By Mary O’KEEFE

I was going to write about the overabundance of sea urchins and why this is important to sea kelp – and I will next week – but over the weekend I saw a lot of Father’s Day posts and shares. We had our traditional Father’s Day dinner with my husband and my son, who has been a dad for three years now … and has thrived. At our table were photos of dads/grandfathers who have passed and, of course, we toasted to their memory.

As I watched my son and husband play a very creative form of baseball my grandson has created, I realized how important fatherhood is. Being a mom I know how instrumental moms are to the lives of our kids – and honestly we do get a lot of love on Mother’s Day – but dads are often a second thought. And this thought took me to Kruger National Park and elephants.

I often forget what I did yesterday but this story I read decades ago I still remember as if I had read it today. The article was about a group of elephants that had been separated due to overpopulation at a park in South Africa. Because of logistics officials moved young elephants, male and female, and older females to another park leaving the heavier older male elephants at their original location. What happened next really highlighted the importance of a positive male role model.

Not completely trusting my memory I researched the decades-old story and below is what I found:

The Kruger National Park and game reserve in South Africa found themselves with an overpopulation of the once-endangered elephants. The solution was to airvac (evacuate via helicopter) elephants to another park, Pilanesberg National Park. They realized that the full adult male elephants were too heavy to actually airvac so they went with the relatively smaller females and young males.

“As a result, there were no older bull elephants to push these youngsters out of musth. The huge rush of testosterone was overwhelming them and driving them to aggressive behavior,” according to BBC earth.com.

Musth is a unique state to elephants when young elephants, usually in their 20s, are flooded with reproductive hormones. This is a time when they adopt a definite swagger to make themselves look taller, along with other biological things happening, all in an effort to let females know they aren’t just looking for a mate but they are really cool elephants looking for a mate. They become very aggressive and have been known to fight each other to death, stabbing their opponent with their tusks. What normally happens is when these hyped-up hormonal young elephants meet up with a bigger, dad-type bull they immediately drop out of musth as they know their young maleness cannot compete with the older male.

“A young male may only be in musth for a few days. As he ages, the length of his musth periods increase until by the time he’s in his 40s he can handle it and his musth period could be weeks,” according to BBC earth.com.

The result of these young hormone-driven male elephants at Pilanesberg National Park was frightening. The elephants began attacking and killing rhinos in the park. The rhinos were badly mutilated, over 50 in all, with wounds to the top of their shoulders and necks. It is apparently common for fights to break out between rhinos and elephants over watering holes but this was something different. The volume of attacks was very unusual. Gus Van Dyk, an ecologist at Pilanesberg National Park, researched the issue and found a group of adolescent male elephants between the ages of 12 and 20 years old were experiencing heightened aggression.

Officials introduced six older male bull elephants from Kruger National Park that towered over the adolescents and literally within hours the teen thugs had dropped out of musth. No more rhinos had been killed since the older males were introduced.

“This musth story was used in an American academic paper as an example in human adolescence of the importance of a stable society and a father figure to provide boundaries for teen males. … The result was a happy ending for the elephants in Pilanesberg and one from which maybe we can learn,” according to BBC earth.com.

This is also an example of how vital it is for all adults to be positive role models. Children are watching, and guiding them into a positive world is important.

The story is also an example on how fragile our ecological system is. First, due to the overhunting and murdering of elephants almost to extinction then “autocorrecting” by protecting them and then to separate them once again affecting their social structure and acculturation.

Looking ahead, there may be cloudy mornings ahead breaking through, at times, with some sun shining during the day.

Recently the foggy day predictions have become rainy day realities, which returns us to the heavy marine layer we have been seeing lately. According to Mike Wofford, meteorologist with NOAA, there is not an easy way to predict the rain that could – or could not – follow the heavy marine layer … and sometimes drizzle can move into measurable rain.

Today’s cloudy day may bring some drizzle but rain isn’t expected; however, Friday looks like a higher chance of rain.

Also, Wofford pointed out, what we’re been expecting in the coming days is more cloudy skies rather than actual fog.

As for the future, meteorologists are looking at an upcoming El Niño event.

“We are looking at how [El Niño] could impact our winter,” he said.

Temperatures, according to NOAA, will have highs in the low 70s through Saturday and then slightly warmer Sunday through Tuesday.