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This morning, as I walked to the shops, I spotted a crow.  That wasn’t hard because it was making a loud cawing sound – a proper South East London crow, indeed.  Perhaps there was a cat around, maybe it was trying to locate its mate, or it could have been defending its territory.  I’m not sure what was going on, but one thing was for sure – this crow was perched very precariously on a sapling in a planter.  Perhaps six foot tall, the young tree has been damaged (perhaps by the crow?), meaning that a bird, if it lands elegantly enough, can perch atop it.  Yet what bird would want to do that? This one, obviously.  I didn’t see it land, but the level of expertise it must have taken is astonishing.  I say this because I can’t even do a three-point turn very well, so I can’t imagine calculating angles with height involved too.

Still pondering these avian acrobatics, I reached home and popped the eggs I had just bought into the fridge. I discovered a single egg at its back, and I decided that, since the crow had given me a visual treat, I would give the ones that haunt my garden an edible one. Now, this isn’t something I do often.  Although I do like to see the bigger birds in my garden (the rivalries between the crows and the magpies are legendary for their riotousness, noisiness and general length!) I generally do not feed birds at all. I used to, but then read up on it and discovered that it could produce an over-reliance on feeders, not to mention that lots of birds congregating together isn’t necessarily good for their general health.

Some species don’t need males.  Take the New Mexico Whiptail Lizard for example.  There are no males in this species. So, of course, the sensible question to ask is how do they reproduce?  They use something called parthenogenesis which involves no males and no sperm.  The female can produce an egg all by herself.  The eggs will produce an all-female brood, clones of the other – who will go on to… you get the point.  While this does allow some species to rapidly increase their range, it does somewhat limit the genetic diversity of the species!

For a closer look at parthenogenesis, take a look at these videos created by the Natural History Museum in the UK.

Did you know that a health queen honey bee can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day in the peak season?  That is one busy queen – and running the whole colony on top of that must sap her strength somewhat.  But wait a second – does a queen bee actually run her colony?  That is what most people would naturally assume, but they would be wrong.  She doesn’t make any decisions about what goes on in the hive, she simply secretes a pheromone that reassures the other bees that she is still around and healthy to boot.  If she stops producing the pheromone the colony would quickly become chaotic.  The worker bees that make up 99% of the colony and they are really the ones who keep the colony together, through a variety of tasks that they do throughout their lives.

There is a strict hierarchy in a hive and that includes not just the workers, but drones too. These are the only males in the colony and – unfortunately for  them – they get thrown out of the hive when times get hard.  I suppose having one job (mating) is a plum one when times are good (except for one gruesome fact!). Find out all about bee hierarchies in this fascinating video. 

The ruddy duck is small compared to other ducks (even though their eggs are huge relative to their size), but once you have seen one, you won’t forget especially if you see a male in mating season (when his beak turns blue and he plumps his head feathers up to make himself look like he has horns!).  Although they come from North America, they are making some inroads into Europe.  Yet it’s when it comes to their courtship that these ducks become truly memorable! All Things Birdie explains why the duck makes these bubbles (yes, it’s the mating game again) and just as importantly how it is created to become the fascinating bubble display that you can see in the video below.  To our ears the mating call of the male doesn’t sound very attractive – it’s something like a belch, but I am sure the female ruddies just love it!  Find out more about the ruddy duck by watching the video. Image Credit

Over on our sibling site, Kuriositas, there is a  new article about the fascinating bird’s nest fungi.  Not only does it say what it does on the label (its correct name is Nidulariaceae so you can see why it got its common name), it has an intriguing way of ensuring its survival. In a world where many organisms rely on wind, wings or brute abundance to spread their offspring, bird’s nest fungi have evolved a system that turns rainfall itself into a delivery mechanism – precise, forceful and repeatable. A raindrop becomes a trigger, a launcher and a dispersal strategy all in one, converting something as ordinary as weather into a highly targeted reproductive event.  Find out more about it at Kuriositas, which also has a lovely gallery of images of the bird’s nest fungi. Image

Did you do a double take? This striking behaviour reflects the strong parental care (and perhaps patience) shown by female alligators during the early months of a juvenile’s life. After hatching, young alligators often remain close to their mother, who offers protection from predators and even other adult alligators. Resting on the adult’s head or back provides safety, warmth, and a vantage point above the water’s surface. Contrary to common belief, adult alligators do not indiscriminately attack everything nearby; feeding behaviour is context-specific. In this case, the adult recognises the juvenile as its own offspring and tolerates its presence, demonstrating an important survival strategy within the species.

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Snakes have been around for about 150 million years – which is a little longer than we have, that’s for sure.  One of the questions that snakes provoke from kids (of all sizes) is how on earth do they manage to eat things that look, to all intents and purposes, way, way bigger or longer than them?  How can this happen? It looks impossible.

Well, if you have been around for as long as snakes, you have the time to solve this kind of problem.  Plus of course, we sometimes look at problems from our perspective.  Our jaw bones are fused which means that we would not be able to get something ridiculously large in our mouths and down into our stomach (although I have seen people try at parties).  The jaw bones of the snake, on the other hand, are not fused.  They are still connected but by a ligament of such elasticity that their mouths can be dramatically stretched.  The gape can be large – even up to 180 degrees (and that has to be seen to be believed).  That always leads to another question – when a snake swallows something much bigger than itself, how come it doesn’t suffocate?

This and other questions are answered in the video below, a TED-Ed lesson by Niko Zlotnik, directed by Anna Benner and narrated by Adrian Dannatt.

There have been no beavers in the English county of Bedfordshire for four hundred years.  They were hunted out of existence throughout the country as farms expanded due to the increase in population and demand for more food.  There was, it seems, no place for beavers.  Incredibly, they were thought to do more damage than good. The beaver is of course one of the best ecosystem engineers that we have available to us.  The landowner, Charles Whitbread, had to get a licence (The Beaver Trust helped with the application) and build an enclosure for the beavers (which must have cost him quite a lot of money), so he is obviously particularly please to see his plan come to fruition, at Southill Estate. This video from the Wildwood Trust shows the release of the family of Eurasian beavers at the Estate.  What a wonderful day it must have been for everyone involved!

Beavers are among the most transformative agents of ecological recovery in the natural world. In the English landscape, where vast areas of wetland have been drained, channelled, and degraded over centuries, these remarkable animals quietly reverse the damage all on their own. By building dams and reshaping waterways, they slow the flow of water, reducing flood risk and allowing it to spread and soak into the land. In doing so, they create complex, thriving mosaics of ponds, marshes, and wet meadows.

These newly formed habitats support an extraordinary diversity of life, including insects and amphibians to birds and mammals - triggering a chain reaction of returning species. At the same time, beaver wetlands lock away significant amounts of carbon in waterlogged soils and vegetation, contributing to climate resilience. What makes this even more striking is that all of this is achieved without costly infrastructure or intensive human intervention (OK, once the new habitat is set up, but after 400 years some groundwork had to be done!). Beavers, working instinctively, accomplish landscape-scale restoration in ways that are not only effective, but also self-sustaining and economically efficient.

Let’s hope the beavers at Southill Estate thrive! Watch the video below.

Here’s the story of Doris the duck and her nine eggs, as told on the BBC’s new nature programme, Secret Garden.  Narrated by David Attenborough, it shows how the ducklings “talk” to each other and so trigger hatching at the same time, so that all nine get to experience life simultaneously.  Of course, the mother duck does not have the father around, and looking after  nine ducklings present her with a set of big challenges. The first one is getting the ducklings from the nest to the water.  As they jump down, you will  be forgiven for keeping fingers, toes and everything crossed, but thanks to the cushioning effect of their downy feathers, they all make it to where they want to go intact. Phew!  

Mum Doris is waiting at the bottom of the drop to escort them the last of the way to  the water, and once they make it, she gets them into hiding as soon as she can.  There are predators about, and she wants to make sure they all her ducklings survive!  This is a beautiful piece of film-making from the BBC and I look forward to watching the rest of the episodes on iPlayer.  Let’s keep our fingers (at least) crossed that Doris and her ducklings make it through!

The Greater Glider is cute, but not many people get the chance to see one in the eastern Australian wilds it calls home.  They are shy, solitary and nocturnal, yet one thing is certain – this endangered marsupial species has adorable down to a fine art.  It was, until 2020, believed to be a single species, with variations according to habitat.  After careful research using high-throughput genetic marker techniques, it was discovered that the genus Petauroides was not monotypic – it did not contain a solitary species, after all: there are three species of greater glider. Image

Southern Greater Glider

So, what does one do when this happens?  Keeping things simple and straightforward is always a good plan, so we now have the Northern, Central and Southern greater gliders – named after the regions of the range in which they are found.  Just to make matters a little complicated, each species comes in two forms.  The central greater glider is usually silvery-brown, while the southern greater glider is especially well known for having both dark and pale grey-white forms (the variation seems to be a normal colour morph rather than a sign that they are different sexes or ages. In other words: some are naturally darker, some paler).

The South African Dwarf Chameleon has to contend with a problem.  It can sometimes get cold where it lives and that means that if it laid eggs, they probably wouldn’t hatch. So, evolution came up with a neat solution to that – instead of laying eggs, this chameleon carries it young like a mammal.  In order to properly incubate her eggs, she finds the sunniest spots in which to bask and enable them to grow.  When it is time for them to be born, she gives birth from fairly high up in the branches.  Fortunately, the young do not drop to the ground.  They are born with a membrane that temporarily encloses them – and the membrane is sticky and so attaches itself to a branch on the way down!  Once the newborn has dried off, as it were, it is ready to pursue life in the branches.

Watch the amazing video, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, below: 

In the coral reefs of Indonesia, something remarkable happens on remote coral reefs.  The Banded Sea Krait, which lays its eggs on land but hunts in the water, has a problem.  They aren’t fast enough to catch free-swimming fish, so resort to trying to find those hiding among the coral. A single bite is sufficient to paralyse prey, but getting at it is the problem! Fortunately (for them), they get assistance from the yellow goat fish which live around the reef, as well as trevally fish – and together they form what can only be described as a pack – at some points in this film there are around fifty snakes and countless fish, banding together with only one thing in mind – food!

The fish will chase the prey into the coral and then the snakes go in. When some of the smaller fish try to escape, then the yellow goat fish and trevally are waiting for them. It’s a win-win situation for both the snakes and the fish.  It is thought that this behavior was much more widespread when Indonesia’s reefs were pristine, but these days it only happens in some of the more remote reefs – the main reason why this kind of hunting is not seen very often.

Watch the intriguing video from BBC Earth below.

The last insect you would expect to be buzzing around the Falkland Islands is the humble bumblebee.  The islands are harsh, not to mention isolated in the South Atlantic, so it is difficult for any insects to reach them naturally.  Not only that, but it is even more difficult for them to create and continue a presence on the island.  However, this is what local scientists believe may have happened in the Falklands.

This could have come in on the deck of a boat or a plane.  However, once arrived, it only takes one queen to set up a nest.  Locals would quite like this to be the case as the sight of a bumblebee in one’s garden is always a pleasure. Plus, the Falklands do not have any native bees, so unless they have a negative impact on the local ecosystem, we can only hope that the bumblebee can establish itself on the islands.

Watch the video describing the appearance of the bumblebee on the Falkland Islands below.

When you look at the butterfly above, what do you immediately see? Yes, the clue was in the title of this article, but we definitely can make out the number 88 on its wing.  Found in Middle and South America, these butterflies are, unsurprisingly called mariposa ochenta y ocho (eighty-eight butterfly) in Spanish. Image Credit

 

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Perhaps more of a revelation is that, depending on where you are, you might not be looking at the same species. Just as we have not one “8” but two, so there are two distinct species with variations of the name the eighty-eight butterfly (there are 12 altogether, it would have been more fun had there been eight).   Of course, they certainly share one big thing in common, but evolution shaped the wing pattern for survival, not for numeracy (and more about that later).

Now, there is a question and I would guess the answer is very much down to the tastes of the individual responder.  Sometimes the plainest of butterflies can be a person’s favorite, and so considered the most beautiful in ways other than those which greet the eye.  This fascinating video covers a number of butterflies, all of which are quite stunning.

We have featured a few on Arkinspace before – such as the amazing glasswing – and that species is on this particular list too.  This list features the Top 20, including the Island Marble, linked closely to the San Juan island area in Washington State. Then there is the Peacock with its amazing eyespots.  Then there is the ulyss, with its iridescent blue markings. My own is the Anna's eighty-eight, which does exactly what is says on the packet.

Of course, there are another 16 on this list, beautifully created by 4 Ever Green, besides those mentioned above. Will your favorite be on it? Watch the full video below and find out.

Much is known about orangutan physiology and behavior. Yet there is one thing that is still unsolved – the exact reason why some male orangutans develop a flange while others do not. These large cheek pads certainly have their advantages as we shall see - it’s most certainly about dominance and mating with as many females as possible – so why do they only develop in some males and not others?

First things first – the flange is not a physical signal that a male has reached sexual maturity as was once thought – they already have quite a while back. Even though orangutans are among the slowest mammals to reach reproductive age, between 7 and 10 years of age for the male, they are capable of producing offspring at this age. However, it is rare for the male to mate before the age of 15. Females mature at about 5 years of age but like many great apes undergo a period of infertility in their adolescent years which preclude offspring for between 2 and 4 years and will not produce offspring until they too are well in to their teens.

Japan is a crowded country but stull has many diverse wildlife and landscapes. Many of the animals have adapted and continue to thrive alongside humans.  This documentary is a very sweet and beautifully created piece of work and features narration by Michelle Dockery.  You will witness frogs and their amazingly complex nests, the tadpoles feeding off it before they make their way out into the world.  Then there are the macaques raiding the local farms for the fresh produce (well, everyone has to eat, don’t they?).  These and many other animals will thrill and engage you for 20 minutes. I particularly liked the underwater sequences - simply phenomenal.  It leaves me wondering how on earth it was done. Enjoy!

The wonderfully eccentric Snares penguin is always up for a spot of self-care.  In their New Zealand forest habitat they thrive, but there is something that happens in a forest that wouldn’t if they were, say, to live in ice-bound conditions further south.  Mud.  Forests are muddy. 

The clingy mud (which they themselves have helped to generate as they waddle through the forest) could be a threat to them. If the feathers are clogged, regulation of body temperature is very difficult and so this might kill the penguin if they don’t get their feathers clean soon.  So, they go to the baths and give themselves a proper scrub, after which they lay on a special wax to their feathers!

Watch the delightful video below.

There are lots of videos doing the rounds that feeding birds in our gardens helps to spread disease.  Not only that, it favours some of the more aggressive species of birds to thrive to the detriment of others.  What exactly does help the birds in our gardens?

As landscapes changed – bird-feeding spread.  Here, Joel Ashton tells, with great clarity, the steps that can be taken to help stop the spread of disease.  It is also very sensible advice.  For example, the blue-tit is quite an assertive bird and people think that it is hogging the feeding stations – as well as the  nest boxes we place in the gardens, too.  As a fan of the blue tit, I was relieved to find that it is not the thug in the garden that many people think it is.

Bird behaviour changes when resources are limited.  So a lot of birds behave badly – but of course that is a human interpretation of their actions.  Gardens are shared spaces, and competition is normal – the birds don’t quite see things as we do.  A simple tip is to spread different types of feeding stations around the garden to avoid the birds having to feed shoulder-to-shoulder.

Watch the video below – it’s a great watch wherever you are.

You may or may not know this but Ark in Space is curated by just one person – and that person would be me! There are a number of expenses that the site incurs each month and so, with my cap in my hand, I’m going to beg a favor.

If you enjoy Ark in Space, please consider helping out with the cost of running the site.  As you can guess, it takes a lot of time and effort, too!

Below this post you will see a button which will enable you to make a contribution safely and securely. You can give as little or as much as you like – I’m not going to limit your choices! Anything will be gratefully received and will help to ensure that I can carry on bringing you all the great features, photographs and videos about the natural world that makes the site what it is.

So, if you read or watch something that you have really enjoyed, please think about sending us a small donation. Thanks!

Best regards

Robert-John