TAKE A COAL SHOWER: As coal-fired power plants try to rein in their air pollution — not necessarily carbon dioxide emissions, but more direct pollutants like sulfur dioxide — they're increasingly faced with a new problem: water pollution. Plants like Hatfield's Ferry in Masontown, Pa., have installed "scrubbers," which work by blasting smokestack emissions with water, trapping some of the pollutants so the cleaner, lighter smoke can waft upward. The problem, reports the NY Times' Charles Duhigg, is that the toxic pollutants essentially jump out of the frying pan and into the water, which must still be put somewhere. At Hatfield's Ferry, "somewhere" is the Monongahela River, a receptacle made possible by lax or nonexistent federal regulations of how power plants must dispose of such wastewater. Duhigg's coverage is part of the Times' "Toxic Waters" series, and includes a video and an interactive graphic showing a national map of power plants that have violated the Clean Water Act. (Source: New York Times)

 

TANGLED WEB: About 40,000 spiders have been documented over the course of human history, and so far they've all been red-blooded meat-eaters. But a newly discovered spider in Central America is the first-ever vegetarian spider known to science. Dubbed Bagheera kiplingi, the spider lives in acacia shrubs and feeds primarily on leaves, not insects as virtually all other spiders do. While other spider species had been seen drinking nectar before, this is the first one known to live on plant matter. Observations of their behavior and chemical studies of their bodies show they eat almost exclusively acacia — the few insects they do eat are ants that also live among the acacia, acting as the shrubs' "bodyguards" from other hungry herbivores. The spider normally dodges the ants by living high up on the shrub, mostly using the older stalks that ants patrol less often. When the spider does decide to dine on an ant, it mimics their movements, the researchers noticed, carrying itself in jerky movements until it makes the kill. (Sources: New Scientist, e! Science News)

 

GONE TO THE DOGFISH: The dogfish has become a scapegoat for crashing fish stocks, the AP reports, with one commercial fisherman referring to the slender, bug-eyed shark species as "a [expletive] plague of locusts." Dogfish are notoriously ravenous predators, eating anything from cod to other dogfish, and their range stretches along the U.S. East Coast, from Nova Scotia to Florida. But, much like many of the fish they rob from fishermen, dogfish are also threatened after being overfished in the late 1990s. They've rebounded along the coasts, where fishermen are seeing them in large numbers, but regulators say they're still weak overall. And while they may be helping keep some other fish populations low, the real culprit in collapsing fisheries is decades of overfishing, says a shark specialist with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. "I think it's a very popular notion to say this voracious predator is scarfing up all the good stuff," she tells the AP. "The facts don't back it up." (Source: Associated Press)

 

A CATCHY TUNA: Speaking of overfishing, the bluefin tuna's days may be numbered. The Cadillac of the open ocean — which has been known to cruise at 40 mph and traverse the entire Atlantic in short periods — is being hunted toward extinction for sushi, largely to be consumed in Japan. The highly migratory bluefin haunts U.S. waters among its other territories, but it increasingly seems like a ghost; the species has fallen 82 percent since the 1970s. It's now being considered for addition to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, a 1975 global pact that has been critical in saving whales, tigers and other endangered animals. CITES' participating countries only convene every couple of years, and the deadline for listing new species this year is tomorrow, Oct. 14. NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco has until then to back the proposal to add bluefin tuna. (Source: Los Angeles Times)

 

WINGING IT: A Minnesota couple will donate more than 2 million specimens of moths and butterflies to the Florida Museum of Natural History, making it one of the largest such collections on Earth, with a total of more than 9 million specimens. The donation, worth about $41 million, fills in many gaps and includes specimens from areas that are now inaccessible — such as Afghanistan, North Korea and Pakistan — as well as some from habitats that have since been destroyed by humans. Some were even collected in the 18th and 19th centuries by peers of Charles Darwin. Begun by a Minnesota doctor while he was in medical school in the 1970s, the collection may also include more than 1,000 species that have never been identified. (Source: USA Today)

 

CHEETAHS ALWAYS WIN: Male cheetahs are known to sometimes hunt in groups, one of the few times big cats (aside from lions) break from their solitude shtick. Unlike solo-hunting female cheetahs, males team up to increase their chances of catching food and females while protecting their turf. Despite this strength in numbers, however, even groups of male cheetahs rarely take on prey that a single male couldn't handle on his own. And since cheetahs are such slight, lean creatures, they don't usually pursue large, burly animals like eland, oryx or ostriches. But a BBC film crew has gotten evidence of a band of cheetah brothers cooperatively hunting an ostrich — a supersized bird that can continue running while carrying a full-grown cheetah on its back. Such cheetah behavior has never been documented before, and possibly never even seen, and a BBC producer says the ostrich-hunting will probably die out when these cheetahs do, since, unlike females, they're raising no offspring who can learn the technique. (Source: BBC News)

 

— Russell McLendon