An Asiatic black bear named Na spent the last 20 years in a tiny cage in Vietnam. Now she will get a second life in a large, open habitat in a sanctuary with other bears.
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An Asiatic black bear named Na spent the last 20 years in a tiny cage in Vietnam. Now she will get a second life in a large, open habitat in a sanctuary with other bears.
We have been following the charmed life of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who flew the coop in the Central Park Zoo nine months ago and has lived in freedom ever since. This week Flaco took off again, this time to a garden in the Lower East Side and beyond. Wherever he lands next is up to Flaco.
A private golf course in Sedona, Arizona is under siege as dozens of javelinas – the wild pig-like peccaries of the Southwest – have been tearing up the grass in search of tasty grub worms. Seven Canyons Golf Club in the state’s Coconino National Forest has not yet figured out how to deal with the marauding beasts.
A sheep named Sugar, who had escaped from an Australian farm five years ago, was spotted living in a mob of wild kangaroos at a reservoir 20 miles from Melbourne.
Japanese scientists have successfully grown mouse embryos aboard the International Space Station, a first. Their research appears in the journal iScience.
Among the 6,400 extant species of mammals, it was long believed that only humans and four species of toothed whales experience menopause. Now wildlife biologists have observed “the change” in chimpanzees, and the discovery is challenging a long-accepted hypothesis for why it happens at all.
A new (but very old) Jurassic-era creature has just been described by paleontologists, and it already goes by many names: ancient sea monster, Lorrainosaurus, sea murderer (!), and, as noted in the journal Scientific Reports, where the new research appears, “macropredatory pliosaurid.”
“The idea that animals should have the right to vote sounds preposterous.” That’s how Chicago lawyer Ioan-Radu Motoarcă opens his argument, published in the serious Oxford University Press journal Analysis.
In August 2019, Japanese researchers tagged 14 streaked shearwater seabirds with GPS trackers with the aim of monitoring their nesting behavior. But when Typhoon Faxai battered the eastern coast of Japan later that month, one of the birds was taken on a wild ride.
In May, we were wishing Bobi a happy birthday, his thirty-first – by far more birthdays than any other dog had ever celebrated. We’re sad to report that there will be no more, as Bobi has passed on after three decades.
The depth of human tragedy attendant to the Hamas-Israeli war leaves little emotional bandwidth for animal welfare, but animals – dogs, cats, and other pets – still need care. Animal rescue goes on, within and near Gaza, even under extremely dangerous and stressful conditions.
Since 2007, marine biologists and interested amateurs have been observing a curious behavior of humpback whales called “kelping,” in which the giant cetaceans seem to be playing with seaweed. Now researchers from Griffiths University in Australia have looked into the phenomenon; their study appears in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has taken nearly two dozen animal species off of the endangered list, and that’s bad news because it means there’s no hope for them. The animals – one mammal, 10 types of birds, two species of fish, and eight types of mussels – are too far gone to warrant protection.
Nearly a thousand birds were killed in a single night in Chicago this month, as they flew into the side of a single building, the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. It was both horrifying and frustrating, because the tragedy could have been prevented with some fairly simple precautions.
Female frogs, specifically the European common frog, deploy a number of strategies to ward off hyper-amorous males, including faking their own deaths. Researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin publish the sex-averse findings in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
The bears have eaten and the people have spoken. The winner of the 2023 Fat Bear Week is an empty-nest mom named Grazer 128. The zaftig beauty beat out the competition at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, where she won the final round in a landslide – 108,321 votes to 23,134.
The UK’s Natural History Museum has announced its annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year winners. Top marks go to French marine biologist-photographer Laurent Ballesta, who captured on film a gold-colored horseshoe crab patrolling the sea floor off Pangatalan Island, Philippines, closely followed by three tiny golden trevally fish.
A bear in Tennessee had an awful August and September as he spent the entire time with a plastic jug stuck on his head. Finally, on October 3, rescue angels were able to tranq the little bear and remove the thing, which turned out to be part of an automatic pet feeder.
We’ve talked about the mad scientists trying to resurrect the extinct wooly mammoth before, but now a Belgian company wants to go a step further and produce edible meat from the long-dead creatures. Startup Paleo has a patent pending for this macabre product.
Commander, Joe Biden’s 2-year-old German shepherd, has been removed from the White House after biting a Secret Service agent, at least the eleventh such incident since Biden took office in 2021. Commander may now join Major, another biting shepherd, who was exiled to Delaware last year to live with the president’s friends.
