The most dangerous books in the library; how male spiders avoid cannibals
|  | Thursday, April 28, 2022 | | | | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER BROWN | |
Powerful psychedelic mushrooms may be growing in your yard. How did they get there?
It turns out that webs of white mycelium flourish amid wood chips. Like rats, pigeons, and cockroaches, these most potent of psychedelics not only survive but thrive in urban and suburban environments that are filled with mulch beds.
The mycelium is inside some of the wood chips bought in the Pacific Northwest and perhaps farther afield, Nat Geo reports. One chemist and fungi forager isn’t surprised. “It’s fascinating,” says Jordan Jacobs, “that a psychoactive mushroom that has potential long-lasting effects on human consciousness has decided that this ecological niche suits it well.”
Read the full story here.
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Pictured at top, a gardener displays three types of potent psychedelic mushrooms found in back yards and gardens. Above, chemist Jordan Jacobs shows a fellow forager Psilocybe ovoideocystidiata in a small park near Bellevue, Washington.
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| | Hello, Dali! Usually, photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Charlie Hamilton James is doing the looking. But on this day in Peru’s Manú National Park, a young giant otter sized up the photographer as well. The otter, known by researchers as Dali, was hunting with his family on an oxbow lake that borders the Manú River. Fun fact: giant otters require up to nine pounds of fish a day. | | | |
 | PHOTOGRAPH BY REBECCA HALE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
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| EARTH MONTH: ARTICLE OF THE DAY | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPHS BY KHOLOOD EID | | | Fish migration: Climate change could affect the way we eat. Rivers and lakes are warming, causing fish and other freshwater vertebrates to go extinct faster than land vertebrates. Clint Muhlfeld (above right), an ecologist who studies westslope cutthroat trout in Montana’s Flathead River, says that climate change is helping rainbow trout move upstream and hybridize with the native cutthroat (above left). In the hybrids, “you see a dramatic decline in fitness,” he says. “So that’s a major concern.” | | | |
 | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SHICHANG ZHANG
| | Leaving so soon? This group of male spiders aren’t sticking around for dinner. In one species of tiny orb-weaving spider, males launched into the air after mating to flee cannibal females who might find them easier to catch than other prey. Scientists who observed this unusual behavior reported that all the male spiders who “catapulted” to escape sexual cannibalism survived. (Pictured above, a male Philoponella prominens, at right, mates with a female in a lab.)
Related: For these horseshoe crabs, too, love is a battlefield | | | |
| This newsletter was curated and edited by David Beard, Jen Tse, and Monica Williams. Do you have an idea or feedback? Let us know at david.beard@natgeo.com. Thanks for reading! | |
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