They also found out that three groups of anacondas that were believed to be of three different species, are actually the same species. So this research led to a a net biodiversity change of minus one species.
An eerie glow has been emanating from Wales' forests and rockpools for the country's annual dark skies week.
His photos of temperate rain forest in Wales reveal shapes, structures and colours that rival a coral reef.
The 34-year-old is on a one-man mission to shine UV light on what he calls a "magic world" in which plants and animals fluoresce to communicate.
Mr Atthowe visited woodlands in Wye Valley and in Pembrokeshire Coast National Park giving tours for Wales Dark Skies Week.
"The ancient woodlands are full of moss and lichen which light up under UV and lots of creatures too, like wood lice and centipedes all doing interesting things."
Ruth Waycott from the Wye Valley National Landscape helped organise one of the biofluorescence walks, at Whitestone, a Natural Resources Wales-owned forest near Chepstow in Monmouthshire.
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If you're into ecosystem restoration is easy to discount the importance of the megafauna on a landscape, and how they shape the desired community, as you're more often concerned plant and soil metrics. Wildlife can tend to be a check-box to measure said performance, rather than viewed as ecosystems engineers.
The portal’s mouth — a furrowed pit about half a mile wide — spirals 1,250 feet into the ground, exposing a marbled mosaic of young and ancient rock: gray bands of basalt, milky veins of quartz and shimmering constellations of gold.
At some point not long after our planet’s genesis, in some warm, wet pocket with the right chemistry and an adequate flow of free energy — a hot spring, an impact crater, a hydrothermal vent on the ocean floor — bits of Earth rearranged themselves into the first self-replicating entities, which eventually evolved into cells.
This deluge is partly a consequence of geographic serendipity: Intense equatorial sunlight speeds the evaporation of water from sea and land to sky, trade winds bring moisture from the ocean and bordering mountains force incoming air to rise, cool and condense.
Nearly two and a half billion years ago, photosynthetic ocean microbes called cyanobacteria permanently altered the planet, suffusing the atmosphere with oxygen, imbuing the sky with its familiar blue hue and initiating the formation of the ozone layer, which protected new waves of life from harmful exposure to ultraviolet radiation.
Conceived by the British scientist and inventor James Lovelock in the 1960s and later developed with the American biologist Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that all the animate and inanimate elements of Earth are “parts and partners of a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life.”
The tunnels and chambers were decorated with strange and beautiful formations: massive chandeliers of frostlike gypsum, lemon-yellow sulfur pods, pearly balloons of hydromagnesite, transparent selenite spears and calcite lily pads hovering over turquoise pools.
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