In the wild, Andrew feeds on fish, sponges, small crustaceans, nematode worms and protozoans.
Benny's diet is very specialized, consisting mainly of the interior of Ramy nuts, nectar from the Traveller's Palm tree, some fungi and insect grubs. He is also known to raid coconut plantations, and has been seen eating lychees and mangoes, which are also plantation crops.
Now accepting donations in exchange for recognition and fame on Zooillogix!
Currently Featured: Mystic Aquarium generously donated by Eric Heupel of The Other 95%
The List:
Adventure Aquarium
Bronx Zoo
Brookfield Zoo
Cincinnati Zoo
Cleveland Metroparks Zoo
Florida Aquarium
Georgia Aquarium
Knoxville Zoo
Lincoln Park Zoo
Maritime Center in Norwalk, CT
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Mystic Aquarium
New England Aquarium
New York Aquarium
Newport Aquarium
Philadelphia Zoo
Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies
San Diego Zoo
Sea World San Diego
Shedd Aquarium
Smithsonian National Zoo
South Carolina Aquarium
Tennessee Aquarium Feed me Seymour!
Brits of all shapes and sizes have been spitting out mouth fulls of tea and shepherd's pie at the announcement that a strange unidentified insect seems to be running rampant across England, including London.
The black and red bug resembles the Arocatus roeselii, a rare central European insect, only Britain's bugs are significantly duller in color. It's not every day that an unknown species emerges in the center of one of the oldest cities in the world.
Click here to watch an informative video on the topic.
London's Natural History Museum will be analyzing specimens of the bug to determine its genetic makeup.
Every year tens of thousands of golden rays, also known as cow nosed rays, make a biannual migration between Western Florida and the Yucatan Peninsula. They are known to school in groups of 10,000 or more during their exodus. These shots were snapped off the coast of Mexico by Sandra Critelli, an amateur photographer and printed in Britain's Daily Telegraph (more pics can be found by reading the full article).
StickyBot is a robot designed by researchers at Stanford Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab as part of the Robots in Scansorial Environments project (RiSE). The robotic gecko tests their hypotheses about the "requirements for mobility on vertical surfaces using dry adhesion. The main point is that we don't need more adhesion, we need controllable adhesion."
The site boils down the "key ingredients" as follows:
* hierarchical compliance for conforming at centimeter, millimeter and micrometer scales,
* anisotropic dry adhesive materials and structures so that we can control adhesion by controlling shear,
* distributed active force control that works with compliance and anisotropy to achieve stability.
In layman's terms, all of the above means someone should buy us one for Christmas.
Via the awesome i&o blog, we bring you Cinders, a pig with mysphobia - a fear of dirt. The porker's owners, Debbie and Andrew Keeble, pig farmers and sausage makers in North Yorkshire England, had never seen anything like it. The tiny piglet would cower and shake in the grass at the edge of the mud pit while his siblings gallivanted about in the filth like proper British pigs. The family's five year old daughter suggested putting her Paddington Bear boots on the pig to overcome its fear and it seems to have worked.
Zooillogix was skeptical that one could actually diagnose a piglet with mysophobia, but the video we found says it is so with a British accent, thereby proving it is true. (Update: they took the BBC video down so we have replaced it with a less authoritative CNN one)
Researchers have witnessed how cleaner fish calm their subjects, often dangerous predators, by massaging them gently with their fins while they're cleaning them. A new study in the journal Behavior Ecology, however, is showing how this calming effect not only prevents the cleaner fish from becoming meals, but other prey fish in the general vicinity as well.
You want happy ending?
Redouan Bshary and his team at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland set up reefs in an aquarium with predators, prey and cleaners and other reefs with just predators and prey. The result was...
While Andrew and I tend to focus on bizarre animal news from the fringes of research and geography, every once in a while we like to do a fluff piece that is close to home...this next piece couldn't be fluffier or closer to home.
Between the years of 2003-2006, Lewis, a polydactyl, domestic longhair cat went on a terror spree in Fairfield, Connecticut (Andrew and my hometown); He was alleged to...
Researchers from Oklahoma State University have discovered the shortest living tetrapod (four limbed vertebrate) to date. The hard-livin' Labord's Chameleon spends 8-9 months incubating within the egg, only to hatch and die 4-5 months later. Published in the July issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the report states: "Remarkably, this chameleon spends more of its short annual life cycle inside the egg than outside of it. Our review of tetrapod longevity (>1,700 species) finds no others with such a short life span." Most tetrapods live between 2 and 10 years.
8 going on 80
This finding sheds may new light on the question of why some species of chameleon die so quickly when held in captivity at zoos. It turns out taunting and knocking on the glass by bratty, under-supervised, 10 year olds was not to blame.
Tarsiers are prosimian primates, sharing their primitive grouping with lemurs, bushbabies and the aye-aye. However, due to numerous similarities to ancestral monkeys, apes and humans, there is some disagreement as to whether tarsiers should be grouped with the other prosimians in the Suborder Strepsirrhini or with the monkeys and friends in the Suborder Haplorrhini. The tarsier finds all of this debate quite dull and prefers to spend its time eating insects and bird eggs.
These pictures were taken by our friend's father in the jungles of the central Philippines.
They look pissed.
Special thanks to Will O'Boyle Sr. for traveling to find these little guys and Jr. for forwarding along the pics.
Lunch time for Golem
Incidentally, I almost bought a tarsier t-shirt at a craft fair this weekend. Here are some other good ones.
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $14.95. That's 50% off the cover price! If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
