Earlier this year, a motorist driving near Picayune Strand State Forest, in southwestern Florida, spotted a dead panther on the side of the road. Although the entire population of Florida panthers numbers fewer than a hundred and eighty, this was not a particularly unusual sight. In 2014 alone, twenty-two panthers were killed by automobiles. This animal, it turned out, had not been hit by a car. When wildlife officials conducted a necropsy, they found that it had died from a gunshot wound. It was the second such attack in six months. The previous October, a different driver on the same road had spotted a two-year-old male panther behaving strangely. When the animal was captured, officials discovered that he had been blinded by buckshot. Because Florida panthers are endangered, intentionally killing one is a federal offense, punishable by up to a year in jail and a hundred-thousand-dollar fine. Nevertheless, at least five panthers have died this way since 2008. In the couple of cases that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has solved, the perpetrators were hunters—people who didn’t like the cats competing for the same prey. Florida has a panther problem. Read the rest at newyorker.com

A new piece at NewYorker.com about the stars, GPS, and a physicist: "As a species, humans lack many of the biological gifts that allow other animals to get around. A loggerhead turtle, for example, begins to take its bearings within a couple of hours of hatching, using magnetite crystals in its brain to sense Earth’s magnetic field. (Spiny lobsters, monarch butterflies, and termites have similar compasses.) Honeybees get from nectar to hive and back in part by judging the position of the sun, which they can sense, even on a cloudy day, from patterns in polarized light. Where biology has failed humans, we have substituted culture. Throughout our evolutionary history, we have created ad-hoc systems of knowledge that organize environmental information and make it transmissible to the next generation. Often, difficult and monotonous landscapes—desert, sea, ice—resulted in more intricate systems. Several thousand years before the magnetic compass was invented, Pacific Islanders had worked out how to navigate by star compasses and read ocean swells for information about nearby land." Read the rest...