The hair shed by cats is very useful. It may be the key to catching the murderer! | Natural Trumpet

Welcome to the 46th issue of the Nature Trumpet column. In the past half month, we have collected the following natural news and research worth reading:

1) When you are sad, find a puppy. The puppy will comfort you.

2) The hair shed by cats is very useful. It may be used to catch the murderer

3) Fake spider webs for Halloween kill wildlife

4) There are no difficult storms, only brave birds

5) The disappearance of Arctic sea ice has led to the death of a large number of gray whales

6) Mermaid mummy is actually a monkey-fish hybrid

When you are sad, look for a puppy

When you are sad, just give the dog a hug!

A new study found that dog hugs can comfort people of all genders equally . The researchers found 15 professionally trained therapy dogs and provided free dog petting services to 168 experimental participants (college students of different races). Each dog stayed with 3 to 4 college students for 20 minutes at a time; the dog trainer would also accompany the dog, introduce the identity of the human to the dog, and guide the college students to pet the dog in a friendly manner.

Therapy dogs are trained to be particularly peaceful and docile, and can get along well with humans | Laliv g / Wikimedia Commons

The results showed that no matter female, male, or non-binary participants, they felt happier and relieved stress, homesickness, and loneliness after just 20 minutes of dog petting . The researchers believe that schools can provide students with such dog therapy activities to maintain everyone's mental health.

Even the hospital bed has puppy power! | Laliv g / Wikimedia Commons

In fact, the power of puppies is greater than you think - you don't even need to touch a real puppy to get happiness from it. Previous research has shown that even a short interaction with a puppy online is enough to reduce people's stress . So if you don't have a dog, it doesn't matter if your friend has a dog. If you are sad, just make a video with your friend's dog, or go online to watch some puppy videos and let the power of puppies heal you!

Cat Catching Criminals

Don’t be annoyed by your cat’s constant shedding. You may not think that cat hair can be a big help in catching criminals !

In murder cases, the murderer is often careful to be fully armed and not leave any fingerprints or hair at the scene. But the cat owners here know that it is easy to have no hair on your clothes, but it is impossible to have no cat hair. In a previous murder case, the murderer left cat hair at the scene . Genetic experts analyzed the cat hair and found a rare mitochondrial DNA mutation in it - and one of the suspects' cats happened to have this mutation, which was very helpful in identifying the murderer.

Cat: My fur is everywhere I go! | Pasi Mammela / Wikimedia Commons

It is not easy to solve a case with cat hair. The DNA in cells exists in the nucleus and mitochondria. The hair that a cat sheds has no roots, so there is very little nuclear DNA that can be analyzed. Only mitochondrial DNA can provide clues (mitochondria come from the mother, and its DNA can be used to identify maternal relatives). In the past, the technology was relatively backward and could only detect some DNA fragments. In the previous case, if the cat's own DNA was not special enough, the police would be helpless .

Cat hair under an electron microscope | Gerry Danilatos / Wikimedia Commons

Recently, scientists have discovered a more powerful and sensitive method that can detect the entire mitochondrial genome in cat hair - that is, from just a single strand of cat hair, it is possible to identify each cat. They have already tested this method in a missing cat case, matching the DNA from the remains of the missing mother cat with the hair DNA of her still-living male offspring. Perhaps this technology can also be used by the police in the future to solve cases.

Halloween spider web

The fake spider webs in Halloween decorations may not be scary to many people, but they are scary enough to look realistic to wild animals.

Halloween decoration spider web | Monique Harmer / NCA NewsWire

They may not be made of the same ingredients as real spider webs, but they are very strong and sticky, and are even more effective at trapping animals than real spider webs . Every Halloween, wildlife rescuers in the United States begin to work overtime to rescue animals trapped in fake spider webs - most of the victims are birds, but there are also squirrels, opossums and even deer.

Hummingbird entangled in fake spider web | WildCare

Trapped animals that happen to be found still have a chance of survival, but countless animals may die silently of hunger or die from injuries while struggling. Fake spider webs are not the only culprits, more common light strips and ribbons are equally scary to animals. If you want to use fake spider webs and light strips for decoration, try not to leave them outdoors, or check them from time to time to prevent passing animals from getting entangled. If you really find entangled birds, it is best to gently cut the web and then slowly untie it; do not pull them out of the web directly to avoid tearing their legs or wings.

Owl trapped in fake spider web | WildCare

There is actually a better solution - don't use such decorations. Even if these decorations do not entrap innocent animals, they will also cause long-term harm to the environment as disposable plastics , indirectly harming us and other animals living on the earth.

Brave Seabird

A brave seabird flew more than 1,000 kilometers in a typhoon - although the more likely scenario is that it did not escape the typhoon and was forced to fly more than 1,000 kilometers .

White-fronted Shearwater, a pelagic seabird | Kanachoro / Wikimedia Commons

In a newly published study, scientists fitted 14 white-fronted shearwaters with GPS trackers to study the homing behavior of seabirds. Unexpectedly, a powerful typhoon hit, and the GPS happened to record what the white-fronted shearwaters encountered in extreme storm conditions.

Most white-fronted shearwaters found a place to hide from the storm, but one male white-fronted shearwater was particularly brave (miserable). The tracker showed that it turned five large circles in 11 hours, with a diameter of 50 to 80 kilometers, and was obviously being carried by the typhoon . Generally speaking, the flying altitude of white-fronted shearwaters over the sea is less than 100 meters, and the flying speed is only 10 to 60 kilometers per hour. However, this white-fronted shearwater in the typhoon soared to an altitude of 4,700 meters, with a speed of 90 to 170 kilometers per hour, and was even swept from the sea to the sky above the Japanese mainland.

The typhoon that swept away the seabirds was Faxai | National Institute of Communication and Technology

Pelagic seabirds have many ways to deal with strong winds at sea. Some will stay in the eye of the storm and enjoy the calm; some seabirds, such as the black-bellied frigatebird, will fly high into the sky and wait for the storm to pass below; and birds such as the brown pelican will return to land and wait for the storm to pass. As for the protagonist this time, scientists said they don’t know what this seabird was thinking . It may have wanted to escape but was swept away by the typhoon, or it may have thought it would be better to just lie down in the storm, go wherever it goes, and wait until the wind dies down before flying back.

A black-bellied frigatebird flies above a storm. Peterwchen / Wikimedia Commons

The Mystery of Gray Whale Deaths

Hundreds of gray whales are dying under mysterious circumstances, and now scientists have finally solved the case.

In 2019, more than 70 gray whales died in a six-month period and their bodies washed up on the shore. And this was just the beginning. Four years later, gray whale carcasses continued to appear on the beach. As of September this year, a total of 688 gray whales had died .

Dead Gray Whale | Justin Sullivan

Scientists have found that the cause of death of gray whales is related to the disappearance of Arctic sea ice . Gray whales come to lagoons near Mexico every winter to spend the winter and breed, and migrate to the Arctic in summer to find food. The bottom of the Arctic sea ice is algae, which sinks to the bottom of the sea and rots, and can be used as food to feed seabed creatures, including crustaceans on the gray whales' diet . When the sea ice becomes less, the food for crustaceans will also become less; the resulting ocean currents also carry away the seabed sediments on which they depend for survival - eventually the gray whales will have nothing to eat.

Melting Arctic sea ice | Jeremy Potter / NOAA

Too little or too much sea ice affects gray whales. If the sea ice disappears, they will not be able to eat enough; if there is too much sea ice and the ice cover is too high, it will block their passage to the Bering Sea and the Chukchi Sea in summer, and they will not be able to reach their foraging areas. In such years, the gray whale population will be greatly reduced. In the past 50 years, there have been two similar incidents : one was from 1987 to 1989, when at least 700 gray whales died; the second was from 1999 to 2000, when 651 gray whales died.

Faced with the increasingly warming Arctic Ocean, although scientists have found the cause of gray whale deaths, they have no way of knowing how long the ongoing gray whale deaths will continue or whether they will stop .

Mermaid Mummy

A mysterious "mermaid" mummy is actually made up of monkeys, fish and lizards.

The mummy has been around since the mid-19th century, bought in Japan by a U.S. Navy officer and donated in 1906. Researchers performed X-rays and CT scans on the mummy and found that its head and half of its torso belonged to a monkey , the lower body was from a fish with its head cut off , and the hands were probably the claws of a Komodo dragon .

The monkey head, fish body and lizard claws were put together by a pair of wooden sticks . Scans show that one stick went through the head and tail, and the other was in the shoulder blade. Now, researchers are using the scans to build a model of the mummy and asking zoos and aquariums to help determine what species the put-together animals are.

The "mermaid" mummy after scanning | Joseph Cress / Fiji Mermaid Project

Various "mermaid" and "alien" mummies pop up from time to time to shock the public, but in fact most of them are man-made . In 2022, a "mermaid" mummy with scales on its body was found in a temple in Japan. A note was attached to the mummy, claiming that it was caught in a fishing net in the Pacific Ocean between 1736 and 1741. But the scan results showed that it was cotton, cloth and paper fixed with metal pins , covered with charcoal and sand, and glued with fish skin and mammal hair on the surface.

Another "mermaid" mummy appears in 2022 | Asahi Shimbun / YouTube

References

[1] https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/doi/10.1079/hai.2023.0037

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1872497323001199

[3] https://phys.org/news/2023-10-fake-halloween-spiderwebs-scaryto-wildlife.html

[4] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.4161

[5] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi1847

[6] https://www.livescience.com/human-behavior/conspiracies-paranormal/haunting-mermaid-mummy-from-japan-is-a-gruesome-monkey-fish-hybrid-with-dragon-claws-new-scans-reveal

Author: Cat Tun

Editor: Mai Mai

This article comes from GuokrNature (ID: GuokrNature)