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Year 2013

Entries 2 Total

Old Whales

Jan 24, ’13 5:16 PM

Bowhead whales were nearly hunted to extinction for their clean burning blubber. After the whale oil boom their population was estimated to be around one thousand individuals, but today they are doing much better. According to this article scientists “began recording whale numbers 34 years ago, [since then] their counts have increased from 1,200 animals in 1978 to 3,400 in 2011. From those numbers of whales seen, George estimates there are now 14,000 to 15,000 animals.”

This blog post from the Smithsonian points out that the best part of the article is that the whales can live up to 200 years. Which means there may be whales swimming in the arctic today that were born before Melvile wrote Moby Dick in 1851.

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Spiders Weaving Spiders

Jan 4, ’13 2:24 PM

Scientists in Peru have discovered what they think may be a new species of spider which uses twigs and dead insects to build decoy spiders to trick predators.

Afterward, Torres returned to the trails near the research center. Only within a roughly 1-square-mile area near the floodplain did Torres find more spider-building spiders — about 25 of them. “They could be quite locally restricted,” he said. “But for all I know, there’s millions of them in the forest beyond.” The spiders’ webs were crafted around face-height, near the trail, and about the width of a stretched-out hand. Some of the decoys placed in the webs looked rather realistic. Others resembled something more like a cartoon octopus.

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