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!  

 

APLNJ image

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