Three-Foot Rat Found In New York City Shoe Store
Wondering what creature will inherit the earth after the fall of man in 2012? Well, take a peek at our future masters. Someone tweeted this photo of a gigantic rat, supposedly caught inside a Foot Locker store in the Bronx. Similarly sized rats were spotted in Brooklyn last year (with some photographic evidence as well). Via Gothamist:
Antarctic ‘Lost World’ Discovered
New type of octopus found in Antarctic. Photo: Oxford Univ.
Some of these creatures are pretty sci-fi! From Fox News:
A “lost world” of sea creatures was discovered near Antarctica, British scientists announced Wednesday.
New types of yeti crab, starfish and octopus were among the species found 8,000 feet (2,400 meters) below the surface of the sea, Oxford University researchers said.
The new life-forms were able to exist by feeding off chemicals from black smoke emitted by volcanic hot vents beneath the Southern Ocean, where temperatures can reach 720 degrees Fahrenheit (382 degrees Celsius).
“Hydrothermal vents are home to animals found nowhere else on the planet that get their energy not from the Sun but from breaking down chemicals, such as hydrogen sulphide,” according to Oxford University professor Alex Rogers, who led the research…
[continues at Fox News]
Thousands Of Birds Fall Dead From Sky In Arkansas
In recent times, New Year’s seems to always bring with it mystifying mass animal deaths. What an appropriate way to ring in 2012! The New York Daily News writes:
Thousands of blackbirds dropped dead on New Year’s Eve in Arkansas in an incident eerily similar to one that occurred at the same time a year ago.
The disturbing deaths in Beebe, a city northwest of Little Rock, were sparked after loud fireworks sent flocks of the small birds into a panic, scientists said. This caused them to collide with each other, as well as power lines, houses and cars.
On New Year’s Eve 2010, an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 birds died from “blunt trauma” after they were similarly spooked by fireworks.
Eyewitnesses told authorities “the birds were hitting mailboxes, cars, basketball goals, houses, trees,” Keith Stephens of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission told the Daily News last January. “The trauma shows that they were…
Man Jailed For Creating Mutant Taxidermy
Guilty of imagining a vivid, strange world that doesn’t exist, and trying to bring it into creation. The Daily Mail writes:
Like a modern day Dr Frankenstein, Enrique Gomez De Molina creates hauntingly stunning hybrid sculptures made from the stuffed parts of dead animals. But it…could land the Miami artist in jail for up to five years and see him forking out $250,000 in fines.
He pleaded guilty to illegally importing parts from endangered species to make his beloved mythical creatures. He smuggled in the parts, skins and remains, from whole cobras, pangolins, hornbills, and the skulls of babirusa and orangutans from areas all over the world including Bali, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and China.
An App That You Play With Live Pigs
Provide some kicks for both yourself and a farm animal on a faraway continent. Treehugger writes:
In hopes of staving off boredom in human and swine alike, a team of Dutch designers have created Pig Chase — an app for interspecies entertainment that playfully pits iPad users against real-life pigs, who might otherwise only meet one another on a plate.
Since 2001, law has required pig farmers in the European Union to provide some form of entertainment to their livestock as a way of keeping them in good emotional health, which in turn helps curb aggression and anxiety. Often, toys and other materials are placed inside the sties for animals to interact with, but perhaps unsurprisingly, some farmers have found it quite difficult to turn their pigpens into playpens.
With that in mind, designers from Utrecht School of the Arts and Wageningen University in the Netherlands ventured to create new ways to make swine…
Rats Display Human-Like Empathy
Rats are better than many people. The Telegraph writes:
Rats actually display human-like empathy and will unselfishly go to the aid of a distressed fellow rodent, research has shown.
The results of an experiment in which rats opened a door to free trapped cage-mates astonished scientists. No reward was needed and not even the lure of chocolate distracted the rescuing rats.
”This is the first evidence of helping behaviour triggered by empathy in rats,” said US study leader Professor Jean Decety. ”There are a lot of ideas in the literature showing that empathy is not unique to humans, and it has been well demonstrated in apes, but in rodents it was not very clear.”
Psychology graduate student Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, who helped devise the experiment, pointed out that the rats were not trained in any way. ”These rats are learning because they are motivated by something internal,” she said. ”We’re not showing them how to…
World’s Biggest Insect Found In New Zealand
No word on whether it is available for adoption. Via the Daily Mail:
Mark Moffett’s find is the world’s biggest insect in terms of weight, which at 71g is heavier than a sparrow and three times that of a mouse. The 53-year-old former park ranger discovered the giant weta up a tree and [it] has now been declared the largest ever found. The creepy crawly is only found on Little Barrier Island, in New Zealand, although there are 70 other types of smaller weta found throughout the country.
Male Spiders Pay For Sex
Via PhysOrg:
Male nursery web spiders (Pisaura mirabilis) prepare silk-wrapped gifts to give to potential mates. Most gifts contain insects, but some gifts are inedible plant seeds or empty exoskeletons left after the prey has already been eaten (presumably by the male himself!).
Males will also ‘play dead’ if a female moves away and then attempt to re-establish mating. New research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology examines the reproductive success of deceitful males and shows that females are not impressed by worthless gifts.
Male spiders were provided with either a potential gift of a fly, or a worthless item, such as a cotton wool ball, a dry flower head, a prey leftover (previously eaten housefly), or no gift at all. All the gifts were approximately the same size, so the females would not be able to tell what the gift was without unwrapping it. Males that offered any gift…
I’m High on Crystal Meth: Time to Kill and Eat A Bobcat
Via the Mercury News:
A 38-year-old Morgan Hill man has been charged with being high on methamphetamine, owning a stash of sharp cockfighting ankle spikes, and skinning a bobcat before he ate it.
Henry Arnibal was not charged with eating a bobcat. That’s not illegal, but killing one without a permit is against the law, Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Steve Lowney said. Arnibal didn’t have a permit. All the charges, filed Monday, are fish and game violations, except for the penal drug charge. All are misdemeanors.
Arnibal was arrested Nov. 7 on Sleepy Valley Road in unincorporated Morgan Hill. He was allegedly high on meth. Deputies found 50 roosters, gaffs, sharp hooks that are attached to roosters’ legs for illegal cockfights, and the preserved carcass of a bobcat. Arnibal told authorities that the large feline had eaten five of his roosters, according to Lowney. He killed it with a .22-caliber rifle, authorities allege.
The (Unexplained) Death of Bats
Via New Times:
The abandoned iron mine at Mine Hill in Roxbury used to provide a winter home for 3,000 bats — the largest bat hibernaculum in the state. The last time Jennie Dickson, a wildlife biologist with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, counted, there were about 100 bats there.
“That’s not good,” she said. For the past five years, the bats of the eastern United States have been dying in like numbers — one of the worst environmental catastrophes in recent years.
What biologists like Dickson knew was that the dying bats could be found with an off-white fungus on their nose and wings. What was causing the die-off was uncertain …
Did Prehistoric Giant Squids Make Art From Bones?
It sounds completly crazy. But it’s what a group of paleontologists are claiming — the first sentient beings on Earth to create art may not have been humans, but monstrously large, tentacled sea creatures called “kraken” who lived 200 million years ago and possibly arranged bones in geometric, decorative patterns. io9 explains further:
For decades, paleontologists have puzzled over a fossil collection of nine Triassic icthyosaurs (Shonisaurus popularis) discovered in Nevada’s Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. Researchers initially thought that this strange grouping of 45-foot-long marine reptiles had either died en masse from a poisonous plankton bloom or had become stranded in shallow water.
But recent geological analysis of the fossil site indicates that the park was deep underwater when these shonisaurs swam the prehistoric seas. So why were their bones laid in such a bizarre pattern? A new theory suggests that a 100-foot-long cephalopod arranged these bones as a self-portrait after drowning the reptiles.…
Thousands of Dead Birds Wash Ashore in Ontario
Via CTV:
Thousands of dead birds will be collected from an Ontario shoreline on Monday as the province’s Ministry of Natural Resources tries to determine what killed the waterfowl. Officials estimate as many as 6,000 dead birds have washed up on the Georgian Bay’s shoreline.
The carcasses are scattered along a nearly three-kilometre stretch near Wasaga Beach. “You just want to cry,” resident Faye Ego told CTV Toronto on Saturday.
Authorities speculate that the birds may have been killed by a form of botulism after eating dead fish. Locals said they noticed some dead fish on the beach a few weeks ago and a few dead birds earlier in September. During Monday’s cleanup, crews will be trying to tally up the total number of dead birds on the shoreline …
This #OccupyWallStreet Dog Hates Banksters!
You know your movement is rockin’ the interwebs when you have a Tumblr blog for animals supporting it.
See more conscientious animal objecters to the current state of capitalism at: Awwccupy Wall Street …
Soy Protein Present in Egg Yolks and Chicken Tissues
Via Health Freedoms:
There is a growing market today of consumers trying to avoid soy in their diet. Many people have developed soy allergies, and a number of people are concerned about the plant estrogen properties of soy protein. Soy protein is linked to the rise in hypothyroidism, early puberty in young girls, and lower testosterone levels in men, among other problems. Much of this research is documented in Dr. Kaayla Daniel’s book The Whole Soy Story.
What most people do not realize, however, is that due to the predominance of soy in animal feeds, soy protein is probably present in your food even if it is not listed as an ingredient anywhere. Very little testing has been done to determine if the soy protein from the animal feed is passed into the end products we consume. Most laboratories do not even have tests available to test for this.
Professor M. Monica Giusti,…
Mystery Behind Virgin Births Explained
Explaining a virgin birth by means of a serpent? God must have a sense of irony. Jennifer Viegas writes on Discovery News:
An eastern diamond rattlesnake recently gave successful birth five years after mating, according to a new paper that describes this longest known instance of sperm storage, outside of insects, in the animal kingdom.
The study, published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, also presents the first documented virgin birth by a copperhead snake. In this case, the female never mated, proving that snakes and certain other animals can either give true virgin — dadless — birth, or may store sperm for long periods.
Actual mate-less virgin birthing, known as parthenogenesis, “has now been observed to occur naturally within all lineages of jawed vertebrates, with the exception of mammals,” co-author Warren Booth told Discovery News. “We have recently seen genetic confirmation in species such as boa constrictors, rainbow boas, various…
You Can No Longer (Legally) Have Sex with Animals in Florida
Matthew Hendley writes in the Broward-Palm Beach New Times:
… Senate Bill 344, which bans “sexual contact” and “sexual conduct” with animals, goes into effect on Saturday [October 1].
Unfortunately for animal sexers, several people have faced charges in Florida after being caught fornicating with fauna; however, we couldn’t find a case of anyone being convicted. Police say Eugene Hickman, a 54-year-old DeFuniak Springs resident, was arrested in June after his grandson walked into a bedroom and saw him naked on top of the family bulldog, attempting to have sex with it.
According to the Walton County Clerk, Hickman is scheduled to go to trial in November on an animal cruelty charge as well as a charge of lewd and lascivious exhibition charge for allegedly doing the deed in front of the kid … Still, State Sen. Nan Rich’s bill banning sex with animals didn’t pass until her third attempt because legislators were…
Chimpanzees Are Spontaneously Generous After All
Via ScienceDaily:
Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have shown chimpanzees have a significant bias for prosocial behavior. This, the study authors report, is in contrast to previous studies that positioned chimpanzees as reluctant altruists and led to the widely held belief that human altruism evolved in the last six million years only after humans split from apes.The current study findings are available in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
According to Yerkes researchers Victoria Horner, PhD, Frans de Waal, PhD, and their colleagues, chimpanzees may not have shown prosocial behaviors in other studies because of design issues, such as the complexity of the apparatus used to deliver rewards and the distance between the animals.
“I have always been skeptical of the previous negative findings and their over-interpretation, says Dr. de Waal. “This study confirms the prosocial nature of chimpanzees with a different test, better adapted…
Dolphins Address One Another By Name
Their names, however, are whistle patterns. New Scientist reports:
Stephanie King of the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues monitored 179 pairs of wild bottlenose dolphins off the Florida coast between 1988 and 2004. Of these, 10 were seen copying each other’s signature whistles, which the dolphins make to identify themselves to each other.
The behavior has never been documented before, and was only seen in pairs composed of a mother and her calf or adults who would normally move around and hunt together.
The copied whistles changed frequency in the same way as real signature whistles, but either started from a higher frequency or didn’t last as long, suggesting Dave was not merely imitating Alan.
Parasite Tricks Male Rats Into Becoming Cat Food
Via ScienceDaily:
When a male rat senses the presence of a fetching female rat, a certain region of his brain lights up with neural activity, in anticipation of romance. Now Stanford University researchers have discovered that in male rats infected with the parasite Toxoplasma, the same region responds just as strongly to the odor of cat urine. Is it time to dim the lights and cue the Rachmaninoff for some cross-species canoodling?
“Well, we see activity in the pathway that normally controls how male rats respond to female rats, so it’s possible the behavior we are seeing in response to cat urine is sexual attraction behavior, but we don’t know that,” said Patrick House, a PhD candidate in neuroscience in the School of Medicine. “I would not say that they are definitively attracted, but they are certainly less afraid. Regardless, seeing activity in the attraction pathway is bizarre.”
For a rat, fear of…
