gracious/science

Two chalk drawing of penguins, sketched by legendary explorers Captain Scott and Ernest Shackleton, have been discovered at Cambridge University.

The sketches which date from 1904 and 1909, are signed by the renowned polar explorers.

They were probably drawn to illustrate public lectures that the pair gave after returning from their Antarctic voyages.

The blackboards were found lying in the basement of the university's Scott polar research institute. No one is sure when they arrived or how they found their way to Cambridge.

Vacuum cleaners kill fleas just as well as any poison, surprised U.S. researchers found.

They said a standard vacuum cleaner abuses the fleas so much it kills 96 percent of adult fleas and 100 percent of younger fleas.

Glen Needham, associate professor of entomology at Ohio State University, suggested that the vacuum brushes wear away a waxy outer layer on insects called the cuticle. Without it, the fleas, larvae and pupae probably dry up and die, he said.

The findings were so surprising that the researchers ran their experiment several times.

Dogs possess such an extraordinary sense of smell that they can distinguish among the feces of 18 species at once, making them ideal tracking aids for conservation biologists hoping to cover a lot of ground. Or water.

Beyond helping document grizzly and black bear behavior in Alberta's vast Jasper National Park, the dogs have located floating feces from endangered North Atlantic right whales in Canada's Bay of Fundy and from the Pacific Northwest's declining orca population. Remarkably, some of the poop snoopers perched on the bows of research vessels have tracked down whale scat more than one nautical mile away.

Among the growing number of scat-detection dogs used to track wildlife by land or by sea, the canines employed by the University of Washington's Center for Conservation Biology are showing that no technology can yet outdo their know-how for doo-doo.

Samuel Wasser, the center's director, said feces is the easiest part of an animal to collect and a "treasure trove" of vital information. Apart from diet, scat can reveal the species, sex and identity of an individual through DNA, while released hormones can record an animal's nutritional state, reproductive status and stress levels.

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Taranaki Daily News photographer Mike Scott is focusing his camera on Antarctica during a 10-day stint in November, as part of Antarctica New Zealand's media program. While he's staying at Scott Base, his blog creates a picture of what makes this land of ice, penguins, scientists and ordinary Kiwis tick.

The Bohart Museum of Entomology on the UC Davis campus, houses three of the world's largest cockroaches: the Death Head (Blaberus cranifer), collected from a bat roost in Panama; Peppered or Peruvian Cockroach (Archimandrita tesselata) from Peru; and Madagascar hissing cockroaches (Gromphadorhina portentosa) from Madagascar.

Bohart Museum scientists have maintained terrariums of Madagascar hissing cockroaches for some 30 years. At any given time, the museum has hundreds of them. It's the most popular display among the kids, because of three reasons: the hissing sound they make, their size and their appearance.

Photo: Kathy Keatley Garvey

From the page: "Her life permanently changed the popular perception of animal intelligence, overturning long-held assumptions about differences between humans and other great apes, and presaging the genetic revolution that would reveal that humans and chimps biologically aren't separated by much."

If you're expecting to see the usual crowds of blue tits in your garden this winter, you could be in for a disappointment.

Wildlife experts say millions of the young birds starved or drowned during the storms and floods of May, June and July.

Numbers of great tits, whitethroats and reed warblers are also dramatically down after their worst breeding season in a generation, it is claimed.

In a good year, David Hackenberg can make a $100,000 profit from beekeeping, but this past year has been a financial disaster. And it all began one afternoon last November when he checked on some of his hives in Florida.

"When I pulled into a bee yard in Florida, there was 400 hives of bees that three weeks before that looked great. And all of a sudden, here we got roughly 400 beehives that are totally empty," he recalls.

The bees were gone, and Hackenberg says he doesn't know where they went. "I mean, I literally got down and crawled around. I mean, seriously, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled around. And there's no dead bees. There are no dead bees anywhere. I mean, you can't find any bees. They flew off someplace," he recalls.

The bees, Hackenberg says, never came back. It's something he says he'd never seen before . . .