Hand-feeding wild hyenas is not an unusual practice in Harar, Africa, as it appears in Episode 6 of Planet Earth Season 2. In the documentary, Attenborough describes a peaceful relationship between humans and spotted hyenas. The hyenas chomp down on the bones left in the meat market by butchers with their powerful bone-crushing jaw bones... Continue Reading →
Supermom: A Polar Bear Mothers’ sacrifice and struggle in raising cubs
In the Planet Earth episode “From Pole to Pole,” we are shown a courageous mother who guides her two cubs into the unprotected outside Arctic for the very first time. Upon becoming pregnant, female polar bears build their own maternity dens, where she will birth and nurse her babies until the spring, by excavating a... Continue Reading →
Endangered Bengal tiger: the trilemma of a tigress
Although Bengal tigers are at the top of the food chain in the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, located at the heart of India, they still face a number of serious difficulties, especially for the tigresses who have cubs to raise. In the episode 5 of Dynasties (Season 1), David Attenborough describes the lives of a Bengal... Continue Reading →
The Bleaching of 1998: Devastation of Corals in the Western Indian Ocean and Beyond
In "ABC Australian Story: Into Hot Water", professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg explains that bleaching events in the Western Indian Ocean caused an approximately 46% decrease of corals in late summer 1998. This bleaching started from small shallow warm water regions, called “hotspots,” and eventually lead to massive coral bleaching over a 6 months period in many... Continue Reading →
Not so Tiny Tortoises
Anyone who has taken an evolutionary biology class knows about Darwin’s famous trip to the Galapagos during which he observed the natural phenomena that influenced the development of his Theory of Evolution. On this trip, one of the most well-known examples of his observations were the giant Galapagos tortoises (Chelonoidis nigra), the largest land turtles,... Continue Reading →