The Marine Mammal Protection Act was enacted in 1972 to protect any and all marine mammals from U.S. citizens who might want to take them or import them. The Georgia Aquarium, SeaWorld and Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium are working to try to import the 18 Russian beluga whales that they captured between the years of 2005 to 2011.
I guess we all need a theme song, and I’m sad to say I think this one may be mine… that or the aardvark song…
This post comes from the heart. The tale of the Pondicherry vulture is not a happy one. Once a species that numbered in the hundreds of thousands in less that 20 years the population has dropped to less than 10,000. This isn’t due to the common causing like poaching or nuisance killing, but is actually caused by a medication given to cattle that is toxic to vultures. When the cattle die and the vultures eat the cattle, they die. The Pondicherry vulture’s population has halved every other year.
The second semester of my freshman year of college I was desperate to transfer. I wasn’t a huge fan of the social scene and I would do anything to get out of Texas. I had planned to go abroad for a year to Costa Rica to live at a research station in Monte Verde Cloud Forest. I was leaning away from studying medicine and changing my major to biology and journalism. I wanted to study animals and write about them! What kinds of animals? Well, I just wasn’t so sure yet.
If any of you read National Geographic News or follow them on Facebook you might have recently seen something about the California Dwarf Fox coming back from the brink of extinction. The drastic increase in numbers over the last nine years has been staggering. While this is all well and good what really caught my attention was the idea of island dwarfism, something I have been fascinated with since I was a little girl.
This is a lovely animated video found on the Guardian, a UK news source, on their environmental blog. This video is full of bright colors and will make your heart hurt.
I don’t know who the artist is, but I found it on I F*cking Love Science’s Facebook page
Yippee! I had time, and actually remembered, to make a hump day post this week! Even though I am still on vacation in France with my family I am finally getting enough internet to blog. Lets discuss virgin birth, or, parthenogenesis. Most people have heard of the legend of the Virgin Mary, and if you’re not familiar with Christianity at all, most religions have virgin birth myths. Well, it doesn’t tend to occur very often(if at all) in mammals, but is quite common among other types of animals!
I am obsessed. These animals look so cool and prehistoric. The Sichuan takin is a sub-species of takin, and for those of you(like, until recently, me) who don’t know what a takin is, a takin is a goat-antelope. These large lumbering creatures live in large herds and can even stand on their back legs to reach high leaves.
This week in science from I F*cking Love Science
Endangered Living 