January 2019 - Favorite World Press

The FWP weekly digest of wondrous wildlife happenings
and other interesting items from the natural world

Creatures to meet | Things to learn
Things to do

Lisa S. French

Because trees convert carbon dioxide into food for growth, they are one of the planet’s most naturally efficient ways to store carbon. One tree can absorb as much as 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year and sequester one ton of carbon by the time it reaches 40 years old. Trees actually get better at storing carbon with age. Old-growth forests, which have developed for at least 120 years without disturbance, contain over 300 billion tons of carbon. That’s 600 trillion pounds of CO2 not floating around sneakily warming the atmosphere! You can help us plant more handy, leafy sky vacuums by joining the FWP Frankie and Peaches Kindness Crew.

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Lisa S. French January 31, 2019

Night Pollinators

According to a report from the World Wildlife Fund, more than a third of crops globally are partially pollinated by animals. Lucky for us, these farmer’s helpers work around the clock. When busy bee and bird pollinators say goodbye to the day, night pollinators like the common fruit bat swoop in for the second shift. Bats pollinate over 500 species of plants including eucalyptus, mango, clove, cocoa, banana, and avocado.

In addition to helping keep humans stocked in delightful tropical fruits and all-important chocolate, these furry fliers play a critical role in maintaining the health and functioning of rainforest ecosystems. They can also contribute to natural reforestation of the tropics through “what goes in, must come out” seed dispersal. In case you were wondering, pollination by bats is called chiropterophily—chiro for hand, ptero for winged and phily as in tendency toward. Those of us with a tendency toward mangoes say keep up the good work little, wing-handed friends.

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Lisa S. French January 28, 2019

Beaked Builders

With his glossy blue-black plumage and striking violet eyes, the male satin bowerbird really stands out in a flock. As if purple peepers weren’t enough to grab attention, the bowerbird has evolved to develop quite a flair for design and construction in order to compete for female interest. And apparently, the competition is pretty stiff. Male bowerbirds are evaluated by females based on their ability to build a complex structure or bower made from twigs and dried grass. Once the walls of the U-shaped bower are complete, objects carefully chosen for artistic impact, including flowers, berries, shells, feathers and brightly colored bits of plastic, are precisely placed around the base of the bower to increase the overall appeal.

Bowerbirds that beautify with berries get the added advantage of a local crop to harvest from for redecorating when discarded fruits grow into plants. Native to Australia and New Guinea, each of the twenty species of these masters of avian architecture works with a species-specific color palette. To showcase his design chops, the satin bowerbird prefers to accessorize in shades of blue, perhaps as a complement to his feathered finery. If you’re still honing your decorating skills don’t worry, it took millions of years for the bowerbird to get this good. You can learn more about the satin bowerbird and other clever winged creatures in The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman.

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Lisa S. French January 24, 2019

Strategic Squirrels

If you’ve ever watched a squirrel gather and bury nuts in preparation for winter and assumed the flurry of activity was completely random, scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have discovered that there is a cognitive strategy behind all of that bushy-tailed toing and froing. It appears that squirrels have the ability to organize information about their winter food inventory using a memory device called “spatial chunking” which enables them to bury and retrieve nuts in scattered locations according to size, type, and even nutritional value. To ensure they find their carefully categorized nuts as they left them, these crafty critters have also mastered fake burying—or the squirrel spoof. By pretending to dig and cover storage holes while slyly hiding treasured nuts away from spying eyes, squirrels keep their crunchy cache safe from potential poachers.

However, even the most strategic squirrels lack perfect memory and about three-quarters of buried nuts are never retrieved. The good news is those forgotten nuts grow into trees which provide food and habitat that other animals also depend upon for survival. And when you ’ve enjoyed the shade of a mighty oak, hickory or walnut tree a squirrel may have had a paw in the planting. If you’d like to show your squirrel appreciation, there’s actually a day for that, January 21. In honor of forest generating squirrels, go nuts!

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Lisa S. French January 21, 2019

Matching Giraffes

Particular patterns of spots passed down from female giraffes to their offspring may play an important role in helping to keep calves safe in the wild. Scientists are working to understand how inheriting similar shapes and patterns of spots from their mothers could increase young giraffes chances of survival. It appears those beautiful markings, which also serve as camouflage from predators, may not be random after all—apparently, the larger and more irregular the spots the better. When it comes to giraffe survival in the savanna, it seems there’s no such thing as being too matchy-matchy.

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Lisa S. French January 18, 2019

Snoring Tadpoles

When you need a little break from the hurly-burly of daily duties, what could be more calming than the soft, snuffling sounds of hibernating tadpoles? Take a trek to the frozen north of Norway and have a listento the drip, plop, drip of melting snow and snoozing sounds of future frogs with BBC Radio 3 – Slow radio.

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Lisa S. French January 15, 2019

How to Bee

When the days draw in, busy bees on blooming blossoms may be a distant thought, but now is the perfect time to think about ways to support our pollen gathering pals next spring. Watch this inspiring video and find out how an amazing global network of Bee Guardians are helping honey bee colonies thrive and become more resilient and get the latest buzz on how you can lend a hand to these VIPs (Very Important Pollinators). If you aren’t ready to go full-beekeeper, there are other easy, low-cost ways to Airbee-n-bee here. If you need help identifying your hard-working house guests, check out The Bee, A Natural History.

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Lisa S. French January 10, 2019

City Turtles

You might not think that an urban beach in densely populated Queens would be a natural choice for a critically endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle to lay her eggs, but last July, for the first time in the recorded history of New York, one lone turtle laid 110 eggs on Far Rockaway peninsula. In September, after about 60 days of incubation, eight dozen, flippered hatchlings emerged from their shells and very, very slowly trundled toward the Atlantic.

Although young Kemp’s ridley turtles have appeared as far north as Nova Scotia, researchers aren’t exactly certain why this turtle mom traveled so far from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico where the rare species usually nests. Some believe that as global waters warm due to climate change, more Kemp’s ridley turtles will migrate beyond their instinctual year-round comfort zone resulting in larger numbers of shell-shocked seasonal strandings as the northern Atlantic rapidly cools in the winter. You can help keep these youngsters safely turtling around by adopting your very own trio of hatchlings from the World Wildlife Fund. And you can find more magnificent reasons to support marine life in these photos from Call of the Blue / Paul Holberton Publishing.

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Lisa S. French January 7, 2019

Hoppy They’re Here

Pop quiz! What can be found on every continent except Antarctica, fits in the palm of your hand, comes in 4,740 different models, amazingly eye-popping colors, and drinks and breathes through its skin? Hint: it’s not the iPhone 30X. It’s a humble hopper–the frog. Last fall, a particularly tiny, bright green member of the frog family, the Pickersgill’s reed frog, made a big splash in biodiversity conservation when two hundred of the endangered amphibians were returned to the only place they call home, a 56-square-mile patch of habitat in coastal South Africa. So, why the tiny frog fuss? This particular army of frogs was raised in captivity by scientists working to rapidly breed species on the brink of extinction, one of many global teams rushing to conserve threatened wildlife.

While they may not take up much space in our minds or on the planet, frogs are important because they are a keystone species, a critical link in the chain of organisms that support functioning ecosystems, benefiting both humans and other animals. Sticky-tongued frogs are natural bug zappers, eating a variety of insects including the disease-carrying mosquito. They are also a food source for larger species including fish, birds, and monkeys. Pre-frogs, otherwise known as tadpoles, do their bit to help to keep waterways clean by eating algae. And because frogs are super-sensitive to environmental stressors, a typically frog-friendly habitat that becomes frog-free can alert us to changes in climate, air and water quality. Conserving the creature components of global ecosystems, even the tiny, green ones, keeps interdependent living parts of the natural world healthy and that’s a wonderful thing. If you’d like to support the preservation of forest and wetland habitats for our amphibian friends, hop on over to WWF.

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Lisa S. French January 5, 2019

Animal Farmers

While you’ll probably never encounter a porcupine peddling potatoes at your neighborhood farmer’s market, there are species of animals, including specific types of ants, beetles, birds, and fish, that appear to cultivate plants. One such floating animal farmer, the white spotted jellyfish, carefully tends and harvests algae that grow in its very own personal, portable tentacle garden. Talk about local veg!

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Lisa S. French January 3, 2019