A group of wandering wild elephants suddenly left their home in the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve, which have become a hit in China and globally.

Since leaving the reserve, the elephants have walked over 310 miles. Along the way, they have got into farms for food and water, walked through urban streets, and even paid a visit to a car shop and a retirement home. However, they have destroyed more than $1 million worth of crops.

Researchers are not sure why the elephants decided to leave or where they are headed. While elephants are known to leave their habitats (栖息地) in search of food, this is the longest moving of wild elephants recorded in China. Because of the extreme distance traveled, some doubt that the elephants   ay be lost. However, other scientists think the elephants were forced to move due to deforestation.

Successful protection efforts have almost doubled the elephant population in the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve and the surrounding regions. However, their natural habitat has been continuously reduced to make room for agricultural development.

“We’ve seen elephants swelling their range for decades now, as their populations increase, and they search for more food for the growing group,” Becky Shu Chen, a scientist at the Zoological Society of London, told The Washington Post.

The wandering elephants’ search for a suitable home has not gone unnoticed by the millions of locals that eagerly follow their daily movements on social media. Adam Chang, assigned to deliver food to the elephants, says, “Before this meeting, I just felt curious about animals. Now, I think I would volunteer in animal rights groups to preserve those giant creatures.”

A new study using satellite mapping technology reveals there are nearly 20% more emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica than was previously thought. The results provide an important standard for monitoring the impact of environmental change on the population of this bird.

Reporting this week in the journal Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation, the authors describe how they used images from the European Commission's Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite mission to locate the birds. They found 11 new colonies, three of which were previously identified but never confirmed, That takes the global population to 61 colonies around the continent.

Emperor penguins need sea ice to breed and are located in areas that are very difficult to study because they are remote and often inaccessible with temperatures as low as — 50°C. For the last 1 years, British Antarctic Survey (BAS) scientists have been looking for new colonies by searching for their guano(鸟粪石)stains on the ice.

Lead author Dr. Peter Fretwell, a geographer at BAS says:

“This is an exciting discovery. The new satellite images of Antarctica's coastline have enabled us to find these new colonies. And while this is good news, the colonies are small and so only take the overall population count up by 5 — 10% to just over half a million penguins or around 265, 500 — 278, 500 breeding pairs.”

Dr. Phil Trathan, Head of Conservation Biology at BAS, says:

“While it's good news that we've found these new colonies, the breeding sites are all in locations where recent model projections suggest emperors will decline. Birds in these sites are therefore probably the ‘canaries(金丝雀) in the coalmine’ — we need to watch these sites carefully as climate change will affect this region.”

Comparatively few fresh-water species of fishes are limited in their distribution to a single river system, yet not many are found on both sides of a high mountain ridge, such as the Rocky Mountains in North America. That is to say, the fishes of the Mississippi Valley are generally different from those of the Pacific slope.

While it is a well-known fact that the fish life in no two river systems, even though they empty into the sea on the same side of a divide, is exactly identical, such streams do have many species in common. The principal rivers of the Atlantic slope of the United States, for example, contain several species common to all of them, including the bullhead catfish, the bluegill sunfish, and the large mouth bass. None of these species can endure salt water, so they cannot move from one river system to another. On the other hand, the more northern streams contain species not found in the southern ones, and vice versa. The common pike, for example, is found in the Atlantic streams from Maryland northward, and the brook trout and yellow perch occur only in the streams from North Carolina southward.

How the present distribution came about must remain a matter of quest. It is quite probable that some of the streams, including those on opposite sides of a divide, may have been connected at one time. Again, streams may be entirely separate during normal weather, but an exceptionally heavy rainfall or the sudden melting of snow in the uplands sometimes causes floods which may form a temporary connection between them, providing a passageway for fishes. It is also possible that water birds may accidentally carry fish or spawn(卵)   from one stream to another, or that man may be instrumental in such a transfer.