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All in Animals
There’s been at least five shark attacks in the Northeast over the past month, enough to temporarily close a few Long Island beaches to swimming. Shark panic is an annual summer tradition, but perhaps the uptick in bites is a good sign.
In England last week a beagle-mix named Bonnie had an adventure that reads like the plot of a children’s book. It began when the five-year-old pooch went on the lam from her Bolney, West Sussex home, making her escape while her wards were preparing her food.
At the Phoenix Zoo they call them “bloodsicles,” “fishsicles,” or just “frozen food.” In UK zoos “ice lollies” are on the menu. In Spain the celebrity giant panda Bing Xing (which means “star of ice”) slurps watermelon popsicles.
In early June, a homing pigeon named Bob set off from Guernsey in the Channel Islands on a 400-mile route to Gateshead, a flight that’s supposed to take 10 hours. Several days and 4000 miles later, the four-year-old bird showed up on the other side of the pond, very lost in Mexia, Alabama.
For the third time in five years, Fred the labrador has adopted an orphaned brood of ducklings. Fred is the 15-year-old resident dog at Mountfitchet Castle, a living history museum in Essex, England.
It’s been known for some time that dogs can identify the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with a sniff, but now we know a dog’s olfactory ability is so precise it can detect even long covid cases. The new research is published in Frontiers in Medicine.
Paleontologists have discovered the oldest known belly button. Using high-tech imaging to examine the remains of a bipedal horned dinosaur of the genus Psittacosaurus, the scientists noticed the thin trace of an umbilical scar in the 125-million-year-old fossilized skin.
Late last year, a team from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida captured and killed one of the thousands (or more) of the Burmese pythons plaguing the Everglades. This one, a female packed with 122 egg follicles, was a whopper: nearly 18 feet long and weighing 215 pounds.
Here’s something you don’t see every day: a chimpanzee digging a well. Digging for water has been observed in elephants, warthogs, wild horses, zebras … and now a primate – the East African chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii). The research appears in the journal Primates.
The chihuahua mix named Mr. Happy Face has issues. The little guy has tumors, neurological problems that make standing or walking a struggle, has to wear a diaper, and holds his head at an odd angle. In spite of these medical problems – or because of them – Mr. Happy Face is a winner: he just took the World’s Ugliest Dog honors in Petaluma, California.
There are species of frogs that are so small, they can’t jump. Well, they can, technically, but they probably shouldn’t: their graceless attempts at leaping always end in awkward belly-flops.
They called him wrinkled and jowly, and now they call him the best. Trumpet the bloodhound has won Best In show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, held for the second year in a row in Tarrytown, NY.
Cats love catnip. They eat it, roll in it, and clearly get a buzz from it. Most cats also love silver vine, a plant not closely related to catnip. Even big cats – like jaguars and tigers – will enjoy a good chew.
Last week fishers in Cambodia landed the world’s largest freshwater fish, a giant 13-foot stingray weighing 661 pounds. The fish the size of a baby grand piano was mercifully returned to its rightful place in the murky waters of the Mekong River.
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.
