Nature inFocus #Photography Contest 2021—a competition that honours shutterbugs that document unique natural history & critical conservation issues—has announced its winners!
(📸: Kallol Mukherjee-Special Mention in Creative Nature category)
Thread! 👇
Animal Portraits category winner: City Lights
The photographer spent months documenting the behaviour of Arabian Red Fox families in Kuwait. Although scared at first, the foxes became more comfortable around his presence after frequent visits.
📸: Mohammad Murad
Wildscape & Animals in Habitat category winner: The Resting Monarch
A gigantic kaleidoscope of Monarch butterflies sits huddled together on Oyamel Fir trees in the overwintering grounds of central Mexico. The tree canopy provides a blanket effect.
The spores of a bracket fungus (Polypores) create a vast spectrum of colours when lit from an angle. The photographer came across the fungi as they grew on a dead tree log.
📸: Prathamesh Ghadekar
Young Photographer category winner: Hop Into The Limelight
A staunch believer that one doesn't have to travel far to photograph wildlife, Anagha captured this surreal image of a grasshopper resting on a flowering plant at the outskirts of #Bangalore.
📸: Anagha Mohan
Conservation Issues category winner: Evicted
A lone Gharial is portrayed against the backdrop of construction work, highlighting their changing habitats. Captured in Bihar, India.
📸: Mahisin Khan
Animal Behaviour category winner: Tag, You Are It!
When awakened from deep sleep by the alarm calls of a Malabar Giant Squirrel, this leopardess launched an attack, chased the squirrel around the tree trunk, and eventually captured it.
📸: Priyanka Rahut Mitra
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While searching for life in the Gulf of Mexico, researchers pulled out a new bizarre-looking species of isopod, whose head resembles the Darth Vader from Star Wars!
This new-found crustacean, named Bathonymus yucatanensis, has 14 legs and is around 26 cm long — approximately 25 times larger than its closest relative, the common woodlouse.
While these blonde creatures seem pretty scary, the "Vanilla Vaders" are, in fact, harmless to humans.
Their huge size is only due to deep-sea gigantism — a phenomenon wherein ocean dwellers grow bigger than their terrestrial relatives due to lack of sunlight.
This super-Earth is a rocky world, on which a year is equal to just 11 Earth days.
The short orbit is down to the red dwarfs being a lot smaller than the Sun that centres our solar system. But the smaller sizes also make their gravitational fields less expansive than the Sun's.
Therefore, Ross 508b revolves around its red dwarf at a distance of just 5 million km. Mercury, in comparison, is about 60 million km from the Sun.
The short distance between this super-Earth & its red dwarf begs the question: how could it possibly be habitable?
#Japan is making grand plans of creating interplanetary #trains and champagne flute-like glass habitats in its bid to send and host humans on the #Moon and #Mars!
An interplanetary transportation system dubbed the 'Hexatrack', which maintains a gravity of 1G during long-distance travel to mitigate the effects of prolonged exposure to low gravity, has been proposed by #Japanese researchers.
The #trains will also possess 'Hexacapsules', which are essentially hexagon-shaped capsules with a moving device in the middle.
In 2012, the almost-complete skeleton of a new kind of #dinosaur was found in the northern Patagonia region of #Argentina.
The dinosaur has been christened #Meraxes gigas. The generic epithet is an ode to a dragon in the #GameOfThrones series.
Standing at the height of 11 m (36 ft) and weighing roughly 4000 kgs, the #dinosaur sported several crests, bumps and horns on its skull, which lent it a menacing appearance.
But the highlight of the findings is that the dinosaur had teeny-tiny arms, just like the #Trex!
Dr Jose, along with an international research team from the US, UK and Australia, will be examining the Galactic Centre Cloud (GCC) — the central molecular zone of our Milky Way — in April 2023.
They have been allotted 27.3 hours over the access period of 12 months.