Frigatebirds are a family—Fregatidae—of seabirds found across all tropical and subtropical oceans. The five living species are classified in a single genus, Fregata. All have predominantly black plumage, long, deeply forked tails and long hooked bills. Their pointed wings can span up to 2.3 metres (7.5 ft), with the largest wing area to body weight ratio of any bird. Females have white bellies and males have a distinctive red gular pouch, which they inflate during the breeding season. Able to soar for days on wind currents, frigatebirds spend most of the day in flight hunting for food. They mainly eat fish and squid that have been chased to the surface by large predators such as tuna. Frigatebirds are kleptoparasites as they occasionally rob other seabirds for food, and are known to snatch seabird chicks from the nest. Three of the five species are widespread, while two are endangered and restrict their breeding habitat to one small island each. The oldest fossils date to the early Eocene, around 50 million years ago; classified in the genus Limnofregata, those birds had shorter less-hooked bills and longer legs, and lived in a freshwater environment.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigatebird
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1629:
Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, and Danish King Christian IV signed the Treaty of Lübeck to end Danish intervention in the Thirty Years' War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_L%C3%BCbeck
1816:
A riot broke out in Littleport, Cambridgeshire, England, over high unemployment and rising grain costs, spreading to Ely the next day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ely_and_Littleport_riots_of_1816
1856:
US Congressman Preston Brooks attacked Senator Charles Sumner with a cane for a speech Sumner had made attacking Southerners who sympathized with the pro-slavery violence in Kansas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner
1958:
Ethnic rioting broke out in Ceylon, targeted mostly at the minority Sri Lankan Tamils, resulting in up to 300 deaths over the next five days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_anti-Tamil_pogrom
1980:
Pac-Man, an arcade game that became an icon of 1980s popular culture, made its debut in Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
protaspis: (paleontology) A stage in the development of a trilobite where the creature has not yet developed articulated segments. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/protaspis
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
The ancient intuition that all matter, all “reality,” is energy, that all phenomena, including time and space, are mere crystallizations of mind, is an idea with which few physicists have quarreled since the theory of relativity first called into question the separate identities of energy and matter. Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form; that matter is insubstantial in origin, a temporary aggregate of the pervasive energy that animates the electron. … The cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the center of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no center. Such an idea holds no terror for mystics; in the mystical vision, the universe, its center, and its origins are simultaneous, all around us, all within us, and all One. --Peter Matthiessen https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Matthiessen