On #WorldWhaleDay, here are some fun facts about #WHALES that are sure to blow your mind away!

Fun facts: weather.com/en-IN/india/bi…

📸: NOAA

Thread👇
The earliest whales were land-dwelling!

Whales first marked their presence on Earth around 50 million years ago. In fact, last year, palaeontologists unearthed a 43-million-year-old fossil of a four-legged whale that walked on land and swam in oceans.

📸: Robert B
Dolphin is a type of whale!

Yes, you read it right. They belong to the class of toothed whales—those whales that have teeth and use them for hunting and feeding on their prey.
Whales are helping us fight the #ClimateCrisis!

Their iron-rich faeces create conditions for phytoplankton growth—the tiny plants that pull carbon from the atmosphere and produce oxygen.

Also, when whales die, the carbon becomes fuel for deep-sea ecosystems.
Humpback whales fast for several months.

While travelling long distances, these animals live off their fat reserve for 5-7.5 months of the year.

After returning to Antarctica from their tropical breeding grounds, they actively feed on krills for around 22 hours of the day!
Humpback whales and Bryde Whales trap their prey using a behaviour called bubble-net feeding.

They blow bubbles through their blowhole and encircle their prey. The prey is unable to overcome the bubble barrier and eventually fall prey to the trick.
A whale's tail is the key to identifying individuals.

Like human fingerprints or tiger stripes, each whale's tail is unique. The underside of a whale's fluke (its tail) may have scarring, notches, patterns and shapes that help to tell individuals apart.

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More from @weatherindia

Feb 19
Rekambo chimps in #Gabon’s forests are applying insects to each other’s wounds! 🐵🪰

Whether it's merely a gesture of goodwill or a medication practice, we don't know for sure yet.

Read: weather.com/en-IN/india/sc…

📸: Pixabay (Via Canva)

Thread. 👇 Image
Back in 2019, @alessandra_masc, a volunteer at the Loango Chimpanzee Project in #Gabon, recorded a female chimpanzee named Suzee and her son, Sia.

In the video, Suzee plucked an #insect from the underside of a leaf, squeezed it b/w her lips, & applied it to Sia's gash.
Such behaviour had never been observed or documented before!

In the year following the incident, researchers filmed all chimps with injuries. They gradually built up a record of 22 events, most of which involved individuals applying insects to their respective wounds.
Read 7 tweets
Nov 30, 2021
Here's a story of how an Australian man's tryst with a golden meteorite helped unearth a scientific treasure that was older than the earth!

Read: weather.com/en-IN/india/sp…

📸: Melbourne Museum

Thread👇
Six years ago, an Australian man named David Hole set out on a journey of finding gold.

Armed with a metal detector, he scoured to the Maryborough Regional Park in Melbourne—a famous Australian gold rush site of the 19th Century.
To his amazement and sheer luck, nestled between yellow clay, Mr Hole did find something.

Determined that he'd struck gold, he picked up a reddish rock that was only 39 cm long and 14 cm wide but weighed 17 kgs for some reason.
Read 11 tweets
Nov 29, 2021
While #Omicron has sparked global fears due to the possibility of higher transmissibility & resistance to certain vaccines, here's a quick look at the situation & actions that countries are taking to control the number of cases:

weather.com/en-IN/india/co…

📸: R Sharma / BCCL Patna
During the routine sequencing by Network for Genomics Surveillance, seventy-seven samples within #SouthAfrica's #Gauteng contained the variant.

The variant has a deletion within the S gene that helps in rapid identification.
This variant is not a 'daughter of the delta' or 'grandson of beta' but represents a whole new lineage of SARS-CoV-2, which the scientists termed B.1.1.529.

Thus it is unclear whether vaccines or booster doses may be effective against Omicron.
Read 7 tweets
Nov 25, 2021
Indian astronomers are on a winning streak! In two separate discoveries, researchers have found an exoplanet 1.4x the size of Jupiter and a rare class of radio stars hotter than the Sun!

Read: weather.com/en-IN/india/sp…

📸: ESO/M Kornmesser

Thread 👇
The first discovery of new exoplanet TOI 1789b was made by Prof A Chakraborty and team using the PARAS optical fibre-fed spectrograph—the first of its kind in India—on the 1.2-metre Telescope of PRL at its Mt Abu Observatory.
The exoplanet was found to have 70% of the mass and 1.4 times the size of Jupiter.

TOI 1789b orbits its Sun in just 3.2 days. Due to its closeness to its host star, the planet is intensely hot, with a surface temperature of up to 2000 K.
Read 8 tweets
Nov 24, 2021
Before Neil Armstrong set his foot on the Moon in 1969, NASA's Apollo 10 module named Snoopy was sent to snoop around the landing site.

Now, Peanuts’ iconic character Snoopy will again travel to the Moon—only this time, for real!

weather.com/en-IN/india/sc…

📸: Kenny Space Center
Peanuts comic’s iconic character Snoopy has been nominated to be the NASA mascot for mission Artemis I, which is up for launch in early 2022.

Like Apollo 10, Artemis I would serve as a test mission—the first one in a series of increasingly complex Artemis missions.

📸: NASA
During this flight, the uncrewed Orion spacecraft will launch on the most powerful rocket in the world, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and travel thousands of kilometres beyond the Moon—farther than any spacecraft built for humans has ever flown.
Read 8 tweets
Nov 24, 2021
Every winter, #DelhiPollution spikes drastically, partly due to the stubble burning activities in neighbouring states.

Now, @NASA has captured satellite images depicting stubble plumes gushing towards #Delhi.

Read: weather.com/en-IN/india/po…

📸: Lauren Dauphin/NASA Earth Obsv.
#StubbleBurning is the process whereby farmers get rid of crop residues by torching them up, so as to create space for a fresh batch of crops. This annual activity leads to the exacerbation of recurring seasonal pollution.

📸: Piyal Bhattacharjee/TOI, BCCL, Delhi
The images captured by @NASA underline the magnitude of the #StubbleBurning problem by depicting a massive ‘river of smoke’ originating from fires in Punjab, Haryana and even north Pakistan, stretching towards Delhi.

📸: Lauren Dauphin/NASA Earth Obsv.
Read 7 tweets

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