National Geographic Magazine - UK May 2023

THERE ARE FEW SPECIES on the planet that fascinate us quite like elephants. With their long lives and enormous brains, their complex social networks, and, of course, those incredible trunks that do everything from grasping food to drinking and holding water, elephants feel both prehistoric in their majesty and also somehow like us. It’s no surprise we’ve long associated them with intelligence, strength, and wisdom. In the new series Secrets of the Elephants, on National Geographic and Disney+, National Geographic Explorer Paula Kahumbu takes you from Africa to Asia, across the varied ecosystems in which elephants live, to bring to life the biology, behaviors, and adaptations that make them one of Earth’s most extraordinary creatures. You’ll also meet people worldwide who are studying them and working to protect them. As…

LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE…

FOR AS LONG AS he can remember, Visarute Angkatavanich has been fascinated by fish. At age seven he took up photography, first with a disposable Kodak camera and later with his father’s Nikon FM. But it wasn’t until he became a dad and started spending more time at his home in Bangkok that he merged the two passions. Angkatavanich studied the traits and care of Siamese fighting fish, also known by the apt scientific name Betta splendens. Then he procured some from a pet store in the city’s Chatuchak Market and began photographing them, experimenting with different enclosures and lighting. “I can’t ask the fish to act like people,” he says, so he learned to coax them into various positions by changing the size and shape of the tanks. A…

IN THIS SECTION Love, Echidna Style Scotland Goes Wild Glowing Ghost Fungus Anne Frank’s Protector DIVING MADE MY WORLD BIGGER. And I remember the moment it happened. I was descending through warm, clear water in Rarotonga, the largest of the South Pacific’s Cook Islands, on my fifth dive. Inexperienced divers are often busy divers, and so it was with me. I double- and triple-checked gauges, was hyperfocused on the feeling of breathing through a regulator, fretted in gear that felt claustrophobic, and used my arms to orient myself in the strange blue expanse, expending valuable energy. Diving is about being calm and measured. I hadn’t learned that lesson yet. But then I looked around and was stunned into stillness. I found myself in an enchanted forest straight out of a…

With translucent skin and muscles, the glass frogs of Central and South America blend in with the green leaves they rest on during the day. But the camouflage is even more complicated than scientists realized, a study published in Science reveals. When Fleischmann’s glass frogs (Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni) sleep, they store up to 89 percent of their darkly colored red blood cells within crystal-covered livers. The crystals seem to act as a mirror, reflecting incoming light rather than allowing blood cells to absorb it. With their red blood cells stored away, the sleeping frogs become two to three times more transparent than the wakeful ones, by the study’s measurements. Particularly intriguing: The H. fleischmanni frogs seem to suffer no ill effects from hours with those cells in one place—and still clot…

The world’s most popular vegetable oil, palm oil is used in many food and household products. But making it damages Earth, as it’s a major driver of deforestation in the tropics. An eco-friendly alternative is on the way: oil made from microbes. Scientists have identified scores of oil-rich algae and yeast strains that don’t need space or sun to grow and could thrive on oxygen and sugar from other industries’ waste.…