Animals

A Chinese woman surnamed Liu bequeathed 20 million yuan not to her sons and daughters, but to her pets. Although a few years ago she made a will that would have left her entire fortune to her children. But they did not visit their mother often and refused to take care of her during her illness, so she reconsidered her decision.

As the Shanghai resident said, only her cats and dogs kept her company during difficult times. In her second will, Liu gave her fortune to a veterinary clinic, which she made responsible for her animals.

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Researchers first encountered the rare horned viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides) in 1968 during an expedition to Iran. It was characterised by an unusual “spider-like” tail.

Scientists first thought that this feature was a neoplasm or a parasite. Since there were no other specimens, they were not in a hurry to identify the snake as a new species.
And only in 2003 specialists found a similar viper. It became the proof that it is a new species. Having observed the snake in natural conditions, the scientists told about the nuances of its behaviour.
This viper during the hunt burrows into the rocks and leaves on the surface only a “spider” on the end of its own tail, wagging it. In this position the snake can stay for several hours until the bird reacts to the ruse.

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Experts from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance have determined where the endangered species Rhynchopsitta pachyrhyncha, known as the thick-billed ara, whose primary nesting habitat is pine forests in northwestern Mexico, go to winter. These animals make the migration to the southern part of the Western Sierra Madre range every October. There, according to the researchers, these birds spend a little less than half a year.

The researchers pointed out that only 8.5 per cent of the area where the thick-billed ara is overwintering is currently protected. As noted by experts, the rest of this territory is under the threat of logging for timber harvesting and agricultural development. In total, according to scientists, only 20 per cent of the entire habitat of this endangered species is protected.

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Forests are often seen as the best stores of carbon. But due to logging, insect pests or fires, decades of carbon stored in the bark and leaves of trees can end up in the atmosphere in a matter of hours. And even in healthy forests, much of the carbon stored in terrestrial vegetation decomposes and returns to the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas in less than a century.

Meanwhile, the soil beneath savannahs and grasslands, where there are few trees but many herbivores, can store carbon for tens of thousands of years in hard-to-reach underground pools. So what’s the point?

A 2009 study found that when gnu antelopes returned to the Serengeti savannah in East Africa in the 1960s after an epidemic, catastrophic forest fires declined markedly. The animals began eating and trampling the vegetation cover that had fuelled the fires in their absence. The abundance of plants and trees in the burned areas gradually recovered to previous levels.

It may seem counterintuitive, but large herbivores and seasonal fires are natural elements of grassland ecosystems. Without antelope, elephants or zebras, small fires become natural disasters.

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A team of physicists from the USA has devoted research to the mechanism of landing a blue fly on the ceiling. It turned out that this process can be divided into 4 stages. It is characteristic of many flying insects, but it is still not perfected and requires non-trivial efforts from creatures.

The main question the scientists were interested in was: does the fly turn over immediately before contact with the ceiling surface – or does it do so in advance during flight?

It is known that insects can fix themselves on a horizontal plane upside down by special suction cups on their legs (pulvillae). A group of biophysicists led by Bo Cheng found that the landing algorithm is built somewhat more complex than expected.

A videographer was used for the study. The device recorded in detail all the movements of the wings, limbs and body of the insect during landing. Additionally, the fly’s visual perception of the surface was analysed and the mechanism based on this was used to estimate the approximate time until contact with the ceiling.

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