This week’s Environmental News from Chuck Sheppard’s News of the Weird

Good to Know: A case report in a recent issue of the journal Emergency Medicine Australasia described the successful removal of a leech from an eyeball. A 66-year-old woman, gardening in her back yard in Sydney, had accidentally flicked some soil into her eye. By the time a surgeon could extract the leech, it had roughly tripled its body size by feeding on the eyeball's blood vessels. (The key, by the way: a few drops of saline solution). [News.com.au-Australian Associated Press, 4-20-09]

In a recent journal article, researchers from the University of Whitwatersrand (South Africa) and the University of Sydney (Australia) reported that young male Augrabies lizards avoid older predatory males by, basically, cross-dressing (pretending to be female by suppressing their extravagant male coloration until they are fully developed and able to defend themselves). Thus, they avoid being attacked and, at the same time, increase their own freedom to hit on females. (They must still be careful, say the researchers, because the older males might whiff their male scent, which cannot be suppressed.) [Agence France-Presse, 3-3-09]

Two workers at Yellowstone National Park were fired in May after being caught on surveillance video urinating into the Old Faithful geyser. [MSNBC-AP, 5-14-09]

Over a 10-week period this summer, nearly 200 young Saudi women are auditioning for a beauty pageant, but one called "Miss Beautiful Morals," in which physical attractiveness is irrelevant, replaced by judging of the ladies' observance of traditional Saudi values, especially the honoring of their mothers. Saudi Arabia does have pageants devoted to physical beauty, as reported in News of the Weird in 2007 and 2008, but those are contests for camels and goats, based on such criteria as (according to one camel breeder) "big eyes, long lashes and a long neck." [Indianapolis Star-AP, 5-7-09]

Kailash Singh, 63, who lives in a village near the holy city of Varanasi, India, told reporters in May that he had not bathed in the last 35 years, but for a good reason: remaining water-free would improve his chances of fathering a male instead of a female. (It hasn't worked, and he has moved on to a new cause, shunning baths until India's social problems are resolved.) Singh previously owned a shop, but became a farmer because customers increasingly declined to approach him. [Agence France-Presse, 5-12-09]

Recurring Theme: According to a March dispatch in London's Observer, activists in Mauritania have protested the new military government's support for an African tribal tradition of forcibly fattening up adolescent girls to make them appear "healthier" for early marriage (traditional in, among other countries, Nigeria, mentioned in News of the Weird in 1998). In the custom of "leblouh," the size of the female indicates "the size of her place in her man's heart." [The Guardian (London), 3-1-09]

Entomologists in San Antonio said in May that the "Raspberry ant" (whose colonies produce billions and cover everything in sight) had migrated north to within 75 miles of the city and would arrive by year's end, posing, said one, a "potential ecological disaster." [KENS-TV (San Antonio), 5-18-09]

A University of Florida researcher found, for a recent journal article, that mockingbirds, among all animals, are skilled at identifying particular humans who have displeased them and whom they wish to attack. [USA Today, 5-19-09]

In 1993 India Scott dated both Darryl Fletcher and Brandon Ventimeglia when she lived in Detroit and moved in with Fletcher in 1994 when she was about to give birth. Neither knew about the other, and she had told each man he was the father. For two difficult years, Scott somehow managed to juggle the men's visitations, but in March 1997 when she announced she was leaving the area, both Fletcher and Ventimeglia separately filed for custody of "his" son. Only then did Ventimeglia and Fletcher find out about each other. They took blood tests to determine which was the real father of the boy they had cared for for more than two years, and in May 1997 the blood test revealed that neither was. [St. Petersburg Times, 5-14-97]

Bad Sci-Fi Movies Come to Life: A portion of downtown Rotterdam, Netherlands, was blanketed in gluey white "silk" in May, from a six-week-long invasion of caterpillars that strip trees and cover them with gooey larvae. [Dutch Daily News, 5-27-09]

Nicola Bruce and her two toddlers, who live in government-assisted housing in Stoke-on-Trent, England, have awakened nearly every morning for two years to a fresh invasion of about 50 slugs, despite 30 attempts by contractors to find their source (in addition to the remodeling of the kitchen and bath and the bleaching of floors). [The Sentinel (Stoke-on-Trent), 1-14-09]

Two scientists from Britain's University of Oxford, on a three-year study costing the equivalent of nearly $500,000, found that ducks may be even more comfortable standing under a sprinkler than paddling around in a pond. Lead researcher Marian Stamp Dawkins concluded that ducks basically just like water. [The Guardian, 5-20-09]

Using GPS and state-of-the-art sonar, Columbia University researchers recently made the first comprehensive map of the wonders submerged in New York City's harbors. Supplementing those findings with historical data, New York magazine reported the inventory's highlights in May: a 350-foot steamship (downed in 1920), a freight train (derailed in 1865), 1,600 bars of silver (unrecovered since 1903), a fleet of Good Humor ice cream trucks (which form a reef for aquatic life), and so many junked cars near the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges that divers use them as underwater navigation points. Of most concern lately, though, are the wildlife: 4-foot-long worms that eat wooden docks and tiny "gribbles" that eat concrete pilings. [New York, 5-18-09]

In the Kings Creek area north of Lenoir, N.C., according to sheriff's deputies, two feuding families created a ruckus in May after a dog killed a neighbor's cat. When the cat's owner found out, he shot the dog dead. When the dog's owner found out, he shot the cat's owner and the man's young daughter. Deputies were called, and when they arrived, the dog's owner shot both of them, but one got off a return shot, fatally wounding the dog's owner (and completing the chain!).