Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i BBC Wildlife Magazine

Brian May: The badgers, the farmers and me Follow the rock star’s ten-year campaign to stop the controversial badger cull and uncover the truth behind the spread of bovine tuberculosis. Catch up on iPlayer Rare Earth The Save Our Seabirds episode explores the many challenges facing seabirds, from avian flu to overfishing, and BBC Wildlife columnist Mike Dilger reports from Shetland on an extraordinary colony of storm petrels. Catch up on BBC Sounds Animal Park It’s not too late to watch this summer’s series featuring Kate Humble and Ben Fogle sharing stories from across Longleat safari park, revealing the extraordinary lengths the devoted keepers go to for the exotic creatures in their care. Catch up on BBC iPlayer Keep in touch wildlifemagazine@ourmedia.co.uk instagram.com/bbcwildlifemagazine twitter.com/WildlifeMag facebook.com/wildlifemagazine…

WHO HASN’T FELT SICK after eating something dodgy, then pledged to avoid it for life? This same strategy is now being used to teach animals not to eat cane toads. These non-native amphibians, introduced to Australia in the 1930s, produce a potent toxin that can be fatal if consumed. This has particularly impacted the freshwater crocodile population, which has been reduced by more than 70 per cent in some areas. Now conservationists are teaching crocodiles to avoid eating cane toads using a method called ‘conditioned taste aversion’. Working with Bunuba indigenous rangers, researchers from Macquarie University in Sydney collected more than 2,000 dead cane toads and removed their poisonous parts. They injected the cadavers with a nausea-inducing drug and hung them as ‘bait’ from sticks overhanging rivers in the Kimberley…

IMAGINE IT’S THE HEIGHT OF SPRING ON the Inner Hebridean island of Tiree. There are flighty pairs of lapwings and oystercatchers rearing their precious broods of chicks in almost every field, and around the margins of the island, the short-cropped machair (low-lying grassy plain) is dabbed yellow and white with buttercups and daisies. Brown hares are common, too, but the real jewels on this emerald isle are the nearly 300 or so calling male corncrakes, a once-common migrant that has disappeared from almost the entirety of Britain. “Cattle graze some areas more than others, creating a mosaic of habitats in which wildlife can flourish” Modernisation, particularly mechanisation, of farming across the country has left this dumpy little bird with nowhere to breed, but on Tiree, traditional crofting (farming on small,…

THE FEMALE PRAYING mantis is a serious candidate for nature’s most misunderstood animal. She is famous for being a femme fatale: a voracious sexual predator that consumes her lover headfirst during sex. But it turns out that sexual cannibalism is by no means a universal predilection, making the mantis female ripe for rebranding. Things started out very differently for this titillating killer. The original prescientific Western belief painted the mantis as a pious creature, whose prayer-like posture suggested a devout rather than devious nature. Hence the name: ‘mantis’ stems from the Greek word mantikos, which means soothsayer or prophet. In fact, many ancient societies believed the mantis harboured supernatural powers. Everything changed in the 18th century when European naturalists, such as the German entomologist August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof, began…

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER Bruno D’Amicis is an award-winning nature photographer living in the shadow of the Apennines. brunodamicis.com He is also co-creator of multimedia project L’Orse e La Formica (The Bear and the Ant): orsoeformica.it.…

Przewalski’s horse Przewalski’s horse, once widespread across the steppes of Europe and Asia, is considered the last truly wild horse species. The 2,000 or so animals alive today are descended from just 12 wild-caught individuals. Scientists from the non-profit organisation Revive and Restore have made two clones, Ollie and Kurt. Both are copies of a Przewalski’s stallion whose cells were cryopreserved (where biological material is frozen to preserve it) 40 years ago. Their births restore this lost genetic diversity back to the modern world. Black-footed ferret Revive and Restore scientists have also made a clone of a black-footed ferret called Willa, whose cells were frozen in 1988. Black-footed ferrets are native to central North America, but they were almost wiped out by disease. Captive breeding has significantly boosted their numbers,…

IT MAY BE LOATHED BY WALKERS, BUT the biting midge could hold the key to painless medical injections. The midge’s mouthparts are made up of an outer tube that houses two jagged, saw-like mandibles either side of a central needle. As the insect bites, it first advances the outer tube, then the mandibles and finally the needle. This sequence is repeated hundreds of times until the whole structure is beneath the skin. By distributing the force in this way, the force needed to penetrate is greatly reduced. At the same time, the whole mouth vibrates at 30-40Hz in time with each advance. This gentle buzzing does two remarkable things. First, it further reduces the force needed to penetrate the skin; second, it activates skin sensors (which are different from pain…

THE WHITE-BLOODED FISH (or icefish) has icy white blood, a phenomenon that puzzled scientists for decades. Thriving in Antarctica’s frigid depths, it lacks the red blood cells essential for oxygen transport in humans. Instead, it carries blood proteins that act like antifreeze and prevent ice-crystal formation in its organs. Not only is this unique adaptation a great example of life’s solutions to environmental challenges, it also has implications for medical science, particularly in the storage of organs (on ice) prior to transplantation and the management of patients with inadequate oxygen delivery to their organs. Understanding the white-blooded fish’s survival mechanisms could lead to better care of those in a life-threatening state.…

Email your questions to wildlifemagazine@ourmedia.co.uk Why are some lakes pink? LIKE CELLOPHANE FLOWERS AND girls with kaleidoscope eyes, pink lakes are the stuff of 1960s pop songs and hallucinogenic experiences. Except that you can visit one in real life while stone-cold sober. There’s one in the Camargue of France, one in Azerbaijan, a couple in Ukraine, and Australia has quite a lot of them. As stunning and otherworldly as they surely are, there’s something unsettling about them, too – the sort of thing one might expect in the aftermath of a chemical spillage. But there’s nothing unnatural about them. Pink lakes are usually ‘terminal’ lakes, meaning they have no outflow. Water can only leave by evaporation, which leaves behind its mineral content. This leads to an unusually high salt content,…

What is an obligate carnivore? Many meat-eaters, including most species of dog and bear, also include vegetable matter in their diets. An obligate carnivore, though, eats only meat. Amongst the mammals, cats, polar bears, whales and dolphins are all obligate carnivores, as are snakes and spiders (apart from one species of vegetarian spider). Obligate carnivores tend to have shorter guts than omnivores and vegetarians, because meat is easier to digest than plant material. What is moss? Standing just a few centimetres (or even millimetres) tall, and inhabiting the world‘s darker, danker corners, mosses are surely among the most easily overlooked of plants. And yet they cover nine million square kilometres of the Earth’s surface – an area similar in size to China. Along with the closely related liverworts, mosses comprise…

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1. Glass frog Native to Central America’s rainforests, this frog has a transparent belly and chest, with internal organs and a blood-pumping heart visible through the skin. The glass frog can also strategically remove red blood cells – which give blood its vibrant colour – from circulation and store them in the liver to make itself even more see-through. 2. Sea angel This curious creature is actually a slug that can swim by flapping transparent fleshy ‘wings’. It is also a formidable predator, primarily feeding on sea butterflies, which it is closely related to. The sea angel grabs prey with tentacles protruding from its head, using specialised appendages to hook and prise sea butterflies out of their shells. 3. Glasswing butterfly The glasswing’s transparent wings lack the densely packed pigmented…

A NEW STUDY HAS REVEALED OMINOUS SIMILARITIES between New Zealand’s endangered flightless birds and those that have already been lost to extinction. Using computer simulations, scientists from the University of Adelaide have been able to reconstruct with some confidence the geographic range of extinct moa birds, and in particular their last refuges of habitat. These so-called ‘moa graveyards’ are also where the islands’ remaining flightless birds are found today. Standing at about 3.5m tall, moas were once found across New Zealand in diverse habitats, from forests to coastal dunes. However, human colonisation of the island in the 13th century proved disastrous for these birds and a combination of habitat change, introduced species and hunting drove the moa to extinction. The flightless birds that survived now face similar threats, with many…

Scientists are training artificial intelligence (AI) to identify individual forest elephants from camera-trap images in the Congo Basin, West Africa. Their aim is to gain accurate estimates of population sizes within specific areas to inform conservation initiatives, such as rewarding villages that co-exist with elephants. The technology could take a year to develop.…

1 LOWER ZAMBEZI NATIONAL PARK Hugging the northern banks of the Zambezi River, the park offers night drives, walking and boat safaris 2 KAFUE NATIONAL PARK One of the largest parks in Africa. Despite being accessible by road from Lusaka, it has a remote feel and boasts immense biodiversity 3 KASANKA NATIONAL PARK One of Zambia’s smallest national parks, Kasanka boasts incredible biodiversity in a wide variety of habitats, from rainforest, papyrus swamp and forested rivers to wet grassland 4 BANGUELU WETLANDS Owned and managed by the local community, this is one of Zambia’s prime birding destinations. Here you can get into a mokoro (a wooden dugout canoe) to look for shoebills. 5 SOUTH LUANGWA NATIONAL PARK Undoubtedly Zambia’s most popular park, four of the ‘Big Five’ are easily seen…

IN THE LUSH EXPANSES OF SIERRA LEONE, uncharted mountains sprawl with verdant forests that blend seamlessly, eventually tumbling down to the coast. These slopes are home to the western chimpanzee – one of four subspecies of the common chimpanzee – yet this charismatic great ape is not having an Loss of habitat as a result of (illegal and legal) logging and mining is not only fragmenting the chimps’ forest home, but making them easier targets for bushmeat hunters. In rural areas of Sierra Leone, people still rely on local wildlife as a source of food, targeting adult chimps in particular. Their orphaned youngsters often end up as pets. In 2016, the western chimpanzee became listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Fortunately, these rare apes have a hero…

I WORK IN AN AMAZING, complex and technological place: the intensive care unit. Every day, I’m surrounded by flashing machines and expensive drugs that save human lives. We use this modern technology to help patients survive accidents, beat cancer, fight pandemics and restart their hearts. We use it to give people a ‘Life 2.0’. Yet these modern techniques are not really modern at all. They have been handed down to us from animals that evolved millions of years ago – from those that fly to those that crawl. Working in the ICU, I see many different patients with many different problems. Moving from bed to bed, there’s always a species that can help – and who we can help in return. For years, the problem was just as Winnie-the-Pooh once described:…

IN 1926, PIONEERING CARDIOLOGIST Frits Meijler embarked on a quest to record the heart activity of the world’s largest mammals, with near-disaster when his cetacean subjects damaged equipment. It wasn’t until 1991 that a recording was finally made, of a 30-tonne humpback, challenging previous understandings of heart function. Decades of research into the whale heart – the size of a grand piano – have revealed profound insights into heart function across species. Scientists discovered that the time taken for electrical impulses to travel from the top to the bottom of an animal’s heart does not proportionally increase with their size. This finding led to the understanding that these heart regions do not simply conduct electrical signals like wires. Instead they are control centres that can be tweaked and altered to…

This is a title that is often claimed for Steller’s sea eagle, a fish-eating species from North-East Asia. However, the white-tailed eagle of Eurasia might just match it in terms of wingspan (both can reach about 2.5m), and the Philippine eagle and harpy eagle of tropical America might be just as heavy (up to about 10kg). For an undisputed winner, you have to go back 600 years. Weighing 15kg and with a 3m wingspan, Haast’s eagle specialised in hunting New Zealand’s giant, flightless moas. It disappeared in the 15th century after the Māori hunted the moas to extinction.…

FUNGI ARE FOUND EASILY IF YOU know where to look – from mushrooms in forests to mould on bread – but many are inconspicuous or invisible to the naked eye. This might explain why they’re so often overlooked and were once grouped together with plants, despite being a kingdom with their own branch on the tree of life. How do fungi differ from animals and plants? Like plants, many fungi grow in soil, can’t move from place to place and their cells have walls (reinforced by cellulose in plants and by chitin in fungi). But these are only superficial similarities. The most fundamental difference is nutrition: while most land plants are ‘autotrophs’ that use light to produce carbohydrates via photosynthesis, fungi are ‘heterotrophs’ that eat molecules made by others. So,…

How did your career start? Growing up in urban Los Angeles, I connected with nature by photographing the animals found along the edges of civilization. I continued at college and after learning how to scuba dive I started shooting underwater extensively, honing my skills and building my portfolio, until I found the direction for my work today. You focus on the ocean. What is it about the underwater world that appeals? Being underwater feels like exploring an alien planet. You’re floating through this incredibly intricate world that’s hidden right below the surface, with so much colourful life that’s just out of sight for us as land animals. It can only be described as magical, and as a photographer I want to capture that magic for everyone. Which of your photographs…

WE OFTEN COME ACROSS DOR beetles on our morning walk through local woods. They are easy to spot, with iridescent purple undersides, and are frequently on their backs waving their legs around, seemingly unable to right themselves. The longer they stay on their backs, the weaker and slower the leg-waving becomes, so we turn them when we can. Sometimes this takes several attempts as they often tip themselves over again. Over the last few days there has been a sudden increase in numbers, including numerous dead beetles on their backs, so we’ve been very busy turning those that are still kicking in the hope that they’ll survive. Yesterday there were 86 beetles (39 alive and 47 dead) and today there were 76 beetles (52 alive and 24 dead). Each day…

NICK BAKER “From the tip of its abdomen, the moth extends four long, shiny, grey and fluffy organs” P.36 GILLIAN BURKE “Like a camera shifting focus, different maps can teach us to see the world in fresh ways” P.27 MARK CARWARDINE “It is illegal to kill most songbirds in the EU. But the legislation is hardly worth the paper it’s written on” P.30 LUCY COOKE “The female mantis lays her eggs in a protective case, produced from her rear like a 3D printer” P.29 MIKE DILGER “Hanging spaces can quickly fill up and any bats returning late must cling on to a neighbour” P.32…

TIGER NUMBERS IN THAILAND’S WESTERN Forest Complex (WEFCOM) have seen a phenomenal 250 per cent increase in a 15-year period, from 2007 to 2023. WEFCOM is a vast conservation area in western Thailand, covering around 18,000km² of land including protected areas, national parks and reserves. The rise in Indochinese tigers there, from around 40 individuals to more than 140, has been put down to long-term conservation measures and effective law enforcement, especially high-quality patrolling, which protects tigers and their prey from poaching and the destruction of habitat. Prior to the new measures, illegal hunting and logging were rife in the forested area, with tigers on a path towards extinction. “The law enforcement system has been in place since 2006 in the core area of WEFCOM, and then scaled up for…

Breeding buddies Many of the female bats in Kasanka are at different stages in their breeding cycle. Some are mating, while others are either pregnant or with young. As different colonies appear to synchronise their breeding, this seems to corroborate the belief that the bats are visiting Zambia from widely dispersed areas. For the record The number of bats roosting at Kasanka has been open to much debate, with figures of up to 12 million regularly touted. However, Max Planck Institute researchers recently assessed the population using a series of video cameras and AI, and determined that the colony contained around a million bats at its peak. Holding fast Bat’s knees are hinged in the opposite direction to most mammals. While roosting, special tendons in their legs mean they are…

ON 30TH JULY 2003, A VERY SPECIAL GOAT was born in a Spanish research facility. She had wobbly legs, toffee-coloured fur and dark, doe eyes, and for a few, short moments, everyone was in awe. The newborn was a bucardo, a type of wild mountain goat that used to roam freely in the Pyrenees. Three years earlier, it had gone extinct, but now it was back. Researchers had taken cells from the last living female before she died, and used them to make a clone, which then developed inside the womb of a domestic goat. The kid was delivered by C-section, but no sooner than she was born, she began to develop breathing problems. She died just a few minutes later, and so the bucardo became not just the first…

LIKE A NICHE MARVEL SUPERHERO, the naked mole rat defies the laws of ageing. While similar-sized mammals such as mice live to around four years of age, naked mole rats can reach 30 years, remaining fertile until the end. It’s the equivalent of a human living to 300 and then having a baby. In 1825, mathematician Benjamin Gompertz discovered Gompertz Law, where the risk of death in mammals rises exponentially with age (in humans, it doubles every eight years). Yet, after the naked mole rat reaches sexual maturity, its chance of dying remains the same – at 1 in 10,000. Its key superpowers are special mechanisms for repairing damaged DNA (which can lead to disease) and high levels of ‘chaperone molecules’, which enable proteins to function properly, thus keeping the…

IN CAMEROON, A POIGNANT MOMENT unfolded at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Centre following the natural death of Dorothy, the matriarch, in 2008. Twenty five chimpanzees from her community gathered in a display of quiet contemplation, a stark departure from their typically noisy gatherings, suggesting a profound sense of loss. The event was photographed by volunteer Monica Szczupider and the image won a National Geographic competition, reaching millions and sparking widespread astonishment at the human-like expressions of grief exhibited by the chimpanzees. That grief appears to be experienced by our closest living relatives, and maybe other species across the animal kingdom, prompts a re-evaluation of the importance of mourning and the processing of such emotions. When the space and ability to mourn is lost in human societies, poor mental health and…

THE GREAT WHITE SHARK IS THE only extant species in the genus Carcharodon and the largest predatory fish in the world. It can grow to up to 6.4m in length and weigh as much as 2,041kg. This super-swimmer can cruise for long periods of time but is also capable of high-speed pursuit, reaching about 50kph. It’s an ambush hunter known for breaching (launching itself out of the water) to catch a meal in its sharp, triangular teeth, disabling its target with a bite force of up to 1.8 metric tonnes. Why are they called great white sharks? They belong to the family Lamnidae, which also includes porbeagle sharks, salmon sharks and mako sharks. A type of mackerel shark, the great white is named after its white belly. The top of…

ACROSS 9/10 Onager (7,4,3) 11 Arboreal snake of Central and South America (4,3) 12 Flowering plant in the family Iridaceae, native to Africa (7) 13 Large, long fish with strong teeth (6,3) 15 ___ layer, stratospheric shield depleted by CFCs (5) 16 Young hare (7) 19 Female striped cat (7) 20 Tropical fruit (5) 21 Colonies of the corvid Corvus frugilegus (9) 25 Clinging seaside gastropod (7) 26 Climbing vine (7) 28 Move like a beetle or crab (7) 29 Resting place for a harp seal, possibly (3,4) DOWN 1 ___ hawker, dragonfly of eastern Europe (6) 2 Grazing duck (6) 3 Cut trunk of a pollarded tree (4) 4 Period in which the woolly mammoth flourished (3,3) 5 Cave-dwelling tropical bird (8) 6 Australian skink species (4-6) 7 Odorous…

Tourism gives wildlife a value, helping to protect species across the globe, but is not without its downsides. In the next issue of BBC Wildlife, we delve into the debate. We’ll share examples of holidays that support conservation, look at sustainable travel in Florida, investigate the truth about carbon offsetting and report on rewilding efforts in the Galápagos Islands. Don’t miss it! ON SALE 17th OCTOBER…