All creatures on earth are sentient beings. There is not an animal on earth, nor a bird that flies on its wings - but they are communities like you." (The Quran 6:38)
Something awful is happening in the waters off Peru's northern coast, where some 3,000 dolphins have died and washed ashore since January. This rates as one of the worst, if not the worst, Unusual Mortality Event (UME) ever recorded.
What's Going on With Peru's Dolphins and Pelicans?, 5/7/12
Check out this video of an octopus literally crawling out of the water and dragging itself across dry land in pursuit of a meal. A family with a camera was lucky enough to be on the scene and captured the whole thing on video:
Octopus crawls out of water and walks on dry land, 11/23/11
Metasepia pfefferi, better known as the Flamboyant Cuttlefish, is truly a unique sea creature. Not only does it change colors, but it creates a moving pattern of color which is mesmerizing to watch.
Flamboyant Cuttlefish, A Rare Color-Changing Creature, 11/20/11
Rhinella’s brutal appetite is among a string of recent revelations of what might be called extreme or uncanny cannibalism, when one animal’s determination to feed on its fellows takes such a florid or subversive turn that scientists are left, as Mark Wilkinson of the Natural History Museum in London put it, “gobsmacked” by the sight.
‘A Toad-Eat-Toad World,’ and Other Tales of Animal Cannibals, 10/31/11
The global commercial pet food industry is astonishingly profitable and continues to grow (sadly) by leaps and bounds. Let's define commercial pet food, for our purposes, as anything that is packaged in cans or bags, even if labeled holistic or natural. Hundreds of generations of pet guardians have fed their animals successfully without the use of bagged, canned and processed pet foods, but that fact has been virtually covered up by "Big Pet Food," and consequently forgotten by consumers.
Horrors of Commercial Pet Food, 6/28/11
This is about the wild horse roundups. BUT, ranch owners who own cattle and sheep should pay attention to the following, and wonder what water or land will be left for your livestock grazing in the future. Why do you think the DOI is removing all of the wild horses off our public lands? For you?
An open letter to the BLM, 5/9/11
What does a bee-less world look like? Einstein is supposed to have said humanity would have four years once the bees were gone. What would those four years be like?
Leaving aside factors like agricultural collapse in favor of the personal, say we like delicious, succulent watermelon. We get our vines all planted and they`re growing like sixty. And we even get some fruit. So, what`s the flap all about?
What Bees do for us, 5/6/11
Fire ants might be infuriating little beasts, an invasive species we'd all be pleased to see banished to its native Brazil, but it turns out a fire ant colony has some pretty amazing properties. In groups, they knit together, more like a fabric than anything else, and are waterproof, totally flexible, and nearly indestructible. A mechanical engineer describes these groups as behaving like a thick liquid.
Things Fire Ants Behave Like: Gore-Tex, a Liquid, a Woven Material, and a Waterproof Raft, 4/26/11
A crucial lifeblood to agriculture, bees continue to face threats of extinction by things like pollution and pesticides, both of which are implicated in causing mass bee die-offs, also known as "colony collapse disorder" or CCD (http://www.naturalnews.com/honey_be...). And scientists say that because of this massive onslaught of toxins, bees are actually entombing, or sealing off, their hive cells in an attempt to quarantine polluted pollen and prevent it from destroying the entire colony.
Bees 'entomb' pesticide-tainted pollen in effort to protect themselves from extinction, 4/13/11
Amazing video of calming a shark by hand
Christina Zenato, expert shark handler
Shepherds still exist. Unlike their European counterparts centuries ago, however, many of today's American herders tend hybrids with human hearts, brains, livers, and a potpourri of other homo-sapiens attributes.
Geneticists create living human-animal chimeras, 3/26/11
People talk to animals all the time, especially to their pets. Yet few animals really answer back. A few that do (or did, as they've sadly passed on) are featured here.
Amazing animals that talk back to you, 3/5/11
Hilarious British animal voiceovers
Hilarious British animal voiceovers
It seems like the “flamboyant” voiceover that’s been laid over this video of a Honey Badger would get old quickly, but it doesn’t. It only gets funnier.
The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger, 2/20/11
A novel X-ray imaging technology is helping scientists better understand how in the course of evolution snakes have lost their legs. The researchers hope the new data will help resolve a heated debate about the origin of snakes: whether they evolved from a terrestrial lizard or from one that lived in the oceans. New, detailed 3-D images reveal that the internal architecture of an ancient snake's leg bones strongly resembles that of modern terrestrial lizard legs. The results are published in the 8 February issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
X-rays reveal hidden leg of an ancient snake, 2/7/11
This is quite a shark tale.
Pilot Steve Irwin was astonished after spotting a mass of more than 100,000 sharks swimming just 100 yards off Florida's sandy beaches.
The long-time fisherman and marine technology expert was cruising 300ft above the clear waters in his helicopter on Sunday when he came across the astonishing
Some fins up! 100,000 sharks mass off Florida's beaches,2/2/11
After a farmer in northeastern China picked a fossilized flying lizard out of the ground last year and sold it to a museum, paleontologists quickly noticed a broken wing - and an egg nestled next to the animal's tail. The scientists dubbed the spectacular specimen "Mrs. T" - a contraction of "Mrs. Pterodactyl" - and are announcing her as the first prehistoric flier to be assigned a sex.
She provides vital clues to the mating habits of the creatures that ruled the skies for 150 million years before birds appeared.
It's a girl! ... pterodactyl, that is, 1/20/11
Scientists have found the toughest material made by life yet — the silk of a spider whose giant webs span rivers, streams and even lakes.
Spider silks were already the toughest known biomaterials, able to absorb massive amounts of energy before breaking. However, researchers have now revealed the Darwin's bark spider (Caerostris darwini) has the toughest silk ever seen — more than twice as tough as any previously described silk, and more than 10 times stronger than Kevlar.
Itsy Bitsy Spider's Web 10 Times Stronger Than Kevlar, 10/24/10
What happens when animals get sick in the wild -- do they just fight off disease by themselves? It seems they may actively treat themselves, and their sick offspring, with natural therapies. If that sounds like a far-fetched idea, listen up. Although few studies have been conducted on self-medication by animals, researchers from Emory University in Atlanta theorize the practice may be far more widespread than humans have realized. In fact, they've just discovered that monarch butterflies use medicinal plants to treat their offspring for disease.
Monarch butterflies use medicinal plants to treat diseases in their offspring, 10/21/10
What is it about interspecies friendship that makes it universally cute, hilarious and heartwarming?
I don’t know the answer, but if you tell me there is something better on the internet, I won’t believe you. These videos of friendship between a tortoise and a hippo, a gorilla and a kitten, and an elephant and a dog are all the evidence I need.
Why Can’t We Be Friends? Top 10 Interspecies BFF Videos, 10/4/10
One of the world's tiniest frogs has been discovered in Borneo. At 10-12 mm long, Microhyla nepenthicola may be micro, but its croak is loud. That's how researchers found them, swimming in tiny puddles of water captured by pitcher plants.
A group of zoologists with Conservation International say they found the frogs by the side of the road in Borneo, near a national park. They were very hard to locate because of their small size, but the scientists followed the frog's loud calls and discovered them living among pitcher plants.
Ultra-tiny frogs discovered living like faeries inside pitcher plants, 8/25/10
They look like aliens from some futuristic Hollywood blockbuster.But these ugly bugs have already invaded your home.
Magnified over a million times, these are the true faces of the mites, flies and fleas that lurk in our carpets, sofas and kitchen cupboards.
They include the flour mite - a revolting bug that infests packets of pasta, flour and bread bins - and the dust mite which thrives in furniture, curtains and carpets.
Hidden horrors: Extreme close-ups of the creepy crawlies that infest our homes, 8/3/10
When a monkey tried to make a new friend in her zoo enclosure, it was clear that the relationship was not an equal one.
Grabbing a toad as it rested by a pond, female swamp monkey Swoozie stunned visitors by spending the rest of the day clutching it to her breast
Swoozie the monkey stuns zoo visitors by making friends with a toad... and carrying him around for a whole day, 8/3/10
Glistening in the early morning, these insects look like creatures from another planet as dew gathers on their sleeping bodies.
Captured in extreme close-up, one moth appears to be totally encrusted in diamonds as it rests on a twig.
Dragonflies, flies and beetles also take on an unearthly quality as the water droplets form on them.
These remarkable photographs were taken by physiotherapist Miroslaw Swietek at around 3am in the forest next to his home.
Using a torch, the 37-year-old amateur photographer hunts out the motionless bugs in the darkness before setting up his camera and flash just millimetres from them.
Would dew believe it: The stunning pictures of sleeping insects covered in water droplets, 3/31/10
The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth.
Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).
The key lies in a process called transdifferentiation, where one type of cell is transformed into another type of cell. Some animals can undergo limited transdifferentiation and regenerate organs, such as salamanders, which can regrow limbs. Turritopsi nutricula, on the other hand, can regenerate its entire body over and over again. Researchers are studying the jellyfish to discover how it is able to reverse its aging process.
The world's only immortal animal, 3/16/10
Woolly mammoths and other large beasts in North America may not have gone extinct as long ago as previously thought.
The new view — that pockets of beasts survived to as recently as 7,600 years ago, rather than the previous end times mark of 12,000 years ago — is supported by DNA evidence found in a few pinches of dirt.
After plucking ancient DNA from frozen soil in central Alaska, researchers uncovered "genetic fossils" of both mammoths and horses locked in permafrost samples dated to between 10,500 and 7,600 years ago.
Mammoths Were Alive More Recently Than Thought, 12/16/09
An octopus that uses coconut shells as portable armor is the latest addition to a growing list of animals that use tools.
The veined octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) apparently can stack discarded coconut shell halves just as one might pile bowls, sits atop them, makes its eight arms rigid like stilts, and then moves the entire heap across the seafloor. These soft-bodied creatures perform this ungainly "stilt walking" to use the hard shells for shelter later when needed.
Clever Octopus Builds a Mobile Home, 12/14/09
This 5 year old male was a pet in a home, and now lives at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. This little guy had been given an apple to eat, and seems to act more like a puppy than a porcupine!
Porcupine who thinks he is a puppy!,5/3/09
I wish to speak of the bees very simply, as one speaks
of a subject one knows and loves to those who know it not. I do not
intend to adorn the truth, or merit the just reproach Reaumur
addressed to his predecessors in the study of our honey-flies, whom
he accused of substituting for the marvellous reality marvels that
were imaginary and merely plausible. The fact that the hive contains
so much that is wonderful does not warrant our seeking to add to its
wonders. Besides, I myself have now for a long time ceased to look
for anything more beautiful in this world, or more interesting, than
the truth; or at least than the effort one is able to make towards
the truth. I shall state nothing, therefore, that I have not
verified myself, or that is not so fully accepted in the text-books
as to render further verification superfluous. My facts shall be as
accurate as though they appeared in a practical manual or scientific
monograph, but I shall relate them in a somewhat livelier fashion
than such works would allow, shall group them more harmoniously
together, and blend them with freer and more mature reflections
The Life of the Bee: by Maurice Maeterlinck
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