"After a visitor group had left the compound area, Santino went inside the enclosure and brought a good-sized heap of hay that he placed near the visitor's section, and immediately after that he put stones under it. He also appeared to have placed projectiles behind, just before he went in after the hay. After this, he sat down beside the hay and waited. When the visitors came back, he waited until they were close by and, without any preceding display, he threw stones at the crowd. What makes this a bit special is that he actually had not experienced before what he seemed to anticipate. He, in a sense, [...]
"What the movie shows is very interesting. The animal excavates sand to get the shell out, then swims for a long time to find an appropriate area where it can crack the shell. It requires a lot of forward thinking, because there are a number of steps involved. For a fish, it's a pretty big deal." —I'll say! University of California ecology and evolutionary biology professor Giacomo Bernardi talks about the orange-dotted tuskfish he filmed opening a clam with the help of a rock. It is the first filmic evidence of tool usage by a fish. I can't wait for the next scene, when the fish uses a fork [...]
"None of us on that cruise had been to the patch, but we had all heard that it's twice the size of Texas. That's in a textbook. These statements are so frequent and in so many places that they are accepted as fact. But they undermine the credibility of those advocating for reduction of plastic pollution in the terrestrial and marine environments. Plastic is everywhere. But it's not a patch." —Oregon State University in Corvallis microbial oceanographer Angel White sets the record straight. Having once mentioned the alarming original claim myself, I feel an obligation to also further the debunking: There is not a patch of [...]
Huh. Honey helps sea-turtles recover from life-threatening injury. Turtle rescuers at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center have been healing gashed-up loggerhead turtles with a new medical balm called "MediHoney." The makers of MediHoney claim that it, "Promotes a moist environment conducive to healing Is highly absorbent Cleanses and debrides Helps to lower the wound pH, for an optimal wound healing environment Is non-toxic, natural and safe Is easy to use and easy to apply"
Discovery reports on a Binghampton University study that suggests female water striders prefer less aggressive males, and in fact produce more eggs when mating with them. Lovable dork and guest columnist Cynthia Mills writes: Evidently, some male water striders like to come on a bit strong to the females. In my day they would have been sidling up with line like, 'Hey baby, what's your sign?' I guess now they would be saying 'Hey baby, what's on your playlist?' Whatever line they are using, they are obnoxious, and as such, clearly they would make lousy mates. The water strider females agree. Unfortunately, if the pond is small, they [...]
"As the footage begins, you can see one gorilla stopping briefly to rest under a tree, but then it's compelled to move forward by the troop. When another spots the camera trap, it briefly charges, Tarzan style, toward the screen, beating its chest." —We know you've watched too many movies when we describe the way a gorilla beats his chest as "Tarzan style." (But I love you, Jennifer Viegas! I have watched too many movies, too!) That's like saying that a horse's hoof is horseshoe-shaped, right? Anyway, extremely rare footage of the extremely rare Cross River gorilla!
"It’s a mammal with a long, rat-like snout, a rather high number of small incisors, closely spaced premolars with pointed cusps, and especially long, curved upper canines. Note that, unlike dogs, foxes and so on, it doesn’t have an obvious rhinarium (the area of dark, distinctly textured skin that surrounds the nostrils in such animals). These features all immediately screamed “opossum” to me. Partly this is because I’ve handled opossum skulls and am familiar with their surprisingly big upper canines and high number of incisors. Even the fur looks opossum-like (mammal carcasses typically slough fur after they’ve been decomposing in water for a while, and this explains the naked [...]
I feel like my imaginary girlfriend Jennifer Viegas is baiting me with this one. (Viegas is not imaginary; she's an animal life reporter for Discovery News. But the part about how she's my girlfriend is—as is the thought that she knows who I am.) A rap song produced by a conservationist group that starts off with the lyrics "Finding crazy geckos/That look like Satan…"? Are you kidding me? What am I supposed to do with that? I'm paralyzed by simultaneous revulsion and adoration.
Okay. It's been fun (is that the right word?) getting all hysterical about the great planetary die-off this week. (Sure, yes, "fun" is right.) But, really, everything's going to be okay.
Once when a bunch of us were tripping on mushrooms, two of my friends got into discussion about which type of dog was best. One of them was asserting the superiority of golden retrievers, like the one his family had had when he was a kid, over all other breeds when a look of self-reflective horror came over his face. "Wait a minute," he said, "does that make me a racist?" We all agreed that yes, it definitely did. But times change! And this past weekend, a blow was struck for equality when two brave dogs, Otis and Diesel, took the stage at an American Kennel Club sponsored dog show [...]
"We have found an unknown branch of the tree of life that lives in this lake. It is unique. So far we know of no other group of organisms that descends from closer to the roots of the tree of life than this species." —University of Oslo researcher Dr. Kamran Shalchian-Tabrizi on the discovery that the collodictyon, a single-cell creature found in the sludge of a lake located 20 miles outside of Oslo, does not fit into any of the previously known categories of living organisms. It is "human's remotest relative," reports Discovery News. And "not an animal, plant, parasite, fungus or alga."
"He achieves continuous sperm transfer after having been removed by the aggressive female, or has moved away himself. At the same time, his palp (sexual organ) plugs the female, thereby monopolizing her." —Arachnologist Matjaz Kuntner describes the findings of a study wherein 90 percent of male spiders were observed cutting off their penises during sex, which increases the chances of successful impregnation and also of the males escaping from their mates, who generally try to eat them after copulation.
Cute, right? Baby otters! Doesn't it tug on your heart strings to see them behind that fence? Set them free! Animals should be free!
No! They should be locked in cages forever. Those baby otters will grow into adult otters. Some of them probably male. And while the otters in the video happen to be river otters, if adult male river otters are anything at all like adult male sea otters, they should be kept away from all other animals at any cost. Adult male sea otters, it turns out, are horrible, terrible, despicable monsters.
A warning: what you are about to read, should you choose to continue, [...]
Chimpanzees dancing themselves into a trance state beneath a waterfall. Wolves howling at a full moon. Cats eating catnip til they're writhing on the ground and chasing imaginary mice. Are these animals undergoing something like what humans refer to as spiritual experience?
University of Kentucky neurologist Kevin Nelson, whose book The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain will be published in January, thinks maybe so.
So it looks like the coyotes are here to stay. This video was filmed three weeks ago at "The Pond" in the southeast corner of Central Park. When the car lights pass it's like that scene from Collateral, right? After this week's exciting chase through Chelsea, Paul D. Curtis, Cornell University associate professor of Natural Resources talked to Discovery's Jennifer Viegas about it. "Coyotes have been in Central Park in the past, and will continue to appear in such urban parks and green spaces throughout most of New York State," Curtis said. "People will need to find ways to coexist with urban wildlife to minimize potential [...]
