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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.
It’s been a year since Charlotte Maxwell-Jones refused to leave Afghanistan as the country fell into Taliban control. The woman from East Tennessee who founded the Kabul Small Animal Rescue would not abandon the many dogs, cats, sheep and parrots in the chaos of the US withdrawal.
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.
Birds everywhere are swimming, nesting, and living in human garbage, most of it plastic. Crowd-sourced photos from all over the world in a project called Birds & Debris are documenting the mess.
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.
