Not many people have been to every continent on Earth—Antarctica is the toughest for most—but now there's another destination for the true completists. The existence of an eighth continent, Zealandia, was only confirmed back in February. The landmass managed to fly under the radar for so long because most of it is underwater—just six percent of the India-sized continent is above sea level—mostly just New Zealand. And, not surprisingly, most of it hasn't been surveyed or studied. Until now.

An international team of researchers just finished a nine-week, National Science Foundation–funded excursion to learn more about Zealandia and its past. They drilled down and took core samples in six different locations that were all 4,000 feet or more underwater. Scientists pulled up a total of more than 8,000 feet of rock and sediment that are providing, for the first time, a detailed record of the continent's geology, climate, and even life over millions of years. Pollen from land-dwelling plants suggests that now-submerged parts of Zealandia were once at the surface, and microscopic shell fossils suggest that, at times, it was covered by a warm, shallow sea.

The continent probably took its first dive underwater about 80 million years ago, when it separated from Antarctica and Australia. About 30 to 40 million years after that separation (after the dinosaurs all went extinct, the Pacific Ring of Fire formed and caused Zealandia's seabed to buckle. These cores are going to keep scientists busy for a long time. They have an entire continent to explore.

In northern Labrador, one of the few places on the planet where rock from Earth’s early history has survived, a team of scientists from the University of Tokyo have found mineral graphite that shows evidence of life on earth 3.95 billion years ago.

That makes this the oldest evidence ever found of life on earth, as the CBC reports.

In a new study published in Nature, Yuji Sano and Tsuyoshi Komiya describe their discovery of graphite in the Saglek Block, the oldest known stretch of metasedimentary rock in the world. Graphite can form when decaying organic material is heated to hundreds of degrees, and mineral formed in this way has a distinctive chemical clue that it was formed from once-living material. Graphite is made of carbon, and if the isotope carbon-12 is present in particularly high concentrations, compared to carbon-13, it’s a sign of organic material.

Dating material this old is always a challenge. There are only four places on Earth that are known to have rock that dates back to the Eoarchean period, more than 3.6 billion years ago. Having survived this long, the rock has transformed, making it difficult to trace the history of any particular sample. But, as The Atlantic reports, the team calculated that the graphite formed at temperatures that could have also turned the surrounding, 3.95 billion-year-old rock into its current, metamorphic state. That evidence suggests that the sample was already in place during that transformation and also dates back that far.

This work is so tricky that there’s always some doubt, but scientists who didn’t participate in the study are very enthusiastic about its results. The Earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old, and this line of research is putting the origin of life ever closer to the planet’s birth. “Earth has been a biotic, life-sustaining planet since close to its beginning,” one scientist told TheAtlantic.

It was dark when Roy Thompson, a 20th-century river worker, came under fire from local oyster police. He and a young man named Frank had snuck onto the waters of the Chesapeake Bay to harvest oysters. As they hauled their load aboard the boat, shots rang and bullets peppered the vessel. Thompson revved his watercraft into action, racing forward in an attempt to outrun the police, who were rapidly approaching, their gunfire shattering his windows. But his boat, chock-full of oysters, was too heavy for a hasty getaway. He ordered Frank to start dumping the mollusks back into the bay to lighten the load, desperate to escape the ambush. Though a bullet did shoot the shovel Frank was using right out of his hand, the two men managed to survive unharmed.

It wasn’t their first, or last, close encounter with the authorities.

Thompson and his fellow nighttime dredgers were among the thousands of oyster pirates who pillaged the Chesapeake Bay area during the Oyster Wars that rocked Maryland and Virginia’s shared waters from the mid-19th century all the way up until the late 1950s. Beneath the dark cloak of the night sky, hidden behind veils of mist and clouds, the pirates plundered the bay as part of a loosely united ramshackle crew, known as the Mosquito Fleet for their small, swift boats.

Unlike the historic pirates of the open ocean, these men weren’t searching for gold coins or sunken jewels. Their treasure came in a shell rather than a chest, its value found within the slimy meat shuttered inside. In fact, calling members of the Mosquito Fleet “pirates” doesn’t quite accurately depict what they truly were: poachers. The shellfish thieves were illegally pilfering a valuable natural resource.

Though oysters were originally considered a poor man’s food, after the Civil War people’s attitudes toward the briny meat began to shift. Northerners with a newfound disposable income began to see oysters as somewhat of a high-class cuisine worthy of their palates. With large portions of the New England oyster stock already depleted, watermen turned toward the abundance of crustaceans farther down the Atlantic coast. The waters around Maryland and Virginia boasted some of the richest, most plentiful beds in the world, spurring an oyster boom akin to an aquatic gold rush. Soon, people from across the globe were importing Chesapeake Bay oysters, coveting their own chance to slurp mouthfuls of the mollusk. By 1870, the oysters were at the forefront of a $50 million seafood industry.

For natives of the Chesapeake Bay area, on both the Maryland and Virginia side of the border, aquatic resources—used for food, fertilizer, and as a source of income—were an essential aspect of everyday life. The poorer waterfront communities relied on the oysters to make the money they needed to feed their families. They’d already spent the years prior to the Civil War watching northern fishermen trickle into their waters with advanced equipment used to reap bountiful harvests.

When watermen from New England arrived in the Chesapeake Bay, they brought with them their dredgers. The steel-framed, chain meshed nets were used to scoop the shellfish from their beds. The equipment, which had led to the massive decline of oysters along the country’s northern shores, was far more effective than the rake-like hand tongs traditionally used in the Chesapeake. In an effort to preserve its precious resource, Maryland enacted laws that limited oyster harvesting to state residents, then in 1865, further required that its local oyster harvesters purchase a yearly license. Virginia, however, did not.

This posed a problem.

The Chesapeake Bay falls within the territory of Maryland and Virginia, and while both state governments were aware of the value of the sought-after sea creatures, the odd geopolitical nature of the shared waters made the oyster industry difficult to control. As the Washington Post has noted, per a 1785 agreement, both states had to pass the same legislation in order to enact any laws regarding the shared waters of the Potomac River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay. But Maryland and Virginia disagreed with each other over the necessary policies to put in place to regulate the oyster harvests.

This legislative friction reflected the mounting tensions among the citizenry. Locals, who originally relied on tongs, resented the Northern newcomers because their dredges allowed them to collect a heftier bounty. After Chesapeake Bay residents acquired dredgers of their own, they also found themselves fighting against gun-happy local authorities, from both Maryland and Virginia, who were desperately trying to maintain order on the chaotic waters.

In 1868, Maryland created its own armed Oyster Navy in an effort to regain control of an area that had turned into something of a watery no-man’s land. As James Tice Moore details in Gunfire on the Chesapeake, Virginia, not to be outdone despite its lax laws, eventually began its own crusade to capture illegal harvesters.

But the Oyster Navy was a poorly planned endeavor. The underfunded entity struggled to keep pace with the abundance of pirates. The captains abused and risked the lives of their employees, most of whom were immigrants.

The Mosquito Fleet were a hardy bunch. Many of the original members were veterans of the Civil War. They weren’t an exclusive group, nor did they adhere to racial segregation—the only prerequisite for joining the notorious fleet was the ability to outrun the police. An inspector from the Fish and Wildlife Service, quoted in 1887, called the pirates, “unscrupulous men, who regard neither the laws of God nor man.” According to him, they were the lowest of the low, hailing from disgraceful places such as jails and the “vilest dens of the city.”

Many of the men were locals who had grown up earning their livelihoods from the water. For them, the oyster boom was a welcome opportunity for economic growth, a chance to take advantage of a surplus resource. “Oysters was ass-deep in the Potomac River,” remembers Walter Dorsey, a native, in an oral history captured by the journal SlackWater. As John Wennersten describes in The Oyster Wars of Chesapeake Bay, the pirates took to conducting nighttime raids within the water, slinking throughout the bay to illegally dredge oysters. After Maryland outlawed dredging in the early 1930s, Virginia residents, claiming they were adhering to their own state laws (or lack thereof) continued anyway. “They figured that the good Lord put the oysters out there for them and to hell with anybody else,” said Earl Brannock, a retired oyster police officer, in SlackWater.

The Mosquito Fleet braved treacherous nighttime conditions all the way through the middle of the 20th century. They not only faced poor visibility and sometimes unpredictable waters, but also police forces lurking within the coves. Police boats would often dim their lights, sitting and waiting in utter blackness until it was time to stage an attack. Then, they’d rush forward, firing their guns at the unsuspecting poachers, sometimes even ramming their boats into the offending vessels of the Mosquito Fleet. Of course, the pirates typically fired right back.

However, the oyster police did eventually take matters too far. On the night of April 7, 1959, Berkeley Muse, a man from the rugged gambling haven of Colonial Beach, decided to tag along with his buddies Harvey King and John Griffith for a bit of midnight dredging. The three set out on their covert mission, unaware of a nearby police stakeout. When police opened fire on the small band of pirates, King took a bullet to the leg. Muse, who had decided to join King and Griffith for a bit of mischief, was shot and killed.

Muse’s death prompted the Maryland and Virginia governments to finally attempt to work together to put an end to the backwater madness. After a long period of turbulent negotiations, the two states came together to support the Potomac River Fisheries Commission bill, which dictated how to conserve and manage their shared maritime resources. Congress approved the plan in October of 1962, and President John F. Kennedy signed the bill into law on December 5, effectively ending the Oyster Wars that for nearly 100 years had ravaged the Chesapeake Bay.

Babka Vanda—eyes like shiny buttons, hair tucked beneath a headscarf, dressed in a floral-print blouse—told photographer Siarhiek Leskiec a story about her grandmother. She was thought to be a witch, Babka Vanda said, and the local priest had forbidden her from treating people—until, that is, he was bitten by an adder. She whispered words into the wind, and he was cured. She eventually passed that power, to heal through whispers, to Babka Vanda.

Today, this ancient Belarusian healing tradition is slowly disappearing. For Leskiec, it’s a part of his country's heritage, and he wants to document it before it is gone completely.

Like other former Soviet republics, independent Belarus has evolved in ways both predictable and unexpected. Geographically, it’s small and landlocked between the Baltics, Ukraine, Poland, and Russia. The country remained majority Orthodox Christian through the years of Soviet-enforced atheism. Politically, it precariously straddles the divide between the Kremlin and the West. and its leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, has been in power for 23 years, and is seen as more dictator than politician. Through all of this, the healing tradition practiced by women such as Babka (Belarusian for "grandmother") Vanda has remained strong—until now. It is unlikely to survive the decline of the country's rural population. Today, three of every four Belarusians live in cities.

“The tradition is preserved for 1,000 years of Christianity, Stalinist repression, and atheism and persecution of believers in the USSR, but is dying now under the influence of globalization and urbanization,” says Leskiec. “Young people do not believe in these 'tales' and do not want to learn. They think it is unnecessary and primitive.”

The whispering healing is heavily ritualized. “For each disease there are special words. These are small, often rhymed text that you want to say in one breath and a barely audible whisper,” says the photographer. “Most often [they] read words about the patient, or over the water, then this water [the] patient must drink and wash her face and sore place for three days.” Whispering occurs on certain days for men and other days for women, and never on Sundays or holidays. The healers treat diseases and infections, but also more spiritual concerns: “The strongest whisperers can even cast out evil spirits.” Their methods can also incorporate herbs and other rituals.

The healing tradition is believed, according to Leskiec, to have its roots in paganism. When Christianity came to Belarus, the spells were adapted to incorporate elements of organized religion, including the names of saints. Christian orders were highly suspicious of the spells—“damned pagan whisperers,” they called them, according to Leskiec. However, religion and folk practice found a way to coexist. “Now even the whisperers themselves are deeply religious Christians, but they have their own understanding of faith and tradition.”

One image from the photographer's documentation project depicts a “female cross,” a traditional crucifix that has been draped in pieces of cloth. The cloths are donated each year, by the villagers, to ward off evil and maintain good health. Says Leskiec, “So the cross is adorned as a woman in a traditional costume and the symbol of Christianity is like a female goddess.”

It has always been difficult to become a whisper healer. Knowledge is passed to children—male or female—between seven and 12 years old, by close relatives, usually grandparents. “All prayers were taught verbally and rarely were they were written down on paper,” says Leskiec. The were other requirements for the profession as well. “A person should be kind and curious, purposeful, and open to communication with others.” But initiates must then wait, sometimes for decades, before they can actually engage in the practice—after they've built their own families or gone through menopause.

Leskiec's project began in 2012, but it took time, not just to find the healers, but to gain their trust. He spent several years learning about the tradition before being, in a way, initiated. "After that it was easy for me to talk to other whisperers," he recalls. "Our knowledge was equal." At the start, Leskiec found 40 healers; today he knows only five. His goal is to create a book from the project so the stories can live on. Every year, he says, there are fewer inhabitants in rural villages, and fewer young people to teach. “Old people live there," he says, "and together with them, old healing traditions of ancient Europe also die.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Leskiec’s project.

The apparent pun in Smilodon, the scientific genus of the saber-toothed cat, seems to be an accident. The largest assemblage of fossils of these prehistoric carnivores comes from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, where they lived up until about 11,000 years ago. Weighing between 100 and 620 pounds, depending on the species, they had exceptionally long canine teeth, specially designed for precision killing. A new study, published in PLOS ONE, reveals more about these mammals and how they killed their prey. Limb bones found in the tar pits suggest that, even as kittens, Smilodon was very strong and robust. These kittens had big teeth—and muscles to match.

A team of scientists from California State Polytechnic University analyzed these fossils to see how the kittens changed as they aged. The La Brea Tar Pits have provided a wealth of samples, and some 90 percent of all fossils found there come from carnivores, who came to the pits looking for easy, captive prey. Sometimes they got a meal, other times they themselves got stuck in the thick petroleum goop.

Unlike modern big cats, which start as vulnerable kittens and get much stronger as they age, saber-toothed kittens had husky, muscular forelimbs, based on the the bone density of the samples. This would have allowed them to attack prey even from a very young age. What's more, the hardiness of these bones tells us that Smilodon likely didn't like to run very fast—or at least that they were more likely to kill their prey by ambush rather than by chasing it down. Smilodon favored big beasts—elephants, rhinos, and other massive herbivores no longer alive today. Compared to other predators or cats of similar size, they were far stronger and heavier. This carnivore, the study says, "used their powerful forelimbs to quickly wrestle prey to the ground and pin it before slashing its vulnerable throat or belly with their saber-like canines." Grim, but effective.

Wiped out in the last Ice Age, Smilodon has left us no direct descendants. Of the big cats around today, which come from a different lineage, leopards, cheetahs, and lions are more likely to chase their prey, while cougars are typically ambush predators. They might wait on ledges or in trees before leaping onto the their prey and delivering a suffocating neck bite. Smilodon's practices, it seems, were not dissimilar.

When European settlers arrived in Tasmania at the end of the 18th century, they dubbed the strange, dog-like marsupial they encountered the Tasmanian tiger. But the Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine, wasn't always exclusive to the island off Australia's southeastern coast. The thylacine lived all across the mainland until about 3,200 years ago, when it suddenly went extinct there. The cause of this disappearance is a mystery (perhaps much like the question of whether they're still out there). A new study based on DNA analysis suggests that an abrupt change in climate played a big role.

The commonly accepted explanation of the thylacine's mainland extinction has involved three factors: humans, dingoes, and climate. It's been suspected that climate played a minor role, and that dingoes, introduced to Australia around 5,000 years ago, and the growing population of increasingly sophisticated humans outcompeted thylacines as predators. The Tasmanian population, separated from the mainland about 14,000 years ago, survived until 1936, when the last known indidivual died in a Hobart zoo.

But mitochondrial DNA from 51 thylacine specimens from Australia and Tasmania suggests that an El Niño-Southern Oscillation event contributed to the mainland extinction. The early populations in Australia were genetically diverse, but the weather pattern triggered a series of prolonged droughts that were especially tough on the ones that were living in arid Western Australia. This contributed to their extinction, as well as that of the mainland population of Tasmanian devils. Conditions were a bit better in Tasmania—the thylacines there dropped in number, but started to bounce back about 700 years ago—just in time for the arrival of Europeans.

For close to 60 years, a set of notebooks sat unused in the herbarium at the Yangambi Biological Station in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. During the colonial era, this was an agricultural research station, the National Institute for Agronomic Study of the Belgian Congo, or INEAC. Every week for two decades, from 1937 to 1958, biologists at the station observed 2,000 individual trees and recorded whether they had flowered, fruited, or dropped their leaves. As The Guardian reports, the scientists scrawled their observations in small notebooks and coded them into larger logs, creating a detailed record of forest life during the final decades of Belgian occupation of this part of Africa.

When Koen Hufkens, an ecologist at Harvard University, arrived at the station in 2013, the documents had been overlooked for years. The roof of the herbarium was broken, and the notebooks had been damaged by water and nibbled away by rodents. But there was still valuable information inside. Hufkens pulled them together and set about saving the data gathered more than half a century before.

Why would scientists today care about mid-century Congolese trees? The forests in this part of the world have been relatively little-studied compared to the forests elsewhere, in part because of the political instability and military dangers of this region. But the rain forest in Africa, which covers more than 2.4 million square miles, is one of the most important carbon sinks on Earth, as it absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locks it away in organic matter, which helps regulate the Earth’s climate. The project that Hufkens was originally working on when he arrived sought to better understand the relationship between carbon storage and biodiversity in Yangambi.

Like all ecosystems on Earth, the rain forest in Africa is being affected by climate change. That part of the world is beginning to dry out, so scientists want to understand how that will change the forest’s ability to store carbon. To do this, they need to know how the plants grow, drop their fruit and leaves, and eventually die, and how that has changed over time. The information trapped in those old, forgotten notebooks might contain some clues.

Observations like these—weekly data for 500 species of trees over 20 years—is hard to come by, says Hufkens. (Imagine trying to get a research grant for that project now.) The data from 60 to 80 years ago can “provide baseline measurements to which to compare the state of the forest and/or its response to climate change,” he says. “These measurements currently do not exist, and only historical data can fill in this knowledge.” The project he’s now working on, called COBECORE (or "Congo basin eco-climatological data recovery and valorisation"), aims to extract data from the analog archives of INEAC—to store it all in a formal archive, not a crumbling herbarium.

First, the analog records need to be transformed into digital data, a painstaking process. After he found the tree data in the herbarium, Hufkens scanned the record books and enlisted help on Zooniverse, a platform that connects scientists with amateur researchers.

The records books contain a sort of code, of faint, penciled lines that chronicle the trees’ lives. Solid lines and cross-hatched marks indicate events such as fruiting and leaf fall, while an X stands for a tree’s death or removal from the study. Volunteers coded each of these marks so that a computer could read them and translate them into a digital database.

That’s just the beginning of unlocking the value of this data, though. Hufkens and his colleagues also need meteorological and weather data to start to understand how environmental changes might have affected the trees’ growth. The INEAC archives that COBECORE is digitizing are vast. But ultimately these old, almost entirely lost records may be able to help scientists see into the future of the Congo’s forests and understand how they might react to the challenges to come.

There are a lot of things to do in Brooklyn Bridge Park, an 85-acre green space that snakes along New York City's East River. You can attend a reading or a movie or a concert. You can gaze across the river at the Statue of Liberty, tag along on a historic walking tour, or take a spin in a kayak.

And on certain days, you can pay your respects at the Brooklyn Bridge Elephant Stampede memorial, a recreation in bronze of that fateful day in 1929 when P.T. Barnum's pack of circus pachyderms went rogue, trampling spectators all along the bridge.

If you're wondering why you've never heard of this tragedy before, it's because it never happened. Neither did the Staten Island Ferry Octopus Disaster of 1963, during which one of the borough's famous orange boats was dragged below the East River's surface by an enormous, tentacled beast—but there's a memorial for that, too, in Manhattan's Battery Park. Both are the work of Joseph Reginella, a native New Yorker who describes them as tributes to the city where he's spent his life.

Reginella, who lives in Staten Island, is a professional sculptor. He makes sets and props for TV commericals, and displays for stores like Macy's. Left to his own devices, though, he tends to create pieces that find humor in the juxtaposition of fear and innocence: a Jaws-themed baby bed, say, or his line of macabre "Toxic Teddies."

A few years ago, he was on the Staten Island ferry with his young nephew, who put him through a classic kid interrogation. "He was asking weird questions—like, 'Is this water infested with sharks?', this and that," says Reginella. "And off the top of my head I was like, 'No, but you know, in the '60s, one of these boats was pulled down by a giant octopus.'"

Reginella's nephew was thrilled, and Reginella got inspired. "I was like, 'Wait a second,'" he says. "That would be pretty cool if I could pawn that off on everybody." He began concocting a full story, in which a ferry called the Cornelius G. Kolff "vanished without a trace" in a flurry of "large tentacles" on its way from Staten Island to Manhattan, with 400 people on board.

He picked a date: November 22, 1963, the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination, which would have ensured that this other tragedy got buried in the news. And he made the sculpture: a three-foot "bronze" replica of the sinking, sucker-stricken boat, placed on top of a "marble" column, and captioned by a sober plaque. (The whole thing, Reginella says, is actually made of painted styrofoam.)

The statue was intriguing on its own, but Reginella was hoping to make a bigger splash. "You need to have a larger platform, I believe, to sustain [the story]," he says. So he brought in a team of friends to help him create a multimedia experience: staged crime scene photos; photoshopped news clippings; a short documentary, full of slow pans and shellshocked witnesses.

Reginella set up the memorial in Battery Park. When people came over, he handed them brochures for the "Octopus Memorial Museum," also a hoax. The museum's "location" was actually that of a cultural center on Staten Island.

"I figured if I'm going to send people to a fake address, I don't want to totally dupe them," says Reginella. "But then I started getting nasty phone calls from the people who were running the [cultural center]. People were going out and walking the grounds, actually looking for the [museum]... That was very stunning to me."

Eventually, local news channels picked up the story, and the jig was up. Fans kept coming anyway, though: "People seemed to love it even though they knew it was fake," Reginella says.

It was all enjoyable enough that he figured he'd do it again. This year's story involves a deadly elephant stampede that just happened to occur on October 29, 1929, the same day as the stock market crash that kickstarted the Great Depression. The memorial shows three elephants mid-rampage, in front of the Brooklyn Bridge's iconic pylons.

The website has another documentary, this time voiced by Disney Channel stars, thanks to Reginella's relationship with screenwriter Ricky Roxburgh. There is also another brochure, more doctored newspaper clips, and a walking tour, narrated by New York punk legend David Johansen. "I'm lucky enough to have a whole bunch of people willing to go along with my insanity," says Reginella.

Reginella makes the sculptures to entertain himself and others. He's especially happy when they seem to tap into shared cultural fantasies or memories: the discovery that Salman Rushdie has also written about a Staten Island sea monster, in his 2015 novel Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights, thrilled him, and he combined two true past events to come up with this false elephant stampede.

But in this particular historical moment, he sees a lesson embedded in them, too. "I hate the term 'fake news,'" says Reginella. "But one thing I do hope people get out of this is to do their due diligence. To do their own research, and not to believe everything they hear."

Mostly though, he says, it's a love letter to New York City: perhaps the only place in the world where events like these—for a moment, at least—seem like they might be plausible.

You can keep tabs on the memorials' appearances on their respective Facebook pages: Staten Island Ferry Octopus Disaster Memorial Museum and Brooklyn Bridge Elephant Stampede.

As long as humans have made art, we're instinctively used the natural world—caves, rocks, trees, plains, cliffs—as a canvas. But as we've come to cherish natural spaces more for their own beauty, outbursts of outdoors creativity in such settings are not always welcome.

A few years ago, for example, hikers in Joshua Tree National Park, California, lamented that the famous graffiti writer Andre Saraiva had tagged a boulder there. Last year, a federal judge banned an amateur artist, Casey Nocket, from entering all federal, state, and municipal parks after it was revealed that she was behind Creepytings—a collection of artwork, promoted on social media, she made on rocks in several natural meccas, including Yosemite and Death Valley National Parks. According to the Los Angeles Times, street artists might be deliberately targeting natural areas as a new frontier.

Enter the Mediterranean archipelago of Malta, where colorful, cartoonish paintings have appeared at one of the country's most iconic vistas, Xlendi's Kantra Valley on the island of Gozo, which has become a major tourist attraction since appearing in the first season of Games of Thrones.

The works resemble the distinctive style of English graffiti writer Nathan Bowen and, well, he signed them, too. “We are actively looking for him,” a local policewoman told the London Evening Standard. The incident has raised the ire of many, who have suggested that Bowen should be sentenced to clean the rocks by hand, or be banned from the country for life.

It's been a bad year for Games of Thrones locations in Malta this year. The iconic Azure Window, also used in the show, collapsed into the sea after a brutal storm in May.

Just about a year ago, Rosetta, the spacecraft sent to orbit comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, crash landed on 67P's surface and ended its mission. For the two years it orbited the comet, it had sent back an incredible series of images, the best views we’d ever had of a comet and its surface.

Now, the European Space Agency has announced that, just before the spacecraft crashed, it sent one last image back to Earth.

The image is a blurry but detailed photo of the comet, taken about 55 to 65 feet from the surface, Gizmodo reports.

This photo was reconstructed from data sent in the last moments of Rosetta’s life. Each image it sent back was divided into six packets, but only half of those made it back to Earth, in this case. The automated system wasn’t able to recognize that data as a photo. But the ESA camera team noticed the stray packets and thought, “Wow, that could be another image,” as the ESA reports in a release.

The packets contained layers of information, so the image isn’t missing pieces, just detail. (And at the distance it was shot, it would have been blurry no matter what.) It's one last bit of wonder sent directly from space back to us here on Earth.

Whales are incredibly generous animals. In life, they sing, make rainbows, and throw big, smelly parties. In death, they nourish whole underwater ecosystems—and, it turns out, bring other species together in unprecedented numbers.

As ABC Kimberley reports, an "enormous rotting whale carcass" on the sandflats near Western Australia's Montgomery Reef has attracted over a dozen saltwater crocodiles, which normally keep to themselves.

Jim French, the helicopter pilot that spotted the popular buffet, told the outlet that he and his passengers counted "fourteen crocodiles, including two that came out of the whale's belly." "[They] were just in their element," he added. The fun will likely be over soon, as sharks have been joining the crocs at high tide, and there is less and less whale every minute.

Meanwhile, on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, 230 polar bears have come from far and wide to eat a dead bowhead whale, the Siberian Times reports.

Pictures perhaps shows 1% of all the polar bears left on the planet as they feasting on bowhead whale carcass! https://t.co/59cVGNLfJtpic.twitter.com/d0TOHpI1QO

— The Siberian Times (@siberian_times) September 29, 2017

The bears—who, like many of their kind, are probably hungry from dwindling sea ice—were spotted by tourists on the Akademik Shokalskiy, a Finnish cruise ship. Photos of the island show dozens of fuzzy-looking white dots lumbering down from higher ground to take part in snacktime.

And then there's the humpback carcass in Australia, which had to be exhumed earlier this week in order to get rid of the dozens of sharks who came calling.

Yet another lesson from whales: if you're trying to get all your friends to hang out, just drum up an irresistible meal.

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.

A giant red and yellow macaw sits on a pedestal above a figure of the monkey-god Hanuman, the bird’s concrete wings spread out as if ready to take flight. Behind it is a small gushing waterfall, surrounded by lush green foliage. Melodious tweets, boisterous squawks, and dulcet calls fill the air. I’m at the entrance of Shuka Vana, also known as Parrot Park or the Forest of Parrots, an aviary situated on the outskirts of Mysore in South India.

Over 2,000 birds live at Shuka Vana, and as the name suggests, the majority of them are parrots. The aviary was founded in 2012 by Dr. Sri Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swamiji, the spiritual and cultural head of an ashram, Avadootha Datta Peetham. In May 2017, the 1-acre wide and 50-meter (164-foot) high structure, which is located on ashram premises, garnered the Guinness World Record for having the most bird species (468) in an aviary.

It’s a Sunday morning when I arrive and scores of people are already milling around. A busload of school girls has arrived and their excited voices add to the cacophony of the birds. Three middle aged women draped in sarees push past me as I enter.

Inside, the aviary is stocked with tall slender trees and swaying palms, alongside short shrubs such as ferns and crotons. A pair of cockatoos frolics in the canopies and a lone blue crowned pigeon scans the ground. Many more birds, obscured by the foliage and the shining sun, only their shapes visible, fly around the canopies.

Rows of enclosures, housing cockatoos, macaws, amazon parrots, parakeets, and conures, adorn the sides of the aviary. While some birds are allowed to fly freely during the roughly six hours of public access per day, others are kept in the enclosures for the sake of their safety and establishing proper feeding habits. Guests walk around on tiled paths, admiring Shuka Vana's colorful inhabitants.

The idea and vision for Shuka Vana took root in 2011 when Sachchidananda Swamiji, who was unavailable to be interviewed for this article, visited South America to promote the mass chanting of the Ramayana, a Hindu holy text. According to Shiva Kumar, manager at the aviary, Sachchidananda Swamiji’s boat overturned in Venezuela. “As he was being rescued from the water,” Kumar says in the local language of Kannada, “he saw a horde of white Amazon birds circle around him and fly away.

Kumar adds that when Sachchidananda Swamiji came back to India, a devotee gifted him 25 birds of the parrot family, many of which were unhealthy. Taking this as some sort of divine message, he nurtured the animals back to health and endeavored to care for more.

Word of his mission spread and people from different parts of India brought birds that were abandoned, injured, or sick to his ashram. As the number of his patients grew, Sachchidananda Swamiji established the aviary, with an attached hospital where unhealthy birds can be rehabilitated.

The aviary conserves endangered and vulnerable birds that have entered the country through the pet industry. All the creatures brought to Shuka Vana were born and bred in captivity and it’s considered unsafe to release them into the wild.

A narrow path on one side of the aviary leads to the bird rehabilitation center, a few meters away. The square building opens into a wide room, its walls lined with cages arranged in rows.

The very first cage is home to an African grey parrot with a congenital disorder. One of its legs is shorter than the other. It cannot balance take-offs or landings well, and has to be kept confined. In separate nearby cages, there’s a sun conure with only one leg and a cockatoo with a fractured wing.

In the center of the room, another cockatoo, this one with an e-collar on its neck, is prancing around a table. Dr. Dasari Srilakshmi, a bird behavior specialist, talks to it in soothing tones and engages it in games. Dr. Srilakshmi, along with a veterinarian and a nurse, tends to the avian patients at Shuka Vana. In addition, there are 25 to 30 volunteers who help take care of the birds and are trained to keep a keen eye for behavioral changes, weight loss, and other issues.

The cockatoo was sent here recently by someone who found it in a miserable state in a pet shop. Suffering from depression, the bird had taken to self-harm, plucking its own feathers and even its flesh. After many months of rehabilitation and behavior therapy, the cockatoo is now on its way to recovery and will soon join a flock at the aviary.

“These birds have ailments similar to humans. Some have congenital disorders, some suffer from depression,” says Dr. Srilakshmi. She adds, “their lifespan is also long, 60 to 70 years. Often people do not realize the care they need while purchasing them as pets.”

The hospital is well-equipped to detect, diagnose, and treat illnesses—there’s an ultrasound machine, digital X-ray, an avian blood lab, an operation theater, and a microscopy lab. There is also a DNA lab, where a small research project is underway to determine what makes some birds more adept at speech than others.

The top floor of the hospital holds a quarantine center where new arrivals are held for three weeks while they are tested and monitored for diseases and infections. Once cleared, they are released into the aviary.

The process of grouping the old and new birds is meticulously planned. Dr. Srilakshmi ensures that birds of the same species but with different personalities—dominant, introverted, friendly—are grouped together to keep the harmony. The idea is also for them to have enough interaction with each other to choose their mates. “Birds of the parrot family bond for life monogamously. The bonding could be male-male, female-male, or female-female,” Dr. Srilakshmi explains.

Dr. Srilakshmi and I walk back into the aviary. It’s almost noon and the institution will soon close to the public so the birds can feed freely. A great military macaw, a green-and yellow macaw, and a scarlet macaw are perched on a feeding station, nonchalantly watching their human guests. Nearby, a yellow-naped amazon parrot flutters its wings and drinks water from a cup held out by one of the volunteers. Here at Shuka Vana, these formerly neglected birds have finally found a safe haven.

Permanence is a fallacy. Time crumbles, earthquakes shatter, wars raze, waters rise—but two pieces of music, recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, may be able to endure any disaster, natural or manmade, for thousands upon thousands of years. U.S. company Twist Bioscience, working with Microsoft Research and the University of Washington, is using the latest genetic technology to encode data directly into strands of DNA. Generally, digital information is encoded as a long, long string of zeros and ones, known as binary format. DNA can store it with four values—A, T, C and G, corresponding to adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, the nucleobases that make up the biological molecule—which makes it far more efficient for data storage.

It’s now possible—whether this future is frightening or promising may be a matter of perspective—to create synthetic DNA strands. These artificial pieces of genetic code combine the nucleobases in any order we want, which makes it possible to store data in a vanishingly small space. The entire internet, the project stated in a release, would fit into a shoebox of DNA. All the world's music would fit into a few drops. This data, once encoded, can be analyzed and reconstructed with no loss of information. DNA is also a very stable molecule, and once encapsulated, it could last for millions of years—think of a fly in amber. In millions of years, future human beings, if we're still around and able to retrieve this information, will be able to hear the strains of 21st-century jazz, exactly as it sounds today. The first songs encoded into very the fabric of life are "Tutu," by Miles Davis, and a jazz cover of "Smoke on the Water," by Deep Purple.

Could this be the end of the infinite grind of music formats and obsolescence? Phonograph cylinders, LPs, cassettes, 8-tracks, CDs, mini-discs, mp3s—and now DNA? The only problem might be how you keep from losing it.

Yakushima is an almost perfectly round island 37 miles south off the southernmost point of the Japanese island of Kyushu. Its remote and isolated setting is home to one of the best-preserved moderate temperate growth rainforests in Japan.

The 17-mile-wide island also possesses one of the wettest climates anywhere in the world, so much so that locals say it rains “35 days a month.”

Diverse ecosystems coexist here, ranging from subtropical lowlands, to cool temperate highlands, where it can even snow. The combination of these factors has given Yakushima a mystical aura that is often compared to fantasy lands such as the island where King Kong resides (in large part due to its almost perfectly round shape), as well as providing inspiration for the animated film Princess Mononoke from the Japanese animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli.

To reach Yakushima, you take a leisurely four-hour ferry ride from Sakurajima, famous for its active volcano that makes headlines every few years as it spews ash to cover the city. The ferry lands at the north of the island in the port settlement of Miyanoura, where the majority of Yakushima’s population of about 13,000 resides. The rest of the population is sprinkled along the coastline supporting mostly tourism activity that has replaced the logging economy that once thrived here.

The desire for a spiritual experience with nature lures many to this island, where many Japanese salarymen relieve job stress by hiking the interior mountains. There are multiple walking trails, some of which traverse the entire width of the island. For those who wish to do overnight hikes, simple mountain huts found along certain parts of the trails that can be used free of charge.

The trails wind among Yakushima cedar trees (Yaku-sugi), which are famous for their incredibly old age. Most are around 1,000 years old, and a few are believed to be older than 7,000. Due to the abundant rainfall, there are moss-covered rocks all over the forest floor, which add to the overwhelming green.

The largest animals to be found are Yakushima macaque monkeys and spotted white sika deers that are endemic to the island. These two creatures sometimes show a symbiotic relationship. Some visitors have even reported seeing monkeys riding the deer for transportation purposes.

In a recent speech in Adelaide, Australia, the aspiring space maven Elon Musk updated the public on his plans for colonizing Mars. His current vision includes a massive 40-cabin spacecraft, an aspirational launch date of 2024, and technology that can produce fuel from the planet's thin atmosphere.

As with the heady beginnings of most space travel plans, this is all very glitzy and appealing. If you ask Wieger Wamelink, though, any successful Mars mission will eventually have to leave room in the plans for something a bit more quotidian: a heck of a lot of worms.

Wamelink, a senior ecologist at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, spends most of his time studying Earthly questions. Much of his work involves what he calls "plant-soil relations," or figuring out why particular plant species will grow easily in one place, and not at all in another. A few years ago, though, he became interested in a far-flung version of this question: if humans were able to provide them with water, air, and climate control, could some plant species grow on dirt from the moon? What about from Mars?

At first, Wamelink proposed a theoretical study, based on comparing plant needs with what we know about these extraterrestrial soil types. But then he learned that NASA actually sells simulants of each, based on samples analyzed by probes or, in the case of the Moon, brought back by astronauts. "I thought, why not change the project into something experimental?" Wamelink says. So in 2013, he and his students filled a greenhouse with three sets of pots: some with lunar dirt, some with Martian dirt, and some with dirt from the Rhine river. (Wamelink deliberately chose a coarse, nutrient-poor Earthly soil, he says, to even the playing field a bit.)

They planted 4,200 seeds from various useful plant species, including nitrogen-fixers such as lupin and clover, and four different crops: rye, carrots, tomatoes, and garden cress.

"Our expectations were low," says Wamelink. But just a few days after planting, sprouts started popping up. In the end, "almost all the seeds germinated," he says. Although the simulated moon plants withered quickly after sprouting, the others thrived, producing flowers, fruits, and even seeds. "The Mars soil simulant was even better than the Earth control that we used," he says. "That was maybe the biggest surprise." (He and his team later published this research in PLOSOne.)

The next year, 2014, Wamelink and his students mixed things up. They grew only crops—ten species, including radishes, chives, and arugula—and they enriched the soils with dead plant parts, to mimic what might happen in a successful space-gardening scenario. They switched the Earth control to potting soil, now that the space soils had proved they could pull their weight. This imrpoved things: On the Mars soil, "all the plants did well except the spinach," he says. "Even on the moon soil we had tomatoes, though they never made it to red."

They tested the vegetables for heavy metals—a concern with space dirt, which contains cadmium, copper, and lead—and also came up clear: "the lead content was higher in the tomato we grew on Earth potting soil," Wamelink says. After the third experiment, which was completed last year and aimed at getting as large a harvest as possible, they served up the fruits of their labor, complete with an interplanetary tomato taste test. ("The Mars soil tomatoes were a bit more sweet," says Wamelink.)

These results have been promising. But soil alone can only do so much: a sustainable off-earth farming ecosystem also involves fungi, bacteria, and pollinators such as bees and butterflies. (Wamelink is betting on bumblebees: "you can keep them in hibernation," he says, so they'd easily survive the rocket trip.) Over the past month, he and his team have begun testing the next most important ecosystem member—earthworms—to see if they are able to hack it in relatively harsh exoplanetary dirt.

The dangers are many: lunar dirt is very sharp, because the moon lacks weather. "Stones and rocks over there fall apart because of cosmic radiation," says Wamelink. "But they just fall apart and lie there. They have all kinds of sharp edges… imagine eating glass." (Martian dirt has the same problem, though to a lesser extent.) The heavy metals, too, pose a threat: at certain concentrations, copper and cadmium are toxic to at least one common worm species.

If the earthworms do prove flexible about their earthiness, though, they'll be a great help. On this planet, they are incredible gardening accomplices, breaking down organic matter into forms that plants can soak up, and aerating the soil with their burrows so that nutrients and water can reach their roots.

In space, they'll be even more vital: "Moon soil especially is very compact and dense," says Wamelink. "Even air has trouble getting in." He thinks this may be one reason that the lunar soil tends to underperform. By tunneling, worms could provide the necessary egress, solving this problem.

The official worm experiment started last week: Wamelink made worm homes out of organic matter, pig slurry, and the various soils, planted some arugula seeds, and dropped in several different types of wrigglers. Now, the waiting and watching begins. (You can follow the experiment's progress on the group's Facebook page.) But Wamelink, in his excitement, has given himself a sort of sneak peek: since February, he's had worms in Martian-style soil living in a small terrarium on his desk.

"They are still alive," he says. "They really seem to like it. They seem to be very happy." One small bite for worm, one giant dig for wormkind.

There are an endless number of decisions that a brewer can make about a beer recipe, but one ingredient—water—seems like it should be an afterthought. But even for the most basic, cheap beers, brewers pay a lot of attention to water chemistry. If it's too alkaline, or full of minerals and other contaminants, it will impact the flavor of the final product. So they carefully test their water sources to make sure they're good enough—and now one brewery in the Czech Republic has hired some tiny new employees to take over this task. They're paid in food. Because they're crayfish.

Crayfish, crustaceans that live on the bottom of streams, are considered an indicator species in the wild. Their absence from a waterway usually means that it is polluted. At the Protivin Brewery—brewers of the Platan family of beers—Reuters reports, they can show whether water pumped from a local natural source is safe to use. Five of the clawed arthropods have infrared sensors mounted on their backs that monitor their heart rates and movement. A portion of the water headed for the brew kettle is diverted to their tank, and if three or more of the crayfish have elevated heart rates, or start moving around a lot, a computer will tell brewers within three minutes that there's a problem.

The brewery is working with scientists from the University of South Bohemia to develop this biosensor system, which they plan to continue upgrading. Cameras that can monitor the crayfishes' hearts are a planned addition. The system remains experimental, so brewers still have to monitor water quality in a lab.

Ernest Hemingway was once a 10-year-old boy, and he was already trying to write. In 1909, he was checking maps and learning about landmarks in Ireland and Scotland, because he wanted his story of a fictional journey to sound true.

This early work—the earliest known example of the famous author’s fiction—was recently rediscovered in a freezer bag, stashed inside an ammunition box, in the archive of a Hemingway family friend, The Telegraph reports.

In 1962 Hemingway’s fourth wife left “Toby” Bruce, who had worked for Hemingway and become a friend, with a portion of the famous author’s archives. The materials left to Bruce were thought to be less important parts of Hemingway’s extensive papers, and they remained in the Bruce family’s care.

This past May, Sandra Spanier, a Penn State professor and editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, and the historian Brewster Chamberlin found the notebook containing young Hemingway’s story in the Bruce archive, The New York Times reports.

Spanier had come to Key West, Florida, in advance of the publication of volume four of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, scheduled to come out this month. There will be 17 volumes in all, and this one covers 1929 to 1931. Spanier wanted to check that the book was not missing any letters from that period, and she and Chamberlin were going through the Bruce collection when they found the notebook.

"We are going on a trip to Europe," the story begins. "We are going on the 20th Century Ltd. to NY City where we expect to take a boat to Europe."

The freezer bag was labeled “September 8, 1909, EH diary to Europe.” Hemingway wrote the story as a diary and letters addressed to his parents, so it’s not immediately clear that it’s fiction. But Hemingway didn’t reach Europe for the first time until later in his life and never made the exact trip described in the notebook. The details in the story about local landmarks and lore came from research alone.

Much of Australia's native megafauna, including wombats the size of hippopotamuses and 10-foot tall kangaroos, has been extinct for thousands of years. Yet this continent-sized island is now home to eight introduced species of megafauna (defined as animals weighing more than 100 kilograms, or about 220 pounds), some of which are extinct in their original homes. Wild dromedary camels live alongside endangered water buffalo, while wild horses and sambar deer gambol in its plains and valleys. New research published in Ecography suggests that these out-of-place transplants may play an important role in "rewilding," or filling vacant niches in, their ecosystems.

All over the world, large herbivores are finding success in unexpected places—and these populations sometimes have complicated origin stories. In Colombia, drug baron Pablo Escobar once famously owned a herd of hippos. Now, dozens of their descendants rampage around the countryside near his former home. The wild burros, or donkeys, of Arizona originated in Africa, and were brought to the United States by early prospectors, miners, and rangers. The population that calls the Sonoran Desert home are their abandoned progeny, left to run wild.

Previous research, the study says, has focussed on the negative aspects of introducing large species to potentially fragile ecosystems, with good reason. But there's evidence to suggest that these non-native animals are often occupying the roles of other species that had been driven to extinction. They might eat vegetation that is too tough for smaller animals. The donkeys, for instance, dig groundwater wells over three feet deep, which provide water for more than 30 other species and river vegetation. "Conservation typically ignores these populations by defining them as alien or invasive," study author Arian Wallach of the University of Technology Sydney’s Centre for Compassionate Conservation, told Australasian Science. "However, these populations are likely critical buffers against extinction, and there is growing evidence that they are making positive contributions in their new homes."

Of the 76 megafauna species alive today, almost a third also live wild outside of their native homes, in which they may be threatened or extinct. It might not be the conservation we imagine, but these displacements may have benefits for both the animals and their new homes. There's also evidence to suggest that ecosystems can adapt on the fly—such as dingoes in Australia finding a new food source in African donkeys, or mountain lions limiting wild horse populations in the United States. The anthropocene is in full swing, but don't count nature out just yet.

As any horror film fan can attest, the bathroom can be a scary place. From Janet Leigh's infamous shower scene in Psycho to the blood-spewing drain pipes of Stephen King's It, there's no shortage of genuinely startling imagery connected to lavatories. But when it comes to conjuring up the most terrifying possible interruptions to our most private moments, no one beats Japan.

In Japanese folklore, there are a number of spirits rumored to appear in bathrooms. Some reach out from the insides of toilets; others whisper through the stall walls. Each one has its own grim story and particular behavior, but they all share a connection to the bathroom. “In a sense, the bathroom is a somewhat unusual space in a household or school or wherever it exists,” says Michael Dylan Foster, author of The Book of Yôkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. Foster describes bathrooms as liminal spaces in that they connect the normal, everyday world to a whole different realm, namely the sewer.

“In that sense, the bathroom is a place of transition, and the toilet in particular is a portal to a mysterious otherworld," says Foster. "Even though we generally flush things down, it would not seem surprising for something mysterious to come up through the toilet.” A hand reaching up through the toilet is just one of the possible creep-outs a Japanese bathroom ghost might visit on someone.

Toire no Hanako-san

One of the best-known of Japan’s bathroom spirits is Toire no Hanako-san, or Hanako of the Toilet. Like all ghost stories, the details of Hanako’s origins vary somewhat from telling to telling, but in general, Hanako is said to be the ghost of a young girl who died around WWII, and now haunts school bathrooms. Usually described as wearing an out-of-fashion red dress and bob haircut, she can be summoned by going to the girl’s bathroom on the third floor, knocking on the third stall three times, and saying, “Are you there Hanako-san?” Depending on regional variations, Hanako will respond by saying, "Yes I am," or a ghostly hand will appear. If someone enters the stall, they could also be eaten by a three-headed lizard.

The last outcome notwithstanding, Hanako is generally just a spooky presence meant for a good scare. Hanako has appeared in numerous anime series and television shows, and is pretty much a star. “[The legend] is well known because it is essentially an ‘urban legend’ associated with schools all over Japan. Since the 1990s, it has also been used in movies, so it became part of popular culture not just orally transmitted or local folklore,” says Foster.

Kashima Reiko

Hanako is not the only young girl said to haunt the bathrooms of Japan. There is another legend of a young girl named Kashima Reiko, said to be the ghost of a girl who died when her legs were severed by a train. Her legless torso now haunts bathroom stalls, asking unlucky visitors, “Where are my legs?” The correct response, “On the Meishin Expressway,” could save your life. Otherwise, it’s said that she might tear a person’s legs off.

Kashima Reiko is a bathroom-centric variation of another Japanese ghost story known as “Teke Teke,” which also features the ghost of a young girl who was cut in half by a train. There's also a version of the Kashima Reiko story that suggests she will appear within one month to anyone who learns her story. This set-up probably sounds familiar to anyone who knows the popular Ring franchise, which Foster compares to the liminal aspect that makes bathrooms so ripe a setting for horror. “[Note] the classic J-horror film (and book) Ringu, in which Sadako is in a well; the association of the well as a mysterious place has precedents in earlier Japanese folklore. Also if we think about the imagery of Sadako coming out of a television set, we get the same idea that the television is a portal to another world; she literally crawls from another world into our own.”

Aka Manto

It’s not all scary little girls. One of the most gruesome of Japan’s bathroom ghosts is Aka Manto, or the Red Cape. Also sometimes called Aoi Manto (Blue Cape), or in some variations, Akai-Kami-Aoi-Kami (Red Paper, Blue Paper), this modern spirit is said to resemble a person completely covered by a flowing cape and hood, wearing a mask that hides an irresistibly handsome face. He is said to appear to people (usually in the last stall) as they are going to wipe, asking a strange question. Sometimes the spirit asks, “Red cape or blue cape?” or offers “Red paper or blue paper?” Choosing red will lead to Aka Manto flaying a person’s back (a red cape), or another gruesome, bloody death, while choosing blue will cause the spirit to suffocate you. Getting clever and choosing any other color will just cause you to be dragged to the underworld. The only way to escape Aka Manto’s punishment is to decline its offer entirely.

Kappa

One of Japan’s most famous mythological creatures, the kappa is said to sometimes be found in bathrooms. “However, it is not specifically thought of as a bathroom spirit, but more generally as a creature associated with water—usually rivers or ponds. But there are a lot of legends in which the kappa appears in an outhouse, where it harasses people (especially women),” says Foster.

Akaname

This goblinesque yōkai spirit is filthy and disheveled, with a long, protruding tongue, and according to Foster, it is primarily known for licking the filth off of bathtubs. While not seen as a particularly frightening creature, the image of a gross little sprite licking the dirt off of a tub is not exactly friendly.

Japan's bathroom spirits may appear to be uniquely ready to haunt your every bowel movement, but ultimately there are good reasons bathrooms everywhere tend to be a source of fear. “You are exposed and vulnerable—literally naked, at least in part—so there is a certain amount of danger or uncertainty associated with being there,” says Foster. “The bathroom is not a place you want to stay longer than necessary to complete the job you came to do.”