Quirks & Quarks
with Bob McDonald

The Burmese python is native to Southern and Southeast Asia. It is a constrictor and one of the largest snakes in the world. Burmese pythons became popular pets in the United States decades ago. Since then, their release into the wild has created a huge ecological problem throughout Florida's Everglades National Park. In the rich Everglades the pythons bred like rabbits, and ate like wolves.  A new study by Dr. Michael Dorcas from the Department of Biology at Davidson College in North Carolina has revealed the extent of that problem for the first time.  The pythons' prey, mid-sized mammals and birds, seem to be crashing catastrophically. The raccoon population has decreased by 99%, opossums by 98% and the bobcat population is down 87%.  Rabbits and foxes have effectively disappeared. Several of the birds being preyed on by the python are already on the endangered list, and their fate is unknown. The overall ecological health of the Everglades is threatened because at present there is no way of controlling the Burmese python population.
          

The Little Ice Age put Europe in a deep freeze for hundreds of years, up until the early 19th century.  However, researchers have never agreed on the cause and the exact time of onset for this long cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.  New research by Dr. Gifford Miller, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, and his colleagues, may have solved the puzzle. They have dated recently exposed frozen plants from under retreating ice caps on Baffin Island. Those plants turn out to have been frozen in just as the Little Ice Age was starting. The abruptness of the cooling that froze them led to a scenario in which multiple volcanic eruptions at the end of the thirteenth century cooled the north, and triggered a feedback loop that kept things cold for half a millennium.      

The declines in seasonal Arctic sea ice has opened northern waters to killer whales or orcas, who have recently increased their range into areas where they were previously rare or unknown.  However, the hunting and dietary habits of orcas in the north are not well understood, so estimating the impact on other wildlife of this fearsome predator has been a challenge. Dr. Steven Ferguson, a marine biologist from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the University of Manitoba, enlisted the help of over 100 Inuit hunters and elders, whose knowledge of arctic ecosystems has been honed by generations of life on the land, sea and ice, to help fill in the picture of killer whale behaviour in the North. The Inuit described killer whales eating  ringed, harp, bearded and hooded seals, as well as other whales, including narwhal, bowhead and beluga. It is hoped that this combination of scientific knowledge and traditional observation can be a powerful tool in understanding changes in the Arctic.

Fruit flies can be levitated right off the floor of their container and kept weightless for weeks, right here on Earth. In a recent study, Dr. Richard Hill of the University of Nottingham and his colleagues used a superconducting magnet and a technique called diamagnetic levitation to create a controlled, weightless environment on Earth. They say the levitated flies behaved just like a group of fruit flies did when they were sent into space. This suggests their levitation technique could be used for long-term research on the effect of zero gravity on living organisms that might help prepare us for longer journeys in space.

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