![]() “What I’m doing now is a worldwide investigation about biodiversity and the way it changed … from the time of Darwin until today,” Rault says in an interview. 12, 2021, and for the next four years will navigate the same route traveled by the Beagle: along the Atlantic coast of Africa, toward South America, around Cape Horn to Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands, French Polynesia in the South Pacific, Tasmania in Australia, the Keeling Islands and Mauritius, and then back to England. Aboard a sailing ship named after the naturalist, Rault left Plymouth on Sept. The French documentary maker is the creator of the Captain Darwin Project, which follows in the footsteps of the English researcher and explorer almost two centuries later. When they spot a palatable tree, their comings and goings naturally create a track, that they keep free of vegetation by spreading a natural pesticide that they have on their body.” They do not only practice agriculture, but they are road builders too. The pieces of leaves we see them carrying around can measure up to 20 times the size of their bodies! They can cut and transport the leaves thanks to their powerful mandibles. One hundred and sixty-three years after the publication of that seminal book, Victor Rault shares a similar view on his social media accounts about the encounter with the same insects in Rio de Janeiro state: “Ants are extraordinary. A colony may have up to 3 million individuals. “A person, on first entering a tropical forest, is astonished at the labours of the ants: well-beaten paths branch off in every direction, on which an army of never-failing foragers may be seen, some going forth, and others returning, burdened with pieces of green leaf, often larger than their own bodies,” he wrote in On the Origin of Species. The Beagle docked in Bahia and then Rio de Janeiro, both in Brazil, where Darwin described his observation of two leafcutter ant species of the genera Atta (known locally as saúva) and Acromyrmex ( quenquém). Upon leaving the port of Plymouth in southern England in December 1831, the vessel made stops in the Canary Islands and Cape Verde, both off the West African coast, before heading for South America. He based his theory on a lifetime of observations, including those made 28 years earlier during his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, which sailed around the globe for five years. With On the Origin of Species, he introduced the scientific world to the concept of natural selection in plants and animals. It was in 1859 when British naturalist Charles Darwin published the work that’s still considered the basis of evolutionary biology. At the end of his four-year voyage, Rault plans to write a book and make a documentary: “My aim is to predict what the world will look like if we decide to take action as a global community now, and not wait for the extinction of all the species.”.Rault has already made stops in Brazil, in the same places that Darwin visited, and recorded a mixed picture as a result of widespread deforestation: a decline in sloth numbers, but a boom in the population of leafcutter ants.His goal is to retrace the same route taken by famed naturalist Charles Darwin nearly 200 years earlier and assess how the species he described in the 19th century are faring today.12, 2021, French documentary maker Victor Rault set sail from Plymouth, England, aboard his sailing ship, the Captain Darwin.
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