As people join together to watch the eclipse, scientists and observers get ready to study wildlife responses to darkness - Entrepreneur Generations

Some animals seem to respond to mid-day darkness.
(Photo by Luca Serazzi, CC 2.0 via Atlas Obscura)

While many people are making plans to watch the total eclipse on April 8, some animal lovers and scientists are preparing to study nature's responses to the mid-day darkness. "When the moon consumes the sun, the day will plunge into twilight, the temperature will drop — and nature will take notice," reports Carolyn Y. Johnson of The Washington Post. "Plenty of scientists see eclipses as rare opportunities to bolster anecdotal reports by studying how nature responds — or doesn't — to a few minutes of dusk in the
middle of the day."

Past animal events have included lightning bugs that start blinking in the darkening afternoon and nocturnal animals lurking about. Some apiary scientists "found that the environmental cues overrode bees' own internal circadian clocks, with darkness causing them to return to the hive and hunker down," Johnson writes. "Those findings square with another study that found bees stopped buzzing around flowers during totality."

Researchers can use data from the 2017 eclipse and compare it to this year's event. Johnson writes, "In the 50 minutes before and after totality in 2017, researchers monitoring flying insects and birds via the weather radar network found that the skies went eerily quiet, but there was an intriguing uptick of activity right at totality."

Scientists will also study plant responses to afternoon darkness. Daniel Beverly, a plant ecophysiologist at Indiana University, "studied how sagebrush in Wyoming reacted during the 2017 eclipse," Johnson reports. "The scientists found that photosynthesis plummeted during totality, then took hours to recover from the shock of the sun reemerging minutes later."

NASA's "Where and When" eclipse map is found here.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/RW1J3ye As people join together to watch the eclipse, scientists and observers get ready to study wildlife responses to darkness - Entrepreneur Generations

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