• Nepal’s Terai Arc Landscape (TAL) initiative, aimed at restoring ecosystems and creating space for tigers, receives global recognition from the U.N. as one of seven World Restoration Flagships.
• Launched in 2004, the TAL initiative restored 66,800 hectares (165,000 acres) of forest and significantly increased the Bengal tiger population in the region.
• The U.N. recognition opens doors for technical and financial support to restore an additional 350,000 hectares (865,000 acres) in both Nepal and India, but overcoming challenges like infrastructure expansion and human-wildlife conflict remains critical for long-term sustainability.

KATHMANDU — Nepal’s pioneering landscape-level ecosystem restoration initiative, aimed at creating dispersal space for tigers, has been globally recognized for its efforts to fight and reverse ecosystem degradation. Yet sustaining the success is rife with hurdles such as infrastructure development, human-wildlife conflict, political instability and climate change uncertainties, experts caution.

Launched in 2004, the Terai Arc Landscape (TAL) initiative, which led to the restoration of 66,800 hectares (165,000 acres) of forest and nearly tripling of the endangered Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) population, has been honored as one of seven U.N. World Restoration Flagships by the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-30) program jointly led by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization.

“We are glad to receive the recognition from the U.N. as one of the seven best examples of ecosystem restoration around the world,” said Dipak Gyawali, deputy director-general of the Department of Forest and Soil Conservation. “The landscape is important, as it connects different ecologically critical protected areas, not just in Nepal, but also in India,” he added.

The Nepal portion of the TAL spans from the Bagmati River in the east to the Mahakali River in the west, covering an area of 24,710 square kilometers (9,540 square miles). It is home to a variety of wild animals such as tigers, elephants (Elephas maximus), rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis), gharials (Gavialis gangeticus), hispid hares (Caprolagus hispidus), sloth bears (Melursus ursinus) and river dolphins (Platanista gangetica), as well as more than 500 species of birds, many of them endangered.

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Portia is a genus of jumping spider that feeds on other spiders (i.e., they are araneophagic or arachnophagic). They are remarkable for their intelligent hunting behaviour, which suggests that they are capable of learning and problem solving, traits normally attributed to much larger animals.

Intelligence

Portia often hunt in ways that seem intelligent. All members of Portia have instinctive hunting tactics for their most common prey, but can improvise by trial and error against unfamiliar prey or in unfamiliar situations, and then remember the new approach.

They are capable of trying out a behavior to obtain feedback regarding success or failure, and they can plan ahead (as it seems from their detouring behavior).

Portia species can make detours to find the best attack angle against dangerous prey, even when the best detour takes a Portia out of visual contact with the prey, and sometimes the planned route leads to abseiling down a silk thread and biting the prey from behind. Such detours may take up to an hour, and a Portia usually picks the best route even if it needs to walk past an incorrect route.

Nonetheless, they seem to be relatively slow thinkers, as is to be expected since they solve tactical problems by using brains vastly smaller than those of mammalian predators. Portia has a brain significantly smaller than the size of the head of a pin, and it likely has less than 100,000 neurons [!] (for comparison, a mouse brain has about 70 million neurons [!!] and a human brain has 86 billion [!!!]).

Portia can distinguish their own draglines from conspecifics', recognizing self from others, and also discriminate between known and unknown spiders.

Social behavior

Members of the species Portia africana were observed living together and sharing prey.

If a mature Portia male meets a sub-mature female, he will try to cohabitate with her.

P. labiata females can discriminate between the draglines of familiar and unfamiliar individuals of the same species and between their own draglines and those of conspecifics. The ability to recognize individuals is a necessary prerequisite for social behavior.

smort spider

Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a large-scale ocean current and a major part of the global thermohaline circulation, which distributes heat around the planet and significantly contributes to the structure of atmospheric air circulation. The stability of the AMOC is a big part of why, for instance, TERF Island--which has roughly the same latitude as Newfoundland--is temperate instead of being a frozen hellscape. For a couple of decades, climate scientists have been warning that the combination of temperature increase and fresh water influx from melting ice might destabilize this current, eventually leading to a catastrophic "phase change" in which the circulation goes from relatively stable to completely absent in a very short (i.e. on the scale of decades) amount of time.

The first detailed study and simulation of contemporary AMOC dynamics suggests that we are much closer to this tipping point that we previously thought, and that the process of collapse might have already begun. It is impossible to overstate how bad this would be. The AMOC drives temperature, precipitation patterns, and a whole host of other aspects of the global climate--its stability is one of the major reasons for the Holocene climate optimum that we have enjoyed for all of our species' history. A collapse would be incredibly bad for us and for the biodiversity of the planet as a whole.

The Amazing Sidewinder - zackandscottkarmachameleons

Desert vipers, such as the rattlesnake of southwestern USA, are remarkable in the way that they effectively move their bodies across their sandy environment. Rattlesnakes live in the desert, where dunes full of loose sand make for a difficult environment for movement. These desert vipers are able to navigate this sandy environment through a rather odd technique, called sidewinding.

Sidewinding is different than normal serpantine motion, in that the snake seems to hoist itself along its path one segment at a time. Sidewinding is initiated by a wave propagated from the rearward motion of the snake (similar to normal serpentine motion). The sidewinder does not trace the normal path of a snake, rather it essentially fixes a part of its body in the sand while simultaneously lifting the adjacent side.

The result of this motion can be explained by the unique traces left in the sand during movement. These traces show the perpendicular nature of snakes body to its trajectory and the uniqueness associated with the creature’s movement.

The blog continues with technical info and a related comment.

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Sidewinding - Wikipedia

A crude animated line-drawing showing the locomotor pattern of sidewinding. The light brown areas are the tracks left behind, and also indicate where the body of the snake touched the ground.

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Sidewinder - Wikipedia

Sidewinding, a form of locomotion used by some snakes

• Bitis peringueyi or sidewinding adder, a venomous adder species found in Namibia and southern Angola

• Cerastes cerastes or Saharan horned viper, a venomous pit viper found in northern Africa and parts of the Middle East

• Crotalus cerastes or sidewinder rattlesnake, a venomous pit viper species found in the southwestern United States

[underwater mic] And as you can see here! [breath] This water is super cold, and super salty!