Pics du jour

🐻🏆 128 “Grazer” won Fat Bear Week in a landslide. The ~700-pound bear made Fat Bear Week history yesterday by becoming the first competitor to win while caring for a cub. In a rematch of last year’s finals, Grazer soundly defeated 32 “Chunk” to claim a second straight victory that also felt deeply personal to her fans, as Chunk had attacked and killed Grazer’s second offspring earlier this summer.

🌀 Hurricane Milton re-intensified to a Category 5 storm. Milton appears headed for the Tampa area, where it's expected to make landfall as a Category 3 storm late tonight or early Thursday. The National Hurricane Center is warning of a life-threatening storm surge up to 15 feet high. Florida officials have issued mandatory evacuation orders for 11 counties, encompassing ~5.9 million people.

🪼 An alien-like species of deep sea jellyfish fuse their bodies together when injured. In a study published this week in Current Biology, researchers described how comb jellies (aka ctenophores) tend to fuse together when injured, creating a single massive individual with permanently combined nervous systems and stomachs. It marks the first recorded instance of such behavior in any species.