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All in Animals
Life is hard for a turtle in Rhode Island these days. "We see a lot of mortality in turtles this time of year and sadly, it's all female turtles carrying the next generation and now sadly we have a poaching crisis,” Lou Perrotti, director of conservation programs at Roger Williams Park Zoo, told NBC affiliate WJAR.
First-time parents, Zola and Azaan, are pleased to announce the birth of a daughter, yet unnamed. The healthy girl is the first aardvark born in the San Diego Zoo in more than 35 years.
For more than a century we thought the “fantastic giant tortoise” (Chelonoidis phantasticus) of the Galápagos was extinct, but a 50-year-old female of the species has been found. She’s been named “Fernanda,” after the Fernandina Island in the western Galápagos Archipelago where she was living.
We’ve known for a few years that the larvae of certain beetle species can eat plastic, giving hope to the idea that the world’s waste problem might have a (quasi) natural solution. Now researchers in Australia believe they have identified the garbage-eating gut bacteria that makes this gastronomic feat possible. Their research appears in Microbial Genomics.
This week New Zealand unveiled a draft plan to tax farm-based methane emissions in an effort to fight climate change, which is another way of saying that the country is putting a price on belching cows and sheep.
Zoo Miami is about to open its Sea Turtle Hospital, but it already has taken in a patient – a 50-year-old, 388 pound loggerhead turtle. On May 22, the zoo got a call from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission: a large female loggerhead was just rescued near the Port St. Lucie Power Plant. She had a severe wound on her left front flipper, probably from a shark attack.
West Sacramento, California has a novel answer to wildfires: 400 goats. The city has enlisted the services of the animals to eat their way through vegetation that would otherwise become fuel for the fires that have scorched the state in recent years.
Male mice are freaked out by bananas, and now we know why. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal discovered the fruit fear while analyzing spiking stress hormones in male mice when they are near pregnant or lactating females. The boys are triggered by a compound in the females’ urine called n-pentyl acetate, which also happens to be the compound that gives bananas their smell!
When an octopus mom’s eggs are close to hatching, she will start acting a little bit nuts. She may stop eating, tear at her own flesh, beat herself against a rock; and if she does eat, the meal might be pieces of her own arms. The gruesome self-flagellation continues until death.
