Earthweek: a diary of the planet

A lone narwhal has been spotted swimming in eastern Canada’s St. Lawrence River, 600 miles south of its typical habitat, apparently welcomed by a pod of beluga whales as one of their own. The two species are closely related and are about the same size. But narwhals have a single pointed tusk sprouting from their heads. Researchers from the Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals say the narwhal is even beginning to pick up beluga behavior, such as blowing bubbles. Five infant squirrels that got their tails caught together in a giant knot were rescued and untied by the Wisconsin Humane Society. They were taken to the group’s vets by someone who came across the bizarre scene of their tails caught in what the rescuers called a “Gordian knot” of squirrel tail and nest material. “You can imagine how wiggly and unruly this frightened, distressed ball of squirrelly energy was, so our first step was to anesthetize all five of them at the same time,” the Humane Society said. Weather agencies around the world predict there is a 60 to 70 percent chance the weather-altering phenomenon El Niño will emerge during the next two months. The last time the ocean-warming stretched across the tropical Pacific was in late 2015 into 2016. It was among the strongest on record and caused weather-related crop damage, wildfires and disastrous flooding in various parts of the planet. But researchers say they don’t expect the new one to be as intense. Mosquitoes could be eating tiny bits of plastic pollution and carrying them to contaminate new food chains and ecosystems. Amanda Callaghan and her team at the University of Reading say the insects could already be mistaking the microplastics for food. “It occurred to us that aquatic insects might carry plastics out of the water if they were able to keep the plastics in their body through their development,” they wrote in the journal Biology