It has been a difficult year for Homo sapiens. The coronavirus pandemic exposed our vulnerabilities in a natural world that is constantly changing. Many were forced to find new levels of determination and creativity in order to survive.
While humans went into quarantine, birds, insects, fish, and mammals displayed their own ingenuity. The year 2020 was when murder horns appeared in the United States, scientists introduced us to an octopus as cute as the emoji, and researchers found platypus glow under a black light.
What follows are some articles about animals – and the people who study them – who have been surprised or delighted readers of The Times the most.
The longest year, the longest animal
In many ways, 2020 felt like the longest year. It’s also the year that scientists discovered possibly the longest creature in the ocean – a 150-foot-long siphonophore spotted in the deep ocean off Western Australia.
“It looked like an incredible UFO,” said Dr. Nerida Wilson, a senior research scientist at the Western Australian Museum.
Each siphonophore is a colony of individual zooids, clusters of cells that clone themselves thousands of times to produce a sprawling, rope-like body. While some of her colleagues compared the siphonophore to silly wire, Dr. Wilson that the organism is much more organized than that.
While the world is at a standstill, salamanders rule the road
This year, amphibian migrations in the northeastern United States coincided with the coronavirus pandemic. Social distance and shelter-in-place orders reduced car traffic, making this spring an unintended large-scale experiment.
“It’s not often we get this chance to investigate the real effects human activity can have on road-crossing amphibians,” said Greg LeClair, a graduate herpetology student at the University of Maine who is coordinating a project to help salamanders. help you to drive safely on roads. .
He was a stick, she was a leaf; together they wrote history
It was an age-old leaf insect mystery: what happened to the Nanophyllium female?
In the spring of 2018, at the Montreal Insectarium, Stéphane Le Tirant received a clutch of 13 eggs that he hoped would hatch in leaves. The eggs were not ovals but prisms, brown paper lanterns barely bigger than chia seeds.
They were laid by a wild-caught female Phyllium asekiense, a leaf insect from Papua New Guinea belonging to a group called frondosum, known only from female specimens.
After the eggs hatched, two of them became slender and stick-like, and even sprouted a pair of wings. They bore a curious resemblance to leaf insects in Nanophyllium, a completely different genus of which the six species were only described on the basis of male specimens. The conclusion was obvious: the two species were in fact one and the same, and were renamed Nanophyllium asekiense.
“We’ve only found men since 1906,” said Royce Cumming, a graduate student at the City University of New York. “And now we have our latest solid evidence.”
An octopus as cute as the emoji
What lies in front of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, in the Coral Sea? The region was largely unexplored and unknown until a recent expedition searched the dark waters and discovered an abundance of life, strange geological features, and spectacular deep corals.
An expedition organized by the Schmidt Ocean Institute mapped the remote seabed with sound beams and used tethered and autonomous robots to take close-up images of the inky depths.
Their work captured video of the dumbo octopus – which bears a striking resemblance to the octopus emoji – and the region’s thriving chambered nautili population. The team also found the deepest living hard corals in eastern Australian waters and identified as many as 10 new species of fish, snails and sponges.
Time to hibernate like a hummingbird
The energy required to survive in 2020 may feel the same as that of the hummingbird. The flapping creatures have the famous metabolism among vertebrates and to fuel their spirited lifestyles they sometimes drink their own body weight in nectar every day.
To conserve their energy, hummingbirds in the Andes Mountains of South America have been found to go into an exceptionally deep sleep, a physiological state similar to hibernation in which their body temperature drops by as much as 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
At the end of the year, it might be an opportunity for us to learn from these little birds and take it easy.
Glowing like the platypus
When we last looked at the platypus, our expectations of mammals with its webbed feet, a duck-like beak, and egg-laying were confused. More so, it produced poison.
Now it turns out that even its dull-looking coat hides a secret: when you turn on the black lights, it starts to glow.
By shining an ultraviolet light on a platypus, the animal’s fur fluoresces with a greenish-blue tint. Platypus are one of the few mammals known to exhibit this trait. And we still don’t know why they do it – if there is any reason at all. Scientists are also discovering they may not be alone among secret glowing mammals.
Bats, the likely original source of the coronavirus
An international team of scientists, including a prominent researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, analyzed all known coronaviruses in Chinese bats and used genetic analysis to determine the likely origin of the new coronavirus in horseshoe bats.
The researchers, mainly Chinese and American, conducted an in-depth search for and analysis of coronaviruses in bats, with a view to identifying hot spots for possible spillover of these viruses in humans and the resulting disease outbreaks.
The genetic evidence that the virus came from bats was already overwhelming. Horseshoe bats, in particular, were considered likely hosts because other spillover diseases, such as the SARS outbreak in 2003, originated from viruses that originated in these bats.
None of the bat viruses are close enough to the novel coronavirus to suggest it made a direct leap from bats to humans. The direct precursor to the new virus has not been found and may have been present in bats or another animal.
Kenya has the worst grasshopper outbreak in 70 years
“It was as if an umbrella covered the sky,” said Joseph Katone Leparole, who spent most of his 68 years living in a shepherd’s hamlet in Wamba, Kenya.
A swarm of fast-moving desert locusts cut a path of devastation across Kenya in June. The sheer size of the swarm stunned the villagers. They initially thought it was a cloud full of cooling rain.
The highly mobile creatures can travel more than 80 miles a day. Their swarms, which can contain up to 80 million adult locusts per square kilometer, eat as much food every day as about 35,000 people.
While spraying chemicals can be effective in controlling the pests, locals fear that the chemicals will affect the water supply used for drinking and washing, as well as for watering crops.
Climate change is expected to make locust outbreaks more frequent and severe.
Millions of minks are slaughtered to prevent the spread of the coronavirus
The Danish government slaughtered millions of minks on more than 1,000 farms earlier this year, citing concerns that a mutation in the new coronavirus that infected the mink could potentially interfere with the effectiveness of a vaccine for humans.
Scientists say there are reasons for Denmark to intervene in addition to this particular mutated virus. Mink farms have been shown to be breeding grounds for the coronavirus, and minks are capable of transmitting the virus to humans. They are the only animal known so far.
This series of mutations may not harm humans, but the virus will no doubt continue to mutate into mink as in humans, and the overcrowded conditions on mink farms could put different evolutionary pressures on the virus than those in the human population. The virus can also jump from mink to other animals.
Murder hornets are here for your honey bees
The arrival of “murder hornets” in the United States has certainly caught the world’s attention this spring.
The Asian Giant Hornet is known for its ability to wipe out a honey hive in hours, decapitate the bees and fly away with the victims’ chests to feed their young. For bigger targets, the hornet’s powerful venom and sting – long enough to pierce an apiary suit – make an excruciating combination that victims have compared to hot metal penetrating their skin.
This fall, after several sightings in the Pacific Northwest, officials in Washington State reported discovering and eliminating the first known murder horn nest in the country. The aggressive hornets’ nest was removed just as they were about to enter their ‘slaughter phase’.
Even if no other hornets are found in the area in the future, officials will continue to use traps for at least three more years to ensure the area is free of the hornets.