bleimanb | July 17, 2008Brits 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…
bleimanb | July 9, 2008
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).
We're going to need a bigger boat...
zooillogix | July 7, 2008StickyBot 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…
zooillogix | July 6, 2008
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…
bleimanb | July 6, 2008Researchers 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...
...resounding…
bleimanb | July 5, 2008While 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...
...have been involved in six or more attacks in Fairfield's Sunset Circle neighborhood, including biting and scratching an Avon Lady and killing and eating a herd of sheep...Ok, made up the herd…
zooillogix | July 2, 2008Researchers 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…
zooillogix | June 30, 2008Tarsiers 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…
zooillogix | June 27, 2008A not at all exhaustive collection of cool bizarro aquariums.
Modular fish tank
Toilet tank. Kind of like fish purgatory.
The Fish-Bird Tank-Cage
many more below the fold...
Sink tank
The sophisticated ichthyologist's sitting room
A concept piece by a Japanese architectural firm
More of the above
This robotic fish tank senses which direction the fish is swimming and drives off in that direction. Could prove extremely useful in absolutely no circumstances.
In this Korean tank, the pump and aerator are powered via USB. Additionally, temperature is controlled via software on your…
bleimanb | June 26, 2008In a new discovery published in the current issue of the science affairs journal Current Biology , new research reveals that unborn baby crocodiles begin communicating to each other and their mothers moments before they are born.
He can talk. He can talk. He can talk....I CAN SINNNNNNNG!!!
It is believed that the noises, described as "umph, umph, umph," help to syncronize the hatch and signal to the mother that it's time to start preparing for her brood's emergence in the big bad world.
Scientists Amelie Vergne and Nicolas Mathevon of the French Universite Jean Monnet discovered the…
bleimanb | June 24, 2008Scientists have solved a timeless question that has divided Andrew and myself, more than once leading us to come to blows...And as it turns out, only one species of giant wombat roamed the planet between 2 million and 10,000 years ago, despite evidence that they varied significantly in size. Boo hoo, Andrew. You lose again!
Majestic, weren't they?
A study by Gilbert Price in the last issue of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society , focused on tooth specimens of the giant wombats (the largest ever marsupials to reign on Earth). After comparing over...
...a thousand teeth, Price…
zooillogix | June 23, 2008No one quite knows when the Light Brown Apple Moth arrived on the shores of California, but after DNA identification in 2007, it wasted no time pitting the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the populace of San Francisco against one another. Today the CDFA announced a new strategy for the eradication campaign: releasing bioengineered sterile moths to lure-in amorous males.
Ever tried to neuter a moth? Not easy...
Indigenous to Australia, the non-descript moth breeds prolifically with an average of three broods generations per year. However, much like Paul Hogan before it, the…
zooillogix | June 19, 2008
New Mexico is phenomenally weird and the Century Plant is a prime example. Thanks to S. Smith for taking this pic and sending it along, even if it ain't an animal.
From Wikipedia: The Century Plant or Maguey (Agave americana) is an agave originally from Mexico but cultivated worldwide.
It has a spreading rosette (about 4 m wide) of gray-green leaves up to 2 meters (6 ft.) long, each with a spiny margin and a heavy spike at the tip. Its common name derives from its habit of only occasionally flowering, but when it does, the spike with a cyme of big yellow flowers, may reach up to 8 meters (…
bleimanb | June 18, 2008First Guy Fawkes, then the IRA, then Al Qaeda. Now England is facing a new threat from within...slugs. The mild, wet winter in England has created the perfect conditions for slug overpopulation and the destruction of British gardens. The Daily Mail (England's most trusted, oldest, and least sensational periodical) is doing its civic duty by calmly informing the population, GARDENERS WARNED SLUG EPIDEMIC THIS SUMMER WILL BE THE 'STUFF OF NIGHTMARES'.
Slug 1: You be ready and do exactly as I say. On my signal, ride
round behind our position and flank them.
Slug 2: We must not divide our…
bleimanb | June 16, 2008A pilot program has been launched in England to take blood samples from animals in zoos not with plastic syringes but with live, bloodsucking insects known as a kissing bugs.
You may feel a slight pinch...
As many of our zoo keeper readers can tell you, taking blood samples from animals in zoos can be a very stressful and complicated undertaking, often involving sedating the captive creatures. Through the new program first reported by the BBC and being tested now at the London and Whipsnade zoos, the keepers are...
...using kissing bugs to do their work for them. The kissing bugs are raised…
zooillogix | June 15, 2008Spent the day at the Brookfield Zoo and was lucky enough to catch a resident polar bear inventing games for himself and doubly lucky my fiancee brought a video cam.
Polar Bear Takes a Dive
Polar Bear Tossing Around His Toy
More below the fold
Polar Bear Balances Toy on Nose and Paw
zooillogix | June 15, 2008The world's largest zoo and aquarium shot glass collection just got one glass bigger. Someone call the Guinness Book! Growing up in Connecticut, The Mystic Aquarium was basically Benny and my Disney World. Special thanks to Eric Heupel of the awesome invertebrate blog, The Other 95%, for the donation.
Also picked up the Brookfield Zoo this weekend, so that brings the tally to 23. The new list is below the fold. I know you are all fascinated...
Adventure Aquarium (formerly Camden Aquarium)
Bronx Zoo
Brookfield Zoo
Cincinnati Zoo
Cleveland Metroparks Zoo
Florida Aquarium
Georgia Aquarium…
zooillogix | June 13, 2008"Toad licking" has been well documented around the world with secretions from many species causing intense hallucinations. In this 2006 NPR podcast, they tell the story of a poor cocker spaniel who became addicted to toad. "We noticed Lady (the cocker) spending an awful lot of time down by the pond in our backyard. Late one night after I'd put the dogs out, Lady wouldn't come in. She finally staggered over to me from the cattails. She looked up at me, leaned her head over and opened her mouth like she was going to throw up, and out plopped this disgusting toad." Increasingly Lady would return…
bleimanb | June 11, 2008A new study of barn swallows has shed fascinating light on the link between appearance and the levels of sexual hormones in their bodies. Scientists have long noted that male swallows with deeper red throats attract more females and have higher levels of testosterone. Conventional wisdom assumed that swallows born with more testosterone had deeper throats and thus attracted more females. Turns out, however, that this is only partially true.
Who's the private dick who's the sex machine with all the chicks?....Artificially painted barn swallow! Awwwwwww yeah.
University of Colorado, Boulder…
zooillogix | June 11, 2008
This calf was born yesterday to Qila, who herself was born at the Vancouver Aquarium 12 years ago.
Special thanks to Vancouver Aquarium employee Keey Prior for bringing this to our attention.