Tag Archives: science

a ray of hope for captive chimpanzees

Chimpanzees share 98% of our DNA, they have complex relationships, raise their young, wage wars, have friendships, alliances and enemies. They have extensive tool use and even have intricate means of communication. As far as I knew, they were endangered species. I mean, this is what IUCN’s website and even WWF will tell you. But today I learned that that was only applicable to free-living chimpanzees. This means that chimpanzees in captivity are listed as threatened. Maybe this doesn’t seem so bad, until you realize that that is the loophole that allows them to be test subjects and live in labs, in often, sub-par conditions.

Photo from WWF
Photo from WWF

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odd animal profile: pondicherry vulture

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.

Photo from Planet of Birds
Photo from Planet of Birds

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island dwarfism

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.

Photo of dwarf fox from Treehugger.com
Photo of dwarf fox from Treehugger.com

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virgin birth

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!

Photo from Cheezburger.com
Photo from Cheezburger.com

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odd animal profile: sichuan takin

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.

Photo by Mary Gorman
Photo by Mary Gorman

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aceh rainforest

About a month ago I wrote a post called ‘it’s only 4 million acres‘ about an Indonesian govenor’s plan to open up 4 million acres of conserved rainforest to mining and plantation use on the island of Sumatra. That is the area of one million football fields.

Photo from WWF
Photo from WWF- There are less than 200 Sumatran rhinos left in the wild

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top ten new species of 2012

Recently the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University chose 10 species that it named the top 10. The species are chosen based on being unique, unusual or even ones that live in treacherous terrain. These new species are not just animals, but include plants and fungus as well!

zhivotnie-0002

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unlikely mothers

Yesterday was mothers day and so in honor of all the mothers out there, on two legs and on four I am going to tell you a little bit about some very different animal mothers. Dogs adopting lions, whales adopting dolphins, and even a lion adopting an antelope.

Photo from Life with Dogs
Photo from Life with Dogs

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