The Taipei first girls high school marching band perform at the 134th rose parade in Pasadena, California on January 2, 2023. (Photo by Michael Owen Baker/AP Photo)

A woman holds a disguised cuy or guinea pig (Cavia Porcellus), a popular source of meat in southern Colombia, at the Cuy Festival in La Laguna municipality, Nariño department, Colombia, on January 7, 2022. (Photo by JOaquin Sarmiento/AFP Photo)

A street performer walks past an image of a Russian serviceman reading “The Motherland we defend” at a street exhibition of military photos in St. Petersburg, Russia, Tuesday, March 14, 2023. A campaign to replenish Russian troops in Ukraine with more soldiers appears to be underway again, with makeshift recruitment centers popping up in cities and towns, and state institutions posting ads promising cash bonuses and benefits to entice men to sign contracts enabling them to be sent into the battlefield. (Photo by AP Photo/Stringer)

The night view of the National Assembly Building and Yeouido in Yeongdeungpo District, Seoul taken on the December 27, 2024. The lights shine in a cross shape thanks to the cross filter used. (Photo by Koh Woon-ho)

A woman falls while slipping on ice during freezing rain on Roosevelt Island, a borough of Manhattan, in New York January 5, 2014. New York City was hit on Friday by the first severe winter storm of 2014 and was still in the grip of sub-freezing weather on Sunday morning. The woman got up and walked away from the fall. (Photo by Zoran Milich/Reuters)

“Cassowaries are large, flightless birds related to emus and (more distantly) to ostriches, rheas, and kiwis”, writes Olivia Judson in the September issue of National Geographic magazine. How large? People-size: Adult males stand well over five foot five and top 110 pounds. Females are even taller, and can weigh more than 160 pounds. Dangerous when roused, they’re shy and peaceable when left alone. But even birds this big and tough are prey to habitat loss. The dense New Guinea and Australia rain forests where they live have dwindled. Today cassowaries might number 1,500 to 2,000. And because they help shape those same forests – by moving seeds from one place to another – “if they vanish”, Judson writes, “the structure of the forest would gradually change” too. (Photo by Christian Ziegler/National Geographic)

A shoebill is displayed at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo August 28, 2012. (Photo by Itsuo Inouye/Associated Press)

Juno, a Beluga whale, greets a young viewer at the Mystic aquarium in Connecticut, USA on December 5, 2015. (Photo by Tim Clayton/Corbis)