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All in Animals
When the annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition rolls around, there’s always (at least) one image of a species we had never seen before. In this year’s competition – the 58th by the UK’s Natural History Museum – that animal is the houbara of the Canary Islands.
Fat Bear Week is over at Katmai National Park and the winner is … this big boy. Bear 747 took the honors!
In Germany a wild boar piglet was separated from her peers, probably when the group (called a “sounder”) crossed a river. Fortunately the lone pig found some friends in a herd of cows, which have now adopted her as one of their one.
As Florida continues assessing the damage wrought by Hurricane Ian, there’s one bit of good news: Ernest Hemingway’s Key West home has weathered the storm unscathed and, more importantly, so have the 59 cats that live there.
Alameda County has banned the rodeo spectacle of “wild cow milking,” in which lactating beef cows are separated from their calves, chased around an arena until roped and tackled into submission, then forcibly milked. The Mercury News calls this barbarism “one of the sport’s more popular local events.”
Researchers at the Universities of Hong Kong and Würzburg, Germany have addressed a question that no one asked, “How many ants are there on Earth?” The answer: 20 quadrillion. It’s difficult to grasp the enormity of such a number. The authors of the study that painstakingly added up the ants call it “20 thousand million millions, or in numerical form, 20,000,000,000,000,000 (20 with 15 zeroes).” The researchers warn that figure is a “conservative” estimate.
Certain small mammal species – shrews, voles, stoats, weasels – shrink their brains and other organs in wintertime, a strategy that helps them conserve energy when food is scarce. Now the European mole (Talpa europaea) has been found to deploy this same weird adaptation.
Researchers observing the sex lives of the rock hyrax (Procavia capensis) have learned what we all suspected to be true: the best musicians get the girl. According to the study published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Animal Ecology, males that sing the most and with rhythm have the best reproductive success.
The long-running war over garbage in Southern Sydney in NSW, Australia has evolved into a battle of wits. On one side are the humans, who want to keep their street-side rubbish bins sealed until the garbage trucks arrive; on the other side are the cockatoos, who want the opposite.
The winner was the stuff of nightmares: a parasitic fungus erupting from the body of a fly. Evolutionary biologist Roberto García-Roa captured the moment when “spores of the so-called ‘Zombie’ fungus infect arthropods by infiltrating their exoskeleton and minds. … Here, they await death, at which point the fungus feeds on its host to produce fruiting bodies full of spores that will be jettisoned to infect more victims—a conquest shaped by thousands of years of evolution.”
"We get invited, we show up, and we let the dogs do their work." So says Bonnie Fear, crisis response coordinator for the Lutheran Church Charities K-9 Comfort Dog Ministry, which sent ten golden retrievers to Uvalde, Texas, site of a school shooting in May.
An enduring and endearing staple of nature shows is the monogamous penguin. The idea that these tuxedo-clad flightless birds mate for life without the occasional affaire de coeur is adorable, but is it true?
Turkmenistan’s Alabay - They really like the Central Asian shepherd dog, also known as the Alabay, in Turkmenistan. A new law recently took effect that restricts export of the beloved native breed and requires puppies to be registered in the government’s pedigree book.
A pair of giant pandas were born this week at the Qinling Panda Research Center in Shaanxi province, southwestern China. The male and female twins are reportedly healthy and definitely adorable.
Japanese researchers have observed a phenomenon that we thought was impossible: a nonhuman animal crying tears of joy. A new study reported in Current Biology this week demonstrated that our canine friends will well up with tears under certain circumstances, and it probably happens more often than we think.
A brown bear got into some hallucinogenic honey in Turkey’s northwestern Duzce province this week. It didn’t go well. The Guardian reported that the female brown bear was found wobbling and whining in the forest, where some good Samaritans rescued her. She had got into some mad honey, or “deli bal” in Turkish, produced by beekeepers who feed their honeymakers a kind of rhododendron nectar that packs a potent neurotoxin.
Australia is rife with invasive species like the feral pig, introduced by European settlers in the late 18th century, now spread across 40 percent of the country and numbering in the tens of millions. Invasives get a foothold because there are few natural predators in their new homes, but in Australia the pigs have at least one enemy: the saltwater crocodile.
Long-tailed macaque monkeys at the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary in Bali have a lot of time on their hands and they’re not wasting it. Apparently the animals, male and female, are using stone tools as masturbatory aids.
“Euthanasia is out of the question,” said Frank Bakke-Jensen, Norway’s Director of Fisheries just a couple of weeks ago, referring to Freya, the 1300-pound walrus who spent much of the summer swimming and sunbathing around Oslo marinas. But that turned out to be a lie, because the authorities just put poor Freya down, claiming that her presence put humans at risk.
Researchers at the University of Konstanz in Germany have been staring intently at baby jumping spiders while they sleep, wondering if the eight-legged children have the capacity to dream. Their conclusion: maybe.
