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The iconic migratory monarch butterfly is now, officially, “endangered,” according to the IUCN, which this week entered Danaus plexippus plexippus into its Red List of Threatened Species. The colorful flyer, known for its annual 2500-mile migration across the Americas, is being pushed to the brink of extinction by the twin forces of habitat loss and climate change.
Baseball fans in Queens are cheering on a first-place team and a first-rate dog: Shea the labrador retriever. Shea is spending the first year and a half of his life hanging out with the New York Mets and their fans, after which he’ll be placed with a disabled veteran as a service dog.
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.
One of the most pernicious invasive species in North America is the European green crab. The small crustacean hitched a ride in the ballast of merchant ships in the 19th century and, with few natural predators on this side of the pond, have been outcompeting local species for food and habitat ever since.
The odds are stacked against the tiny raptor known as the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl (Glaucidium brasilianum). The owl’s range in the US – in isolated chunks of the southernmost parts of Arizona and Texas – is under siege by development, invasive species, wildfires, and of course climate change.
It pays to be different. Employees at a Hollywood, Florida Red Lobster restaurant noticed there was something off about one lobster that came in for dinner, because it wasn’t in fact red. The rare bright-orange lobster was too strange to boil alive and eat, so the staff called Ripley’s Aquarium of Myrtle Beach to rescue the flashy crustacean.
A “beagle breeding facility” in Virginia has been shut down, following two years of failed inspections that revealed horrifying living conditions. Inspections of the Cumberland, Va. facility run by the company Envigo, uncovered dozens of violations of federal regulations and revealed heart-wrenching cases of underfed, sick, injured and – in some cases dead – beagles. Last week a federal judge declared that some 4000 dogs are now up for adoption, giving authorities 60 days to move the beagles to safe havens.
Nothing good has come of Putin’s misadventure in Ukraine. Besides the toll on human life, the war has destroyed or damaged zoos and animal shelters, damaged terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and upended the lives of all species caught in the crossfire. It has also severely disrupted scientific research – in Russia.
Today we remember Henry David Thoreau, America’s original environmentalist. Born on July 12, 1817, Thoreau came of age in the thick of the Industrial Revolution, as machines transformed the lives of humans – for good or ill.
There’s a new dinosaur species on the block. Discovered in Argentina’s Patagonian Desert, the new guy looks a lot like a Tyrannosaurus rex but is only a distant cousin to the classic predator.
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.
A giant African land snail has been spotted in the New Port Richey area of Pasco County in Florida. The snail (Lissachatina fulica) will feed on more than 500 types of plants but nothing will feed on it, nothing in Florida anyway. The invader was first spotted here in 1969 and has since been “eradicated” twice – in 1975 and again last year – but life finds a way.
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.
Winkie Winkerton left her condo above the sink on June 25 after 11 years of happy living in upstate New York. She was at least 16. The good people at Heart of the Catskills, a humane society in Delhi, drove two hours for a prearranged meet and greet at the Kingston Petco, where I waited with a carrier. “Not everyone wants a senior cat,” said her chauffeur. Since no one picked up the black cat sitting in the next cage, I got her too.
Let’s take a closer look at one of the parasites that live on our bodies. A species of microscopic mite (Demodex folliculorum) lives in the pores on our face, as well as in facial hair follicles, including the eyelashes. They are an invisible 0.3 millimeters long and are passed on to us at birth. They mate – right there on our faces – at night.
We’re celebrating the birthday of Pamela Anderson, animal rights activist among other credits, who was born on July 1, 1967. Vogue earlier this year dubbed Anderson “Hollywood’s Top Bombshell.” All good, but we love her for her inner beauty, radiating specifically from her love of animals.
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.
