Aminals
purepedantry | February 10, 2009Head over to BBC News to see some cool and extremely rare footage of Narwhals during migration.
purepedantry | February 3, 2009
Smaller chimps may use grooming rather than aggression as a means to rise in their social hierarchy:
The finding was gleaned from 10 years of observing dominant male chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, looking at behaviors they used to compete for alpha male status relative to their size. Analysis showed that larger males relied more on physical attacks to dominate while smaller, gentler males groomed other chimpanzees, both male and female, to gain broad support.
The study focused on three alpha males who reigned between 1989 and 2003. Frodo, one of the largest and most aggressive…
purepedantry | January 28, 2009Doing behavioral experiments with rats, I can totally understand how this may have happened. This abstract speaks for itself:
A single Norway rat released on to a rat-free island was not caught for more than four months, despite intensive efforts to trap it. The rat first explored the 9.5-hectare island and then swam 400 metres across open water to another rat-free island, evading capture for 18 weeks until an aggressive combination of detection and trapping methods were deployed simultaneously. The exceptional difficulty of this capture indicates that methods normally used to eradicate rats…
purepedantry | June 21, 2007Electric fish, Brienomyrus brachyistius, produce tiny electric signals from an organ in their tails that can be used to communicate and convey social status. They can also be used attract a mate, as reported in a study by Wong and Hopkins in the Journal of Experimental Biology. (The ghetto picture to the right -- the only one I could find that I am certain is of the right fish -- is from Schluger and Hopkins (1987), actually an interesting paper in and of itself. It shows that the fish follow electric field lines.)
In the study, the researchers recording from pairs of mating electric fish…
purepedantry | May 30, 2007Research in army ants has shown that they will plug holes in the road using an interesting technique:
Certain army ants in the rainforests of Central and South America conduct spectacular predatory raids containing up to 200,000 foraging ants. Remarkably, some ants use their bodies to plug potholes in the trail leading back to the nest, making a flatter surface so that prey can be delivered to the developing young at maximum speed.
The raid always remains connected to the nest by a trail of forager traffic, along which prey-laden foragers run back to run back to the nest. This trail can be…
purepedantry | May 2, 2007The Freakonomics guys have a simply hysterical article in the New York Times magazine about monkey economics. The article discusses how monkeys possess the mental apparatus for economic valuation including the use of money. They train the monkeys to use silver tokens as currency to trade for food, and then they show that the monkeys behave very similarly to humans in a variety of situations. Money quote:
The capuchin is a New World monkey, brown and cute, the size of a scrawny year-old human baby plus a long tail. ''The capuchin has a small brain, and it's pretty much focused on food and…
purepedantry | April 25, 2007I don't know if you have been following this story, but there have been massive honey bee die-offs recently in the United States. Considering that honey bees are the primary pollinators for many of the crops grown here, this is a problem that greatly exceeds just the bees.
Scientists have been racing to figure out what the problem is, and many theories have been suggested to explain the bee die-offs, most of them completely ridiculous. Most of the non-ridiculous ones are focused on the possibility of transmitted disease in the bees or some environmental toxin. To distinguish the two, I…
purepedantry | April 19, 2007Outcast chimp prefers humans to other chimps:
We all know not to feed the animals when visiting the zoo. Now the Antwerp Zoo has urged visitors to, please, stop staring at the chimpanzees.
New rules have been posted outside the chimp enclosure at the city zoo urging visitors not to form a bond with a particular male chimp named Cheetah. He was raised by humans but is now bonding with the seven other apes at the park, a zoo official said Wednesday.
"We ask, we inform our daily visitors and other visitors that one of the monkeys (sic) is particularly open for human contact," zoo spokeswoman…
purepedantry | April 5, 2007You know, waiting might have been just as effective:
It took a Coast Guard helicopter to rescue a man and his pet cockatoo from the heights of a pine tree after he got stuck trying retrieve the $2,000 bird.
William Hart, 35, had climbed about 60 feet up the tree to get the bird after it escaped from its cage and flew out a bedroom window. Television video showed him standing on a branch Tuesday evening awaiting rescue, the exotic white bird apparently tucked under his shirt.
The bird, Geronimo, got out after Hart's daughter apparently forgot to latch his cage after feeding him, Hart told the…
purepedantry | March 28, 2007This is not just videos of hairy, fat people having sex. This is actual panda porn we are talking about:
Chuang Chuang the panda has been spending his days in front of a big-screen television watching panda porn.
Authorities at the Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand hope the images will encourage him to mate with his partner, Lin Hui, and serve as an instructional lesson in how to do it right.
So far, it's been a tough sell, the zoo's chief veterinarian, Kanika Limtrakul, said Tuesday.
"Chuang Chuang seems indifferent to the videos; he has no reaction to what he's seeing on TV," Kanika said…
purepedantry | March 5, 2007Not the kind of story you read everyday:
Three teenagers may be on the hook for a hefty fine if a court decides that their festive firecrackers outside an eastern German farm scared the libido right out of an ostrich named Gustav.
Rico Gabel, a farmer in Lohsa, northeast of Dresden, is claiming $6,450 in damages for the alleged antics of the three youths, ages 17-18, between Dec. 27 and 29, 2005.
According to his lawsuit, the farmer claims that fireworks set off by the boys made the previously lustful Gustav both apathetic and depressed, and thus unable to perform for a half-a-year with his…
purepedantry | March 2, 2007I don't know if you have ever seen this show on Animal Planet -- Meerkat Manor. It is disgustingly cute. It is about a family of meerkats that were followed over several years.
Anyway, I love that show, so lately I have had meerkats on the brain.
Some other researchers are also apparently interested in meerkats. Publishing in the journal Science, they have recently shown that meerkats teach their young how to hunt.
Thorton and McAuliffe examined hunting in meerkats. Meerkats eat basically anything they are bigger than -- as you will note if you watch the show above. This would…
purepedantry | February 27, 2007A damn-building mammal...get your mind out of the gutter:
Beavers grace New York City's official seal. But the industrious rodents haven't been spotted here for as many as 200 years -- until this week.
Biologists videotaped a beaver swimming up the Bronx River on Wednesday. Its twig-and-mud lodge had been spotted earlier on the river bank, but the tape confirmed the presence of the animal.
"It had to happen because beaver populations are expanding, and their habitats are shrinking," said Dietland Muller-Schwarze, a beaver expert at the State University of New York College of Environmental…
purepedantry | February 19, 2007A squirrel running around the innards of the plane grounded a Dallas-Tokyo flight:
An American Airlines flight made an unscheduled landing after pilots heard something skittering about in the wire-laden space over the cockpit.
The airline blamed the emergency landing of the Tokyo-Dallas flight with 202 passengers on a stowaway squirrel.
"You do not want a varmint up in the wiring areas and what-have-you on an airplane. You don't want anything up there," said John Hotard, spokesman for the Fort Worth, Texas-based airline.
He said pilots feared the animal would chew through wiring or cause…
purepedantry | February 16, 2007I know that a bunch of other people covered this story, but I managed to find a video of it so I thought I would post it anyway.
Researchers working in Ivory Coast have found remnants of a chimpanzee habitation from over 4,000 years ago, and these remnants include tools that chimps use to break open nuts:
Researchers have found evidence that chimpanzees from West Africa were cracking nuts with stone tools before the advent of agriculture, thousands of years ago. The result suggests chimpanzees developed this behaviour on their own, or even that stone tool use was a trait inherited from our…
purepedantry | January 31, 2007There is no reason that you would know this (and frankly I doubt you really want to), but I have a problem when women stay over. There are hot as hell, and they always want to cuddle and make me hot as hell too. I end up scooting over to one side of the bed to avoid the personal sweating lodge that develops. Then they get mad at me. You see where this is going...
Anyway, having read this study, I really wish that I could do what penguins do when they are huddled together: lower their metabolic rate to save energy and avoid overheating.
A team of scientists that had already shown that…
purepedantry | January 29, 2007At a zoo in England, a Komodo dragon has laid eggs that have hatched even though she has never been exposed to a male:
Scientists unveiled five squirmy black and yellow Komodo dragons Wednesday that were the product of a virgin birth, predicting that the hatchlings offered hope for breeding the endangered species.
Flora, the Komodo dragon, has produced five hatchlings although a male has never been close to her, the proud staff at the Chester Zoo said.
"Flora is oblivious to the excitement she has caused, but we are delighted to say she is now a mum and dad," said a delighted Kevin Buley,…
purepedantry | January 25, 2007German scientists are having trouble getting their sloth to work:
Scientists in the eastern German city of Jena said Wednesday they have finally given up after three years of failed attempts to entice a sloth into budging as part of an experiment in animal movement.
The sloth, named Mats, was remanded to a zoo after consistently refusing to climb up and then back down a pole, as part of an experiment conducted by scientists at the University of Jena's Institute of Systematic Zoology and Evolutionary Biology.
Neither pounds of cucumbers nor plates of homemade spaghetti were appetizing enough…
purepedantry | January 23, 2007The terror bird or Titanis walleri was a flightless, carnivorous bird present in North America. Researchers at the University of Florida have determined that it was probably present in North America prior to the formation of the land bridge that connected Alaska with Asia North America and South America:
A University of Florida-led study has determined that Titanis walleri, a prehistoric 7-foot-tall flightless "terror bird," arrived in North America from South America long before a land bridge connected the two continents.
UF paleontologist Bruce MacFadden said his team used an established…
purepedantry | January 17, 2007Why do I love stories about monkeys so much:
An escaped chimpanzee at the Little Rock Zoo raided a kitchen cupboard and did a little cleaning with a toilet brush before sedatives knocked her out on top of a refrigerator.
The 120-pound primate, Judy, escaped yesterday into a service area when a zookeeper opened a door to her sleeping quarters, unaware the animal was still inside.
As keepers tried to woo Judy back into her cage, she rummaged through a refrigerator where chimp snacks are stored. She opened kitchen cupboards, pulled out juice and soft drinks and took a swig from bottles she…