An albino miniature aquatic turtle!
Kristin Hugo
The African big cats give birth around the same time so that they can take care of each other's cubs.
While researching lions in Zambia, biologist Thandiwe Mweetwa noticed that lionesses within a pride will all have cubs around the same time.
When she looked into it further, Mweetwa learned lionesses sync their fertility cycles so that they can all raise their young together.
There's a reason for that. “Synchronized estrus is thought to increase reproductive success in the pride,” says Mweetwa, a National Geographic emerging explorer and Big Cats Initiative grantee. Having cubs at the same time means that mother lions can rely on each other to nurse, babysit, and protect the youngsters.
This safety in numbers also allows more lions to survive to adulthood. Predation is a great threat to small, vulnerable babies in any species, but if all babies are born at the same time, there are only so many that predators can eat.
If young are born at different times throughout the year, predators could use them as a steady source of food.
Even so, many still die: More than half of all African lion cubs don’t make it past their first year. They're at risk from predation, disease, abandonment, starvation, and being killed by an outside male.
Monkeys mounting and humping deer, even pulling on their antlers
Japanese macaques are occassionaly seen mounting and attempting to mate with sika deer. Researchers hypothesize this might be a way to relieve sexual tension for adolescents and low-rankers. Read more in this article.
Click the link above for the video
Spotting a rare, snowy white animal that would typically be colorful is a surprising treat, and stunningly beautiful. White feathers or fur can be caused by genetic conditions including albinism and leucism. Albinism is a genetic mutation in which the body cannot produce melanin pigments. Leucism is another genetic peculiarity that causes white coloration, but the animal may have some pigments, such as giving them blue eyes or color patterning. Sometimes the white color can make animals more vulnerable to predators since they stand out. However, the coloration can also help them blend in. Albino and leucistic animals can also be dangerously susceptible to sunburn. Owners of pets with albinism and leucism can make accommodations to protect their companions.
Source: National Geographic
December 20, 2017—An arctic fox climbed over a mound of kelp to join Dave Briggs of the tour company Arctic Kingdom. During a six-week season, three arctic foxes visited the camp near the Hudson Bay Coast in Nunavut, Canada. Wary at first, they came dusk and before dawn. But one, nicknamed "Spot" for a patch on its hind quarter, became bold, and would approach people outside the camp. The veteran tour leader has rarely had a fox approach so close, saying the experience is "magical and fills me with joy." Footage and images: Dave Briggs / Arctic Kingdom arctickingdom.com
Source: National Geographic
For the first time, scientists have been able to observe something amazing: the evolution of a completely new species, in the wild, in real-time. And it took just two generations.
Now, genomic sequencing and the analysis of physical characteristics have confirmed the new species of Darwin's finch, endemic to a small island called Daphne Major in the Galápagos. Its discoverers have nicknamed it Big Bird.
There are at least 15 species of Darwin's finches, so named because their diversity helped famed naturalist Charles Darwin figure out his theory of evolution by natural selection - that is, mutations can help species become better adapted to their environment, and be passed down to subsequent generations.
It's two of these species that came together in what is called species hybridisation to create an entirely new one.
“This is Miss Alicia. Alicia is a flying fox that was rescued in Queensland, Australia. She was hit by a car and in need of rehabilitation. Nothing was broken and all four limbs are in working order. Alicia is expected to make a full recovery. Flying foxes have a diet of fruits, nectar and flowers.”
Flying foxes are megabats which live in along the tropical and subtropical coasts of the Pacific and Indian oceans. Unlike microbats, they do not possess echolocation, but instead have very well developed sight and hearing. Flying fox fossils from 35 million years ago appear almost no different than the ones we see today. Many flying fox species are threatened by extinction. Some of their biggest threats are deforestation, hunting, and predation by invasive species. Many species have already gone extinct.
Source: National Geographic
The fearsome mongoose. It can fight a cobra, kill a snake with one bite, and keep a farmer’s field clear of mice, rats, and insects.
But to some in India, which is home to six species of the ferret-like animal, they’re valuable in another way. Their fur makes expensive—and illegal—paintbrushes for artists.
As long ago as 1972, India prohibited the hunting, selling, and buying of mongooses and mongoose parts, including their hair, because of overhunting for their fur. Yet the poaching and the black market continue to this day. As recently as August, Indian officials arrested people suspected of smuggling 12 pounds of mongoose hair, the equivalent of more than 130 animals, the New Indian Express reported.
In the early 2000s some 50,000 mongooses—the most recent data available, according to the nonprofit Wildlife Trust of India—were being killed annually. Although we don’t know how many are killed today, experts say the black market continues to thrive.
“The production of mongoose-hair brushes is still ongoing,” says Jose Louies, of the Wildlife Trust of India. “The domestic trade is down, but the international trade is what drives the trade. Mongoose brushes are considered as fine brushes by artists across the world.”
These brushes are sometimes sold directly to buyers in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, and sometimes they’re passed off as sable or badger paintbrushes, which are legal.
Hunting can be brutal business. Indigenous hunters typically trap mongooses using snares or nets and then beat them to death with clubs, according to a documentary the Wildlife Trust of India produced. Hunters pull the fur off the skin, keeping the meat for themselves and selling the hair to middlemen. One mongoose provides a small handful of hair. The middlemen consolidate hair from many villages and sell it to factories to produce paintbrushes.
It can be a large-scale operation. In 2015, Indian law enforcement seized 14,000 mongoose-hair paintbrushes from a distributor in a coastal town of southwestern India, the Times of India reported. They’d been manufactured in the state of Uttar Pradesh, in an area the Wildlife Trust of India has said is home to many brush manufacturers.
Earlier this year, National Geographic reported on the environmental destruction taking place in the South China Sea while politicians and diplomats argue over which country controls the region. The fishery, one of the largest in the world, is on the brink of collapse, and hundreds of acres of coral reef, some of the most biodiverse in the world, have been buried under artificial islands or dug up in the quest for giant clams.
Giant clam poaching is the main cause of reef destruction in the South China Sea. Some 40 square miles of coral reefs, or about 10 percent, have been killed by Chinese fishermen seeking the giant bivalves. A booming trade in Tanmen, a port town in the southern Chinese province of Hainan, has made the fishing, carving, and selling of giant clam shells, carvings, and jewelry a lucrative business.
Now, in a stated attempt to protect the marine environment, Hainan Province has banned the processing and trade of giant clams and corals, another marine product that’s seen an increase in illegal trade. Calling the sea around the province, which encompasses several contested island chains in the South China Sea, a “treasure house,” the regulations amend the Coral Reef Protection Act of Hainan Province to include giant clam species.
“Poaching and illegal transportation of these animals, including their dead body and products, are strictly prohibited, including online transaction and mailing,” a translation of the regulations reads, noting that the Fisheries Management Bureau will be in charge of protecting giant clams. (...)
Giant clams, which can grow to nearly four feet across, play an important role in the sea’s ecosystem by filtering pollutants in the water. Furthermore, the destruction required to remove them from the reefs kills of large swaths of coral, potentially exacerbating the already critical overfishing problem in the region because coral beds provide habitat for marine life.
Those who have studied the trade aren’t confident that these new regulations will change much. “While the new rule is very comprehensive, I am not sure how well or effectively it will be implemented,” said Zhang Hongzhou, a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, in an email. He said selling giant clams has always been illegal under other laws, but enforcement was a gray area. “My concern is that as long as there is huge demand for giant clam products, actions taken on the supply side will only achieve limited effects.”
Greg Poling at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, however, notes that the market has seen a shift in the last year. "By many accounts, [Chinese President Xi Jinping's] anti-corruption drive undermined demand for the expensive jewelry and statues carved from giant clam shell, which is what finally put a halt to the devastating clam-digging throughout the Spratly [Islands]" in the South China Sea.
For the first time, scientists have sequenced the entire genome of a seahorse to discover that it has a higher rate of evolution than any other species of bony fish that’s been studied so far.
This rapid evolutionary rate explains many of the seahorse’s strangest traits, including its toothless, tubular snout, unique body shape, and the fact that the male sea horse experiences pregnancy - not the female.
"We have discovered an array of changes in the genome, which helps to explain why the seahorse looks the way it does," one of the team, Byrappa Venkatesh, from the Agency for Science Technology and Research in Singapore, told PBS Newshour.
Venkatesh and his team sequenced the genome of the tiger tail seahorse(Hippocampus comes) - a threatened species from the tropical regions of the Western Central Pacific that can grow up to 18.7 cm long (7.4 inches).
Once they had the species' entire genome mapped out, they could start piecing together the evolutionary history that set seahorses apart from other teleost fish - a group that makes up 96 percent of all fish on Earth, including the most highly evolved ones.
If it hadn’t really occurred to you that seahorses were a type of fish - just like catfish, salmon, and whatever’s in your fish tank - that’s kind of the point here.
Looking like a cross between a tiny pony and an eel, seahorses - and their close relatives, sea dragons and pipefish - don’t look like any other type of fish on the planet.
And now scientists have pinpointed the genetic pathways that led to many of its unique features, such as a loss of teeth and pelvic fins, a poor sense of smell, and the ability for males to carry and birth their young.
One of the most obvious clues in the seahorse genome for how it ended up the way it is today is the fact that it’s missing the P/Q-rich SCPP genes, which in other teleost fish are responsible for the production of enamel to form teeth.
The evolutionary pressures that would have come from a lack of teeth could explain how the seahorse’s jaws ended up fusing into a long, tubular snout, which they use to suck up tiny morsels of food such as small fish and plankton, and swallow them whole.
Backyard birders have another tool in their arsenal, with a newly updated smartphone app that can recognize a bird species by analyzing a photo.
Much like facial recognition systems, the app – The Merlin Bird Photo ID, created by researchers from Caltech and Cornell University – only needs a clear, quality photo to begin matching the picture against a database of 650 North American bird species it currently stores.
Users simply show the app their bird photo, tell the program where and in what time of year the winged wonder was spotted, and then wait a moment to see if Merlin comes up with an answer.
If it thinks it's identified the bird, the app supplies one or more possible suspects, with details about the bird's markings, behavior and breeding. Also supplied are juvenile and adult photos, sample calls from the bird, and a map showing the animal's year-round, breeding, migrating and non-breeding ranges throughout North America.
The researchers say, in a press release, that the program will be correct about 90 percent of the time, assuming a quality picture and, of course, that the bird is present in the database.
Does it work as advertised? This author supplied the app with a picture of a sharp-skinned hawk taken in his backyard and the program indeed returned the correct hawk species as a potential identification, along with a second possibility, a Cooper's hawk, which looks a lot like a sharp-skinned. The picture was somewhat dark, originally taken by smartphone at "web photo" image quality, so at least in that case the app seemed pretty agile.
Caltech engineering professor Petro Perona said the app is part of a wider vision centered around machine learning and visual classification.
"Ultimately," Perona said, "we want to create an open platform that any community can use to make a visual classification tool for butterflies, frogs, plants, or whatever they need."
“The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund maintains daily gorilla tracking and anti-poaching patrols not only to monitor the status of the gorillas but also to look for dangers and illegal activities in the forest, especially snares set by poachers. In Rwanda, these snares are mainly set for game animals, such as antelopes, but gorillas can and do get caught in them as well, which can cause serious injuries.
In 2016, we are extremely happy to report that none of the gorillas in the groups we monitor were caught in snares! This is only the second time in a decade that this has happened, so we are proud of our success. Still, our field staff find – and dismantle – up to about a thousand snares during the year, luckily before the gorillas reach them.
In fact, on Dec. 28, one of our tracking teams located some snares very close to a gorilla group, and a small antelope – called a duiker – had already been ensnared. Our trackers were able to free the duiker, which was still unharmed, all while the gorillas were observing.
Over the years, our field staff has observed gorillas dismantling snares themselves, including silverbacks and even a few juveniles. But this is very dangerous and can result in injuries. Still, it shows us that at least some gorillas are “snare aware” and know that these traps are dangerous.
When Dian Fossey began her studies nearly 50 years ago, poaching was at record-high levels and that is what led her to begin anti-poaching patrols. Today, we have special teams for this and our gorilla group trackers also look for and destroy snares. This type of daily monitoring has proven crucial to protecting the mountain gorillas and is a major factor in the doubling of their numbers since Fossey’s time. Still, their population is tiny and they remain a critically endangered species, requiring perpetual protection. The Fossey Fund hopes to make 2017 and subsequent years snare free!”
Scientists are close to bringing back a huge ancient cattle species called an aurochs.
Aurochs roamed Europe for thousands of years until the last of their kind died in the Jaktorow Forest in Poland in 1627.
They were 7 ft (2.13 m) tall and weighed around 1,000kg.
Since 2009, European science teams have been breeding cattle which still carry aurochs DNA. Two programmes are attempting to revive a version of the aurochs through breeding.
One is Operation Taurus, which has selectively bred 300 calves with aurochs DNA via a process called back-breeding. They select breeds of cattle which have certain aurochs characteristics and each generation of calves gets closer to the original aurochs in appearance, behaviour and genetic makeup.
There are several breeds of cattle the scientists use which have characteristics closest to the aurochs, including the Maremmana from Italy and Podolica and Busha breed from the Balkans.
"They have the highest percentage of aurochs genetic material," Professor Donato Matassino from the operation told The Telegraph.
"I don’t think we’ll ever be able to create an animal that is 100 percent like the aurochs, but we can get very close."
Another programme trying to revive the aurochs is The Taurus Project in Portugal, which has also been cross-breeding species in an attempt to recreate the animal.
These programmes are all part of the Rewilding Europe project, which aims to reintroduce Europe’s lost, wild species, which would not only help the environment, but also be good for local tourism.
"Wild cattle are one of the species that shaped the European landscape over hundreds of thousands of years," Wouter Helmer, founder of Rewilding Europe, told The Telegraph.
"If there are no large herbivores then the forest regenerates very fast.
"Big grazing animals keep patches of land open and create variety in the landscape which helps many thousands of species of plants, insects and animals."
Aurochs appear often in cave paintings across Europe, which suggests they were an important part of our agriculture, another reason scientists want to bring them back.
Also on the list for "de-extinction" are woolly mammoths and moas which were giant flightless birds.
(...) Several decades of observation show that orcas are not naturally violent towards humans. There are no recorded cases of a wild orca killing a human.
"In captivity, we force this artificial proximity to human beings, so the orcas do act out once in a while and kill you," says marine mammal scientist Naomi Rose of the Animal Welfare Institute in Washington, DC. "They are too large to be kept in captivity." (...)
"These are animals that coordinate their movements over scales of tens of kilometres. It's difficult to replicate that in any aquarium," says conservation biologist Rob Williams at Oceans Initiative in Seattle, Washington.
Many orcas travel over 100km (62 miles) every day.
We do not quite know how far they travel in any given year, but we are starting to find out. One team tagged a group of orcas and discovered that they frequently travel all the way from the Antarctic Peninsula to Brazil and back again. At one point they travelled nonstop for 42 days and covered 9,400km (5,075 miles).
That big animals need habitats to match is obvious. What is less clear at first glance is how sociable orcas are.
All whales and dolphins are highly social, but orcas go one further. "They are the most social mammal on Earth, [and] that includes humans," says Williams.
That is because they live in multi-generational units, which live together for almost their entire lives.
There are only three species of elephants living today: The African Bush Elephant, the African Forest Elephant and the Asian Elephant. While being clearly different from one another, all three share the same basic characteristics: mostly hairless big bodies, thick legs, long trunks and tusks derived from the upper incisors. However, this uniformity undermines the astounding variety of extinct elephant relatives, which are collectively called Proboscideans.
There were the famous hairy mammoths and mastodons, the enormous Deinotherium with downward-pointing tusks coming out of its lower jaw, and the long-faced Gomphotherium with not only two, but four tusks coming out of its mouth. Still, one of the most bizarre extinct proboscideans was Platybelodon.
Platybelodon has puzzled scientists ever since its discovery in the early 1920s. While the overall body did resemble modern elephants, its skull indicates something very different was going on. It had a very elongated mandible from which two long flat teeth protruded, forming a distinctly shovel-shaped appendage that extended far past the upper jaw. And since we don’t have any fossilized remains of soft tissue from Platybelodon, we also don’t know for sure if it had a normal elephantine trunk, or something different like a fleshy, flat upper lip that could work alongside the strange spade-like teeth to procure food.
For many years, the consensus was that Platybelodon and similar relatives were swamp-dwellers, much like the old view of sauropod dinosaurs. They would use their shovel-mouths to scoop up soft plants from shallow waters and lead a mostly semi-aquatic lifestyle like hippos. However, recent research by paleontologist Gina Semprebon and colleagues confirmed a theory put forth in 1992 by David Lambert. The microscopic patterns of damage present on the teeth of these animals suggested that they were being used against rougher surfaces, like bark, branches and other land-based plants instead of soft aquatic vegetation, which would not cause as much tooth wear.
It now seems that the shovel-tusked Platybelodon did not use its tusks like shovels after all, but more like scythes. It had a flexible trunk to hold onto trees and branches while sawing at them with the sharp edges of its teeth to cut mouthfuls of vegetation and then bring those to its large mouth. This made them versatile terrestrial browsers much like modern elephants, while using a very different technique.
Original research published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology
In the deserts of Namibia, water is perhaps the scarcest resource. Animals of this size are rare because they require enormous quantities of food and water per day. Yet these elephants have found a way to survive. They acquire water from the plants they eat, resorting to gymnastics to reach the most nutritional branches. Only plants with the deepest roots can survive in desert conditions like these. Because the elephant digestive system is very inefficient, elephants are on a constant search for food.
And when there aren’t enough plants around, elephants have the unique ability to sniff out underground water - a trait likely passed down as knowledge in families. Once they pinpoint a good source, they dig until they reach the moisture. They siphon out the sandy water and are then able to drink out of the clean well. These wells are a lifeline for many other desert inhabitants as well.
(gifs from NatGeo WILD’s Destination WILD Namibia)
Beco the elephant plays water polo at the Columbus Zoo! (thanks to the Columbus Zoo Media on YouTube)