National Geographic Magazine - UK February 2023

WHEN I WAS a young boy, my favorite stuffed toy was a floppy-necked bear named Bearby, crocheted for me by my aunt Lori. And my second favorite was a plush sea otter. As we all know, sea otters are deeply, relentlessly cute. No doubt attracted first by their cuddly appearance, I soon became fascinated with their story. These otters were hunted nearly to extinction for their fur in the 1700s and 1800s, along the Pacific Ocean coasts of Japan, Russia, and North America. During my childhood, sea otters were protected, but their comeback was not assured, despite a variety of attempts to help them on their way. As Cynthia Gorney reports and Ralph Pace and Kiliii Yüyan document in stunning photographs for this issue (“What’s Not to Love?”), although sea…

Roughly 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is ocean, yet scientists have only explored five percent of that. As researchers delve into bigger projects in harder-to-reach locations, they’re relying more on citizen scientists to help conduct long-term environmental research. This is particularly important when it comes to marine environments, which can be difficult to research year-round because of cost and accessibility. The non-profit Whale and Dolphin Conservation conducted a nine-year observational study of bottlenose dolphins in Scotland’s Moray Firth. As part of this “Shorewatch” project, volunteers scanned the waters for ten minutes every daytime hour to record dolphin sightings. In total, citizen scientists collected 70,000 surveys (equal to roughly 12,000 hours of work). This wealth of data helps scientists understand the patterns and behaviours of Scotland’s coastal species, which in…

LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE…

A CHICKEN “IS NOT JUST an animal that gives us eggs,” says Alex ten Napel, who’s been roaming his home country of the Netherlands in search of farm fowl since 2014. Taking inspiration from Melchior d’Hondecoeter, a 17th-century Dutch artist known for his work with birds, ten Napel uses lighting, backdrops, and an elevated, catwalk-like stage to bring chickens out of the coop and into an entirely new context. “What I hope you see in the photos is that chickens can be proud beings or funny beings,” he says. “They can be like gymnasts or ballerinas. Not what most people think of when you talk about chickens.” While each animal has different characteristics, ten Napel has noticed the emergence of some patterns throughout his travels. Roosters, or male chickens, tend…

ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY THE SIX-POUND BOX arrived on a steamy June day, hot from its ride in the delivery van. The label said Boot Barn in capital letters, and when I opened the package, the oaky scent of leather enveloped me. The lower half of the boots had a distinct wrinkly pattern that was rough to the touch. Stamped inside the boots’ shaft: “genuine elephant leather.” At a list price of $799.99, they’d been advertised online as El Dorado Men’s Brass Indian Elephant Exotic Boots. That is, boots purportedly made from an endangered Asian elephant. After four years as a reporter for Wildlife Watch, an investigative project funded by the National Geographic Society, I knew there was a market for just about any exotic species,…

At biologist Sam Wasser’s University of Washington lab, researchers had successfully identified elephant ivory origins using DNA analysis. To attempt the same with leather from Boot Barn’s boots, they cut small samples and ripped them into shreds with a razor blade—a low-tech way to get as much surface area as possible, which increases the chances of finding DNA. They put the samples into chemicals that break cell walls apart, basically turning the shreds into a brown sludge that wildlife genetics lab manager Zofia Kaliszewska described as “gross and pulpy.” They spent about a week incubating the sample, adding chemicals, trying to find any usable DNA. But eventually, their computer spit out DNA results for only their control samples—none for the Boot Barn samples.…