The process of ‘return’ is one that many creatives have tried to grapple with; the process of returning to one’s roots and facing memories, attachments and maybe even fears from years long past. This is the focus of Gleeson Paulino’s Batismo, an enchanting series which documents his return to Brazil, and the way nature provided him with a new home.
At the age of just 17, Gleeson left his hometown of Eldorado and made the near 5,000 mile move to London. The journey was a means of escaping the “strict” religion Gleeson grew up in – one he likens to the environment of the Amish community. “I always felt very caged, especially the guilt of being gay in those communities,” Gleeson shares. “When I came to London, I finally had the feeling that I could be myself, and experience life more freely without fear of rigid rules.”
However, after a number of years living in London, Gleeson began to have feelings of restlessness, and a desire to return to his home country. “It was becoming clear to me that I had to return to face the traumas and fears I’d still been holding,” he expands. The decision wasn’t what you may call a thoroughly considered one or, as Gleeson puts it, a “rational” one. Instead, it was one driven by intuition, much like his decision to move to the UK.
The winners have been announced in the third annual World Nature Photography Awards. A haunting glance from a mud-crusted crocodile lying in wait takes the top honors, but there’s a visual feast to enjoy from the other winners and runners-up.
Based in London, this completely independent contest aims to encourage people all over the world to take in different perspectives, and change their own behavior and decisions for the good of the planet and its other inhabitants. To put its money where its mouth is, the World Nature Photography Awards team plants a tree for every one of the thousands of entries it receives.
The overall World Nature Photographer of the Year for 2023 is Germany’s Jens Cullman, who shot the winning image below. Crocodiles are well known for their fast strike and savage power, but Danger in the Mud highlights their other key weapon: patience. This yellow-eyed fella has lain in wait long enough for the mud on his snout to bake into a cracked crust.
Danger in the Mud: the patient eye of a mud-caked predator Shot in Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe – Gold in Animal Portraits and winner of this year’s World Nature Photographer of the Year grand prize
Jens Cullmann
Another that caught our eye was The Ghost of the Rocks, which took out the Gold prize in the Behavior-Invertebrates category. Spainiard Javier Herrantz uses a long exposure to turn a wave washing over a stationary red crab into a misty and atmospheric veil.
The Ghost of the Rocks: a red crab sits stoic as water washes over it Shot on La Gomera Island, Spain. Gold in the Behavior – Invertebrates category
Javier Herranz Casellas
Then there’s the extraordinary work of Japan’s Norihiro Ikuma, whose shot Ride on You, below, takes us to an underwater landscape that may as well be an alien planet. A stacked pair of Japanese stream toads strike an imperious pose as they watch over an impossibly huge mass of loosely tangled egg strings stretching off into the distance.
Ride on You: Japanese stream toads watching over a tangled mass of egg-strings Shot in the Owase Mountains, Mie, Japan – Gold in the Behavior – Amphibians and reptiles
Ikuma Norihiro
And it’s not all about the category winners. Portugal’s Antonio Coelho may only have taken out Bronze in the Plants and Fungi category, but his image Foggy Morning, below, is another example of how sometimes a different perspective on planet Earth can place the familiar in a spectacularly different light.
Foggy Morning: Mycenas fungi in gorgeous half-light Taken in Recarei, Paredes, Portugal – Bronze in the Plants and Fungi category
Antonio Coelho
Check out the image gallery for the rest of the winners and a few of our favorite runners-up. Pop back and check out last year’s winners if you need a little more of nature’s beauty up your optical nerve today.
With the announcement of the 2023 winners, the World Nature Photography Awards has also opened up entries for next year’s competition, with an entry fee of UK£30 (~US$36) getting you six entries – and six trees planted.
Tyre Nichols had his dreams stripped from him. Nichols loved photography and had plans to shoot his way into a career—literally. Well, this weekend, a selection of his Nichols photos will appear on billboards across parts of California.
According to the New York Times, as part of Desert X’s political art exhibition, some of Nichols’ photography will appear on billboards across Palm Springs, California.
“We think about this as a way of celebrating Tyre’s imagination,” Neville Wakefield, the Desert X artistic director, said. “He was an aspiring photographer, and in that sense, we’re commemorating not just his life but the creative potential of all lives truncated or cut short by police violence.”
Ben Crump, a lawyer who is representing the Nichols family, has also been instrumental in this project. “We believe in the mission of Desert X and feel that now, more than ever, art giving voice to important social issues is crucial,” Crump said to the New York Times.
The billboard, dubbed “Originals,” will include six photos Nichols snapped in Memphis. The photos include a beautiful shot of the Hernando de Soto Bridge, a colored sunset, and a monument to Tom Lee, a Black river worker who saved several from a capsized boat on the Mississippi River.
Wakefield organized this year’s edition of Desert X with Diana Campbell, a well-known curator. New York Times reported that it was the director of Desert X, Jenny Gil who showed Wakefield the website where Nichols posted his photography.
“[This presentation] “contrast the serenity and beauty of these images, levitated above the roadways, with the violence that happens on the side of the road, particularly to Black and brown bodies,” Wakefield said. “And in so doing,” he continued, “we hope to make people think about the importance of traffic-stop reform.”
On Jan. 7, Nichols was viciously beaten by five Memphis police officers after a traffic stop. All five officers have been charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct, and official oppression.
UK-based artist Rebecca Wheeler creates adorable needle-felted mice dolls. Needle-felted dolls are handmade dolls that are created by shaping and sculpting wool fibers using a special needle-felting technique. The process involves repeatedly poking the wool fibers with a barbed needle, which causes the fibers to interlock and compact, forming a solid shape.
Needle-felted dolls can be a fun and rewarding craft project, and can be customized to create unique and personalized dolls. They can also be used as decorative items or given as gifts to friends and family. Artist Rebecca Wheeler, aka The Old Thread House, takes inspiration from fairytales and vintage clothes to craft gorgeous and lovely needle-felted mice dolls.
Scroll down and inspire yourself. Check Rebecca’s Instagram for more amazing work.
Photographer JK Bruce-Vanderpuije took this picture of an Accra football team in the 1920s
A decades-old photograph from Ghana’s Deo Gratias studio, now in its centenary year, demands attention.
It is not one of dozens snapped in a hurry to be swiped through and then forgotten.
The photographer and the subjects clearly spent time on the composition and production. That time needs to be repaid.
A couple dressed in traditional clothes in a photo studio
One day in the 1930s a local chief fisherman holding a ceremonial oar must, along with his wife, have stepped into JK Bruce-Vanderpuije’s studio in Accra, the capital of what was then known as the Gold Coast.
Asking the couple to keep still and look straight ahead, he captured their regal look – dressed in fine cloth with a symbolic crown. The couple are frozen in time but the country was undergoing big changes around them.
Three decades later colonial Gold Coast, under British rule, would become Ghana through the pressure of an independence movement that served as an inspiration to other anti-colonial struggles on the continent.
What emerges from the 50,000 images that still exist in the Deo Gratias archive is a record of a transforming society.
Wedding couple
Bruce-Vanderpuije was one of the few commercial photographers operating in Accra at that time, and weddings provided one of the biggest sources of income.
Many were dressed, like the couple above from the 1930s and the two below from the 1940s, in English top hat and tails and white bridal gown. They have the same serious stare as the chief fisherman, but the clothes seem worlds away.
Wedding couple
By the 1970s, the wedding clothes were still formal but the suits became more relaxed and some took to wearing traditional Ghanaian kente cloth and felt able to smile in the photograph.
Wedding couple in kente cloth
The studio, in the city’s commercial Jamestown district, was a magnet for those who wanted a memento of their lives.
It was close to a lot of churches and people often came in wearing their Sunday best like the two below in the 1930s, hoping the camera would capture them looking their finest.
A couple dressed in Sunday best
The vast archive of photographs is now in the hands of Bruce-Vanderpuije’s grand-daughter, Kate Tamakloe.
The Deo Gratias studio, still in the same place where it was founded just over 100 years ago, has stacks of old pictures and glass plates in its darkrooms, she says.
“It’s exciting to see them and see how Ghanaians lived and looked like then.”
Young woman in photographer’s studio
There are also envelopes full of old passport photos, dating from a time when going to a professional studio was the only way to get a picture for an official document.
Looking at the pictures now and meeting the gaze of the person in the photograph, there is a profound sense of staring into the past. But there are a lot of unanswered questions.
Ms Tamakloe is left with some dates of when the photographs were taken, but most of the subjects’ names have been lost.
She is now trying to sort through them and gradually digitise the archive so that more people can see it.
“I really want to put them out there and watch people get excited to identify their relatives, so that people can tell the story of every photo,” she says.
Baby pictures were also a mainstay for Bruce-Vanderpuije.
Around the time of Ghanaian independence, which fell on 6 March 1957, two proud parents brought their child to the studio to be photographed.
He is sitting on a cloth marking the birth of a new nation with a portrait of then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah.
There are thousands of others like this of people who went on to become citizens of a new country.
A group of men formally arranged for a photograph
As a man with a camera, Bruce-Vanderpuije was in demand by all sorts of groups, including those in the vanguard of the independence movement.
In 1948, he took the picture above of the leaders of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), who posed for the photo along with their British lawyer Dingle Foot.
The men are considered to be the country’s founders. Among them was Nkrumah (top row, second from right), who later broke away from the UGCC and led Ghana to independence.
JB Danquah (bottom row, second from right), established the party and is said to be the person who came up with the name Ghana. Edward Akufo-Addo (top row, first on the left), later went on to serve as president and was the father of the current president.
Kwame Nkrumah declaring independence with other leader behind him
“At long last the battle has ended! And thus Ghana, your beloved country, is free for ever,” Nkrumah told the crowds at independence just after midnight on 6 March 66 years ago.
Bruce-Vanderpuije got out of the studio and was there to capture the famous moment, but it is the host of other images of unknown people that are in a way more significant.
They provide a snapshot of the lives of less celebrated people.
What Ms Tamakloe wants to do now is “exhibit all these photos… and tell the Ghanaian story to the world”.
If you think you recognise someone in the photographs or may know someone who had their picture taken in the studio contact [email protected] or leave a message here.
Here are the 35 laugh-out-loud animal moments that will brighten your day. Life can be tough at times, but one thing that can always bring a smile to our faces is animals and their hilarious antics. Whether it’s a clumsy puppy or a mischievous monkey, animals have a way of making us laugh out loud and forget our troubles.
Here are some of the funniest animal moments that are sure to brighten your day: Dancing birds, Sneaky cats, Dogs and their toys, Playful otters, Goofy monkeys, Silly squirrels, Purrfectly timed cat videos, and many more.
These are just a few of the many laugh-out-loud animal moments that are sure to brighten your day. So the next time you’re feeling down, take a break and watch some animal videos. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your mood improves!
Here in this gallery you can find 35 funny animal photos. All photos are linked and lead to the sources from which they were taken. Please feel free to explore further works of these photographers on their collections or their personal sites.
#1. “Hello There!”
Source: reddit.com
#2. “Hogwarts Letter Finally Arrived”
Source: reddit.com
#3. “Platypus Babies Are Called “Puggles””
Source: rgatoNacho
#4. “Victorious!”
Source: PatientEqual5443
#5. Big Cats Like Boxes Too!
Source: reddit.com
#6. “This Owl Captured Child’s Hobby Horse And Carries It Around The Town”
Source: WorriedAmoeba2
#7. Tired Hamster
Source: reddit.com
#8. The Shell Knight
Source: reddit.com
#9. “Have You Ever In Your Life Seen A Bear Sitting In A Eagles Nest? You Have Now!!!”
Source: Shari Armstrong
#10. Look At That Tongue
Source: reddit.com
#11. “Well Howdy”
Source: reddit.com
#12. “When You Try To Google Tony Hawk But Accidentally Type In Tiny Hawk”
Source: Scaulbylausis
#13. “Excuse me, sir, do you have a moment to talk about global warm-up?”
#23. “Huckleberry Is Wearing The Tennis Balls Of Shame.”
Source: reddit.com
#24. “This Is Yoda. Yoda Likes Tomatoes”
Source: reddit.com
#25. “My Dad Sent Me A Picture This Morning And Said “It Finally Happened”
Source: reddit.com
#26. This Fat Bee Trying To Climb
Source: reddit.com
#27. “It’s Gonna Be A Loooong Car Ride!”
Source: brolbo
#28. “He Can Stack 7 Cheerios On His Head”
Source: Its-Spectral
#29. Red Pandas Stand Up And Extend Their Claws To Look Bigger And Dangerous
Source: pifuel
#30. Owls Are Allowed To Run????
Source: IgnacyPankracy
#31. “Jennifer Slopez Is Forever Determined To Go Downstairs. Had To Put Up This Gate That Even Grown, Able-Bodied Adults Struggle To Open. She Does Not Respond To Verbal Commands Like “Turtle! No!!!”
The glitz and glamour of casinos and theme parks probably come to mind whenever someone mentions Genting Highlands, but things may take a turn starting this September.
From hiking trails that are fun for the whole family, to trails along the contours of the 1,800-metre hill for the most seasoned hikers, Genting Highlands is opening up a total of 24 hiking trails over the next few years.
Awana Trail — which is also known as the Fashion Forest since 2017 — and Clearwater Way, which opened in 2022, are currently available for hikes with a private guide to preserve the forest.
While they’re open daily, these hikes still aren’t top of mind for most Genting Highlands fun-seekers.
Come September, they can look forward to exploring two new hikes known as the Heritage Trail and Memorial Trail. One of the toughest among the 24 trails — the Dragonback Trail, which follows through multiple ridges of the hill — will open in January 2024.
Heritage Trail, Memorial Trail, and along with Awana Trail and Clearwater Way suit hikers of varying levels, with some even suitable for kids to explore.
If you are used to the glitzy parts of Genting Highlands, you may be wondering where did they even manage to find space to carve out so many new walking trails.
To that, Genting Nature Adventure’s in-charge Eddie Chan tells us that developments for roads and hotels take up less than 10 per cent of the forest.
What can you see in this 130-million-year-old rainforest?
Reputed to be 130 million years old, Genting Highland’s forest is separated into three main ‘parks’ — Awana Bio Park at 3,000ft with its upper dipterocarp forest, Chin Swee Bio Park at 4,500ft with its montane oak forest, and Genting Bio Park at 6,000ft with its montane ericaceous forest.
Barely 30 minutes into our exploration and Eddie points us toward ‘Bob Marley’. Not the king of reggae, but a palm tree with clustering fruits that’s just as iconic and aptly named by the naturalist.
“Its fruits are so sappy that even our gibbons don’t even eat them,” explains Eddie.
Among its flora and fauna popular among naturalists are also their pitcher plants which are endemic in this region.
Compared to the ones we see at places like Gardens by the Bay, Eddie shares that the pitcher plants in Genting Highlands don’t look as “perfect” due to them being in the wild and cross-pollination between species.
Animal lovers may also want to keep a lookout for Charlie, a black panther that lives in the rainforest, slow loris Slowie, siamangs (black-furred gibbons), large moths, and various species of butterflies.
Whether it’s a leisure walking trail or a back-breaking half-day hike, Genting Highlands’ forest is bound to take your breath away.
Recent storms have transformed Southern California’s usually bone-dry wildlands into brilliant green landscapes, snow-capped mountains and something even more breathtaking: seldom-seen waterfalls.
After heavy storm systems brought rain and snow to Angeles National Forest, drivers along Highway 39, north of Azusa, were gifted with the rare sight of temporary waterfalls cascading down the rocky cliffs.
On Wednesday morning a pair of spontaneous waterfalls, dozens of feet high could be seen just south of the San Gabriel Dam, cascading into the San Gabriel River. Drivers pulled over to take pictures, including a Times photographer who captured images of several waterfalls along the highway, which winds through the forest to Crystal Lake.
The road has since been closed to traffic north of Azusa as Caltrans workers clean up a rockslide, meaning these images may be the only way to see the waterfalls before they dry up.
Some places in Southern California have up to six feet of snow. The San Gabriel Dam has received more than 10 inches of rain over the past week, according to meteorologist Carol Smith of the National Weather Service in Los Angeles/Oxnard.
That was apparently enough to bring to life long-dry waterfalls, she added.
“We’ve had a lot of big storms, so it’s all kind of adding up,” Smith said.
The winter storms have dropped so much precipitation that some parts of California are no longer facing drought conditions. Some parks, including Yosemite National Park and the Mojave National Preserve, have closed indefinitely due to the extreme weather conditions and resulting damage.
Access to Angeles National Forest remains limited by several road closures due to mudslides and rockslides, said Dana Dierkes, a public affairs officer for the forest. On Wednesday, an avalanche occurred on Mt. Baldy. Residents in mountain communities are struggling under the heavy snowfall, with some trapped in their homes.
Dierkes cautioned visitors not to attempt to chase waterfalls.
“There are still many roads into the forest that are closed or have very limited access at this time,” Dierkes said.
Times photographer Raul Roa, who photographed the waterfalls before the road closure, said he has never witnessed anything like them in more than 30 years visiting the forest. Waterfalls were pouring down in places where he’s only ever spotted faint water stains.
“Even from some 100 yards away, the sound of the water crashing onto the rocks as it tumbles down the hillside is loud and intense,” Roa said. He estimated that some of the waterfalls were at least 100 feet high.
“This was obviously a very rare year as far as the winter is concerned,” Dierkes said. “The amount of snowfall that we got and the repeated storms has brought a very unusual weather phenomenon to the Angeles National Forest and the surrounding mountains.”
Did you know that legendary Beatle Paul McCartney’s first wife was a professional photographer? And a brilliant one at that! Linda McCartney (1941-1998), born Linda Eastman, was the first-ever female photographer to shoot a cover image for Rolling Stone magazine – with an image of Eric Clapton. She was a renowned music photographer in her own right covering the early New York doo-wop scene.
The Linda McCartney Retrospective is an exhibition opening this week at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, and has been curated by Paul McCartney and their daughter Mary McCartney, who is now also a photographer and documentary filmmaker, to showcase Linda’s entire career from 1965 to 1997.
Students at Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography had the chance to interview Paul McCartney about Linda, and his responses provide a great insight into her life and career, as well as her duties as a working professional photographer, wife, and mother of four. Paul is quoted saying, “Linda was a great photographer and loved it so much that she would always find a way.”
“After we got married, her photography started to focus on family life with the kids, horses, countryside and landscapes. Whatever situation she was in she would use it for her art,” shares McCartney in response to a student question about which area of photography excited Linda most.
“At one point she heard about cyanotypes and became really fascinated by the whole idea of printing photos herself. She loved treating the paper haphazardly and the whole process of putting it out on the balcony in the sun to develop: she thought it was magic. So, I would say she was excited about all her photography, because it was her life.”
• Paul McCartney’s lost photographs of The Beatles are exhibited
“Linda had a pretty wide knowledge of art. That was one of the things we both had in common when we first met”, says Paul McCartney. “I was enjoying people like Magritte, which impressed her. One of my big show-off moments was asking, ‘Have you seen my Magritte?’” According to him, she was fascinated with all areas of photography and had a knack for creative hacks.
“She started off with a Nikon camera, and there was a technique where she would pull off a little piece of the Kodak film box and pop it into a little slot at the back of the camera to remind herself what film she was on. A clever little trick!”
The first person ever to have both photographed a Rolling Stone magazine cover, and appear on it herself in 1974, Linda McCartney was highly renowned for the work she put into her career as both a photographer and musician, founding the band Wings where she performed vocals and keyboard, alongside Paul.
She was voted as the US Female Photographer of the Year in 1967, and received the Distinguished Photographers Award from ‘Women In Photography’ in 1987, and even appeared on an episode of The Simpsons called ‘Lisa the Vegetarian’ with her husband Paul McCartney in 1995, the same year she was sadly diagnosed with breast cancer.
Linda McCartney had the ultimate career that any music photographer (and most likely photographers in general) would no doubt be envious of. She began her interest in photography in the early 1960s after majoring in Art History at The University of Arizona in Tucson, the same university where the latest exhibition of her life’s work is being held.
Linda dabbled in artistic styles that involved creating cyanotypes and salt prints, Cibrachrome prints, and mastered many different photographic techniques over the years from photogravure still lifes, platinum print landscapes, and Polaroid transfers. She released several photo books and exhibitions showcasing this format.
The Linda McCartney Retrospective exhibition will showcase 176 photos, running until August 05, 2023, and can be visited at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography.
• You may also be interested in the best camera settings for live music photography, as well as how to get started in live music photographyas advised by pro photographer Christie Goodwin.
• Get your images ready to enter into the Abbey Road Studios’ Music Photography Awards this year, and get some inspiration from our interview with iconic music photographer Denis O’Regan.
Shining down upon us all winter long, Orion is the brightest and grandest of all the constellations.
Dominating our winter evening skies is the Great Hunter or Celestial Warrior the most brilliant of the constellations and visible from every inhabited part of the Earth. This season, Orion can readily be found standing high in the southern sky at nightfall and doesn’t completely set until around 1:30 a.m. Throughout March, the Hunter will begin to move westward. Three bright stars in a diagonal line in the middle of a bright rectangle decorate Orion’s belt which points northward to the bright orange star Aldebaran of Taurus, and southward to the Dog Star, Sirius.
Within Orion we find two immense stars, Rigel and Betelgeuse, apparently at two entirely different periods in a star’s existence. In Rigel (the “Left Leg of the Giant”), we find a star apparently reaching the prime of its life. Betelgeuse (“The Armpit of the Giant”) in contrast, shines with a cool, dull ruddy hue; an irregular pulsating supergiant star, nearing the end of its life and as such it expands and contracts spasmodically.
Read more: Orion Constellation: Facts, location and stars of the hunter
Explore the Orion Nebula via multiple space-based observatories
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Alluring cloud of gas and dust
But undoubtedly one of the most wonderfully beautiful objects in the night sky is the Great Orion Nebula, also known as M42. It appears to surround the middle star of the three stars that lie below the Hunter’s belt between its ‘legs.’
Plainly visible to the naked eye under a dark sky, it can be clearly resolved in good binoculars and small telescopes — even from urban areas — as a bright gray-green mist enveloping the star.
In larger telescopes it appears as a great glowing irregular cloud; there is considerable detail with branches, rifts and rays. A sort of auroral glow is induced in this nebula by fluorescence from the strong ultraviolet radiation of four hot stars called the “Trapezium,” entangled within it. In 1929, amateur astronomer, William T. Olcott wrote: “Words fail utterly to describe its beauty.”
The Great Orion Nebula is a vast cloud of extremely tenuous glowing gas and dust, approximately 1,600 light-years away and about 30 light-years across (or more than 20,000 times the diameter of the entire solar system). Astrophysicists now believe that this nebulous stuff is a stellar incubator; the primeval chaos from which star formation is presently underway.
Painting outdoes photograph
Everyone who has viewed M42 agrees that no photograph they had seen compared in splendor to what appeared in the eyepiece. Its complex, gossamer-like structure is indeed an eyeful, but photographs often “burn-out” the inner region of the nebula and obscure the Trapezium stars. In 1880, using M42 as his subject, Henry Draper (1837-1882), known as a pioneer of astrophotography, was the first person to successfully photograph a nebula.
In 1875, during his stay at Harvard Observatory, French artist and astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827-1895) captured almost to perfection, the remarkable detail of the Great Orion Nebula. Interestingly, he didn’t draw it merely by “eyeballing.” Instead, Trouvelot used a grid of squares in the eyepiece and then meticulously copied the details onto squared paper. In addition, there are many other sky objects which he depicted such as solar eclipses, comets and the Milky Way, which made him known worldwide as one of the finest artists of celestial objects during the late 19th century.
But these beautiful renditions were not the only legacy that Trouvelot brought to our shores.
If you want to check out the Orion nebula for yourself, our guides for the best telescopes and best binoculars are a great place to start. It doesn’t take much to be able to see many of the deep space wonders of the night sky!
And if you’re looking to snap your own gorgeous photos of the night sky, check out our guide on how to photograph the moon, as well as our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography.
A scorned legacy
Besides being an astronomer and artist, Trouvelot was also an amateur entomologist. In 1869 he had a wild idea to produce silk more cheaply by crossing the silkworm with the spongy moth.
You might know the latter insect better by its former name, the gypsy moth, but in March 2022, The Entomological Society of America formally adopted the new name, spongy moth. This change was necessary because the word ‘gypsy’ is considered a derogatory term for the Romani people. The moth’s new moniker, is derived from the common name used in France and French-speaking Canada, “spongieuse,” and refers to the moth’s sponge-like egg masses.
So Trouvelot imported some live egg clusters to his home in Medford, Massachusetts for experimentation. He failed, but some of the creatures escaped and after a decade began to proliferate alarmingly; over the next century, spreading throughout New England, the Mid-Atlantic, Greater Ohio Valley, Piedmont and southern Great Lakes, to the point where late-spring infestations periodically cover forests and houses with hairy caterpillars that denude oak tree foliage as they produce their “silk.”
I saw this firsthand several years ago when my own property endured an invasion of spongy moths and as a consequence, I lost several majestic hardwood trees. Today this pest is listed as one of the 100 most destructive invasive species worldwide.
No question about it. Trouvelot should have stuck to astronomy!
Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmers’ Almanac and other publications. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
