No one really knows what to do about the 1.5 million feral hogs that run rampant across the state of Texas, destroying crops, with few local predators to keep them in check.
Some hunters have taken, in recent years, to so-called "pork choppers"—really just ordinary helicopters—and to target hogs from the air, despite expert warnings that the effectiveness of the technique is limited at best. Not to mention that the hogs appear to have learned to run from the sound of helicopter rotors.
Other solutions, such as trapping, are similarly inadequate, which helped lead two state legislators to propose legislation that would allow the shooting of hogs from balloons, which are quieter and more stable than pork choppers. The bill passed the Texas House of Representatives on Tuesday with no opposition. It is now headed to the Texas Senate, where its prospects are uncertain.
The problem, though, as the Houston Chronicle explained, might be that, "operators can't steer a balloon like a helicopter pilot can direct a chopper," meaning that "balloons used in a hog hunt wouldn't be able to pursue the animals running across the countryside to escape being shot."
It seems the hogs will continue to breed to their heart's content in the Texas wilderness, unaware that while they might lose a lot of little battles, they're still winning the war.
If you're a crab and want to keep predators at bay in Bodega Bay, California, the strategy is to dress up to blend in—some algae, a sponge or two, maybe even an anemone. KQED, San Francisco's PBS affiliate, takes us underwater with this video of decorator crabs picking out the perfect bits of camouflage to help them avoid hungry fish and octopuses.
Decorator crabs, which are found all over the world, have special hooks on their upper shells that work a bit like Velcro and keep their disguises attached. Some crabs use aquatic mosses and sponges to disappear among rocks, while others get a little craftier. A few species stick stinging anemones on their backs—a perfect combination of offense and defense—while others choose toxic algae and sponges. While some disguises are purely visual, others can also fool a predator's sense of smell or taste.
Decorator crabs aren't the only species that use objects or plants in their environment as mobile camouflage. Xenophora snail shells are frequently adorned with smaller shells, rocks, and coral. Caddisfly larva make fancy, protective tubes of tiny rocks or snail shells. And lacewing larvae have bristles on their sides that pick up bits of foliage as they feed. But the prize for craftiest—and most morbid—goes to the assassin bug, which carries around the dried out corpses of its insect prey on its back. Sometimes, nature rewards the strange.
Every day across the southeastern United States, people cross paths with alligators. This is especially true in the spring—when the weather warms up, the reptiles warm up, too, and wander around in search of food and mates. Just in spring 2017, alligators have been found on porches from Florida to South Carolina, sauntering across front lawns, and creating highway trafficjams. One showed up on a tennis court, and another visited a furniture store. A small alligator was found in a dorm room (though that one didn’t get there under his own power). Alligator encounters are so common these days that for one to make national news, it has to be a weird or special animal—say, with dyed-orange skin or truly gargantuan size. And that’s just the encounters that made the news at all.
Often, the people in these stories are freaking out, at least a little bit, because of the proximity of animals so large, toothy, and intimidating. But we're far more of a threat to gators than they are to us. Wandering too close to humans is often a death sentence for them, yet they rarely represent a direct threat to human life. However, many people still haven’t learned to chill out about their presence in our ponds, golf courses, and yards. Based on one ongoing case study, though, the key to peaceful coexistence may actually involve getting even closer and more intimate with gators.
For much of American history, the question of what to do if you spotted an alligator had been fairly straightforward. "From the times of European pioneers or settlers ... alligators were shot just for sport," says Kent Vliet, a professor of reptilian biology at the University of Florida. "They'd kill them just to rid the place of [what they considered] vermin."
By the 1860s, fashionable Europeans went crazy for alligator leather, and hunting the reptiles became more about profit than pest control. Once dead they were the stuff of haute couture, but living alligators still carried bad reputations. In 1935, Edward Avery McIlhenny—heir to the Tabasco hot sauce fortune and a dedicated conservationist—called them“a maligned and much misunderstood reptile.”
By the 1960s, after two centuries of this open-season strategy, Southern states began to realize that their toothy neighbors were in trouble. In 1962, commercial alligator-hunting was outlawed. Five years later, the American alligator was classified as endangered by the Secretary of the Interior, under a 1966 law that preceded the Endangered Species Act of 1973. "If you can limit unregulated harvest, and you can protect habitat, alligators are very capable of reproducing themselves," says Vliet. "Quite rapidly, after these protections went into place, alligator populations began to rebound in the South."
Around the same time, though, human populations began to increase there, too. Today, Florida has more than 20 million permanent human residents and about 1.3 million alligator ones, not to mention around 100 million tourists each year. Many major Florida cities—including Orlando and Miami—are built on old swampland, and gators have stuck around in the bodies of water that are left, whether that's a pond, river, or golf course water hazard. With all this going on, says Vliet, "there's just a lot of potential contact between alligators and people."
On rare occasions, these encounters can be justifiably frightening. During a recent spring weekend, Juliana Ossa was swimming in a lake in Orlando when a nine-foot alligator bit down on her leg and wouldn't let go. The ten-year-old didn't panic, though. "I thought of a plan they taught in Gatorland," she later told TODAY. "I stuck my two fingers up its nose so it couldn't breathe … and [it] opened [its mouth], so it let my leg out." She was rushed to a nearby hospital for her injuries, but was released just a couple of days later.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) has a two-pronged strategy for encouraging peaceful human-alligator coexistence. First is education, of the sort that may have saved Ossa's life. On their website, they provide a printable "Don't Feed Alligators" sign to post near ponds, and a "Living with Alligators" brochure, full of tips for sharing space safely. For kids, there's an "All About Alligators" coloring book, which features helpful facts and tips alongside illustrations from local seventh graders. (The best of which is an alligator with sunglasses and a chain.) "The goal is to prevent human destruction of alligators due to human ignorance," the kids write.
The second prong of the FWC plan is the "human destruction of alligators." To keep the population of the predators manageable, the FWC holds a popular annual lottery for alligator-hunting permits. They also maintain what they call the Statewide Nuisance Alligator Program, or SNAP. If someone has alligator problems on their property, they can call a special hotline (866-FWC-GATOR). If the gator in question is indeed deemed a nuisance, a state-contracted alligator trapper comes to nab it and—in most cases—kill it and sell its hide, meat, and skull. The FWC currently has 104 trappers on call, and last year they removed 8,118 alligators.
Most states in the American alligator's range—which runs from Texas to North Carolina—have similar alligator control programs. Relocating alligators is not a possibility, as most would just return to where they were captured and likely be more difficult to remove a second time, according to the FWC. When ecologist Kimberly Andrews, of the University of Georgia, studied alligators in South Carolina, she tracked animals that were moved from Bluffton to Charleston, close to 100 miles away. “They came back,” she says. “If you move them, that doesn’t fix the problem. The alligator comes back to that site of conflict.”
Plus, even if the alligator doesn’t return, some other alligator will see that nice, empty habitat and move in. “You’re just going to have same problem with another alligator,” Andrews says. “If it’s good habitat for one alligator, it’s going to be a good site for another one.”
"Nuisance," of course, is a relative term. "The untold truth about [SNAP] is … most alligators that are killed as a nuisance aren't really a nuisance in any sense except that someone phoned in about them," says Vliet. While there are some bad-apple alligators—like the one that attacked Ossa—very, very few alligator encounters result in attacks of any kind. "I don't think the majority of animals that have been killed as a nuisance were ever going to cause harm to a person," he adds.
The problem is that some people think they will—often tourists, snowbirds, and other newcomers who aren't used to having them as neighbors. "We have so many people who have come from elsewhere," Vliet says. In this environment, he says, something like SNAP is valuable: "I think of nuisance alligators as animals that are being sacrificed for the greater good of the gator population." If people have a number they can call, he points out, they're less likely to become gator vigilantes or to paint the animals with a broad brush and demand that even more of them be killed.
But in at least one place in gator country, scientists are trying a different approach. On Jekyll Island, a vacation destination off the coast of Georgia, Andrews, the island’s research coordinator, has been dealing with alligators in a novel way. She and her colleagues have stopped removing them at all.
Jekyll Island has plenty of amazing alligator habitat. Upland, beyond the beaches and dunes, four lagoon-filled golf courses crowd together, right next to the marsh. Once, this part of the island was maritime forest of live oak and pine, a freshwater wetland that would have appealed to alligators. “We destroyed one habitat and created another,” says Andrews. For the alligators, though, “this new habitat works as well.”
Starting in 2011, Andrews and her colleagues began to focus on training and educating the agencies that deal with alligator complaints, as well as the island's residents and visitors. Their education programs cover basic alligator biology, their own research, the risks of alligator encounters, and myths and misunderstandings. One of the most important lessons? Don’t feed alligators. Ever. They quickly associate people with food, so they’ll swim over to humans and wait for a treat. “They beg like a dog, they just can’t bark,” says Andrews.
By capturing (and releasing) alligators for research purposes, the scientists also taught the more congenial alligators that humans aren't always so friendly after all, and the alligators relearned to keep their distance. That is, except for one ambassador: At the island’s Georgia Sea Turtle Center, visitors can meet a small alligator named Tiny, who was raised by humans and is evidence of how charismatic alligators can be.
So far, the strategies are working. When Andrews and her team first surveyed the island in 2011, there were only six alligators who had grown to reproductive size, which can take twenty years. Six years later, about 100 alligators live there, and about 12 to 15 are large and old enough to reproduce. Even with the population thriving, not one person has been injured by an alligator. In fact, the last known alligator-induced injury on Jekyll Island was in 1994, when a gator bit a golfer. The alligators have stayed safe, too. As far as Andrews knows, no animals have been removed during the course of her study, though one had to be whisked back to his home pond after he wandered into less alligator-friendly territory).
One of the female alligators Andrews’s team tracks lives in the culverts under the island’s Hampton Inn hotel. Another gator, Jesús, is fond of the protected wetlands near the island’s airport. Males tend to move around more than females, the team has found. Jesús was first spotted near the Methodist Church and moves between marshes and wetlands. Another, named Slayer for his deer-eating prowess, moves between Jekyll Island and nearby Raccoon Key—because he’s found mates in both places.
So much public education is a huge endeavor, though. “We worked with the Georgia State Patrol, the fire department, Jekyll Island residents and tourists, and the Georgia Department of Resources,” says Andrews. “It took a team effort. While this is a logical list of partners to involve, they move in different circles and operate in different ways. Reaching all these different groups is challenging.” What’s more, their research shows that just handing out pamphlets with gator info doesn't do the job. It takes in-person educational programs to build bridges between human and reptile.
“While people are scared of alligators, they’re also fascinated by them,” says Andrews. Often, she says, when freaked-out people call to report an alligator, the educators simply tell them that there’s no threat—sit back and enjoy watching the animals. Before long, the callers get attached to their alligator neighbors, and only call again when they don’t see them and are concerned that they might have been removed. (The team reassures them that, no, the alligator probably just moved along for the winter on its own.) “When people have not had any experience with an animal, and everything they know about it is rumor," says Andrews, "you give them an encounter, and sometimes the 'wow factor' is them thinking, 'That was completely okay.'”
On September 23rd, 1953, Walt Disney called up his friend, the painter and art director Herb Ryman, and asked him to come down to his studio. "I'm going to do an amusement park," Disney said when Ryman arrived. His brother, Roy Disney, was set to give a presentation to potential corporate investors that Monday, to show them what the park would look like.
"Ryman said that he was curious himself and asked to see the drawing," writes Neal Gabler in his 2006 biography Walt Disney. And then came a twist worthy of the world's leading storyteller: the drawing, as of yet, did not exist. "'You're going to do it,' Walt said."
And so he did. Ryman drew for forty-two hours straight, subsisting on tuna sandwiches and milkshakes, and coached at every turn by a chain-smoking Walt Disney. When he was done, he had the map above—a dreamy, colorful plan for what was, at that point, an imaginary place.
Now, over 63 years later, Disneyland is decidedly built. Some of the map's features—like "World of Tomorrow," which became Tomorrowland— are present there, while others, like "Lilliputian Land," never came to pass. And the map has become an attraction in itself—it's set to go up for auction next month.
According to U.S. News and World Report, the map, which is "affixed to a tri-fold poster board like a science fair display," was languishing in a corner of Walt Disney's office when an employee, Grenade Curran, asked if he could take it home. His boss agreed. About twenty years later, collector Ron Clark bought it from him. With his seventieth birthday approaching, Clark is hoping the auction will provide the map with a more permanent home.
The map will go under the hammer on June 25th, at Van Eaton Galleries in Sherman Oaks, CA, the New York Times reports. Auction house owner Mike Van Eaton called the map "the most valuable Disneyland artifact ever offered at auction," and expects it to sell for between $750,000 and $1 million—about 10,000 times more than a one-day ticket to the real thing.
In the 1930s, Britain's Ministry of Transport built an extensive network of bike highways around the country—at least 280 miles of paved, protected infrastructure dedicated to cyclists alone. For decades, it was entirely forgotten—overgrown and overlooked—so much so that no one seems to remember that these lanes had existed at all.
“There’s all this infrastructure, it’s been there for 80 years, and nobody knows what it was,” says Carlton Reid, author of the forthcoming book Bike Boom. Reid, who’s been a cycling journalist and historian for 30 years, rediscovered the network while researching his book. Now he’s teaming up with an urban planner to reveal the full extent of Britain’s historic cycleways.
Before starting research on the book, Reid knew of the existence of a handful of ‘30s-era bike lanes. But when he started studying the decade’s road-building policies, he found archival maps showing that as new arterial roads were built, they all had cycleways installed beside them. “Every one I looked at showed that there were cycleways built,” he said. “It was clear that there were far more than anyone had understood.”
These bike highways were nine feet wide and surfaced in concrete, and they ran along major roads for miles. According to Reid’s research, the Ministry of Transport was inspired by newspaper reports of similar lanes in the Netherlands and contacted the Rijkswaterstaat, its Dutch counterpart. The head engineer of the Rijkswaterstaat sent the Brits “these incredible exploded diagrams of how they built cycleways next to the road and the railways and how they separated the traffic,” says Reid. “The Brits, in effect, were 'going Dutch,'” decades before that phrase became a mantra among cycling enthusiasts who long for infrastructure as good as Amsterdam’s.
In the 1930s, cycling in Britain was at its peak, and cyclists far outnumbered motorists. As in America, it was British cyclists who first pushed the government to build smoothly paved roads between cities. Those roads, though, were catnip to motorists, too, and “motorists, if they wanted to use their cars and go fast ... clearly had to get cyclists off the road.” These bike highways were intended in part to separate cyclists from the main rush of traffic and clear the way for drivers.
As more people bought cars, politicians grew increasingly concerned about cyclist and pedestrian safety. “The government was saying, ‘Yes, we want to get cyclists off the road so we can drive’—because the politicians were motorists—but also we have to save our citizens,” says Reid. “There was a definite idea of keeping people safe. It was both.” But plenty of cyclists at the time didn’t want to be siphoned off onto these bike-specific lanes. “There were all sorts of major campaigns against this infrastructure from hardcore club cyclists,” Reid says. But those who just wanted to commute to work or ride out of the city on weekends on two wheels were happy to use them.
In the years that followed the construction of the cycleways, though, cars became the predominant form of transportation, and the bike lanes fell out of use. Even the Ministry of Transport forgot that it had built them. “Within 40 years, it had been lost in their own department that they were doing this,” says Reid. He read the ministry’s minutes going through the 1960s and found records of ministers saying that they’d never built anything like a bike highway before.
“You did do it! I’m just willing them—look, look in your own minutes!” says Reid. “You’ll see that you did do it.”
After Reid discovered the extent of the network, he went looking for the paths themselves. It happened that there were two examples within cycling distance of his home in Newcastle. When he first saw them, he couldn’t believe his eyes. They were unused but pristine. “You look at archive photos from the 1930s, and they just haven’t changed,” he says. “It’s the original surface, even.”
The knowledge that these paths were meant for bicycles, though, had been thoroughly lost. When he was exploring, Reid says, he saw cyclists come riding by on the skinny sidewalk, when the 1930s cycleway was right there. “They didn’t think it was theirs,” he says.
Not all of the original 1930s network remains. Some lanes have been resurfaced, and most of what was built in London has fallen to development. Reid estimates that about 10 to 15 percent of the original cycleways have been buried. And there are places where the original work is at least partially concealed. Reid heard about a major route from London to the coast, for instance, that was very popular for weekend getaways in the 1930s. On Google Street View, he saw slivers of concrete, a couple of feet wide, that run by the road for a while, then disappear, only to reappear farther up the road. “I know what that is,” he says. “I know what’s under there. You’ve got this five-to-ten -mile stretch that people had forgotten was there.”
Reid and his collaborator, urban planner John Dales, are raising money on Kickstarter to continue their research, with the goal of restoring some of the network to use. (With two weeks to go, they’ve doubled their original fundraising goal.) They’ve already heard from cities on the network with money to spend. “Some of these cities look as though they’d be excited to work with us,” Reid says. “We’re going to work with the willing first.” Soon, it’s possible that these decades-old cycling highways could once again be part of Britain's transportation network.
It's a sad fact of urban living—when more people move in, if they're not careful, animals often end up moving out. Such has been the case with the California pipevine swallowtail butterfly, an iridescent blue-green creature that has been driven out of its native range by rampant development.
Over the years, various groups have attempted to reintroduce the butterfly—but although they've been fairly successful in Sonoma (where they live in a butterfly garden) and Santa Cruz (where they've been spotted near a golf course), the butterflies haven't been able to make it in San Francisco.
That is, until now. As Vox reported earlier this year, one San Franciscan—biologist Tim Wong, of the California Academy of Sciences—is doing a lot all on his own. Wong, who has been raising butterflies since childhood, has dedicated a large chunk of his backyard to the pipevine swallowtails, building a large, screened enclosure filled with native plants where they can enjoy San Francisco weather without fear of predators.
The bugs are a bit picky—as caterpillars, they eat exactly one plant, the California pipevine, which is also rare. (Other, introduced pipevines, will poison them.) Wong managed to nab some native pipevine clippings from the San Francisco Botanical Garden—with permission, of course.
He then brought in about 20 caterpillars from outside the city, where the species is more present. He watched them eat the pipevine, form chrysalises, and emerge weeks later, as butterflies, to restart the cycle. When he got his first clutch of tiny caterpillar eggs, he incubated them indoors, where they were safe from hungry bugs that could sneak into the mesh enclosure.
Wong has been successful enough to bring thousands of the caterpillars to the San Francisco Botanical Garden, where they live in the "California Native" exhibit.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
On Serum Island, part of Indonesia’s Maluku province, a 37-year-old man was walking down the beach at night, when he saw a strange shape in the water. It was a hulking, drifting mass, and from afar he thought it was a boat. But as he approached, he could see more clearly: whatever this was, it had once been alive.
The massive pile of decomposing flesh measures almost 50 feet long and has washed up onto the shore. Experts believe it died days ago; it’s in such an advanced state of decomposition that it’s hard to tell what it is.
Originally, locals thought it might be a giant squid. But squid aren’t known to roam in these waters, and it now seems most likely it was a giant baleen whale.
From some angles, it’s possible to see some features of this mass of misery, but for the most part it looks like a giant grey blob. As much as the ocean can offer up creatures that seem like horrors to our earth-bound sensibilities, in this case the horror is the reality of death and decay, the inevitable end of us all.
A memo from the CIA’s declassified archive shows the Agency’s strong interest - and subsequent disillusionment - in investing in a device that purportedly warded off sharks with electric shocks.
The memo goes on to state that if the device works, the Agency would see the need for roughly 30 of them …
and includes a copy of the Parade article that originally piqued someone’s interest.
That interest would not be piqued for very long, however, as a demonstration by the device’s inventor did not impress, to put it mildly.
With even more considerable effort than last time, and using up the very, very last of our favors within the intelligence community, we were able to get CIA footage of the failed demonstration:
Though this particular device might have been a dud, the CIA’s interest in the growing field of sharkrepellollogy continued into the next decade, as evidenced by another memo referencing the successful testing of the “Shark Screen” in 1974.
Just in time, too—Jaws came out the very next year. The full memo is here.
Concrete, in its most basic form, has just three ingredients: aggregate (such as sand or crushed stone), a binder (such as gypsum or lime), and water. The hard, versatile building material has been used for thousands of years—in particular by the Romans, who used it to make everything from aqueducts to the spectacular, unreinforced dome of the Pantheon. The term "concrete" also refers to anything solid and physical—not abstract. Yet Hungarian photographer Gábor Kasza illustrates how concrete can be both at once with his new photo book, Concrete passages about closeness and coldness ... and a couple of songs. The inside is a series of photographs taken in empty concrete structures that highlight how otherworldly and abstract concrete can be. The outside, on the other hand, is a slipcase made of real, heavy, gray concrete.
“The concept and design of a good photo book also needs to echo its content,” he says. “It’s a possibility to create something that can help to understand the content.”
But making a slipcase out of the material proved to be a serious challenge. “It turned out to be pretty tough. I had no skills or experiences to do this," he says. "The designers to whom I presented the idea always gave me the same answer: ‘Who has time to do this? It’s too thin and complicated, maybe even impossible.’” Kasza was not deterred, and decided to do it himself. “I had to learn to work with concrete, learn how it works, what its edges are.”
It took a lot of trial and error, but Kasza eventually produced a prototype: less than a quarter-inch thick and weighing over three pounds, with a red lining and the title imprinted into the spine. Through Indiegogo, he hopes to produce 50 copies.
The result is minimalist, smooth, and cold, much like the unfinished structures featured in his photographs, but Kasza believes that the material has some untapped potential. “The most important thing is not the material, but rather the empty, cold, gray, huge, raw buildings that are the scene of my photographs .... I use this environment to highlight the importance and nature of relationships.
“It looks like an impersonal, gray, frigid material," he adds. "In contrast, it can be very organic and sensitive if you use it well.”
Atlas Obscura has a selection of photos of the cover and from the book, so you can decide for yourself just how organic concrete can be.
Peter Schultz likes to go on "tours of Mars" in his spare time. The Brown University geologist scans random images of the red planet from NASA satellites and looks for interesting surface features that may be worth more study. It was on one of these tours that Schultz noticed bright streaks radiating from an impact crater. They seem to extend farther than rest of the impact debris, and because they are so bright in the infrared image, he figured that they represent bare rock. Something had swept away the Martian soil after the collision. Schultz decided to look closer.
Working with graduate student Stephanie Quintana, he got a clue from experiments in NASA's Vertical Gun Range. The Vertical Gun Range allows scientists to simulate planetary and lunar impacts by shooting projectiles in a vacuum. When a meteor crashes into Mars, for example, material from both the meteor and Mars itself is vaporized, and this vapor is violently pushed out from the crater. Simulations suggest that it could move at supersonic speeds.
That alone doesn't really explain the streaks, but Schultz and Quintana found that if something, such as the edge of an older crater, interrupts the flow, vortices would form—fast-moving tornadoes that would scour the ground clean. “This would be like an F8 tornado sweeping across the surface,” Schultz said in a press release. (City-leveling F8 tornadoes are essentially impossible on Earth. Thank goodness.)
The scoured streaks can help geologists better understand the past and present of the Martian surface: erosion rates, the presence of ice, the composition of the colliding object. Shultz said: “They may have a lot to tell us, so stay tuned.”
January, 1865. The peace on a regular English train journey from Carnforth to Liverpool is shattered by one man’s deranged laughter and erratic antics. Armed with a gun and attacking the windows to get to the other increasingly frightened passengers, he seems out of control. At the next train stop in Lancaster, the man suddenly becomes calm and serenity is returned. But as the train begins to roll again, his aggression returns . The motion of the train becomes the only means to gauge the man’s behavior. His mood changes from one stop to the next, twisting and turning with the carriage.
The railway passenger prancing around with a pistol was by no means the strangest case of “railway madness” reported during the Victorian era in Britain. There seemed to be something about the railways that made people—particularly men—suffer mental anguish and unrest.
As the railway grew more popular in the 1850s and 1860s, trains allowed travelers to move about with unprecedented speed and efficiency, cutting the length of travel time drastically. But according to the more fearful Victorians, these technological achievements came at the considerable cost of mental health. As Edwin Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller wrote in The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present, trains were believed to “injure the brain.” In particular, the jarring motion of the train was alleged to unhinge the mind and either drive sane people mad or trigger violent outbursts from a latent “lunatic.” Mixed with the noise of the train car, it could, it was believed, shatter nerves.
In the 1860s and ‘70s, reports began emerging of bizarre passenger behavior on the railways. When seemingly sedate people boarded trains, they suddenly began behaving in socially unacceptable ways. One Scottish aristocrat was reported to have ditched his clothes aboard a train before “leaning out the window” ranting and raving. After he left the train, he suddenly recovered his composure.
Regarding the specific type of mental condition believed to have been caused by the trains, Professor Amy-Milne Smith, a cultural historian at Wilfrid Laurier University, notes that “railway madmen would have all likely be seen as suffering mania.” Medical journals at the time were very concerned about how railway madmen could be detected when their madness might lie latent.
Not all goings-on in the first- and second-class carriages involved eccentric rambling in the nude—vicious attacks with knives and other weapons that could result in death were reported as well. The trains themselves were considered to be ridden with perilous conditions that endangered passengers. Confined carriages were locked for privacy reasons, meaning people were at risk of being trapped in small rooms with “lunatics” who were ready to snap at any minute. The lack of suitable on-board communications meant that if attacked by such a person, you couldn’t easily call for help.
The media did its part to whip up a frenzy over railway madness. One 1864 story, starkly titled “A Madman in a Railway Carriage,” gleefully related how a burly sailor became incensed, flailing around in an erratic manner first trying to climb out of the window , and then swearing and shouting at the other occupants of the carriage and struggling with everyone . A superhuman strength gripped this aggressor and four people were required to restrain him and he had to be bound to a seat. The conflict was not over yet though. When the sailor was released, he charged viciously at those who had restrained him and accusing them of stealing from him, it took railway officials and finally the police to subdue and arrest the sailor.
The problem of railway madness did not just refer to those driven insane in the process of the journey. Another concern of the time was that the railway provided a swift and convenient getaway for patients who had escaped from the various mental-health institutions throughout Great Britain.
In 1845, Punch magazine published a cartoon showing train tracks leading to an asylum. The logistics of the railways dotted around the countryside meant that a “mental patient” could evade the staff and hop on the next train to freedom. Stories of maniacs and terror on the tracks terrified many and delighted others.
As Professor Anna Despotopoulou at the University of Athens says, “the train in the 19th century offered women an unprecedented opportunity to travel freely” but stories of madmen on the rails “often heightened the anxiety to travel.” After going on a particular train ride, female novelist George Eliot stated with tongue firmly in cheek that upon seeing someone who looked wild and brutish, she was reminded of “all the horrible stories of madmen in railways.” Elliot seemed to relish the excitement of a possible confrontation and sounded rather disappointed when the figure turned out to be an ordinary clergyman.
Other members of the elite were more frightened than Eliot of the potential for being in a compartment with a maniac. However, there was no easy solution because of the trains’ design, which encouraged the form of physical isolation that increased fears of these fabled madmen.
It was nevertheless agreed that something had to be done to protect passengers against railway maniacs. Attacks, according to the Scotsman newspaper, were becoming an everyday occurrence, and railway madness on British trains had become internationally renowned. One “American Traveller” spoke of carrying a loaded revolver on trains in England because of the prospect of encounters with a “madman.”
The 1864 by-laws of the Victorian Railways stipulated that “insane persons” should be isolated“in a compartment by themselves.” If railway madmen could not be stopped then they might at least be contained. These regulations, of course, ignored those who boarded the train perfectly in control of their faculties and only displayed their erratic behavior once the train was in motion and the doors locked.
Implementing these rules was a problem. Every time an invention was proposed to ensure greater safety, it was rejected on the grounds of protecting personal space. Case in point: “Müller’s lights,” windows within the train carriages designed to allow observation of other compartments and installed by several companies such as the South Western Railway. These portholes were meant to reduce seclusion inside the coach, but were regarded as an intrusion—and raised fears about Peeping Toms. In other areas there were calls for increasedcommunication on the trains such as cables to signal an emergency but problems of logistics prevented this.
The railways seemed to cause anxiety and concern about madness because of the noise and the unpredictable nature of the railways. There were also beliefs within the medical profession that the vibrations of the railway carriage could have a disastrous effect on people’s nerves. And it was impossible to predict who might be the one to be driven mad. As Professor Amy-Milne Smith wrote, “not only might you be attacked by a madman on a railway journey—you might become one.” As a result railways became associated with insanity. What might be thought of as more like post-traumatic stress disorder today was viewed as a form of nervous disturbance by Victorians.
Eventually, the outrage over mental-health problems on the railways and the “railway madmen” faded out as inexplicably as it had appeared. The blood-and-guts-loving Victorian media moved onto the next story, though onboard disturbances still happened from time to time. In 1894, one naked individual even launched a full-on assault on the train though disabling the communications and then attacking those onboard, roaming around at will through the train. The whole affair was treated as puzzling, but not frightening—the attacker was battled and jabbed back with the pointy end of an umbrella.
Thousands of years ago—when humans weren't a threat to the Earth and invasive species couldn't stow away on ships, enter foreign lands, and destroy many of the things that made those lands unique and beautiful—all sorts of distinct native birds flourished on the islands that now constitute New Zealand.
Today, more than 40 of those unique species are extinct, thanks to humans. We hunted them, destroyed their habitats, and, maybe most importantly, introduced rats and opossums and stoats—a type of weasel—which slaughtered the birds, many of which, the Associated Press says, "gave up flight altogether to strut about the forest floor." The 40-odd surviving native bird species struggle on.
Now, the government and activists have come up with a solution: kill all the rats and opossums and stoats, every last one of them, to protect what's left and, possibly, bring back some that are thought to be lost. (There are still sightings, for example, of the South Island kokako, which may or may not be extinct.) "It's about looking after our identity as much as it is looking after the birds," Paul Ward, the head of a volunteer pest control group, told the AP, in an article that's very much worth your time.
The government has earmarked tens of millions of dollars for the project, though it's thought the final cost will be in the billions. And that's not to mention the sheer enormity of the challenge: How does one eradicate an estimated 30 million opossums and an untold number of rats and stoats?
No one knows, but a number of methods are being employed and considered, from traps to poisons to changing the pests' genetic makeup. Despite the considerable effort, there are (understandably) skeptics, who argue primarily that the task is impossible. "It's a fantasy science fiction," Wayne Linklater, a wildlife biologist at the Victoria University of Wellington, told the AP.
Still, any birds reading this, just know that New Zealand is trying. Humans, if you can believe it, have done a lot worse.
Earlier this month, the COSCO Developmentbecame the biggest ship ever to traverse the recently enlarged Panama Canal. Here's a video of it passing between oceans:
How big is it? Around 1,200 feet long, big enough to hold 13,000 20-foot cargo containers (that's about four million flat-screen TVs). And while that's big, it doesn't even crack the top 50 largest container ships in the world, headlined by the recently completed Madrid Maersk.
On May 8, the Development, which set out from Hong Kong weeks ago, arrived and broke the record for the largest ship to arrive on the East Coast, set just last summer by a comparatively tiny ship with 20 percent less capacity. It has since made stops in Savannah and Charleston, after which it will set off for Asia, on a course that takes it around South Africa's Cape of Good Hope.
The ship has brought excitement everywhere it has called. Georgia Governor Nathan Deal was on hand when it docked in Savannah.
When someone mentions Florence Nightingale, who was born this week in 1820, one particular image likely comes to mind: A caring presence, head covered by a shawl, holding a lamp as she ministers to patients in the dark. The "Lady with the Lamp," as she was known, still serves as a symbol for nurses everywhere.
But for every hour Nightingale spent burning the midnight oil to help a sick soldier, she likely spent another up late doing something else: working on some of the world's first explicitly persuasive infographics. In addition to caretaking and advocating, Nightingale was a dedicated statistician, constantly gathering information and thinking up new ways to compare and present it.
In August of 1856, Nightingale headed home from her famous stint at Scutari hospital in Crimea, where she had successfully lobbied to improve conditions and to expand the role of nurses. Upon her return to Britain, she was greeted as a hero—the press knew her as "a 'ministering angel'," and luminaries were eager to donate to training funds established in her name.
But in private, she had two things on her mind: death and statistics. Even if the most recent war had ended, there would be more, she reasoned, and without some kind of permanent reform, Nightingale feared all future wars would look much the same—full of needless deaths, even off the battlefield. "Oh, my poor men who endured so patiently," she wrote to a friend in late 1856, thinking back on the soldiers she had treated who hadn't made it. "I feel I have been such a bad mother to you, to come home and leave you lying in your Crimean graves, 73 percent in eight regiments during six months from disease alone."
Nightingale had always had an affinity for math—as a child, she filled notebooks with tables of data about the fruits and vegetables in her garden, and according to one of her contemporaries, Francis Galton, she believed that statistics were the most effective way to "understand God's thoughts."
Her months in the war hospitals of Crimea provided her with plenty of opportunities to gather information, something that, in her view, those in charge had been fairly lax about. "The Army Medical Statistics… do not appear hitherto to have contemplated the necessity of [tabulating the sick at a given time]," she later wrote. "It cannot be ascertained correctly even for the Crimean Army."
When she returned, sheafs of stats in tow, it was to a Britain gripped by its own numerical fervor. In 1834, scientists there founded the London Statistical Society, which aimed at "procuring, arranging and publishing facts," in order "to illustrate the condition and prospects of society." Three years later, the country set up a General Register Office to record births, deaths, and marriages. Soon, journalists and politicians were comparing sets of numbers in order to demonstrate particular correlations—between education and crime, say, or relationship status and longevity.
When, in February of 1857, the Secretary of War reached out to Nightingale and asked her to "communicate her opinions" about hospital treatments in Crimea, she saw her chance. Rather than drawing up some brief notes, she quickly began work on what would become Notes on Matters Affecting Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration in the British Army, an 850-page report that combines stories and observations with tables, graphs, and charts.
The report took her two years of near-constant work: peers, she wrote, accused her of "making my pillow of Blue-books." It also taught her something surprising—far more Crimean War soldiers had died from preventable diseases than from anything else, including combat. What's more, after a sanitary commission was sent to Crimea to clean up the hospital, death rates plummeted. These conclusions—and the data that supported them—were "like light shining in a dark place," wrote her mentor and collaborator, the epidemiologist William Farr.
With such a massive tome on offer, though, Nightingale feared that this most vital conclusion might be overlooked. So she developed a series of charts meant to make it even clearer to the reader. Her most famous graph, displayed at the top of this article, shows the number of soldier deaths per month from various causes. Each pie slice represents a different month, from April 1854 through March 1856, and each color stands for a different cause of death. It takes just a quick glance to achieve the two main takeaways: that disease, colored blue, killed far more soldiers than either "wounds" (red) or "other" (black), and that it was reduced greatly in 1855.
Nightingale called this chart type—which she seems to have invented— "the coxcomb," due to its shape and color. Although she wasn't the first person to present statistics in chart form—that honor goes to William Playfair of Scotland, who published a book of infographics in 1786—"she may have been the first to use them for persuading people of the need for change," writes the historian Hugh Small.
After she completed her report, Nightingale worked hard to turn its conclusions into common knowledge, privately distributing it to influential people and writing several more reports, many of which included coxcombs. When she received pushback from Army doctors, who thought sanitary measures a waste of money, she even leaked some of her charts to the press.
Eventually, Nightingale defeated said critics, and her findings won out. By the 1880s, sanitation standards in the British Army had greatly improved—soldiers were given the space and time to wash their clothing, bedding, and selves more regularly, among other reforms—and these gains had spilled over into the general population as well. As the statistician Jil Matheson told the Guardian in 2010, "the 'Lady with the Lamp' was also a lady with powerful ideas"—and it's those ideas that truly helped Britain shine.
At lunchtime on May 4, 1945, Virginia Christoffersen wrote a letter to her husband, Rolf, who was serving in World War II, overseas with the Norwegian Navy.
“Are you as lonesome for me as I am for you?” she wrote.
She posted the letter, but it never reached him. It made its way back to her, marked “Return to Sender.”
Decades later, a family moved into the Christoffersens old house in New Jersey and began to renovate the attic. They found the letter that Virginia had written all those years ago. It seems that the letter was dropped by someone walking up the attic stairs, where it slipped through the cracks.
Through Facebook, the Christoffersens were located quickly, in California. Virginia died six years ago, after many years of marriage, but Rolf’s daughter read him the letter his wife had written as a young woman to her “favorite pin-up boy.” All her other love letters were lost when the family moved, the children told the Detroit Free Press—this one that slipped between the cracks is the only one left, now.
One hungry black bear in Rocky Mountain National Park snacked on hundreds of fruits in short succession last summer.
How do we know? Because one mound of his poop has sprouted about 1200 chokecherry and Oregon grape seedlings in the park's greenhouse.
As Cool Green Science reported last week, the scat was collected by Trish Stockton, a biological science technician at the park. Stockton dried the scat, mixed it with soil, and waited. Although this was her third year planting poop, and the last two years didn't go great, she was optimistic about this particular pile: "To find [one] with that many seeds in it, I knew I was on my way," she told CGS.
Her good feeling was borne out. Not only did the scat give rise to thousands of sprouts, each is "twice as tall as any human-grown sprout," writes CGS. This is likely because going through the interior environment of a bear is good for certain seeds,including Oregon grapes and chokecherry. (Human attempts to do the same using acid baths have been far less successful, in the park's experience.)
When they're big enough, the resulting plants will be relocated throughout the park. And once they're mature enough to sprout berries, maybe they'll meet another bear.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
They can be awful pretty, but there are very few circumstances under which a lionfish is a welcome sight on a coral reef. They are voracious, aggressive, and territorial—and surrounded by a halo of long, twitchy, venomous spines. For divers and fishermen there is the risk of a sting, but it's worse for full-time reef dwellers. One study conducted in the Bahamas by marine biologists from Oregon State University found that just one lionfish took out 80 percent of the juvenile fish in its territory. In the Caribbean, East Coast of the United States, and other places outside of their usual range on Indo-Pacific reefs, they are an invasive scourge with few natural predators.
Devising new strategies for limiting lionfish populations means learning as much as possible about their biology and behavior, including the sounds that they make. Scientists in North Carolina recently identified and recorded for the first time the “roar” of the lionfish, which is more of a guttural heartbeat that grows into a drum-like thumping when they’re agitated.
Understanding this sound and why they make it could make it easier to count lionfish in murky water—and make it more efficient to get rid of them. The only good way to get lionfish off a reef it to pluck them off by hand or net. It’s also known that they sometimes congregate in large numbers, so knowing the sounds they make could help scientists spot these gatherings, or even make it possible to attract them in large numbers, hopefully leading to a whole lot of ceviche and happier reef inhabitants. (So far, one of the most effective control campaigns was a push in Colombia to encourage people to eat lionfish—safe when prepared properly—on Fridays.)
In January, The Great Falls Tribunewrote about a theft that, for a small-ish town paper in Montana, deserved something more than the police blotter but something less than a full-on investigation: the disappearance of 488 bee hives, or more than enough to fill a tractor trailer. According to their owner, Lloyd Cunniff, the hives, which were in away California to pollinate almonds at the time of the theft, vanished overnight.
Suspects in the case were not immediately apparent, and in the following days Cunniff raised more than $11,000 to help make up for what he said would be something in the neighborhood of $400,000 in lost income.
The story might have ended that way—just another bizarre news item in a rapidly growing menagerie—except, on May 12, the Tribuneprovided an update. Suspects had been arrested and charges filed. Most of the hives, improbably, have been returned. And the great bee heist of January 2017 had, in fact, somehow gotten stranger. Authorities said that Ukrainian-Russians were involved, possibly because, the Tribune writes, a group of them "have turned to agriculture thefts, particularly bees, to fund organized crime rings."
Cunniff wasn't the only victim. Other hives have gone missing across California, where almond farmers frequently rent bees to pollinate their crops. Apparently the thieves went on to re-rent Cunniff's bees, netting them an estimated $100,000.
Cunniff recovered around two-thirds of his stolen hives and equipment. A lot of it is damaged, but he told the Tribune that he should be able to recover, thanks in part to insurance money. He also plans to be more cautious. For next year's pollination season, their stay in California might be a little shorter. The bees are simply worth too much.
The seltzer market in North America is blossoming; the old standards (Polar, Canada Dry, Schweppes, Perrier) are more successful, and smaller regional brands (LaCroix, Hal’s New York Seltzer Water) are popping up outside their respective home territories. Seltzer is cool now! But to figure out where the love of carbonated water came from, we have to take a trip to Germany, where the fondness for bottled water is as pure as the Bavarian springs.
German mineral water culture dates back to the time of Caesar and Augustus, who conquered the area now known as Germany in the early 1st century. The Romans, with their incredibly strong spa/bathing culture, were very excited by the many sick springs they discovered in “Germania,” and began an intense love affair with natural water that never left the German psyche.
In 1767, an Englishman named Joseph Priestly figured out a clumsy but effective way to carbonate water by messing around with sulfuric acid and powdered chalk. He wrote a paper about it, which was mostly ignored, except a few years later, a German living in Geneva read the paper and got some big ideas. By this time, partly thanks to torrid sanitary conditions in the rapidly industrializing cities of Europe and partly thanks to a renewed spiritual belief in the healing power of water, mineral water was having a renaissance. Very trendy stuff, and potentially very profitable.
Several of the mineral springs in Germany are naturally carbonated. One of those is in a town called Selters, which eventually gave us the word seltzer. Carbonation was prized as an element of some carbonated waters, and also probably enjoyed for the same reason it is today—because it’s a fun feeling in your mouth. That Swiss-German guy decided to capitalize on this by artificially carbonating some spring water, making cheaper, but luxurious-feeling, healing waters.
The Swiss-German guy’s name was J.J. Schweppe, and he began selling his bottled carbonated water in 1783. Schweppes might be the most successful international seltzer brand to come out of German seltzer culture, but if that’s all you know, you’re missing out on a very deep and instinctive love of fizzy water embedded in the German palate.
Today, Germans have water sommeliers, rating systems, and firm preferences. Mineral water—mineralwasser, in German—is by far the most popular non-alcoholic beverage in the country. “It’s definitely much more prevalent than soft drinks, and it always was, I would say,” says Arnim von Friedeburg, the owner and managing partner of CMA Foods, an agency and online retailer that promotes German cuisine. Tap water in Germany is of excellent quality, and yet if you order it at a restaurant, says von Friedeburg, you’ll reveal yourself as a tourist. There is perhaps no other country that ignores its high-quality municipal tap water to such a degree.
Germany, according to a 2015 survey, ranks fourth in the world in per capita for bottled water consumption. The European Federation of Bottled Waters puts Germany’s consumption at 177.3 liters per person per year. But that’s sort of misleading; the top two countries on that list, Mexico and Thailand, have unsafe municipal tap water systems. Italy, in third place, has tap water that is generally safe to drink, but often considered gross-tasting; with a high calcium content (also known as “hard” water), it can also leave mineral deposits in pipes and any machines that use water. Fearing clogged coffee machines, Italians turn to bottled water.
But we’re not just looking at mineral water here; we’re looking at seltzer. And Germany just crushes every other country in sparkling water consumption. Seventy-eight percent of Germany’s bottled water consumption is carbonated. In the entire EU, only 40 percent of bottled water is carbonated, which means Germany is almost singlehandedly fighting the good fight for seltzer, drinking almost 138 liters of the stuff per year. Americans, just for comparison, drink fewer than 5 liters of sparkling water per year.
Mineral water is, by German law, completely unaltered and unfiltered (with the exception of carbonation) water taken directly from a spring. It includes, thanks to the lack of filtration, a number of dissolved solids, which might include calcium, magnesium, and various salts. It might also contain dissolved carbon, which can make it effervescent.
Beginning in the mid-1800s, right after Schweppe started raking in the money from his bottled seltzer, German companies began buying whole springs, digging them deeper to better pull out the water, bottling it, and selling it. The German government soon started regulating it to ensure both purity and safety. Today, says von Friedeburg, mineral water boasts the strictest regulations of any food in Germany.
There are few national brands; Gerolsteiner and Apollinaris might be the Coke and Pepsi of mineral waters, but beyond that, brands are not generally carried outside their specific region. Because of the high number of springs and the distinctly different flavor of the water that comes from each of them, there are hundreds of mineral water brands throughout the country, the vast majority only available in close proximity to the spring itself.
When traveling in Germany, it’s the norm to sample whatever the local mineral water is. Typically, says von Friedeburg, you’ll be asked simply “mit oder ohne gas?” The option isn’t tap water, sparkling water, or soda; the option is to have your mineral water—because that’s the only water any German would have—either still or carbonated. Carbonated is much more popular. The variety of mineral water is most likely to be simply whatever the closest, or preferred, brand is. It’s as if it was assumed that, when dining in the U.S. you would order a Coke in Atlanta, or a Moxie in New England.
Germans very rarely put ice in carbonated or mineral water; they want to really taste the flavor of the water, and consider it sort of weird that Americans tend to demand their soft drinks be ice-cold.
Carbonated mineral water is often advertised in different ways based on the degree of carbonation. You can find “mild” or “medium” carbonation, along with other descriptions of the mineral content of the water. But because these waters are unfiltered, there’s a distinctly different flavor to all of them, and Germans often have a strong attachment to the water brand they grew up with. Von Friedeburg’s favorite is Rosbacher, which happens to be the brand served on the Lufthansa trains.
As for non-German carbonated waters, some Germans may scoff. Von Friedeburg lives in Washington, DC, and drinks San Pellegrino and Perrier, but only reluctantly. “They have much less mineralization than the average German water, and I like the mineralization, he says. “It gives a flavor and a certain gravitas to the water, and I don't find that with Pellegrino. But I buy it because I like the bubbles.”
Germans are responsible for whatever minor seltzer culture exists in the United States. The very first water sommelier in the U.S. is a German guy. The first wave of Jewish immigrants to come to the U.S. were largely German, and brought their love of seltzer with them. Starting in the 1880s, small delivery businesses began popping up to delivery locally made carbonated water to the Jewish communities throughout New York City, and as with the bagel, what’s good in the Jewish community usually becomes popular in New York City as a whole.
“Sparkling water has been one of the sectors of the nonalcoholic beverage industry in the U.S. that's been growing significantly,” says Duane Stanford, the executive editor of Beverage Digest. But some of its German roots are dying out. “I think [in] the Northeast, New York, seltzer is the word you'll hear a lot. You won't really hear that in the South,” says Stanford, who is a Southerner. “Nobody in the South walks around saying, ‘give me a seltzer.’”
The regional brands like LaCroix and Hal’s still count their biggest markets in big cities, especially in the Northeast. But the original, Schweppes, remains one of the biggest national brands—even if they call their products “sparkling water” and “club soda” instead of tafflewasser mit gas.
In general, humans tend to like carbonated water—carbonation as a whole, really—for a few possible reasons. One is that, like with spicy foods, the presence of carbon dioxide can trigger a minor pain reaction, which can induce a flow of endorphins. Pleasure and pain being all knotted up in the neurotransmitters of the human brain, we can sort of trick ourselves into getting some nice pleasure feelings by indulging in acts our brains interpret as dangerous but which aren’t actually dangerous at all—like spicy food or carbonation. It’s sort of like a roller-coaster. You do it not because it’s dangerous, but because your brain will think it’s dangerous, which gives you a fun thrill. Loving spicy food is linked with liking other thrill-seeking behaviors, like roller coasters.
Germany ranks fourth in the world in number of roller coasters. I’m not sure if that’s connected; I suggested it to Von Friedeburg, who seemed to think it was a fun comparison, but he didn’t feel comfortable generalizing about whether the country has some kind of universal love of risk-taking.
Another possible reason for the German love of carbonation is that carbonation isn’t just a textural adjustment; it changes the flavor of the water as well. Carbonating water creates carbonic acid, which is, like its name suggests, sour. Perhaps Germans, already accustomed to noticeable mineral flavors in their water, found the added acidity in carbonated water pleasant rather than off-putting.
Von Friedeburg mentioned that carbonation runs deeper in Germany than in other countries. They may not drink soda, but the alcohol of choice is beer, which in Germany is almost always carbonated. “We are drinkers of beer, and beer usually has carbonation. So that could be—and I don't know it for a fact—that the acquired taste for beer and its carbonation leads to a taste for carbonated water,” he says. But mostly, he thinks that it’s just what Germans drink, and what they have always drunk.
The Mexican free-tailed bat is a tiny, common chiropteran found across the Western Hemisphere. It is also fast, elusive, and prone to taking up residence in spaces that humans would prefer them not to—hot, dark, manmade spaces like, say, your attic.
That's where a homeowner in San Antonio recently found a Mexican free-tailed bat colony, according to WOAI. They have singled out her home, she said, despite there being some attractive alternatives.
“I don't understand why of all of these beautiful homes, mine is the one the bats are attracted to," Lisa Marie Vargas told WOAI. Vargas spent $525 on a removal service, which seemed to solve the problem—until the bats came back.
This meant another call to a removal service and, perhaps, a life of never-ending bat war. Lately bats seem to have been appearing in all sorts of places where we don't really want them to be.
