conspiracy

WTF Fun Fact 12943 – A Conspiracy of Lemurs

Lemurs are fascinating creatures. They’re also diverse – there are 113 types of lemur, all native to Madagascar. Lemurs are social creatures that are active during the day and live in groups of up to 30. These groups are called a conspiracy of lemurs (or alternately a troop).

Why is it called a conspiracy of lemurs?

According to LiveScience (cited below), “Lemurs’ main predators are fossas (Cryptoprocta ferox) — carnivores that looks a bit like a cat or weasel. Lemurs can also become prey for large snakes, birds, humans and animals humans have introduced to Madagascar, such as domestic cats.”

By living in groups, it’s easier for lemurs to alert each other to dangers. The reason a group of lemurs is also called a “conspiracy” is that they work together (or conspire) to outsmart predators and stay safe.

Unfortunately, they can’t conspire to stop habitat destruction. “In 2020, the IUCN(opens in new tab) announced that 98% of all lemurs are threatened with extinction. The main reasons lemur populations have declined so significantly is because of habitat loss due to deforestation(opens in new tab) and hunting in Madagascar. Their habitat is often destroyed so that it can be used for agriculture, and they are hunted for food,” reports LiveScience.

Lemur mobbing

After conspiring to outsmart the predators they have some control over, lemurs also use a technique called “mobbing” to attack predators all at once.

Lemurs can jump up to six times their body length, so they presumably seem like they come out of nowhere and predators hardly get a chance to know what hit them (literally – conspiracies of lemurs have been known to beat large snakes to death).

Cooperative attacking and harassing (aka mobbing) is not limited to lemurs. Many species use this technique to eliminate the threat of predators.

These furry creatures seem to have quite a few sophisticated anti-predator behaviors. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Lemurs: A diverse group of endangered primates” — LiveScience

WTF Fun Fact 12549 – The Shugborough Inscription

Sometime between 1748 and 1756, Thomas Anson, a member of the British Parliament, commissioned a monument for his family’s estate, Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, England.

The stone arch features a relief by the Flemish sculptor Peter Scheemakers duplicating a 1638 painting by Nicolas Poussin called The Shepherds of Arcadia. But unlike the painting, the relief includes an extra sarcophagus with the words “I am also in Arcadia.”

But what really gets people riled up about the arch is an inscription on it that no one has explained. Of course, it can simply be something personal to the family, but pseudohistorians and conspiracy theorists have deemed it something bigger – a mysterious ciphertext.

The inscription is a series of letters – O U O S V A V V – between the offset letters D and M.

According to the most likely theory, handed down by Keith Massey, a linguist who teaches Arabic and Latin and was hired by the NSA to crack the code, it’s not a secret message worthy of worldwide attention.

For example, the letters D M can be found on Roman tombs and stand for Dis Manibus, which translates to “dedicated to the shades.”

With this clue in place, Massey postulated that the rest of the letters stood for “Oro Ut Omnes Sequantur Viam Ad Veram Vitam,” or “I pray that all may follow the Way to True Life.”

Frankly, that seems like a good enough explanation for a random monument in someone’s backyard. But the fact that people (including the likes of Charles Darwin) had been trying to decipher it for many years indicated to some that it has a much deeper meaning. Of course, there’s no way of knowing if that’s true, and it seems unlikely.

But conspiracy theorists won’t be denied their conspiracies. They’ve been egged on by the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which hypothesized that a secret society called the Priory of Sion is helping to keep the secret that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children. The authors acknowledge the book is fiction, but their passing reference to Poussin being a member of this group and his painting The Shepherds of Arcadia holding some clue to the location of the Holy Grail (which, in this case, is not a vessel but Mary Magdalene herself) has been enough to keep the conspiracy alive.

A spokesman for Shugborough House says they get numerous messages each week of someone claiming to have solved the “mystery,” and they’ve largely started ignoring them. After all, they could simply be initials or stand for something that would only be meaningful to the family that once lived there. But they are also partly to blame for the continued interest since a promotional campaign they launched to get more tourists made repeated references to the storyline in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. –  WTF fun fact

Source: “200-year-old mystery of Shugborough Code ‘solved,’” The Birmingham Post