Whales dive to nearly two miles depth, hold breath for two hours
Friday curiosity: Duck-diving Cuvier’s beaked whales can hold their breath for over two hours, and reach a depth of 2 miles (3.2 km) underwater. What’s more, when they come up, they recover in an...
View ArticleSalmon quite happy to adapt to warmer world
You will never guess, but salmon that survived the hot Holocene period, and the even hotter Eemian, will probably be OK in a slightly warmer world. Expert researchers found this surprising. Given the...
View ArticleFossils show models can’t predict how climate affects animals
Fossils show those dang mammals lived in all the spots they weren’t supposed to live in. Climate models don’t predict the climate, and animal distribution models don’t predict (or in this case...
View ArticleLife on Earth more adaptable than models predict
Potato Beetle Researchers predicted a particular beetle would not be able to get into the cold areas of Kazakhstan and western China. But the sneaky beetles learnt to cope with the cold by burying...
View ArticleLo! Shark god protects us from storms, floods, heatwaves (sayth Nature & ABC)
Big news: A new endogenous forcing found for climate change — sharks. For millions of years you thought predator-prey relationships were just about big fish having dinner, but not so, they are climate...
View ArticleLife copes: The horses that adapted to massive climate change in just 800 years
… In evolutionary terms, it’s a blink. Around 1200-1400AD a bunch of people bought a few domestic horses to far east freezing Siberia, where the temperature sometimes falls below -70. Somehow the...
View ArticleAsteroid kills 90% of all mammal species: Anthropocene kills one rat (maybe)
Compare the tallies. Sixty-five million years ago an asteroid smacked-down and only 10% of mammal species survived. So far in the Anthropocene Catastrophe, one type of rat has been wiped off a 300m...
View ArticleSolar cycles to blame for jellyfish plagues (not coal fired plants)
Image Erin Silversmith Three amazing things in this story. One that solar cycles might influence the oceans to such an extent that jellyfish plagues are cycling in tune with the sun. Second is that the...
View ArticleThe Anthropocene: all that CO2 and the only mammal extinction is a brown rat...
Where’s the apocalypse: With all the forecasts of doom, is this it? Global Lament is rising for the small brown rat (Melomys rubicola) lost off a desert island no one heard of til morning tea today....
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