Hey!
No vayas presumiendo por ahí
Diciendo que no puedo estar sin ti
Tú qué sabes de mi.
Hey!
Ya sé que a ti te gusta presumir
Decir a los amigos que sin ti
Ya no puedo vivir.
Hey!
No creas que te haces un favor
Cuando hablas a la gente de mi amor
Y te burlas de mi.
Hey!
Que hay veces que es mejor querer así
Que ser querido y no poder sentir
Lo que siento por ti.
Ya ves
Tú nunca me has querido ya lo ves
Que nunca he sido tuyo ya lo se
Fue sólo por orgullo ese querer ehe ehe
Ya ves
De que te vale ahora presumir
Ahora que no estoy ya junto a ti
Que les dirás de mí.
Hey!
Recuerdo que ganabas siempre tú
Que hacías de ese triunfo una virtud
Yo era sombra y tú luz.
Hey!
No se si tú también recordarás
Que siempre que intentaba hacer la paz
Yo era un río en tu mar.
Ya ves
Tú nunca me has querido ya lo ves
Que nunca he sido tuyo ya lo se
Fue sólo por orgullo ese querer ehe ehe
Ya ves
De que te vale ahora presumir
Ahora que no estoy ya junto a ti
Que les dirás de mi.
Hey!
Ahora que ya todo terminó
Que como siempre soy el perdedor
Cuando pienses en mi.
Hey!
No creas que te guardo algún rencor
Es siempre más feliz quien más amó
Y ese siempre fui yo.
Ya ves
Tú nunca me has querido ya lo ves
Que nunca he sido tuyo ya lo se
Fue sólo por orgullo ese querer ehe ehe
Ya ves
Tú nunca me has querido ya lo ves
Que nunca he sido tuyo ya lo se
Fue sólo por orgullo ese querer ehe ehe
Ya ves
Tú nunca me has querido ya lo ves
Que nunca he sido tuyo ya lo se
Fue sólo por orgullo ese querer…
Hey!
Don't go around showing off
Saying that I can't bear to be without you
What do you know about me?
Hey!
I already know that you like to show off
Saying to your friends that without you
I can't live anymore
Hey!
Don't think you're doing yourself a favour
When you talk to people of my love
And you make fun of me.
Hey!
There are times when it's better to love like this
Than to be loved and not be able to feel
What I feel for you
You see
You have never loved me, you see now
That I've never been yours, I already know
That love was only for pride ehe ehe
You see
What is it worth to you now to show off?
Now that I'm not with you
What will you tell them about me?
Hey!
I remember that you always used to win
That you made that winning a virtue
I was a shadow and you, the light.
Hey!
I don't know if you'll remember as well
That whenever I tried to make peace
I was a river in your sea
You see
You have never loved me, you see now
that I've never been yours, I already know
That love was only for pride ehe ehe
You see
What is it worth to you now to show off?
Now that I'm not with you
What will you tell them about me?
Hey!
Now that it's all over
That as usual I'm the loser
when you think about me
Hey!
Don't think I bear any grudge against you
The happiest one is always the one who loved the most
And that was always me
You see
You have never loved me, you see now
That I've never been yours, I already know
That love was only for pride ehe ehe
You see
You have never loved me, you see now
That I've never been yours, I already know
That love was only for pride ehe ehe
You see
You have never loved me, you see now
That I've never been yours, I already know
That love was only for pride ehe ehe
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/hey-hey.html-0
Starfish, also called sea stars, are echinoderms. They are star-shaped and belong to the class Asteroidea. There are over 2,000 species of starfish in the water bodies around the world. Starfish are colorful with colors such as light brown, gold, dark brown, or reddish.
The starfish have one central disk and five arms except for a few species that have more arms. An example of the unique species of starfish is Luidia ciliaris which has seven arms. Furthermore, the starfish belonging to the family Solasteridae have 10-15 arms.
They possess an exoskeleton which makes it easier for them to move in water. The body wall of the starfish consists of an epidermis, a thin cuticle, dermis, and a coelomic myoepithelial layer. The starfish release waste, known as ammonia, by diffusion since they lack distinct excretory organs.
Starfish reproduce in two ways; spawning or asexual reproduction. During spawning, both the male and female starfish gather to mate. The male starfish releases sperm into the water while the female starfish releases millions of eggs. The eggs and sperm find each other which results in fertilization. After fertilization, the zygotes sit on the central disks or arms of the starfish until they hatch.
Asexual reproduction is a process where a starfish’s central disk splits into two. The division leads to the existence of two amputated starfish. However, with time they grow new arms which replace the lost ones. An unusual behavior in starfish is their ability to regenerate their body parts.
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Whenever a part of their body is chopped off or caught in a net, the remaining part of the body will grow new arms. In fact, sometimes the starfish sheds arms as a way of defending themselves from its predators.
Secondly, starfish do not have brains. Therefore, they cannot make decisions regarding their lives. Their lives are programmed to do only two things: find food and avoid predators. The complex central nervous system controls the actions of the starfish.
Starfish can only survive in salt water because they need lots of calcium for the formation of their bodies. Consequently, their habitats are oceans. The highest number of starfish lives within the Indo-Pacific Ocean region. They also flourish in the cold waters of the North Pacific.
The diet of the starfish mostly includes mussel, arthropods, oysters, small fish, clams, and snails. However, their feeding habits vary with their locations, species, design, and diet. Some starfish are not exclusively carnivores, and they may also feed on organic detritus and algae. Starfish are opportunistic when it comes to feeding. As such, they will cease every opportunity that comes their way to feed.
Starfish can feed in food larger than their bodies as they can digest food which is out of their bodies. Whenever there is a shortage of food, starfish can survive on the organic materials that have dissolved in their water habitat.
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They feed either through suspension feeding or by eversion of their stomachs. Starfish, also called sea stars, are echinoderms. They are star-shaped marine animals. There are over 2,000 known species of starfish.
The starfish is not a fish at all, and in fact, today most people call them sea stars. This is because starfish do not have gills, scales, or fins like fish do and they move quite differently from fish. Over 2,000 species of sea stars or starfish live in all the world’s oceans, from tropical seas to the cold seafloor. Most starfish have five arms but there are species with 10, 20, and even 40 arms.
While some appear smooth, they all have spines covering their upper surface and a soft underside. If you gently turn over a live Starfish, you’ll see its tube feet wiggling back at you. Starfish come in a variety of colors that help them either to hide from their enemies- or to scare them off.
https://www.reddit.com/r/forbiddensnacks/comments/c2g8am/forbidden_grape/
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They are famous for their ability to grow their limbs back- which means that if a starfish loses one of its arms, it will promptly grow another one. Starfish have a very simple eye that looks like a red spot at the end of each arm. The eye doesn’t see much detail, but can sense light and dark.
Starfish come is different sizes. Some can be larger than your face; others may be smaller than your palm. They generally feed on meat, decomposed plant and animal materials and algae. Mussels, crustaceans, worms and echinoderms- which are other starfish or sea urchins- are their favorite treats.
Starfish have tiny, suction-cupped tube feet which they use to open clams or oysters. Then their sack-like stomach emerges from their mouths, envelops the prey to digest it, and finally withdraws back into the body! The biggest threats to starfish are a reduction of coral reef habitat, pollution, and marked changes in water temperature.
https://www.wildrepublic.com/product/starfish/
The five colours blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavours dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.
Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees. He lets go of that and chooses this. The five colors, tones, and flavors represent the classical Chinese categorization of these senses, much as for colors we have the seven-fold ROY G BIV system (probably invented by Crayola), for tones we have a twelve-note scale, and for flavors we have spicy, sour, sweet, salty, bitter, and sometimes even sandy on bad days. But these categories do the infinite variety and acuity of experience absolutely no justice.
Lao Tzu is dwelling pretty near to John Zerzan’s theoryopolis here. Both see language as an invention just as alienating as virtual reality. What happens when we run a sensual experience through the old language program?
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Do we experience the event more vividly, with more juicy exhilaration and intimacy, or do we just get a barrage of kind of junky thoughts? Try an experiment or two and get back to me.
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Starfish (or sea stars) are beautiful marine animals found in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes. All starfish resemble stars, and though the most common have only five arms, some of these animals can grow up to 40 arms.
The amazing sea creatures—part of a group of animals known as echinoderms—travel using their tube feet. They can regenerate lost limbs, and they can swallow large prey using their unusual stomachs.
Although sea stars live underwater and are commonly called "starfish," they are not true fish. They do not have gills, scales, or fins like fish do. Sea stars also move quite differently from fish. While fish propel themselves with their tails, sea stars have tiny tube feet to help them move along.
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Because they are not classified as fish, scientists prefer to call starfish "sea stars." Sea stars belong to the phylum Echinodermata. That means they are related to sand dollars, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and sea lilies. Overall, this phylum contains over 6,000 species.
Many echinoderms exhibit radial symmetry, meaning their body parts are arranged around a central axis. Many sea stars have five-point radial symmetry because their body has five sections.
This means that they do not have an obvious left and right half, only a top side and a bottom side. Echinoderms also usually have spines, which are less pronounced in sea stars than they are in other organisms such as sea urchins.
There are about 2,000 species of sea stars. Some live in the intertidal zone, while others live in the deep water of the ocean. While many species live in tropical areas, sea stars can also be found in cold areas—even the polar regions.
While many people are most familiar with the five-armed species of sea stars, not all sea stars have just five arms. Some species have many more, such as the sun star, which can have up to 40 arms.
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Amazingly, sea stars can regenerate lost arms, which is useful if the sea star is injured by a predator. It can lose an arm, escape, and grow a new arm later. Sea stars house most of their vital organs in their arms.
This means that some species can even regenerate an entirely new sea star from just one arm and a portion of the star's central disc. It won't happen too quickly, though. It takes about a year for an arm to grow back.
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Depending on the species, a sea star's skin may feel leathery or slightly prickly. Sea stars have a tough covering on their upper side, which is made up of plates of calcium carbonate with tiny spines on their surface. A sea star's spines are used for protection from predators, which include birds, fish, and sea otters. One very spiny sea star is the aptly named crown-of-thorns starfish.
Instead of blood, sea stars have a circulatory system made up primarily of sea water. Seawater is pumped into the animal's water vascular system through its sieve plate.
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This is a sort of trap door called a madreporite, which is often visible as a light-colored spot on the top of the starfish. From the madreporite, the sea water moves into the sea star's tube feet, causing the arm to extend. Muscles within the tube feet are used to retract the limb.
https://www.twitch.tv/jinnytty/videos/all
Sea stars move using hundreds of tube feet, which are located on their underside. The tube feet are filled with sea water, which the sea star brings in through the madreporite on its top side. Sea stars can move quicker than you might expect.
If you get a chance, visit a tide pool or aquarium and take a moment to watch a sea star moving around. It is one of the most amazing sights in the ocean. Tube feet also help the sea star hold its prey, including clams and mussels.
Sea stars prey on bivalves like mussels and clams, as well as small fish, snails, and barnacles. If you've ever tried to pry the shell of a clam or mussel open, you know how difficult it is. However, sea stars have a unique way of eating these creatures.
A sea star's mouth is on its underside. When it catches its food, the sea star will wrap its arms around the animal's shell and pull it open just slightly. Then it does something amazing. The sea star pushes its stomach through its mouth and into the bivalve's shell. It then digests the animal and slides its stomach back into its own body.
This unique feeding mechanism allows the sea star to eat larger prey than it would otherwise be able to fit into its tiny mouth. Many people are surprised to learn that starfish have eyes. It's true. The eyes are there—just not in the place you would expect. Sea stars have an eye spot at the end of each arm. This means that a five-armed sea star has five eyes, while the 40-armed sun star has 40 eyes.
Each sea star eye is very simple and looks like a red spot. It doesn't see much detail but it can sense light and dark, which is just enough for the environments the animals live in. Starfish belong to the animal class Asteroidea. These echinoderms all have several arms arranged around a central disk.
Asteroidea is the classification for "true stars." These animals are in a separate class from brittle stars and basket stars, which have a more defined separation between their arms and their central disk.
Male and female sea stars are hard to tell apart because they look identical. While many animal species reproduce using only one method, sea stars are a little different. Sea stars can reproduce sexually. They do this by releasing sperm and eggs (called gametes) into the water.
The sperm fertilizes the gametes and produces swimming larvae, which eventually settle on the ocean floor, growing into adult sea stars. Sea stars can also reproduce asexually through regeneration, which is what happens when the animals lose an arm.
https://www.thoughtco.com/facts-about-sea-stars-2291865
Last Friday I asked people if they would rather be a US Navy or a US Air Force pilot. The US Navy itself replied with this video of an F-18 night landing on an aircraft carrier. Hard to argue with that. It's terrifying. Sure, the pilots now have night vision and instrument landing systems, but it is still an incredibly difficult operation.
And those electronic aids can malfunction, so they train to do it old school if needed. And old school is extremely hard. The Navy has been doing night landings for a long time. The first night landings happened aboard the USS Langley (CV-1/AV-3), their first aircraft carrier. That was on April 1925, off the coast of San Diego.
A few years later, in 1929, every pilot had to practice night landings, which were truly terrifying. They had to do four per year, and most of the time the training was under the light of a full moon or with the sun setting. The carriers had landing signal officers on board for both day and night landings. At night, they had to determine the attitude and approach speed of the inbound fighters based only on the lights of the plane and sound of the engine.
Depending on the colors of the lights—which changed from green to yellow to red depending on the plane's altitude—the LSO gave the planes indications like too high, too low, too fast, etc. You can imagine the experience.
Because of their extreme difficulty, during World War II the Navy tried to stay away from night landings as much as possible. There were some night takeoffs just before dawn, but those were straightforward and weren't as dangerous as the landings.
Still, sometimes they couldn't be avoided. To give you an idea on how dangerous things were, during the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Navy lost 20 planes trying to sink the Japanese carrier Hiyo.
After the Hiyo sunk, they lost another 72 trying to land at night. Incidentally, none were lost on the Yorktown because of the work of the Lt. Dick Tripp, the landing signal officer aboard that carrier. Apparently, Tripp was considered the best LSO in the Pacific—and rightly so, according to this incident.
During the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953, night landings became standard, with pilots specializing in night attacks. Still, those landings were terrifying too. Here's a first-person account of one by Lieutenant Bill Raposa, who received two Navy crosses and the Distinguished Flying Cross during his tours of duty in World War II and the Korean War:
One night returning from a mission the weather had deteriorated badly. I had a wingman and two night-fighters with me trying to find the carrier.
My aircrewman had the ship on our radar but we could not even see the wake so I had to execute a missed approach to bring the flight lower and break out under 400 feet to see the ship. I broke off the F4U5N's first since they had less fuel, then my wingman, and I gave them a lot of room before I began an approach.
The first Corsair waved off but the second landed, followed by my wingman, Jamie Morris. I let the lead Corsair try again and he hit the ramp and only got half the plane on the flight deck with the tail going into the spud locker on the hangar deck. The engine and cockpit half rolled up the flight deck to be stopped by the barricades.
The pilot, Butch O Hara, was not seriously injured but that ended his Korean tour. It also left me hanging in the air with low state, a fouled deck and bad weather. Tilly took twenty minutes to clear the wreckage. With a clear deck Charlie, I got aboard on the first pass with twenty gallons of fuel to spare.
The aircrewmen in the belly of the AD4N had only one small window on each side and these young men put their life and trust in the fellow up front. They never knew how scared we really were operating at 110% capacity with no margin of error available.
Those VC-35 aircrewmen deserved a lot of recognition for their courage. Indeed, those guys had steel balls. As do the Navy pilots today who continue to land small planes on narrow, seaborne runways night after night after night.
https://gizmodo.com/this-night-carrier-landing-is-crazy-but-they-were-even-5949840
A new research from the University of Vienna has revealed that the vocal tract of non-human primates such as monkeys and apes are designed for talking but their brains are not wired for it.
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The study, published in the journal Science Advances, reveal that the inability of monkeys to talk does not lie on their vocal anatomy but their brains. In fact, the researchers did x-rays of the vocal tracts of monkeys and found out that their larynx, tongue and lips are more flexible than what scientists previously thought.
Using x-ray video, the team of scientists, led by Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna and Asif Ghazanfar at Princeton University, analyzed the mouth and throat of macaque monkeys while they consume food, vocalize and create facial expressions, Science Daily reports.
The scientists used the data from the x-ray video to make a model of the monkeys' vocal tract. The model showed that these animals could easily talk if they wanted to -- however, the problem lies in their brains.
This changes a previous study done by cognitive scientist Philip Lieberman who said that monkeys are only capable of producing vowels and not a full string of words. Different from examining a live monkey, Lieberman and his team examined a dead rhesus macaque monkey for the study back in the 1960s, CS Monitor reports.
“No one can say now that there’s a vocal anatomy problem with monkey speech. They have a speech-ready vocal anatomy, but not a speech-ready brain. Now we need to find out why the human but not the monkey brain can produce language," Ghazanfar told New Scientist.
Meanwhile, Lieberman has applauded the new study, telling CS Monitor that the team has done an excellent job but noted that even though monkeys have the vocal cords to talk, there are still "nuances" and "it wouldn't be an effective means of communication."
Ghazanfar said that despite the growing evidence of monkeys, particularly great ape species, learning to pronounce vowel-like sounds, they are still far from developing and adapting human speech -- even that of a baby.
https://www-natureworldnews-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.natureworldnews.com/amp/articles/33803/20161211/monkeys-talk-vocal-chords-designed-speech-brains-arent.htm?amp_js_v=0.1&usqp=mq331AQCKAE%3D#origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&prerenderSize=1&visibilityState=prerender&paddingTop=32&p2r=0&horizontalScrolling=0&csi=1&aoh=15778413217211&viewerUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Famp%2Fs%2F
Moses (c. 1400 BCE) is considered one of the most important religious leaders in world history. He is claimed by the religions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Bahai as an important prophet of God and the founder of monotheistic belief.
The story of Moses is told in the biblical books of Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers but he continues to be referenced throughout the Bible and is the prophet most often cited in the New Testament.
In the Quran he also plays an important role and, again, is the most often cited religious figure who is mentioned 115 times as opposed to Muhammed who is referred to by name only four times in the text. As in the Bible, in the Quran Moses is a figure who alternately stands for divine or human understanding.
Moses is best known from the story in the biblical Book of Exodus and Quran as the lawgiver who met God face-to-face on Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments after leading his people, the Hebrews, out of bondage in Egypt and to the "promised land" of Canaan.
The story of the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt is only found in the Penteteuch, the first five books of the Bible, and in the Quran which was written later.
No other ancient sources corroborate the story and no archaeological evidence supports it. This has led many scholars to conclude that Moses was a legendary figure and the Exodus story a cultural myth.
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The Egyptian historian Manetho (3rd century BCE), however, tells the story of an Egyptian priest named Osarsiph who led a group of lepers in rebellion against the wishes of the king who wanted them banished.
Osarsiph, Manetho claims, rejected the polytheism of Egyptian religion in favor of a monotheistic understanding and changed his name to Moses meaning "child of..." and usually used in conjunction with a god's name (Ramesses would be Ra-Moses, son of Ra, for example).
Osarsiph would have attached no god's name to his own, it would seem, since he believed himself a son of a living god who had no name human beings could - or should - utter.
Moses could have been a mythological character who took on a life of his own as his story was told over & over again or could have been a real person to whom magical or supernatural events were ascribed or could have been precisely as he is depicted in the early books of the Bible & in the Quran.
Manetho's story of Osarsiph/Moses is related by the historian Flavius Josephus (c. 37-100 CE) who cited Manetho's story at length in his own work. The Roman historian Tacitus (c. 56-117 CE) tells a similar story of a man named Moses who becomes the leader of a colony of Egyptian lepers.
This has led a number of writers and scholars (Sigmund Freud and Joseph Campbell among them) to assert that the Moses of the Bible was not a Hebrew who was raised in an Egyptian palace but an Egyptian priest who led a religious revolution to establish monotheism.
This theory links Moses closely with the pharaoh Akhenaten (1353-1336 BCE) who established his own monotheistic belief in the god Aten, unlike any other god and more powerful than all, in the fifth year of his reign.
Akhenaten's monotheism may have been born of a genuine religious impulse or could have been a reaction against the priests of the god Amun who had grown almost as wealthy and powerful as the throne. In establishing monotheism and banning all the old gods of Egypt, Akhenaten effectively eliminated any threat to the crown from the priesthood.
The theory advanced by Campbell and others (following Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism in this) is that Moses was a priest of Akhenaten who led like-minded followers out of Egypt after Akhenaten's death when his son, Tutankhamun (c. 1336-1327 BCE), restored the old gods and practices.
Still other scholars equate Moses with Akhenaten himself and see the Exodus story as a mythological rendering of Akhenaten's honest attempt at religious reform.
Moses is mentioned by a number of classical writers all drawing on the stories known in the Bible or by earlier writers. He could have been a mythological character who took on a life of his own as his story was told over and over again or could have been a real person to whom magical or supernatural events were ascribed or could have been precisely as he is depicted in the early books of the Bible and in the Quran.
Dating Moses' life and the precise date of the Exodus is difficult and is always based on interpretations of the Book of Exodus in conjunction with other books of the Bible and so are always speculative.
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It is entirely possible that the Exodus story was written by a Hebrew scribe living in Canaan who wished to make a clear distinction between his people and the older settlements of the Amorites in the region.
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The story of God's Chosen People led by his servant Moses to a land their God had promised them would have served this purpose well. The Book of Exodus (written c. 600 BCE) picks up from the narrative in the Book of Genesis (chapters 37-50) of Joseph, son of Jacob, who was sold into slavery by his jealous half-brothers and rose to prominence in Egypt. Joseph was adept at understanding dreams and interpreted the king's dream accurately predicting a coming famine.
He was placed in charge of preparing Egypt for the famine, succeeded brilliantly, and brought his family to Egypt. The Book of Exodus opens with the Hebrew descendants of Joseph becoming more numerous in the land of Egypt so that the pharaoh, fearing they might seize power, enslaves them.
Moses enters the story in the second chapter of the book after the unnamed pharaoh, still worried about the growing population of the Israelites, decrees that every male child must be killed. Moses' mother hides him for three months but then, afraid he will be discovered and killed, sets him adrift in a papyrus basket on the Nile where he floats down to where the pharaoh's daughter and her attendants are bathing.
The child is taken from the river by the princess who calls him "Moses" claiming she chose the name because she "drew him out of the water" (Exodus 2:10) which is making the assertion that "Moses" means "to draw out". This etymology of the name has been contested since, as noted, "Moses" in Egyptian meant "child of".
Moses grows up in the Egyptian palace until one day he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave and kills him, burying his body in the sand. The next day, when he is again out among the people, he sees two Hebrews fighting and pulls them apart asking what the problem is.
One of them answers by asking if he plans to kill them as he did the Egyptian. Moses then realizes his crime has become known and flees Egypt for Midian.
In the land of Midian he rescues the daughters of a high priest (named Reuel in Exodus 2 and Jethro afterwards) who gives him his daughter Zipporah as a wife.
Moses lives in Midian as a shepherd until he one day encounters a bush which burns with fire but is not consumed. The fire is the angel of God who brings Moses a message that he should return to Egypt to free his people.
Moses is not interested and bluntly tells God, "Please send someone else" (Exodus 4:13). God is in no mood to be questioned on his choice and makes it clear that Moses will be returning to Egypt. He assures him all will be well and that he will have his brother, Aaron, to help him speak and supernatural powers which will enable him to convince pharaoh that he speaks for God.
He also tells Moses, in a passage which has long troubled interpreters of the book, that he will "harden pharaoh's heart" against receiving the message and letting the people go at the same time that he wants pharaoh to accept the message and release his people.
Moses returns to Egypt and, as God had promised, pharaoh's heart is hardened against him. Moses and Aaron compete with the Egyptian priests in an effort to show whose god is greater but pharaoh is unimpressed.
After a series of ten plagues destroys the land, finally killing the first-born of the Egyptians, the Hebrews are allowed to leave and, as God directed, they take a vast amount of treasure out of Egypt with them.
Pharaoh changes his mind after they have gone, however, and sends his army of chariots in pursuit. In one of the best-known passages from the Bible, Moses parts the Red Sea so his people can cross and then closes the waters over the pursuing Egyptian army, drowning them.
He leads his people on, following two signs God provides: a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. At Mount Sinai, Moses leaves his people below to ascend and meet God face to face; here he receives the Ten Commandments, God's laws for his people.
On the mountain, Moses receives the law and also instructions for the ark of the covenant and tabernacle which will house God's presence among the people. Down below, his followers have begun to fear him dead and, feeling hopeless, ask Aaron to make them an idol they can worship and ask for help.
Aaron melts the treasures they took from Egypt in a fire to create a golden calf. On the mountain, God sees what the Hebrews are doing and tells Moses to return and deal with his people. When he comes back down the mountain and sees his people worshipping the idol he becomes enraged and destroys the tablets of the Ten Commandments.
He calls all who remained faithful to God to his side, including Aaron, and commands they kill their neighbors, friends, and brothers who forced Aaron to make the idol for them. Exodus 32:27-28 describes the scene and claims "about three thousand people" were killed by Moses' Levites.
Afterwards, God tells Moses he will not accompany the people anymore because they are "stiff-necked people" and, should he travel further with them, he would wind up killing them out of frustration.
Moses and the elders then enter into a covenant with God by which he will be their only god and they will be his chosen people. He will travel with them personally as a divine presence to direct and comfort them.
God writes the Ten Commandments on new tablets which Moses cuts for him and these are placed in the ark of the covenant and the ark is housed in the tabernacle, an elaborate tent.
God further commands that a lampstand of pure gold and a table of acacia wood be made and placed before his presence in the tabernacle for receiving offerings, specifies a courtyard to be created for the tabernacle, and outlines acceptable offerings and various sins one must avoid and atone for.
No longer will the people have to question his existence or wonder what he wants because, between the Ten Commandments and the other instructions, everything is quite clear and, further, they will know he is among them in the tabernacle.
Even with God in their midst, however, the people still doubt and still fear and still question and so it is decreed that this generation will wander in the desert until they die; the next generation will be the one to see the promised land.
Moses then leads his people through the desert for forty years until this is accomplished and the younger generation reaches the promised land of Canaan. Moses himself is not allowed to enter, only to look upon it from across the River Jordan. He dies and is buried in an unmarked grave on Mount Nebo and leadership is assumed by his second-in-command, Joshua son of Nun.
Moses' trials and challenges mediating between his people and God, as well as his laws, are given in the books of Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy which, taken with Genesis and Exodus, make up the first five books of the Bible, which traditionally are ascribed to Moses himself as author.
The Exodus story resonates as it does because it touches on universal themes & symbols regarding personal identity, purpose in life, & the involvement of the divine in human affairs.
Biblical scholarship, however, discounts Moses' authorship and maintains that the first five books were written by different scribes at different time periods. The story of Moses as related in Exodus is the hero's story as elaborated by Joseph Campbell in works such as The Hero with a Thousand Faces or Transformations of Myth Through Time.
Although Moses is born a Hebrew he is separated from his people shortly after birth and denied his cultural heritage. Upon discovering who he is he must leave the life of comfort he has grown used to and embarks on a journey which leads to his recognition of his purpose in life.
He is afraid to accept what he knows he must do but does it anyway and succeeds. The Exodus story resonates as it does because it touches on universal themes and symbols regarding personal identity, purpose in life, and the involvement of the divine in human affairs.
https://www.instagram.com/dewdropdwelling/
Moses' entrance to the story purposefully employs the motif of the infant born of humble parents who becomes (or is unknowingly) a prince. At the time of the writing of Exodus this story had been known in the Middle and Near East for almost 2,000 years through the Legend of Sargon of Akkad. Sargon (2334-2279 BCE) was the founder of the Akkadian empire, the first multi-national empire in the world.
His famous legend, which he made great use of in his lifetime to achieve his aims, relates how his mother was a priestess who "set me in a basket of rushes and sealed my lid with bitumen/ She cast me into the river which rose over me.
The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me. Akki/the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener" (Pritchard, 85-86). Sargon grows up to overthrow the king and unite the region of Mesopotamia under his rule.
Scholar Paul Kriwaczek, writing on Sargon's story, mentions the International Babylon Festival of 1990 CE at which Saddam Hussein celebrated his birthday. Kriwaczek writes:
The festivities came to a climax when a wooden cabin was wheeled out and large crowds dressed in ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian costume prostrated themselves in front of it.
The doors opened to reveal a palm tree from which fifty-three white doves flew up into the sky. Beneath them a baby Saddam, reposing in a basket, came floating down a marsh-bordered stream.
Time magazine's reporter was particularly struck by the baby-in-the-basket theme, describing it as "Moses redux". But why on earth would Saddam Hussein wish to compare himself to a leader of the Jews? The journalist was missing the point.
The motif was a Mesopotamian invention long before the Hebrews took it up and applied it to Moses. The Iraqi dictator was alluding to a much more ancient and, to him, far more glorious precedent. He was associating himself with Sargon.
The writer of Exodus also wanted his hero associated with Sargon: a true hero who would rise from inauspicious beginnings to achieve greatness. Those who believe the Exodus story is a cultural myth point to Moses' beginnings, along with many other facets of the story, to prove their claim.
Other scholars, such as Rosalie David or Susan Wise Bauer, accept the Exodus story as authentic history and ascribe to the characters in the story a knowledge of Sargon's legend which the author of Exodus faithfully set down. Bauer writes:
Sargon's birth story served as a seal of chosenness, a proof of his divinity. Surely the mother of the Hebrew baby knew it, and made use of it in a desperate (and successful) attempt to place her own baby in the line of the divinely chosen.
To these scholars the fact that there are no records of the Exodus and no archaeological evidence to support it can be explained by the embarrassment the departure of the Israelites would have caused the pharaoh of Egypt. Bauer writes:
The exodus of the Hebrews was a nose-thumbing directed not just at the power of the pharaoh and his court but at the power of the Egyptian gods themselves. The plagues were designed to ram home the impotence of the Egyptian pantheon.
The Nile, the bloodstream of Osiris and the lifeblood of Egypt, was turned to blood and became foul and poisonous; frogs, sacred to Osiris, appeared in numbers so great that they were transformed into a pestilence; the sun-disk was blotted out by darkness. Ra and Aten both made helpless. These are not the kinds of events that appear in the celebratory inscriptions of any pharaoh.
A simpler explanation, however, is that the events described in the Book of Exodus did not take place - or, at least, not as described - and so no inscriptions were made relating to them.
The Egyptians are famous for their record-keeping and yet no records have been found which make the slightest reference to the departure of a segment of the population of the land which, according to the Book of Exodus, numbered "six hundred thousand men on foot besides women and children" (12:37) or, as given in Exodus 38:26, "everyone who had crossed over to those counted, twenty years old or more, a total of 603,550 men" again not counting women or children.
Even if the Egyptians decided the embarrassment of their gods and king was too great a shame to set down, some record would exist of such a huge movement of so vast a population even if that record were simply a dramatic change in the physical evidence of the region.
There are seasonal camps from the Paleolithic Age in Scotland and other areas dating to c. 12,000 BCE (such as Howburn Farm) and these sites were not in use anywhere near the amount of time of the forty years of campsites the Hebrews would have made use of in their trip to the promised land.
Arguments by Egyptologists such as David Rohl, that evidence of the Exodus does exist, are not widely accepted by scholars, historians, or other Egyptologists. Rohl's claim is that one can find no physical or literary evidence of the Exodus only because one is looking in the wrong era.
The Exodus has traditionally been placed in the reign of Ramesses II (1279-1213 BCE) but Rohl claims the events actually took place much earlier in the reign of the king Dudimose I (c. 1650 BCE). If one examines the evidence from that time, Rohl claims, the biblical narrative matches up with Egyptian history.
The problems with Rohl's theory are that it the evidence from the period of the Middle Kingdom (2040-1782 BCE) and Second Intermediate Period (c. 1782-c. 1570 BCE) does not actually substantiate the Exodus story.
The Ipuwer Papyrus, which Rohl claims is an Egyptian account of the Ten Plagues, is dated to the Middle Kingdom, long before Dudimose I's reign and, further, is quite clearly Egyptian literature of a known genre, not history.
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The Semites Rohl asserts lived in great numbers at Avaris cannot be identified with the Israelites. In every instance where Rohl makes his claims linking the Book of Exodus with Egyptian history he either ignores details which prove him wrong or twists evidence to fit with his theory.
In spite of Rohl's claims, and those of others who have seized on them, there is no archaeological or literary evidence of Moses leading the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. The only source for the story is the biblical narrative.
The Egyptian Priest Theory - Still, there is an Egyptian record of an event which, some claim, inspired the Exodus story in Manetho's account of the Egyptian priest Osarsiph and his leadership of the community of lepers. Manetho's account has been lost but is quoted at length by Josephus and later by the Roman historian Tacitus.
According to Josephus, the king Amenophis of Egypt (who is equated with Amenhotep III, c. 1386-1353 BCE) wished to "see the gods" but was told by an oracle that he could not - unless he cleansed Egypt of lepers. He therefore banished the lepers to the city of Avaris where they were united under the leadership of a monotheistic priest named Osarsiph.
Osarsiph rebelled against the rule of Amenophis, instituted monotheism, and invited the Hyksos back into Egypt. In Tacitus' version, the Egyptian king is named Bocchoris (the Greek name for the king Bakenranef, c. 725-720 BCE) and he exiles a segment of his population afflicted with leprosy to the desert.
The exiles remain in the desert "in a stupour of grief" until one of them, Moses, rallies and leads them to another land. Tacitus goes on to say how Moses then taught the people a new belief in one supreme god and "gave them a novel form of worship, opposed to all that is practiced by other men".
As with the Exodus story, there are no records which corroborate this version of events and the reign of Amenhotep III was not marked by any rebellions by lepers or anyone else. Tacitus' account of Moses coming to power during the reign of Bakenranef is equally unsupported.
Further, Manetho's account explicitly states that Osarsiph "invited the Hyksos back into Egypt" where they ruled for thirteen years but the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt in c. 1570 BCE by Ahmose I of Thebes and no records indicate they ever returned.
Historian Marc van de Mieroop comments on this, writing, "Scholars have different opinions about exactly what historical events Josephus's account recalls, but many see a lingering memory of Akhenaten and his unpopular rule in the tale".
Akhenaten famously introduced monotheism to Egypt through the worship of the one god Aten and proscribed the worship of all other gods. According to the theory most famously expounded by Freud, the Osarsiph story is actually an account of Akhenaten's reign and one of his priests, Moses, who carried on his reform.
Freud is openly bewildered by the fact that no one seems to have noticed that this allegedly Hebrew leader of the Exodus from Egypt had an Egyptian name, writing, "It might have been expected that one of the many authors who recognized Moses to be an Egyptian name would have drawn the conclusion, or at least considered the possibility, that the bearer of an Egyptian name was himself an Egyptian" . Freud further states:
I venture now to draw the following conclusion: if Moses was an Egyptian and if he transmitted to the Jews his own religion, then it was that of Ikhnaton [Akhenaten), the Aten religion. According to Freud, Moses was murdered by his people and the memory of this act created a communal guilt which infused the religion of Judaism and characterizes that belief system as well as those monotheistic faiths which came after it.
As interesting as the theory may be, like many of Freud's theories, it is based on an assumption which Freud never proves but continues to build an argument on anyway. Susan Wise Bauer writes:
For at least a century, the theory that Akhenaten trained Moses in monotheism and then set him loose in the desert has floated around; it still pops up occasionally on History Channel specials and PBS fund raisers.
This has absolutely no historical basis and in fact is incredibly difficult to square with any of the more respectable dates of the Exodus. It seems to have originated with Freud who was certainly not an unbiased scholar in his desire to explain the origins of monotheism while denying Judaism as much uniqueness as possible.
Although his name certainly suggests an Egyptian origin, the first text which introduces the character of Moses clearly indicates he was the son of Hebrew parents. Whether one accepts the Book of Exodus as a reliable account or a cultural myth, one cannot change the text to fit one's personal theories which is basically what Freud does.
At the same time, one cannot claim a "respectable date" for the Exodus when there is no historical record of the event outside of the manuscript of the Book of Exodus.
The events of the Exodus are traditionally assigned to the reign of Ramesses II based on the passage from Exodus 1:11 where it states that the Hebrew slaves worked on the cities of Pithom and Rameses, two cities Ramesses II was known to have commissioned.
Bauer, however, writes that a "respectable date" for the Exodus is 1446 BCE based on "a straightforward reading of I Kings 6:1 which claims that 480 years passed between the Exodus and the building of Solomon's temple".
Further complicating the dating of the event is that Exodus 7:7 states that Moses was 80 years old when he first met with pharaoh but Moses' birthdate is given by Rabbinical Judaism as 1391 BCE making the 1446 BCE date impossible and there are plenty of other suggestions for possible birth years as well which also make the 1446 BCE date for the Exodus untenable.
Exodus as Naru Literature - The problem with all these speculations stems from the attempt at reading the Bible as straight history instead of what it is: literature and, specifically, scripture. Ancient writers were not as concerned with facts as modern audiences are but were certainly interested in truth.
This is exemplified by the ancient genre known as Mesopotamian Naru Literature in which a figure, usually someone famous, plays an important role in a story which they did not actually participate in.
The best examples of Naru Literature concern Sargon of Akkad and his grandson Naram-Sin (2262-2224 BCE). In the famous story "The Curse of Akkad", Naram-Sin is portrayed as destroying the temple of the god Enlil when he receives no answer to his prayers.
There is no record of Naram-Sin doing any such thing while there is a great deal of evidence that he was a pious king who honored Enlil and the other gods. In this case, Naram-Sin would have been chosen as main character because of his famous name and used to convey a truth about humanity's relationship with the gods and, especially, a king's proper attitude toward the divine.
In the same way, the Book of Exodus and the other narratives concerning Moses tell a story of physical and spiritual liberation using the central character of Moses - a figure previously unknown in literature - who represents man's relationship with God.
The writers of the biblical narratives go to great lengths to ground their stories in history, to show God working through actual events, in the same way the authors of Mesopotamian Naru Literature chose historical figures to convey their message.
Literature, scripture, does not need to be historically accurate to express a truth. Insistence on stories such as the Book of Exodus as historical denies a reader a wider experience of the text. To claim that the book must be historically true to be meaningful denies the power of the story to relay its message.
Moses is a symbolic figure in the story while at the same time remaining a completely autonomous individual with a distinct personality. Throughout the narrative Moses mediates between God and the people but is neither completely holy nor secular.
He accepts his mandate from God reluctantly, constantly asks God why he was chosen and what he is supposed to be doing, and yet consistently tries to do God's will until he strikes the stone to produce water instead of speaking to it as God had instructed (Numbers 20:1-12).
God had previously told Moses to strike a rock to get water (Exodus 17:6) but this time told him to speak to the rock. Moses' actions here, ignoring God's instruction, prevent him from entering the promised land of Canaan.
He is allowed to see the land from Mount Nebo but cannot lead his people once he has compromised his relationship with God.
As with the rest of the narrative concerning Moses, this episode with the rock would have conveyed (still conveys) an important message about a believer's relationship with God: that one must trust in the divine in spite of one's own perceived knowledge or reliance on precedent and experience.
It does not finally matter whether a historical individual named Moses struck or spoke to a rock which then gave water; what matters is the truth of the individual's relationship with God that story conveys and how one can better understand one's own place in a divine plan.
Moses in the Quran - This is also seen in the Quran where Moses is known as Musa. Musa is mentioned a number of times throughout the Quran as a righteous man, a prophet, and a sage.
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In the story of the Exodus in the Quran, Musa is always seen as a devout servant of Allah trusting in divine wisdom. In Surah 18: 60-82, however, a story is related which shows how even a great and righteous man still has much to learn from God.
One day, after Musa has delivered a particularly brilliant sermon, a member of the audience asks him if there is another on earth as learned in God's ways as he is and Musa answers no. God (Allah) informs him that there will always be those who know more than one does in anything, especially regarding the divine. Musa asks Allah where he might find such a man and Allah gives him instructions on how to proceed.
Following Allah's guidance, Musa finds Al-Khidr (a representative of the divine) and asks if he might follow him and learn all the knowledge he has of God. Al-Khidr answers that Musa would not understand anything he said or did and would have no patience; he then dismisses him. Musa pleads with him and Al-Khidr says, "If you would follow me, ask me not about anything until I mention it myself" and Musa agrees.
As with the biblical Moses, the Musa of the Quran is a completely developed character with all the strengths & weaknesses of any person. As they travel together, Al-Khidr comes across a boat by the shore and kicks a hole in the bottom of it. Musa objects, crying out that the owners of the boat will not be able to earn their living now.
Al-Khidr reminds him how he told him he could not be patient and dismisses him but Musa asks forgiveness and promises he will not judge or speak on anything else. Shortly after the boat incident, though, they meet a young man on the road and Al-Khidr kills him. Musa strongly objects asking why such a handsome young man should be killed and Al-Khidr again reminds him of what he said before and tells him to leave now immediately. Musa again apologizes and is forgiven and the two travel on together.
They reach a town where they ask for alms but are refused. On their way out of the town they pass a stone wall which is falling down and Al-Khidr stops and repairs it. Musa is again confused and complains to his companion that at least he could have asked for wages in repairing the wall so they could get something to eat.
At this, Al-Khidr tells Musa that he has breached their contract for the last time and now they must part ways. First, though, he explains: he scuttled the boat because there was a king at sea seizing every boat which put out by force and enslaving the crew.
If the good people who owned the boat had gone out, they would have met with a bad end. He killed the young man because he was evil and was going to bring great pain to his parents and community.
Allah had already provided for another son to be born to the parents who would bring them and others joy instead of pain. He rebuilt the wall because there was a treasure hidden beneath it which two orphans were supposed to inherit and, if the wall had crumbled any more, it would have been revealed to those who would take it. Al-Khidr ends by saying, "That is the interpretation of those things over which you showed no patience" and Musa understands the lesson.
As with the biblical Moses, the Musa of the Quran is a completely developed character with all the strengths and weaknesses of any person. In the Bible, Moses' humility is emphasized but he still has enough pride to trust in his own judgment in striking the rock rather than in listening to God.
In the Quran his faith in himself and his own perceptions and judgments is questioned through his inability to trust in God's messenger. The story from Surah 18 teaches that God has a purpose which human beings, even one as devout and learned as Musa, cannot understand.
Throughout the Christian New Testament Moses is cited more than any other Old Testament prophet or figure. Moses is seen as the Law Giver in the Christian writings who exemplifies a man of God. To cite only one example, Moses features prominently in the famous story Jesus tells concerning Lazarus and the Rich Man in Luke 16: 19-31.
In this story a poor, but pious, man named Lazarus and a rich man (unnamed) live in the same town. Lazarus suffers daily while the rich man has everything he could desire. They both die on the same day and the rich man wakes up in the underworld and sees Lazarus with Father Abraham in paradise.
He begs Father Abraham to help him but is reminded that, on earth, he lived a life of ease while Lazarus suffered and now it is only just that the roles are reversed.
The rich man then asks Father Abraham to send someone to warn his family, as he has five brothers still living, and tell them how they should better live to avoid his fate. Abraham responds, "They have Moses and the prophets, let them listen to them."
The rich man protests saying that if someone should rise from the dead to warn his family then they would surely listen but Abraham says, "If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets neither would they listen should someone rise from the dead." In this story Moses is presented as the paradigm of God's truth.
If people would heed Moses' example and words then they could avoid separation from God in the afterlife. The story emphasizes how Moses' teachings provide everything anyone needs to know about how to live a good and decent life and enjoy an afterlife with God and how, if one is going to ignore Moses and the prophets and justify one's life choices, one would just as easily dismiss someone returning from the dead; the two are equally self-evident of God's desires for human piety and behavior.
Moses is also featured in Jesus' transfiguation in Matthew 17:1-3, Mark 9:2-4, and Luke 9:28-30 along with Elijah when God announces that Jesus is his son with whom he is well pleased. In these passages and others in the New Testament Moses is held up as an exemplar and representative of God's will.
Whether there was a religious leader in history named Moses who led his people and initiated a monotheistic understanding of the divine is unknown.
Individual beliefs will dictate whether one accepts the historicity of Moses or regards him as a mythical figure more than any historical evidence - or the lack of it - ever will.
Either way, the figure of Moses has cast a long shadow across the history of the world. The monotheism he is credited with introducing was further developed by the teachers of the Jewish faith which influenced the atmosphere in which Christianity was able to thrive which then led to the rise of Islam.
All three major monotheistic religions in the world today claim Moses as their own and he continues to serve as a model of humanity's relationship with the divine for people of many faiths around the world.
https://www.ancient.eu/Moses/
Alligators are usually found in bodies of fresh water, which is why you’ll spot them in the swamp on your Orlando airboat tour. They tend to only be found in the southeastern United States, South Africa, and China, while crocodiles can be found all over the world. Crocodiles can survive in both fresh and salt water, which is why they can be found most anywhere.
But did you know the Everglades is the only place where crocodiles and alligators co-exist? Caimans can also adapt in both habitats, and are sometimes kept as pets. Although they're the smallest of the crocodilians (they are rarely over seven feet in length), we don’t recommend it because it’s not only illegal in the United States, but the animal shouldn’t be kept in poor, household conditions either.
Now, the physical differences can get a little tricky, especially because a full-grown caiman can be confused for a young alligator. However, crocodiles are usually the largest when it comes to overall size.
A salt water crocodile can grow to sizes over 23 feet and weigh up to 2,200 pounds… now that’s a big reptile! The average size of a female alligator is 8.2 feet, the average size of a male is 11.2 feet, and they usually don’t weigh more than 1,000 pounds.
An average caiman is about 43 inches to 197 inches in length, but a black caiman is a totally different story. They are the largest caiman species in the world at over 20 feet long!
Alligators and caimans both have a rounded, U-shaped snout and tend to have an overbite, while crocodiles have a V-shaped snout and no overbite. If you ever see their sharp teeth up close, caimans and crocodiles have dagger-shaped teeth and the inside of their mouths are an orange-ish color.
If you ever get a chance to catch a gator feeding show at our Gator and Wildlife Park, you’ll notice alligators have conical shaped teeth and the inside of their mouths are a beige color.
https://blog.wildfloridairboats.com/what-in-the-world-is-a-caiman-and-how-does-it-relate-to-an-alligator-or-crocodile
Everyone has a perfect “running pace”, where our bodies use the least amount of oxygen to cover a certain distance. The shorter the distance, the faster the pace we can sustain. The average man jogs at a speed of 8.3 mph, or 100m in 27 seconds, while the average woman runs at 6.5 mph, covering 100m in 34 seconds.
Humans could perhaps run as fast 40 mph, a new study suggests. Such a feat would leave in the dust the world's fastest runner, Usain Bolt, who has clocked nearly 28 mph in the 100-meter sprint. The new findings come after researchers took a new look at the factors that limit human speed.
Yes, 15mph is very fast for a runner as it equates to a 4-minute mile. 15mph represents the fastest a human can run, with extensive training, for a distance of 1 mile to 2 miles. Sprinters can run faster, but obviously for a much shorter duration.
The world's fastest crocodile on land is the freshwater crocodile (Crocodylus johnstoni). This Australian species can attain speeds reaching 17 km/h (10.56 mph) when in full gallop – a mode of terrestrial locomotion that only a few species of crocodile can accomplish.
Today, Nissin has 21,900 employees, enjoys net sales of over $3.2 billion per year, operates 29 plants in 11 countries, and sells its products worldwide.
You probably know that fish can breathe underneath the water. They can do this because they have these special organs called gills. Turtles, on the other hand, are a lot like us. They lack gills and instead have lungs. And although their lungs are exponentially smaller than ours, they are still powerful enough to let them stay submerged for long periods of time.
However, they do need to surface every now and again. How easily a turtle can drown will depend on several factors, but one of the most important ones is what species it is.
Red-eared sliders for instance, typically spend around most of their lives in the water, swimming around, sleeping and eating. They are super comfortable in the water. Most box turtles, however, are terrible swimmers, lack webbed feet and prefer to stay in very shallow water areas.
Tortoises are even worse, as not only do they lack webbed feet, they are not used to the water at all, and would quickly drown if placed in a deep lake or pond. Some people may get confused and think turtles can breathe underwater because they will often blow bubbles out of their mouths when submerged.
This, however, is simply air escaping from their bodies. It certainly doesn’t mean they are breathing! (Note: if you ever see a turtle blow bubbles outside of the water, it’s a common sign of a respiratory infection!)
Loggerhead turtles, for instance, can stay underneath the water for hours. In fact, the longest a loggerhead has been observed is a stunning 10 hours beneath the water! However, although sea turtles spend 99% of their lives in the water, they do sometimes drown.
You probably have an idea why, and yep, it involves us, humans. Fishing nets. Sometimes sea turtles will get caught in fishing nets, tire out from frantically trying to get out and drown. It, unfortunately, does happen from time to time.
Painted turtles and red-eared sliders, being aquatic turtles, have often been seen staying underneath the water for more than 20 minutes at a time. Similar to sea turtles, aquatic turtles spend most of their lives in the water, and like sea turtles, they can still drown under the right circumstances.
In my experience, this happening is quite rare and has been in every case that I know of, due to the owner’s negligence. As I noted above, it’s almost always a case of the turtle getting trapped underneath the water, underneath a rock or tangled up, and being trapped there.
Baby turtles are often at risk of drowning due to their inexperience and weaker bodies. I would say that the most likely cause of a baby turtle drowning in your tank is going to be related to your basking dock, ie; the baby turtle cannot climb up the ramp and eventually tires out.
This can happen if the ramp or entry area of your basking dock is too slippery, too steep or just too difficult for a baby turtle to climb up. It’s definitely not common, but it can happen. Certain other species, usually box turtles, are sometimes labeled as drowning risks depending on what kind of environment they are in. Reeves turtles, as well as mud turtles, are 2 common examples.
Box turtles tend to tire out much, much faster in deep water compared to aquatic species, so you will need to be extra cautious when constructing your tank. Avoid putting too much water into it.
I have to admit, this question has certainly crossed my mind. My red-eared slider is able to sleep underwater for what seems to be an incredibly long time. But does that mean a sleeping turtle could actually drown? The answer is no.
For turtles that sleep underwater (usually aquatic species like sliders and painted turtles), this is totally normal. What often happens is that they will naturally make their way to the surface (usually just drifting there) and take a breath or two.
If they start to stay down too long, they will wake up and consciously swim to the surface to get air. I wanted to make a quick note regarding a turtle’s ability to breathe underwater. What about when they hibernate/brumate?
There are certain species of turtles that are able to absorb oxygen on certain parts of their body, but this ability is really just limited to hibernation. This occurs in the wild during the cold winter months, when wild turtles will often submerge themselves in mud or water (or both!).
So no, turtles cannot breathe underwater, and they most certainly can drown. What are the most common reasons for a turtle drowning? There are 2 main causes: The turtle doesn’t have a basking spot or a way to get out of deep water, so it eventually tires out and drowns. The turtle accidentally flips over and/or gets stuck underneath the water, trapping it. Both of these causes are extremely rare.
Just about everyone knows that turtles can hold their breath for a really, really long time. But can you drown a turtle? Here’s the startling answer. Yes, absolutely. Although turtles can remain under water for long periods of time, they cannot breathe underwater. Under the right circumstances, turtles can drown.
You probably know that fish can breathe underneath the water. They can do this because they have these special organs called gills. Turtles, on the other hand, are a lot like us. They lack gills and instead have lungs. And although their lungs are exponentially smaller than ours, they are still powerful enough to let them stay submerged for long periods of time.
However, they do need to surface every now and again. How easily a turtle can drown will depend on several factors, but one of the most important ones is what species it is. Red-eared sliders for instance, typically spend around most of their lives in the water, swimming around, sleeping and eating.
They are super comfortable in the water. Most box turtles, however, are terrible swimmers, lack webbed feet and prefer to stay in very shallow water areas.
Tortoises are even worse, as not only do they lack webbed feet, they are not used to the water at all, and would quickly drown if placed in a deep lake or pond. Some people may get confused and think turtles can breathe underwater because they will often blow bubbles out of their mouths when submerged.
This, however, is simply air escaping from their bodies. It certainly doesn’t mean they are breathing! (Note: if you ever see a turtle blow bubbles outside of the water, it’s a common sign of a respiratory infection!)
However, based on my research and personal experience, it seems that most common pet species of turtle can remain submerged for between 15 to 30 minutes. Loggerhead turtles, for instance, can stay underneath the water for hours. In fact, the longest a loggerhead has been observed is a stunning 10 hours beneath the water!
However, although sea turtles spend 99% of their lives in the water, they do sometimes drown. You probably have an idea why, and yep, it involves us, humans. Fishing nets. Sometimes sea turtles will get caught in fishing nets, tire out from frantically trying to get out and drown. It, unfortunately, does happen from time to time.
Painted turtles and red-eared sliders, being aquatic turtles, have often been seen staying underneath the water for more than 20 minutes at a time. Similar to sea turtles, aquatic turtles spend most of their lives in the water, and like sea turtles, they can still drown under the right circumstances.
In my experience, this happening is quite rare and has been in every case that I know of, due to the owner’s negligence. As I noted above, it’s almost always a case of the turtle getting trapped underneath the water, underneath a rock or tangled up, and being trapped there.
Baby turtles are often at risk of drowning due to their inexperience and weaker bodies. I would say that the most likely cause of a baby turtle drowning in your tank is going to be related to your basking dock, ie; the baby turtle cannot climb up the ramp and eventually tires out.
This can happen if the ramp or entry area of your basking dock is too slippery, too steep or just too difficult for a baby turtle to climb up. Certain other species, usually box turtles, are sometimes labeled as drowning risks depending on what kind of environment they are in. Reeves turtles, as well as mud turtles, are 2 common examples.
Box turtles tend to tire out much, much faster in deep water compared to aquatic species, so you will need to be extra cautious when constructing your tank. Avoid putting too much water into it.
For turtles that sleep underwater (usually aquatic species like sliders and painted turtles), this is totally normal. What often happens is that they will naturally make their way to the surface (usually just drifting there) and take a breath or two.
If they start to stay down too long, they will wake up and consciously swim to the surface to get air. Do Turtles Breathe During Hibernation? I wanted to make a quick note regarding a turtle’s ability to breathe underwater. What about when they hibernate/brumate?
There are certain species of turtles that are able to absorb oxygen on certain parts of their body, but this ability is really just limited to hibernation. This occurs in the wild during the cold winter months, when wild turtles will often submerge themselves in mud or water (or both!).
The turtle doesn’t have a basking spot or a way to get out of deep water, so it eventually tires out and drowns. The turtle accidentally flips over and/or gets stuck underneath the water, trapping it. Turtles just don’t usually drown. They are fairly intelligent creatures and most of the time, they can get themselves out of any predicament they may be in. It will take a long time to tire out a turtle.
That being said, if the water in your tank is too low, and your turtle flips over and is unable to right him or herself, it could drown. Thus, it’s imperative that you fill your tank with the correct amount of water.
I’ve got good news and bad news when it comes to resuscitating drowned turtles. The good news is that your turtle may still have a fighting chance. The bad news is that you will need to take your turtle to the vet ASAP, no matter what.
Whatever you do, here is the ONE cardinal rule that you may NEVER break when it comes to a drowned turtle. That is incredibly dangerous and your strong breath is likely to damage its internal organs. If you do do this, any remaining air left in the turtle may be forced out unintentionally.
The first thing to do is to remain calm. Turtles are unlike humans. If a human is lifeless due to drowning, you need to act fast. As in, within minutes.
With turtles, you at least have a little bit more leeway in terms of time. That is because they don’t need quite as much oxygen as humans do in order to keep everything more or less functional inside of them.
Here’s some common, good old-fashioned advice when dealing with a drowned turtle: Take the turtle out of the water, and hold it vertically, so that its head is pointed down. Very gently, grab the turtle’s head right behind its ears and pull its neck out until it is extended, as you do this water will probably leak out of its mouth.
Next, put the turtle on a stable, dry surface upright (NOT on its back). Grab the front legs, and pull them gently until they are fully extended, and then push them in again, watch as water will probably drip out of its mouth again. Do this with the hind legs as well.
Alternate pulling its front and hind legs until no more water drips out of the turtle’s mouth, this will probably take a few minutes. If the turtle is showing any signs of life, such as movement, good! Take it to the vet ASAP! If the turtle is still lifeless, try one more thing.
Gently place the turtle in your palm and gently grab its head, then swing your arm from side to side, so that any remaining water might be thrown out from inside its body (be careful!). No matter what, you’ll need to take it to the vet at this point (even if it revives). Even if your turtle is able to be resuscitated, you will still need to take it to the vet.
Here’s why. Pneumonia! Pneumonia can be fatal to turtles and often develops in turtles that have drowned. Your vet will probably administer antibiotics in order to stave it off.
The other threat is lack of oxygen, so many vets will hook up a small tube that fits into the turtle’s mouth in order to deliver pure oxygen. Other antibiotics will also likely be given to stimulate the turtle and force it to get rid of the remaining water in its system.
When it comes to resuscitating drowned turtles, baby turtles often do not fare very well, so the younger the turtle, the quicker you will need to act.
Turtles can and do unfortunately drown (although it is rare). If your turtle drowns, never ever place it on its back or give it mouth to mouth. Be gentle, follow the steps outlined above and take it to the vet ASAP. Most pet turtle species are able to remain submerged beneath the water for 15 to 30 minutes.
https://www.turtleholic.com/can-drown-turtle/
In 1908 the Model T cost $850, or around $21,340 in today's dollars when adjusted for inflation. In 1916, the prices had dropped to only $360 for the most basic Model T, or around $7,020 in today's dollars. In 2012, the least expensive new car is $10,990.
A crayfish which tore off its own claw to avoid being cooked has been adopted – by the man who was about to eat it. The quick-thinking crustacean's survival instincts kicked in as it was seen clinging on to the edge of a pot in a restaurant in China.
The crayfish was being cooked alive by diners– until he made a break for it. In the video, the crayfish can be seen clambering out of the hotpot, while one of its claws remained dangling immobile inside, being cooked into lifelessness.
In what appears to be a determined attempt not to be dragged back into the boiling water by its dead claw, the crustacean then tore itself free from the ‘limb’ with the aid of its right claw, punching and pushing until it detached and fell back into the pot.
The crustacean then began crawling across the dinner table. The clip begins with the crustacean sitting on the edge of a boiling pot looking clearly agitated as he grips one leg with another.
The camera shows the only claw which has gone into the water is swollen and darker in colour where it has been burned in the water. The distressed animal began to grab at his hugely swollen claw on the edge of the pot in China.
It soon becomes clear the crayfish is punching and pulling at his claw in a bid to remove it. While it might have been a simple step to grab the escapee and drop it, body and all, back in the pot, the diner, known only as Jiuke, decided to turn it into an instant pet and ended up taking it home for a long and happy life in an aquarium.
The 11-second video clip was originally shown on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. Later Jiuke told the Taiwan News that he had adopted the crayfish after its dramatic escape from certain death. ‘I let him live,’ he said
‘I already took him home and I’m raising him in an acquarium.’ His kindness has received applause from people who have watched the video and who had appealed to him not to eat the crayfish.
There are no concerns that the escape artist from the deep will have to live with only one claw for the rest of its life. Marine experts say crayfish are able to grow back limbs. The Mail reported in 2014 that a pregnant lobster which lost both claws and four legs had managed to grow all her limbs and even claws.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5800181/amp/The-CRAY-T-escape-Crayfish-COOKED-tears-leg-bid-dodge-dinner.html
Southern Han (Chinese: 南漢; pinyin: Nán Hàn; 917–971), originally Great Yue (大越) was one of the ten kingdoms that existed during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. At the same time Vietnam named as An Nam. But late changed to Great Yue 大越 ( for the periods from 1054 to 1400 and 1428 to 1804 ).
The name Great Yue came to end when the Nguyen dynasty took power. The country's name was officially changed in 1804 the name Nam Viet or Nam Yue was picked and asked for recognition from the Qing dynasty but the Qing dynasty reversed the name. This time to "Viet Nam" (越南) or Yue Nam in Chinese.
Originally when the first Nguyen emperor of Vietnam requested the Chinese ruler to endorse a new name for Vietnam, the first name was 南越 (Nanyue). The Chinese however found that the name was identical to the name of the Nanyue kingdom, a former country that had territory in both southern China and northern Vietnam.
To avoid confusion and to dispel any possible future Vietnamese claim to former Nanyue lands (In Guangdong and Guangxi in China), the Chinese reversed the two syllables and created 越南 (Yuenan), the new name for Vietnam and the name for Vietnam in modern Chinese language.
https://www.quora.com/Does-Vietnam-Yuenan-mean-Southern-Yue-or-South-of-the-Yue
Vietnam's nearly long coastline uncoils in the shape of an "S" from China's border to the southeastern extremity of mainland Southeast Asia.
It is bordered on the north by China, to the west by Laos and Cambodia, and to the east and south by the South China Sea. Vietnam extends unevenly at widths ranging from 31 to 310 miles and covers an area of 127,300 square miles.
Vietnam's two fertile alluvial basins, the Red River in Tongking and the Mekong in the south, have inspired the image of the Vietnamese peasant carrying a pair of rice baskets suspended at the end of a pole.
The two deltas, covering only a quarter of the land area, supports almost 80 percent of the country's population, which was estimated at 76,000,000 people in 2000. Vietnam ranks seventh in Asia and twelfth in the world in its size for population.
The female population is larger, at 52 percent. In general, the population is young, with 80 percent of the people born after 1945; the population below 15 years of age accounts for 45 percent.
Vietnamese citizens between the ages of 16 and 60, who comprise the bulk of the workforce, account for 48 percent of the population, while the elderly population (aged 61 and older) accounts for only 6.5 percent. Infant mortality has gone down significantly since 1975, standing at 48 per 1,000 in the year 2000.
The Tongking Delta has long reached the point of optimum agricultural expansion; its cultivable land has benefited from a 2000-year-old irrigation system based on an intricate network of dams and canals. It is the cradle of Vietnam's history and culture. Until the fifteenth century, Vietnam was limited to a little south of the Tongking Delta.
Pressures on land have historically led to expansion in Central and South Vietnam through the extinction of the Champa kingdom in Central Vietnam—most of it in 1471 and the remnant in 1720. It wrested the Mekong delta from Cambodia in the eighteenth century, thereby reaching its present borders of Vietnam.
The two rich deltas made Vietnam one of the world's leading rice exporters in the twentieth century. (That status was lost during the decades of conflict from 1940 to 1975, but it was restored in the late 1980s.)
Prince Valient
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, extensive reserves of petroleum and natural gas, believed by some experts to be the largest in the world, were also found.
Approximately 80 percent of the population lives in rural areas, mostly in the river delta areas and along the coast. Ethnically, an overwhelming majority of the population, 85 percent, are Vietnamese or Kinh, a mixture of non-Chinese Mongolian and Austro-Indonesian stock, who moved into Tongking Delta from Kweichow, Kwangsi, and Kwantung areas of China beginning around the third century B.C.
Minority communities in Vietnam, comprising roughly 11,000,000 people in 2000 A.D. included more than 50 diverse tribes, living mostly in the northwest mountains and in the central highlands where the French lumped many of them together as montagnards or mountain people.
There are some 35,000 to 40,000 Chams, descendants of a once mighty Cham kingdom (second to fifteenth century A.D.) who fled to central highlands, and about 660,000 Khmers in South Vietnam.
There are also 1,000,000 Hoa or Chinese, who migrated at different times in history, most of them during the French rule and with French encouragement, to Vietnam in the nineteenth century.
The Chinese are concentrated in Quang Ninh province in North Vietnam and in Cholon, the twin city of Ho Chi Minh City in the south. Many of them were relocated in the New Economic Zones following the reunification of Vietnam.
An estimated 250,000 of them migrated across the northern border to China and to other countries as "boat people" during the period of hostile relations between Vietnam and China.
Few countries have attracted international attention for so long as Vietnam did in the third quarter of the twentieth century. The world witnessed a small country of relatively short and wiry people with only conventional weapons and without the use of airpower holding a superpower at bay and emerging victorious.
Historians will debate for a long time whether the Vietnamese were inspired by visions of world communism or those of narrow nationalism.
...
Communist Vietnam's wars with the fraternal Communist states of Cambodia and China in the late 1970s raised serious questions whether communism had ever been a dominant motivation among the Vietnamese masses during the severe conflict with the Americans in the Second Indochina War (1964-1975).
Vietnamese nationalist identity was fostered by long periods of struggle against alien domination, first the Chinese rule for 1050 years from 111 B.C. to 939 A.D. and from 1407 to 1428 A.D. and in modern times by a century of French rule that ended in 1954.
Vietnamese historians have emphasized the existence of a thriving indigenous culture, notably the Dongson culture (700-300 B.C.) predating the Chinese rule and the numerous expressions of Vietnamese "nationalism" in the form of anti-Chinese revolts, some of them successful in punctuating the Chinese rule.
One of the revolts was led by two Trung sisters, who ruled as joint queens for two years in the first century A.D. A disproportionately large Chinese force crushed the revolt, and the two sisters jumped in the river Day to commit suicide. During the long centuries of their rule, the Chinese imposed their culture and institutions on their Vietnamese subjects, notably Confucianism, which provided the basis for the political order, the social hierarchy, and the value system. It also formed the core of the curriculum for their civil service examination system.
It took several years to gain proficiency in the Chinese script (characters), and to master the literature, philosophy, and law that were mostly based on Confucian scholarship and were needed to pass the triennial examinations that were offered at three levels corresponding to the district, provincial, and imperial levels. Success in the examinations brought bureaucratic appointment of a mandarin along with high prestige in the society and land grants from the government.
Even after the overthrow of the Chinese rule, the Vietnamese emperors continued with the study of Confucianism and the conduct of the civil service examinations.
During the last quarter of the eleventh century A.D., the Ly rulers established an elaborate apparatus to promote the Confucian cult at the court; these included a Confucian Temple of Literature and the Han-Lin Academy for Study in Confucianism at the highest level.
In 1076 A.D., the Quoc Tu Giam (National College) was opened to teach Confucianism to children of the royal family and nobility. Only scholars well-versed in Confucianism could pass the civil service examinations. In 1089, the Ly Emperor fully adopted the Chinese model of hierarchical bureaucracy, creating nine levels of civil and military officials.
In 1397, Emperor Tran Thuan Tong opened public schools right down to the district level. In the following century, during the rule of Emperor Le Thanh Tong (1460-1497), the number of such schools multiplied substantially to enable the children of the common people to study Confucianism and prepare them to take the civil service examinations.
Besides the relatively smaller number of government schools at the nation's capital and the capital cities of the provinces and districts, there were a large number of private schools, financed and managed by the people at village and commune levels.
Thus, despite fears that China would dominate Vietnam politically, the Vietnamese rulers deliberately set their nation on a course of Sinicization (change through Chinese influence) through adoption of Confucianism.
Parallel to and sometimes overlapping the civil service examinations, a system of conferring academic degrees developed over the centuries. Thus, from the beginning of the thirteenth century, a degree called thi hoi, which according to Vietnamese experts, roughly equaled the western Master of Arts degree, was conferred.
From the fourteenth century onwards, a higher degree, thi dinh, equivalent to a doctorate, was awarded. The best among the holders of the doctorate were called trang nguyen. At Van Mieu (Temple of Literature) in Hanoi, there are 83 steles bearing the names of 1,036 "doctors" who had won the highest academic distinction from 1442 to 1779. The Vietnamese emperors held the civil service examinations in Tongking until 1915 and in Hue until 1918.
Along with continuing Confucian learning, some Vietnamese emperors developed pride in Vietnamese culture and promoted the development of an independent literature in the Vietnamese language. In the fourteenth century A.D., a form of writing called Chu Nom, which represented a radical modification of the Chinese Chu Han, developed.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, a Jesuit, Alexandre de Rhodes, developed Quoc Ngu, a Romanized phonetic script with diacritical marks to help catechism and compile a Vietnamese-Latin-Portuguese dictionary. The French rulers encouraged Quoc Ngu, which progressively replaced the Chinese as well as Chu Nom methods of writing.
After World War I, a group called Tu Luc Van Doan (Self-Reliance Literary Club) reformed Quoc Ngu by standardizing six tone signs and three vowel signs, making it easier to learn the script and the language. It is this form that has been adopted by the Vietnamese governments since 1945.
As in China, the Vietnamese people have always given education a high priority and held educated people in high respect. Vietnamese mandarins, Confucian scholars who had passed the examinations, were, as a rule, regarded as social, intellectual, and cultural leaders.
In the period just before the French rule began in the nineteenth century, Vietnam had an estimated 20,000 schools with a very high literacy rate. At the end of the French rule, literacy was estimated at around 10 percent, a measure of the neglect of education under the alien Western rule.
For purposes of administration, the French divided Vietnam into trois pays or three countries. Tongking in the north with Hanoi as center was technically a protectorate though, in practice, it was as directly ruled as was Cochin-China or South Vietnam centered on Saigon (renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1975), which was given the status of a colony.
In the center of the country was Annam, with Hue as the seat of the imperial Nguyen family, which was allowed nominally to rule with the help of a traditional council of mandarins.
Hanoi became the seat of the French governor-general of Indochina, including Lao and Cambodia. Beginning the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the French introduced a dual policy aimed at the eventual acculturization of its colonial subjects: the higher-level policy of "assimilation" for Cochin-China and the transitional-level policy of "association" for Tongking and Annam.
There was a very high percentage of Frenchmen in the administration as well as in the educational establishment of Cochin-China, where Confucianism disintegrated faster than in the other two areas.
Those who collaborated with the French regime in business and administration saw benefits of acquiring a French education in Vietnam and France. These included a large number of Catholics, who received preferential treatment from their ruling co-religionists.
While in France, many Vietnamese improved in their self-esteem as they successfully competed with Frenchmen in studies. They also learned about the disparity in the French profession of liberty, equality, and fraternity and their government in the colonies where these values were conspicuous by their absence. Some of the Vietnamese ex-patriates in France like Ho Chi Minh got acquainted with radical ideologies including Marxism-Leninism.
Many of those who returned to Vietnam with university degrees found their avenues of employment blocked by French nationals. Not surprisingly, the anti-colonial movements, whether communist or noncommunist, were led by such frustrated educated young men who developed an identity for Vietnam as a whole condemning the French concept of trois pays as a deliberate myth to divide the colonial subjects and make it easy for the French to rule over them.
Inspired by the victory of Japan over Russia in 1905, many Vietnamese, among them a future eminent leader of the nationalist movement, Phan Boi Chau, went to Japan for higher studies. In northern Vietnam, an anti-colonial movement manifested itself in the form of a "free schools" movement, the most notable of these being the Dong Kinh Free School, which opened in Hanoi in 1907.
The school's founders openly declared that education would be a means to "regain national autonomy." It quickly became a movement attracting more than 1,000 students; besides regular education, it promoted agricultural and commercial cooperatives and became a center for raising funds to send students to China and Japan for higher studies.
The movement reflected the thinking of China's modernizers such as Kang Yu-wei, who had advocated in the beginning of the twentieth century a combination of tradition and Western sciences and Western literature as a means of strengthening nationhood of a people. The French colonial authorities quickly smothered the movement by closing the Dong Kinh School in less than one year of its opening.
However, the French reacted to the development by establishing a Franco-Vietnamese or Franco-Native school system of its own, not so in pursuance of its proclaimed goal of a civilizing mission but to combat the incipient growth of nationalism through Vietnamese traditional education.
Thus far, the French had established schools in three cities of Hanoi, Hue, and Saigon not for the benefit of the colonial subjects, but for the children of French residents of Indochina.
Very few Vietnamese children, mostly from Francophile families, would be admitted if they passed the prerequisite examinations for admission to lycees (grammar schools).
By the early twentieth century, children of Vietnamese civil servants and business collaborators outnumbered the French children in the lycees because often the latter failed to pass the examinations.
In 1906, the French appointed the Council for the Improvement of Native Education, which met periodically in Hanoi. Its deliberations clearly indicated that the French school system would be developed in Vietnam as a response to the indigenous bid to establish their own system, with their own interpretations of Western civilization. The Council's recommendations eventually led to a Code of Public Instruction in December 1917.
Under it, new Franco-Vietnamese schools were opened in the main cities and towns of Vietnam. In 1924, in a move that would exclude all other educational systems, the government enacted strict laws that required all educational institutions to follow a common curriculum, to use only French and Vietnamese (not Chinese) in the Quoc Ngu script, and to employ only government-certified teachers.
All schools, public and private would be subject to inspection by the Inspector of Public Instruction. The curriculum in the schools for French children would be different from that followed by the Franco-Vietnamese schools. The Vietnamese schools were the most affected by this law, which led to the closure of 1,835 Vietnamese traditional schools.
The educational system introduced by the French rulers in Vietnam in 1917 consisted of 13 years of education: 3 years of elementary school in Vietnamese in the Romanized Quoc Ngu script; 3 years of primary education in French; 4 years of vocationally-oriented primary superior education in French; and 3 years of French-language secondary education leading to an Indochinese baccalaureate. The enrollment in schools was about 15 percent of the school-age children.
Of them, 90 percent were in elementary classes where the teaching was in Vietnamese, elementary math, moral education, hygiene and/or drawing, and manual labor. The remaining 10 percent were in primary through secondary university education. The first university was established in 19l9.
While the emphasis at the elementary level was chiefly on learning Vietnamese, at the primary and secondary levels, it was on learning French and literature.
There was hygiene and practical science but no hard sciences; math was only for 2 hours of a 27-hour school week, history for one half hour, and moral education and physical education were about 2 hours each.
The emphasis was on teaching about Vietnam, not about France or other parts of the world, the intention being to expose the population to more than a simplistic life and agricultural pursuits.
The French neglected education of their subjects in Vietnam focusing primarily on the economic exploitation of the country, a principle source of exports of rice and rubber.
After 1917, the French made some half-hearted efforts to introduce education also at the higher level. Thus, a number of colleges were opened. Before 1917, there was only one, namely, the College of Medicine and Pharmacy opened in 1902.
In 1917, the Teacher Training College was started. In 1918, four were added: the College of Veterinary Medicine, the College of Law and Administration, the College of Agriculture and Forestry, and the College of Civil Engineering.
In 1923-1924, three more were opened: the College of Literature, the College of Experimental Sciences, and the College of Fine Arts and Architecture.
Yet as Pham Minh Hac observed, the education offered in these mostly two-year institutions was more like that offered in vocational education. Beginning in 1919, the first pre-university level courses in physics, chemistry, and natural sciences were taught.
It was beginning in 1924 that the first batch of students for the degree in medicine was enrolled. Most institutions needed to wait until the establishment of the University of Indochina, to which most colleges were affiliated, in 1940.
And it was later, during the course of the war when the pro-Vichy and pro-Japanese regime prevailed, that the college education was upgraded to the degree level in Law, Agriculture, Civil Engineering, and the Sciences.
In l954, when the French were forced to quit Vietnam, there was only one university in the country and 14 secondary schools. Only 10 percent of the primary-school-age children enrolled in the so-called Franco-Vietnamese schools.
The severe suppression by the French of the noncommunist nationalist movement in 1930 gave scope for the Indochina Communist Party (ICP), which was also suppressed but survived because of their superior underground organization.
Taking advantage of the wartime conditions, Ho Chi Minh brought Communists and noncommunists alike under an anti-Japanese front, the Viet Minh (short for Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi or Vietnamese Independence League), which received assistance, financial and military, from the Allies, including the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA, in their fight both against Japan and Japanese-supported pro-Vichy French regime in Vietnam.
Taking advantage of the interregnum between Japan's withdrawal and the arrival of the Allied forces, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) on September 2, 1945, with a program that was liberal but totally devoid of communism.
In the following year, Ho entered into an agreement with the French, allowing them to return temporarily on certain conditions, an agreement soon violated by the French bombardment of the port of Haiphong, which commenced the First Indochina War (1946-1954).
After the birth of NATO and the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the conflict became increasingly a part of the global Cold War between Communist and anti-Communist forces.
The Viet Minh, by then led by the ICP, emerged victorious at Dien Bien Phu in May, 1954. The Geneva Peace Agreements that followed in July, temporarily divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, with the provision for elections two years later for the reunification of the country.
The DRV in the north became a communist regime; in the south, the government was led by Ngo Dinh Diem, who received massive U.S. assistance including military in the capacity of "advisers."
In 1955, South Vietnam declared itself a separate sovereign republic and was recognized among others by the United States, United Kingdom, and France.
Frustrated by the pro-Catholic, anti-Buddhist, authoritarian regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, badly advised by his brothers and a sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, a strong anti-government movement developed under the National Liberation Front (NLF), which was dominated by the southern communists who were soon to be assisted by the DRV. The assassination of the Ngo brothers in 1963 brought several revolving-door governments led by the military and assisted by the United States.
The Second Indochina War (1964-1973), called "The American War" by pro-Communist and Communist Vietnamese, adversely impacted both the halves of Vietnam, resulting in a loss of 3,000,000 Vietnamese lives, and causing long-term damage to the environment.
It brought physical and emotional devastation far more in the south than in the north, creating large-scale demographic changes as large numbers of rural population moved for security to towns and cities, inducting hundreds of thousands of youngsters, who should have been in schools, into prostitution and pimping.
The war's end in 1975 marked a communist victory and led to the reunification of the country in the following year, for the first time in a century, this time under Hanoi's domination. Saigon's name was changed to Ho Chi Minh City.
https://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/1672/Vietnam-HISTORY-BACKGROUND.html
A mammoth is any species of the extinct genus Mammuthus, one of the many genera that make up the order of trunked mammals called proboscideans. The various species of mammoth were commonly equipped with long, curved tusks and, in northern species, a covering of long hair.
They lived from the Pliocene epoch (from around 5 million years ago) into the Holocene at about 4,000 years ago, and various species existed in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. They were members of the family Elephantidae, which also contains the two genera of modern elephants and their ancestors.
The oldest representative of Mammuthus, the South African mammoth (M. subplanifrons), appeared around 5 million years ago during the early Pliocene in what is now southern and eastern Africa.
Descendant species of these mammoths moved north and continued to propagate into numerous subsequent species, eventually covering most of Eurasia before extending into the Americas at least 600,000 years ago.
The last species to emerge, the woolly mammoth (M. primigenius), developed about 400,000 years ago in East Asia, with some surviving on Russia's Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until as recently as roughly 3,700 to 4,000 years ago, still extant during the construction of the Great Pyramid of ancient Egypt.
The earliest known proboscideans, the clade that contains the elephants, existed about 55 million years ago around the Tethys Sea area. The closest relatives of the Proboscidea are the sirenians and the hyraxes.
The family Elephantidae is known to have existed six million years ago in Africa, and includes the living elephants and the mammoths. Among many now extinct clades, the mastodon is only a distant relative of the mammoths, and part of the separate Mammutidae family, which diverged 25 million years before the mammoths evolved.
Since many remains of each species of mammoth are known from several localities, it is possible to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the genus through morphological studies.
Mammoth species can be identified from the number of enamel ridges on their molars; the primitive species had few ridges, and the amount increased gradually as new species evolved and replaced the former ones.
At the same time, the crowns of the teeth became longer, and the skulls become higher from top to bottom and shorter from the back to the front over time to accommodate this.
The first known members of the genus Mammuthus are the African species Mammuthus subplanifrons from the Pliocene and Mammuthus africanavus from the Pleistocene. The former is thought to be the ancestor of later forms.
Mammoths entered Europe around 3 million years ago; the earliest known type has been named M. rumanus, which spread across Europe and China. Only its molars are known, which show it had 8–10 enamel ridges.
A population evolved 12–14 ridges and split off from and replaced the earlier type, becoming M. meridionalis. In turn, this species was replaced by the steppe mammoth, M. trogontherii, with 18–20 ridges, which evolved in East Asia ca. 1 million years ago.
Mammoths derived from M. trogontherii evolved molars with 26 ridges 200,000 years ago in Siberia, and became the woolly mammoth, M. primigenius.
The Columbian mammoth, M. columbi, evolved from a population of M. trogontherii that had entered North America. A 2011 genetic study showed that two examined specimens of the Columbian mammoth were grouped within a subclade of woolly mammoths.
This suggests that the two populations interbred and produced fertile offspring. It also suggested that a North American form known as "M. jeffersonii" may be a hybrid between the two species.
By the late Pleistocene, mammoths in continental Eurasia had undergone a major transformation, including a shortening and heightening of the cranium and mandible, increase in molar hypsodonty index, increase in plate number, and thinning of dental enamel.
Due to this change in physical appearance, it became customary to group European mammoths separately into distinguishable clusters:
Early Pleistocene – Mammuthus meridionalis
Middle Pleistocene – Mammuthus trogontherii
Late Pleistocene – Mammuthus primigenius
There is speculation as to what caused this variation within the three chronospecies. Variations in environment, climate change, and migration surely played roles in the evolutionary process of the mammoths.
Take M. primigenius for example: Woolly mammoths lived in opened grassland biomes. The cool steppe-tundra of the Northern Hemisphere was the ideal place for mammoths to thrive because of the resources it supplied. With occasional warmings during the ice age, climate would change the landscape, and resources available to the mammoths altered accordingly.
Etymology and early observations - The word mammoth was first used in Europe during the early 17th century, when referring to maimanto tusks discovered in Siberia. John Bell, who was on the Ob River in 1722, said that mammoth tusks were well known in the area.
They were called "mammon's horn" and were often found in washed-out river banks. Some local people claimed to have seen a living mammoth, but they only came out at night and always disappeared under water when detected. He bought one and presented it to Hans Sloan who pronounced it an elephant's tooth.
The folklore of some native peoples of Siberia, who would routinely find mammoth bones, and sometimes frozen mammoth bodies, in eroding river banks, had various interesting explanations for these finds.
Among the Khanty people of the Irtysh River basin, a belief existed that the mammoth was some kind of a water spirit. According to other Khanty, the mammoth was a creature that lived underground, burrowing its tunnels as it went, and would die if it accidentally came to the surface.
The concept of the mammoth as an underground creature was known to the Chinese, who received some mammoth ivory from the Siberian natives; accordingly, the creature was known in China as yǐn shǔ 隐鼠, "the hidden rodent".
Thomas Jefferson, who famously had a keen interest in paleontology, is partially responsible for transforming the word mammoth from a noun describing the prehistoric elephant to an adjective describing anything of surprisingly large size.
The first recorded use of the word as an adjective was in a description of a large wheel of cheese (the "Cheshire Mammoth Cheese") given to Jefferson in 1802.
Like their modern relatives, mammoths were quite large. The largest known species reached heights in the region of 4 m (13.1 ft) at the shoulder and weights of up to 8 tonnes (8.8 short tons), while exceptionally large males may have exceeded 12 tonnes (13.2 short tons).
However, most species of mammoth were only about as large as a modern Asian elephant (which are about 2.5 m to 3 m high at the shoulder, and rarely exceeding 5 tonnes). Both sexes bore tusks.
A first, small set appeared at about the age of six months, and these were replaced at about 18 months by the permanent set. Growth of the permanent set was at a rate of about 2.5 to 15.2 cm (1 to 6 in) per year.
Based on studies of their close relatives, the modern elephants, mammoths probably had a gestation period of 22 months, resulting in a single calf being born.
Their social structure was probably the same as that of African and Asian elephants, with females living in herds headed by a matriarch, whilst bulls lived solitary lives or formed loose groups after sexual maturity.
Scientists discovered and studied the remains of a mammoth calf, and found that fat greatly influenced its form, and enabled it to store large amounts of nutrients necessary for survival in temperatures as low as −50 °C (−58 °F). The fat also allowed the mammoths to increase their muscle mass, allowing the mammoths to fight against enemies and live longer.
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Depending on the species or race of mammoth, the diet differed somewhat depending on location, although all mammoths ate similar things. For the Columbian mammoth, M. columbi, the diet was mainly grazing. American Columbian mammoths fed primarily on cacti leaves, trees, and shrubs.
These assumptions were based on mammoth feces and mammoth teeth. Mammoths, like modern day elephants, have hypsodont molars. These features also allowed mammoths to live an expansive life because of the availability of grasses and trees.
For the Mongochen mammoth, its diet consisted of herbs, grasses, larch, and shrubs, and possibly alder. These inferences were made through the observation of mammoth feces, which scientists observed contained non-arboreal pollen and moss spores.
European mammoths had a major diet of C3 carbon fixation plants. This was determined by examining the isotopic data from the European mammoth teeth.
The arctic tundra and steppe where the mammoths lived appears to have been dominated by forbs, not grass. There were richer in protein and easier to digest than grasses and wooden plants, which came to dominate the areas when the climate became wetter and warmer. This could have been a major contributor to why the arctic megafauna went extinct.
The Yamal baby mammoth Lyuba, found in 2007 in the Yamal Peninsula in Western Siberia, suggests that baby mammoths, as do modern baby elephants, ate the dung of adult animals. The evidence to show this is that the dentition (teeth) of the baby mammoth had not yet fully developed to chew grass.
Furthermore, there was an abundance of ascospores of coprophilous fungi from the pollen spectrum of the baby's mother. Coprophilous fungi are fungi that grow on animal dung and disperse spores in nearby vegetation, which the baby mammoth would then consume.
Spores might have gotten into its stomach while grazing for the first few times. Coprophagy may be an adaptation, serving to populate the infant's gut with the needed microbiome for digestion.
Mammoths alive in the Arctic during the Last Glacial Maximum consumed mainly forbs, such as Artemisia; graminoids were only a minor part of their diet.
The woolly mammoth (M. primigenius) was the last species of the genus. Most populations of the woolly mammoth in North America and Eurasia, as well as all the Columbian mammoths (M. columbi) in North America, died out around the time of the last glacial retreat, as part of a mass extinction of megafauna in northern Eurasia and the Americas.
Until recently, the last woolly mammoths were generally assumed to have vanished from Europe and southern Siberia about 12,000 years ago, but new findings show some were still present there about 10,000 years ago.
Slightly later, the woolly mammoths also disappeared from continental northern Siberia. A small population survived on St. Paul Island, Alaska, up until 3750 BC, and the small mammoths of Wrangel Island survived until 1650 BC. Recent research of sediments in Alaska indicates mammoths survived on the American mainland until 10,000 years ago.
A definitive explanation for their extinction has yet to be agreed upon. The warming trend (Holocene) that occurred 12,000 years ago, accompanied by a glacial retreat and rising sea levels, has been suggested as a contributing factor. Forests replaced open woodlands and grasslands across the continent.
The available habitat would have been reduced for some megafaunal species, such as the mammoth. However, such climate changes were nothing new; numerous very similar warming episodes had occurred previously within the ice age of the last several million years without producing comparable megafaunal extinctions, so climate alone is unlikely to have played a decisive role.
The spread of advanced human hunters through northern Eurasia and the Americas around the time of the extinctions, however, was a new development, and thus might have contributed significantly.
Whether the general mammoth population died out for climatic reasons or due to overhunting by humans is controversial. During the transition from the Late Pleistocene epoch to the Holocene epoch, there was shrinkage of the distribution of the mammoth because progressive warming at the end of the Pleistocene epoch changed the mammoth's environment.
The mammoth steppe was a periglacial landscape with rich herb and grass vegetation that disappeared along with the mammoth because of environmental changes in the climate. Mammoths had moved to isolated spots in Eurasia, where they disappeared completely. Also, it is thought that Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic human hunters might have affected the size of the last mammoth populations in Europe.
There is evidence to suggest that humans did cause the mammoth extinction, although there is no definitive proof. It was found that humans living south of a mammoth steppe learned to adapt themselves to the harsher climates north of the steppe, where mammoths resided.
It was concluded that if humans could survive the harsh north climate of that particular mammoth steppe then it was possible humans could hunt (and eventually extinguish) mammoths everywhere.
Another hypothesis suggests mammoths fell victim to an infectious disease. A combination of climate change and hunting by humans may be a possible explanation for their extinction. Homo erectus is known to have consumed mammoth meat as early as 1.8 million years ago, though this may mean only successful scavenging, rather than actual hunting.
Later humans show greater evidence for hunting mammoths; mammoth bones at a 50,000-year-old site in South Britain suggest that Neanderthals butchered the animals, while various sites in Eastern Europe dating from 15,000 to 44,000 years old suggest humans (probably Homo sapiens) built dwellings using mammoth bones (the age of some of the earlier structures suggests that Neanderthals began the practice).
However, the American Institute of Biological Sciences notes that bones of dead elephants, left on the ground and subsequently trampled by other elephants, tend to bear marks resembling butchery marks, which have allegedly been misinterpreted as such by archaeologists.
Many hypotheses also seek to explain the regional extinction of mammoths in specific areas. Scientists have speculated that the mammoths of Saint Paul Island, an isolated enclave where mammoths survived until about 8,000 years ago, died out as the island shrank by 80–90% when sea levels rose, eventually making it too small to support a viable population.
Similarly, genome sequences of the Wrangel Island mammoths indicate a sharp decline in genetic diversity, though the extent to which this played a role in their extinction is still unclear. Another hypothesis, said to be the cause of mammoth extinction in Siberia, comes from the idea that many may have drowned.
While traveling to the Northern River, many of these mammoths broke through the ice and drowned. This also explains bones remains in the Arctic Coast and islands of the New Siberian Group.
Dwarfing occurred with the pygmy mammoth on the outer Channel Islands of California, but at an earlier period. Those animals were very likely killed by early Paleo-Native Americans, and habitat loss caused by a rising sea level that split Santa Rosae into the outer Channel Islands.
An estimated 150 million mammoths are buried in the frozen Siberian tundra. One proposed scientific use of this preserved genetic material, is to recreate living mammoths.
This has long been discussed theoretically but has only recently become the subject of formal effort due to advances in molecular biology techniques and cloning of mammals.
According to one research team, a mammoth cannot be recreated, but they will try to eventually grow in an "artificial womb" a hybrid elephant with some woolly mammoth traits.
Comparative genomics shows that the mammoth genome matches 99% of the elephant genome, so some researchers aim to engineer an elephant with some mammoth genes that code for the external appearance and traits of a mammoth.
The outcome would be an elephant-mammoth hybrid with no more than 1% mammoth genes. Other projects are working on gradually adding mammoth genes to elephant cells in vitro.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth
The word "ivory" was traditionally applied to the tusks of elephants. However, the chemical structure of the teeth and tusks of mammals is the same regardless of the species of origin, and the trade in certain teeth and tusks other than elephant is well established and widespread.
Therefore, "ivory" can correctly be used to describe any mammalian tooth or tusks of commercial interest which is large enough to be carved or scrimshawed.
Teeth and tusks have the same origins. Teeth are specialized structures adapted for food mastication. Tusks, which are extremely large teeth projecting beyond the lips, have evolved from teeth and give certain species an evolutionary advantage.
The teeth of most mammals consists of a root and the tusk proper. Teeth and tusks have the same physical structures: pulp cavity, dentine, cementum and enamel. The innermost area is the pulp cavity.
The pulp cavity is an empty space within the tooth that conforms to the shape of the pulp. Odontoblastic cells line the pulp cavity and are responsible for the production of dentine.
Dentine, which is the main component of carved ivory objects, forms a layer of consistent thickness around the pulp cavity and comprises the bulk of the tooth and tusk. Dentine is a mineralized connective tissue with an organic matrix of collagenous proteins.
The inorganic component of dentine consists of dahllite. Dentine contains a microscopic structure called dentinal tubules which are micro-canals that radiate outward through the dentine from the pulp cavity to the exterior cementum border.
These canals have different configurations in different ivories and their diameter ranges between 0.8 and 2.2 microns. Their length is dictated by the radius of the tusk.
The three dimensional configuration of the dentinal tubules is under genetic control and is therefore a characteristic unique to the order. Exterior to the dentine lies the cementum layer.
Cementum forms a layer surrounding the dentine of tooth and tusk roots. Its main function is to adhere the tooth and tusk root to the mandibular and maxillary jaw bones. Incremental lines are commonly seen in cementum.
Enamel, the hardest animal tissue, covers the surface of the tooth or tusk which receives the most wear, such as the tip or crown.
Ameloblasts are responsible for the formation of enamel and are lost after the enamel process is complete. Enamel exhibits a prismatic structure with prisms that run perpendicular to the crown or tip.
Enamel prism patterns can have both taxonomic and evolutionary significance. Tooth and tusk ivory can be carved into an almost infinite variety of shapes and objects. A small example of carved ivory objects are small statuary, netsukes, jewelry, flatware handles, furniture inlays, and piano keys.
Additionally, wart hog tusks, and teeth from sperm whales, killer whales and hippos can also be shrimshawed or superficially carved, thus retaining their original shapes as morphologically recognizable objects.
The identification of ivory and ivory substitutes is based on the physical and chemical class characteristics of these materials. These pages present an approach to identification using the macroscopic and microscopic physical characteristics of ivory in combination with a simple chemical test using ultraviolet light.
There are some tables included to summarize the class characteristics, to give a flowchart for the preliminary identification of ivory and to give a list of supplies.
https://www.fws.gov/lab/ivory_defined.php
Adorable dog looks so human people are convinced his face has been edited. Nori the Aussiepoo mix is leaving the internet baffled with his human eyes and warming smile. Just look at his eyes and smile.
A cute dog named Nori is baffling the internet with his human-like face - convincing people his photos must have been altered. With large almond shaped eyes that make him look like a wise old soul and a genuine smile, the Aussiepoo mix's owners have got used to being stopped whenever they leave the house.
After Kevin Hurless and Tiffany Ngo posted a photo of their doggo on social media, he quickly became a viral sensation racking up over 9,000 likes. He can still give some serious puppy dog eyes though.
Kevin, from Seattle, said: "When he was a puppy, we couldn't go more than a block without someone stopping us to ask questions about him. "It has become less frequent as he's gotten older, but we still often hear about how human his face and eyes look.
"When he was a puppy, his fur was much darker and he often was compared to Chewbacca or an Ewok, which are characters in Star Wars.
"We usually hear that it is his eyes that creates the human look and I tend to agree. Owners Kevin and Tiffany often get stopped when they are out with Nori. "Nori is a Toy Australian Shepard and Toy Poodle mix and he often looks like he's smiling."
The adorable dog has his own Instagram account where comments are often left about his human features. Dog mum Tiffany said Nori is incredibly sweet, energetic and determined to make friends with every dog or human he meets.
He will often put a toy in his mouth while he 'kneads' with his front paws, like cats often do.
The Aussiepoo mix went viral when his owners posted a photo on Twitter. It's not the first time a dog has shocked people with its human appearance.
Yogi, a Shih-poo, also attracted attention last year with his 'human eyes' - and was even compared to celebrities including Ed Sheeran. Nori's owner Kevin added: "We were surprised by all the attention he gets at first.
"We knew he had a very unique and interesting look, but didn't expect quite the reaction we got. Nori now has Boba as a friend to keep him company.
"But we remember being dogless and wanting to pet all of the dogs, so we try to be friendly and let people meet him as much as possible. "We made the decision to get Nori a friend last year, Boba, who is a one year old Shorkie - which is a Shih-tzu, Yorkie mix.
"They get along great and play together all the time, though Nori sometimes has too much energy for Boba and Boba gets annoyed. "You can see Nori's human look even more when the two are stood side by side.
"'Doodles' as a breed are very popular right now, but being a toy mix, Nori is only about 13 pounds and mostly fluff. "He looks completely different during a bath."
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/adorable-dog-looks-human-people-20422452
For the sake of elephants in captivity, zoos must phase out their elephant exhibits, abandon breeding programs, and strive to provide the elephants who are currently in captivity with a more humane existence. The vast majority of elephants now in zoos were taken from their homes and families in the wild.
Zoos rob elephants of their most basic needs, including extended social relationships and the opportunity to walk long distances. Lack of exercise and long hours standing on hard surfaces are major contributors to foot problems and arthritis, the leading reasons why captive elephants are euthanized. Many die decades short of their expected lifespan.
Elephants require vast spaces to roam, socialize, and express their natural behavior. In the wild, they live in matriarchal herds and are active for 18 hours per day, foraging for fresh vegetation, playing, bathing in rivers, and travelling as far as 30 miles a day.
The elephant-care standards adopted by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) are woefully inadequate. The AZA does not prohibit keeping elephants in frigid northern climates (as a result, many in these regions spend months indoors each year), and it does not expressly prohibit the use of bullhooks or chains.
Even though elephants thrive in family herds, the AZA allows them to be kept in near-isolation. Zoos are only required to hold two or three female elephants, two males, or three of mixed gender.
Many zoos are squandering millions of dollars to increase the size of their elephant exhibits only slightly, but elephants in captivity don’t need a few more square feet—they need, at minimum, square miles.
Because of space limitations, no amount of expansion at any zoo will give them the complex, varied habitat—with ponds, mud, trees, and hills—that they need for their physical and psychological well-being.
Breeding elephants in captivity has been a colossal failure. For every elephant born in a zoo, another two die—yet zoos continue to breed elephants in an effort to churn out more “cash cows.”
According to an in-depth report by investigative reporter Michael J. Berens, the overall infant-mortality rate for elephants in zoos is an appalling 40 percent—nearly triple the rate of elephants in the wild.
Artificial insemination involves the insertion of probes, catheters, and scopes into an elephant’s rectum and complex vaginal opening. There’s nothing simple or straightforward about this procedure. Elephants are often chained by their legs when they give birth.
At the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, an elephant named Chai was subjected to traumatic artificial insemination 112 times, with only one successful birth: a calf who later died. In a 25-year period at the Houston Zoo, 14 out of 14 elephant calves died—a 100 percent mortality rate.
Those who manage to survive will never be released to the wild. The bottom line is that zoos breed elephants because babies bring paying visitors through the gates.
The tens of millions of dollars that are spent each year at zoos for a small number of elephants should instead be responsibly directed toward elephant conservation work in Asia and Africa.
While zoos waste resources, legitimate conservation groups struggle for funding. On an annual budget of just $500,000, the Amboseli Trust for Elephants in Kenya makes a difference for the Amboseli National Park’s 1,500 African elephants as well as for the Kenyan farmers living nearby who lose their crops to elephants every year.
The group’s presence in the park also discourages poaching—the Amboseli elephants are the least threatened population of elephants on the African continent.
The claim that zoos are saving elephants by displaying them has been debunked. Elephants have been exhibited in zoos for more than a century, yet they’re facing extinction in the wild. Placing these intelligent and complex individuals in conditions that are harmful to them, just so that we can look at them, teaches us nothing.
Keith Lindsay of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project believes that zoos have “next to nothing to offer” with regard to education. According to him, “It is much better to watch films of real elephants behaving naturally—walking, feeding, playing, mating, fighting—in truly natural social groups of up to hundreds of animals ranging widely across ecosystems than to see miserable captive elephants standing around in a bare enclosure, no matter how ‘naturalistic’ the landscaping design may be.”
Since 1991, more than a dozen zoos in the U.S. have closed their elephant exhibits or announced that they intend to phase them out, citing an inability to provide the animals with proper care.
This progressive trend must continue. Zoos need to abandon failed breeding programs and stop pretending that elephants can thrive in captivity. Elephants should be retired to reputable, accredited sanctuaries such as The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee or the Performing Animal Welfare Society in California.
https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-in-entertainment/zoos/get-elephants-zoos/
In Siberia, the winter temperature can drop to -60C, making it one of the coldest places to live in the world. In the first of our series on extremes, Adam Mynott finds out how the people of Oymyakon district cope with everyday life under such extraordinary conditions.
It was extremely cold. Stepping off the plane from Moscow into the brutal, brittle cold of Yakutsk in eastern Siberia, I could hardly believe that humans could survive, let alone thrive in such harsh conditions.
Yet this was a relatively mild start to my 10 days in the region. The temperature was -32C, and I was to encounter much worse. Extreme World is a new season of coverage on TV, Radio and Online, examining global differences.
Over the next few months, BBC News correspondents will be exploring eight key themes that illustrate the divisions in our extreme world.
One of the first things I noticed in Yakutsk, the regional capital of Sakha province, was that this city must be at severe risk of flooding, as all the buildings were built on concrete and steel stilts, suspending them 2m (6ft) above the ground.
But Valentin Spector, a senior researcher at the Permafrost Institute, said the stilts had nothing to do with flooding. He explained that in the summer, when temperatures can rise to more than 40C, the top layer of frozen ground warms and defrosts, in some places to a depth of a metre and in others to as much as three metres.
This "active layer," as Mr Spector called it, is very unstable, and unless the foundations of buildings are firmly rooted deep in the permafrost below, movement in the summer will bring them crashing down.
He told me that 65% of Russia sits on permafrost, and in some places in Siberia the frozen ground is 1500m deep. The permafrost poses many other difficulties.
Even though the summers are hot, it takes a long time for the topsoil to shake off the chill, and the growing season for farmers is shoe-horned into a small period of a few weeks.
The following day we flew to Ust-Nera, a town north of Yakutsk, inside the Arctic Circle and deep in the mountains. The air temperature fell another 10 degrees to around -42C, another startling shock to my life-support system.
As we drove into the town from the airport, we fell in behind a column of cars on their way to a funeral. Another problem posed by permafrost: how do people bury their dead in the middle of winter?
It takes two or three days to dig a grave in frozen ground. A fire is lit and coals are piled on; after a couple of hours the coals are dragged to one side and the 15cm of ground defrosted by the heat and flames are dug and cleared. Hot coals are then pushed into the hole and the process begins all over again until the hole is 2m deep.
I was beginning to get used to the cold, but I still found it shockingly painful and difficult to operate in. In the winter here, no-one goes outside unless they absolutely have to, and if they do have to venture out to shop or go to school or work, they are very well wrapped up.
Fur hats and long fur coats are everywhere. A long fur coat can cost more than $1550 (£1000), beyond the purse of many people where the average wage is the equivalent of $600 (£400) a month. You can take out a mortgage on a fur coat - banks will lend to enable people to buy the garment they need.
https://www.facebook.com/AvataraAnand
I arrived with more sets of thermal underwear than I knew what to do with, but what I lacked was a good hat. I was told by everyone that real fur was the only sensible solution, but I did not want to be responsible for the death of an Arctic Fox or a rabbit and, frankly, the real fur hats were very expensive, so I decided to go for fake fur.
This caused snorts of derision from the government guide who was accompanying me. He looked at me with a mixture of pity and contempt.
"Huh, Greenpeace," he said. The town of Ust-Nera started as a small settlement after geologists discovered gold and other minerals in the region in 1937.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin saw the underground reserves as one solution to deal with bourgeois "enemies of the state," and sent many tens of thousands of political prisoners to gulags (work camps) in Siberia to extract the gold and other minerals with picks and shovels.
Mikhail Ivanov is one of the few gulag workers who survived the ordeal and is still alive. I met the academic and historian in his apartment in Yakutsk, where he told me his crime had been just to praise the writings of a Yakut accused of being a nationalist.
After a sham trial, he was sent to work in a coal mine. "If I dragged 25 wheelbarrows full of coal up to the surface, I received two bowls of porridge. If I couldn't manage 25, I got just one bowl," he told me.
The mines are still operating under, of course, totally different regimes. The money they offer in wages attracts miners from all over Russia and beyond. It is the mines that sustain the economy in this barren cold environment.
And without the mines, the town of Oymyakon, which is the coldest inhabited place on Earth, would probably only be occupied in the summer by reindeer herdsmen.
When I visited the Badran gold mine, the temperature above ground was -45C. I found it almost unbearable. Andrei Dubov, who has worked at the mine for a decade, said the cold was no problem.
"I wrap up warm, and it's dry. So it's a much better climate than many other parts of Russia." He said the coldest temperature he could recall was -63C. "It was probably colder," he told me, "but the thermometer only reads down as far as -63C."
Underground, the miners work in temperatures between -15C and -20C, which seems appalling, but remarkably, the mine feels incredibly mild, warm even. The coldest temperature I experienced in my few days in Siberia was -53C.
This was so cold that after no more than a few minutes outside, exposed skin started to smart with pain, damp surfaces in my nostrils froze, and toes and fingers turned uncomfortably cold very quickly, despite three layers of thick socks and two pairs of gloves.
I was carrying my microphone, and the flexible cable that led to the recording machine turned as rigid as a stick and I was warned that if I tried to bend it before it warmed up, it would snap.
It is easy, perhaps even arrogant, to look at the lives of the people who live in the district of Oymyakon and think they would not live in such a physically demanding place if they knew better.
Of course, they do know better. I visited the Vadreyev family, who were all born in Ust-Nera and feel they belong to the town and its people.
As she dressed her daughter, Maria, in a thick fur coat, fur hat, scarf and gloves, Martina Vadreyev said: "Sure, we have to wrap up warm. In other parts of Russia you can throw on a coat to go outdoors, here it takes ages to dress.
But we are used to it. This is our home." Then the two of them pulled open the door of their apartment and stepped into the blast of super-chilled air -52C and falling.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-11875131
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