The latest performance-enhancing drug for horses has been dubbed frog juice. It’s a painkiller that existing drug tests missed:
Then a lab in the Denver area tweaked its testing procedure, and in recent days more than 30 horses from four states have tentatively tested positive for the substance, dermorphin, which is suspected of helping horses run faster.
Why frog juice? It’s synthesized now, but it was originally extracted from South American frogs.
The bubonic plague hasn’t completely disappeared, even from the US, where seven cases are diagnosed in an average year, primarily in the southwest.
I don’t know why an Oregon man would try to take a dead rodent from the mouth of a stray cat, but he did, the cat bit him, and now he’s been diagnosed with plague:
The plague bacteria cycles through rodent populations without killing them off; in urban areas, it’s transmitted back and forth from rats to fleas. There’s even a name for it, the “enzootic cycle.”
The bacteria thrive in forests, semi-arid areas and grasslands, which plague-carrying rodents from wood rats to rock squirrels call home.
Once a coin flip with death, the plague is now easier to handle for humans in the U.S. The national mortality rate stood at 66 percent before World War II, but advances in antibiotics dropped that rate to its present 16 percent.
Central Oregon health officials don’t blame the cat.
“The reality is that, in rural areas, part of the role of cats is to keep the rodent population controlled around our homes and barns” said Karen Yeargain of the Crook County Health Department.
The Prineville man, who is in his 50s, remained in critical condition Friday at a Bend hospital. His illness marks the fifth case of plague in Oregon since 1995.
State public health veterinarian Dr. Emilio DeBess said the man was infected when he was bitten by the stray his family befriended. The cat died and its body is being sent to the CDC for testing.
Humans resemble juvenile apes, and this neoteny may explain how our species diverged from the other apes and became so successful.
Now it looks like birds may also have neoteny — or paedomorphosis — to thank for their outliving the (other) dinosaurs:
Bhullar and Abzhanov reached this conclusion by comparing the skulls of birds and dinosaurs across phylogenies, or related groups, and at different developmental stages. To quantitatively compare cranial geometries, they scanned the skulls of theropod dinosaurs (which are thought to be birds’ ancestors), crocodiles and alligators (dinosaurs’ cousins), early transitional birds such as Archaeopteryx, and modern birds. Then they created digitized versions of each skull and mapped out cranial landmarks, such as nostril tips, eye socket dimensions and places where bones meet.
Their measurements showed that whereas a typical non-avian dinosaur began life with a round head, large eyes and a big brain (relative to the rest of the body) then later developed an elongated snout and smaller relative brain size, birds kept their baby faces.
If birds did evolve by paedomorphosis, they join species such as axolotls. These salamanders evolved to retain tadpolelike gills and fins and, unlike most other amphibians, remain aquatic into adulthood. This feature appears to be due to a hormone disruption. By adding thyroid hormone into their water, researchers have caused axolotls to metamorphose into terrestrial salamanders.
But why would it be advantageous for adult animals to look like kids? Greg Erickson, who studies evolutionary morphology at The Florida State University and was not involved in the study, says that paedomorphosis can help a species to develop new adaptations and exploit new niches. In particular, he suggests that paedomorphosis may have enabled birds to develop larger eyes, which aid in spatial assessment during flight as well as a high brain-to-body-mass ratio, which may contribute to intelligence.
An even simpler explanation is that kids are small and, in times of environmental stress, small is good. Bhullar cites an example of Temnospondyli — large primitive amphibians that were common before 120 million years ago. Catastrophic events killed off most of the temnospondyli, except for a few paedomorphic species. “The interesting thing to me is that [after the catastrophe] these little paedomorphic animals were at the base of a giant radiation,” Bhullar says. He suggests that a similar phenomenon may have occurred during the catastrophic events that killed the dinosaurs — being small may have been an advantage, because smaller animals require less food and can more easily hide. “Everything that lived on land and weighed more than one kilogram perished,” Bhullar says. “The only dinosaurs that survived were the paedomorphic ones.” And after many of those larger species went extinct, the little dino may have been better placed to exploit the new niches that opened up.
Matt Ridley shares a “gorgeous little juxtaposition of tales” from Dario Maestripieri’s new book:
Generally, junior professors write long and unsolicited emails to senior professors, who reply with short ones after a delay; the juniors then reply quickly and at length. This is not because the seniors are busier, for they, too, write longer and more punctually when addressing their deans and funders, who reply more briefly and tardily. The asymmetry in length and speed of reply correlates with dominance.
When a subordinate chimpanzee grooms a dominant one, it often does so for a long time and unsolicited. When it then requests to be groomed in turn, it receives only a brief grooming and usually after having to ask a second time.
Maestripieri is a professor and a primatologist (and a primate), and his book explores the Games Primates Play:
He observes two university colleagues in a coffee shop and notes how the senior one takes the chair with the back to the wall (the better to spot attacks by rivals or leopards), is less attentive to her colleague’s remarks than vice versa, stares down her colleague when a contentious issue comes up and takes the lead on walking out the door at the end — all of it neatly corresponding to the behavior of two baboons when one is dominant.
(A new member of a committee on which I served once asked me why a senior colleague was being so horrible to him. I replied: “Oh, it’s because when a new male baboon joins a troop, it’s traditional for the alpha male to beat him up before becoming his best friend-soon he’ll think the world of you.” I was right.)
Dr. Maestripieri’s most intriguing chapter is entitled “Cooperate in the Spotlight, Compete in the Dark.” He describes how people, like monkeys, can be angels of generosity when all eyes are on them, but devils of spite in private. Famously, the citizens of New York City turned to crime when the lights went out in the blackout of July 13, 1977 — not because they were evil but because the cost-benefit calculus was altered by the darkness.
Dr. Maestripieri then offers a fascinating analysis of the conundrum of peer review in science. Peer review is asymmetric: The author’s name is known, but the reviewers remain anonymous. This is to prevent reciprocal cooperation (or “pal review”): I’ll be nice about your paper if you’re nice about mine.
In this it partly works, though academics often drop private hints to each other to show that they have done review favors. But peer review is plagued by the opposite problem — spiteful criticism to prevent competitors from getting funded or published. Like criminals in a blackout, anonymous reviewers, in the book’s words, “loot the intellectual property of the authors whose work they review” (by delaying publication while pinching the ideas for their own projects) and “damage or destroy the reviewed authors’ property” (by denying their competitors grants and publications).
Studies show that peer reviewers are motivated by tribal as well as individual rivalry. Says Dr. Maestripieri: “I am a Monkey-Man, and when I submit a grant application for peer review, I am terrified that it might fall into the hands of the Rat-People. They want to exterminate all of us… (because our animals are cooler than theirs).”
His answer (and it applies to far more fields than science) is total transparency with the help of the Internet. The more light you shine, the less crime primates commit. Once everybody can see who’s reviewing whose papers and grant applications, then not only will spite decline, but so will nepotism and reciprocity. Anonymity alters the cost-benefit balance in favor of competition; transparency alters it in favor of cooperation.
Larger animals tend to have larger eyes, but faster animals tend to have larger eyes too:
“If you can think of mammals that are fast like a cheetah or horse, you can almost guarantee they’ve got really big eyes,” says Kirk. “This gives them better vision to avoid colliding with obstacles in their environment when they’re moving very quickly.”
Kirk and physical anthropology doctoral student Amber Heard-Booth are the first to apply Leuckart’s Law — a hypothesis that was developed specifically for birds and speed of flight — to 50 species of mammals. The paper is forthcoming in the journal Anatomical Record. Heard-Booth presented the findings at the 2011 American Association of Physical Anthropology Meeting, where she was awarded the Mildred Trotter Prize for exceptional graduate research in evolutionary morphology.
Previously it was thought that the time of day that an animal is active (nocturnal or diurnal) would be the main factor driving the evolution of mammalian eye size. However, comparative research on the anatomy of the eye has shown that although nocturnal and diurnal species differ in eye shape, they often have similar eye sizes. Although nocturnal species may appear to have bigger eyes because more of the cornea is exposed to let in more light, activity pattern only has a modest effect on eye size.
By comparison, body mass plus maximum running speed together can explain 89 percent of the variation in eye size among mammals.
The researchers controlled for body size and evolutionary relationships, and found that the relationship between eye diameter and maximum running speed is stronger than the relationship between body mass and running speed.
Michael Yon describes the Sundarbans, between India and Bangladesh:
When a man says, “It’s a jungle out there,” he means, “It’s the Sundarbans.” Among the many wild and unforgiving places in the approximately 65 countries I’ve traveled, most are fairly safe when approached with good judgment and aforethought. The Sundarbans is not one of those places. Few jungles are this dangerous.
The natives here rub shoulders with mortality on a daily basis. And so before venturing into the labyrinth waterways, one should acquire a guide, which in my case was a government employee with a powerful FN-FAL rifle to ward off man and beast. Competent, local guides are always your best insurance, and if I had a choice of any rifle in the world to bring here, the FN-FAL would be high on the list. And so those boxes were checked.
Within about a week previous my arrival, eight people had been killed and more than a dozen wounded in personal combat with tigers. Nobody knows why the tigers kill so many people here. None of the eight people recently killed were eaten. The tigers often devour their prey, but sometimes they just murder, and of course there is always a market for tiger parts. It’s a bloody mess.
Add to that the giant saltwater crocodiles, sharks, incredibly venomous snakes, mosquitoes and so on and so forth, and the Sundarbans is a mysterious place that remains off of the backpacker beat. I’ve wanted to come here for years but was rudely interrupted by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The vast jungle and mangrove swamps cover about 10,000 square kilometers. Many sights and smells can nearly mirror places in Florida, and so at times it felt like home and could have made me homesick it weren’t so fun and interesting. Anglers who tool around the estuarine river areas of Florida, and who cast for snook near the mangroves, would find reminders in the form of beautiful white egrets, kingfishers and relentless sun. The mostly compliant alligators we see basking in Florida are replaced here by extraordinarily ferocious crocodiles.
Noticeably missing are the turtles. Whereas in Florida it would be normal to see a hundred turtles per day sunning themselves on white-worn branches elbowing out of the waters of the Peace River, it can be rare to see even a single turtle after spending long days on many Asian rivers. This is true ranging from the mighty Mekong, to the Mae Ping, the Salween, over to the Ganges or up at the Bramaputra in Nepal. I rarely if ever see turtles in Asia, though there were land turtles in Afghanistan. There has been a program to introduce thousands of snapping turtles into the Indian Ganges to eat the thousands of human corpses, but apparently the turtles could not keep up. My guess is that the people ate the turtles.
Numerous substantial rivers including the Ganges feed the Sundarbans. About one third of the Sundarbans drains from India and the rest from Bangladesh. Due mostly to Hindu funerary traditions, the Indians dump countless tons of human flesh into “Mother Ganges” (Ganga Ma) each year, which flows and fans to the delta by the crocodiles, the crabs, and the tigers. Some people believe that the Royal Bengal Tigers of the Sundarbans may have gotten their taste for man from the stream of corpses flowing into their abode.
In the United States, to see people petrified of snakes is almost comical:
Practically nobody dies from snakebites in America. The chances are far higher of being hit by lightning. The most deadly snakes in the US are still second-chance serpents, like rattlers or moccasins. If a diamondback hits you, you’ll almost certainly live because you’ll probably get to a hospital and suffer through. But if a cobra or other super-snake hits a villager, he’s likely finished.
There are about 216 types of snakes just in India, of which about 52 are venomous. Nearly all the deaths are caused by “The Big Four”: Indian Cobra; Common Krait (the bed snake); Russell’s Viper (which Indians call “Daboia”—the lurker); and the Saw Scaled Viper, a vicious little snake that some people consider the most deadly in the world.
There are many lists for the “most dangerous” or “most venomous” snakes in the world. The snakes that count most are not the ones with the most toxic juices, or the most dangerous bites, but the ones who actually fill the most graves.
The deadly Krait likes to come inside homes where it often slithers in bed with people. Its bite is so painless that many victims do not realize they have been envenomated. Some Indians believe the Krait just licks people. Victims are found dead in their beds, or wake up and die.
Cobras are not much better; they also like to move into people’s homes to chase rats. Getting bitten by a cobra is like being blasted by a shotgun. There was once a practice of putting cobra venom inside musket balls and arrowheads, though I have no idea if this still occurs.
In India alone, it is believed that snakes kill up to 50,000 people per year.
Did bigfoot really exist? Well, Gigantopithecus, the Pleistocene Yeti, did, in India, until 300,000 years ago:
Scientists first learned of Gigantopithecus in 1935, when Ralph von Koenigswald, a German paleoanthropologist, walked into a pharmacy in Hong Kong and found an unusually large primate molar for sale. Since then, researchers have collected hundreds of Gigantopithecus teeth and several jaws in China, Vietnam and India. Based on these fossils, it appears Gigantopithecus was closely related to modern orangutans and Sivapithecus, an ape that lived in Asia about 12 to 8 million years ago. With only dentition to go on, it’s hard to piece together what this animal was like. But based on comparisons with gorillas and other modern apes, researchers estimate Gigantopithecus stood more than 10 feet tall and weighed 1,200 pounds (at most, gorillas only weigh 400 pounds). Given their size, they probably lived on the ground, walking on their fists like modern orangutans.
Fortunately, fossil teeth do have a lot to say about an animal’s diet. And the teeth of Gigantopithecus also provide clues to why the ape disappeared.
The features of the dentition — large, flat molars, thick dental enamel, a deep, massive jaw — indicate Gigantopithecus probably ate tough, fibrous plants (similar to Paranthropus). More evidence came in 1990, when Russell Ciochon, a biological anthropologist at the University of Iowa, and colleagues placed samples of the ape’s teeth under a scanning electron microscope to look for opal phytoliths, microscopic silica structures that form in plant cells. Based on the types of phyoliths the researchers found stuck to the teeth, they concluded Gigantopithecus had a mixed diet of fruits and seeds from the fig family Moraceae and some kind of grasses, probably bamboo. The combination of tough and sugary foods helps explain why so many of the giant ape’s teeth were riddled with cavities. And numerous pits on Gigantopithecus‘s teeth — a sign of incomplete dental development caused by malnuntrition or food shortages — corroborate the bamboo diet. Ciochon’s team noted bamboo species today periodically experience mass die-offs, which affect the health of pandas. The same thing could have happened to Gigantopithecus.
Further evidence of Gigantopithecus‘ food preferences and habitat was published last November. Zhao LingXia of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues analyzed carbon isotopes in a sample of Gigantopithecus teeth. Plants have different forms of carbon based on their type of photosynthesis; this carbon footprint is then recorded in the teeth of animals that eat plants. The team determined Gigantopithecus — and the animals living alongside it, such as deer, horses and bears — ate only C3 plants, evidence the ape lived in a forested environment. This work also supports the proposed bamboo diet, as bamboo is a C3 plant.
So what happened to this Pleistocene Yeti? Zhang’s team suggested the rise of the Tibetan plateau 1.6 million to 800,000 years ago altered the climate of South Asia, ushering in a colder, drier period when forests shrank.
The saber-toothed “tiger” (Smilodon) had long, saber-like teeth — as did a couple other saber-toothed species — and those saber-like teeth seem to come with massive arms:
Back in 2010, Meachen-Samuels placed Smilodon fossils in an X-ray machine, and showed that it has extra-thick, reinforced bone in its upper arms, with large attachment points for its large muscles. It was a particularly butch cat.
The study confirmed the idea that Smilodon used its huge teeth in a very different way to its modern relatives. Living cats use their jaws to close the throat or nose of their prey, choking them to death. Their conical canines are well-suited to the task, able to withstand forces in all directions. Sabre-teeth, while they look formidable, were actually quite fragile. They were long and flattened, rather than short and conical. If the cat’s prey struggled, its teeth would have shattered. If the teeth hit bone during a bite, they would have shattered.
So Smilodon used the sabres like an assassin’s dagger rather than a swordsman’s blade, dispatching victims with quick stabs. Its big arms helped it to restrain its prey for the killing blow. Meachen-Samuels wondered if other sabre-toothed predators shared the same adaptations.
She compared the skeletons of 15 species of living cats with fossils from 8 species of sabre-toothed ones, 5 nimravids and 1 barbourofelid. Across the groups, Meachen-Samuels found that the species with the most exaggerated canines also had the most robust front legs and the widest paws. Based on the dimensions of these limbs, you could predict whether one of these animals had sabre teeth with almost perfect accuracy.
Hugh Glass was one tough son of a gun:
In August 1823, old frontiersman Hugh Glass was scouting ahead for a fur trapping expedition in South Dakota when he surprised a grizzly bear mother with her two cubs. The bear charged him immediately, knocking his rifle away and mauling him badly. Glass drew his knife and fought the grizzly hand-to-hand (maybe I should say hand to paw?), stabbing it repeatedly as it clawed and bit him. Hearing his screams, two trapping partners soon arrived and found him laying unconscious on top of the bear in a ghastly mess of human and animal blood. They finished off the dying bear with a rifle shot to the head, then took Glass with them back to their camp. Expedition leader Andrew Henry took a good look at the mangled mess of a man and announced that he would soon die of his injuries. Henry asked two trappers to stay with Glass until he died, give him a good burial, and then rejoin the group.
Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald volunteered to stay behind with Glass and began to dig his grave. What happened next is uncertain. The two men later claimed that they fled for their lives after hostile Arikaree Indians discovered them, but there is no evidence of that. They soon caught up to the rest of the group heading to Yellowstone and reported that Hugh Glass was dead. However, the old mountain man did not die—after an unknown period of time he woke up in his shallow grave, under a thin layer of dirt and leaves. All his weapons, equipment, and protective clothing were gone, taken by the two men responsible for his burial. His leg was broken, and the rest of him was hardly better off. The bear attack had cut him so badly it exposed rib bones on his backside. He had lost a lot of blood, and his wounds were festering. Alone and defenseless, he was more than 200 miles away from the nearest settlement, Fort Kiowa. He set his own broken leg, wrapped himself in the bear hide that had covered him in the grave, and started crawling.
It took Glass six weeks of crawling on his hands and knees to reach the Cheyenne River, 100 miles away from his grave. The bear had nearly torn off his scalp. He suffered from fever and advanced stages of infection. To prevent gangrene from progressing in his wounds he lay back on rotting logs and let the maggots eat his dead flesh away. Too weak to hunt or fish, he survived mostly on wild berries, roots, and other edible plants. Once he was able to scare a couple of wolves away from a bison they had killed. He ate some of the bison’s raw meat himself, still alone, dragging his broken leg along with him. When he finally reached the Cheyenne river, he built a raft from a large fallen tree and floated down the river. Along the way he encountered friendly Sioux who fed him and helped tend his wounds. Eventually he succeeded in floating in his dead tree all the way to Fort Kiowa.
Hugh Glass later admitted that he was motivated to survive only by revenge.
His story doesn’t quite end there.
The Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Florida recently announced that Cheetah, the chimpanzee “star” of the Tarzan movies from the 1930s, had finally died of kidney failure at age 80.
This re-raises some old questions though. A few years ago R.D. Rosen looked into the truth about Cheeta [sic] the Chimpanzee:
In the fall of 2007, I had been working for several months on a proposal for the authorized biography of Cheeta, Johnny Weissmuller’s sidekick in MGM’s Tarzan movies of the 1930s and ’40s. Against all odds, Cheeta was still alive at the age of 75, 20 years older than a captive chimp’s normal life span. When the agent for Cheeta and his owner, Dan Westfall, had first approached me about writing the biography, I was astonished that a fixture of not just my own childhood, but my parents’, as well, one of the most celebrated animals in movie history, was retired in Palm Springs, Calif., selling his paintings for $135 donations to thousands of far-flung admirers. His birthday parties were now covered by national, and even international, media. At Cheeta’s 75th birthday party, his owner, who runs a non-profit primate sanctuary, had played a video of Jane Goodall attempting to sing “Happy Birthday” to him in the pant-hooting language of the wild chimps she had first observed in Tanzania in the early 1960s. Could there be higher tribute to a chimp than that?
[...]
But one oft-repeated fact about the chimp’s life nagged at me. It was one of the standard stories in Cheeta’s biography — repeated in Newsweek and other magazines, recited by Cheeta’s current owner and many Cheeta admirers — that the first of his two owners, animal trainer Tony Gentry, had gotten him in Liberia as a baby and smuggled him under his overcoat aboard a Pan Am flight home in 1932. During the long flight, the diapered Cheeta escaped from under Gentry’s coat, mischievously scampered up and down the aisle, and had to be subdued by hysterical stewardesses with a bottle of warm milk.After four months of research and writing, I decided to ask a question that, in retrospect, was so obvious that it was curious that no journalist before me had bothered to ask it: In 1932, were there any transatlantic flights for Gentry to smuggle Cheeta onto? The answer, I wasn’t surprised to learn, was no. Transatlantic commercial airline service wasn’t inaugurated until 1939.
Early on, I had raised the issue of documenting Cheeta’s age. Obviously, I had to be protected against the possibility that, if I published a biography of the world’s oldest chimpanzee, someone would make a fool out of me, my reputation, my publisher, Cheeta, his owner, and the agent by proving he was not 75. But at that early stage, it seemed a mere formality, and I had no idea even what such documentation would consist of. It was unclear if Tony Gentry, who had given Cheeta to his distant cousin Dan Westfall two years before his death in 1993, had left any papers. I’d questioned both Westfall, and his agent about the file of documents that persuaded Guinness World Records in 2001 to award Cheeta a certificate for being “the world’s oldest living primate, aged 69 years and one month.” But it didn’t seem urgent, and it certainly wasn’t desirable, to question the entire premise of the book I had just agreed to write.
The falsehood about 1932 gave me pause, but I reasoned that anyone can get a memory wrong. In the first of what were to be several acts of denial, I simply ignored my discovery and proceeded with my research. But my subconscious, already on notice, soon prompted me to verify another routine biographical “fact” about Cheeta’s life. Westfall had mentioned that Cheeta had come out of retirement in 1966 at the age of 34 to play the role of Chee-Chee the chimp in 1967′s “Doctor Dolittle” with Rex Harrison. Even People magazine (Cheeta’s “last film hurrah was 1967′s ‘Doctor Dolittle’ “) and Newsweek (“You laughed at him in ‘Doctor Doolittle’ “) said so. Numerous Web sites concurred. So I watched a DVD of “Dr. Doolittle,” a movie in which Chee-Chee is played by a juvenile chimp no older than 7 or possibly 8; after that age, a chimp’s physical appearance changes dramatically. That was it. Cheeta was not in that film. Whatever Cheeta was doing in 1966, he wasn’t making a movie with Rex Harrison.
The same Newsweek also reported, “Only once did Cheeta walk off the set — reportedly when Ronald Reagan kept forgetting his lines in ‘Bedtime for Bonzo.’ ” “Bedtime for Bonzo!” If Cheeta had actually been Reagan’s as well as Tarzan’s sidekick, that would make him the Zelig of primates, turning up wherever entertainment history was being made. I sent 1951s “Bedtime for Bonzo” to the head of my Netflix queue and wasn’t shocked to discover that Cheeta, by then a full-grown 19-year-old, is not in that movie, either. Bonzo was played by another, infant or juvenile chimp.
As Cheeta’s claims to fame were springing leaks, I began spending hours in front of my television, freeze-framing on close-ups of various Cheetas in MGM Tarzan movies I had rented. I would take an 8-by-10 glossy of Westfall’s Palm Springs Cheeta, approach the television and compare the two images. Chimpanzees’ faces change quite a bit as they age, not unlike most human ones, but the contours and configuration of an ear change very little. I would freeze on a frame of Cheeta in three-quarters or full profile and try to find a match. In each Tarzan movie, the Cheeta role had been played by more than one chimp, depending on what talents the scene called for. (In fact, there was another, less well publicized Cheeta in Palm Harbor, Fla., who was also said to be in his 70s and a veteran of Weissmuller movies. But that’s another story.) The trick was to look at all the scenes and positively identify Westfall’s Cheeta in at least one. But none of the movie chimps’ ears was an adequate match for the Palm Springs Cheeta’s.
We can all rest easy knowining someone‘s looking into this for us.
There’s something oddly endearing about a monkey washing dishes:
(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)
David Attenborough’s rendition of “It’s a Wonderful World” should improve your day:
(Hat tip to io9.)
Black bears may be smaller and less aggressive than their grizzly cousins, but as they’ve multiplied, human-bear clashes have risen:
Black bears, which can top 350 pounds, were hunted with vigor for centuries. But with their populations near collapse, states began imposing hunting limits or bans in the 1970s.
Recovery has been slow—bears reproduce just every two to three years—but pronounced. Today there are an estimated 3,000 black bears roaming Florida, up from just 300 in the mid-1970s, said David Telesco, who manages bear conservation in the state. Between 300 and 400 black bears live in Nevada, and biologists say the population is growing 16% a year.
“There are now bears in areas of the country where there haven’t been bears since the colonial days,” said Rick Winslow, a carnivore biologist with the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish.
Black bears preparing for winter eat 20,000 calories per day, so they’re always looking for food:
In New Jersey, the state Department of Environmental Protection tallied 2,400 bear incidents last year, up from 1,800 in 2009. The reports ranged from a bear strolling through a college campus to home invasion. “Literally, people would go out to get the groceries from their car, leave the screen door open, and come back to find a bear in their home,” said Larry Ragonese, a spokesman for the department.
In New Mexico, the Department of Game and Fish has killed more than 230 bears this year that were disturbing people, pets or property, up from 86 last year and 24 the year before.
In Nevada, where black bears have taken to raiding garbage bins around Lake Tahoe, the legislature authorized the state’s first-ever bear hunt this year, to the dismay of antihunting activists.
The antihunting activists don’t seem to realize that a bear population growing at 16% a year can’t just be left alone.
“Kine” is an archaic plural for cow, but unlike other plurals formed by adding -n rather than -s — children, brethren, oxen — it has no letters in common with its singular form.
Then again, cattle isn’t too similar, either:
Cattle did not originate as the term for bovine animals. It was borrowed from Old French catel, itself from Latin caput, head, and originally meant movable personal property, especially livestock of any kind, as opposed to real property (the land, which also included wild or small free-roaming animals such as chickens — they were sold as part of the land).
The word is closely related to “chattel” (a unit of personal property) and “capital” in the economic sense. The term replaced earlier Old English feoh “cattle, property” (cf. German: Vieh, Gothic: faihu).
The word cow came via Anglo-Saxon c? (plural c?), from Common Indo-European g??us (genitive g?owes) = “a bovine animal”, compare Persian Gâv, Sanskrit go, Welsh buwch.[citation needed] The genitive plural of “c?” is “c?na”, which gave the now archaic English plural, and Scots plural, of “kine”.
In older English sources such as the King James Version of the Bible, “cattle” refers to livestock, as opposed to “deer” which refers to wildlife. “Wild cattle” may refer to feral cattle or to undomesticated species of the genus Bos. Today, when used without any other qualifier, the modern meaning of “cattle” is usually restricted to domesticated bovines.
It just gets weirder when we realize there is no singular form of cattle:
Cattle can only be used in the plural and not in the singular: it is a plurale tantum. Thus one may refer to “three cattle” or “some cattle”, but not “one cattle”. There is no universally used singular form in modern English of “cattle”, other than the sex- and age-specific terms such as cow, bull, steer and heifer. Historically, “ox” was a non-gender-specific term for adult cattle, but generally this is now used only for draft cattle, especially adult castrated males.
“Cow” is in general use as a singular for the collective “cattle”, despite the objections by those who insist it to be a female-specific term. Although the phrase “that cow is a bull” is absurd from a lexicographic standpoint, the word “cow” is easy to use when a singular is needed and the sex is unknown or irrelevant — when “there is a cow in the road”, for example. Further, any herd of fully mature cattle in or near a pasture is statistically likely to consist mostly of cows, so the term is probably accurate even in the restrictive sense.