A delivery column on a platform that's routinely cleaned. Photograph by David Doubilet

We've covered a lot of water since our last field dispatch from artificial reefs. We left fisheries biologists using ROVs to estimate fish biomass on artificial reefs off the Pensacola coast and drove west across a still battered Gulf Coast. Hurricane damage was still evident in every direction. We rolled into Lake Charles, Louisiana, late in the evening, bleary-eyed and shaking from an overdose of Starbucks and Redbull. We met our fixers Darrell and Cher Walker (True Blue Watersports), repacked the gear for a few days in the Gulf, and loaded our Sport Fisherman in the dark. Captain Keith Monroe and first mate Eric Larson pulled us off the docks at 2 a.m., and we headed into the Gulf of Mexico. Daybreak gave us a view of a forest of platforms stretching to the horizon–some manned, some not. The water closer to the coast was mud brown, useless for photography, so we pressed deep into the Gulf looking for clear water. 

In an early scene of the film, Army General Hopgood, played by Stephen Lang, attempts to walk through a wall. His effort fails. Big time. What is to blame: Bad teaching or real world physical forces? We asked physicist Jeffrey Hazboun, who studies nature’s fundamental forces at Utah State University, about the physical forces governing walls. Here are three things we learned.

There's something growing inside our October issue, and it's not a redwood. It's a pumpkin. And you won't believe how much it weighs now.

To illustrate "Pumped Up," our article on the world's largest pumpkins, we first juxtaposed a seed specially bred to grow giant pumpkins with the garden variety (above left). Photo editor Susan Welchman and I liked the shot, but we thought it would be cooler if the giant seed were sprouting. So we entrusted the seed to Elena Sheveiko, our resident green thumb.

Vernon Yates took one of his 18 tigers to a party—his fee varies by event. “You can’t trust tigers,” a guest said. To prove her wrong, he told her he’d stick his head in the animal’s jaws and tug its tongue for $20. She had to pay up.

Usually when I walk by the office of senior graphics editor Fernando Baptista, I see him hunkered over a drafting table, sketching in pencil or watercolor. A few months ago, I saw him sculpting in clay. What exactly? I didn't know. The forms looked like decomposing brownies. Fernando saw something different: five stages in the formation of Tsingy de Bemaraha, Madagascar's limestone forest.

Fernando has used this process before to depict squid, barnacled whales, and a baby mammoth, but this was his first landscape. When I asked him, "Why clay?" I expected to hear how working in three dimensions adds mass and realism to his work. Instead, he said, "because it's fun!"

Here's how Fernando built a stone forest in 5 simple steps:

The antlered animals weren’t made for this—to stumble onto a boat in the middle of an autumn night and bump and sway on the water for six hours until they attain solid ground again and resume their overland migration to a winter refuge. In Norway, both reindeer and their seminomadic herders, members of the indigenous Sami, are struggling to find their balance as development intrudes on traditional grazing lands, changing the way humans and animals move.

Why are some loons acting so, well, loony? Mercury. Long-term studies of common loons in the United States and Canada reveal that the toxic stuff is invading birds’ brains and bodies in dangerous concentrations. It’s disrupting behavior and physiology—and could put loon populations in peril.

In the National Arboretum’s parched herbarium, where dried plants date to the 1790s, Alan Whittemore is providing needed acorn perspective. A year after few fell in parts of the U.S., the botanist says hungry squirrels and an anxious press—which breathlessly wondered, Is it climate change?—can relax.

I wasn’t expecting to find a tempest in a stockpot in Crimea, where I recently spent a month covering a story on that part of southern Ukraine. But that’s what happened when I met Galina Onischenko, a devoutly pro-Russian citizen of Sevastopol. Galina invited me over for lunch at her fifth-floor walk-up apartment and served borscht. Even before my spoon hit the soup, she wanted me to know that her borscht was Russian. Her tone implied that borscht from any other Slavic country was not even worth mentioning.

There are no political boundaries when it comes to recipes, but no surprise, either, to food being a sticking point (dare we say a flashpoint in a pan?) for nationalist rivalries and tension. Think of the culinary kafuffle of 2003 when U.S. conservatives renamed French fries “freedom fries” to express anti-French sentiment during international debate over the launch of the Iraq invasion. And so it is with borscht. Just ask Galina.

Is it?

The November issue of National Geographic magazine features a moving photograph of chimpanzees watching as one of their own is wheeled to her burial. Since it was published, the picture and story have gone viral, turning up on websites and TV shows and in newspapers around the world. For readers who’d like to know more, here’s what I learned when I interviewed the photographer, Monica Szczupider.

On September 23, 2008, Dorothy, a female chimpanzee in her late 40s, died of congestive heart failure. A maternal and beloved figure, Dorothy had spent eight years at Cameroon’s Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, which houses and rehabilitates chimps victimized by habitat loss and the illegal African bushmeat trade.

To find out, we asked the folks at sortprice.com, a price-comparison site that covers merchants who sell Halloween costumes—and that has seen 1.2 million costume searches this month.

Here are the top animal costumes this year. And then for the heck of it, here are seven popular costumes for animals.

10. The number of featured musicians from the video kicking off a 23-date North American tour to promote “peace and community and mindful joy” through music.

6. The number of songs Mark Johnson, co-founder of Playing for Change, the grassroots organization behind the song and tour, listed when asked for his top five songs of all time.

On the eve of the tour I asked Johnson to talk about the group he founded in 2001 and how his effort differs from the time at camp when we all had to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.”

Grab a bitter leaf and chew. Then take another and another, letting the wad rest in your cheek. Soon you’ll feel less hungry, more alert, a little euphoric. That’s qat (pronounced cot, often spelled khat), a stimulant used for centuries in Yemen and Africa’s Horn by laborers for energy and by men to while away afternoons. Today, with increased urbanism, easier access to cash, and relaxed social mores, it’s taking deeper root. “People chew it in the early morning, on the street,” says psychologist Michael Odenwald. “Children and breast-feeding women chew it.”