Welcome to my blog.
The Summer of Annoying Orcas continues as rambunctious killer whales continue to “play” with sailboats off the Spanish coast by ramming them, sometimes causing real damage. Scientists studying the odd behavior say that young orcas in the pod might be learning how to harass boats by copying their elders.
Hangzhou Zoo in eastern China felt the need to deny allegations, made on social media, that their Malayan sun bears are in fact humans wearing bear costumes.
A Japanese man spent two million yen (about $15K) on a terrifyingly realistic dog suit. He goes only by his dog name, Toco, preferring to keep his human identity a secret.
In the Florida Keys temperature of the seawater topped 100°F, a mark never before recorded, anywhere. The extreme heat is killing off coral reefs at a terrifying rate. The Coral Reef Foundation reports that even their coral-restoration sites – nurseries intended to replenish the depleted reeds – are being cooked to death.
The mayor of Béziers, a small city on France’s southern coast, has had it with dog poop. Robert Ménard has decreed that dogs walking on the main streets must have their DNA on file with the local government, so that negligent owners can be tracked down and fined when they fail to clean up after Fifi.
Only a handful of species undergo menopause – six, as far as we know, including humans and some toothed whales, among them orcas. Researchers are investigating why female orcas live for decades beyond their reproductive years, and it could be to keep the peace among younger members of the pod, especially the males.
The staff at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium were surprised to find a newborn baby in their gorilla troop, partly because they hadn’t realized the mother was pregnant, but mostly because they’d thought the mother was a male.
The usual method to prevent malaria is to attack mosquitoes that spread the disease to humans, but now scientists are enlisting the little pests as allies. The method, still in the proof-of-concept phase, involves genetic engineering to bolster the mosquito’s immune system with mouse genes.
Urban architecture often uses bird-unfriendly materials – spiky wires and nails, e.g., on ledges, statues, and elsewhere – to discourage birds from nesting and pooping on human structures. It mostly works, but now some clever crows and magpies have been removing the anti-bird bits and are using them to build their nests.
Orcas continue to attack yachts in the Mediterranean, sharks still menace bathers in Australia, and humpback whales are terrorizing fishermen off the Canadian coast. Now comes a new marauder, a sea otter who bullies surfers in Santa Cruz.
Nassir the gorilla, a 14-year-old male living at the Toronto Zoo, is distracted – by visitors who show him their smartphone pics and videos. The zoo is concerned that too much screen time is not good for the primate.
Most birds are monogamous(ish) and a few species even mate for life, but divorce is also common, and may even be on the rise. A German-Chinese research team analyzed data on 232 bird species to document the avian discontent.
The panda population in South Korea just went up by two, as beloved mom Ai Bao gives birth to twin girls. Officials at the Everland theme park near Seoul said mother and babes are in good health.
This week the goats returned to Riverside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Charlie, Chico, Cowgirl, and Mallomar launched their summer’s groundskeeping job with a “ribbon chewing” ceremony to open the park’s new compost site, to which the four will be contributing over the next two months.
A mayor in Mexico’s Oaxaca state has married a caiman – a toothly reptile and close cousin to alligators and crocodiles – in a traditional wedding. Victor Hugo Sosa got hitched to one “Alicia Adriana” in the town of San Pedro Huamelula, re-enacting an ancestral ritual believed to bring good fortune.
Perhaps you’ve seen a squirrel, spread-eagled and flat on the ground, motionless. He’s fine, he’s just “splooting,” that weird, limbs akimbo pose assumed by some mammals to beat the heat.
A 28-year-old chimpanzee named Vanilla was saved from a notoriously cruel lab in upstate New York. When introduced to her new digs – a 150-acre sanctuary in Florida – her reaction to seeing the sky and feeling grass are heartwarming.
“It tastes like chicken,” declared the NPR reporter on her visit to UPSIDE Foods facility in Emeryville, California. As well it should: UPSIDE’s “textured chicken product” is made almost entirely from chicken cells, but no chickens were harmed in the making.
The rambunctious orcas off the coast of Spain continue to harass boats, going so far to disturb a couple of entrants in The Ocean Race last week. More concerning, now come reports of killer whales ramming boats off the coast of Scotland, some 2,000 miles from the original attacks.
