More crazy shit from nature
I've been reading Sy Montgomery's Birdology, which I highly recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in birds. There's so much interesting stuff in here, I could probably rewrite the book trying to share it all, but here's one particularly mind-blowing set of factoids:
"Many mammals migrate, from whales to wildebeest, as do some fish, reptiles, and insects, but it's birds who most capture our hearts. These famously fragile creatures undertake some of the longest journeys on the planet. The distance record holder was the black and white Arctic tern, with its 22,000-mile yearly journey between polar ice caps, but in fall 2006, a team of researchers published news of sooty shearwaters captured in their New Zealand breeding burrows and outfitted with satellite tracking devices. Flying in a giant figure eight over the Pacific basin, they journey 39,000 miles a year. (The birds can also dive beneath the ocean's surface, searching for squid, to 225 feet.) In 2007, an even more astonishing record was established by a bar-tailed godwit. Satellite tracking allowed researchers to follow a female shorebird who flew 7,145 miles nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand. In nine days, she crossed the vast Pacific, without a single meal, rest, or drink."
I've been racking my brain trying to figure out how evolution would select for these things, because who was the first bird to decide to go on a journey of thousands of miles? The ones that go from pole to pole don't settle in between - somehow, they figured out that the other side of the planet was just like the first side, but how?
"Many mammals migrate, from whales to wildebeest, as do some fish, reptiles, and insects, but it's birds who most capture our hearts. These famously fragile creatures undertake some of the longest journeys on the planet. The distance record holder was the black and white Arctic tern, with its 22,000-mile yearly journey between polar ice caps, but in fall 2006, a team of researchers published news of sooty shearwaters captured in their New Zealand breeding burrows and outfitted with satellite tracking devices. Flying in a giant figure eight over the Pacific basin, they journey 39,000 miles a year. (The birds can also dive beneath the ocean's surface, searching for squid, to 225 feet.) In 2007, an even more astonishing record was established by a bar-tailed godwit. Satellite tracking allowed researchers to follow a female shorebird who flew 7,145 miles nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand. In nine days, she crossed the vast Pacific, without a single meal, rest, or drink."
I've been racking my brain trying to figure out how evolution would select for these things, because who was the first bird to decide to go on a journey of thousands of miles? The ones that go from pole to pole don't settle in between - somehow, they figured out that the other side of the planet was just like the first side, but how?