A Ladybug Swarm Over California Was Huge Enough to Show Up on Radar
SOMETHING STRANGE WAS HAPPENING. On Tuesday, June 4, 2019, the evening sky over San Diego was fairly free of clouds, but meteorologists saw a thick swirl on their radar.
The culprit was a bloom of ladybird beetles, more commonly known as ladybugs. The little beetles were soaring more than a mile above the ground in a diffuse cluster many miles wide, a meteorologist from the National Weather Service’s San Diego office explained to the Los Angeles Times.
In this case, meteorologists were able to check in with people on the ground, who saw some of the little speckled beetles up close and helped clear up confusion about the blob. Without this ground truthing, though, it’s really hard to tell what’s making its mark on radar. The technology measures the shape, reflectivity, and altitude of things in the sky, and can gauge speed of movement. That allows meteorologists to assess, for instance, the size of the hail being dropped by a storm or where plumes of smoke are blowing—but it definitely doesn’t provide enough detail to be able to tell if the sky is awash with particularly charismatic insects. “The radar does not explicitly say ‘bugs or ladybugs,’” explains Alex Tardy, a meteorologist at the NWS San Diego office, via email. “It can tell us by the shape and reflectivity returns if there are birds or bats for example, but not the bug type or amount of bugs.”
To drill down to the species level, you need more than just a blob on a screen. “There needs to be an expert on insect migration to evaluate the science,” Tardy says. California is home to scores of ladybug species, and Cornell University entomologist John Losey told NPR that these were likely convergent lady beetles, which are known to migrate in early summer. Still, it’s not totally clear why so many ladybugs are clustered this way. Tardy suggests that it might have to do with a spell of wet, cool weather, and Losey wondered if they were responding to some consequence of recent wildfires, or a change in the population of their prey, which is mostly aphids.
The ladybugs were surprise guest stars—the meteorologists hadn’t set out to find them—but scientists sometimes intentionally tap into existing weather-tracking infrastructure to keep tabs on animals. During the 2017 total solar eclipse, for instance, some researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology compiled data from 143 Doppler stations across the United States to see how flying animals reacted to the midday darkness—such as whether hordes of birds or insects took to the sky en masse at that moment. In this case, “the weather watchers lost sight of the cloud overnight, and the ladybugs’ current location isn’t clear,” NPR reported. They were a fleeting wonder that’s since flitted away.
[SOURCE: Atlas Obscura.]
Found! 7 Ancient Footprints of a Giant, Flightless Bird
MICHAEL JOHNSTON HAD JUST TAKEN his boss’s dogs for a swim in the Kyeburn River in Otago, New Zealand, when he noticed something unusually prehistoric: Enormous, three-toed footprints almost a foot wide speckled the riverbed. Though Johnston didn’t know it at the time, he had just discovered footprints from a moa, a gigantic flightless bird that roamed New Zealand until their extinction in the 1300s. And these aren’t just any ordinary moa tracks. Researchers believe the prints are the first ever found on New Zealand’s South Island and could be up to 12 million years old, according to ABC News.
When Johnston spotted five footprints in the clay bank in March 2019, he reached out to the local Otago Museum, according to TVNZ.com. Kane Fleury, a natural science assistant curator at the museum, was stunned to see Johnston’s pictures, which clearly revealed the perfectly preserved footprints. A few days later, Fleury drove down to meet Johnston at the river, threw on a snorkel and wetsuit, and dove down to see the prints for himself. Once underwater, Fleury discovered two more prints hidden under gravel, for a total of seven astonishingly well-preserved tracks.
After seeking permission from local iwi—one of the tribes within the indigenous Māori community—the museum experts began the excavation, according to a press release from the Otago Museum. Fleury believes that a major flood from November 2018 caused the bank to erode, thus revealing the footprints. Because the prints were submerged under a meter of water, the experts had to temporarily divert the river’s flow in order to chisel out the prints one by one from the clay. Ian Griffin, the director of the Otago Museum, captured a time-lapse of the excavation, which you can watch here.
After all the footprints are extracted and transported to the museum, researchers will begin the long process of drying each hunk of clay to ensure the substrate remains stable enough to prevent any damage to the prints. After this conservation treatment, the prints will go on display.
Moas resembled enormous, fluffy emus, standing over 12 feet tall and weighing over 500 pounds, until they were hunted to extinction. So their footprints, like those of any extinct animal, are quite rare. Until now, scientists had only preserved 25 footprints from the giant bird, according to the museum’s statement. Most moa bones known to science are around 12,000 years old, so these newly discovered tracks are exceptional for their age. “It makes you wonder how many other moa prints are buried or destroyed, or no one knows they’re there,” Mike Dickison, the world’s foremost moa expert, told The New Zealand Herald.
[SOURCE: Atlas Obscura.]
Found! A 99-Million-Year-Old Millipede, Perfectly Preserved in Amber
JUST SHY OF 100 MILLION years ago in what is now Myanmar, a small but long critter found itself stuck in a sticky spot of tree resin. It died there, its slightly iridescent body coiled into the shape of an S and pristinely preserved in lemon-yellow amber. When scientists recently unearthed its fossilized body, they realized the arthropod was a newly described species of millipede with such a strange morphology that it revises what scientists previously understood about when and how millipedes evolved. These findings appear in a new study published May 2, 2019, in the journal ZooKeys.
In fact, the 99-million-year-old specimen is so unusual that it necessitated the creation of an entirely new suborder in the current tree of millipede classification, Pavel Stoev, a researcher at Bulgaria’s National Museum of Natural History and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. For context, the small but mighty field of millipede research has only seen a handful of new suborders established over the past 50 years. So the researchers named the unusual new species Burmanopetalum inexpectatum, with the latter word translating into “unexpected” in Latin.
In order to verify that Burmanopetalum did indeed mark a new species, the researchers used 3D X-ray microscopy to construct a virtual model of the 0.3-inch-long specimen, including its skeleton, internal anatomy, and healthy abundance of tiny legs. The millipede’s uncannily perfect preservation allowed the researchers to observe the tiniest morphological traits that rarely show up in fossils.
“It came as a great surprise to us that this animal cannot be placed in the current millipede classification,” Stoev said in a statement. One of the unique morphological features that set this millipede apart from the rest of the pack includes an eye composed of five ommatidia (the optical units that make up a compound eye). By comparison, many other millipede orders boast just two or three ommatidia. Another distinction is the arthropod’s unusually smooth, unbristled hypoproct (the spot located in between the anal opening and the genitalia)—an evolved kind of bikini wax, if you will. Apparently modern millipedes are significantly bushier down there.
This millipede was the only one of the order Callipodida identified among the other 529 millipede specimens found in the same amber deposit. Scientists have never before discovered a Callipodidan in Myanmar, so this new fossil extends the historical range of the order into Southeast Asia. “In the past few years, nearly all of the 16 living orders of millipedes have been identified in this 99-million-year-old amber,” the fossil arthropod expert Greg Edgecombe of the Natural History Museum in London said in a comment. Now, this strange Callipodidan joins the club.
[SOURCE: Atlas Obscura.]
Bohemian Grove Under Fire Again
The notoriously secretive club of power brokers known as Bohemian Grove is the subject of renewed criticism concerning the group's all-male membership policy. Established in 1878, the annual summer gathering in the wilderness of Monte Rio, California has played host to all manner of wealthy and elite individuals over the years, including former presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. In recent times, the group has become the subject of considerable speculation among conspiracy theorists due to both the clandestine nature of the organization as well as the powerful people who are a part of it.
Beyond the possibility that members of the group are plotting the course of world events, Bohemian Grove's controversial status as a 'gentleman's club' is being criticized once again by politicians who oversee the campground where the gatherings are held. At a hearing of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors last week, board members reportedly raised issue with a longstanding agreement in which the group pays local sheriffs to provide security at the all-male retreat. Supervisor Shirlee Zane expressed concern that by working with the group, "we’re basically consenting to gender discrimination."
As such, the contract between the organization and the county has been tabled until lawyers can look it over for any legal issues which might arise. In an effort to open a dialogue with the tight-lipped group, supervisor Lynda Hopkins actually went so far to pen an open letter to the members of the club. After stressing that she does not believe that they are bad people, the politician declared "stop trying to convince me that the Grove is totally normal. It's not. It's weird. But here’s the thing — I don’t have a problem with weird. So just be honest with me and admit that it's weird."
Answering some of the arguments put forward by members, Hopkins noted that Bohemian Grove is different from a run-of-the-mill men's social club by virtue of the powerful people who are a part of it as well as the strict rules concerning women interacting with the organization. She went on to call for more openness from the group, urging them to be "more self-aware" and to consider reaching out to women leaders to possibly be a part of the organization in the future. While it remains to be seen whether or not the suggestions in Hopkins' letter will be seriously considered by the club, it's a safe bet that we haven't heard the last of this controversy.
[SOURCE: Coast 2 Coast AM.]
Found! 40,000-Year-Old Severed Wolf's Head in Siberia
A Siberian man searching for mammoth tusks amid melting permafrost was taken aback when he stumbled upon the severed head of a wolf that turned out to be 40,000 years old. The remarkable find was reportedly made last year as Pavel Efimov walked along the shore of a river in the district of Yakutia. He subsequently turned it over to scientists, who kept the discovery under wraps until they unveiled it this week at an event in Tokyo.
According to experts who examined the remarkable remains, the wolf likely roamed the Earth during the Pleistocene era and was considerably bigger than its modern-day counterparts that reside in the region today. The head of the animal, alone, they say measures 16 inches, which is around half the size of a modern gray wolf's whole body. Scientists were particularly excited about the discovery because of its well-preserved nature. To that end, not only were the animal's teeth and fur still intact, but so was its brain.
As to how or why the wolf's head wound up being severed from its body, experts postulated that the ancient decapitation was probably not the work of human hands, because the region where it was found was not settled by people until a period long after the event likely took place. Despite only having the head to work with, scientists hope to reconstruct the complete creature for some kind of display in the future while also studying the DNA of the ancient wolf to gain new insights into the long-departed canines which once called Siberia home.
[SOURCE: Coast 2 Coast AM.]
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