Ingham’s WORLD
LIGHTNING, as we all know, never strikes twice. But what do we know? In Venezuela lightning strikes up to 40,000 times a night in the same place.
To brave the most electric place on Earth you should to go to the mouth of the Catatumbo River where it pours into tropical Lake Maracaibo.
The world’s most spectacular light show is laid on nightly thanks to warm, moist air evaporating off the lake to be blown inland by onshore breezes from the nearby Caribbean.
Here, says a new book, it meets cold air tumbling down the mountains to form tall storm clouds filled with electric charges.
Somehow this perfect storm seems a perfect symbol for Venezuela – an economic basket case greatly admired by Jeremy Corbyn. But Molly Oldfield’s beautifully illustrated grand tour wisely avoids political issues.
She takes readers to the Devil’s Throat, the 250 thundering waterfalls of Iguazu on the borders of Argentina and Brazil, where the spray supports a rainforest which is home to jaguars, caiman and giant anteaters.
In Japan we meet randy firefly squid which light up the sea thanks to bioluminescent tentacles. When tens of thousands of the squid gather together in an orgy of mating they give the sea a blue glow.
Then there’s the Great Blue Hole of Belize, nearly 500ft deep and 1,000ft across and surrounded by a coral atoll.
From the air the sinkhole stands out as dark blue in an aquamarine sea and attracts equal amounts of divers and sharks.
Further west is a forest of living confetti, the winter refuge in Mexico of 100 million Monarch butterflies escaping the chill of the US and Canada.
They migrate north in the spring and south in the autumn – but no butterfly has ever made the whole trip. Each stage is completed by a new generation, untaught by its elders, yet these insects with tiny brains navigate with incredible accuracy year after year.
I’ve never managed to visit any of these sights. But one I ticked off this summer was beyond stunning: the salt flats of Uyuni 12,000ft up in the Bolivian Andes.
They stretch over 4,000 sq miles and in the wet season are like a giant mirror visible from space. At sunset they turn into a psychedelic palette of reds, oranges and yellows, made more mystical by a glass of hooch.
So don’t get despondent as the world seems to go to hell in a handcart. It’s a wonderful world.
Natural Wonders Of The World by Molly Oldfield (£14.99, Wren & Rook), out soon. DRACULA ants make the blink of an eye seem slow. Their jaws are the fastest known animal appendage, reports Royal Society Open Science. The Burmese bugs snap their jaws at a deadly 90 metres per second or a turbocharged 202mph.
CLING film is very useful but hard to recycle. For an alternative try beeswax food wraps. They keep food fresh, are reusable and can be put in your compost to biodegrade.
THEY have a lot of trees in Finland, so Aalto University has used them for high fashion, making an eco evening gown from birch bark. It was worn by Jenni Haukio, the wife of Finnish president Sauli Niinistö
– and she looked a million dollars.
GREEN TIP: Recycle old mobile phones. Gorillas are threatened by mines in Africa for precious metals used in phones. CITY slickers are sexier than country bumpkins, says the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Panama City’s male tungara frogs sing faster, more complex and catchier songs than their rivals in the jungle, reports Nature Ecology & Evolution. Females opted 3-1 for the townies when given a choice.
CATTLE have been beasts of burden since Stone Age man stalked the land. They were used to pull loads in 6000BC or 2,000 years earlier than once thought, a University College London team tells Antiquity. The cows were used to drag logs in the Balkans three millennia before anyone even dreamt up Stonehenge.
DON’T call this an old bat. It is one of 157 new species discovered in the past year in the rainforests of the Greater Mekong – or three every week. They include this bat with frosted tips on its fur found in the Burmese foothills of the Himalayas and a leaf-toed gecko from Thailand with racing stripes. WWF says two of the newcomers have Hollywood glamour. There’s a Star Wars gibbon and a Lord Of The Rings toad. The Skywalker hoolock gibbon from Burma is already endangered while a tiny Vietnamese toad with sharp eyelid horns has been dubbed the Toad from Middle Earth.