White-faced Heron, Tide Pools, Cowries

Some pretty cool pics and a new animal for me - the cowry - over at the other blog.

Little Pied Cormorant, Cat's Eye Sea Shell

Over at my Aussie site.

Baby foxes under the house

I've got a family of foxes under the room where I sit right now. Little tiny baby foxes comeout to play right under my window:

Wow: India To Move All Zoo Elephants to Wildlife Parks

Hopefully we do the same some day soon.

Photo source

Backseet Dog Iz Wachin U...

This is something I don't normally do, but this dog over at AmericaBlog, where they're posting pet photos, just cracked me up. She's "Moxie from Portland, Maine," and you've got to click on the pic to enlarge it and look at the look on her face. Too funny. She was just asking for a caption. (I actually had to search and find out how to caption photos, and found this site. Piece of cake.)

Reckon I'll start a "Backseet dog iz wachin u" series.

Snake With a Foot

This will turn out to be a hoax. Or, since the snake has a sizable bulgle in its length right about the spot the leg is protruding, it'll turn out to be the leg of lunch.

Giant Octopus Encounter

From my Digg science feed in the sidebar:

Man Gored to Death By Bull In Pamplona

Hundreds of people surround and taunt this bull for minutes, and it's obviously confused. Hemingway can kiss my ass. This is, or has become, an awful ritual.

Oh, Dodo

A previously undiscovered 17th century picture of a dodo, drawn before the bird became extinct, is to be sold at auction by Christie’s. [...]

Dodos were the main predators on Mauritius until settlers introduced bigger animals to Indian Ocean island, including pigs. Many were shipped to Europe as curiosities or had their nesting areas destroyed and the species was extinct by 1700.

The 350-year-old drawing, described by Christie's as “vibrant”, is one of a small number of images of the unfortunate bird whose demise was largely unnoticed until a dodo featured in Lewis Carroll’s popular 1865 book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Extra.

"Stoned wallabies make crop circles"

Headlines like that just kinda jump out at you don't they? (Oh crap - I swear that pun was unintentional.) Back to our story:

Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said.

Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania, said the kangaroo-like marsupials were getting into poppy fields grown for medicine.

She was reporting to a parliamentary hearing on security for poppy crops.
Australia supplies about 50% of the world's legally-grown opium used to make morphine and other painkillers.

We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles. Then they crash
Lara Giddings, government official

"The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," Lara Giddings told the hearing.

"Then they crash," she added. "We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."

Photo of stoned wallaby from here.

Dolphins Blow Ring-Shaped Bubbles

And then they play with them. Just too cool. Look at the moment at about 1:20 in.



And since this has been on youTube several times over the last couple years, it almost seems like this is a disguised advertisement for the aquarium that posted the video. But whatever.

Photos of Jaguar, Short-Eared Wild Dog in Peru

From National Geographic.

I've never even heard of the short-eared dog. The photo here is from Wiki commons, the one they just got is much better.

A rare short-eared dog is captured in a camera trap intended for jaguars in a picture released January 27, 2009. Little is known about these wild fox cousins, which until 1990 hadn't been seen in their natural habitats for two decades.

Saturday Sonata XX: Lobsters

My twentieth Saturday Sonata is now up over at The Peace Tree.

This week: a lobster theme. A crabby sample:

Red List of Threatened Species

We need a de-population program.

Polar Bears "Resort to Cannabilism" As Ice Shrinks

Damn:

Less than 30 years ago, there would still be 7 million square kilometers or 2.5 million square miles of ice left at the end of an Arctic summer. That's now dropped by almost 40 percent.

[...]

"The Arctic sea ice melt is a disaster for the polar bears," according to Kassie Siegel, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. "They are dependent on the Arctic sea ice for all of their essential behaviors, and as the ice melts and global warming transforms the Arctic, polar bears are starving, drowning, even resorting to cannibalism because they don't have access to their usual food sources."

Polar Bears International.

The Animals Are Going to Win

Queensland's flying foxes may be spreading a deadly virus to humans...as a reaction to habitat loss.

"It's like a biological weapon protecting their ecological niche. Only when humans try to destroy that balance that the virus jumps out."

BIZARRE Goblin Shark Caught on Video

"Caught on video." Nice phrase, isn't it?

Anyway, a Goblin shark, inspired by Alien:

125,000 Western Lowland Gorillas

How much you want to bet that this story is used as a weapon to fight the endangered species list in this country?

An estimated 125,000 Western lowland gorillas are living in a swamp in equatorial Africa, researchers reported Tuesday, double the number of the endangered primates thought to survive worldwide.

Predicted Right Wing logic: "This is why we should drill in ANWR!"

Bear Attack Victim on Video

Funny lady.

I heard king of a squishy, crunchy "pop" and I thought, "there goes my eye"...

Deepest Live Fish Catch: 7,100 Feet

Amazing. Because such creatures live under such enormous pressure, bringing them up normally kills them long before they even reach the surface. But they have pressurized tanks that they put live catches in while at depth, and the latest technologies have allowed for these records.

"Pressurised recovery has been around for the past 30 years, but this is the deepest fish-capture under pressure - the previous record was 1,400m. This is also the first time pressurised capture has occurred at a hydrothermal vent," said Dr Bruce Shillito, marine biologist at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France.

The shrimp species were caught at 1,700m (5,600ft; Mirocaris fortunata and Chorocaris chacei) and 2,300m (7,500ft; Rimicaris exoculata) at two vent fields, Lucky Strike and Rainbow, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.