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Five axolotls were recently seized by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as they were being smuggled into the United States. Fortunately for the amphibians, they have been taken in by San Francisco Zoo & Gardens.
Researchers in the Pacific Ocean encountered a rare – and bright – octopus squid, a bioluminescent creature said to have the world’s largest biological lights. A team from the Minderoo-UWA Deep Sea Research Centre plunged a camera into the depths when a deep-sea hooked squid (Taningia danae) mistook the device for a snack.
Hawaii’s birds are seriously imperiled by avian malaria, which spreads, like the more familiar variety of the disease, by mosquitoes. The counterintuitive solution to this dire problem involves releasing millions of mosquitoes into the wild.
Seven Przewalski's Horses – the last true wild horse in the world – have been returned to their native stomping grounds, Kazakhstan’s Golden Steppe. An operation to reintroduce the horses to their natural homeland is the culmination of decades of work by a consortium of zoos and other conservation groups.
Our drugs are making brown trout addicted to meth and female starlings less attractive to potential mates. These are among the disturbing effects documented in a new paper in Nature Sustainability.
The New York Times just dropped a new 6-part podcast called “Animal,” featuring writer Sam Anderson. Backed by the resources of the Times, the production goes out into the world – Iceland, Mexico, Japan – to teach us about animals and our relationship to them.
Envigo, the company that had to put 4000 beagles up for adoption because its breeding facility was shown to be a squalid hellhole, has gotten its comeuppance in the form of a $35 million fine.
A researcher in Brazil investigated why some snakes bite humans and others don’t using a very unusual– not to say totally nuts – methodology: he stepped on them, thousands of times. João Miguel Alves-Nunes of the Butantan Institute published the results of his experiment in Scientific Reports.
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced last week that three healthy peregrine falcon chicks have hatched in their aerie, a specially built nesting box atop the Verrazzano Bridge. The fluffy hatchlings were tagged with identifying bands while their mother soared nearby, 700 feet over the Narrows.
Killing rats in New York City is usually a thankless task, but rat-killer extraordinaire Luna just got a good citizen award. Council Member Chi Ossé, presented Luna with a City Council Citation for “being New York's strongest soldier in our war against the rats.”
This week a story on the history of cockroaches, based on new research published in Proceedings of of the National Academy of Sciences, dominated nature writing all over the country.
“Shocking footage,” is how the New Zealand Department of do Conservation describes a video of the 50-year-old man who tried to body slam a couple of orcas swimming near his boat off the coast of Devonport in Auckland.
This week PBS aired a new documentary on heroes of Ukraine, human and animal. “Saving the Animals of Ukraine” documents wartime life and death for animals – in war-torn households, in zoos, in the wild – and the people who save them.
Last month we noted the birth of two groundhogs, offspring of the Punxsutawney prognosticator Phil and his wife Phyllis. Now we know the kits’ genders – boy and girl – and now they have names: Shadow and Sunny, respectively.
Torrential rains and intense floods soaked southern Brazil last week, killing over 140 people and forcing more than 100,000 to evacuate. Amid the disaster in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, hundreds of volunteers are busy rescuing animals stranded by the rising water.
The world’s oldest bird, a Laysan albatross named Wisdom, is still strutting her stuff after more than 70 years on Midway Atoll. She has outlived the average life expectancy of seabirds of her kind by a couple decades.
Scientists from Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) and MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory believe they have decoded, or at least discovered, the “sperm whale phonetic alphabet,” revealing a rich lexicon not previously observed in whale communication. The research is published in Nature Communications.
A Labrador retriever in Taiwan named Roger couldn’t cut it as a drug-sniffing police dog – apparently too playful to be a cop – but he has since emerged as a rescue dog and something of a media star.
There is something about ginger cats. They tend to be more confident, more outgoing, and generally more cheeky – especially the toms. BBC News asked biologist and cat behavior expert Roger Tabor if there was a reason for ginger adventurousness.
The cicadas have arrived. Slightly earlier than predicted, but the first bugs have been reported in Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. In the coming weeks, two distinct bug broods, which usually emerge in separate years but in 2024 their disparate cycles are in sync, will infest the US southeast and midwest.
