Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2019 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

NAT GEO FILMS The Cave: Tending Syria’s war wounds in secret wards In a hidden underground hospital in war-torn eastern Ghouta, Syria, pediatrician Amani Ballour (above) and her staff risked their lives to provide medical care to the besieged local population. In The Cave, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Feras Fayyad tells the harrowing true story of “Dr. Amani,” her colleagues, and her patients. The film, which just had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, is in theaters this fall. TELEVISION Watch the search for evidence of Amelia Earhart’s last landing Follow explorer Robert Ballard—known for his 1985 discovery of the Titanic shipwreck—to a remote Pacific island where he hopes to solve the mystery of aviatrix Amelia Earhart’s disappearance. The expedition employs cutting-edge devices in its search, in a…

Behold the rare Megachile pluto, Wallace’s giant bee. Seen here at roughly life-size, it’s the world’s largest bee, with a wingspan of 2.5 inches. Biologist Alfred Russel Wallace discovered it in 1859 in what’s now Indonesia, but it was feared extinct until 1981—and had never been photographed in the wild until January 2019, when it was spotted by a team that included nature photographer Clay Bolt and Princeton entomologist Eli Wyman. Bolt says Wyman was overjoyed to find the bee and hear its wings’ sound, a “deep, slow thrum that you could almost feel as well as hear.”…

On the edge of a rusty-red cliff at Waimea Canyon, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, grows a seemingly unremarkable shrub, Melanthera waimeaensis. But these narrow-leafed plants, numbering seven in all, are anything but ordinary: They’re the last of their kind growing in the wild. M. waimeaensis is just one of hundreds of plants disappearing as invasive flora crowd out Hawaii’s native species and introduced animals (such as wild boar) disrupt local vegetation. Today 134 plant varieties (or taxa) unique to the islands are thought to be extinct, and the rate of loss is accelerating: In the past six years, 12 species have vanished. “That’s big time,” says botanist Kenneth Wood of the Hawaii-based non-profit National Tropical Botanical Garden. Working alongside Hawaii’s Plant Extinction Prevention Program staff, Wood has spent…

Heat regulation Bones Vascular system WHY THE LONG NECK? Feeding Surveying Fighting The reason for the giraffe’s six-foot neck remains a mystery. It may have evolved to reach high branches, above competitors. Other theories suggest it improved vigilance or that longer necks provided an advantage to males fighting to win a mate. RETICULATED GIRAFFE Giraffa reticulata MALE FEMALE Weight 2,600 lbs 1,750 lbs Height 14 ft Life span 25 years KEEPING A COOL HEAD A large nasal cavity likely helps cool both blood and the brain. SUPER FLEXIBLE Like okapis and humans, giraffes have seven neck vertebrae, but ball-and-socket connections, similar to human shoulders, allow them to rub their noses on their lower backs. ARTERIES AND GRAVITY Arteries above the heart are muscular and elastic to pump blood against gravity…

We may love coffee but, according to a 2019 study, our morning cup could be on the brink. Scientists at Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens claim that conditions like deforestation, pests and pathogens could see 60 per cent of all wild coffee species perish within the next few decades. Climate change alone could cut land suitable for Arabica production in half by 2050. Nespresso wants to make sure none of this comes to fruition. That’s why they’ve created the AAA Sustainable Quality program to help farmers in prime coffee growing regions make their smallholdings more resilient to climate change. One of the ways it’s doing so is with trees, which are key to the future of not only high-quality coffee but the valuable heritage of the cultures that grow it. By…

MY CAT, BERNSTEIN, likes bird-watching almost as much as I do. Bernstein is an easygoing three-year-old short-haired tabby whose other passions include laser pointers, elastic hair bands, and dental floss. And me, I’m a 33-year-old short-haired blond who has always been, petwise, a cat person. Bernstein and I often hang out together in the living room, appreciating the natural order of hummingbirds and chickadees outside our window. Bernstein was a tiny kitten, unable to eat or open his eyes, when he was rescued after being abandoned in a barn. (His littermate, Woodward, remains with the journalist friend who rescued them.) He’s one lucky cat—and I’ve wondered if his genial personality might be due, at least in part, to everlasting gratitude for having dodged a lifetime of starvation, shelters, and other…

MORE THAN A QUARTER of all species assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature are considered threatened. Many species have moved through several of the IUCN Red List categories—from least concern to vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered, and ultimately extinct. But every once in a while, a species takes a step away from the brink—in other words, it’s downlisted. That doesn’t always happen without help. Conservation measures over the years helped improve the status of 13 animal species worldwide in 2018 (five are shown here). Such downlistings are worth celebrating, but some scientists worry that they’ll slow the momentum required to keep an animal safe. In assessments so far in 2019 where the status changed, in every case the species declined. CONSERVATION STATUS Least concern Near threatened Vulnerable Endangered…

WHEN NORTH ATLANTIC RIGHT WHALES migrate along North America’s eastern seaboard, they run a gantlet of fishing lines in their path. Today 83 percent of the population shows signs of entanglement, a leading cause of death for this endangered species. Fishing for crab and lobster involves placing traps (also called pots) on the ocean floor and marking the spot with a surface buoy that’s connected to the traps with a sturdy line. But the lines routinely harm whales; they cut into flesh and impede the whales’ diving, surfacing for air, and feeding. To CT Harry of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a remedy seems clear: “Fishing without vertical lines is what’s going to save this species.” 1 Encountering traps Right whales, which see mostly in black and white, often…

IT IS A HORROR MOVIE director’s dream of a natural history collection. You find it by driving 10 miles southeast of New Orleans, to a piece of land that is part swamp, part forest, on a bend in the Mississippi River, down a dirt track named Wild Boar Road. Alligators and water moccasins live in the tangled woods to the left. On the right stands ammunition bunker number A3, its flanks heavily bermed against the danger of explosion, its loading dock cracked and skewed forward by the more reliable detriments of time. There are 26 such bunkers, widely distributed around the roughly 400-acre property, most of them abandoned. During World War II, U.S. Navy ships stopped here to pick up artillery shells before heading out to sea. Later the Central…

Left unfixed, Oliver and Bella—America’s favorite cat names—get frisky by six months old and can produce multiple litters each year, with predictable results. In the U.S., about 90 million cats live with their human caretakers; another 30 million to 80 million roam wild, from back alleys to remote deserts. In Australia cats have become such deadly and prolific predators that they threaten to extinguish whole species of indigenous birds, reptiles, and small mammals. To prevent that, the Australian government launched a drive in 2015 to kill two million feral cats by 2020. Worldwide, approximately half a billion cats—give or take a couple hundred million—populate six continents, 118 of the world’s 131 main island groups, and the farthest reaches of the internet. To find a more successful invasive species, you’ll need…

WHEN YOU CONJURE up “extinction” in your mind’s eye, you probably see an animal—a dodo, perhaps, or a Tasmanian tiger. But the biodiversity crisis isn’t just faunal, it’s floral too. Since the 1750s, at least 571 species of plants have gone extinct in the wild, according to a global survey recently published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. More than eight plant species have disappeared every three years, on average, since 1900. This pace of extinction is as much as 500 times plants’ natural or background extinction rate. “I find it shocking on a personal level, but bigger than that, I find it frightening for the future of our planet,” says study co-author Maria Vorontsova, a plant taxonomist at the U.K.’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. “Plants are the infrastructure of ecosystems,”…

WHO PS works at a bank in Dubai and pursues photography as a hobby. WHERE Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya WHAT A Nikon D5 camera with a 70-200mm lens From 1993 to 2014, the planet lost 43 percent of its population of African lions, conservationists estimate. Nistar PS, a wildlife enthusiast, was lucky to see this trio while on a safari in Kenya last year. Early one morning, the safari group’s guide pursued rumors of a pack of six male lions sighted in the Masai Mara National Reserve. Seeing multiple male lions together can be rare–as can photographing them side by side. As PS held his camera, the light, the sky, and three lions aligned for an instant. Join National Geographic’s Your Shot community and share your photos at YourShot.ngm.com.…