WHERE'S WALLY?
Wandering walrus embarks on European summer tour, complete with merch
to Clonakilty Distillery. And there he remains for the time being. So far, he has swum at least 1,700 miles (2,800km) to get to Ireland from Greenland, plus a further 2,500 miles (4,000km) to tour Europe – a record voyage for a walrus – and he shows no sign of heading home.
While Wally probably headed south to feed, polar bear researcher Ian Stirling and colleagues have come up with what could be another compelling reason. After seeing a polar bear use tools to reach a hanging chunk of meat in a Japanese zoo, he collated reports from Inuit hunters relating to tool use by polar bears. One of the most persistent behaviours reported was of bears killing walruses by bashing them on the head with large stones or chunks of ice. Long dismissed as a myth by Western researchers, alongside reports of shapeshifting bears, Stirling now believes that these Inuit reports of tool use are true. “Really, the only species you would want to bonk on the head with a piece of ice would be a walrus,” agrees Andrew Derocher, director of the Polar Bear Science Lab at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. BBC News, 15+20 Mar, 20 May, 2+13 July; Live Science, 25 May; ITV News, 28 May, 19 Aug; Science News, 29 July 2021.
RADIOACTIVE TERROR PIGS
In a study of how the partial meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactor in 2011 had affected local wildlife, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers reported a surprising discovery. As expected, animals and plants from the surrounding area moved in and started to recolonise the radioactive area vacated by humans; less expected was how the local wild boar had taken advantage of the situation. The Japanese Boar ( Sus scrofa leucomystax, also known as the White-Moustached Pig) had taken over the entire district and in the initial 20km exclusion zone around the reactor, where the radiation is highest, they had also extensively cross-bred with domestic pigs left behind by fleeing humans. This produced a sturdy new boar-pig hybrid contaminated with up to 300 times the safe human dosage of the lethal isotope cæsium-137 without showing any mutations. These radioactive hybrids have become cocky and aggressive, losing their usual wariness of people. They now make up 10 per cent of the local boar population and are proving unwilling to cede territory to the humans now returning to the exclusion zone, standing their ground and attacking people, forcing the authorities to send in heavilyarmed hunters to flush out and cull the dangerous crossbreeds. theregister.com, 1 July 2021.