Inner Nature: The Otherworldly Octopus
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
I was watching a male ruby-throated hummingbird at my feeder the other day. Hummingbirds fascinate me. Besides being charismatic and heart-stoppingly beautiful, they are feisty. I watched him drink his fill and then sit on a nearby branch to play dog-in-the-manger, chasing away other hummingbirds who dared to try to take what he didn’t want. Their speed, their...
Inner Nature: The incredibly resilient tardigrade
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
In the annals of the ecosystem’s version of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not is a long list of organisms that are considered over-performers: tough, enduring and even thriving in environmentally adverse conditions. Most endure in state known as cryptobiosis (also called anabiosis), which means “mysterious or enigmatic” and refers to the difficulty in telling if...
