bleimanb | October 2, 2008When elephants become separated from their group they can use their keen senses of smell and sight to locate their brethren, OR they can use the Earth like a giant telephone and call their herd with rumble vocalizations. A new study by Katherine Leighty and a team from the...wait for it....wait for it...Disney Animal Kingdom in Florida (yes, seriously!) has shed light on how elephants use these infrasonic sounds to communicate through the ground over distances of up to 1.5 miles.
Thank you for calling 1-999-HOTTUSK, the steamiest place to rendevous with Africa's most eligable, randiest…
zooillogix | October 1, 2008A report published yesterday by the Wildlife Conservation Society shows that black bears living in urban areas weigh more, get pregnant at a younger age, and are more likely to die violent deaths.
The study tracks 12 bears living in Lake Tahoe over a 10 year period and compares them to 10 bears living in surrounding "wildland" areas. The urban bears weighed an average of 30 percent more because their diet was delicious, fatty, garbage - basically the same stuff you eat. While the bears in the wildlands typically gave birth between 7-8 years of age, some of the skanky city bears first…
zooillogix | October 1, 2008Built by the French performing arts group "La Machine" for Liverpool's European Capital of Culture program a few weeks back, the giant arachnid reaches 15 meters tall and weighs 37 tons.
Built from both steel and wood, it utlizes a hydraulic system to move all spider-like and is operated by 12 people all sitting atop or strapped below the cephalothorax. If even one of those 12 drivers so much as yawns, the giant metal spider will grab the nearest human victim with its powerful jaws and suck out all of their internal juices.
We're trying to track down schematics so you can build your own at…
zooillogix | September 30, 2008Aquarium staff at Kinosaki Marine World in western Japan recently noticed that their dolphins were less acrobatic in their performances and more lethargic in general. Concerned about their health, the dolphins were weighed and found to be significantly heavier since only a few months prior. Apparently a fattier mackeral, their typical breakfast, lunch, and dinner, was to blame. Aquarists quickly started calling the dolphins "fatty" and "fatty-fat-fat" and telling them no one would love them in an effort to get them to throw-up their meals after eating them. When that failed, they tried…
bleimanb | September 30, 2008First ever footage of dolphins trying to save one of their own. Warning: Sad ending!
bleimanb | September 25, 2008
Just a friendly reminder that Zooillogix, Gene Expression, Deep Sea News, Adventures in Ethics and Science, and Thoughts from Kansas are throwing the biggest, most fun, blowout bonanza ever put together tomorrow night!***
The party starts at 9pm sharp at Tonic, the bar owned by yours truly on Polk Street in San Francisco. Scandelous clothing is highly encouraged unless you're a dude or not good looking!
Can't wait to see you all there. We're going to laugh; we may cry a little; and without any doubt, somebody is going to get into a drunken brawl with a cop (Oh please, let it be Janet…
bleimanb | September 24, 2008Just when we thought that Dirty Jerse had hit rock bottom, its rivers and forests have become overrun with a slimy, invasive species of eel that can live for months during droughts and change sex if necessary in order to keep reproducing. The Asian swamp eels were found recently in Silver Lake (which is located approximately here in the Eastern U.S.).
Hey, fuggetaboutit!
The swamp eels eat just about anything that moves including invertebrates, fish, reptiles and amphibians and have no known predators, which may pose a disasterous threat to the New Jersey's native ecosystem. They are also…
zooillogix | September 19, 2008Marine biologists off the coast of Australia have discovered what they believe to be hundreds of new species on the Great Barrier and Ningaloo Reefs. The project is part of CReefs, a global census of coral reefs, which is in turn part of the larger Census of Marine Life, an ongoing effort to catalog all ocean life.
The researchers were kind enough to take a number of incredible photos, many of which we share below. It's not clear to me which of these are newly identified organisms and which are just pretty critters they encountered along the way, but many of them are spectacular regardless…
bleimanb | September 18, 2008Subterranean...blind...predatory...smokin' hot AILF! These are all adjectives that you could use to describe a newly discovered ant from the Amazon rainforest. Dubbed the Martialis heureka or "Ant from Mars" (not kidding), the sightless creature lives inside the soil and presumably hunts prey with massive mandibles. The Ant from Mars also represents a new subfamily of ant, a discovery that hasn't happened since 1923 (Note: see comments for various competing view points).
Take me to your watermelon.
After evaluating the DNA of the ant, researchers have concluded that this ant is on the bottom…
zooillogix | September 18, 2008Don't know the background here. Not for those with weak stomachs, pretty incredible though.
zooillogix | September 16, 2008I stumbled into a meeting my brain and experience are wholly unqualified to report on, so instead, I will tell you about this much more exciting piece of information. Today, from 4PM-7PM, the AZA will be holding a live auction of paintings created by animals. Anyone can join the auction online but be aware you must register first. Thanks to reader JuliaGoolia for cluing clueless me in.
Check it:
Art by Mishindi the Rhinoceros from the Denver Zoo
Art by Hari and Hakuna the Meerkats from the San Diego Zoo
more below the fold
Art by the Chubs Raccoon Family from the Huchinson Zoo
Art by…
bleimanb | September 16, 2008While Andrew wows you with such exciting facts as What Kind of Hay to Feed an Oryx from the AZA, I thought I'd cover some actual bizarre zoological news this week. A group of ichthyologists have recently made a startling discovery, one that was literally glowing right before their eyes.
This fish subsists on a diet of the pious and the weak.
Conventional marine biological wisdom (which some say is an oxymoron, oh ZINGA DING DING, Kevin Z!!!) has always assumed that fish at certain depths have no capacity to see red wavelengths. The sun's red rays do not penetrate past a certain point…
zooillogix | September 16, 2008Basically this session is about making a media story out of a zoo or aquarium's conservation efforts. I'm making a story out of making a story.
Challenging Media Myths About White Sharks
Speaker: Karen Jeffries, Monterey Bay Aquarium
The Monterey Bay Aquarium examined the possibility of exhibiting a great white shark in an effort to change perceptions of an animal most commonly associated with the movie Jaws. The husbandry challenges were formidable. Of the 37 previous attempts to exhibit a great white, all had died quickly, the oldest living only 16 days.
The PR challenges were also…
zooillogix | September 16, 2008After the keynote, Jack Hanna, Director Emeritus of the Columbus Zoo, received the AZA R Marlin Perkins Award for Professional Excellence. For those of you who don't know him, Hanna is a regular guest on morning news shows, late night talk shows, and pretty much anyone with a TV show and a desk in-between. He typically brings an assortment of animal ambassadors with him. He also stars in his own TV show, Into the Wild.
Classic Hanna
For a guy who sometimes comes off as hoaky (to me) on TV, Hanna in person was sincere and humble. Apparently his college president called him into his office as…
zooillogix | September 16, 2008I'm sitting in the keynote speaker session listening to Nigel Martin, host of Prehistoric Park, Penguin Safari, Shark Week and other Discovery/Animal Planet shows, discuss the parallels between his job and that of zoo and aquarium employees.
He offered a number of examples including figuratively transporting people to places and introducing them to animals they could never have met otherwise. Without knowing these animals, viewers and visitors won't support conservation efforts, so the logic goes.
Listening to him speak, I could not help but also notice contrasts between his work and that of…
zooillogix | September 16, 2008You may have noticed a dearth of Zooillogix posts over the last two weeks. This is due in large part to Benny buying a bar, and me buying a puppy. They are the same amount of work. Well I aim to make it up to you today and already I have forced myself out of bed at 5:00 AM and boarded a train to Milwaukee to spend the day covering the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Annual Conference.
I'll do my best to make the posts real-time but this might not always be possible, as is the case at the moment, sitting on the train, surrounded by loudly snoring sales guys. They probably think I'm a sales…
zooillogix | September 11, 2008A quick wrap-up of the animals discovered not to be extinct this week:
Armoured mistfrog
This Armoured Mistfrog, thought by many experts to be extinct due to the recent amphibian chytrid fungus epidemic, was rediscovered by my boss, enterprise search god, Chris Cleveland, while he should have been working, on CNN. And more specifically, in a remote tropical area in northern Australia.
Tadpole Shrimp
Heavy rains in Scotland have created perfect conditions for the reemergence of the tadpole shrimp, thought extinct in the UK until recently. The little critter resembles a tiny horseshoe crab…
bleimanb | September 10, 2008Readers, Friends, Enemies, Members of the Press!
My mildly authoritarian brother and I would like to remind you of the life-changing event we're throwing on Friday, September 26th, in San Francisco at Tonic. The party starts at 9pm and goes until ?. (That's right ladies, you read me correctly, it goes until "?").
EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT #1
- Million Comment Party -
Our Zooillogix Key Party happens to coincide with ScienceBlogs' Million Comment Parties everywhere! It is for this reason that we have banded together with Razib from Gene Expression, Gilligan Mcclain from Deep Sea News, Janet "…
zooillogix | September 5, 2008Zooillogix would like to take a moment to introduce you to Parborlasia corrugatus, a proboscis worm residing in the waters of Antarctica. We should note that we were inspired to learn more about these cute little fellows from this outstanding pic we saw on Ugly Overload.
Photo credit Jeff Miller
P. corrugatus grows up to two meters in length, comes in a variety of delightful colors, and kills its prey by rapidly and repeatedly stabbing it with a harpoon-like barbed proboscis! This proboscis has adhesive secretions which secure it in place. When threatened, this fast moving giant death worm…
bleimanb | September 3, 2008A paper by the University of Basel's Zoological Institute to be published in the upcoming issue of the journal, Animal Behavior, reveals the complex relationship that baby bugs - nymphs and larvae - have with their parents.
When young tree hoppers feel threatened they will shake the leaves and stems that they reside on, signaling their mothers to sit on top of them and chase away any attackers. Burying beetles and earwigs kick their mothers in the face until they regurgitate delicious filth into their babies' open mouths. Even Vespidae wasp larvae, which grow up in cells, will scratch at the…