At the bottom of your local river, mostly out of sight, sits one of the best water filters in the natural world. It's also one of the most endangered animals on the continent.
Freshwater mussels are certainly not glamorous. They look like rocks, they barely move, and they spend their long lives, often decades, buried in the streambed doing one thing: filtering water.
A single mussel pulls 8-10 gallons through its body a day, stripping out algae, sediment, bacteria, even heavy metals and traces of pharmaceuticals. A healthy bed does it at a scale that's hard to believe.
Along one stretch of the Upper Mississippi, the mussels filter more than 14 billion gallons a day, dozens of times what the nearby sewage plant handles.
And North America is the mussel world capital. Nearly 300 species live here, close to a third of every freshwater mussel species on Earth, more than any other continent.
Here's the part that should be a bigger headline: around 70 percent of those species are imperiled: already extinct, endangered, threatened, or heading that way, hit by dams and pollution harder than almost any other group of animals we have.
The hopeful part is that they respond to our conservation efforts. Biologists are breeding mussels and restocking rivers by the tens of thousands, and the water clears behind them.
En arrivant au Brésil et en étant témoin de l'esclavage de près, Charles Darwin écrivit :
« Près de Rio de Janeiro, ma voisine d'en face était une vieille dame qui possédait des vis-pouces avec lesquelles elle écrasait les doigts de ses esclaves. Dans une maison où j'avais séjourné auparavant, un jeune serviteur mulâtre était, chaque jour et à toute heure, insulté, battu et pourchassé avec une fureur capable de décourager jusqu'au plus vil des animaux.
J'ai vu un enfant de six ou sept ans frappé à la tête avec un fouet (avant que je puisse intervenir) parce qu'il m'avait servi un verre d'eau légèrement trouble...
Et ce sont là des actes commis par des hommes qui prétendent aimer leur prochain comme eux-mêmes, qui croient en Dieu, et qui prient pour que Sa volonté soit faite sur terre !
Le sang bout dans nos veines et nos cœurs s'emballent quand nous songeons que nous, les Anglais, et nos descendants américains avec leurs cris fanfarons pour la liberté, avons été et sommes encore coupables de cet énorme crime. »
(Charles Darwin, Le Voyage du Beagle)
Smells a dead mouse from a mile away. Eats anthrax for breakfast. Prevents epidemics just by existing.
The turkey vulture — the most important bird nobody respects.
THE NOSE:
→ Best sense of smell of any bird on Earth
→ Can detect ethyl mercaptan (decomposition gas) from 1+ mile
→ Gas companies add the same chemical to natural gas lines
→ Turkey vultures have circled gas leaks — engineers follow them
THE STOMACH:
→ Stomach acid: pH ~1 (nearly pure hydrochloric acid)
→ Destroys anthrax, botulism, cholera, hog cholera
→ Eats diseased carcasses that would otherwise spread epidemics
→ Essentially a flying biohazard disposal unit
THE BALD HEAD:
→ No feathers = bacteria can't get trapped when eating carrion
→ UV sunlight sterilizes the bare skin
→ Same reason vultures sunbathe with wings spread (UV sterilization)
THE FLIGHT:
→ Soars for hours without flapping (uses thermals)
→ Distinctive "wobbly" flight with wings in shallow V
→ Can cover 200 miles per day searching for carrion
WITHOUT VULTURES:
→ In India, vulture populations crashed 99% due to a cattle drug
→ Result: rotting carcasses, feral dog explosion, rabies epidemic
→ Tens of thousands of human deaths attributed to vulture decline
Respect the cleanup crew.
You need them more than they need you.
They’ve found that sperm whales have such complex language that its structurally comparable to Chinese. They use what are essentially vowels. They have different cultural identity markers for each clan of whales. Thats actually insane.
🚨 Section 8 of Flock Safety’s contract caps liability at just $100.
100,000+ cameras. 49 states. 20B license plates scanned every month. $8.4B valuation. If your data is leaked, lost, or misused: max payout is $100.
Billions for them. $100 for you.
Y'all okay with this?