Creatures great & small -- & a black bear news flash!

                                  

African elephants

Sorry to say, I still don’t know why those elephants in the news earlier this summer were traveling in China, or where they wound up (hopefully, each in one piece, with tusks intact).  China, remember, is the place that’s so fixated on elephant ivory and probably still leads the world in consuming it, thereby driving the poachers who are only too happy to slaughter elephants for their tusks.  That mysterious wandering herd better watch its back!

Elephants.  Both supremely wonderful and supremely threatened creatures.  Sometimes described as more human than humans as far as good qualities go – family oriented, social, complex, smart . . . . Most of the poems about elephants that I know of don’t at all suffice to suggest their majesty, their nobility.  Neither do the quotes about them that I’ve seen.  (I welcome your suggestions on both!)

Asian elephants 

The very best thing I’ve ever heard about elephants is the gorgeous yet heart-rending poem, “The Sacred Elephant,” by Heathcote Williams (read by him and two others).  And the worst thing I’ve heard about elephants is the real possibility of their going extinct in the wild.  That’s painful even to imagine.

Way before today

Today, elephants are found only in Africa and Asia, but at one time, they inhabited the whole planet. Today, elephants are the largest land mammal, while long ago in some places, they had evolved into being horse-size.

Off Italy’s boot, Sicily is just one island where remains of “dwarf elephants” (now extinct) have been found, and scientists are trying to figure out the evolutionary rate of “elephant shrinkage” in such “geographic isolation” sites as islands.   

There’s proof that downsizing evolution happened to elephants and other animals in such places; the question is, how long did it take those full-size elephants to become dwarf elephants.  https://tinyurl.com/27cvh53s

And even before that . . .

Steppe mammoth  (artist: Beth Zaiken)

Before “our” elephants, there were Columbian mammoths (distant relatives of African elephants) -- taller, heavier and with longer tusks – who roamed North America during the last ice age.  They were assumed to have come from the one known Siberian mammoth lineage.

But then, using DNA more than a million years old -- the oldest ever recovered from a fossil (in this case, three mammoth molars, each about the size of a milk carton) – researchers painstakingly discovered a new mammoth lineage after long years of assuming there was only one, which had produced the Columbian mammoth. 

That changed everything.  Continued genomic research ultimately indicated that this newly found mammoth line had bred with the wooly mammoth to produce the Columbian – therefore, a hybrid species, appearing later than had been thought.   https://tinyurl.com/2exmj6rt

 Sound & light

Sing it!  Now that Brood X cicadas have come and gone, high summer has arrived and insect songs have started, here’s a reminder of who we’re hearing, and when.  Daytime: (most) cicadas; night: crickets can start at dusk and make a night of it, while katydids pick up later and can go till dawn.

Katydid

            Enjoy the concerts, which will eventually end as temperatures fall.  

It takes a swarm: In some species, only when enough fireflies gather together in a dense swarm, do they blink together, in near perfect synchronization.  This seems to happen spontaneously, without a firefly leader.  Apparently, one firefly, flashing while moving, can incite other insects to flash too.

Nor are fireflies the only animals who can glow or flash.  Certain sharks, mammals and reptiles also have the gift of glow.  https://tinyurl.com/tf73y3vr

                                           The best possible news for bears

“Good” only begins to describe this news: The black bear season is closed. New Jersey’s Comprehensive Black Bear Management Policy (CBBMP) expired on June 21.  There will be no black bear hunt in 2021!  

 

Details to follow in the next post.  Meanwhile, rejoice!  

 

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