CBS Sunday Morning – We leave you this Sunday morning with whale sharks near Holbox Island off the coast of Cancun, in Mexico. Videographer: Lance Milbrand.
As the largest fish in the sea, reaching lengths of 40 feet or more, whale sharks have an enormous menu from which to choose. Fortunately for most sea-dwellers—and us!—their favorite meal is plankton. They scoop these tiny plants and animals up, along with any small fish that happen to be around, with their colossal gaping mouths while swimming close to the water’s surface.
Filter Feeding
The whale shark, like the world’s second largest fish, the basking shark, is a filter feeder. In order to eat, the beast juts out its formidably sized jaws and passively filters everything in its path. The mechanism is theorized to be a technique called “cross-flow filtration,” similar to some bony fish and baleen whales.
CBS Sunday Morning – We leave you this first Sunday of 2023 at Ausable Chasm (known as the “Grand Canyon of the Adirondacks”), near Lake Champlain in New York state. Videographer: Jaime McDonald.
Ausable Chasm, open since 1870, is the oldest and largest natural attraction in the Adirondacks. More than 10 million visitors have explored the chasm on the well-maintained scenic nature trails.
CBS Sunday Morning – A winter wonderland, at Good Earth State Park in South Dakota. Videographer: Kevin Kjergaard.
Good Earth State Park southeast of Sioux Falls is an important cultural and historical site as well as a unique nature retreat adjacent to the most developed and populated part of our state. The site itself is one of the oldest sites of long-term human habitation in the United States. The river, abundant wildlife, fertile flood plains, availability of pipestone (catlinite) and protection from winds made the area an important gathering place for seasonal ceremonies and a significant trading center for many tribal peoples from 1300-1700 A.D.
During this time, occupants were primarily Oneota Tradition Peoples, including Omaha, Ponca, Ioway and Otoe, but many other tribes were attracted and participated in trading agricultural product as well as hides, pelts and pipestone (catlinite).
This is the largest Oneota cultural site discovered to date in the upper Midwest. There are two other significant Oneota cultural sites located respectively in southwest Iowa and central Missouri.
BBC Earth – Arctic Siberia’s Nomadic Nenets herders have migrated with reindeer for generations. Reindeer were among the last animals domesticated by humans.
According to the Nenets legend, the humans promised the reindeer that they would protect them on their long migration from the mainland to the seashores as long as the reindeer provide humans with all their needs, including milk, fat, meat, bones, horns, and skins. The nomadic reindeer herders reside in the taiga forests of the Russian tundra and northern Mongolia.
CBS Sunday Morning (December 2022) – We leave you this Sunday morning with reindeer in northern Finland, prepping for their big night! Videographer: David Cohen.
Northern Finland is the northernmost part of Finland. Administratively it comprises Finnish Lapland and the provinces of Kainuu and Northern Ostrobothnia. This region is very sparsely populated even for Finland – while it covers almost half of the country it has a population slightly larger than the city of Helsinki.
Smithsonian Magazine – Ten Best Science Books of 2022 – December 7, 2022: From a detective story on the origins of Covid-19 to a narrative that imagines a fateful day for dinosaurs, these works affected us the most this year
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong
In An Immense World, science journalist Ed Yong dives into the vast variety of animal senses with a seemingly endless supply of awe-inspiring facts. As humans, we move through the world within our Umwelt—a term for subjective sensory experience Yong borrows from the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. But every creature on Earth has its own Umwelt that we can scarcely imagine. Through interviews with scientists around the globe, Yong teases out the astonishing details of other animals’ perceptions, introducing us to their fantastic Umwelten. Scallops, for example, have up to 200 eyes with impressive resolution, but their brains are likely not complex enough to receive and process such crisp images. Some butterflies can perceive ultraviolet color patterns on their wings that distinguish them from other species. And hammerhead sharks have receptors that scan the seafloor for the electric fields emitted by hidden prey, “as one might use metal detectors,” Yong writes. But many creatures’ senses have been thrown off by human activity, he notes. For example, our visually centered society has erected artificial lights that disorient migrating birds and hatchling sea turtles.
Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage by Rachel E. Gross
Perhaps no aspect of our anatomy is both more fascinating and misunderstood than the vagina—down to the very common usage of what that word means. A vagina isn’t the whole of a woman’s reproductive anatomy. Instead, the vagina is a muscular canal that’s part of many people’s reproductive systems, of varying genders, whether they were born with it or had it surgically constructed. Nuance exists in this territory that is so often overwhelmed by a tangle of science, myth and cultural perceptions, and journalist Rachel E. Gross has composed an enthralling, sensitive book that’s relevant to everyone no matter what your personal topography looks like.
The pages of Vagina Obscura contain plenty of cutting-edge popular science and historic reflection on everything from how ovaries were once miscategorized as female testicles to how operations for individuals injured in war paved the way for gender-affirming surgeries. The book is arranged by anatomical part, and Gross details the function each part carries out. Gross’ work stands out because the unfolding story is couched in what we’ve been wrong about, how our ideas have changed, and how every person—no matter their sex—shares far more in common than we often recognize. Everyone’s reproductive anatomy, as Gross notes, is made up of the same parts in different arrangements, a quirk of human development that underscores commonality. Gross’ exploration is far more than a natural history of human anatomy, but a narrative that busts myths and celebrates all that we’ve come to know about vaginas and their associated parts during a time when such clarity on sex, gender and bodily autonomy is more needed than ever. Where the popular understanding of human anatomy is sometimes shallow, Vagina Obscura brings depth. (Riley Black)
Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus by David Quammen
In Breathless, David Quammen has constructed a masterful book about scientists’ efforts to understand SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Make no mistake, the book is not about healthcare and our response to Covid-19. The main character in this tale is the virus, and Quammen crafts a detective tale about the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 by chronicling the efforts of scientists around the world to identify it, search for its origins, understand how it mutates and respond to it. He interviewed 95 scientists and allows readers to look over the shoulders of many of them as they use their specialized expertise to study the virus. To show how the scientific process works on a global scale, he details the work of a genomic epidemiologist here, an evolutionary virologist there and a computational biologist somewhere else. Each expert adds or refutes some important detail about the rapidly evolving virus that has created a pandemic. Each discovery builds on those that came before.
Quammen has said he wrote the book with no outline, instead allowing each addition to naturally form on the next, in the way a crystal forms. He has the skills and knowledge to do this thanks to decades spent writing captivating science books, on everything including evolution and the spillover of disease from animals into humans. What results from his immense effort is a solid, reliable and entertaining scientific thriller about a shifty and prolific virus that is still very much evolving. (Joe Spring)
CBS Sunday Morning (December 2022) – We leave you this morning with Nature’s great spectacle at the Mauna Loa volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Notice that Mauna Loa, the largest active volcano in the world, was going to erupt — as it did this week for the first time in nearly four decades — came to people on the Big Island of Hawaii an hour before the lava began to flow. Public officials scrambled to alert nearby residents. Scientists rushed to predict which areas of the island might be in danger. The curious made plans to observe what could shape up to be an event of a lifetime: the exhalation of a massive mountain.
CBS Sunday Morning – We leave you this Sunday morning with some very lucky turkeys living it up at Swan Creek Metropark in Toledo, Ohio. Videographer: Alex Goetz.
Ohio’s largest gamebird can be viewed almost everywhere, nowadays – woodlands, prairies and even areas of suburbia. Seen and heard in just about in every Metropark and sometimes frequenting the Windows on Wildlife at Wildwood and Swan Creek Preserve in the city, a wild turkey could soon be visiting a backyard feeding station near you.
The Yorkshire Dales is home to outstanding scenery, great castles, abbeys and a breathtakingly peaceful atmosphere. At its heart are two very special protected areas – Yorkshire Dales National Park and Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) – as well as it having the Forest of Bowland AONB and North Pennines AONB as its close neighbours. These protected areas are truly not to be missed.
“Yorkshire Dales, a home to 20000 people and 600000 sheep. The Dales is group of river valley in north England, each valley having its own character. This short film shows variety of seasons in the Dales and typical Yorkshire Dales landscape, such as drystone walls, wildflower meadows and limestone pavements.”
Boomers Daily 