Smithsonian.com

After gains in the 1990s, loggerhead sea turtle nesting surveys reveal declines over the last five years, according to the New York Times.

The 300-pound reptiles, with heads and necks out of proportion to their bodies, nest from North Carolina to Texas. Only the females come out of the water onto the beach to lay their eggs.

Though researchers can’t give a definite reason for the decline, they said increased commercial fishing may have something to do with it. Loggerheads get caught in nets and caught on baited hooks intended for other fish.

Cyprian honeybees ball up around invading Oriental hornets until the visitor can no longer breath.

According to new research published in Current Biology, the recently discovered strategy, called “asphyxia balling,” is one of many full-contact tortures employed by bees.

Asian honeybees use a “thermo-balling” strategy. They surround hornets and vibrate their bellies against the hornets abdomen until the invader overheats–a swarming, touchy-feely response that doesn’t exactly say “happy to see you.”

A biologist at Washington University in St. Louis had just finished a census of snakes on a conservation preserve in Missouri when the great flood of 1993 hit.

Instead of viewing the flood as a problem for his study, Owen Sexton took advantage of the disaster, and used it to see how snakes might recover from a natural disaster. A year after the flood he went back to the same spot. Almost three quarters of five species were missing or dead, and three other species could not be found at all.

Which ones survived? You may not like this: The bigger the snake, the better it’s chance of survival. Those that could climb trees fared the best. Aquatic snakes, surprisingly, didn’t do as well.

While many of the snakes may have died, others just moved to higher areas, like people’s backyards and gardens. To keep this from happening next time, Sexton has proposed floating man-made islands amid the flood waters for the snakes and other animals to bask on.

Babies whose mothers smoke prior to breastfeeding sleep less, according to a new study to be published in the journal Pediatrics.

When mothers smoked before breastfeeding, then fed their babies, the little ones slept for less than an hour. On days the mothers didn’t smoke immediately before breastfeeding, the babies slept almost an hour and a half.

The lack of sleep was directly related to higher amounts of nicotine in the milk. The babies drank the same amount of milk, whether the nicotine concentration was high or not.

Seems like a dangerous positive-feedback cycle: The more mama smokes, the less baby sleeps. The less baby sleeps, the more stress on mama. The more stress on mama, the more mama wants to smoke.

Now let’s see if the marketing gurus pick up a tired, crying baby to be the next spokesman for the anti-smoking campaign.

Male bees don’t have time, or frankly care, to stop and smell the flowers. They don’t frolic among the daisies, foraging for food. Their sole purpose in life is to mate with the queen. Then they die.

Now, Professor Hugh Robertson of the University of Illinois and his colleagues have figured out how males do it, in a paper to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  (More…)