The Corinthian
I will not take Mad Winger's name in vain
- Joined
- Dec 10, 2020
- Messages
- 11,828
I thought it'd be good to have a thread discussing and sharing all the incredible things you learn of in nature (is this the right forum)? So to kick things off...
Dung beetles use the light from the Milky Way for direction & navigation
Randomly, I stumbled upon an article which detailed how dung beetles use light from the Milky Way to for orientation and direction...which is mind blowing!
https://theconversation.com/scienti...-use-the-milky-way-to-hold-their-course-75666
When whales reach their end of their life and sink to the ocean bed, they provide the basis for an intelligent ocean ecosystem
When whales die and sink to the ocean floor, their carcass provide nutrients and sustain the ecosystem that exists on the ocean floor. This is called whale fall. It's fascinating.
The above video is one of the stages of whale fall, and you can see the carcass teeming with other life.
They revisited the same location a year later - shown below:
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Would be interested to see what amazing phenomena exist in nature that isn't common knowledge.
Dung beetles use the light from the Milky Way for direction & navigation
Randomly, I stumbled upon an article which detailed how dung beetles use light from the Milky Way to for orientation and direction...which is mind blowing!
https://theconversation.com/scienti...-use-the-milky-way-to-hold-their-course-75666
At night, as visual cues become harder to detect, this process becomes more challenging. Some can use the light of the moon but one insect, the nocturnal dung beetle Scarabaeus satyrus, uses light from the Milky Way to orient itself. To find out exactly how this process works, my colleagues and I constructed an artificial Milky Way, using LEDs, to test the beetles’ abilities. We found that they rely on the difference in brightness between different parts of the Milky Way to work out which way to go.
When whales reach their end of their life and sink to the ocean bed, they provide the basis for an intelligent ocean ecosystem
When whales die and sink to the ocean floor, their carcass provide nutrients and sustain the ecosystem that exists on the ocean floor. This is called whale fall. It's fascinating.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/whale-fall.htmlDifferent stages in the decomposition of a whale carcass support a succession of marine biological communities. Scavengers consume the soft tissue in a matter of months. Organic fragments, or detritus, enrich the sediments nearby for over a year.
The whale skeleton can support rich communities for years to decades, both as a hard substrate (or surface) for invertebrate colonization and as a source of sulfides from the decay of organic compounds of whale bones. Microbes live off of the energy released from these chemical reactions and form the basis of ecosystems for as long as the food source lasts.
The above video is one of the stages of whale fall, and you can see the carcass teeming with other life.
They revisited the same location a year later - shown below:
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Would be interested to see what amazing phenomena exist in nature that isn't common knowledge.