. A new level of tool use has just been found in cockatoos and this elevates them to a higher level of tool user. Scientists classified tools into different categories. Simple tools such as sticks or rocks, A manufactured tool where say a stick is improved by stripping side branches. Then there were compound tools where two elements are fixed together an X for instance. And finally composite tools where more than one item is used to complete a task. Think of a ball and a bat. Well, this is exactly what researchers from the universities of Birmingham and Vienna found cockatoos could do. Yes, I did say cockatoos could do. They devised a game where the birds had to manipulate a ball into a hole in a closed box and then use a stick to push the ball until a trapdoor was triggered. Then they got rewarded with a cashew nut. What's really interesting is that the three birds who played the game each invented different ways to solve the puzzle. One held the state between its mandibles, one between bacon tongue and one used its claw. Professor Sarah beck from the University of Birmingham says this puts cockatoos on a similar level to an eight year old human child in their ability to invent novel solutions to a problem. It's basically a game of crazy golf and it's called a birdie more than actual news tomorrow
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daily Nature News With me. Ross Swan Life is a constant battle for many animals trying to win or defend territory, trying to find a mate trying to fight off rivals without actually getting hurt. It now seems that one route to success is to cheat. Many animals have their own weapons. Deer have antlers, lobsters have claws. There's usually an advantage in having big weapons because you're more likely to win the territory or the mate. But big weapons are expensive. They take a lot of energy to grow and being so big and heavy, even more energy to carry around all the time. The metabolic costs can be a real problem, and in some crustaceans like shrimps and crabs, the weaponry can amount to as much as a third of their total body mass. This is where the cheating comes in. Many animals make their weapons out of inert materials. Crabs used cheatin rhinos use keratin. Unlike muscle, this stuff costs almost nothing to maintain once it's produced. Dr. Jason Dean at the Duke University in the USA, has studied animals with particularly exaggerated weapons and found that regardless of body size, those with bigger weaponry had disproportionately more exoskeleton and less muscle. This means that the more impressive the claw or the answer seems to be, the less power there actually is behind it. The big guns are not what he calls an honest indicator of fighting prowess, but in fact could be the opposite, like a night waving a large assortment of plastic against a rival with a smaller, actually more deadly blade, more daily nature tomorrow.
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Daily nature news with me, Russ, swan, move over cheetah, step aside, please, peregrine falcon. There's a new holder of the title fastest creature on earth. It's tiny and surprisingly, it uses a propeller to be able to swim so fast. All life on earth falls into one of three domains. These are the eukaryotes, that's you and me and every other creature with cells containing a nucleus, the bacteria and the Arcadia dr Lavinia, gam belly. And colleagues at the University of Exeter have been studying a species of archaic called methane, ocal deco Cassville Asus, found near underwater volcanoes of Iceland where the water temperatures can reach a scorching 80 C. They found that these tiny beasts only about one micro meter long, that's 1/1000 of a millimeter, can propel themselves at a speed of half a millimeter per second. That's not very fast in absolute terms, it's only about 1/1000 of a mile per hour, But it equates to 500 body lengths per second Scaled up. That's like a cheetah doing 3000 km/h. Even more amazing is how they do this arcade have propellers. Tiny filaments like tails that they rotate at extraordinary speed to propel themselves forward. The world's smallest propeller powering the world's fastest creature, more Nature news tomorrow
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daily Nature News with me. Roast Swan. If I say toadstool, I'm pretty sure you will think of a mushroom with a white stork and a red dome covered in white spots. It's the archetypal toadstool we all know from countless stories. This is the fly again, Rick, usually found in woodland and parks and particularly underneath birch trees. It is, of course, toxic. It's poisonous. It's not deadly poisonous unless you eat a lot of it. But it is hallucinogenic and can cause seizures. Mushrooms and toadstools are really the same thing, but we usually call the edible ones mushrooms and the toxic ones toadstools. Nature has a way of offering warnings about these things, and something that's red and white is clearly signalling danger unless it seems you are a Japanese squirrel. Professor Kenji Suetsugu and photographer Koichi Gloomy report in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Environment that they have observed a squirrel gnashing down on fly, a Greek with no apparent ill effects. This is a surprise because it's been believed that the fungi evolved their poisons to protect themselves from being eaten. They're pretty sure the squirrel was okay because they saw the same animal the next day eating an even more poisonous toadstool called the Panther cap, and that one can be deadly. The professor is now investigating further to work out whether the squirrel has evolved resistance to the poison or whether the toadstool might be using the animal to help spread its sports mourn engineers tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With me, Russ Juan Hummingbirds have to be one of the most amazing group of animals on Earth. These tiny birds live throughout the Americas. The smallest, the bee hummingbird, weighs less than two grammes. That's about half the amount of sugar in a level teaspoon. Even the largest. The giant hummingbird is only about 24 grammes. Not quite one ends. They're hovering. Flight uses a lot of energy, and so hummingbirds have to feed frequently. Happily, the flower nectar they eat, along with some insects and spiders, is high octane stuff. They exist in a precarious energy balance, taking in enough fuel to keep going without wearing themselves down. This means that getting through the night could be a bit of a problem. Ordinary sleep still uses a fair bit of energy, and there's no chance to fill up while dozing. Their secret is to enter a state of torpor, which is a sort of halfway between sleep and hibernation. It keeps their body functions ticking over, but uses very little precious energy. And we learned that there are two types of torpor in shallow torpor. The birds can lower their body temperature from the normal 38 Celsius by as much as 11 degrees, while in deep torpor it can drop by 28 degrees to just 10 Celsius. A study just published in the Journal of Experimental Biology found that the smaller the hummingbird, the more likely it is to go into deep torpor. By comparison, if a human body drops by just a couple of degrees, it goes into hypothermia. It needs external help to warm up more nature needs tomorrow.
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daily nature News with me swan. We're off to the rain forests of Thailand today with news of the discovery of a new type of tarantula, which has a habitat like no other tarantulas are of course large, strongly built spiders and are widespread in Southeast asia and elsewhere in the world. They fall into two main groups, terrestrial and arboreal living on the ground or in trees. This new type, taxi nous Bambas is the first arboreal tarantula found in northern Thailand, but technically it doesn't live in trees. But inside bamboo stems, bamboo is a type of woody grass growing in segments called combs. These tarantulas make their nests inside a comb lining it with their own silk to make it comfortable and darting out to catch their prey. The question is, how did they get into the bamboo in the first place differentials have powerful bites, but bamboo is too tough even for them. Their nest holes are only about two or 3 cm across and the animals rely on beetles, bees, or rodents to make the initial cuts now officially recognized as Thailand's rarest tarantula. It was discovered by a wildlife youtuber called jojo super. What? Who then collaborated with our technologists from Khon Kaen University and cassette Start University to have the new genus properly documented the power of social media, more nature news tomorrow
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daily Nature News with me. Russ Swan, the world's rarest stalk, is the greater adjutant, a huge scavenging stalk that is being pulled back from the brink of extinction. It used to be widespread in Southeast Asia, but now has just a single stronghold in the Indian state of Assam. These are enormous birds standing up to a metre and a half tour with a wingspan of up to 2.5 metres. They're known locally as Hard Villa, which in the Assamese language means bone swallower. The majority of surviving greater adjutant storks live around the city of Guwahati. They make their living by scavenging, and most of the world's 1200 surviving adults rely on just a single garbage dump for food. There are too many reasons for its decline. Improved sanitation means that paradoxically, there are fewer sites for the stalks to scavenge, and until recently they have been persecuted by local Villagers who saw it as a bad omen. But that's changing largely due to the conservation work of Dr Paramygina Davey Barman. She set out to change local views and has recruited as many as 400 local women who now understand and spread the news about the stalks ecological value. They're known as Hard Villa's army, and it seems they're beginning to make a difference. The adjutants talks. Existence remains precarious, but for the first time in decades, their numbers are slowly beginning to increase, thanks to Dr Berman and Hard Galas Army More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Rust Swan Weather forecast for the week ahead Chilli with a chance of iguanas falling from the sky. Well, at least if you're in Florida with cold weather sweeping down from Canada, people in the Sunshine State might have to dodge a variety of lizards and iguanas plummeting to earth. These reptiles are ecto thermic and cannot generate their own body heat. The term cold blooded isn't really accurate, as their blood is about the same temperature as their surroundings, which in Florida can be pretty darn hot. But when the environment turns cold, these animals can be in trouble. When it falls below about seven degrees Celsius or 45 F, they undergo a temporary cold shock. They lose the ability to control their limbs, and they can lose their grip now. That wouldn't be so bad if they didn't choose to live in trees, usually at the ends of branches. Now this is this is a great place to be to avoid predators. It is a bit precarious in the winter, when the temperature plummets, so do the lizards and iguanas. If they land on something soft, they'll probably survive the fall and when it warms up, they can simply scuttle away. You might think this is a peculiar thing and that the animals might have evolved a different way to get through a cold snap. But over 90% of the lizards and iguanas in Florida are not native species and really belong somewhere much more tropical. More daily nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With me. Russ Swan. Protecting your offspring against predators is a strong instinct for many animals, and they use a number of different strategies to do this for the pied flycatcher, a small black and white bird a little smaller than a sparrow. One trick the females used to maximise the chances of their chicks surviving is to be unfaithful to their partners. The flycatcher lives throughout Europe and Africa and, as the name suggests, make their living by catching flies. Like many birds, they pair up at breeding time and take turns looking after the nest, incubating the eggs and feeding the hatchlings. They face a major hazard from predators, and this is where a promiscuous female has an advantage. A study just published from the University of Tartu in Estonia showed that male pied flycatchers were more likely to defend another pairs nest when there was a chance that he had sired the offspring. Now that makes sense for a male perspective because he wants to maximise the chances of passing on his genes to the next generation. This new study shows how it also benefits the female because she has effectively recruited an extra security guard every time she gets busy with a male other than her official mate, it has even been seen that female birds will increase their promiscuous behaviour. When there were more predators in the neighbourhood. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily nature news with me, ross swan. If you've got more than one hippopotamus, you've either got some hippopotamus is or some hippopotamus. Both words are good. But if you do have several of these enormous animals, you'd better hope they know each other or things could turn nasty. Hippos are quite vocal animals and use their so called wheeze honk as a social calling card to keep their groups together. A group of hippos by the way, can be called a herd or a crash. But the best collective noun is a bloat, A bloat of hippos. Now, hippos can tell if another hippo is a member of their bloat by their we's honk and if they don't recognize that they might react aggressively. This involves responding with their own ways, honk charging at the income er and furiously spraying dung by rapidly flicking their tails while defecating in order to mark their territory. A new study by scientists from the University of Saint etienne France led by Nicolas Math ever showed that hippos are able to identify con specifics members of their bloat based on these vocal signatures, they behave less aggressively to neighbors than strangers. Although there can be still quite aggressive to neighbors. They're quite tetchy sometimes hippos. So remember if you don't want to get sprayed with hippo dung, you'd better use the right ways hawk. More deadly nature news tomorrow
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daily Nature News with Me, Russ Swan. It surprises many people to learn that of all the species of mammal on Earth, 20% of them are bats. There are over 1200 different species worldwide, grouped into two major divisions. One is called the Yang Go Kyra Patrons, which includes most of the bats that use echolocation. The other group is the yanked Iraq Iraq Veterans, which includes the fruit bats or the Flying Fox, is sometimes called the mega bats. Oddly, the Gimp, Tero Cairo veterans also includes a handful of the smaller types called micro bats. Yang bats are widespread and can be found on all continents, while yin bats are in Europe, Asia and Africa, but not the Americas. We know they're different groups through genetic studies, which clearly identify an evolutionary divide. But until now, no physiological trade had been found to tell one group from the other. The yin from the yang. The new discovery is a structure in the inner ear that exists in yin bats but is absent or modified in Yang's. It's called the Rosenthal's Canal, and it's a small, bony plate pierced with tiny holes for nerves to pass through in Yang's, it is either missing altogether or has much larger holes. The scientists who discovered this from the American Museum of Natural History describe the difference as being like comparing a coffee philtre to a pastor strainer. Both groups use echolocation, but in different ways. Yang's tend to use short pulses while Yin's use longer streams of ultrasound. Either way, we hope they have a harmonious time. More nature news tomorrow.
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Daily News with me on today. We're going to see, but not in the way you might think. This is not a crime scene investigation, but citizens science and the delightful story of how thousands of motivated people have contributed to a project to protect the wild. It is a member of that strange group of animals, the mono teams. The other member is that both are mammals that lay eggs they found in Australia. And despite being rather endearing hedgehog like animals, they are or something of a mystery. There aren't easy to study. Being quite reclusive and being spread over a large part of Australia and Australia is big. This is where the citizens science comes in. Researchers at the University of Adelaide launched their kidney project, which recruited participants to report a kidney sightings and collect information and photographs via a smartphone up. They were specifically looking for information on the short, one of four species of the animal. More than 9000 people downloaded the up and over 8000 sightings were reported across every state and territory of Australia. People reported that the motivation for helping was the conservation of wildlife curiosity about the kidneys and wanting to make a contribution to scientific research. Just over 400 of these citizens went the extra mile and collected samples for the researchers. Yes, they posted them bags of the Hapu more daily nature tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me, Russ Swan. Chimpanzees are one of our closest relations in the animal world, and there are lots of examples of similarities between us. They have individual personalities, show emotion through facial expression and have been shown to have a sense of morality and justice. We've just discovered a new way that humans and chimps are similar. It's about the way we learn new things. It seems the chimps, just like us, do not automatically know what to do. When faced with a new challenge, anthropologist Kathleen groups from the University of Zurich in Switzerland carried out some experiments with wild chimps in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea. She presented them with a variety of nuts, which are not normally found in her habitat, along with a selection of stones. Would the chimps work out how to use the stones to get the delicious nuts? After more than a year, not one of the 35 chips was able to invent a way to crack the nuts. Chimps, just like humans, learn better by being taught than by inventing, coops concludes. And if you're thinking per dumb, chimpanzees, think about this. If you've never seen a car before you wouldn't know how to open the door, let alone start the engine and drive off. These are things we humans have to be taught. Just like a chimpanzee cracking a nut. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me. Russ Swan. When we think of nests, we probably don't immediately think of fish, and we probably don't imagine the sea floor under an ice shelf in Antarctica. But it turns out that the philtre ice shelf in the weather sea lies over the largest concentration of fish nests ever discovered. A team of scientists from the Alfred Wagner Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, has announced the discovery of a vast breeding area of a fish known as Jonas ice fish. While touring cameras over the sea floor four or 500 metres down, they came across this astonishing concentration of nests. Ice fish grow to be about half a metre long and the cameras showed as many as two nests per square metre. The total nesting area is about 240 square kilometres, which the team says is about the same as the island of Malta. Now, if you're not familiar with a Malta as a unit of land area, it's about 1/10 of a Rhode Island half of a Singapore or three quarters of an Isle of Wight. The human population of Malta is about half a million, making it one of the most densely populated territories on earth. The ice fish population in the same area under the Fortune Ice Shelf is 60 million. The race is now on to have the area protected under the International Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources before commercial fishing fleets. Pants The Jonas Ice Fish is so named because the first specimen ever discovered in 1947 was in the stomach of a whale. More nature news tomorrow.
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daily Nature News With Me. Ross Swan. Imagine you're a whale, one of the big ones, like a fin whale or a blue whale. Now imagine you're hungry. The big whales, known as the rock walls, get their food by a method called lunge feeding. It's pretty self explanatory, really. They lunge at a cloud of krill with their mouth open and engulf their lunch. They've taken a huge amount of water at the same time. This is where the Berlin comes into play. Berlin is a series of plate like structures the rock walls have Instead of teeth. The water is expelled through the Belene, which philtres out the tasty quill young. But there's a problem. Lunging with your mouth open might cause you to drown. The volume of water taken in can be as massive as the whale itself. Philtre feeding fish like basking sharks don't have this problem as their gills allow them to eat and breathe at the same time, smaller. Every those like dolphins and seals take individual fish one at a time. But the rock walls new research has shown that they have a special mechanism to close off their oesophagus when they lunge this oral plug blocks the nasal passages and the entrance to the pharynx so the whales can feed without drowning. It's like a valve that allows access to either the respiratory or the digestive tract, but not both. At the same time, no other animal has it. It seems appropriate that the researcher at the University of British Columbia who discovered this mechanism unknown until now, is zoologist Dr Kelsey Gil. More nature news tomorrow.
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Hello, I'm Ross one. And this is daily nature news. We have a slightly alarming story today about bees and pesticides. It's common knowledge that bees are vital pollinators, and without them we humans would lose a large proportion of the crops we need to survive. It's also common knowledge that bee populations are in trouble. It must be a good idea to do everything we can to help them. Pesticides used in agriculture Are Prime Suspects in Bee Colony Collapse Concerns about the toxicity of a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, or just neonics, led the European Union to ban them outright. In 2018 this week, the U. K government overturned that ban. It agreed to an application by British sugar, which wants to use neonics because of a perceived threat to the sugar beet crop from beet yellows. Virus not only are next on the same, the three main types are Imidacloprid, firemen folks, um, and three o'clock rid. The Agricultural Research Centre at Roth instead says the first two can be as toxic to bees as they are to the pests they target. On the other hand, honey bees and bumble bees seem able to digest the third type, but it is the poisonous to bees firemen toxin that has been approved for use in the UK When it was banned, Britain was a member of the EU. Now it is free to make its own environmental rules or, in this case, let industrial, chemical and food processing companies take precedence over wildlife. More daily nature tomorrow.
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daily Nature News with me, Ross Juan. Lots of animals are called enigmatic, but if you deserve the title as much as the giant panda confined in the wild, just a handful of forested mountainsides in China they were thought to be on the brink of extinction but are now classified as vulnerable rather than endangered. They remain a powerful symbol of wildlife conservation, and they remain enigmatic, Classified as carnivores, they eat almost nothing except bamboo. Yes, they are vegetarian carnivores. One of the many puzzles about these elusive and solitary animals might just have been solved. How come pandas are so fat when they only eat bamboo? Bamboo is a type of grass. It's very fibrous, and it offers very little nutrition. But have you ever seen a skinny giant panda? They can survive on their low value diet for two reasons. First, they eat all the time. They can spend up to 16 hours a day sitting in the forest, chewing on bamboo leaves. Second, as has just been revealed by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, they can change the microorganisms in their gut to cope with the different nutritional values of bamboo at different times of the year in the late spring and early summer. Their diet changes from just bamboo leaves to the much more nutritious bamboo shoots. These are quite rich in protein and allow the animals to bulk up. Most mammals feed up in the autumn to see themselves through the winter, but pandas do their own thing and feast in the spring to stay roly poly throughout the year. Mm.
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daily Nature News with me. Roast swan. If there's one thing we know about scavengers, it's that they are not picky eaters. It goes with the territory. Really. If you make your living scratching around carcasses for leftovers, you can take what you can get and probably be happy with that, unless you are a Tasmanian devil. These unusual animals are the world's largest carnivorous marsupial, about the size of a small dog, and are native to the island of Tasmania, off the south coast of Australia. In recent years, they have been badly affected by an unpleasant disease, which causes us on their face. Known rather prosaically as devil facial tumour disease. This is killed up to 95% of devils in badly affected areas. There are recent signs that some animals may be developing immunity, but they are still in danger. That doesn't stop them. Being the world's only fussy scavenger, Professor Tracy Rodgers at the University of New South Wales has found that nearly all devils have favourite foods and won't touch anything else. Some like the taste of Wallaby. Others prefer possum. Only about 10% of devils are generalists, like scavengers everywhere else in the world. They may be fussy eaters, but they still have some yucky habits. According to Tourism Australia Devils will fall asleep inside a rotting carcass so that when they wake up, they have their breakfast right in front of them. So, yes, they are very cute and the inspiration for the very best Looney Tunes character of all time. But come on more daily nature news tomorrow.
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Hello and welcome to daily nature news with me. Ross Juan. Today we have a good news bad news story about that most iconic of American wild animals. The bald eagle. 50 years ago, this extraordinary bird was in danger of extinction. It was losing habitat being shot, and it was being poisoned by the insecticide DDT Dyke. Laura Diphenyl Treichl Orally Thane DDT is the most notorious pesticide in history. It was first used in 19 thirties to try to control malaria and afterwards became a widely used agricultural insecticide. But it is really nasty stuff. It poisons the environment in many ways, including causing cancer in humans. Getting it banned in 1972 was one of the first victories of the environmental movement. The ball legal was put on the endangered species list a year later in 1973 and numbers began to recover great news. But it still took 35 years until 2000 and seven before it was removed from the endangered list. Now a new threat has been identified. Bald eagles are being poisoned again not by pesticides but by lead. Gunshot hunters typically leave the image of their kills in the field, including the lead shot, and these remains are then scavenged by eagles, coyotes, foxes and bears. A report this week from Cornell University estimates that bald eagle population growth is being weakened by 4 to 6% every year as a direct result of lead shot poisoning. More daily nature news tomorrow.
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