zooillogix | March 31, 2009In the 1930s, Australian ecologists shortsightedly introduced the Cane Toad, a species indigenous to South America, to their isolated continent to eat agricultural pests. This famously proved to be a complete disaster with the toxic toads running rampant and native species poisoning themselves when they tried to make snacks of the delicious, dimwitted amphibians.
Now a team of Australian researchers from the University of Sydney think they may have found an elegant solution that absolutely, positively, cannot backfire into a 1970 C minus horror movie: Meat Ants. The gentle meat ant lives…
zooillogix | March 26, 2009It might not seem like the an 8 inch long leopard slug could put on an amazing sex show. After all, they can be real slimeballs. But actually, these hermaphroditic gastropod mollusks' sexual behavior is quite... well... beautiful.
video link:
The foreplay for the fertilization, which consists of a lot of licking and nibbling, can last up to 2.5 hours. That's about 793 days in slug time. And when it's all over with, both slugs (slowly) retreat to cold and damp hideaways in order to lay their respective sets of eggs.
If you're thinking about eating these monster slugs, please don't.…
bleimanb | March 26, 2009Zooillogix has seen growth of 35%-40% month over month since we began the site two years ago and currently boasts 200 million readers. It only makes sense that we need a little help. We'd like to introduce you to Katie Thompson, the Zooillogix Intern Extraordinaire!
Careful, she is a certified Krav Maga instructor.
Because Katie's father was in M15, Katie's family moved frequently as she was growing up, often to exotic locations, and she found it difficult to make and keep long term friends. Her mixed racial background (Native American, Finnish, and Swazi) also fostered in her, as she says…
bleimanb | March 24, 2009The Wall Street Journal reported last week that scientists have finally taken my advice and designed a ruthless mosquito-killing laser that could never ever malfunction and target human children by mistake. Former Lawrence Livermore Science Laboratory researchers have created a laser that aims only at female mosquitoes, using parts that they bought on Ebay (not kidding).
Hey, Dr. Strangelove. A little help here?
Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist, is the main force behind the mosquito laser. He was well known for his work on the "Star Wars" defense program of the...
...80's that sought to…
zooillogix | March 24, 2009Siamese Crocodiles
Courtesy of Zooillogix reader extraordinaire, Zellychan.
zooillogix | March 20, 2009For the last few months, a killer stalked the streets of Cornwall... or more specifically, the water of Cornwall, and even more specifically, the living reefs exhibit at Newquay's Blue Reef Aquarium. Day after day, aquarists would return to the award winning exhibit, only to find once healthy coral ripped apart - in some cases literally ripped in half.
Clues were few and a variety of traps yielded no results. When a gentle tang fish was found greviously injured, they called in Scotland Yard. On a side note, tang is delicious.
Reluctant to remember the incident, Curator Matt Slater finally…
zooillogix | March 19, 2009As boneless, gelatinous bags, octopuses rarely find themselves preserved as fossils but just this week it was announced in the journal Palaeontology that three new 95,000,000 year old octopus fossils have been discovered. These are the oldest on record. So what does an octopus fossil look like? Apparently, like something your elementary school child would create in art class when asked to create an octopus fossil.
The precursors to modern octopuses had fins that ran alongside their bodies but these fossils do not. "These are sensational fossils, extraordinarily well preserved' says Dirk…
bleimanb | March 16, 2009A new kind of fish with Dracula style fangs has been discovered...in a fish tank that researchers had been keeping for a year. The fish had been living at the London Museum of Natural History for almost 12 months before scientists realized that they were a new species. They had been collected in Burma.
Which is your favorite movie in the Underworld trilogy? Ours is the latest, Rise of the Lychans.
The pointy fangs seen in the picture are actually not true teeth, but only bony protrusions coming from the fish's jaws. Furthermore researchers don't believe that the fangs are used for feeding…
zooillogix | March 12, 2009Zooillogix friend Tweet sent us along yet more cool ring tail possum pictures from Crocodile Dundee land. Here is one with a 10-14 day old baby.
bleimanb | March 10, 2009As long as we're on the subject, this Asian elephant, Mosha, was outfitted with a prosthetic leg after losing hers to a landmine on the Thai-Burmese border at the tender age of seven months old. She was taken in by the Friends of the Asian Elephant hospital in Lampang, Thailand and in 2007, became the first elephant ever to receive a prosthetic leg.
We can rebuild her...
Sweet Mosha video below the fold...
zooillogix | March 6, 2009Our friends at the New England Aquarium pointed us to these nifty shots of their giant Pacific octopus squeezing itself into a small acrylic box for some delicious crab.
As part of regular enrichment activities for the octopus, aquarist Bill Murphy hides food in plastic boxes with different types of "locks" the octopus must figure out. In this case, the box being used had a hole in it created by the aquarium's previous resident octopus and, rather than open the top, the octopus just sort of poured himself in. When the aquarium really wants to frustrate their octopus, they just give it a…
bleimanb | March 3, 2009A form of deadly herpes is sweeping through American zoos, killing 1 in 5 Asian elephant calves born in the U.S. since 2000 according to a recent article in the New York Times.
It's about suppression.
Researchers and zookeepers know almost nothing about the elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus including how it is spread, which elephants carry it, how to treat it or why it seems to kill only baby elephants. They have, however, begun to recognize some of the myriad symptoms: sluggishness, loss of appetite, swollen heads and pale, bruised tongues. From the time the symptoms are noticed, the…
bleimanb | March 2, 2009Last April we brought you images of a newly discovered frogfish with some unusual characteristics. Here are two videos of the Histiophryne psychedelica in action. After almost a year it has been confirmed, by the way, that this fish is indeed a new species to science.
When the fish opens its mouth for the second time, hit play on the Darkside of the Moon.
It bounces off of coral like a superball!
bleimanb | February 26, 2009Recent conservation efforts in the Florida Everglades to save the American crocodile from the brink of extinction have been effective: good thing. Territorial crocodiles hanging out in Floridian's back yards, however: bad thing. The worst part? Once a crocodile is removed from its favorite haunt, it will travel tens, sometimes hundreds of miles to return, using the Earth's magnetic field as a guide. Now the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has turned to an interesting method of deterring the crocs' return once they have been relocated - taping magnets to the crocodiles' heads…
bleimanb | February 25, 2009A new study of C. maculatus seed beetles has proven the worst case scenario for most men: size and in this case the number of painful, injuring spikes on their penises do in fact matter. The C. maculatus have a series of spikes and barbs on their members that, during sex, become embedded in their mates, acting as anchors of sorts.
We are so sorry, but what you are looking at is EXACTLY what you think it is.
"They literally injure females internally in their copulatory duct. They're pretty mean," Goran Arnqvist, the lead author of the study, said to National Geographic.
Bow-chicka-wow-…
zooillogix | February 24, 2009The barreleye has been known to science since 1939 but scientists have never understood why the fish had a see-through head. Well now researchers at MBARI have solved the mystery: the barreleyes' see-through heads allow them to read each others' thoughts!
OK not true. Actually, their see through heads allow their long tubular eyes to actually stare up through their own noggins. We strongly suggest you go visit the sea monkeys at Deep Sea News to get the whole story. But if you don't care about "facts", and just want pretty pictures and scintillating see-through fish video, well, we got that…
zooillogix | February 22, 2009As many of you know, I collect zoo and aquarium shot glasses. I have the world's largest and probably only collection and it is my pride and joy. When I die, my children will most likely be left poor in "money" but rich in shot glasses. A legacy we can all be proud of.
I have two additions to announce. First and foremost, this beauty sent by Beth F from the awesome Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco. For those of you unfamiliar with this fine institution, you should know that it is the only aquarium with sevengill sharks (I think) and it has the most fancy pants website this side of not-…
zooillogix | February 17, 2009The Audubon Insectarium in New Orleans just bred these rare pink katydids and I find them captivating/delicious.
Pink Katydid Facts:
⢠The parental katydids, both pink, were brought to Audubon Insectarium during
the summer of 2008 as donations by visitors.
⢠The pink katydids were sent off to Cokie Bauder, Manager of Animal Collections
at the Insectarium's Insect Rearing Facility, for supervision and care.
⢠The pink katydids are oblong-winged katydids, Amblycorypha oblongifolia.
⢠This unusual katydid coloration was first written about in a scientific article in
1878.
⢠The first…