Bold Albatrosses | Faux Leopard Furs | Wingless Flies | Finding Fireballs
For wandering albatrosses, fortune may not favour the bold
Being bold isn’t always best for a bird -- or at least, not when it comes to the wandering albatross.
An international team of scientists has studied the personalities of wandering albatrosses on an island in the Crozet archipelago to work out which were bold and whether that upped their ability to catch food and survive in a world with a changing climate -- and the results aren’t what you might expect.
Boldness makes the massive birds relatively inflexible, they found, and less able to adapt to shifts in wind patterns wrought by climate change in the southern Indian Ocean.
They assessed the personalities of nearly 300 wandering albatrosses while the birds sat in their nests on Possession Island, a breeding colony in the Crozet Islands, 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) south-east of Cape Town.
Boldness was measured by the birds’ response to the approach of a human observer, based on whether the birds lifted their heads, vocalized, or jumped to their feet. The higher the score in the test, the bolder the bird was considered to be.
These personality traits were then measured against how individual birds hunted for food. Bolder birds preferred to travel far and to feed opportunistically; shyer ones to search more carefully and to sample foraging patches “of known reward”.
The team used GPS data on the movements of all 294 albatrosses gathered over 11 years.
The findings, recently published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, suggest some sections of the wandering albatross population (the bold) won't be agile enough to adapt to new environmental conditions, adding further pressure to a species already heavily impacted by fishing vessels, whose fishing gear often entangles and drowns the birds.
A wandering albatross on the wing near Possession Island | Antoine Lamielle | Wikimedia Commons
Fake fur to the rescue of southern Africa’s leopards
Conservation group Panthera has teamed up with a faux fur company, ECOPEL, to produce fake leopard furs for members of a South African church, known as the Shembe Church, which has a massive following.
Many of the church’s members wear leopard pelts during religious gatherings.
Panthera and its partners under its Furs for Life Leopard Programme has already supplied more than 18,500 synthetic fur capes, or amambatha as they’re known in Zulu, to the church.
The supply of the so-called “Heritage Furs” has reduced the use of authentic leopard pelts by 50% and “prevented thousands of leopard deaths, with some wild leopard populations stabilizing or in fact increasing in the region,” says a statement from Panthera.
Ten years ago Panthera discovered that at least 800 leopards were being killed annually for their fur in South Africa, out of a population estimated then to number fewer than 5,000.
The group says its new alliance with ECOPEL will provide 600 metres (over 1,900 feet) of Heritage Fur for Shembe church members.
The latest furs are woven with a plant-based textile.
Panthera also works with the Lozi community, in western Zambia, to reduce the impact of ceremonial Lozi practices on wild felines.
“At a recent gathering, almost 70 percent of participants wore synthetic Heritage Furs, replacing authentic leopard, serval and lion furs and helping reduce illicit wild cat hunting across southern Africa,” Panthera says.
A leopard in South Africa’s Kruger National Park | Andrew Shiva | Wikimedia Commons
‘Wingless fly’ discovered in Lesotho
At an altitude of more than 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) in Lesotho’s Maluti Mountains, scientists have for the first time discovered the females of a species of snipe fly, and found that they have no usable wings.
Instead, they have tiny ear-like protrusions where the wings are supposed to be.
Snipe flies, which belong to a large family whose members also occur in Australia and South America, are considered by entomologists to be a “relic" from a much earlier age.
Female snipe flies are notoriously hard to find. The search for the ones in the Maluti Mountains was based on male specimens collected in the 1950s, which had properly-formed wings.
Entomologist John Midgley, from South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Museum, and colleague Burgert Muller from the National Museum in Bloemfontein, set off to find the elusive females in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho.
They were successful, and that’s when they made the remarkable discovery that the females are brachypterous, or short-winged.
The tiny ‘wings’ on their backs serve no purpose at all. The low air pressure and strong winds in the Maluti Mountains, which are mostly covered in short, shrub-like vegetation, make flying a dangerous and unnecessary expense.
The males only retain their wings to aid them in their search for mates.
As the scientists write in their report, the discovery is important because it shows that while biodiversity hotspots like the Alpine zone of southern Africa have received limited attention, and will likely produce more undescribed species in the future, "even the addition of previously undescribed sexes can be remarkable".
The Maluti Mountains in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho | SkyPixels | Wikimedia Commons
Nature Notes: Finding fireballs
Our family doctor once told us a story about how her brother Reginald found a plant species new to science near Zimbabwe’s Mtarazi Falls, in the east of the country.
The Nyanga fireball – as the plant was later named – grows on the floor of deeply-shaded evergreen forests in that part of the country.
On one of his walks near his cottage, not far from where the Mtarazi cascades down a sheer cliff to the Honde Valley, Reginald came upon a patch of forest where all the fireballs were in flower.
Each plant produces a delicate crown of red flowers, which develop into clusters of bright red fruit.
Reginald collected and pressed a specimen. He sent it to a herbarium and had it confirmed as new to science.
All these years later I wonder what it must be like to discover a new species.
The country has been picked over by generations of botanists, ornithologists, herpetologists and entomologists, so the chances of that are remote.
Still, discovering a species that is new to me personally – if not to science – can often be exhilarating.
I found this beautiful shrub flowering at the foot of Mount Chinyakwaremba, near Zimbabwe’s border with Mozambique. It was growing in a place where the sun broke through a thick canopy of tall Albizia trees.
A botanist friend tells me it is Isoglossa milanjiensis. It takes its second name from Malawi’s Mount Mulanje where, long ago, some lucky botanist found the first specimen new to science.