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I recently hiked to the nearest cove of the lake to photograph wildlife. Several hooded mergansers were there, swimming about and diving underwater to hunt. In my opinion, hooded mergansers are among our most beautiful ducks. This first photo is a drake (a male) I saw:  Mergansers are mainly fish eaters, and they dive underwater to catch small fish, crayfish, and other aquatic animals with their long, narrow bill, which has sharp serrations to grip their prey. Hooded mergansers nest in cavities in trees rather than on the ground like many other ducks do. Only one day after hatching, all 7 to 15 of the tiny ducklings leap from the cavity all the way to the forest floor. Then the mother merganser leads them to the nearest body of water. In order for this to work, all the eggs must hatch on the same day. So, the mother waits until she has laid all of her eggs before she starts incubating them. This results in synchronous hatching. Like many ducks, hooded mergansers have extreme sexual dimorphism—the males and females look very different. In this photo, you can see the differences between two females and one male. Cool, huh?  Photo credits: Hooded mergansers - Stan C. Smith
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I took a walk a few days ago hoping to get good photos of the two squirrel species that live here, the gray squirrel and the fox squirrel (we also have flying squirrels, but they are nocturnal and extremely shy, so we've only seen one in all the years we've lived in Missouri). At first glance, gray squirrels and fox squirrels look similar, but they differ in color, size, and preferred habitat. Fox squirrels are orangish in color and they weigh, on average, almost twice as much as gray squirrels. Fox squirrels prefer to live near forest edges, whereas gray squirrels prefer to be deep within the forest. To illustrate that, our house is surrounded by forest, so we see at least twenty gray squirrels for every one fox squirrel. To find a fox squirrel on my hike, I had to go to the lake shore a half mile away, where the forest opens up to a wide grassy shoreline. Fox squirrels love to look for food at this forest edge. Here is a typical gray squirrel:  And here is the only fox squirrel I saw that day (notice the orange color):  Awesome Fact: Gray Squirrel Migration I saw a social media post where someone mentioned that their grandfather told them stories about massive gray squirrel migrations in the eastern half of the United States, with huge swarms of millions of squirrels on the move. I was extremely skeptical of this because I have never seen more than a few squirrels together, and I certainly haven't seen masses of them crossing highways or swimming rivers. So, I dug into this, and guess what—it's real. At least it used to happen. In 1811, Charles Joseph Labrobe wrote about a vast squirrel migration in Ohio: “A countless multitude of squirrels, obeying some great and universal impulse, which none can know but the Spirit that gave them being, left their reckless and gambolling life, and their ancient places of retreat in the north, and were seen pressing forward by tens of thousands in a deep and sober phalanx to the South...” In Wisconsin in 1842, a gray squirrel migration lasted four weeks and involved nearly a half billion squirrels. Thousands of squirrels were even seen swimming all the way across the Mississippi River. Similar events were documented throughout the 1800s, and the last really massive squirrel migration was in 1968. What's up with that? Here's an explanation. Throughout history, some years had bumper crops of acorns and other food, resulting in a drastic increase of the squirrel population. Then, if the next year saw a big decline in nut production, millions of squirrels had to either starve or leave to find greener pastures (or nuttier forests). So, why doesn't it happen anymore? Because the eastern half of the US no longer has vast regions of unbroken forest. The forests are now fragmented, and squirrel density is much lower than it used to be. I'm afraid we'll probably never have an opportunity to see it, but how cool would it be to witness millions of squirrels on the move?  Photo Credits: - Fox squirrel and gray squirrel - Stan C. Smith - Migrating squirrels - Midjourney 6.1 Time travel is one of the most frequent themes in science fiction. In fact, I’ve written a number of novels involving time travel. People love to imagine what it would be like to travel back or forward in time. So, is time travel really possible? Let’s consider the past first. I hate to say this, but currently there are few physics concepts that indicate traveling into the past will ever be possible. Well, there are some, but they are theoretical, with little hope of becoming practical things we can create and control. One example is to create a time curve—if a person follows the path, they would eventually find themselves back where they started. This was first shown to be mathematically possible in 1949, and many times since then. But there’s no evidence such a phenomenon actually exists anywhere in the universe. A few other scenarios have been proposed. There’s a wild idea involving two cosmic strings moving past each other in opposite directions, thus creating a time curve looping around the strings. Another idea is wormholes, in which space-time can fold like a piece of paper. These sound great, but they are mathematical in nature and have not been observed to exist. The barriers to creating and controlling them are overwhelming, to say the least. So… time travel into the past is probably not within our reach. Time travel to the future, on the other hand, is definitely possible. Yay! Technically, we are already traveling into the future at one hour per hour. But you knew that already. How can we travel into the future faster than one hour per hour? It’s simple—all we have to do is move through space very fast. According to Einstein’s Special Relativity theory, if you move through space at a really high speed (relative to other objects), time goes slower for you than for the people you left behind. This is called time dilation, and it’s an observable fact. It’s the reason the clocks on GPS satellites disagree with the clocks on Earth by seven millionths of a second for every day they are in orbit. Sergei Krikalev (a Russian cosmonaut) spent 803 days, 9 hours, 39 minutes orbiting our planet at 17,500 miles per hour. So, he traveled into his own future by 0.02 seconds. The closer you get to the speed of light, the faster your time travel. Let’s say a 10-year-old boy leaves Earth in a spaceship traveling at 99.5% the speed of light, then returns to Earth after five years have passed on the spaceship. The boy would be 15 years old, but his classmates would now be 60 years old. From the boy’s perspective, only five years passed, but fifty years passed on Earth. This is real time travel into the future. The problem is, the faster an object travels, not only does time pass faster, but the object also increases in mass (Special Relativity again), which means more fuel is needed to accelerate the object. At the speed of light, the object’s mass becomes infinite, which is why no physical object can travel the speed of light. With our current technology, we cannot accelerate any object to 99.5% the speed of light (or any velocity even close to that). So, while time travel into the future is certainly possible, it isn’t easy or practical. But that doesn't stop me from thinking about time travel frequently.  Photo Credits: - Time Travel image - Midjourney 6.1 |
Stan's Cogitations
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May 2025
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