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There are more wild camels in Australia than any other country in the world.

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Australia may now have the largest wild population of Arabian camels ( Camelus dromedarius) in the world. They live in most of Australia's desert country including the Great Sandy, Gibson, Great Victoria and Simpson deserts, as well as much of the semi-desert lands. Camels were first introduced into Australia in the 1840's to assist in the exploration of inland Australia. Between 1840 and 1907, between 10,000 and 20,000 camels were imported from India with an estimated 50-65% landed in South Australia.

Camels are highly mobile and may forage over 70 km per day. They form bachelor groups, which young males join after their second year, or family groups containing up to 30 adult females along with their one and two year old offspring. Feral aggregations of up to 500 individuals have been recorded in Australia. Camels have a low potential rate of increase with females usually giving birth to one young every second year, but they are long lived, up to 50 years, and have few mortality factors, other than by human intervention.

Camels are selective feeders with a preference for shrubs and trees rather than grasses. They can go for long periods without needing to drink, but during the heat of summer they will drink every day if water is available.

As large herbivores, camels add to the total grazing impact with damage likely to be most severe during and coming out of drought. They also destroy fences and are a potential carrier of exotic diseases that may be a threat to livestock. Camels are of concern to indigenous communities because they can foul water holes and damage ceremonial art and other cultural sites that are often associated with water holes.

The primary forms of management are trapping at water points, muster and shooting. There is a rapidly expanding industry based on camels, primarily for game meat, although some are also taken for live export and for use in the tourist industry. Fences that exclude camels but allow free access of native wildlife have been used to reduce their damage to key waterholes.

Watch this Meet the Ferals episode on feral camels to learn more.

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Australia may now have the largest wild population of Arabian camels ( Camelus dromedarius) in the world. They live in most of Australia's desert country including the Great Sandy, Gibson, Great Victoria and Simpson deserts, as well as much of the semi-desert lands.

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In 1492 the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed by Pope Alexander VI, which granted Spain all newly discovered land to the west of a demarcation line and Portugal all the land to the west, and this line cut through what we now know as Brazil.

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Treaty of Tordesillas | Summary, Definition, Map, & Facts

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Treaty of Tordesillas, agreement in 1494 between Spain and Portugal aimed at settling conflicts over the Western Hemisphere.

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In 1940, Spain was moved into the Central European time zone to strengthen relations between Franco's Spain and Hitler's Germany. This still affect's the Spanish way of life and can account for part of the stereotype that Spaniards are late to rise and late to bed.

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Spain Has Been In The ‘Wrong’ Time Zone For 7 Decades

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Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco set the country’s clocks an hour ahead in World War II in order to be aligned with Hitler’s Germany. Memo to Spain: the war is over, the Nazis lost and it’s OK to turn back the clocks now.

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In the 1700s in the Netherlands, there was a frenzy for tulip bulbs that drove the price up and up and up, and eventually, tulip bulbs created an economic bubble. Eventually, no one could afford the price of these bulbs, and eventually, the bubble popped, creating financial devastation for many around Holland. This continues to be one of the best examples of the perceived value of an object due to supply and demand.

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The Dutch Tulip Bubble ("Tulip Mania") was a speculative frenzy in 17th-century Holland over the sale of tulip bulbs. The bubble reached its height between 1633 and 1637. When doubts arose as to whether the price would continue to increase, the market collapsed quickly and severely, wiping out entire fortunes.

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The first recorded use of biological weapons was in 1347 when the Mongol army catapulted plague-infested bodies over a city wall, in what is now Ukraine. This was done to devastate the city so it could be easily overtaken. This is also believed to be the origin of the black plague in Europe which went on to kill one-third of the overall population.

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Pre-20th-century use of biological weapons

One of the first recorded uses of biological warfare occurred in 1347, when Mongol forces are reported to have catapulted plague-infested bodies over the walls into the Black Sea port of Caffa (now Feodosiya, Ukraine), at that time a Genoese trade centre in the Crimean Peninsula. Some historians believe that ships from the besieged city returned to Italy with the plague, starting the Black Death pandemic that swept through Europe over the next four years and killed some 25 million people (about one-third of the population).

In 1710 a Russian army fighting Swedish forces barricaded in Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia) also hurled plague-infested corpses over the city's walls. In 1763 British troops besieged at Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh) during Pontiac's Rebellion passed blankets infected with smallpox virus to the Indians, causing a devastating epidemic among their ranks.

Biological weapons in the World Wars

During World War I (1914-18) Germany initiated a clandestine program to infect horses and cattle owned by Allied armies on both the Western and Eastern fronts. The infectious agent for glanders was reported to have been used. For example, German agents infiltrated the United States and surreptitiously infected animals prior to their shipment across the Atlantic in support of Allied forces. In addition, there reportedly was a German attempt in 1915 to spread plague in St. Petersburg in order to weaken Russian resistance.

The horrors of World War I caused most countries to sign the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning the use of biological and chemical weapons in war. Nevertheless, Japan, one of the signatory parties to the protocol, engaged in a massive and clandestine research, development, production, and testing program in biological warfare, and it violated the treaty's ban when it used biological weapons against Allied forces in China between 1937 and 1945. The Japanese not only used biological weapons in China, but they also experimented on and killed more than 3,000 human subjects (including Allied prisoners of war) in tests of biological warfare agents and various biological weapons delivery mechanisms. The Japanese experimented with the infectious agents for bubonic plague, anthrax, typhus, smallpox, yellow fever, tularemia, hepatitis, cholera, gas gangrene, and glanders, among others.

Although there is no documented evidence of any other use of biological weapons in World War II, both sides had active research and development (R&D) programs. The Japanese use of biological warfare agents against the Chinese led to an American decision to undertake biological warfare research in order to understand better how to defend against the threat and provide, if necessary, a retaliatory capability. The United Kingdom, Germany, and the Soviet Union had similar R&D programs during World War II, but only Japan has been proved to have used such weapons in the war.

Biological weapons in the Cold War

In the Cold War era, which followed World War II, both the Soviet Union and the United States, as well as their respective allies, embarked on large-scale biological warfare R&D and weapons production programs. Those programs were required by law to be halted and dismantled upon the signing of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1972 and the entry into force of that treaty in 1975. In the case of the United States and its allies, compliance with the terms of the treaty appears to have been complete. Such was not the case with the Soviet Union, which conducted an aggressive clandestine biological warfare program even though it had signed and ratified the treaty. The lack of a verification regime to check members' compliance with the BWC made it easier for the Soviets to flout the treaty without being detected.

After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and its subsequent division into 15 independent states, Russian Pres. Boris Yeltsin confirmed that the Soviet Union had violated the BWC, and he pledged to terminate what remained of the old Soviet biological weapons program. ( See also yellow rain.) However, another problem remained-that of the potential transfer of information, technical assistance, production equipment, materials, and even finished biological weapons to states and groups outside the borders of the former Soviet Union. The United States and the former Soviet republics pledged to work together to contain the spread of biological warfare capabilities. With financing from the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction Program and other sources, help in obtaining civilian jobs in other fields was also made available for some of the estimated 60,000 scientists and technicians who had worked in the Soviet biological warfare programs.

Biological weapons proliferation

Of the more than 190 members of the United Nations, only a dozen or so are strongly suspected of having ongoing biological weapons programs. However, such programs can be easily hidden and disguised as vaccine plants and benign pharmaceutical-production centres. Biological weapons are not as expensive to manufacture as nuclear weapons, yet a lethal biological weapon might nonetheless be the strategic weapon that would win a war. This prospect of military advantage might tempt some regimes to acquire the weapons, though perhaps clandestinely.

Since the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) has no existing verification or inspection procedures to verify compliance by its signatories, cheating on the treaty might be done with no outside proof to the contrary. It is entirely possible that even a small and relatively poor state might successfully embark on a biological warfare program with a small capital investment and a few dozen biologists, all of which could be secretly housed within a few buildings. In fact, a biological weapons program might also be within the technical and financial reach of a terrorist organization. In summary, the degree of biological weapons proliferation is highly uncertain, difficult to detect, and difficult to quantify.

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Biological weapon - Biological weapons in history

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Biological weapon - Biological weapon - Biological weapons in history: One of the first recorded uses of biological warfare occurred in 1347, when Mongol forces are reported to have catapulted plague-infested bodies over the walls into the Black Sea port of Caffa (now Feodosiya, Ukraine), at that time a Genoese trade centre in the Crimean Peninsula.

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Spain is home to one of the most unique and interesting languages in the world, with around 3 million people in the north of Spain speaking Euskara, or Basque, which is an isolated language that is not related to any other language family and it truly is a mystery how it developed and how it has survived to the present day.

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Basque is the language spoken on both sides of the western end of the Pyrenees. Discover its historical evolution and much more.

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Sea otters often hold hands together to keep from drifting apart while they sleep in the water. I am a big fan of otters and I think this is one of their most endearing habits.