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The problem with goldfish is that “they can eat anything and everything.” That’s according to Christine Boston, an aquatic research biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. The voracious fish, which are in fact a kind of East Asian carp, are living large in the Great Lakes, to the detriment of everything else.
A very rare white alligator was born this month at Gatorland, an alligator-themed park in Orlando, Florida. The gator is a girl, born along with a normal-colored twin brother.
When it comes to power naps, the chinstrap penguin is king. Researchers in Antarctica have determined that the species will doze off for four seconds per nap, up to 10,000 times a day. Their study appears in the journal Science.
We have noticed rare lobsters before. An even rarer specimen – a half-red, half-blue, bi-gendered creature – has wandered into a Maine lobsterman’s pot.
Jonathan the giant tortoise turned 191 years old (or so) this week, reaffirming his title as the oldest-living land animal. He’s been living large on St. Helena, a British territory in the South Atlantic, sharing the grounds with the island governor at Plantation House since the Victorian era. (And the ghost of Napoleon who died here just 51 years of age in 1851).
In August a mysterious canine illness broke out in Oregon, affecting at least 200 dogs. Since then, the respiratory ailment has spread to 14 states, and vets still don’t know what’s causing it.
For more than two decades, the Transportation Security Administration has been clogging airports (or keeping us safe, depending on one’s point of view), aided in part by about 1000 bomb-sniffing canines across the country. This week 15 of these photogenic working doggos are honored in the newly minted 2024 TSA Canine Calendar.
When we last checked in on the companies involved in de-extinction – the process of resurrecting species that have gone extinct – it was our view that resources would be better spent on “restoring the natural habitats of critically endangered species” rather than on cloning.
In western Thailand just outside Kanchanaburi, an elephant sanctuary is home to a few dozen rescued domestic elephants. They’ve had a difficult time, either born into a brutal life of logging or retirees from the slightly less degrading tourism trade.
In 2019, Cyclone Idai swept through Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, which was bad for the animals but good for researchers. The 1,500-square-mile park is one of the most ecologically diverse preserves in the world, as well as the most technologically sophisticated.
If you’ve never witnessed the birth of a rhinoceros, do we have a video for you. This month the Chester Zoo in Cheshire, England announced the birth of the extremely rare Eastern black rhino.
The orcas were still at it off the coast of Spain on Halloween when a small but persistent pod of the killer whales harassed a boat for a solid 45 minutes, causing enough damage to sink it.
No one had seen the extremely rare Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna since 1961, so it was assumed that the weird, egg-laying mammal was extinct. Earlier this month the beast that looks like a spiny anteater was rediscovered in Indonesia’s Cyclops Mountains, likely the only place on Earth the creature exists.
his week Iceland’s most famous singer, Björk, drops a new song featuring Catalan singer Rosalía. The collaboration is intended to raise awareness – and cash – to push back against Iceland’s salmon farms.
It’s been four decades since drug kingpin Pablo Escobar smuggled four hippopotamuses out of Africa to populate his lavish estate in Colombia with exotic animals. Escobar has been dead a long time but his hippos have flourished, with more than 150 of the beasts stomping throughout the Magdalena River basin.
On August 19, 71-year-old hiker Richard Moore of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and his 12-pound dog Finney had set out to climb Blackhead Peak just east of town. He never returned, and a several-days-long search did not find the missing man.
Researchers spent many hours watching and filming domestic cats in a Los Angeles cat cafe, and they determined that the felines can conjure nearly 300 facial expressions. The research is published in the journal Behavioural Processes.
Last year at this time we reported the virgin birth of zebra sharks at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. Now comes news that an epaulette shark at Brookfield Zoo – also near Chicago – has performed the same trick.
An Asiatic black bear named Na spent the last 20 years in a tiny cage in Vietnam. Now she will get a second life in a large, open habitat in a sanctuary with other bears.
We have been following the charmed life of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who flew the coop in the Central Park Zoo nine months ago and has lived in freedom ever since. This week Flaco took off again, this time to a garden in the Lower East Side and beyond. Wherever he lands next is up to Flaco.
