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Riverside Walk Trail

We went on a two mile hike, Riverside Walk.It starts by going down a paved stairway into a canyon. We saw an "amateur arch," an arch which hadn't yet been fully formed. It was part of a hanging garden, which was surprisingly lush for the desert. We also saw a family of deer. They were eating and licking a rock for the salt. Later on the family came out and walked alongside the trail for a while, then went back to the woods. There are nice views of the Virgin River alongside the walk, and some towering rocks leading to the walls of this canyon. The trail ends where the river takes up the whole of the canyon floor, but you can still go on to a place called The Narrows. This is a less populated hike, as there is barely a trail, but it is still one of Zion's top attractions.

Weeping Wall, Zion Nat'l Park    

    Weeping Wall (or Weeping Rock) is a short, paved hike, only 0.5 miles roundtrip. It goes up to a wall where water drips down. The water is 2000-4000 years old, as it has to seep down through sedimentary layers of shale. The water still drips quickly, despite that. We chose people where our water came from (Mikaela was the Egyptian pharaoh, Khufu, and I was Julius Caesar [I said he splashed Augustus with it].)

When you look at the sky on most days, you'll see a few clouds slowly drifting past, pushed by the wind. You might see the shape of a camel in one and a flower in another. You probably already know why clouds exist: water evaporates in the sunlight and rises into the sky, where it again forms tiny water droplets. When the droplets are too large to stay in the air, they fall to the ground as rain and the cycle begins again. But did you ever wonder why clouds are white, and why they become gray during a storm?

Katrianna wrote about why the sky is blue in a previous article, which explained how light is made up of many different colors. White light is a combination of all of the colors. Clouds are white because the water droplets or ice crystals (at a certain altitude, the water freezes to become ice) reflect all of the colors of light in a process called Mie scattering. (All of the colors are reflected in the same way, so they combine to become white light.)

Clouds are dark when they are so thick that the sunlight is blocked by the moisture. When you look down on dark clouds through an airplane window, the clouds will always look bright white. This is because the water or ice on the surface of the cloud is still reflecting the light. Thus, every cloud will have a silver lining -- if you view it from an airplane!

The BP oil spill threatens hundreds of different species, from crabs to dolphins to pelicans. However, the five species of sea turtles living in the Gulf of Mexico -- leatherback, hawksbill, green, loggerhead and Kemp's Ridley -- all of which were endangered or threatened before the BP oil spill, may be hit the worst. 200 dead turtles have been found along the Mississippi coast alone. The Kemp's Ridley sea turtle, which was critically endangered and the rarest sea turtle before this disaster, may have the hardest time surviving. As well as being hunted (in parts of Mexico, they are eaten and used for leather in making boots), they are susceptible to becoming entangled in shrimp-catching nets. But the oil spill has introduced many more threats that the turtles do not know exist and will have an even harder time avoiding.

Right now, the adult turtles are coming ashore to lay their eggs. The beaches on which they lay their eggs are now covered in oil, which is not good for the hatchlings. If the eggshells, which are soft and about the size of ping-pong balls, make contact with the oil, they weaken and there is less of a chance that the turtles will hatch. Even if they do, the hatchlings may be deformed. Those that live will have to cross the polluted beaches to get to the sea and then swim through the oil in the gulf waters. The Kemp's Ridley hatchlings are leaving their nesting grounds in Mexico to swim into the most contaminated part of the gulf, where their instinct to hide and eat amongst clumps of floating vegetation is leading them to clots of oil and polluted seaweed. Their instincts, which come from living in the ocean for over 100 million years, have taught them how to avoid predators like sharks but have not taught them how to cope with exploding oil wells.

No matter how old they are (many sea turtles live for 30 years), if a turtle is exposed to the oil for 4 days, their skin will peel off in sheets, a condition which lasts even after they have been cleaned and treated. The toxic chemicals cause diseases and damage to their livers, kidneys, and brains that might lead to the deaths of many of these animals. The oil also damages their chemoreceptors, which control their senses, making them unable to find prey, to know where their habitat is, or to understand movement. Because they moved farther inshore in their attempts to avoid the oil, they were eating fishing bait and consuming hooks. In June, 583 sea turtles were found in the contaminated area. 447 of these were already dead or died soon after they were discovered, and only 136 were taken to rescue centers. Worst of all, when BP tried setting some of the oil on fire, hundreds or possibly thousands of sea turtles were burnt and killed.

At least some efforts are being made to save the sea turtles. A qualified biologist will be aboard every boat involved in burning the oil to remove the turtles from the area. And 70,000 eggs from the different species of sea turtles are being carefully dug up from their burrows in the sand, because it is difficult to move or disturb the eggs without harming the embryos, and taken to a climate-controlled hangar at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After they hatch -- if the oil doesn't flow around Florida to ruin the plan -- the turtles will be released in the clean waters of the Atlantic.

For thirty years before the spill, scientists, environmentalists, and volunteers have been trying to save sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico. Their programs were working. For my sixth birthday, we drove to a Kemp's Ridley sea turtle hatchery in Galveston, Texas, the only one in the United States. Inside a rather small shack, we saw hatchlings, one-year-olds, two-year-olds, and huge three-year-olds in tubs being fed. It was not very impressive, but they were saving the turtles. We learned about the dangers faced by Kemp's Ridley and Leatherback sea turtles back then and today. People dumping garbage into the oceans is not a new issue, as is the fact that turtles choke on plastic squids used by fishermen to attract animals. If these turtles were in such danger before, now conservation is even more vital in these animals' survival.

Hopefully the conservation efforts will work and the turtles will continue to live healthily in clean water, but all of the other animals that live in the gulf face similar problems. This still leaking spill, which is even worse than the Exxon spill, is just another reminder that we need to work on green energy. We cannot continue to drill for oil and risk losing millions of animals as well as our own safety and the state of our world. The stories of these turtles and of all of the other, less well-known animals that are in danger need to prompt immediate action that will save our planet before it is too late.

In Germany, an octopus is given two flags and a ball: it places the ball on whichever side’s flag it thinks will win the upcoming World Cup game. This time, it picked Spain instead of Germany in the semifinals by dropping tokens into square containers.  Paul the octopus was right again.

Octopuses are smarter than you think. They can also be smaller than you’d expect. In an aquarium, an octopus living in its own enclosure was stealing crabs from a neighboring tank, although the scientists could not figure out how. So they gave it a jungle gym of tubes which were coin-size in diameter and discovered the reason. Watch here.

A common trick that octopuses are capable of is opening jars. They press their body against the lid, and grip the sides with their tentacles. The following shows an octopus performing the feat:

So next time you have a hard time opening a jar, ask an octopus to lend a tentacle. 

The passenger pigeon was the most common bird in North America. Mile-long flocks numbered into the billions, making farmers view the birds as pests. Explorers were amazed by the multitudes, writing that the flocks took hours to pass overhead and that they were countless. No one expected them to go extinct.

No one expected the Rocky Mountain locust, another pest, to go extinct, either. While the passenger pigeons were the second-most common animal in the whole world, these arthropods were the most common. In 1875, a swarm was spotted estimated to be 198,000 square miles -- larger than the entire state of California! That alone would have contained 12 and a half trillion insects, and weighed more than 27 tons!

Yet, less than thirty years after this sighting, the species was extinct. How? These locusts swarmed about for periods, then returned to sandy riverbeds, their natural breeding grounds. When they were in the riverbeds, burrowing under to lay their eggs, they were endangered by farmers plowing the ground above them to plant crops. Records state that farmers brought up thousands of egg cases while tilling their fields. Their egg cases discovered and their breeding grounds destroyed, these insects eventually went extinct. The last locust in the wild was found in Canada in 1902. North America is the only settled continent without a major species of locust.

Like the locusts, the passenger pigeons also vanished. In 1914, the last passenger pigeon, Martha (named after Martha Washington), died, and, unlike the ivory billed woodpecker, which is critically endangered today when it had been believed extinct for years, no other passenger pigeon has ever been found.

There are many causes for this entirely preventable extinction. For sport, hunters went out and slaughtered thousands of them. Shockingly, people killed passenger pigeons in many cruel ways. Some hunters caught a bird, sewed its eyes shut using a needle and thread, and tied it to a stool. As the bird attempted to land, it would flutter its wings, thus attracting the attention of other birds flying overhead. When the flocks landed near the blind bird, the other birds were trapped in nets and the hunters would crush them. Secondly, trees where pigeons made their nests were set on fire, and the smoke drove the birds from their nests. Another means of capturing these birds was to feed them grain soaked in alcohol, which made them easier to catch.

Loss of habitat and introduced diseases were also factors in their disappearance, as was the fact that they were eaten extensively in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1805, in New York City, a pair of pigeons could be bought for two cents. As a result, some slaves and servants never tasted any meat but pigeon. Even when there was only one large flock (of 250,000 birds) left, the hunters, who knew what was happening, did not spare it.

After people realized -- and cared -- that the birds were going extinct in the wild, there was no way to reintroduce them. Flocks of passenger pigeons could only mate if gathered in large numbers; there were not enough pigeons left to make even one of the enormous flocks. For the same reason, captive breeding centers also failed. Mourning doves are the closest relatives of the passenger pigeons. Scientists may someday use them to clone the passenger pigeon. This is similar to how scientists are trying to bring the quagga, which was similar to the zebra, back from extinction.

The quagga's face and neck looked like a zebra's, but the stripes faded along the back to a plain brown. Because of these unusual markings, it was hunted for its skin. It was also valued for its meat and, like the locusts and the pigeons, farmers thought of it as a nuisance. Now, people regret that they killed off this harmless horse, and are trying to breed horses that look more and more like the quagga once was.

It is important to remember the past so that we do not repeat it. Yet any kind of reintroduction, for any species, will not change the fact that their dying out was a disaster that could have been easily avoided... and wasn't.

Besides the obvious issues that global warming introduces, like the melting of the polar icecaps or the rising ocean levels, issues affecting smaller areas are still disastrous. They are determining the future of our everyday lives and the land set aside permanently as national parks. According to a recent National Geographic news article, redwood trees, the world's tallest living things, may go extinct. We might have seen them just in time.

When we were staying in CA, sometimes we would be driving in at night. We lived about 45 minutes away from the beach, so the fog would drift in over the road and make it nearly impossible to see. We would cross over Golden Gate Bridge and look down at the gently rolling mists. While they made it harder to drive, they were also essential to the survival of these botanical giants.

The clouds kept the conifers moist, at exactly the climate they required. A hundred years ago, there was no threat from global warming. A university study said that there has been a 33 percent reduction in the amount of coastal fog produced today when compared to the data from a century ago.

The redwoods only live in the humid areas near the coast, where the fog keeps them watered. Because they have adapted to this ecosystem, they cannot live long in a drought by shutting down their systems to conserve water, as other desert plants do. This means that if there is nothing that can be done, the redwoods may dry out and wither. Some other species of tree, however, can adjust to living with less fog by not growing as quickly as they do in years when water is plentiful.

We went to Humboldt State Park on a mostly overcast, cold day. Logging had thinned many of the forests; the largest existing piece of hewn redwood, made into one person's RV, is on display at the park's visitor center. Early environmentalists had preserved large groves, which have been turned into state parks. To this day, the groves bear names like "Founders Grove," or "Rockefeller's Grove," after these early conservationists.

The tallest tree blew over in a storm a few years before and became a "nurse log." Nurse logs are decaying trees that provide the necessary nutrients for other plants to grow. Saplings, fungi, ferns, and lichen are common plants that sprout from the reddish-brown bark. Insects, like beetles and ants, live in the log's crevices. In places humid enough, these are also home to banana slugs and snails.

As well as being an impressive species themselves, these trees are essential to many other kinds of life. The terrible fact that they are in danger means that if they do not live, their ecosystem will be seriously disrupted. This issue is another reminder that the choices we make in our everyday lives do have consequences and therefore we need to decide to do everything in a manner that will not harm the planet. The fate of these giants is uncertain, the fate even of our planet is uncertain, and it's our actions that will determine it.

Every kind of baby animal has a particular name. Some of them make sense -- a baby goose is called a gosling -- and some don't -- since when was calling a baby kangaroo a joey logical? See if you can pair each species of animal to its particular name!


HINT: Many species of baby animals are referred to as the same thing: for instance, a baby cow and a baby rhinoceros are both called calves. So while some of the following animals can be called the same thing, no two animals can be connected to the same name.

NOTE: This image may be printed for educational purposes, but cannot be sold or printed for commercial reasons. © Mikaela Sarkar 2010

   Penguins live in the wild on every continent in the Southern Hemisphere. But since they naturally live near cold ocean currents, the only penguins to be seen in the North are in zoos.

    Four species of penguin are endangered, but some of the others might be if we don't stop global warming and the melting of their ice shelves. There are 17 penguin species:

Emperor Penguin
Gentoo Penguin
Adelie Penguin
Chinstrap Penguin
King Penguin
Royal Penguin
Macaroni Penguin
Rockhopper Penguin (endangered)
Little Penguin
Fiordland Penguin
Snares Island Penguin
Erect-Crested Penguin (endangered)
Yellow-Eyed Penguin (endangered)
African Penguin
Malleganic Penguin
Humbolt Penguin
Galapagos Penguin (endangered)

   

There is a movie about Emperor Penguins named March Of The Penguins. It is about how they breed. They have to march 70 miles to the Adelie coast. Then, (if the female gets a mate), she lays a single egg, taking almost all of her energy. She then goes to sea to eat again, leaving the male on the ice to guard the egg. The egg has just hatched when the female comes back, and the male goes to sea. The penguins huddle in "turtles" to keep warm.

    Penguins eat fish, squid and krill, and are preyed upon by leopard seals and giant petrels. They have been noted to use sign language to communicate with each other. They have glands which get filled with salt, and they crash their beaks against a boulder to empty them (largely because they drink saline water). Emperor Penguins live 20 years. They first evolved during the Eocene epoch.

    Recently a man was lucky enough to capture an all-black penguin on film at National Geographic.

Although they have several differences, moths and butterflies are surprisingly similar.