Volunteer divers just pulled 3200 pounds of garbage off the ocean floor of Florida’s Deerfield Beach. Imagine if we had cleanup efforts like this all over the world!

To anyone who thinks that flying squirrels actually fly – Wrong! They have membranes that are located between their front and back legs which allow them to glide! 

Photographer Franco Banfi and his fellow divers were following this pod of sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) when the giants suddenly seemed to fall into a vertical slumber. This phenomenon was first studied in 2008 when a team of biologists from the UK and Japan inadvertently drifted into a group of non-responsive sperm whales floating just below the surface.

Baffled by the behavior, the scientists analyzed data from tagged whales and discovered that these massive marine mammals spend about 7 percent of their time taking short (6- to 24-minute) rests in this shallow vertical position. Scientists think these brief naps may, in fact, be the only time the whales sleep.

Photo by Franco Banfi, a finalist in the 2017 Big Picture Competition.

You can see more of the Switzerland-based photographer’s underwater photography on his website and Instagram.


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Opossums attract and then kill thousands of ticks per acre, per week, making them one of our best allies in stopping the spread of Lyme disease, researchers say.


A study compared squirrels, mice and opossums, which all eat ticks, and found opossums were the most effective exterminators.

Ticks favor opossums twice as much as the other rodents, the researchers, from Syracuse University, found.

Fortunately, for humans, possums are also the most effective at killing the disease-carrying pests.

Opossums kill almost every tick that occupies them, the study found. A single opossum kills over 5500 ticks per week.

“Opossums are extraordinarily good groomers it turns out – we never would have thought that ahead of time – but they kill the vast majority – more than 95% percent of the ticks that try to feed on them,” disease ecologist Rick Ostfeld explained.

“So these opossums are walking around the forest floor, hoovering up ticks right and left, killing over 90% of these things, and so they are really protecting our health.”

Worldwide, more than 1.3 million people die each year of infectious diseases transmitted by a vector, such as a mosquito, sand fly or tick, according to the World Health Organization.

Vector-borne diseases also inflict heavy tolls on crops, livestock and wildlife, the study’s authors wrote.

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