Science
How Acacia Trees Prevent Elephant Attacks: With Armies of Ants
It’s a classic David and Goliath story, except there are 90,000 Davids and they all have stings. On the African plains, the whistling-thorn...
Kitchen secrets of Ancient Mariner Cooks
The most reliable ships in the world in the 14th and early 15th century, and by far the biggest, were the Chinese junks.
An...
How Whales Become Entangled
This illustration shows how fishing lines attached to traps and buoys on the ocean floor present a potentially deadly hazard to North Atlantic...
Cone Snail Venom Could Inspire Fast-Acting Insulin For Diabetes
Forget slow and steady. For the cone snail, it’s fast-acting chemistry that wins the race. Researchers have now shed light on the structure...
Beachcomber for a day
One of the chief delights of living on the whale coast is that there is always an excuse to go rambling along the...
Marine Tourism
Elusive leopard kill 33 penguins at Stony Point
Betties Bays’ elusive but well-loved leopard created havoc at the African penguin colony at Stony Point last week. Social media buzzed with excitement...
Beached dead whales can alter the ocean’s carbon footprint
Decades of whaling and fishing for the largest species have altered the ability of oceans to store and sequester carbon.
An individual whale contains...
Billions of Blue Jellyfish Wash Up on American Beaches during 2015
The animals known as "by-the-wind sailors" stay out on the open ocean—until the winds change
In recent weeks, about a billion jellyfish-like "purple sailors"...
What is the smell of rain?
You can tell when rain is coming just by the smell
The word for it is “petrichor.” It’s the name of an oil that’s...
Shipwrecked French Champagne – Revealing tastes from the past
Scientists say that 170-year old champagne found on a shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea actually tasted pretty good. The French...
