The Green Drake is a little mayfly that's only about 4.5 centimetres long, but favoured by trout, which love to gorge on it.
The flies spend several years in a riverbed, in a nymph stage.
When they emerge in late May or early June for action-filled lives lasting about a week, they do so in a gossamer blizzard, numbering in the tens of thousands.
Patrick O'Driscoll
USA TODAYTue, 20 Mar 2007 22:07 UTC
More bird species in the USA are ranging farther north and even staying there for the winter in a possible sign of adaptation to global warming, ornithologists and conservation groups say.
The stranding deaths of about 60 bottlenose dolphins on Texas beaches over the past three weeks has puzzled researchers and is a cause for concern during the calving season, a senior scientist said on Monday.
Clouded leopards found on Sumatra and Borneo represent a new species, research by genetic scientists and the conservation group WWF indicates.
A starving Amur tiger, one of the critically endangered species in Russia's taiga, killed a village dog in east Russia hit by a heavy snowstorm.
Snowstorms, the most powerful in more than 100 years, seized the Primorye Region near the Pacific in early March, creating high snow and making it difficult for tigers to hunt.
"A group of rescuers has been sent to the Yakovlevsky district to take the tiger back to taiga," an official of the Russian Natural Resources Ministry said, adding that the thick snow had forced the tiger to risk moving along cleared roads.
A helicopter is not necessarily a match for an angry moose. Instead of lying down after being shot with a tranquilizer dart, a moose charged a hovering helicopter used by a wildlife biologist, damaging the aircraft's tail rotor and forcing it to the ground.
Neither the pilot nor the biologist was injured, but the moose was maimed by the spinning rotor and had to be euthanized, wildlife officials said.
"It just had to be one of those quirky circumstance. Even dealing with bears and goats and moose and wolves, this is pretty unusual and truly a very unique situation," said Doug Larsen, regional supervisor for the Division of Wildlife Conservation.
On THE morning of December 26, 2004, villagers from Bang Koey in Thailand noticed something strange. Buffalo grazing on the beach lifted their heads, pricked their ears and looked out to sea, then stampeded to the top of a nearby hill. For the baffled villagers who chose to follow them, it was a live-saving move. Minutes later, the tsunami struck.
Since then, there have been hundreds of reports of animals seemingly foretelling catastrophe - not just minutes, but sometimes hours and even days before it occurred. These include tales of bizarre behaviour by wild beasts including elephants, antelopes, bats, rats and flamingos, plus stories of dogs refusing to go for their usual morning walk.
Could these creatures have sensed the massive earthquake that triggered the 2004 tsunami? It is an outlandish assertion, given that seismologists have so far failed to come up with any sign that a quake is imminent. Yet, for the same reason, the possibility animals might hold the answer cannot be ignored. After all, an advance warning system could save thousands or even millions of human lives.
ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
NY TimesTue, 27 Feb 2007 09:21 UTC
VISALIA - David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.
In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation's most profitable.
Comment: While we cannot yet say what might be behind this strange phenomenon, there are two suspects in view: EM waves in the atmosphere - either natural or artificial - or some other kind of disruptive frequency such as cell-phone towers.
It would be an event of the utmost irony if our civilization's mad rush to have the latest gadgets brought the whole kit and kaboodle to its knees via starvation.
Without a trace, something is causing bees to vanish by the thousands. But a new task force hopes to finger the culprit and save the valuable crops that rely on the insects.
Pennsylvania beekeeper Dave Hackenberg was the first beekeeper to report to bee researchers what's become known as colony collapse disorder (CCD).
In October Hackenberg had delivered honeybees to a Florida farm to pollinate crops. The bees typically return to their boxed hives when their work is done. But this time was different.
"I came to pick up 400 bee colonies and the bees had just flat-out disappeared," Hackenberg said. "There were no dead bees, no bees on the ground, just empty boxes."
"In almost 50 years as a beekeeper, I've never seen anything like it."
CCD has spread throughout 24 states and ruined hundreds of thousands of bee colonies.
Comment: While we cannot yet say what might be behind this strange phenomenon, there are two suspects in view: EM waves in the atmosphere - either natural or artificial - or some other kind of disruptive frequency such as cell-phone towers.
It would be an event of the utmost irony if our civilization's mad rush to have the latest gadgets brought the whole kit and kaboodle to its knees via starvation.