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The documentary “Wildcat,” in which a young British war veteran suffering from recurrent depression and PTSD seeks solace in the Peruvian rainforest, is a visually beautiful and sensitive portrait of an ecosystem at risk.
There are 3500 humans living in Nahant, Massachusetts as well as about a dozen coyotes. The latter are terrorizing the former with such ferocity that the townspeople have asked the government to bring in guns.
When a cold snap brought freezing temperatures into Texas last week, Mary Warwick, the Houston Humane Society’s director of wildlife, drove over to the Waugh Drive Bridge to check on the resident bat colony. She found 138 cold-stunned bats under the bridge, victims of hypothermic shock.
In November, a lone polar bear cub was spotted roaming around Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The US Fish & Wildlife Service sent a team, with a vet from the Alaska Zoo, to check on the young male. They made the rare and difficult decision to capture the cub for his own good.
Perhaps you’ve never seen a common loon, but you’ve definitely heard one. The water fowl’s plaintive call is a go-to sound effect in film – heard in such movies as 1917, Godzilla, Platoon, and countless others – to the annoyance of birders, who know the loon’s range is more limited than Hollywood would have us believe.
Many species of dinosaurs have been discovered at Hermiin Tsav in the Gobi Desert over the years, but now there is something new to describe: the first swimming dinosaur. The creature was not a giant but a foot-long streamlined beast, with long jaws full of tiny teeth. The theropod, or hollow-bodied dinosaur, had three toes and claws on each limb and swam in prehistoric Mongolia 145 to 66 million years ago when there were lakes and rivers. Seoul National University paleontologist Sungjin Lee and colleagues have named the dinosaur Natovenator polydontus, the “many-toothed swimming hunter.”
It’s a girl. The Metro Richmond Zoo in Moseley, Virginia received a delightful early Christmas present this year: 16 pounds of pygmy hippopotamus. That’s what she weighed at her first neonatal exam, three days after she came into the world on December 6, to Iris and Corwin. The zoo issued the birth announcement on the 22nd and has yet to name the baby girl.
Researchers have observed that the female southern pied babbler, a small black-and-white bird found across the southern African savannah, gets less smart as it ages, a correlation tied to the number of chicks she has over the years.
A female zebra shark at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium brought some pups into the world by virgin birth, according to a new study appearing in the Journal of Fish Biology. It took a few years for the aquarium researchers to realize the shark had produced offspring via parthenogenesis, in which an egg develops into a viable embryo without the hassle of sperm fertilization.
There are only a few hundred pink iguanas on Earth, and all of them live on the slopes of Wolf Volcano in the Galápagos. Now rangers from the Galápagos Conservancy and national park have spotted nesting sites and hatchlings of this critically endangered species for the first time.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has just signed legislation that will ban the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits at retail pet shops throughout the state, a move intended to end the inhumane conditions rampant in the commercial breeder industry. The ban kicks in December 2024.
Researchers at the University of Adelaide have at long last discovered the female snake clitoris, which was long believed to not exist. The findings are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
When the Johnston-Grimes Metropolitan Fire Department responded to an alarm last week in Grimes, Iowa, they had nothing to do because there was no fire. A security camera revealed who had pulled the alarm.
The US House passed the Big Cat Public Safety Act in July, and last week the Senate gave its blessing for the legislation via unanimous consent. Now the bill waits for Joe Biden to sign it into law before we are all old and gray.
Since 2018, Elon Musk's medical-device company Neuralink has killed about 1,500 animals – monkeys, pigs, and sheep – in its attempt to develop a brain-computer interface. Now the US Department of Agriculture is investigating the company for possible animal-welfare violations.
Winners of this year’s Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards are in and we think they are in fact funny. The comic possibilities of wildlife tend to fall into set categories. There are the photos of slapstick in progress – a 3-month-old lion cub falling out of a tree, for example, which happens to be this year’s overall winner. “It was probably his first time in a tree and his descent didn't go so well,” said photographer Jennifer Hadley.
After more than two decades of incarceration in an Albanian restaurant, Mark the bear has been freed. The animal welfare group Four Paws negotiated the release of the last so-called “restaurant bear” in Albania, and he is now on his way to a bear sanctuary in Arbesbach, Austria.
For decades kids and their families have flocked to Griffith Park Pony Rides of Los Angeles without knowing they have engaged in animal torture. But the fun ends on December 21. Badgered by animal rights zealots, the city’s elders have ordered the park to shut – just in time for the holidays!
Animals that organize in social groups occasionally experience friction, as when competing for food, living space, mates. When conflicts arise between two group members, a third-party intervention can smooth things over to the benefit of all. Pigs appear to be pretty good at conflict mediation.
