Fireproof homes of Bowerbirds and more irrelevancies

Innovation:

Male great bowerbirds (Chlamydera nuchalis) of northern Australia erect two walls of twigs partially flanking a six-foot-long passageway that they pave with conspicuous bits of bones, stones, shells, and fruits. There, the males strut their stuff, inviting females over for a tryst.

Bower construction takes a week or longer, so it's no fun when brush fire sweeps through the savanna and threatens the males' handiwork.

Yet, as a new study shows, the bowers seem strangely immune to fire.
-Live Science

Thanks to the firebreaks they make around their nests.

Animals are marvellous, and their survival instincts wondrous- but when man tampers with them, the consequences are unpredictable:

Residents of a rural district in eastern Sweden said pesticide rules adopted to protect nearby nature reserves have brought swarms of mosquitoes to their homes.

Locals in the Osterfarnebo district said the pesticide restrictions were put in place to protect nearby nature reserves from spraying, but the rules leave residents without an effective weapon to curb the insects' breeding, The Local reported Friday.
-UPI

Nature has great ways of coping up with, nature. What we have here is hardly surprising, if you remember how it is with us people (only the sexes are reversed):

Seahorses have a unique mode of reproduction: male pregnancy. Male seahorses provide all post-fertilization parental care, yet despite the high levels of paternal investment, they have long been thought to have conventional sex roles, with females choosing mating partners and males competing for their attention. However, clutch, egg and offspring size all increase with female body size in seahorses, suggesting that males may obtain fecundity benefits by mating with large-bodied females.

...Mattle and Wilson found striking differences in courtship behavior between male and female seahorses, with choosy males and indiscriminate females. Male seahorses were highly active and showed a clear preference for larger partners. In contrast, females were significantly less active and showed ambiguous mating preferences.
-EurekAlert

Hardly surprising- it is the ones that live with consequences that worry about consequences, and so on.


And finally, a news that comes as a surprise-shock (the Nobel prize winning Novelist is Hemingway):

Last week, however, saw the publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press), which reveals the Nobel prize-winning novelist was for a while on the KGB's list of its agents in America. Co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, the book is based on notes that Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, made when he was given access in the 90s to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow.
-Guardian