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Jellyfish-Like Sprite Makes Surprising Appearance in Sky

Jellyfish-Like Sprite Makes Surprising Appearance in Sky
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Jellyfish-Like Sprite Makes Surprising Appearance in Sky

Jellyfish-Like Sprite Makes Surprising Appearance in Sky

If you've ever looked up during a thunderstorm and glimpsed a red jellyfish sitting high in the sky, you weren't hallucinating. These tentacle-like spurts of red lightning are called sprites. They're ultrafast bursts of electricity that crackle through the upper regions of the atmosphere, between 37 and 50 miles (60 and 80 kilometers) up in the sky, and move towards space, according to the European Space Agency. The phenomenon is a rare sighting: It lasts just tenths of a second and can be hard to see from the ground since it's generally obscured by storm clouds. But Stephen Hummel, a dark-skies specialist at the McDonald Observatory, captured a spectacular image of one of these sprites on July 2 from a ridge on Mount Locke in Texas.

"Sprites usually appear to the eye as very brief, dim, grey structures. You need to be looking for them to spot them, and oftentimes I am not certain I actually saw one until I check the camera footage to confirm," Hummel told Business Insider.

On the night he snapped this photo, he'd recorded 4 1/2 hours of footage before capturing the sprite on film. "Overall I've probably recorded close to 70 hours' worth of footage and stills this year, and caught about 70 sprites," he said, adding that half of those were in a single storm.

Davis Sentman, a professor of physics at the University of Alaska who died in 2011, proposed the name "sprite" for this type of weather phenomenon. He said the name was "well suited to describe their appearance."

Some sprites, like the one Hummel photographed, are jellyfish-shaped. Others are just vertical columns of red light with tendrils snaking down: these are called carrot sprites. Jellyfish sprites can be enormous – the one Hummel photographed was "probably around 30 miles long and 30 miles tall," he said. Some can be seen from more than 300 miles (500 kilometers) away.

"They occur because when lightning strikes the ground, it tends to release positive electrical energy that needs to be balanced out by equal and oppositely charged energy elsewhere in the sky. So sprites are the electrical discharges that balance the equation. The more powerful the storm and the more lightning it produces, the more likely it is to produce a sprite," Hummel explained.

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Researchers Document Huge Drop in African Elephants in a Half Century

Elephants walk at the Amboseli National Park in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 4, 2024. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo
Elephants walk at the Amboseli National Park in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 4, 2024. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo
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Researchers Document Huge Drop in African Elephants in a Half Century

Elephants walk at the Amboseli National Park in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 4, 2024. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo
Elephants walk at the Amboseli National Park in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 4, 2024. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi/File Photo

African elephants are Earth's largest land animals, remarkable mammals that are very intelligent and highly social. They also are in peril. Fresh evidence of this comes in a study that documents alarming population declines at numerous sites across the continent over about a half century.

Researchers unveiled on Monday what they called the most comprehensive assessment of the status of the two African elephant species - the savanna elephant and forest elephant - using data on population surveys conducted at 475 sites in 37 countries from 1964 through 2016.

The savanna elephant populations fell by about 70% on average at the surveyed sites and the forest elephant populations dropped by about 90% on average at the surveyed sites, with poaching and habitat loss the main drivers. All told, there was a 77% population decrease on average at the various surveyed sites, spanning both species, Reuters reported.

Elephants vanished at some sites while their populations increased in other places thanks to conservation efforts.

"A lot of the lost populations won't come back, and many low-density populations face continued pressures. We likely will lose more populations going forward," said George Wittemyer, a Colorado State University professor of wildlife conservation and chair of the scientific board of the conservation group Save the Elephants, who helped lead the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Poaching typically involves people killing elephants for their tusks, which are sold illegally on an international black market driven mostly by ivory demand in China and other parts of Asia. Agricultural expansion is the top factor in habitat loss.

The forest elephant population is estimated to be about a third that of savanna elephants. Poaching has affected forest elephants disproportionately and has ravaged populations of both species in northern and eastern Africa.

"We have lost a number of elephant populations across many countries, but the northern Sahel region of Africa - for example in Mali, Chad and Nigeria - has been particularly hard hit. High pressure and limited protection have culminated in populations being extirpated," Wittemyer said.

But in southern Africa, elephant populations rose at 42% of the surveyed sites.

"We have seen real success in a number of places across Africa, but particularly in southern Africa, with strong growth in populations in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia. For populations showing positive trends, we have had active stewardship and management by the governments or outside groups that have taken on a management role," Wittemyer said.

The study did not track a continent-wide population tally because the various surveys employed different methodologies over different time frames to estimate local elephant population density, making a unified head count impossible. Instead, it assessed population trends at each of the surveyed sites.

A population estimate by conservationists conducted separately from this study put the two species combined at between 415,000 and 540,000 elephants as of 2016, the last year of the study period. It remains the most recent comprehensive continent-wide estimate.

"The loss of large mammals is a significant ecological issue for Africa and the planet," said conservation ecologist and study co-author Dave Balfour, a research associate in the Centre for African Conservation Ecology at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa.

The world's third extant elephant species, the slightly smaller Asian elephant, faces its own population crisis, with similar factors at play as in Africa.

Of African elephants, Wittemyer said, "While the trends are not good, it is important to recognize the successes we have had and continue to have. Learning how and where we can be successful in conserving elephants is as important as recognizing the severity of the decline they have experienced."

Wittemyer added of these elephants: "Not only one of the most sentient and intelligent species we share the planet with, but also an incredibly important part of ecosystems in Africa that structures the balance between forest and grasslands, serves as a critical disperser of seeds, and is a species on which a multitude of other species depend on for survival."