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These Animals are Physics Whizzes

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Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Isaac Newton would never have discovered the laws of motion had he studied only cats.Suppose you hold a cat, stomach up, and drop it from a second-story window. If a cat is simply a mechanical system that obeys Newton’s rules of matter in motion, it should land on its back. (OK, there’s some technicalities — like this should be done in a vacuum, but ignore that for now.) Instead, most cats usually avoid injury by twisting themselves on the way down to land on their feet.Most people are not mystified by this trick — everybody has seen videos attesting to cats’ acrobatic prowess. But for more than a century, scientists have wondered about the physics of how cats do it. Clearly, the mathematical theorem analyzing the falling cat as a mechanical system fails for live cats, as Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek points out in a recent paper.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.“This theorem is not relevant to real biological cats,” writes Wilczek, a theoretical physicist at MIT. They are not closed mechanical systems, and can “consume stored energy … empowering mechanical motion.”Nevertheless, the laws of physics do apply to cats — as well as every other kind of animal, from insects to elephants. Biology does not avoid physics; it embraces it. From friction on microscopic scales to fluid dynamics in water and air, animals exploit physical laws to run or swim or fly. Every other aspect of animal behavior, from breathing to building shelters, depends in some way on the restrictions imposed, and opportunities permitted, by physics.“Living organisms are … systems whose actions are constrained by physics across multiple length scales and timescales,” Jennifer Rieser and coauthors write in the current issue of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics.While the field of animal behavior physics is still in its infancy, substantial progress has been made in explaining individual behaviors, along with how those behaviors are shaped via interactions with other individuals and the environment. Apart from discovering more about how animals perform their diverse repertoire of skills, such research may also lead to new physics knowledge gained by scrutinizing animal abilities that scientists don’t yet understand.Critters in motionPhysics applies to animals in action over a wide range of spatial scales. At the smallest end of the range, attractive forces between nearby atoms facilitate the ability of geckos and some insects to climb up walls or even walk on ceilings. On a slightly larger scale, textures and structures provide adhesion for other biological gymnastics. In bird feathers, for instance, tiny hooks and barbs act like Velcro, holding feathers in position to enhance lift when flying, Rieser and colleagues report.Biological textures also aid movement by facilitating friction between animal parts and surfaces. Scales on California king snakes possess textures that allow rapid forward sliding, but increase friction to retard backward or sideways motion. Some sidewinding snakes have apparently evolved different textures that reduce friction in the direction of motion, recent research suggests.Small-scale structures are also important for animals’ interaction with water. For many animals, microstructures make the body “superhydrophobic” — capable of blocking the penetration of water. “In wet climates, water droplet shedding can be essential in animals, like flying birds and insects, where weight and stability are crucially important,” note Rieser, of Emory University, and coauthors Chantal Nguyen, Orit Peleg and Calvin Riiska.Water-blocking surfaces also help animals keep their skins clean. “This self-cleansing mechanism … can be important to help protect the animal from dangers like skin-borne parasites and other infections,” the Annual Review authors explain. And in some cases, removing foreign material from an animal’s surface may be necessary to preserve the surface properties that enhance camouflage.In fact, the physics of how light interacts with an animal’s surface is relevant for many other behaviors. Bright colors and iridescence in birds, butterflies and some other insects depend on how layers of different microstructures are combined. Such colors contribute to courting and can influence the ability to avoid predators.At larger scales, physics still underlies even the simplest animal movements, which require a complex coordination of electrical and chemical signaling within the body and between body and brain. And for successful motion, internal physics must mesh with the physical properties of the environment. Moving through a fluid, for instance, is governed not only by the body but also by the properties of the liquid.In water, swimming animals employ different moving strategies depending on various factors, including the shape of their body. Fish with slim bodies, for instance, basically propel themselves by side-to-side motion of body and tail. Fish of many other body shapes generate motion by moving their fins.Physics methods for describing these strategies cannot easily account for factors like turbulence and whirlpools. Calculating expected behavior in such situations can exceed available computing power. So scientists have turned to actual experiments. One such study provided clues to a peculiar ability of trout; water flowing past a cylinder induced a vortex that allowed even a dead trout to swim upstream.Animal assemblyEvolution has provided animals with movement skills adapted to the existing environment without any need for an instruction manual. But altering the environment to an animal’s benefit requires more sophisticated physics savvy. From ants and wasps to badgers and beavers, various animals have learned how to construct nests, shelters and other structures for protection from environmental threats.Bird nests, for instance, must combine sticks and leaves and dirt and grass into a structure of dependable stability and mechanical integrity. Birds apparently know that flexible sticks or twigs provide better stability than rigid rods; physics experiments have shown that the bending of the more flexible materials enables frictional forces that help hold the nest together. Rieser and colleagues suspect that applying more bird knowledge about assembling nest components could help scientists design novel metamaterials for various purposes.Animal structures must also obey the physics necessary to control temperature, humidity and ventilation within a comfortable range. “Without sufficient air exchange, for instance, animals would suffocate,” Rieser and colleagues write.Prairie dogs, for example, build extensive burrows with multiple openings. Those openings should differ in elevation, physics analysis shows, to provide proper ventilation (via pressure differences that induce airflow). Field studies show that prairie dog engineers have figured that out for themselves — just as cats figured out how to twist and change body shape when falling.No doubt animals have many other tricks that physicists themselves can’t yet fully explain, which is why the field of animal behavior physics is so fertile.“Further investigations of the many facets of animal behaviors from a physics perspective,” Rieser and colleagues write, “will … aid in the discovery of new physical laws for behavior that nature has figured out but that we have yet to uncover or fully understand.”This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

How falling cats, slithering snakes, burrowing prairie dogs and more exploit the laws of physics

Isaac Newton would never have discovered the laws of motion had he studied only cats.

Suppose you hold a cat, stomach up, and drop it from a second-story window. If a cat is simply a mechanical system that obeys Newton’s rules of matter in motion, it should land on its back. (OK, there’s some technicalities — like this should be done in a vacuum, but ignore that for now.) Instead, most cats usually avoid injury by twisting themselves on the way down to land on their feet.

Most people are not mystified by this trick — everybody has seen videos attesting to cats’ acrobatic prowess. But for more than a century, scientists have wondered about the physics of how cats do it. Clearly, the mathematical theorem analyzing the falling cat as a mechanical system fails for live cats, as Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek points out in a recent paper.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

“This theorem is not relevant to real biological cats,” writes Wilczek, a theoretical physicist at MIT. They are not closed mechanical systems, and can “consume stored energy … empowering mechanical motion.”

Nevertheless, the laws of physics do apply to cats — as well as every other kind of animal, from insects to elephants. Biology does not avoid physics; it embraces it. From friction on microscopic scales to fluid dynamics in water and air, animals exploit physical laws to run or swim or fly. Every other aspect of animal behavior, from breathing to building shelters, depends in some way on the restrictions imposed, and opportunities permitted, by physics.

“Living organisms are … systems whose actions are constrained by physics across multiple length scales and timescales,” Jennifer Rieser and coauthors write in the current issue of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics.

While the field of animal behavior physics is still in its infancy, substantial progress has been made in explaining individual behaviors, along with how those behaviors are shaped via interactions with other individuals and the environment. Apart from discovering more about how animals perform their diverse repertoire of skills, such research may also lead to new physics knowledge gained by scrutinizing animal abilities that scientists don’t yet understand.

Critters in motion

Physics applies to animals in action over a wide range of spatial scales. At the smallest end of the range, attractive forces between nearby atoms facilitate the ability of geckos and some insects to climb up walls or even walk on ceilings. On a slightly larger scale, textures and structures provide adhesion for other biological gymnastics. In bird feathers, for instance, tiny hooks and barbs act like Velcro, holding feathers in position to enhance lift when flying, Rieser and colleagues report.

Biological textures also aid movement by facilitating friction between animal parts and surfaces. Scales on California king snakes possess textures that allow rapid forward sliding, but increase friction to retard backward or sideways motion. Some sidewinding snakes have apparently evolved different textures that reduce friction in the direction of motion, recent research suggests.

Small-scale structures are also important for animals’ interaction with water. For many animals, microstructures make the body “superhydrophobic” — capable of blocking the penetration of water. “In wet climates, water droplet shedding can be essential in animals, like flying birds and insects, where weight and stability are crucially important,” note Rieser, of Emory University, and coauthors Chantal Nguyen, Orit Peleg and Calvin Riiska.

Water-blocking surfaces also help animals keep their skins clean. “This self-cleansing mechanism … can be important to help protect the animal from dangers like skin-borne parasites and other infections,” the Annual Review authors explain. And in some cases, removing foreign material from an animal’s surface may be necessary to preserve the surface properties that enhance camouflage.

In fact, the physics of how light interacts with an animal’s surface is relevant for many other behaviors. Bright colors and iridescence in birds, butterflies and some other insects depend on how layers of different microstructures are combined. Such colors contribute to courting and can influence the ability to avoid predators.

At larger scales, physics still underlies even the simplest animal movements, which require a complex coordination of electrical and chemical signaling within the body and between body and brain. And for successful motion, internal physics must mesh with the physical properties of the environment. Moving through a fluid, for instance, is governed not only by the body but also by the properties of the liquid.

In water, swimming animals employ different moving strategies depending on various factors, including the shape of their body. Fish with slim bodies, for instance, basically propel themselves by side-to-side motion of body and tail. Fish of many other body shapes generate motion by moving their fins.

Physics methods for describing these strategies cannot easily account for factors like turbulence and whirlpools. Calculating expected behavior in such situations can exceed available computing power. So scientists have turned to actual experiments. One such study provided clues to a peculiar ability of trout; water flowing past a cylinder induced a vortex that allowed even a dead trout to swim upstream.

Animal assembly

Evolution has provided animals with movement skills adapted to the existing environment without any need for an instruction manual. But altering the environment to an animal’s benefit requires more sophisticated physics savvy. From ants and wasps to badgers and beavers, various animals have learned how to construct nests, shelters and other structures for protection from environmental threats.

Bird nests, for instance, must combine sticks and leaves and dirt and grass into a structure of dependable stability and mechanical integrity. Birds apparently know that flexible sticks or twigs provide better stability than rigid rods; physics experiments have shown that the bending of the more flexible materials enables frictional forces that help hold the nest together. Rieser and colleagues suspect that applying more bird knowledge about assembling nest components could help scientists design novel metamaterials for various purposes.

Animal structures must also obey the physics necessary to control temperature, humidity and ventilation within a comfortable range. “Without sufficient air exchange, for instance, animals would suffocate,” Rieser and colleagues write.

Prairie dogs, for example, build extensive burrows with multiple openings. Those openings should differ in elevation, physics analysis shows, to provide proper ventilation (via pressure differences that induce airflow). Field studies show that prairie dog engineers have figured that out for themselves — just as cats figured out how to twist and change body shape when falling.

No doubt animals have many other tricks that physicists themselves can’t yet fully explain, which is why the field of animal behavior physics is so fertile.

“Further investigations of the many facets of animal behaviors from a physics perspective,” Rieser and colleagues write, “will … aid in the discovery of new physical laws for behavior that nature has figured out but that we have yet to uncover or fully understand.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

Read the full story here.

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From the telegraph to AI, our communications systems have always had hidden environmental cost

The telegraph was hailed for its revolutionary ability to span distance. Now AI is being hailed as a great leap forward. But both came with environmental costs.

The first attempt to lay submarine telegraph cable between Britain and France. Universal History Archive/GettyWhen we post to a group chat or talk to an AI chatbot, we don’t think about how these technologies came to be. We take it for granted we can instantly communicate. We only notice the importance and reach of these systems when they’re not accessible. Companies describe these systems with metaphors such as the “cloud” or “artificial intelligence”, suggesting something intangible. But they are deeply material. The stories told about these systems centre on newness and progress. But these myths obscure the human and environmental cost of making them possible. AI and modern communication systems rely on huge data centres and submarine cables. These have large and growing environmental costs, from soaring energy use to powering data centres to water for cooling. There’s nothing new about this, as my research shows. The first world-spanning communication system was the telegraph, which made it possible to communicate between some continents in near-real time. But it came at substantial cost to the environment and humans. Submarine telegraph cables were wrapped in gutta-percha, the rubber-like latex extracted from tropical trees by colonial labourers. Forests were felled to grow plantations of these trees. Is it possible to design communications systems without such costs? Perhaps. But as the AI investment bubble shows, environmental and human costs are often ignored in the race for the next big thing. The telegraph had a sizeable environmental and social cost. Pictured: workers coiling the first transatlantic telegraph cable in the bilge tanks of the S.S. Great Eastern in 1865. Universal History Archives/Getty From the “Victorian internet” to AI Before the telegraph, long distance communication was painfully slow. Sending messages by ship could take months. In the 1850s, telegraph cables made it possible to rapidly communicate between countries and across oceans. By the late 1800s, the telegraph had become ubiquitous. Later dubbed the “Victorian internet”, the telegraph was the predecessor of today’s digital networks. Building telegraph networks was a huge undertaking. The first transatlantic cable was completed in 1858, spanning more than 4,000km between North America and Europe. The first transatlantic submarine cables made possible rapid communication between the United States and Europe. This 1857 map shows their paths. Korff Brothers, CC BY-NC-ND Australia followed closely behind. European colonists created the first telegraph lines in the 1850s between Melbourne and Williamstown. By 1872, the Overland Telegraph Line between Adelaide and Darwin had been completed. From Darwin, the message could reach the world. There are clear differences between the telegraph and today’s AI systems. But there are also clear parallels. In our time, fibre optic cables retrace many routes of the now obsolete submarine telegraph cables. Virtually all (99%) of the world’s internet traffic travels through deep sea cables. These cables carry everything from Google searches to ChatGPT interactions, transmitting data close to the speed of light from your device to faraway data centres and back. Historical accounts describe the telegraph variously as a divine gift, a human-made wonder, and a networked global intelligence, far from the material reality. These descriptions are not far off the way AI is talked about today. Grounded in extraction In the 19th century, the telegraph was commonly thought of as an emblem of progress and technological innovation. But these systems had other stories embedded, such as the logic of colonialism. One reason European powers set out to colonise the globe was to extract resources from colonies for their own use. The same extractive logic can be seen in the telegraph, a system whose self-evident technological progress won out over environmental and social costs. If you look closely at a slice of telegraph cable in a museum or at historic sites where submarine telegraph cables made landfall, you’ll see something interesting. The telegraph was a technological marvel – but it came at considerable cost. Pictured is an 1856 sample of the first submarine telegraph cable linking Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in Canada. Jemimah Widdicombe, CC BY-NC-ND Wrapped around the wires is a mixture of tarred yarn and gutta percha. Cable companies used this naturally occurring latex to insulate telegraph wires from the harsh conditions on the sea floor. To meet soaring demand, colonial powers such as Britain and the Netherlands accelerated harvesting in their colonies across Southeast Asia. Rainforests were felled for plantations and Indigenous peoples forced to harvest the latex. European colonial powers drove intensified production of gutta-percha despite the environmental and social cost. Pictured: Kayan people in Borneo harvesting the milky latex around 1910. Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-ND Australia’s telegraph came at real cost, as First Nations truth telling projects and interdisciplinary researchers have shown. The Overland Telegraph Line needed large amounts of water to power batteries and sustain human operators and their animals at repeater stations. The demand for water contributed to loss of life, forced dispossession and the pollution of waterways. The legacy of these effects are still experienced today. Echoes of this colonial logic can be seen in today’s AI systems. The focus today is on technological advancement, regardless of energy and environmental costs. Within five years, the International Energy Agency estimates the world’s data centres could require more electricity than all of Japan. AI is far more thirsty than the telegraph. Data centres produce a great deal of heat, and water has to be used to keep the servers cool. Researchers estimate that by 2027, AI usage will require between 4.2 and 6.6 billion cubic metres of water – about the same volume used by Denmark annually. With the rise of generative AI, both Microsoft and Google have significantly increased their water consumption. Manufacturing the specialised processors needed to train AI models has resulted in dirty mining, deforestation and toxic waste. As AI scholar Kate Crawford has argued, AI must be understood as a system that is: embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labour, infrastructures, logistics, histories and classifications. The same was true of the telegraph. Huge new data centres are being built to service the growth in AI and the wider internet. Pictured: a new Google data centre in the United Kingdom. Richard Newstead/Getty Planning for the future Telegraph companies and the imperial networks behind them accepted environmental extraction and social exploitation as the price of technological progress. Today’s tech giants are following a similar approach, racing to release ever more powerful models while obscuring the far reaching environmental consequences of their technologies. As governments work to improve regulation and accountability, they must go further to enforce ethical standards, mandate transparent disclosure of energy and environmental impacts and support low impact projects. Without decisive action, AI risks becoming another chapter in the long history of technologies trading human and environmental wellbeing for technological “progress”. The lesson from the telegraph is clear: we must refuse to accept exploitation as the cost of innovation. Jemimah Widdicombe works for the National Communication Museum (NCM) as Senior Curator.

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Ukraine and Poland have overtaken other EU countries to become the UK’s biggest egg suppliers, sparking warnings that imports of eggs from caged hens are slipping “through the back door” despite welfare pledges.Freedom of information data from the Animal and Plant Health Agency shows that, while the Netherlands supplied a large proportion of UK eggs in 2022, its share has steadily fallen. By 2025, Ukraine and Poland together accounted for more than 15m kilograms, with Spain, Italy and other southern and eastern European countries also having increased their exports.Ukraine has provided the most eggs so far this year by weight at 8m kilograms, followed by almost 7m kilograms from Poland and 5m from Spain, according to data provided up to July this year.Imports of eggs for consumption rose sharply from about 3,500 consignments in 2023 to more than 10,000 in 2024. Although overall tonnage declined, fewer big shipments have been replaced by many small ones from regions where caged-hen systems remain widespread.Mark Williams, the chair of the British Egg Industry Council, said UK farmers were being placed at an unfair disadvantage. “Our farmers are asked to invest in ever-higher standards of hen welfare while the government leaves the back door open to eggs produced in a system that is banned in the UK. This is morally wrong and unfair, and the government should not be doing this,” he said.Williams said battery cages outlawed in the UK since 2012 were still commonplace in Ukraine, and that eggs linked to food safety issues in mainland Europe continued to be traded.After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the country’s farms, factories and trade routes were badly hit. To help Ukraine’s economy survive, the UK and EU suspended tariffs on its goods, meaning products such as eggs could be exported without extra costs. Ministers argue this tariff suspension is a deliberate step to support Ukraine during wartime.Williams acknowledged the humanitarian case, but added: “Aid should not come at the expense of UK egg farmers – particularly when British retailers have already pledged to go cage-free by 2025. That promise is undermined if imports from countries with weaker welfare standards are allowed to fill the gap into the price-sensitive food service and processing sectors.”The UK currently produces about 88% of its own eggs, and imports the remaining 12%. Leading supermarkets only sell British Lion eggs in retail, following 2017 Food Standards Agency advice confirming they are safe to eat runny or raw. Imported eggs are more likely to be found in restaurants and food processing.“I am not worried about Ukrainian eggs entering retail,” Williams said. “But retail is only 65% of the market. The other two segments – food service (18%) and processing (17%) – are very price-competitive, which makes it attractive for Ukraine to sell eggs or egg products here.”skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionHe added that UK regulations on food safety, animal welfare and environmental protection accounted for about 14% of the cost of producing a dozen eggs. “Ukraine doesn’t face those costs, giving them a huge commercial advantage. That’s why it’s so attractive right now to send eggs and egg products to the UK.”Ukraine has asked Britain to keep tariff suspensions in place until 2029. While the UK has agreed to extend tariff-free trade on most goods to that date, eggs and poultry are classed as “sensitive products” and have only been granted a shorter, two-year extension.A government spokesperson said: “We are backing our farmers with the largest nature-friendly budget in history to get more British food on our plates and we will always protect our farmers in trade deals.“We are making the supply chain fairer and are engaging with the egg industry to draft new regulations to ensure a level playing field for producers.”

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English primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall speaks in the panel "Earth's Wisdom Keepers" on the last day of the forum's Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in 2024.AP Photo/Markus SchreiberJane Goodall, the world’s most famous primatologist, died Wednesday at the age of 91, the Jane Goodall Institute announced on social media.According to the Institute, Goodall passed away “due to natural causes” while in California as part of a speaking tour of the United States.“Dr. Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” the Institute said in a statement.Goodall, the world's foremost authority on chimpanzees, communicates with chimpanzee Nana in June 2004 at the zoo of Magdeburg in eastern Germany. The British primatologist has died.JENS SCHLUETER/DDP/AFP via Getty ImagesIn the spring of 1957, Goodall, then a 22-year-old secretary with only a high school education, boarded a ship from her native England to Kenya. Her work at a local natural history museum soon took her to the rainforest reserve at Gombe National Park (in present-day Tanzania), home to one of the largest chimpanzee populations in Africa.She felt an immediate connection to the chimpanzees. Over the decades that followed, she spent almost all her time in the reserve ― conducting research that reshaped our understanding of chimpanzees and even what it means to be human. Goodall was born on April 3, 1934, in London, to businessman Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall and novelist Margaret Myfanwe Joseph. She grew up in the middle-class resort town of Bournemouth, on the southern coast of England. In grade school, she started reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels and Hugh Lofting’s “The Story of Doctor Dolittle” and became obsessed with the idea of traveling to Africa.Goodall’s parents couldn’t afford to send her to college, so after she graduated from high school, she worked as a secretary for two years to save money for the three-week passage to Africa. Two months after arriving, she met renowned paleontologist Louis Leakey, whose work had shown that hominids originated in Africa, rather than Asia. Leakey recognized Goodall’s intelligence and hired her at the natural history museum in Nairobi, where he worked, intending to send her to the rainforest to study chimpanzees. Goodall appears in Gombe National Park in the television special "Miss Goodall and the World of Chimpanzees," originally broadcast on CBS in December 1965.CBS Photo Archive via Getty ImagesFor the first few months of her stay in Gombe, the chimpanzees were cautious, refusing to come within several hundred feet of the young woman. But Goodall persisted, using bananas as a lure for the chimpanzees, and they eventually became comfortable enough to allow her to observe them at close range. Goodall began giving them individual names — highly unorthodox in a field where the standard practice was to assign animals identifying numbers. And as she got closer to the chimpanzees, she discovered that they behaved in a manner that resembled the rich, complicated social structure of humans far more than anyone had suspected. She came to the belief that they could be caring and violent, resourceful and playful — much like human beings.Goodall feeds rescued chimpanzees on July 14, 2016, at the Sweetwaters sanctuary, Kenya's only great-ape sanctuary.TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty ImagesGoodall made what is still regarded as her most significant discovery about chimpanzee behavior in October 1960. Looking through her binoculars, she saw a male chimpanzee she’d named David Greybeard sticking a twig into a termite colony and using it to retrieve termites that he then ate. Before this moment, scientists had always believed that humans were the only creatures on earth capable of making and using tools.It hadn’t, in fact, been known that chimpanzees ate meat. Goodall later observed chimpanzees hunting and eating mammals, including other monkeys and even, on rare occasions, other chimpanzees.In 1962, Goodall enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Cambridge University, becoming one of just a handful of people ever to do so without an undergraduate degree. While there, she published her breakthrough finding on the tool-using chimpanzee in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.After getting her degree in 1965, Goodall returned to Gombe to continue her work with chimpanzees. She published her first book, “My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees,” in 1967. She has since published more than a dozen other books for adults and several for children. One of these books, 2013’s “Seeds of Hope,” was criticized for including passages lifted from several other sources without attribution, a misstep Goodall attributed to sloppy note-taking. She later published a revised edition.Goodall poses for a photo at Taronga Zoo on Oct. 11, 2008, in Sydney. Robert Gray via Getty ImagesIn 1977, Goodall established the Jane Goodall Institute to promote conservation and development programs in Africa. It now has projects across the world, including youth-focused programs in nearly 100 countries. As Goodall’s fame grew, she became an outspoken advocate for animal rights and conservation. She has been involved in numerous organizations working on behalf of better treatment of animals.“You cannot share your life with a dog, as I had done in Bournemouth, or a cat, and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings,” she told The Guardian in 2010. “You know it and I think every single one of those scientists knew it too, but because they couldn’t prove it, they wouldn’t talk about it.”In a 2021 interview with HuffPost, she reflected on humanity’s stewardship of the world and expressed hope we might lean more on our intellect to work toward the mutually beneficial goal of environmental preservation.That intellect is ultimately what distinguishes us from chimpanzees, she said, and allows us to collaboratively plan for the future:20 Years OfFreeJournalismYour SupportFuelsOur MissionYour SupportFuelsOur MissionFor two decades, HuffPost has been fearless, unflinching, and relentless in pursuit of the truth. Support our mission to keep us around for the next 20 — we can't do this without you.We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves.Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again.We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves.Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again.Support HuffPostAlready contributed? Log in to hide these messages.Chimpanzees have a very brutal, dark, war-like side. They also have a loving and altruistic side. Just like us. But the big difference is the explosive development of our intellect, which I personally think was at least partly triggered by the fact we developed this way of talking with words. So we can tell people about things that aren’t present. We can make plans for the distant future. We can bring people from different disciplines together to discuss a problem. That’s because of words. We now have developed a moral code with our words. And we know perfectly well what we should and shouldn’t do. But there is this kind of innate territorialism, which leads to nationalism. That’s in our genes. But we should be able to get out of it because of this intellect. We have the tools. We have the language. We have the scientific technology. We understand that if we make the right decisions every day and billions of us do it, we can move in the right direction. But will we do it in time? I don’t know.Goodall married Dutch nature photographer Baron Hugo van Lawick in 1964. The two had a son, Hugo, in 1967, and divorced in 1974. She married Derek Bryceson, head of Tanzania’s national parks, in 1975. He died of cancer in 1980. Sara Bondioli contributed reporting.

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Documentary

Wild Florida's Vanishing Call

A moving, powerful inside look at what has happened to the wild, rarely seen, real Florida. A compelling, emotional soundtrack carries the viewer through the past destruction of wild Florida habitats, to beautiful scenes of Florida's rarely seen native wild animals, including the most endangered cat in North America, the Florida Panther, and ends with a positive message encouraging the viewer to work to protect Florida's wildlife and habitat before it is too late.

Animals

Nature

Music

Shaba

In the mountains of northern Kenya, a Samburu community is doing something that has never been done before. They’ve built a sanctuary for orphaned elephants to try to rehabilitate them back to the wild. The project is not just changing local attitudes about elephants, it's changing attitudes about women too because the secret to Reteti’s success is all because of the special bond between a group of local women keepers and one special elephant named Shaba. Reteti Elephant Sanctuary is the first-ever indigenous community-owned and run sanctuary in all of Africa, where rescued orphaned elephants are looked after by local keepers from the Samburu community. They are rehabilitated and raised and then reintroduced back into the wild. The sanctuary is empowering young Samburu women to be the first-ever indigenous women elephant keepers in all of Africa. At first, the community didn’t think there was a place for women in the workplace. Now, the success of these women elephant keepers is unlocking new possibilities and setting a powerful example for young girls, hoping to pursue their dreams. What’s happening there, without fanfare, is nothing less than the beginnings of a transformation in the way the Samburu people relate to wild animals. This oasis where orphans grow up, learning to be wild so that one day they can rejoin their herds, is as much about people as it is about elephants. This is a personal story about a group of women and an elephant named Shaba who changed each other's lives. This film is a powerful reminder that we are a part of a complex world created over millions of years, and the survival of all species is intertwined with our own. Reteti began in partnership with Conservation International who provided critical operational support and work to scale the Reteti community-centered model to create lasting impacts worldwide.

Animals

Conservation

Indigenous