BATS ARE BLIND????? NOT ACCORDING TO THIS.
A common misconception perpetuated by its use in metaphors and similes , bats actually have quite normal eyesight, although they are very photosensitive and easily dazzled by excessive light. However, bats do often use echolocation in situations where their eyesight fails them, such as times of low light levels & darkness.
BATS AND PLANTS IN HARMONY …Well it is truly amazing
Who would have thought that plants and bats can work together in such an interesting relationship? A plant known as Nepenthes rafflesiana pitcher has gained a great source of nutrition and coexistence. Bats seem to work together with the plants, providing them with food as well as using them as a toilet.
Don’t worry, you did hear that right, but it is not quite what you might think. Deep within the rainforests of Borneo, the woolly bat has created a bed out of the carnivorous pitcher plant. While resting in this plant, the bat releases urine and other excrement into the plant. The plant gets almost all of the nutrients it needs just from this alone.
It was quite an unbelievable sight for the scientists who discovered these bats and plants working together. Relationships between vertebrates and plants are quite a rare thing to see, much less to see it to this extent.
Now while you may think it is the plant that is relying on the bat, it is actually the other way around. The bat can enjoy a clean and dry environment in which to nest instead of having to stay inside a cave that is usually filled with blood-sucking parasites.
Research was done on this strange relationship between the bats and pitcher plants and something of interest was found. Even though the bats had many other places to roost during the day, they still chose to settle in the pitcher plants.
It was also discovered that the many pitcher plants that housed the wooly bats had a much higher content of nitrogen to spread to their leaves than those that did not house the wooly bats. This relationship is of mutual benefit to both plants and bats.
OLD TIME DROUGHTS GOING BACK THOUSANDS OF YEARS
Have you ever wondered just how bad the climate can change within a world that is constantly getting hotter? The results would be absolutely staggering. These results come from the journal known as Science.
With Curt Stager leading a professional team of international scientists, more than four dozen paleoclimate records were compiled. These records are samples of sediment cores in Lake Tanganyika and many other areas across Africa. The records that were compiled also explained much of the very extreme droughts that happened over the past 50,000 years. These droughts were known to have struck Africa and Southern Asia more than 16,000 years ago.
Around 17,000 years ago, cool melted water spread throughout the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean. Now, while this caused a large amount of cooling in this region, in tropical areas, they were slammed with massive droughts.
These massive droughts were strongly connected in the Afro-Asian monsoon areas. This was a potential problem for many of the Paleolithic humans that lived in this area during that time.
There were many lakes involved in this “H1 megadrought”. The world’s largest lake known as Lake Victoria in Africa, completely dried out, as did Lake Van in Turkey, and even Lake Tana in Ehthiopia. Is it getting hot or what?
Other rivers like the Congo and the Nile rivers also withered in size during the time of the megadrought.
While no one really knows what “exactly” caused this mega drought to happen, there is much speculation. The main thought is that there was a shift in tropical rains.
Stager, himself, believe that there is nothing to worry about in the future because there is not much ice left to actually melt away. For the sake of much of the world today, many really hope that he is absolutely right about this theory
To Australia’s Aborigines, who are native to the land of Oz, the Devil’s Marbles are called Karlu Karlu. These are giant round granite red boulders with a background of a beautiful landscape. Some are 50 centimeters and others are 60 meters across. Some seem to have been posed in strange positions, like balanced on top of each other. The Devil’s Marbles, it has been told, were formed millions of years ago where molten magma came below sandstone and cooled to form granite. The wear and tear over the years and environment factors caused erosion and other such issues to leave what we see today as the amazing Devil’s Marbles. The Australian Aborigines hold some spiritual significance to this site and what it contains.