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Scientists from Tel Aviv University have created a monster, but it might be a useful monster: a very sensitive odor-identification device built of electronics, artificial intelligence, and the antenna of the humble locust.
The smallest, and probably the rarest, rabbit in the world is on its last legs in the Pacific Northwest. The Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit thrived for thousands of years in the sagebrush steppe of what is now central Washington, but massive habitat loss has pushed the species to the brink of extinction.
A nearly blind, somewhat deaf chihuahua in Camden, Ohio is recognized this week by the Guinness World Records. At 23 years and 44 days old [as of January 20], the dog named Spike has been crowned the world’s oldest canine.
It turns out The Birds was not Tippi Hedren’s worst animal encounter in a movie. That would be Roar, a film that involved close contact with more than 150 untrained lions, tigers, leopards, and cheetahs. It has entered Hollywood lore as the most dangerous movie ever made.
Some good news for sharks: The US has banned the odious shark-fin trade, a move conservationists hope will help protect millions of sharks butchered every year. The Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act, introduced in 2021, is now law, making it illegal to possess, buy, sell, or transport shark fins or any product containing shark fins. Violators (who are truly vile) face up to $100,000 in fines.
“When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.” The last entry in Dian Fossey’s diary is poignant enough without its proximity to the primatologist’s brutal murder in 1985. Fossey was killed in her cabin in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda, where she had observed and lived among the silverback gorillas for decades. The killer was never satisfactorily identified – poachers? gold-smugglers? Fossey’s own assistant? – but let’s “dwell less on what is past” and remember her life this week, when she would have turned 91.
Prison guards at the Pacific Institution in Abbotsford, British Columbia were stunned last week when a pigeon arrived carrying contraband: about an ounce of crystal meth. The bird was attempting to smuggle the drug inside its wee backpack.
The critically endangered western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) gained a new member recently when a baby boy was born at Chester Zoo. The new arrival is far from his natural habitat – Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, and environs – but he is already at home in the zoological gardens just south of Liverpool.
Another year, another headline along the lines of “The T. Rex may have been a lot smarter than you thought.” That one appears in the Washington Post this week, for an article written by the aptly named Dino Grandoni.
A study out of the University of Michigan finds that seniors who live with pets for five or more years have better cognitive memory than those who live without furry roommates. The researchers point out that their findings show correlation, not necessarily causation, but the case for cause is strong.
On the last day of 2022 a black rhino entered the world, a good thing since there are only about 740 of the critically endangered species remaining in the wild. This one will live in a tamer environment, the Kansas City Zoo.
A snowy owl has blown way off course and ended up in Cypress, California. That’s 25 miles south of downtown LA – and about 1200 miles south of where a snowy owl is usually found this time of year.
The documentary “Wildcat,” in which a young British war veteran suffering from recurrent depression and PTSD seeks solace in the Peruvian rainforest, is a visually beautiful and sensitive portrait of an ecosystem at risk.
There are 3500 humans living in Nahant, Massachusetts as well as about a dozen coyotes. The latter are terrorizing the former with such ferocity that the townspeople have asked the government to bring in guns.
When a cold snap brought freezing temperatures into Texas last week, Mary Warwick, the Houston Humane Society’s director of wildlife, drove over to the Waugh Drive Bridge to check on the resident bat colony. She found 138 cold-stunned bats under the bridge, victims of hypothermic shock.
In November, a lone polar bear cub was spotted roaming around Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The US Fish & Wildlife Service sent a team, with a vet from the Alaska Zoo, to check on the young male. They made the rare and difficult decision to capture the cub for his own good.
Perhaps you’ve never seen a common loon, but you’ve definitely heard one. The water fowl’s plaintive call is a go-to sound effect in film – heard in such movies as 1917, Godzilla, Platoon, and countless others – to the annoyance of birders, who know the loon’s range is more limited than Hollywood would have us believe.
Many species of dinosaurs have been discovered at Hermiin Tsav in the Gobi Desert over the years, but now there is something new to describe: the first swimming dinosaur. The creature was not a giant but a foot-long streamlined beast, with long jaws full of tiny teeth. The theropod, or hollow-bodied dinosaur, had three toes and claws on each limb and swam in prehistoric Mongolia 145 to 66 million years ago when there were lakes and rivers. Seoul National University paleontologist Sungjin Lee and colleagues have named the dinosaur Natovenator polydontus, the “many-toothed swimming hunter.”
It’s a girl. The Metro Richmond Zoo in Moseley, Virginia received a delightful early Christmas present this year: 16 pounds of pygmy hippopotamus. That’s what she weighed at her first neonatal exam, three days after she came into the world on December 6, to Iris and Corwin. The zoo issued the birth announcement on the 22nd and has yet to name the baby girl.
