Innehållsförteckning för May 2023 från National Geographic Magazine

THERE ARE FEW SPECIES on the planet that fascinate us quite like elephants. With their long lives and enormous brains, their complex social networks, and, of course, those incredible trunks that do everything from grasping food to drinking and holding water, elephants feel both prehistoric in their majesty and also somehow like us. It’s no surprise we’ve long associated them with intelligence, strength, and wisdom. In the new series Secrets of the Elephants, on National Geographic and Disney+, National Geographic Explorer Paula Kahumbu takes you from Africa to Asia, across the varied ecosystems in which elephants live, to bring to life the biology, behaviors, and adaptations that make them one of Earth’s most extraordinary creatures. You’ll also meet people worldwide who are studying them and working to protect them. As…

AFRICAN ELEPHANTS Elephants once inhabited most of Africa. Today two species of the world’s largest land animal roam sub-Saharan and West Africa. TUSKED AND TUSKLESS Forest elephants navigate dense rainforests with straight tusks, which also allow them to dig for salt. Savanna elephants have curved tusks. Female Asian elephants are tuskless—and therefore not at risk for ivory poaching. EARS ON THE GROUND Elephants can hear varying vocalizations, from high-pitched trumpets to thunder-like rumbles that resonate from miles away. Receptors on their feet pick up vibrations, conducting sound to the inner ear. HERD BEHAVIOR Elephant societies range from free-associating individuals to large female clans in a multitiered, matrilineal structure; groups can fuse or fissure over time. Males usually live alone or form groups. All three species have life spans of 60…

Some 500 federally funded boarding schools for Native children were opened in the U.S. and Canada beginning in the 1800s. Most focused on religious conversion, often through forced manual labor and brutal punishment. In some cases, children were sent thousands of miles from home.…

“IT MAKES YOU SMALL,” Stefano Unterthiner says of Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago perched in the high Arctic, where he and his family spent a year. In 2019 the Italian photographer moved with his wife, Stéphanie, and their young son and daughter to Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s largest settlement. They felt at ease right away: Though the town is home to only about 2,100 people—scientists, tour operators, students—they come from around the globe and represent some 50 nationalities. To learn how a vulnerable ecosystem changes in this fastest-warming place on Earth, Unterthiner went in search of Arctic wildlife. He traveled by snowmobile and on foot, equipped with binoculars and a mandatory rifle, as well as camera gear. He found fjords melting, avalanches increasing, and rain-drenched permafrost icing over the vegetation the wildlife must…

With translucent skin and muscles, the glass frogs of Central and South America blend in with the green leaves they rest on during the day. But the camouflage is even more complicated than scientists realized, a study published in Science reveals. When Fleischmann’s glass frogs (Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni) sleep, they store up to 89 percent of their darkly colored red blood cells within crystal-covered livers. The crystals seem to act as a mirror, reflecting incoming light rather than allowing blood cells to absorb it. With their red blood cells stored away, the sleeping frogs become two to three times more transparent than the wakeful ones, by the study’s measurements. Particularly intriguing: The H. fleischmanni frogs seem to suffer no ill effects from hours with those cells in one place—and still clot…

MIEP GIES WAS A recently married young office worker living in Amsterdam in 1942. As German occupiers tightened their grip on the city, Gies’s boss, Otto Frank, asked her to hide him and his family from the Nazis, who were sending Jews to concentration camps. For the next two years, Gies risked her life daily to smuggle food to the Franks and four others concealed in secret rooms above Otto’s business. When she could no longer protect the family—when the Nazis finally came and took them away in 1944—Gies kept their story alive by saving Anne Frank’s journals. She’s the reason the world has The Diary of a Young Girl. Later in Gies’s life, people called her heroic. Believing she simply did what she could in evil times, she is…

AS WE SQUELCH through the wet mud, Nisar Ahmed M.K. suddenly motions to crouch low. The surrounding foliage, washed vibrant green by a recent rain, has opened onto a pond, where a few young elephants splash about, tumbling over each other. The rest of the herd of about 20 elephants watches nearby in this coffee plantation in Hassan, a district in southern India. Behind us are the plantation quarters, simple structures with red-tiled roofs, whose residents often cross paths with these multi-ton pachyderms. From 2021 to 2022, elephants killed 12 people in Hassan, population 1.8 million. In the same period four elephants died, among which one was shot, one electrocuted, and another run over by a train. Most of the 65 or so elephants in the region bear bumps believed…

THEY LOOK LIKE VISITORS FROM ANOTHER WORLD. Some sprout short stalks capped with salmon-hued baubles; others collect in foamy-looking masses or sprawl in rippling yellow webs. Despite their otherworldly looks, these colorful globs are indeed Earthlings. They’re slime molds, a hodgepodge of different species across multiple groups, some only distantly related. And despite their name, these blobby creatures are not related to mold but are among the large group of mostly single-celled organisms known as Amoebozoa. Slime molds flourish in damp environments around the world, like the nooks of decomposing logs on forest floors. In your own backyard, they may emerge among the chips of mulch. Mycologist Marie Trest of the University of Wisconsin-Madison fondly recalls a particularly wet summer when patches of slime mold speckled her yard. When she…

WHO A software engineer and hobbyist photographer, based in San Francisco WHERE Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve WHAT Sony Alpha 1 camera with a 600mm lens Scan this QR code to see all 10 of the contest’s top photographs at natgeo.com/photocontestwinner. “Whenever there’s salmon, there’s going to be chaos.” This became Karthik Subramaniam’s motto as he watched for action at the water’s edge on the final day of his visit to Haines, Alaska. Near the town, one of the world’s largest congregations of bald eagles gathers every fall during the salmon run. He noticed a few eagles perched on a branch, seemingly waiting for their more adventurous peers to arrive ashore with a freshly caught fish. Then an eagle swooped in, displacing another to claim the prime spot. Subramaniam now…

FOR AS LONG AS he can remember, Visarute Angkatavanich has been fascinated by fish. At age seven he took up photography, first with a disposable Kodak camera and later with his father’s Nikon FM. But it wasn’t until he became a dad and started spending more time at his home in Bangkok that he merged the two passions. Angkatavanich studied the traits and care of Siamese fighting fish, also known by the apt scientific name Betta splendens. Then he procured some from a pet store in the city’s Chatuchak Market and began photographing them, experimenting with different enclosures and lighting. “I can’t ask the fish to act like people,” he says, so he learned to coax them into various positions by changing the size and shape of the tanks. A…

AT THE END OF THE LAST ICE AGE Scotland was a truly wild place, where the Highland tiger, a distinctly banded wildcat, as well as wolves, lynx, and bears, roamed among Caledonian pine forests. The Romans called the country’s north the Great Wood of Caledon. But over time, humans purged the Highlands for timber, charcoal, and agriculture. Native species such as wild boar, polecat, and elk vanished. Today only 4 percent of Scotland’s land area is covered by forest. Now an alliance of environmental groups and government agencies is pooling resources on a larger scale than ever before in an effort to rebuild Scottish ecosystems to their natural states. Some of the coalition’s goals include committing a third of public land to nature restoration by 2030, expanding tree-planting projects, and…

“THEY’RE ALL IN TROUBLE,” says Kenyan ecologist Paula Kahumbu. “All elephants are in major, major trouble.” Populations of the three species have declined: savanna elephants, the largest land animals on the planet, trundling across sub-Saharan Africa; forest elephants, their straight-tusked cousins, navigating the shadows of Africa’s equatorial woodlands; and the smaller-eared Asian elephants, about a third of which live in captivity. And we’re to blame. We’ve expanded into elephant territory, building homes and roads, felling forests and planting crops. More cruelly, people have indulged their desire for ivory trinkets that come from a dead elephant’s tusk. Although elephants are difficult to count, one estimate suggests that the African continent may have been home to some 26 million elephants at the beginning of the 19th century. That number has since plummeted,…

PATRICIA WHITEFOOT doesn’t remember everything from her time at the Yakima Indian Christian Mission, a boarding school on the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington State. “I do remember the runaways,” says Whitefoot, who says she was five or six at the time. “I would witness the older girls running away, and we all had to keep a secret as the girls prepared to run away from the mission. And we did.” Whitefoot, now 73, also remembers missionaries showing up at her grandparents’ house on the reservation. Soon afterward she found herself in a dormitory with other Native girls. For the next few years, her life consisted of rules, farmwork, and little affection from the adults in charge. What she can’t forget is the cloud of otherness, fear, and control that permeated…

IN KOSOVO, A VERY YOUNG COUNTRY of war-scarred survivors, everyone has a story that is almost too painful to recount—except here they are, alive to tell it, and insistent that the world listen. So it is that in the parliament building in the capital city of Pristina, I step into the office of the National Assembly’s 36-year-old deputy speaker, Saranda Bogujevci, whose warm smile and firm handshake do not altogether succeed in deflecting attention from the deep, pale scars on her forearm above her disfigured left hand. Nor does Bogujevci shy from describing the origins of those wounds. She was 13 on March 28, 1999, when a Serbian paramilitary unit descended on the town of Podujevë where Saranda and her family lived. The soldiers herded the 21 Bogujevcis into a garden, pushed…