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APRIL 13, 2015

Windswept

Photograph by Yves Vernin, National Geographic Your Shot

A strong, dry wind—called a mistral in southern France—blows through the city of Marseilles, with hair-raising results. Photographer Yves Vernin had for a long time been hoping to do a series on the mistral, so on a windy day he headed to Notre Dame de la Garde, or the "bonne mère," situated on a hill. “This is a famous place in Marseille, and a windy place,” he writes. “After I searched [for] a good place with nice light and a lot of wind, I waited like a hunter. (Of course, I underexposed because of the light on the faces, and I set a high speed to immobilize the hair.) This one was the most interesting I took.”

Yves Vernin’s photo was recently published in the Street Photography assignment.

This photo was submitted to Your Shot, our storytelling community where members can take part in photo assignments, get expert feedback, be published, and more. Join now »

This Week’s Night Sky: See a Dramatic Eclipse—Off Jupiter

Esta Noche Cielo de Semana: Ver un Eclipse-Off dramático Júpiter

Dos lunas jovianas dan un espectáculo sombra rápida, y la Osa Mayor señala el camino a las galaxias distantes.

M81, la galaxia espiral a la izquierda, y la M82, la galaxia a la derecha, son dos galaxias relativamente cercanas que se encuentran cerca de la Osa Mayor dentro de la constelación de la Osa Mayor, la Osa Mayor.

 
FOTOGRAFÍA DE NOAO / AURA / NSF / TA RECTOR (UNIVERSIDAD DE ALASKA ANCHORAGE) 

Por Andrew Fazekas , National Geographic 

PUBLICADO 13 DE ABRIL 2015

'Bag of Chips' Effect: Bats Eavesdrop on Other Bats to Find Food The calls of other bats tell them there's food nearby, much like opening a bag of chips in a movie theater draws the interest of one's seatmates.

Greater mouse-tailed bats listen to each other's calls to locate prey.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JENS RYDELL

for National Geographic

PUBLISHED JANUARY 8, 2015

When I hear my husband rummaging in the pantry, I often walk over to see if he's found anything good. It turns out bats do something similar by using sound to direct them to the best places to find food.

Like all bats, the greater mouse-tailed bat(Rhinopoma microphyllum) uses echolocation—a type of built-in sonar—to navigate and find prey. When it comes close to an insect, the bat sends out calls that bounce off its prey, helping the predator zero in. But something else happens when these calls go out, a new study says: They serve as a general signal telling other bats there's a meal nearby. (See "Bats Make Calls to Jam Rivals' Sonar—First Time Ever Found.")

Yossi Yovel of Israel's Tel Aviv University, the biologist who led this study—which was published January 8 in Current Biology—calls it the "bag of chips effect."

"If I'm sitting in a dark movie theater and I open a bag of chips, everyone around me knows that I've got something to eat," Yovel said. "It's the same with these bats."

Into the Bat Caves

For the study, Yovel created tiny GPS chips outfitted with a microphone that recorded the bats' high-frequency calls. He tested them by tagging greater mouse-tailed bats—a highly social species that spends the summer in Israel.

Yovel and colleagues caught bats living in caves near the Sea of Galilee (map) and attached the GPS chips to their bodies with surgical glue. The glue naturally disintegrated after a week, allowing the chips to fall off without harming the bats. (Also see "To Know Bats Is to Love Them.")

After confirming that the chips could record the bats' supersonic calls and track their location, Yovel realized he had the opportunity to answer a novel question about bat-foraging behavior: Could the mammals use each other's signals to help find food?

Dinner Bell

So he attached more GPS units to more bats. Yovel and colleagues could retrieve only 40 percent of their data recorders because to find the chips, the researchers had to clamber into caves or climb into the mountains where the bats came to rest. But the researchers still ended up with information on 1,100 interactions between the bats.

Yovel found that when another bat made the stereotypical "homing in on food" call within earshot—roughly 328 feet (100 meters)—of other bats, the eavesdroppers moved toward where they heard the call. (SeeNational Geographic's best bat pictures.)

Yovel emphasizes that the bats aren't making this call to communicate—rather, the bats have simply learned that this signal means there's something good to eat over here.

"These bats are essentially eavesdropping on the sounds of other bats," he said.

4 Sky Events This Week: Inner Planets Dance While Saturn Dazzles The moon rides above Saturn, while bright Venus points to faint Mercury.

Cassini snapped this sweeping view of Saturn back in 2007 when the spacecraft was about two million miles (over three million kilometers) from the planet. This week sky-watchers get a good view of the planet while it's parked next to the moon.

PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Andrew Fazekas

for National Geographic

PUBLISHED JANUARY 12, 2015

An eclipse of a volcanic moon by the king of planets, Jupiter, will thrill stargazers this week, as Earth's moon rides above the ringed world, Saturn.

Moon meets Maiden. On Tuesday, January 13, early birds will enjoy a particularly close encounter with the last quarter moon of the month and with the bright star Spica. All the action takes place in the constellation Virgo, the Maiden, halfway up the southern sky at dawn.

The 250-light-year-distant star appears only 2 degrees below the moon, a distance equal to about the width of your thumb held at arm's length.

It's amazing to realize that the light from Spica left on its journey to Earth back in 1765. That's the year that Great Britain passed the Stamp Act, the first direct tax levied on the American colonies and a prelude of the parliamentary oversteps that led to the American Revolution.

The moon pairs with the brightest star in the constellation Virgo on Tuesday.

ILLUSTRATION BY A.FAZEKAS, SKYSAFARI

Mercury at its best. Look for faint Mercury about a half-hour after sunset on Wednesday, January 14, just above the southwestern horizon.

The innermost planet will appear at its farthest point away from the sun, a moment called the greatest elongation. Sitting 19 degrees east of the sun, it would be challenging to track down its faint point of light if it weren't for the nearby, superbright Venus.

The planetary duo will appear only 1.3 degrees apart, making the pair particularly impressive when viewed through binoculars or a small telescope. Look carefully and you may notice that Mercury appears to be a miniature version of the half-lit moon. (For more Mercury news,click here.)

This skychart shows Venus and Mercury in close conjunction in the southwest sky after sunset on Wednesday.

ILLUSTRATION BY A.FAZEKAS, SKYSAFARI

Volcanic moon eclipse. Sky-watchers armed with telescopes will witness a distant eclipse of Jupiter's moon Io in the early morning hours of Friday, January 16.

At 12:27 a.m. EST, the gas giant's own shadow will glide across the tiny disk of the volcanic moon, which will be visible to the west of the planet.

Also early on Thursday night at 10:56 p.m. EST, Jupiter's massive storm, the Great Red Spot, crosses the middle of the planet's disk. Appearing as an orange-pink oval structure, this hurricane circles the planet every 12 hours or so and is three times larger than the Earth. (Related: "Jupiter's Great Red Spot Is Shrinking.")

This wide-angle skychart shows the location of Jupiter in the southeast sky on Thursday evening and early morning Friday. The insert telescope view shows Jupiter and location of its moon Io just before it enters the planet’s shadow.

ILLUSTRATION BY A.FAZEKAS, SKYSAFARI

Luna and Saturn. Later on, near dawn on Friday, January 16, the waning crescent moon will appear to park itself just 2 degrees north of Lord of the Rings.

The ringed world can't be missed with the naked eye since it is the brightest object visible in the southeastern predawn sky. Its proximity to the moon will make it that much easier to identify.

Train a telescope on this yellow-tinged point of light, and it will readily reveal its stunning rings, tilted a full 25 degrees toward Earth. Currently Saturn sits nearly 994,000 miles (1.6 billion kilometers) away from Earth, which means that the reflected sunlight off its cloud tops takes 87.4 minutes to reach our eyes.

Photo of the Day Ram’s Eye

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JANUARY 12, 2015

Ram’s Eye

Photograph by Dawn Wilson, National Geographic Your Shot

“During a recent trip to Wyoming to photograph wildlife, I made a point of stopping in the North Fork Canyon outside Cody, Wyoming, to photograph the bighorn sheep during their annual rut,” writes Your Shot member Dawn Wilson. “The weather had been warm, so activity was a bit low. But on my final drive out of the canyon before heading home, I came upon two rams fighting nonstop, to the point that each had a bloody nose. An hour into the battle, this ram, which wound up being defeated, stopped for the briefest of moments to look at me, almost like a plea for help.”

Wilson’s picture recently appeared in Your Shot’s Daily Dozen.

This photo was submitted to Your Shot. Check out the new and improved website, where you can share photos, take part in assignments, lend your voice to stories, and connect with fellow photographers from around the globe.

Arctic's 'Penguins of the North' Find Workaround to Climate Change New study finds that little auks are adjusting their food supply, raising questions of adaptation.

Little auks returning from sea to nest after feeding on copepods.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL NICKLEN, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Brian Clark Howard

National Geographic

PUBLISHED JANUARY 12, 2015

What's New: The latest research on little auks, sometimes called "penguins of the north," reveals a surprising response to a rapidly warming Arctic: The birds make up for food lost to the effects of climate change by catching prey that were stunned by the cold water running off melting glaciers—another effect of climate change.

The study, published Monday in the journal Global Change Biology, is the first to examine the feeding habits of little auks as Arctic ice is lost. Scientists watched the birds in Franz-Josef Land, off the northern coast of Russia, during an expedition supported by the National Geographic Society.

Since 2005, the auks' water has become essentially ice-free in summer, reducing the numbers of tiny animals known as zooplankton, a key food source for the auks. Zooplankton normally congregated around sea ice, but now the birds have shifted to eating zooplankton that are stunned—and thus easier to catch—by cold water running off glaciers melting on land. (See photos from the expedition.)

The shift hasn't been entirely seamless. Little auk chicks have been growing just as quickly as they did before 2005, but the adults' body mass has dropped an average of 4 percent since the early 1990s. That might not sound like much, but "we don't know what the weight loss is that would really harm them," says Enric Sala, a co-author of the study and a National Geographic explorer-in-residence.

Little auks return to land in the Arctic, after feeding on plankton at sea.

Why It Matters: Little auks are considered especially vulnerable to climate change. The birds are often considered an indicator species of the Arctic, raising red flags for ecological changes.

"It's good news that the little auks are adapting now," Sala says, "but because the system is changing continuously, we don't know how long they will be able to keep up."

The birds also play an important role in the Arctic ecosystem, so other species could be affected by changes in little auks. (Learn about big waves forming in an ice-free Arctic.)

The Big Picture: To date, the Arctic has warmed twice as fast as lower latitudes have. The Arctic will be essentially free of summer sea ice by the 2030s, with drastic implications for species from seabirds to polar bears, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Similar forces are at work around Antarctica.)

Some Arctic species may go extinct, scientists have warned, but precisely how individual species will respond is largely unknown and will probably hold some surprises, as this new paper suggests.

What's Next: The scientists estimate that all continental glaciers will disappear from Franz-Josef Land within about 180 years, although meltwater could decrease significantly before that. As that happens, it's unclear if the birds will be able to find enough food.

"Ultimately, there is only one thing we can do for little auks, polar bears, and everything else that is affected," says Sala. "That's to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases."

Haiti Photos Then and Now: 5 Years After Earthquake, Much Rebuilding Remains

• Cathedral in Ruins

  Photograph by Allison Shelley

  Like September 11 in the United States, janvye (January) 12 in Haiti has become a term in its own right, a marker against which time is measured. "His son was born two months after janvye 12."

  Monday marks five years since the goudou goudou—the Haitian creole term for the sound that fills the air when a big earthquake happens. The January 12 quake took more than 200,000 lives and left 1.5 million homeless.

  I came to Haiti a month later and stayed for more than a year, photographing the earthquake's aftermath for theNew York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Getty, and groups like the Red Cross.

  I returned to Haiti recently, in the leadup to the fifth anniversary.

  After the quake, the streets of Port-au-Prince, the nation's capital, were strewn with chunks of concrete, rebar, and whatever tropical storms had washed into the spaces in between. Everyone was living life outside: Even those whose homes had not fallen did not trust them to withstand the aftershocks. And every ritual was public: dressing, bathing, grieving. (Learn more about the Haitian earthquake.)

  Several months after I arrived, people began to notice my camera and I realized that the Haitians' personal shock was wearing off. It made my job harder, having to explain that yes, there were many of us taking these same pictures of you and, yes, nothing good has come to you because of it—but maybe this time?

  Today in Port-au-Prince, red construction fences surround many collapsed buildings. They have been nicknamed tol wouj, which literally means "red tin," but which also refers to someone who promises something that isn't delivered. Behind many of the fences is empty space where no one is working. (Watch our "Earthquakes 101" video.)

  The day before the one-year anniversary of the goudou goudou, I wandered into the shell of Port-au-Prince's national cathedral, where only the walls were left standing (above). A woman was winding her way through the debris, holding a white plastic crucifix and wearing a dress the same color as the dusty yellow walls, doing the stations of the cross.

  Now the cathedral entrances are bricked up, except one covered with a metal gate that you can peer through to the same view of debris. A new building next-door accommodates worshippers while the cathedral awaits its makeover. Big and welcoming, the new space nonetheless feels temporary.

  This year's fifth anniversary is being commemorated in the setting of street protests. Haitians have been concerned that if a new election was not set by janvye 12, the parliament would dissolve and President Michel Martelly become the sole head of government. (A deal has now been struck.)

  We don't give Haiti as much credit as it deserves for its ingenuity and savvy in fixing its problems. But much remains to do. Port-au-Prince's streets have been cleared for a while now, and traffic has improved somewhat. New government ministry buildings are under construction around the main city plaza, which is now tent-free and once again features soccer players and ice cream trucks.

  But over 200,000 Haitians still live in tent camps away from the main boulevards, and many others are in homes that suffered major damage.

  The following gallery features my pictures from this month juxtaposed with images I made in the same spots in the months after the 2010 quake.

  In the photo above, a woman prays amid the wreckage of Notre Dame de l'Assomption—the main cathedral in Port-au-Prince—on January 9, 2011.

  —By Allison Shelley, photo gallery by Nicole Werbeck

  Published January 12, 2015
• 

  Roadside Rubble

  Photograph by Allison Shelley

  2010: Forestein Claude (at left), a laborer for the UN-sponsored Cash-for-Work program, talks to colleagues in front of a home where they found the remains of a woman buried in debris, in Port-au-Prince's Fort National neighborhood on April 1. Many Haitians worked for the UN program, making about $4 a day to clear rubble.

  2015: Two brothers sit roadside earlier this month in Fort National in the same spot where the woman's body had been found in a collapsed house. Across the street are new homes built by the United Nations Office for Project Services.

  Published January 12, 2015
• 

  Iron Market Strong Again

  Photograph by Allison Shelley

  2010: The ruins of Haiti's Marché de Fer, or Iron Market, stand behind a construction fence in Port-au-Prince, on March 30. The building was built in the 1890s to serve as a railway station. An iconic landmark, it was badly damaged in a 2008 fire and completely destroyed in the 2010 quake.

  2015: Shoppers and vendors mingle earlier this month in an outdoor shopping area near the Marché de Fer. Irish billionaire Denis O'Brien, whose company Digicel dominates the Haitian cell phone market, paid for a complete reconstruction and inaugurated the new building just before the one-year anniversary of the quake.

  Published January 12, 2015
• 

  Church of Perpetual Help

  Photograph by Allison Shelley

  2010: A man works to clear debris from the site of the collapsed Notre Dame du Perpétuel Secours Catholic Church in the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince on February 27.

  2015: A man walks past the site of the collapsed church earlier this month. A temporary church was constructed just behind the wall.

  Published January 12, 2015
• 

  Healing Fort National

  Photographs by Allison Shelley

  2010: Workers take apart a house in the heavily damaged Fort National neighborhood on March 30, 2010.

  2015: A woman carries her child from her home in the Fort National neighborhood.

  Published January 12, 2015
• 

  Old Church, New Church

  Photograph by Allison Shelley

  2010: Worshippers listen during a Catholic Mass held next to the destroyed Notre Dame de l'Assomption on February 26. The cathedral, built between 1884 and 1914, was destroyed in the earthquake.

  2015: Congregants gather after a church service held in a new building next to the old cathedral.

  Published January 12, 2015
• 

  Still Standing

  Photographs by Allison Shelley

  2010: Horlich Florestal (at left), 24, and Rosemond Altidon, 22, stand on the edge of their apartment building in Fort National shortly after the quake. Half the building was destroyed in the earthquake, killing many of their neighbors, including two cousins and an aunt.

  2015: Florestal, now 29, and Altidon, 27, stand on the roof of their apartment building. They still live there, and Altidon helped convert the building's ragged edges into a balcony. "I was completely scared when that quake happened because I had never felt an earthquake before," Florestal said. "I didn't know if life would continue. Everything was gone. Life was gone."

  Published January 12, 2015