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Nearly all turtles born on Florida beaches over the past four years have been females. Climate change is to blame, as increasingly warming sand where turtle eggs incubate have churned out a 99% female-to-male ratio over that time.
Gillian Anderson, a longtime friend to animals and PETA, turns 54 today with a message for couture giants Michael Kors, Versace, and Jimmy Choo: Stop harvesting hides from alligators, snakes, and lizards.
We don’t often cheer on organized animal slaughter, but what’s not to like about the Florida Python Challenge? For ten days (August 5-14), snake hunters will be allowed to stomp around the Everglades to capture and kill invasive Burmese pythons, which have infested the massive wetlands.
This week (August 7 through 13th) marks the 13th annual “Give a Dog a Bone Week” event arranged by Feeding Pets of the Homeless. The nonprofit has been raising both awareness and pet food for the unhoused for the past 15 years.
Hippopotamus amphibius is a semi-aquatic creature and one of the world’s heaviest land animals, weighing up to 4,000 pounds. There are between 115,000-130,000 stomping around 38 African countries, from Angola to Zimbabwe, but hippo populations in more than half of these countries are either in decline or unknown.
Conservationists in England have released three European bison into West Blean and Thornden Woods, a nature reserve near Canterbury. The Kent Wildlife Trust and Wildwood Trust hope to bring some ecological balance to some 500 acres of woodland.
“Euthanasia is out of the question,” declared Norway’s Director of Fisheries, which was very good news for Freya, the 1300-pound walrus who has been summering in and around Oslo marinas. For months Norwegians have been watching the big mammal eat, sunbathe, and sleep on boats in harbors up and down the country's southeastern coastline. Freya has a preference for inflatables, which sometimes succumb to her prodigious girth and sink.
The fossilized gorgosaurus skeleton has fetched a whopping $6.1 million in auction at Sotheby’s. The sale is the latest in a disturbing trend, as more and more dinosaur fossils become monetized and lost to research.
The highly respected Polish Academy of Sciences has declared the domestic cat an “invasive alien species,” citing the cheeky pet’s propensity for murdering birds and small mammals.
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.
This week Sotheby’s will auction off a fossilized skeleton of a gorgosaurus, an apex predator that terrorized North America 77 million years ago. The “exhibition-ready mounted skeleton” is over nine feet high and almost 22 feet long. It has 79 actual fossil elements, with some additional cast pieces to complete the specimen. The fossils were excavated in 2018 in Choteau County, Montana.
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.
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.
