Animal behavior can often help explain the origin of popular myths and mysteries. Fairy circles, for example, have long puzzled onlookers. These are striking circular patches of perennial grasses with a barren center, which grow in the desert on the southwest coast of Africa. Biologist Norbert Juergens of the University of Hamburg and his colleagues, in a new Science paper, explain how termite feeding and natural rainwater storage produce the grass circles.
According to the researchers, termites feed on the grass roots, preventing growth. Rainwater, however, later stores in the sandy soil depths around the rim of the feeding, which allows some grass to survive.
Bigfoot Roars
Earlier this year, headlines suggested that Bigfoot was living in Oregon, after claims of strange roaring and screeching sounds coming from forests. These claims have been made for years at various locations around the world. Most experts attribute the sounds to coyotes, which vocalize in complex ways, or Barred Owls. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology shares that “the Barred Owl’s hooting call, 'Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?' is a classic sound of old forests and treed swamps.”
Crop Circles
What do drugged-out wallabies have to do with crop circles, those distinctive circular patterns often seen in and around Australia? According to Lara Giddings, attorney general for the island state of Tasmania, the kangaroo-like marsupials feed in the region’s many poppy fields. "Then they crash,” she told the BBC. "We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”
The wallabies literally go around in circles, eating in that pattern or trampling the crops.
Sea Monsters
"Loch Ness monster” sightings were common in Scotland, and people have reported seeing other sea monsters in waters such as Cadboro Bay, Alaska. Animal experts believe these creatures are likely a frill shark, eel or some kind of fish. Jim Covel, senior manager of guest experience at California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium, told Discovery News that he and others can't be more specific, though, because they "do still find new species in the oceans, perhaps allowing some to entertain ideas like this, filling in the gaps with their imaginations.”
Highly endangered frill sharks do have a monster-like look, with their big toothy mouths and undulating, eel-resembling bodies.
Read more at
Discovery News
No comments:
Post a Comment