Innholdsfortegnelse for AUGUST 2016 i National Geographic Magazine

Primary Colors Assignment Red, yellow, and blue are traditional colors in their rawest form. We asked you to show them. EDITOR’S NOTE ‘ There’s a pureness that comes with boiling something to its core elements. Every complex color we see can be broken down and simplified.’ Marie McGrory, Your Shot photo editor Heather Levingstone Gorey, Ireland It was a red balloon and news of a friend’s death that made Levingstone imagine a photo tribute to people who risk their lives in dangerous jobs. She glued a figurine to the balloon and had it hold a pin to show its peril. Zay Yar Lin Yangon, Myanmar Zay Yar Lin was working on a chemical tanker in the Gulf of Mexico. He peered over the bridge one day to watch a man…

THE SUMMER O F SHARKS June Tigers July Great Whites This month Whitetips When the documentary Blue Water, White Death hit U.S. theaters in 1971, its footage of great white sharks crashing into diving cages became instantly iconic. But the footage that stands out 45 years later is a long scene showing oceanic whitetip sharks swarming a whale carcass a hundred miles off the coast of South Africa. It is an amazing scene for two reasons: first, because the divers leave the safety of their cages to film the sharks, believed to be the first time anyone had ever tried the technique among feeding sharks. And second, because it’s a scene that might never be replicated—a marine version of the last photograph of endless bison herds roaming the North American…

Biologists were stunned, in 2013, to pull a goldfish more than 15 inches long from Lake Tahoe. And it had company; aquarium fish dumped by their owners have been multiplying in the lake—and growing enormous. Since the goldfish have plenty of food and little competition, “it may be possible to see larger goldfish in the future in Tahoe,” says Sudeep Chandra, an aquatic ecosystems researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno. The secret to growing these monster-size fish is time. Unlike people, who normally stop growing after puberty, many fish keep growing as long as they live. A lake sturgeon, for example, can live to be over a hundred and grow up to nine feet long. In much of the world, however, overfishing prevents fish from living long lives. As…

Though today giant pandas are known and loved worldwide, it wasn’t always so. Ancient Chinese texts rarely mention the native animals. Westerners first learned of them in 1869 when French missionary Armand David, while in China, laid eyes on a distinctive black-and-white pelt and then bought a complete, dead specimen from local hunters. A zoologist in Paris wrote up the official description of Ailuropoda melanoleuca (literally, “cat foot, black and white”). In 1929 Chicago’s Field Museum put two mounted pandas on display courtesy of the Roosevelt brothers, Theodore Jr. and Kermit. The two were sons of the 26th U.S. president, whose love of sport hunting ultimately propelled major conservation reforms. With the help of Sichuan Province locals, they brought home the first panda shot by white men for the museum’s…

All around her, guys wave seductively, beckoning her to their beach homes. How will the female fiddler crab pick a mate? By the quality of his lodging, the allure of his wave—and, especially, the size of his claw. The female fiddler crab has two small, symmetrical claws; the male has one small and one oversize. “The large claw is all about the initial attraction,” says marine biologist Zachary Darnell of Louisiana’s Nicholls State University. After checking out several males and the love-nest burrows they’ve dug, a female “will find a male whose claw she really likes,” he says. “Maybe a crab with a large claw relative to his body size, and a bit higher wave than others”—because if he can tote and swing a claw that’s up to half his…

I crouch down low in the grass to get a closer look at the animal lurching toward me. She’s about four months old, the size of a soccer ball, slightly bug-eyed, and no doubt soft and fragrant as a puppy. The urge to scoop her up and squeeze her is overwhelming. That adorability is one reason the giant panda is an international sensation as well as a cultural icon, an economic gold mine, and a source of national pride in China—the only country in which these Asian bears still survive. Now the whole world is watching China’s dogged attempt to keep pandas on the map—which in some ways has been an unprecedented success. Like many endangered species, giant pandas have declined as a growing human population has grabbed wild lands…

On July 26, 1945, the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Indianapolis landed on Tinian Island in the northern Pacific and delivered components for the atomic bomb that 11 days later would be dropped on Hiroshima. World War II was almost over. But for the crew of the Indy, the worst of the war was yet to come. Four days later, en route to the Philippines, the ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The ship sank in 12 minutes, taking some 300 men down with it. The remaining 900 men were set adrift for the better part of five grueling days. Only 317 survived. It was the worst disaster at sea in U.S. naval history. It was also perhaps the U.S. Navy’s most shameful debacle. The stranded sailors died in many ways,…

France With the mating season under way, two common toads get intimately acquainted in a shallow section of the Lez River. Their reproductive embrace—in which the smaller male clasps the female beneath her forelegs—is called axillary amplexus. Spain On a frigid winter day in Andalusia’s Sierra de Grazalema Natural Park, a rain-fed pond ripples with color and life. Geranium leaves, frozen oxygen bubbles, and nutrient-rich algae share space beneath a thin sheet of ice scored with thaw lines. United Kingdom A harvest mouse— Europe’s smallest rodent—grooms itself on a hogweed flower head in a meadow near Moulton, England. This adult was raised in captivity, microchipped, and released as part of a study on how the elusive species survives. Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com.…

Tourists find a surprisingly grim scene at the western edge of the cap of ice and snow that covers about 80 percent of Greenland (above). The surface, far from being blindingly white, is sullied by atmospheric soot and dust. Also, the ice beneath is melting rapidly—a trend that will probably continue into the foreseeable future. Why? According to a study of satellite data from 1981 to 2012, Greenland began absorbing more solar radiation around 1996, when temperatures there began to increase. This has intensified the normal summer melt. Blame the grime, at least in part. The impurities cause more solar energy to be absorbed and less to be reflected, as illustrated below. That produces more heat and thus accelerates the melting. The loss of ice concentrates the dirt, creating an…

If you took a glance around Anthony James’s office, it wouldn’t be hard to guess what he does for a living. The walls are covered with drawings of mosquitoes. Mosquito books line the shelves. Hanging next to his desk is a banner with renderings of one particular species—Aedes aegypti— in every stage of development, from egg to pupa to fully grown, enlarged to sizes that would even make fans of Jurassic Park blanch. His license plates have a single word on them: AEDES. “I have been obsessed with mosquitoes for 30 years,” says James, a molecular geneticist at the University of California, Irvine. There are approximately 3,500 species of mosquito, but James pays attention to just a few, each of which ranks among the deadliest creatures on Earth. They include…

‘Whoa,’ yells Brownie Wilson, as the steel measuring tape I am feeding down the throat of an irrigation well on the Kansas prairie gets away from me and unspools rapidly into the depths below. The well, wide enough to fall into, taps into the Ogallala aquifer, the immense underground freshwater basin that makes modern life possible in the dry states of Middle America. We have come to assess the aquifer’s health. The weighted tip hits the water at 195 feet, a foot lower than a year ago. Dropping at this pace, it is nearing the end of its life. “Already this well does not have enough water left to irrigate for an entire summer,” Wilson says. It is three days into January, and we are alone on an endlessly flat…