Earthweek: a diary of the planet
Mixed company
A lone narwhal was 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 (GREMM) said the narwhal is even beginning to pick up beluga behavior, such as blowing bubbles. GREMM experts speculate that the new narwhal-beluga relationship might be due to climate change, and could occur more often as the Arctic warms further.
El Niño return?
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. A recent study predicts that climate change is altering the dynamics of both El Niño and its oceancooling counterpart, La Niña, making their weather impacts more severe as the planet warms.
Earthquakes
The Solomon Islands were rocked by a magnitude 5.8 earthquake that struck in the middle of the night. Earth movements also were felt in the southern Philippines, southwestern Australia, western Denmark, western Iceland and Jamaica. Airborne plastic
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 in England say the insects could 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 Letters. After feeding fluorescent plastic beads to mosquito larvae, the researchers observed the microplastics eventually wound up in some adult mosquitoes’ guts and livers. Obsolete warnings
Experts are cautioning that climate change and the apparent amplified flooding it brought during hurricanes Harvey and Florence might mean that the current Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity is obsolete. Because Florence was repeatedly downgraded from its initial Category 4 force before landfall, some Carolinians ignored evacuation orders only to become trapped by floods.
“There’s more to the story than the category,” said hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. “While you may still have a roof on your house because it’s only a Category 1, you may also be desperately hoping to get rescued from that same roof because of the flooding.” Tropical cyclones
About 100 people are feared dead in in the Philippines from mudslides, flooding and high winds from Super Typhoon Mangkhut. The storm later struck Hong Kong as the strongest there on record. Also this week, Hurricane Florence unleashed catastrophic flooding across the Carolinas and parts of Virginia. At least 40 deaths were attributed to the storm by the end of the week.
Squirrel knot
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 squirrel energy was, so our first step was to anesthetize all five of them at the same time,” the Humane Society said. The squirrels were frazzled but unharmed by the experience.