Why Jupiter is Jinxed & Saturn Stinks? MARCH 2026 Musings.

 

Why Jupiter is Jinxed & Saturn Stinks? MARCH 2026 Musings.

Facts are supposed to provide us with a sense of clarity and certainty. But sometimes they can be misleading too, if we just look at them superficially. Take the case of Jupiter and Saturn, the two largest planets in our solar system.

Let’s take Jupiter. To a superstitious person on Jupiter the Sun would look like a blazing dot and would seem to follow two distinctively strange elliptical orbital patterns and hence the person may think the planet was jinxed. This is the consequence of a unique location of the Sun-Jupiter center of mass (barycenter). The location is outside the Sun, making them perform a loose binary dance rather than a simple planet-star orbit.

Now consider Saturn. Its core consists mostly of hydrogen and helium, both of which are odorless, while its atmosphere has methane, ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide, water vapor, phosphene, ethane, acetylene, propane. Its upper atmosphere has ammonia clouds that would smell like strong cleaning fluid, while deeper layers with hydrogen sulfide might smell faintly of rotten eggs. To a human being trying to penetrate this atmosphere, the planet would stink! But only if the human olfactory sense can survive the journey through its clouds.

In this series of blog posts during 2026, I hope to discuss facts that may seem strange at first glance, but which could otherwise be explained. I will focus on one factoid every month.

The factoid for this month is Not just Humans, African Buffalos also Vote and the females are decisively enfranchised!

Yes, it must be very humbling (nay, indeed humiliating), especially for the votaries of modern western democracies to be told this. But the ecologist Herbert Prins, who spent years observing buffalo behavior, formulated a theory many decades ago, and confirmed by others, that large herds of buffalo in fact have a rudimentary voting system to determine the direction they move in.

African buffalos engage in a democratic "voting" process to make collective decisions about herd movement. Adult females indicate their preferred direction of travel by standing up, looking, and aligning their heads in that direction, with the majority choice ultimately deciding the herd's path.

And other researchers have found that there is more to the “buffalo democracy’ than just migration! Some interesting key aspects of the African buffalo democracy includes:

Inclusive Decision-Making: Even less dominant members of the herd have a say in the decision-making process.

Directional Voting: Females signal their preferred direction by resting, then standing up and turning their bodies to face a specific direction.

Collective Choice: The direction that the herd takes is the one that receives the most "votes" (alignments to traditional pasture cycles), demonstrating a form of consensus.

Social Behavior: This behavior is part of the complex social structure and, specifically, the female-led decision-making process in African buffalo.

So, the next time a candidate turns up at your door soliciting your vote, remember the following:

ü  A bellowing buffalo is just nature’s way of telling the world it is there; so too is the candidate’s supplication, democracy’s way of telling you it still exists!

ü  A buffalo seldom wanders far away from the marsh where it was born; and so is the person standing in front of you!