Why Don’t All Lions Climb Trees?
Visit Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda or Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania, and you’ll see something unusual: lions that climb trees and spend lots of time resting on branches. Elsewhere, lions rarely climb. “They can get up there pretty well,” said Craig Packer, who oversaw the Serengeti Lion Project for years, adding, “They get up there and then they’re like, ‘Whoa, how do I get down?’”
Other big predatory cats climb trees all the time. “Anatomically, leopards are just better built for climbing,” said Luke Hunter, executive director of the big cats' program of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City. “They’re lighter, and a leopard’s scapula, their shoulder blades, are proportionally bigger, flatter, and more concave than a lion’s."
But, he added, lions have “enormously powerful forequarters, and a very, very stiff back,” which they use to wrestle prey like buffalo to the ground. Their enormous power, he said, “comes at the cost of the agility and the vertical power that a leopard has in being able to whip up a tree with an impala.”
Most lions have little need to climb trees. They live in pride and can generally defend meals from other predators. Solitary leopards must stash their kills somewhere safe and would, according to one study, lose more than one-third of their kills to hyenas if they were unable to hoist their captured prey up a tree.
In Zimbabwe, there are very few records of lions climbing trees, said Moreangels Mbizah, a conservation biologist working with lions in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. “The only reason they would want to climb is if there is something on the ground that they’re avoiding,” she said.
After heavy rainfall in 1963, for example, a plague of Stomoxys biting flies drove lions up trees and down warthog burrows, anywhere to escape the insects.
Lions may also climb trees to escape the heat and survey the landscape for prey, said Joshua Mabonga, carnivore research coordinator with the Uganda program at the Wildlife Conservation Society. But in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda, there may be another reason: Lions there live in smaller prides and share the park with large herds of buffaloes and elephants. When faced with a stampede of buffaloes that may endanger them, lions escape up into the branches. “The safest place for lions is in the trees,” Mabonga said.
— ANTHONY HAM
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Insect trash could be a farmer’s treasure
Insects excrete, just as we do, but their feces have a more pleasing name: frass. Unlike us, insects molt as they grow up, producing a series of crinkly silhouettes of their outgrown exoskeletons, also called exuviae.
This waste may be great news for plants. Exuviae and frass contain polymers and nutrients that promote plant growth when mixed into soil.
In a new paper published in the journal Trends in Plant Science, scientists say this kind of insect residue should be used to grow sustainable crops. Insects are increasingly being farmed for food (for humans) or feed (for animals), producing a growing amount of waste. The scientists propose collecting this waste and mixing it into soil to stimulate microbes that promote plant growth. Then, the farmed insects would feed on organic waste from crop production, creating a circular food system.
“Finally somebody has made that connection,” said Esther Ngumbi, an entomologist in Illinois not involved with the research. “I appreciated their entire thinking of all these other benefits that could come along by using this never-used asset.”
Marcel Dicke, an ecologist at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands and one of the authors of the paper, said, “It turns out we can kill two flies with one stone,” adding, “You can produce insects for food and then still also use the residual stream to promote sustainable crop production.”
Researchers focused on exuviae and frass from crickets, mealworms and black soldier flies, said Katherine Barragán-Fonseca, a doctoral student at Wageningen and an author of the paper.
While the new paper proposes how this circular system might work in theory, the researchers have begun to run experiments in the lab and in the field to determine how it might work in practice.
After experimenting with different ratios of frass and exuviae from different insects, Barragán-Fonseca finalized a powdered mixture. She then conducted experiments in which she mixed a few grams of it into the soil before planting mustard. She said she found the mixture could increase plant reproduction by increasing the number of flowers, attracting even more pollinators.
“It’s great to see the power that these insects have,” Barragán-Fonseca said. “Trash for someone can be a treasure for other purposes.”
Insect farming is a growing industry, meaning more insect waste will be produced. This waste used to be discarded, but some companies are beginning to sell it as fertilizer, Dicke said.
— SABRINA IMBLER
Fossil Reveals Secrets of One of Nature’s Most Mysterious Reptiles
New Zealand’s tuatara look like somber iguanas. But these spiny reptiles are not actually lizards, but the remnant of an ancient order of reptiles known as the Rhynchocephalians that mostly vanished after their heyday in the Jurassic period.
And they truly are the oddballs of the reptile family. Tuatara can live for more than a century, inhabit chilly climates and even possess a rudimentary third eye below the scales on the top of their heads that may help them track the sun. These bizarre traits make tuatara an evolutionary enigma, and a spotty fossil record of its long-lost kin has confounded paleontologists. Virtually all Rhynchocephalians went extinct at the close of the Mesozoic Era.
A crucial piece of this puzzle has been found. While sifting through fossils at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Stephanie Pierce and her team discovered the nearly complete skeleton of a lizardlike animal on a slab of stone.
The remarkable fossil was discovered in 1982 during an expedition to the Kayenta Formation, a fossil-rich outcrop in northern Arizona. This band of red rock was deposited during the early Jurassic period when the dinosaur reign was in its infancy. Around this primeval floodplain, early dinosaurs like the crested Dilophosaurus mingled with burly, crocodilelike creatures encased in armor. Underfoot scurried primitive, shrewlike mammals and this strange new reptile.
While fossils of the site’s early mammals garnered much of the initial interest, Pierce and Tiago Simões, a postdoctoral paleontologist at Harvard who specializes in the early evolution of lizards, have finally studied this specimen in depth.
In an article published in Communications Biology, the scientists named the new animal Navajosphenodon sani. Both the genus and species name (which means “old age” in the Navajo language) refer to the Navajo Tribe, who live in the area where the fossil was found.
The scientists employed micro-CT scans to investigate the squashed fossil in three dimensions and digitally pieced together the flattened skull like a puzzle.
Although its body was lizardlike, the structure of its skull resembled a tuatara. It sported similar rows of sharp, interlocking teeth extending directly from the jawbone. The skull also had two holes behind the animal’s eye.
The fossil illustrates that the bodies of modern tuatara emerged in the Jurassic era and have changed little in 190 million years. This supports the popular distinction that these remnant reptiles are “living fossils.”
— JACK TAMISIEA
Meet the Spongy Moth, Whose Old Name Contained an Offensive Term
The Entomological Society of America unanimously voted last month to adopt the common name “spongy moth” for the species Lymantria dispar. The moth had been nameless for about eight months, after the society removed the former common name — “gypsy moth,” based on a term that many Romany people view as derogatory — from its list of common names in July.
“Spongy” refers to the moth’s fluffy, porous egg masses, which had inspired the species’ existing common name in France and French-speaking Canada: “spongieuse.” The new name is effective immediately. “I feel heartened,” Margareta Matache, director of the Roma Program at Harvard, wrote in an email. Romany people “won an important victory today.”
“It takes an ethnic slur out of common parlance,” said Jessica Ware, the president of the society and an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History.
Matache, who was born in Romania, first learned about the moth’s offensive name when she moved to the United States in 2012. “I felt devastated,” she said. “It was created by white Europeans, it carries a painful history and it’s offensive,” she added, noting that some Romany groups in Britain embrace the term.
The society also formed the Better Common Names Project, to review other common names that may be offensive or inappropriate.
The project has taken input since last summer on other potentially problematic names and plans to have a list by summer of the next names they will seek to replace, according to Joe Rominiecki, the communications manager at the society. One possibility that the entomological community has discussed are insects considered pests that are named after geographic places, Rominiecki said.
Leigh Greenwood, a forest health program director at The Nature Conservancy, offered the Japanese beetle as an example. “They try to exterminate it, they try to prevent it, and the language used for those control efforts can become extremely, clearly xenophobic,” she said.
Other biological groups, such as genes and plants, have no formal body that governs common names, Greenwood said. In her eyes, the project is “a great example of a community-based process really could kind of lead the way for plants and animals that don’t have a body that holds names.”
“In science, academic spaces and our societies, we should leave no room for dehumanization, racism and exploitation of cultures,” Matache said. — SABRINA IMBLER
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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