Tourist Martin Nyfeler of Kloten, Switzerland, saw a mother elephant and baby at the watering hole, in Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park, and told the guide to stop, because it would make a cute picture.
Then the crocodile jumped out:
The elephants got away.
(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)
The dogs of war go airborne in Afghanistan — literally:
Members of Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS) special forces have begun parachuting into enemy strongholds in Afghanistan with Taliban-seeking German shepherds strapped to their chests. Once on the ground, the dogs hunt for Taliban insurgents in buildings and — with cameras strapped to their heads sending back video — act as forward scouts for the British special forces unit. The work is every bit as dangerous for the dogs as it is for their human counterparts, The Guardian reports. Eight SAS paratrooper pups killed in combat thus far.
Though the missions are officially secret, earlier reports of the pups’ training shed some light on how the British special forces are likely using them. SAS pooches are trained for High Altitude High Opening (HAHO) jumps, in which parachutes are deployed at a high altitude and long horizontal distance away from a target location in order to allow jumpers to glide in without detection. The SAS dogs are trained to jump tethered to their handlers from heights as high as 25,000 feet and up to 20 miles away — or a 30 minute glide — from a target location. At that height, the lack of oxygen puts them at risk for hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, so the dogs are fitted with special masks to give them breathable air. The Brits reportedly borrowed the tactic from America’s super-secret Delta Force, which first trained dogs to make HAHO jumps.
Virgin births do occur among animals:
Many invertebrates, such as insects, can produce offspring asexually, without ever having mated. They usually do this by cloning themselves, producing genetically identical offspring.
But among vertebrate animals, it remains a novelty, having been documented among less than 0.1% of vertebrate species.
In 2006, scientists discovered that two komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis), the world’s largest lizard species, had produced eggs that developed without being fertilised by sperm — a process called parthenogenesis.
Then in 2007, other scientists found that captive female hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna tiburo) could also reproduce without having sex.
Now researchers have discovered a female Boa constrictor that has produced two “virgin” litters — with an unusual chromosomal twist:
First impressions suggested there was something special about these babies: all were female and all had a particular, rare caramel colouration.
This colour is a rare recessive genetic trait, which is carried by the mother but not by any of the potential fathers.
So Dr Booth and colleagues conducted a series of genetic tests on the snakes to solve the enigma.
What they found was astonishing.
DNA fingerprinting revealed that the offspring had a number of genetic differences from any of their potential fathers, which ruled out all the males as sires of the litter.
That confirmed the first instance of a known virgin birth among boa snakes.
All the offspring also had very unusual sex chromosomes.
Sex chromosomes are packages of DNA that drive the development of sexual characteristics; they essentially make animals genetically male or genetically female.
Humans for example have X or Y sex chromosomes; females have two X chromosomes and males have a combination of an X and a Y chromosome.
In place of X and Y, snakes and many other reptiles have Z and W chromosomes. In all snakes, ZZ produces males and ZW produces females. Bizarrely, all the snakes in these litters were WW.
This was further proof that the snakes inherited all their genetic material from their mother, as only females carry the W chromosome. ”Essentially they are half clones of their mother,” says Dr Booth.
That is because the baby snakes have inherited two copies of one half of their mother’s chromosomes, including one W chromosome.
I always found it odd that the cure for a venom was an antivenin — and that inflammation of a tendon was tendinitis — but it looks like the sensible term, antivenom, has won out:
The name “antivenin” comes from the French word “venin”, meaning venom, and historically “antivenin” was predominant around the world. In 1981, the World Health Organization decided that the preferred terminology in the English language would be “venom” and “antivenom” rather than “venin/antivenin” or “venen/antivenene”.
Antivenoms are similar to vaccines, but immunity isn’t induced directly in the patient; it is induced in a host animal — a horse or sheep — and the hyperimmunized serum is transfused into the patient:
It is quite possible to immunize a person directly with small and graded doses of venom rather than an animal. According to Greek history, King Mithridates did this in order to protect himself against attempts of poisoning; therefore this procedure is often called mithridatization.
However, unlike a vaccination against disease which must only produce a latent immunity that can be roused in case of infection, to neutralize a sudden and large dose of venom requires maintaining a high level of circulating antibody (a hyperimmunized state), through repeated venom injections (typically every 21 days). The long-term health effects of this process have not been studied.
When I first read the Australian news headline that a crocodile on a plane had killed 19 passengers, I had an image of a saltie tearing apart tourists on a jetliner — which seemed not just gruesome but implausible.
What really happened was that a passenger on a domestic flight in the Democratic Republic of Congo — from the capital, Kinshasa, to the regional airport at Bandundu — had brought a crocodile on board, hidden in a large sports bag.
He had plans to sell the crocodile, but it got out of the bag, terrified the passengers, and caused a stampede — which unbalanced the small Czech-made Let L-410 Turbolet, sending it crashing down onto an empty house “just a few hundred metres from its destination.”
Welcome to Africa.
A mountain goat has killed a hiker in Olympic National Park, in Washington:
Witnesses said Mr Boardman, his wife and friend had stopped for lunch on Klahhane Ridge when the ram appeared and moved towards them.
Mr Boardman tried to shoo the animal away but it instead attacked him. After goring the hiker the goat stood over him, and had to be pelted with rocks by a ranger before finally moving away.
[...]
The 63-year-old was transported by US Coast Guard helicopter to a hospital in Port Angeles, where he was pronounced dead.Rangers later killed the goat, which was known for its aggressive behaviour.
Barb Maynes, park spokeswoman, told the Peninsula Daily News that in the past rangers had tried “hazing” the ram — inducing it to be frightened of people — by shooting it with bean bags and throwing rocks.
But there had been no reports of any incidents which would have warranted killing the goat, she added.
I was a bit confused by this note:
Some 300 mountain goats live in Olympic National Park. Found only in North America, they usually stand about 3ft (0.9m) at the shoulder and can weigh up to 300lbs (136kg).
Goats live in the mountains elsewhere, but only the Rocky Mountain Goat (Oreamnos americanus) goes by the name mountain goat.
The goat that lives in the Alps is the Alpine ibex — totally different.
(Hat tip to Todd, who laments that wild animals are f—ing savages.)
Billionaire Tom Siebel decided to go out for a walking safari in Tanzania with his guide, while the rest of his family took the day off — and things didn’t go so well:
I’m not certain what happened. But, all of a sudden, one of the larger female elephants just spun around and sat on her haunches and put her trunk in the air and her ears out fully extended and just bellowed at us. I don’t know if she could see us or smell us, but she pointed right at us. She paused for probably two seconds and then [made] a beeline right at us. So, this is 6 tons of elephant moving 30 miles per hour, and she could cover 200 yards in not much time…. And I would say about 4 yards in front of me the guide is standing there with his.470 double-barreled rifle….
[...]
So, the animal is closing in and the guy doesn’t shoot. Then 40 yards, and the guide doesn’t shoot. This animal’s now 20 yards [away], and the guide has not shot. At 10 yards he still hasn’t shot, and this animal is closing in… like a Caterpillar tractor coming at you…. I’d say the animal is 4 yards away and this guide then shoots and misses. It goes above its head…. Then the elephant came up to him and [with her] trunk… just threw him aside. I could hear the air decompress out of his body as the animal hurled him over maybe 10 yards to my right.
[...]
It knocked me to the ground with its trunk, it rolled me, punched me, put a tusk through my left thigh, gored it, then ripped it out sideways. It stepped on my leg, kicked my leg, broke six ribs and ripped up my shoulder…. I remember every instant of it… trying to protect my head with my arms. I remember the blows to my lower extremities, and it just hurt so bad I couldn’t believe it…. Imagine what it’s like taking an elephant tusk through the thigh… or hav[ing] a 6-ton animal step on your leg… It just snaps…. The pain was intolerable…. I had one thought: “Please, God, make this stop.”And after a while I looked up…. The dust is settled. The elephant’s gone. Dead quiet in the Serengeti…. The guide is over there 12 yards [away], curled up in a ball, wrapped around [the]… rifle, playing dead…. Basically what happened is I got served up. So I said, “This might be a good time to reload.”… He was virtually unhurt.
It took three and a half hours for trucks to arrive from the lodge. Then he had to fly to a hospital in Nairobi. Then he had to fly 20 hours to San Jose — and found out the hard way that they had provided him with 10 hours of morphine.
One year and 16 surgeries later, he’s… better:
I still have something on my leg called an Ilizarov external fixator [to mend, lengthen and reshape] the tibia… between your ankle bone and your knee…. They’ve taken a chunk of bone out of my pelvis about the size of your fist and moved it down into my ankle to try to get it all fused together…. The prognosis is that I’ll be able to walk and run and ride a bicycle and play golf [again]….
(Hat tip to Todd.)
Researchers unearthed remains of a nearly 5-foot-tall penguin that roamed prehistoric Peru 36 million years ago — and its fossilized feathers imply that it was reddish-brown and gray, not starkly black and white:
Pigment is long gone in fossils. But left behind in feathers can be microscopic packets called melanosomes that in life contained color-producing pigments — and the shape of those melanosomes corresponds to different colors. So the researchers compared a library of melanosomes from living birds with these fossilized ones.
The big surprise is that it turns out modern penguins have large melanosomes packed into grape-like clusters, unlike those of any other known bird, while the extinct giant penguin’s smaller melanosomes resembled those of other birds, Clarke said.
The scientists can’t explain the difference. But they say it probably has to do with more than the black tuxedo coloration of today’s penguins.Melanin, the pigment inside melanosomes, helps feathers resist breakage. So one possibility is that the melanosomes got bigger during later penguin evolution as the birds became better underwater swimmers and needed a more hydrodynamic covering.
Chimps in in Bossou, Guinea have learned to disarm the snares set by local hunters to catch them as bush meat:
“They seemed to know which parts of the snares are dangerous and which are not,” Mr Ohashi told the BBC.
In the journal Primates, the researchers describe six separate cases where chimps were observed trying to deactivate snares.
Mostly, the chimps grasped the snare stick with their hands, shaking it violently until the trap broke.
Sometimes a chimp lightly knocked the sapling that holds the snare, before grasping it to break the trap.
But in all cases, they avoided touching the dangerous part, the wire loop.
This is not the kind of thing a chimp could learn by trial and error.
Warning:
Due to the frequency of human-bear encounters, the BC Fish and Wildlife Branch is advising hikers, hunters, fishermen, and any persons that use the out of doors in a recreational or work related function to take extra precautions while in the field.
We advise the outdoorsman to wear little noisy bells on clothing so as to give advance warning to any bears that might be close by so you don’t take them by surprise.
We also advise anyone using the out-of-doors to carry “Pepper Spray” with him in case of an encounter with a bear.
Outdoorsmen should also be on the watch for fresh bear activity, and be able to tell the difference between black bear feces and grizzly bear feces. Black bear feces is smaller and contains lots of berries and squirrel fur. Grizzly bear shit has bells in it and smells like pepper.
(Thanks, Todd.)
A 700-pound black bear dubbed Bubba has been living large on Lake Tahoe’s shores:
The bear has broken into at least 50 homes in search of food the past year, causing more than $70,000 of damage, and leaving stinky, basketball-size deposits as his calling card.
In fact, bears are causing all kinds of trouble these days:
Across California and Nevada, last year’s harsh winter forced bears across California and Nevada down from the mountains in search of food.
In May, Mr. Lackey says one bear killed eight sheep and goats in a single incident in Carson City, Nev. That same month, he says, another bear broke into a garage in Gardnerville, Nev., and got stuck in a Mercedes, surprising the car’s owner when he found the vehicle occupied the next morning.
And in July in Yosemite National Park, bears caused $67,915 of damage in just one week by raiding parking lots, campgrounds and other areas, according to the National Park Service. In comparison, last year bears caused only an average of $1,500 in damage per week.
At Lake Tahoe, Mr. Lackey and other biologists have killed 13 bears so far this year, triple the normal average by August. Bubba, double the size of the average adult black bear, has proven remarkably elusive.
Some of Bubba’s exploits and escapes are the stuff of legend. In one incident in mid-2009, a bear matching Bubba’s description confronted a frightened homeowner, who told officials that he shot the bear between the eyes with a .44 Magnum. The bullet apparently bounced off the bear’s skull, leaving him wounded but still alive, Mr. Lackey says.
Oh, bother!
A powerful rifle is superior to any handgun in killing power, shooter Chuck Hawks says, but if you’re going to carry a handgun for protection against bears, he recommends a Ruger Blackhawk revolver (6.5″ barrel) in .357 or .41 Magnum, or a Ruger Super Blackhawk revolver (5.5″ or 7.5″ barrel) in .44 Magnum. He may have to revise his recommendation upward.
It’s all fun and games when Winnie the Pooh gets his head stuck in a honey pot, but for Jarhead the bear cub it could have meant a slow, painful death:
The bear, his mother and two siblings regularly raided trash bins in Weirsdale, a small community in the vast Ocala National Forest.
[...]
The 6-month-old cub couldn’t eat or drink normally, and was days away from death when he was freed, biologists say.It took 10 days for officials to track down the bear family using baited traps and following up frantic leads by concerned residents.
[...]
After an overnight stay with his groggy mother, Jarhead and the whole family was moved to a less populated part of the forest for safety.
Hiring goats to clear an overgrown backyard is the latest upper-middle-class fad:
Generally, companies truck goats to work sites (some gas required) where the animals munch inside portable fencing or electric netting, often powered by solar panels. Prices can range from $200 a day for a dozen goats to upward of $1,000 for larger herds of 100 or more. On bigger projects, animals may stay overnight supervised by the business owners or specially trained guardian dogs.
At Vanderbilt Mansion, where a small herd currently grazes on seven hilly acres, the job’s $9,000 annual price tag is about two-thirds what hired manpower would run, says Dave Hayes, the estate’s natural-resource program manager. “And the goats are a lot more popular.”
They’re also gentle. Casey Brewer of Duvall, Wash., hired The Goat Lady LLC to clear half an acre overrun with salmonberries. The tally came to just over $1,000 for three days, and Ms. Brewer says the goats didn’t harm her cherished old-growth cedar stumps.
“It’s a wonderful alternative to bulldozing the property,” she says.
There can be snafus. Josh Farmer, 49, runs The Goat Lady with his partner Jill Johnson, an eighth-grade schoolteacher. While electric netting and an Anatolian shepherd dog protect their goats from predators or household dogs, neighborhood children pose a unique threat. “There are those who think it’s fun to unplug my electric fence just when it gets dark, letting goats escape,” Mr. Farmer says.
And some plants are toxic to goats including ornamentals such as azaleas, oleanders and rhododendrons. Lois Anne Keith paid about $14,000 to bring in 130 goats from Rent-A-Ruminant LLC for several weeks of clearing around her 25-acre Woodinville, Wash., property. The experience went smoothly, except one evening when four goats got sick munching old rhododendron stumps because they were hidden by blackberries. Fortunately the owner, Tammy Dunakin, was sleeping on site in a truck and had medicine to give the goats.
“It’s not a simple line of work,” says Ms. Dunakin, who expects to gross just over $100,000 this year, her sixth in the business, and is developing an “affiliate” model to train others in goat brush-clearing. From setting up fencing to giving goats shots, water and mineral supplements, she says, “there are a lot of mistakes people can make.”
Town and city rules about livestock vary. Often animals can’t be raised on property not zoned for agriculture use — but are allowed to visit. In 2004, some residents of the Pacific Palisades, Calif., enclave Marquez Knolls complained, unsuccessfully, to city officials when a resident temporarily parked a trailer with her brush-clearing goats on the street. At night, coyotes circled the truck, recalls Haldis Toppel, president of the neighborhood association. “This is a residential area with dogs, cats and kids and there is a safety factor,” she says.
For its “human edge” series, NPR looks at how slow and steady running won the race:
“Most animals are designed for speed, for power, not for endurance,” Lieberman explains, as we make a turn onto the bridge. “And we are a special species in having been selected for endurance, not speed.”
So we grew longer legs and lighter feet; the joints in the legs and pelvis got bigger to absorb a lot of impact; and we grew a bigger butt muscle.
Lieberman says these and other changes allowed us to run down and exhaust prey, like antelopes. He notes that “persistence hunters” in Africa have been known to do that. And the payoff would’ve been big for early humans: lots of high-calorie meat to feed a bigger brain.
Lieberman is creating a computer model of how we run — in contrast to how other primates might run:
“There are no humans out there with faces as large as Neanderthals,” he explains as he rummages through a cupboard, “so people wear weights in their mouths, which then changes the center of gravity of their head.”
Understanding head control is important. If you don’t keep your head still, you can’t focus your eyes. Lieberman says modern humans, unlike apes, have a special muscle that connects each arm to the neck and head. As you swing your arms, they become counterweights to stabilize your head.
