Co-habitation: Brown Bear and Wolf Documented Sharing and Caring

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Description

Wildlife Photographer Lassi Rautiainen, 56 years old, documented this cooperative relationship between a male brown bear and female grey wolf in Finland in 2013.

He told the DailyMail:

“It’s very unusual to see a bear and a wolf getting on like this. No-one can know exactly why or how the young wolf and bear became friends. I think that perhaps they were both alone and they were young and a bit unsure of how to survive alone…It is nice to share rare events in the wild that you would never expect to see.”

He documented the relationship for ten days, and noted that they would stay in each other’s company for several hours between 8p.m. and 4a.m. While normally these two species would be independent hunters in their own territory, these two individuals would share a deer carcass as a meal every evening.

Not only did they tolerate each other’s presence, but it seems as if they also found a sense of security and companionship with one another too. This type of behavior is often seen with animals of the same species, such as male lions or cheetahs who are brothers and team up by roaming around with one another.

What we can learn

This is a wonderful example that teaches us that nature is more complicated when it comes to behaviors than what mainstream scientific reasoning suggests. This may be an isolated example that can be considered “unusual,” but it shows that nature expresses itself in cooperative ways even despite genetic programming and environmental factors.

If this could be explained simply because the bear and wolf are young and have not yet learned independent survival behaviors yet, then this only gives more credence to the notion that aggressive behaviors are taught to developing animals rather than being the default state they are born with.

Applying this same concept to humans, no human child in their developing phase is born with aggressive tendencies, malicious intentions, racial ideologies, or religious extremism…these are all taught to them by parents and society.

Perhaps the natural state of every living being born into this world is pure and innocent, but the conditions of one’s environment bring out the survival traits programmed within us. At the very least…we can do our best as human beings to give all our children as safe and kind of a world as possible to give them the best chance at becoming beings who are both caring and sharing.like this bear and wolf!

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Living Camouflage: Spider Crabs and Algae

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Living Camouflage: Spider Crabs and Algae

Description

The Common Spider Crab is a slow-moving, long-legged crustacean that lives mostly in shallow bays on the sandy bottom. They are among a group of several different crab species that are known as “decorator crabs,” because they cover their shells with material to disguise themselves from the eyes of predators.

Spider crabs snip off bits of algae and cover their spiny shells with it to make a form of living camouflage. This behavior is incredible because the crabs literally choose to decorate their shells, rather than algae growing on them by accident.

The camouflage works great in allowing them to blend in to their surroundings, and the algae benefits from this mutualistic symbiosis because it gets a free ride, giving it access to more floating debris for food and more space to spread its genetic material around the ocean.

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What We Can Learn

This behavior within crabs teaches us that having adaptability for one’s home is important in maintaining security and sustainability. Being aware of one’s aurrounding landscape and all it can offer us for our conscious evolution makes us more resilient as a community.

Just like the image above, there are a plethora of examples of Earth-sheltered homes that people are building all around the world that work with the surrounding land by incorporating plants into the house’s structure. Not only do these structures look asthetically pleasing by merging with the landscape, they also provide practical benefits such as retaining heat and creating better warer drainage.