Flora & Fauna Archives

November 06, 2008

Pity the Lemming

...already unfairly maligned as suicidal, and now hit hard by climate change. The BBC reports on a new study that finds wetter winters in southern Norway, "a bleak prospect for the region's lemmings." Scientists think that the snow is no longer stable enough to provide the animals with winter shelter.

And the suicide myth?

Rather than hibernating, lemmings spend the winter living in the space between the ground and a stable layer of snow above. Dry winters would allow large numbers to survive until spring, resulting in a population explosion. On occasions, there were so many that snowploughs were deployed to clear squashed animals from roads. These years often saw Norwegian lemmings (Lemmus lemmus) having to compete hard for food. The desperate search led some to jump off high ground into water, leading to the popular - but wrong - assumption that they were prone to commit collective suicide.

Disney didn't help the cause either when, back in 1958, it forced a number of hapless lemmings off a cliff in order to get footage for the so-called documentary "White Wilderness."

I wil think twice before I use another lemming metaphor, not that I often do.

Posted at 04:12 PM in Flora & Fauna | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 16, 2008

Whales to Humans: Don't Start Your Engines

The BBC has a thoroughly depressing (but worth reading) article on its website today about how human activity is making the oceans too noisy for dolphins and whales to communicate, with serious repercussions for their breeding-and-feeding habits. The Beeb reports on a new report from IFAW, the International Fund for Animal Welfare:

Noise generated by ships' engines and propellers, and by seismic airguns used in oil and gas exploration, produce a range of frequencies that can interfere with both these groups of species, IFAW concludes.

Its report--Ocean Noise: Turn it down--cites research showing that the effective range of blue whales' calls is only about one-tenth of what it was before the era of engine-driven commercial shipping.

Quiet down, people. We could use more peace and quiet on land, too.

(Via The Book Bench, "Leviathan Lost")

Posted at 10:25 AM in Flora & Fauna | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 09, 2008

Writing Spider

She's an Argiope aurantia, also known as a writing spider because of the stabilimenta or zig-zag patterns the species weaves into its webs. You can see some of them in the pic.

My son spotted her on our lavender plant a few weeks ago, and she's come to be kind of a family friend. But I haven't seen her since Hurricane Hanna blew through last weekend. I hope she's okay. The lavender looks lonely without her.