GoKawiilHeatwave-driven sleepless nights are robbing people of a crucial aspect of health and recovery. Plus, dolphin calves learn hunting techniques from their mothers and how slavery is linked to health disparities in the United States today.
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This calf is one of the first dolphins to be spotted shelling off the coast of Queensland, Australia. The behaviour had only previously been observed in a small number of dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia. (University of the Sunshine Coast Australia)
Researchers have recorded what appears to be an Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) mother giving its calf a lesson in a hunting technique called shelling. The seldom-observed behaviour involves the dolphin catching a fish in an empty sea snail shell, lifting the shell out of the water and shaking it to drop the fish into its mouth. The team spotted an adult female surfacing with a shell containing a fish, and a calf lifting the same shell a few minutes later, which suggests that it was learning from watching its mother, they say.
Earth.com | 5 min read
Reference: Marine Mammal Science paper
Between 2010 and 2020, mortality rates for Black people were greater in US counties that relied heavily on slave labour in 1860 than those that had no slavery recorded at that time. Researchers also found that the more enslaved people there had been in a county, the greater the disparity between the modern mortality rates of Black and white people in those counties. Quantifying the link between slavery and modern health outcomes helps to reveal “the magnitude, the power, the strength of these historical events”, says social epidemiologist Zinzi Bailey.
Science | 6 min read
Reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper
Astrophysicists have found evidence that the Milky Way collided and merged with a dwarf galaxy around 12 billion years ago. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, the team found that the makeup of some globular clusters — groups of stars held tightly together by gravity — doesn’t match that of those that are thought to be native to the Milky Way or that arrived during a later merger with another dwarf galaxy known as the Gaia–Sausage–Enceladus. “We do not know how our house was built,” says astrophysicist and study co-author Davide Massari. But these findings point to “where the first significant batch of bricks came from”.
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