Man what a beautiful bit if knowledge, reminds me a bit of the eel mystery. Thanks to the researchers doing this sort of work, and I hope their conservation efforts go well
To do your question justice would take a while but its quite an interesting story to google. The gist: We did not have confirmation of where NA/EU freshwater eels laid their eggs until 2022. No one has ever seen them reproduce. This mystery is also old: Aristotle wrote about it. They have been an enigma for a long period of human history despite being an important part of it!
Also, before he got famous for inventing diagnosing everyone with penis envy, Freud spent a summer trying and failing to find the eels' reproductive organs.
Reading the article, makes me think that mined areas are good for conservation. When the Angolan area where they congregate is demined their numbers might start declining.
They weren't "missing": GPS-tagged red-footed falcons revealed that they migrate to a tiny communal roost in central Angola (“Falcopolis”) each February–March.
There, saved you a click (disappointed on National Geographic for that clickbaity headline).
Is this actually clickbait? The title is in the form of many clickbait title, but I'd argue it delivers; the article is more interesting than the title.
I suggest readers spend the click and the five minutes.
I just looked it up and MW’s definition of “missing” is “absent” or “lost” or “needed or expected but not included”. Dictionary.com says “absent, not found, or lost” and “lacking”. Wiktionary says “Not able to be located; gone, misplaced”, “Not present when it (they) should be”, and “Of an internal combustion engine: running roughly due to an occasional lack of a spark or other irregular fault.”
A common theme is that for something to be “missing,” it should not be where you expect it to be. But if your expectation is invalid, then it’s not “missing,” you simply have wrong expectations, which is the case with these falcons.
For example, I could say that there are a million falcons missing from my front yard right now. Do you think that’s a valid way to describe it?
You have a valid reason to expect that your keys are in the place you remember leaving them.
That’s not the case with large flocks of living animals. In that case, you’re simply making a category error in imagining that those living animals behave much like your keys.
> disappointed on National Geographic for that clickbaity headline
I don't think there's a single name brand from "before internet" that has survived without turning into a clickbait chaser of ad revenue above all else.
Flock cameras are for surveilling normal citizen and is used for suppressing freedom, quelling protests and to fulfill capitalist wildest dream to make America like China not for flocks of falcons.
It appeared to be a question about Flock cameras. It really was a double entendre where Flock could be taken to mean a flock of birds. Normally, explaining a joke removes all the humor.
