Everyone knows hippos live wild only in Africa — but that might change in the near future, thanks to infamous Colombian drug cartel leader and all-around douchebag Pablo Escobar. In one of his many outlandish delusions of grandeur, he constructed a private zoo on one of his palatial estates, complete with a herd of hippos. But after Escobar was gunned down, his empire fell and the estate fell to ruin. The hippos ran free, thrived and even reproduced. Now there's even a possibility that the hippos could spread into the surrounding rain forest, becoming one of the larger invasive species in recent memory. Let's go to the tape:
Video: Drug lord's hippos run free in Colombia; could take over local rivers, drug trade
The chupacabra myth: exposed!
Since last summer the small town of Cuero, Texas has been the epicenter of one of the Internet’s favorite points of discussion: chupacabras. In July, a motorist plowed into a hairless purple-hued doglike creature that fits the rough physical description of what the southwest’s most beloved cryptid would actually look like, leaving many people to speculate—sometimes wildly—about the lineage of the unfortunate roadkill.
Phylis Canion, on whose property it expired, decided to find out just what the hell this creature was that, true to chupacabra legend, had been sucking the blood out of all her chickens. So in conjunction with a local news station, she sent DNA samples to Texas State University for further elaboration. The answer she received was far from earth-shattering. It belongs to the coyote family, quoth the lab.
Video: 17-foot long deep-sea shark with meter-wide head waaaay cooler than Cloverfield monster
It's easy to marvel at the rapid advance of CGI monsters in movies and wonder exactly how far off Industrial Light & Magic or WETA is from achieving utter realism. Then you look at one of nature's deep-sea monsters and realize just how far Hollywood has to go:
Barnacles: nature's most attentive lovers
Countless men have been emboldened by one of the most varied and hopeful phrases in the English lexicon: “It’s not the size that matters, it’s how you use it.”
It’s a call-out for those lazy lotharios who rest on their genetic laurels and a lifeline for those eager few who may pay extra attention to their spam email. It’s a proclamation that, all too often, you just can’t have it both ways.
Ladies, suspend your disbelief and slip into something more comfortable (a wetsuit, preferably) because I have someone I’d like you to meet. May I introduce you to….a barnacle.
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Don't wake me up before you go-go: Global Warming could be killing hibernating animals
Everyone knows chipmunks need their sleep — otherwise they get ornery and attack you in local parks. Oh, and they're also more likely to die.
Global warming, it seems, has shortened the hibernation period for animals like bears, marmots and chipmunks like Mr. Cutie Pants over there. But it leads to more than animals just getting crankier: They wake up earlier thinking it's spring, but the food sources often haven't caught up, and the animals starve. So much for the early-bird-gets-the-worm theory; it's more like "the early bird gets the shaft."
Researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological lab have checked up on marmot hibernation behavior since the 1970s, and because temperatures have risen by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit in recent times, they've seen the marmots awaken from their dens about a month earlier.
Because of the temperature change, some animals don't hibernate at all. Brown bears in Spain skipped out on hibernation as did chipmunks in the U.S., and while the bears didn't take much of a population hit, many early-rising chipmunks starved or got chomped by predators.
Protecting the polar bears...with oil!
The polar bear is widely accepted as the unofficial symbol of global warming. Most people would suggest that the poor, drowning, computer-generated creature from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth thrust the plight of the polar bear into the national consciousness. Soon after, with the birth of little Knut in a Berlin zoo, the world had a physical being of heartbreaking cuteness to associate with the problem, though the cub, far from the Dorian Gray of his species, is susceptible to the corruption of age, as are most adolescents.
It didn’t take long for Hollywood to cast them as honorable (and rational) warriors, who’d also star in their own features and rub elbows with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio. So when reports surfaced in 2006 that the shifting climate forced the bears into cannibalism, the public reacted with an outpouring of compassion rather than dismissing them as fearsome predators, as may have been the case in other circumstances. These days, 1993 seems a lifetime ago, when America was captivated by Coca-Cola’s dreamlike Arctic idyll.
Orangutan and Tapir frolic in suburban swimming pool. Really.
"Suyria [the orang] is one of the inhabitants of The Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species (TIGERS), run by Dr Bhagavan Antle."
More pics accessible from the right column of this article.
White Death
No, that's not what they're calling Christian Bale. At least, not that I know of.
"To everyone interested in bat conservation," was the subject line of a letter I turned up in a Google search this morning. So I read it—because, really, who isn't interested in bat conservation?
Don't answer that. Anyhow, it's the story that has Bruce Wayne in tears. Apparently, a somewhat mysterious fungal pathogen is wiping out bat colonies throughout the Northeast. It's called White Nose Syndrome (WNS), because the disease leaves a white moldy-looking ring around an infected bat's nose (insert off-color joke here).
Mole-rats can't feel certain types of pain, still 'pretty on the inside'
Someone once called me "cute as a mole-rat," and I thanked them for the complement. Then I found out what mole-rats looked like, and I cried in the shower for a few days.
But I shouldn't have been so hasty to dismiss my homely likeness: The African naked mole-rat is immune to certain types of pain.They respond to mechanical pain like pinching, but don't respond to pain caused by capsaicin (the hot element in chili peppers), hot objects, and even burns from acid.
Thomas Park of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Gary Lewin at the Max-Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany, and their colleagues discovered that mole-rats lack substance P, a compound that transmits information relating to chronic pain in between nerve cells. The team hopes to apply this discovery in gene therapy to help humans who suffer from chronic pain.
“Instead of going to the pain region of the spinal cord as we would expect, the nerves that lead from acid and capsaicin sensors go to the touch region,” says Park. “And their nerve fibres do not respond to acid at all.”
Did you hear that? At all.
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Reptile Sex Determination Is Hot Topic [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Science Podcast is brought to you by the anole family of lizard, because I caught hundreds as a youth:
Reptile Sex Determination Is Hot Topic
Full transcript after the jump...
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National Geographic films endangered Irish rockers in the wild
You may have heard about U2 3D, the gimmicky concert film that killed at Sundance. But did you know that National Geographic produced it? What does promoting a shark-jumping arena rock band have to do with "inspiring people care about the planet", anyway?
(Speculation follows after the jump.)
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Snake Hearing Is Connected To The Jawbone [podcast]
Today's 60 Second Science Podcast is brought to you by that annoying kid who always tapped on the glass of your reptile cage:
Snake Hearing Is Connected To The Jawbone
Full transcript after the jump...
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Sneaky squirrels use fake burials to fool thieves, me
Goddammit, squirrels. One more show of sudden genetic superiority, and I'm going to have to lobby to have you put on the Terrorist Group Watch List.
To protect their winter stores of nuts, gray squirrels have learned how to stage fake burials so that thieves will get stumped when looking to heist their precious cargo of various nutmeats. Dr. Michael Steele of Wilkes University in Pennsylvania found that about a fifth of all nut burials are fake. The incidence goes up when the squirrels believe their stores are under particular threat.
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Bigfoot lives on Mars
OK, perhaps not, but even a baby cryptozoologist can spot Ol' Harry Henderson in the lower-left corner of this image taken by Spirit on the Martian surface.
How did Bigfoot get there? What does he subsist on, besides sub-surface frozen water and possible fossilized microbes? These are questions for hardier cryptozoologists than me.
I'm just glad he's getting out of the Pacific Northwest a bit more often.
Will Congo's peace treaty save the mountain gorillas too?
The eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, epicenter of what is often called Africa's World War, may soon see peace for the first time in years. More than 20 rebel leaders -- including rogue general Laurent Nkunda, wanted for war crimes -- are signing a cease-fire with DR Congo's government in hopes to quell the violence that has killed 45,000 people per month for the past ten years.
This is good news for DR Congo's mountain gorilla population. Only 700 of the animals are left on earth, mostly in Virunga National Park-- which became a de-facto war zone last year as rebel militias swarmed in.
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