Scientific Investigation

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer  Not all was bad news. Some birds benefited from human armed conflict taken place in the past century. Also, they were used to develop important roles in wars such as communication of military and mental health of patients.  War is hell on earth: no other description better fits the absolute horror of war.  Nevertheless, in his book, Birds and the War, Scottish ornithologist Hugh S. Gladstone (1877-1949) explained that some bird species actually benefit from human armed conflict. In the sea, gulls swarm over fish killed by explosions, and battlefield debris are used by birds […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer  Hidden on top of a hill in Syria, tiny beings have lived for a thousand years, endowed -like the Christian knights who in July 1188 confronted there the troops of Sultan Saladin- with armor, digestive systems, muscles and brains. And their fight against a huge and merciless enemy lasts to this day. This is how the ruins of the Castle or Fortress of Saladin in Syria now look. But in the 12th century, the fortress looked very different, because there a bloody fight took place between the Christian knights who occupied it, and […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer  Windswept in the middle of a forgotten valley in North Africa, an ancient city bears the curious name of Volubilis. Volubilis exists thanks to a love story that almost everyone has heard of, that of Antony and Cleopatra. And its ruins are home to something that should not be there: a snail that seems to be made of marble. In 45 BC the troops of Julius Caesar defeated the Numidian king Juba I. Juba committed suicide in Tunisia, but Julius Caesar took his young son to Rome, a little boy who would be […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer  The reenactments of naval battles, gladiator fights, and hunting of wild animals are not the only dramas in the Roman Colosseum. Ignored by tourists and scientists alike, the coliseum snails have been fighting their own battles for thousands of years. Almost no one notices the small snails that are attached to the ancient walls of the Roman Colosseum and other historical monuments of the Eternal City. They are equally ignored by tourists and biologists. But the Polish zoologist Stefan Witold Alexandrowicz did notice, and he has left us a nice article on the […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer  200 years ago, an Estonian zoologist described a strange worm that lived on the skin of freshwater snails. No one knew what it was doing there, and after 200 years, the answer is that it may be a protector of the snail, that it may be a parasite, or maybe both. It is important to me because I got to know these worms in person when I did my first scientific study almost four decades ago. They looked like dozens of liquid crystal tentacles protruding from the snail. When Estonian zoologist Karl von […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer  Thanks to the fact that a few survived the great slaughter of the 19th century, today we can see herds of bison majestically crossing a few streams in North America. Ecologist Dwayne W. Meadows wondered what effect the trampling of thousands of hooves can have on snails and other small animals that live in these streams. And he not only asked, but went to find out on an island in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. Fuente: Wikimedia. Antelope Island, in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, is a nature reserve with all the wildlife we associate […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer  Isolated from the world for 80 million years, New Zealand’s giant carnivorous snails never developed resistance to desiccation and lack jaws. Some are in danger of extinction, and desperate measures like spraying poison on their enemies have not worked. New Zealand giant snails of the genus Powelliphanta come from a very ancient group, present on the Gondwana supercontinent when the first dinosaurs appeared, but the fact that this particular genus is found only in New Zealand suggests that it evolved less than 80 million years ago, when the archipelago was separated from adjacent lands. For […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer  I can imagine how, over 150 years ago, Emma Darwin showed her usual patience and love when her husband Charles began to submerge land snails in seawater. What was Charles trying to do? Actually, he was trying to solve one of the great mysteries of nature, how the slow and fragile land snails appear in the midst of the deadliest deserts, and on distant islands that were never connected to a continent. Charles Lyell, whose geology book was instrumental in Darwin discovering how species evolve, suggested that land snails could only have reached […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer Some snails appear mysteriously in temporary ponds so small that they would not be enough to fill a large pot. How do they get there? Do all of them die when the pond dries up? And, in that case, how does the species survive? In order to understand the life of the pond snails that appear mysteriously all over the world, even in rain pools, I chose Aplexa hypnorum as an example, a typical snail of that group for which there is a nice study, done by malacologists Cornelis den Hartog and L. de Wolf, […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer  The cloud forest of Costa Rica is home to an extraordinary snail, with a behavior sometimes reminiscent of bats, sometimes of domestic cats. Its survival seems likely thanks to the hydroelectric production program of Costa Rica, one of the world’s most advanced countries in carbon neutrality. Snails do not have dry skin to protect them from dehydration, and they need abundant water to produce the jelly-like substance on which they glide. They do everything to conserve humidity: their shells are usually light-colored and therefore reflect more heat; in addition, shells prevent the passage […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer  In his 1897 novel Dracula, Bram Stoker used Transylvanian nature as background, but besides the wolves, he did not turn animals into characters for his novel. This led me to inquire about what kind of land snails inhabit the Carpathian forest that so much scared Jonathan Harker in the land of Vlad Dracula.  In Dracula, Bram Stoker commented that the Transylvanian landscape was among the last unknown regions left in Europe; but, luckily, if you want to learn about Transylvanian land snails, there is a recent study about the snails of Cheile Vârghișului, one of […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer 75 million years ago, huge herds of Maiasaura dinosaurs crossed the plains of Montana in the company of ankylosaurs, brachiceratops, gorgosaurs and … tiny snails. Reconstruction of Maiasaura nest and young; Maiasaura (the “good mother dinosaur”) is thought to be the dinosaur that produced the dung in which many snails were preserved. Fuente: Keratops Yuta. 75 million years ago, herds of thousands of herbivorous dinosaurs (Maiasaura peeblesorum) crossed the plains of Montana in the United States. The only similar scene that we can see today is the large herds of wildebeest (Connochaetes spp.) that cross parts of Africa. Just as […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer  In the Middle Ages, vassals cut down the vast forests than once ruled Europe,  and built stone castles, meant to be inhabited by ladies and defended by knights in armor; these people would inspire the legends and fairy tales that still entertain our childhood. If there was no hill, the castle was built on the plains, but it was surrounded by moats and drawbridges. Centuries passed and cannons rendered the stone walls useless, so most of the castles were abandoned and slowly they have been falling apart, filling the soil with calcium carbonate […]

Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer  If we could visit the earth more than 400 million years ago, to see the first insect, ancestor of all the millions of species of insects that live today, what would it be like? How did that first insect behave? What did it eat and who were its enemies? Incredible as it may seem, we can answer all this and even more: DNA analysis indicates that today there is an animal that profoundly resembles that first insect, and you can see it with your own eyes! Devonian microlandscape: the earth 400 million years ago. […]