2020 in Animal News – The New York Times

It was a difficult year for Homo sapiens. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed our vulnerabilities in an ever-changing natural world. Many have been driven to find new levels of resolve and creativity in order to survive.

As humans are quarantined, birds, insects, fish, and mammals showcase their own ingenuity. 2020 was the year the deadly hornets first appeared in the United States, scientists presented us with an octopus as cute as emoji, and researchers discovered platypuses glow in black light.

Here are some articles on animals – and the humans who study them – that surprised or delighted Times readers the most.

In many ways, 2020 seemed to be the longest year. It is also the year that scientists discovered the potentially longest creature in the ocean: a 150-foot-long siphonophore, spotted in the deep ocean off Western Australia.

“It looked like an incredible UFO,” said Dr Nerida Wilson, senior researcher at the Western Australian Museum.

Each siphonophore is a colony of individual zooids, clusters of cells that clone thousands of times to produce an elongated, cord-like body. While some of his colleagues compared the siphonophore to silly string, Dr Wilson said the body was much more organized than that.

This year, the amphibian migrations in the northeastern United States coincided with the coronavirus pandemic. Social distancing and shelter-in-place orders led to a drop in vehicle traffic, which turned this spring into an unintentional large-scale experiment.

“It’s not too often that we have the opportunity to explore the real impacts human activity can have on amphibians crossing the road,” said Greg LeClair, a graduate student in herpetology at the University. from Maine who is coordinating a project to help salamanders cross roads safely. .

It was a century-old leaf insect mystery: what happened to the female Nanophyllium?

In the spring of 2018 at the Montreal Insectarium, Stéphane Le Tirant received a clutch of 13 eggs that he hoped to hatch into leaves. The eggs were not ovals but prisms, brown paper lanterns barely larger than chia seeds.

They were laid by a wild female Phyllium asekiense, a leaf insect from Papua New Guinea belonging to a group called frondosum, which was only known to female specimens.

After the eggs hatched, two became thin and stick-shaped and even sprouted a pair of wings. They oddly resembled the leaf insects of Nanophyllium, an entirely different genus whose six species had only been described from male specimens. The conclusion was obvious: the two species were in fact one and the same and received a new name, Nanophyllium asekiense.

“Since 1906, we’ve only ever found men,” said Royce Cumming, a graduate student at New York City University. “And now we have our last solid proof.”

What is happening off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in the Coral Sea? The region was mostly unexplored and unexplored until a recent expedition excavated its dark waters, discovering an abundance of life, bizarre geological features and spectacular deep corals.

An expedition organized by the Schmidt Ocean Institute mapped the distant seabed with sound beams and deployed captive and autonomous robots to capture close-up images of the ink depths.

Their work captured a video of the Dumbo octopus – which bears a striking resemblance to the octopus emoji – and the region’s thriving chambered nautili population. The team also found the deepest living hard corals in the waters of eastern Australia and identified up to 10 new species of fish, snails and sponges.

The energy needed to stay afloat in 2020 may seem similar to that used by the hummingbird. Floating creatures have the fastest metabolisms among vertebrates, and to fuel their zippered lifestyle they sometimes drink their own weight in nectar every day.

To conserve energy, Andean hummingbirds in South America have been shown to enter an unusually deep torpor, a physiological state similar to hibernation in which their body temperature drops to as much as 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

At the end of the year, it can be an opportunity for us to learn from these little birds and slow down.

The last time we checked out the platypus, it was confusing our expectations of mammals with its webbed legs, duck-like beak, and egg laying. In addition, it produced venom.

Now, it turns out that even his drab-looking coat hides a secret: When you turn on the black lights, he starts to glow.

Shining ultraviolet light on a platypus causes the animal’s fur to fluoresce with a greenish-blue tint. Platypuses are one of the few mammals known to exhibit this trait. And we still don’t know why they’re doing it – if there’s a reason. Scientists are also discovering that they may not be alone among the secret luminous mammals.

An international team of scientists, including a prominent researcher from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, analyzed all known coronaviruses in Chinese bats and used genetic analysis to trace the probable origin of the new coronavirus in Chinese bats. Horseshoe.

Researchers, mainly Chinese and American, have conducted extensive research and analysis of coronaviruses in bats, with the aim of identifying hot spots for the potential fallout of these viruses on humans and disease outbreaks that result.

The genetic evidence that the virus came from bats was already overwhelming. Horseshoe bats, in particular, were seen as likely hosts because other contagious diseases, such as the SARS outbreak in 2003, originated from viruses that originated from these bats.

None of the bat viruses come close enough to the novel coronavirus to suggest that it made a direct jump from bats to humans. The immediate progenitor of the new virus has not been found and may have been present in bats or other animals.

“It was as if an umbrella had covered the sky,” said Joseph Katone Leparole, who lived in Wamba, Kenya, a pastoral hamlet, for most of his 68 years.

A swarm of rapidly moving locusts made a devastating path across Kenya in June. The size of the swarm stunned the villagers. At first they thought it was a cloud filled with refreshing rain.

Highly mobile creatures can travel over 80 miles per day. Their swarms, which can contain up to 80 million locust adults per square kilometer, eat the same amount of food daily as about 35,000 people.

While chemical spraying can be effective in controlling pests, locals fear the chemicals could corrupt the water supply used for both drinking and washing, as well as for watering crops.

Climate change is expected to make locust outbreaks more frequent and severe.

The Danish government slaughtered millions of mink on more than 1,000 farms earlier this year over fears that a mutation in the novel coronavirus that infected mink could interfere with the effectiveness of a vaccine for humans.

Scientists say there are reasons beyond this particular mutated virus for Denmark to take action. Mink farms have been shown to be hotbeds for the coronavirus and that mink are able to transmit the virus to humans. They are the only animal known to do so to date.

This set of mutations may not be harmful to humans, but the virus will undoubtedly continue to mutate in mink as it does in humans, and overcrowded conditions on mink farms could exert evolutionary pressures on the virus different from those of the human population. The virus could also pass from mink to other animals.

The arrival of the “murderous hornets” in the United States certainly managed to grab the world’s attention this spring.

The Asian giant hornet is known for its ability to wipe out a beehive in a matter of hours, beheading the bees and flying off with the victims’ thorax to feed their young. For larger targets, the hornet’s mighty venom and stinger – long enough to pierce a beekeeping suit – is an excruciating combination that victims have compared to the hot metal penetrating their skin.

This fall, after several sightings in the Pacific Northwest, officials in Washington state reported finding and removing the country’s first known deadly hornet nest. The aggressive hornets’ nest was removed just as they were about to enter their “slaughter phase”.

Even if there are no other hornets found in the area in the future, authorities will continue to use traps for at least three more years to ensure the area is free of hornets.