A camel is a horse designed by committee.
The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.
Left-handed snails avoid the attentions of right-handed crabs because these dexterous crustaceans find it tricky to eat lefties. For humans, the equivalent is probably those really annoying pistachio nuts that accumulate at the bottom of the bag. They are simply more trouble to open than they are worth, and are thus likely to be tossed aside.
Among spiders, the female of the species really is more deadly than the male. Lady arachnids have a well-deserved reputation for polishing off their suitors, post copula, in a manner that Hannibal Lecter might have admired. But it has never been clear why this happens. Some biologists believe it is simply a mixture of female hunger and the availability of a meal that is in no position to run away. Others suspect that the male is actually sacrificing his life for the good of his genes. In other words, his becoming a meal for his paramour somehow helps the offspring of their union.
Pull a spring, let it go, and it will snap back into shape. Pull it further and yet further and it will go on springing back until, quite suddenly, it won't. What was once a spring has become a useless piece of curly wire. And that, in a nutshell, is what many scientists worry may happen to the Earth if its systems are overstretched like those of an abused spring.
Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
People are not the only creatures who lie. Species from squids to chimpanzees have been caught doing it from time to time. But only Homo sapiens has turned lying into an art. Call it diplomacy, public relations or simple good manners: lying is one of the things that makes the world go round.
He was a socially dangerous warm.
The old saying that where there's muck, there's brass has never proved more true than in genetics. Once, and not so long ago, received wisdom was that most of the human genome — perhaps as much as 99% of it — was "junk". If this junk had a role, it was just to space out the remaining 1%, the genes in which instructions about how to make proteins are encoded, in a useful way in the cell nucleus, more than a century and a half after Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species", biologists do not fully understand how species actually do originate. Work like this suggests one reason for this ignorance may be that they have been looking in the wrong place. For decades, they have concentrated their attention on the glittering, brassy protein-coding genes while ignoring the muck in which the answer really lies.
No other season quite captures the imagination as winter does.
Among the mysteries of evolution, one of the most profound is what exactly happened at the beginning of the Cambrian period. Before that period, which started 541m years ago and ran on for 56m years, life was a modest thing. Bacteria had been around for about 3 billion years, but for most of this time they had had the Earth to themselves. Seaweeds, jellyfish-like creatures, sponges and the odd worm do start to put in an appearance a few million years before the Cambrian begins. But red in tooth and claw the Precambrian was not — for neither teeth nor claws existed.
Using Viking epics, whaling and pollen records, log books, the debris shed by melted ice rafts, diatoms (silicon-armoured algae found in marine sediments), ice cores and tree rings, scientists have constructed a record of the Arctic past which suggests that the summer sea ice is at its lowest level for at least 2,000 years. Six of the hottest years on record — going back to 1880 — have occurred since 2004.
The rhino horn, which is merely agglutinated hair, the same stuff as finger nails, has no pharmacological value. Yet its street price has soared to over $60,000 a kilo, more than for the same weight of cocaine or gold — a proven aphrodisiac.
New Zealand still has seven times as many sheep as people.
The 15 litres of semen from South Africa, from assorted males, would be enough to inseminate some 324 elephants and thereby freshen up the gene pool. But the elephant semen painstakingly gathered for America has been sitting in Pretoria for well over a year because of bureaucratic red tape. South African officials have been slow to grant a permit to export the semen to America simply because they have never done it before.
You know what Washington said when he crossed the Delaware? It's fucking cold.
If jelly is so fortifying, why does it wobble so much?
Cod hate cages — they don't like being handled, are very sensitive to changes in their environment and are very hard to breed.
Most commercial species have been reduced by over 75% and some, like whitetip sharks and common skate, by 99%. For all the marvellous improvements in technology, British fishermen, mostly using sail-power, caught more than twice as much cod, haddock and plaice in the 1880s as they do today. By one estimate, for every hour of fishing, with electronic sonar fish finders and industrial winches, dredges and nets, they catch 6% of what their forebears caught 120 year ago.
Many shallow-water species have highly evolved visual cortexes and their eyes can contain up to eight different light-absorbing photopig- ments, compared with the paltry red, blue and green which humans possess. These extra light receptors give fish increased sensitivity to other wavelengths; some species can even see ultraviolet light, which is invisible to humans.
In Africa it is said that "even the jackal deserves to drink".
It was a Unicorn poop.
A hen is merely an egg's way of making another egg.
Before locusts fly, they march. Millions of juveniles crawl up to 500 meters a day, munching everything in front of them, in bands that stretch for kilometres. This is when the Australian Plague Locust Commission tries to reduce their numbers, by laying strips of insecticide in their path. But often a swarm changes direction without warning. The university group, led by Jerome Buhl, suggests that such changes of movement are mathematically similar to the behaviour of a magnetic material like iron — which, if heated above a certain temperature, known as the Curie temperature, loses its magnetism. In both of these examples interactions between individual particles (magnetic domains in the case of iron, individual insects in the case of locusts) drive sudden changes in group dynamics. The iron stops being magnetic. The locusts change direction.
Lobbyists are swarming over Capital Hill like locusts.
As the researchers report in the Journal of Experimental Biology, compared with other flying animals the fish score well at 4.4:1. This makes them more efficient than swallowtail butterflies (3.6), fruit flies (1.8) and bumble bees (2.5). Flying fish are just as effective at gliding as birds that are known for being strong flyers, like red-shouldered hawks (3.8) and petrels (4). Nighthawks (9) and black vultures (17) make more impressive gliders. When the shape of a wing creates more lift from the air passing around it than it does drag (air resistance), an aircraft will fly. And the higher the ratio, the farther the aircraft will glide. This means if you cut the engine on a small Cessna with a lift-to-drag ratio of 7:1 it would fly seven metres forward for each metre of descent.
Germs are killed by other germs. People just survive.
What is bad news for rodents, though, could be good news for primates.
Whale meat is still occasionally served to schoolchildren in Japan as a reminder of their culture, though large-scale whaling only really began after the war, on the orders of General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw America's occupation. The aim was to provide cheap nourishment for a famished nation. Masayuki Ko- matsu, Japan's former IWC negotiator, who is notoriously blunt and once called minke whales the "cockroaches of the sea".
Why did the turtle stick its head in a bucket?" sounds like the sort of riddle asked by ten-year-olds in school playgrounds. But it was also asked recently by Yuen Ip of the National University of Singapore. And his answer, it has to be said, is precisely the sort that would appeal to a ten- year-old. It is that turtles pee through their mouths. The question was, why?