【推荐1】Despite Ecoador’s tough protection, there have been many giant tortoises(陆龟)killed recently, probably for their meat for financial gains made by wildlife hunters.

For a century, Ecuador’s beautiful and endangered giant tortoises have been protected. Hunting the tortoise is illegal under Ecuador’s laws. These species, living on the Galápagos   Islands, are one of the largest living reptiles(爬行动物) with the longest life span of all vertebrates. The oldest tortoise on record was 175 years old.

“This isn’t a solitary incident,” the Galápagos Conservancy, a US-based conservation organization said. “In September 2021, the remains of 15 other endangered giant tortoises were found on Isabela. The reptiles had likely been hunted for consumption.”

The islands are located around 600 miles off the shore of Ecuador’s coast, in the Pacific Ocean. The archipelago(群岛) is considered one of the world’s best places to see wildlife, and it is home to animal and plant species that are found nowhere else in the world.

Their famously fearless wildlife is believed to have been a source of inspiration for Darwin’s theory of evolution, following his visit to the islands in 1835. The islands were actually discovered by accident in 1535 when a Spanish ship was blown off course while sailing from Panama to Peru. Ironically enough, the ship’s captain was unimpressed by the islands, writing to the king that they were “worthless”. That view, of course, changed over time. Now about 25,000 people live in the four inhabited islands of Santa Cruz, Isabela. San Cristóbal, and Floreana.

There were once at least 250,000 giant tortoises on the islands; there are fewer than 15,000 in the wild today—and two subspecies are already extinct. “Evidence from the 2021investigation showed that the reptiles bad likely been hunted for consumption,” Galápagos Conservancy continued. “Many are worried the population will continue to decrease if serious action isn’t taken soon. We must safeguard giant tortoises and the ecosystems they depend on.”

【推荐2】Many early domestic (驯养的) dogs ate almost no meat. Dogs living around 3000 years ago in what is now Spain were instead fed cereals, such as millet (小米), by their owners.

Although the diet may reflect the fact that meat was relatively in lack among human societies at the time, feeding dogs with cereals could have been advantageous, says Silvia Albizuri at the University of Barcelona in Spain. It may have been a way to ensure the dogs had plenty of energy for the hard work of herding and guarding livestock (牧群), she says, particularly since these dogs “were not pets as we think of them nowadays”. Albizuri and her colleagues studied the remains of 36 dogs from Can Roqueta, an archaeological site near Barcelona. It lies on a plain near the coast and was inhabited from the Stone Age onwards. The dogs lived in the Bronze Age and Iron Age, between 1300 and 550 BC, and had been buried in pits. The researchers obtained protein from the dogs’ bones and focused on the carbon in the samples, which give an indication of what the animals ate.

The dogs’ diets differed considerably. While nine of them ate plenty of meat and 10 were omnivorous (杂食的), the rest ate mostly plants.

The finding adds to the evidence that many early domestic dogs ate little meat, says Albizuri. This trend is thought to have begun with the start of farming. “When human societies began to domesticate plants during the Neolithic period, hunting decreased and the human diet was based mainly on vegetables,” she says. “Dogs began to be fed on plants, mainly cereals.”

【推荐3】What do ants, bees, pigeons, and herrings have in common? All these animals swarm. Swarming occurs when large numbers of individual animals move, work, or cooperate as a group. They appear to know where they are going and what they are doing. Why are they doing this?

Ants are a good example of swarming animals. Swarms of ants can do many difficult tasks. For example, they can find the shortest path to the best food source. It may appear that individual ants build nests and defend their homes, but ants aren’t clever architects or soldiers—at least not as individuals. If you watch an ant try to accomplish something, you will be impressed by how inept it is. Although individual ants don’t appear to be very intelligent, as colonies they are, thanks to swarm intelligence.

Swarm intelligence is the collective behavior of large groups. The key feature of swarm intelligence seems to be that no one is in charge. In the case of ants, there appear to be no leaders. No ant seems to be telling any other ants what to do. There is a queen ant, but her only role is to lay eggs. Yet, a colony of half a million ants functions perfectly without any managers at all. Furthermore, no single ant seems to have any knowledge about the big picture—the main goals or objectives. The swarm relies on lots of interaction between individuals who all follow the rules. One of these rules is to stay close together. When individuals stay close together, they communicate and share a lot of information.

Different animals have different methods of interaction. For example, ants leave a trail of pheromones for other ants to follow. A key component of bee interaction is movement. When bees need to move their hive, scout bees go out in search of a suitable place to live. When they return, they each do a type of dance. The “happier” the bee is about the new location, the faster the dance is. In addition, the dance includes a code with directions to the new location. The excited dancers excite other scout bees. These bees then fly out to check. They come back, get close together, and dance with the other excited bees. The bees will not move until they are all “excited”, or in agreement about the best location. Once a large enough group of bees all agree, they convince the thousands of other bees. Then they all fly together to the new site.

Some scientists are applying the wisdom of animals to solve human problems. Thomas Seeley, a biologist at Cornell University, uses swarm intelligence in his meeting. Seeley doesn’t tell his staff what to do or make all decisions. Instead, he asks his staff to identify all the possibilities, discuss their ideas, and then vote by ballot. Seeley wants his staff, like the bees, to focus on the group’s needs, not on the individual ideas. “It gives a group time to let the best idea emerge and win.” Seeley says that running meetings using swarm intelligence ideas can lead to better decisions. It can also reduce conflict among the staff.

In nature, animals use swarm intelligence for survival. For these animals, working together is a matter of life or death. For humans, there is much to learn from swarm intelligence to make our lives more efficient.

【推荐1】“Buzz. Buzz. The queen is that way,” said one honey bee to another. “Pass it on.” Honey bees can’t speak, of course, but scientists have found that the insects combine teamwork and chemicals to relay the queen’s location to the rest of the community, revealing an extraordinary means of long distance, mass communication.

Individual honey bees communicate with the chemical called pheromones, which scientists have long known. But just how these individual signals work together to gather tens of thousands of bees around a queen has remained a mystery.

In the new study, Dieu My Nguyen, a scientist at the University of Colorado, and his colleagues focused on a colony of western honey bees, the most common honey bee species in the world. The researchers set up a flat, pizza box–size arena with a transparent ceiling, in which the bees could walk around, but not fly. They put the queen bee into a cage on one side and released the worker honey bees on the other. The scientists then recorded the insects’ movements from above with a camera and an AI software tracking bees that were releasing pheromones.

Once the first worker honey bees located the queen, they began to gather chains of evenly spaced bees that extended outward from the queen, with each bee sending out pheromones to its neighbor down the line. The findings are the first direct observations of this collective communication in honey bees. Like smelly bread crumbs, the branching communication lines guided far-off honey bees back to the queen’s location — a feat no single bee could achieve alone.

Mark Carroll, an insect biologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, cautions that the work was done in a closed, practically 2D space. In reality, he notes, honey bee colonies are 3D, and they often have to fight with elements like wind and rain, which make communicating more complicated. “The next step will be to observe natural honey bee swarms and see if they’re actually doing this.” he says.

【推荐1】More than half the world’s population will be regarded as obese by 2035 if action is not taken: the World Obesity Federation warns. Obese is a medical term used to describe a person with an excess of body fat.

Its report says, more than four billion people will be affected with rates rising fastest among both boys and girls. The rates are expected to double from 2020 levels among them. The report predicts the cost of obesity will be up to more than $4 trillion (£ 3. 3 trillion) every year by 2035.

The report also stresses that low-or middle-income countries in Africa and Asia are expected to see the greatest rises. The first reason lies in that people there prefer to eat highly processed foods. In the second place, they are likely to sit too long. Thirdly, in those countries, there are fewer policies to control food supply and marketing. Last but not the least, people there are short of healthcare services to help in weight management and health education.

The president of the federation, Louise Baur, described the report’s findings as a clear warning to countries to act now. If they don’t take any actionthey will be faced with endless bad effects in the future. Baur said that governments and policymakers around the world need to do all they can to avoid passing health, social, and economic costs on to the younger generation. They should find out what are the root causes of obesity.

The data published in the report will be presented to the UN on Monday