animals

Green Sea Turtles (Chelonia mydas)Near Ko'Olina, Oahu, Hawaii 24 Feb 2007Pentax *ist DS with 70mm lens, 1/350 sec @ f/9.5 Technorati Tags: blogpix, green sea turtle, Oahu, ocean
This is the last animal we saw on our South African safari, and we found it sitting on top of our conditioner. Thank goodness it wasn't a leopard. I reckon it's a foamy nest frog, so named for its tendency to lay its eggs into a nest of foamy bubbles overhanging a body of water. I always thought this species had a darker colour but apparently, they become almost white in bright sunlight. Charming little tyke, isn't it?
tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
Patricia Brennan from Yale University is trying to encourage male Muscovy ducks to launch their ballistic penises into test tubes. Normally, the duck keeps its penis inside-out within a sac in its body. When the time for mating arrives, the penis explodes outwards to a fully-erect 20cm, around a quarter of the animal's total body length. The whole process takes just a third of a second and Brennan captures it all on high-speed camera. This isn't just bizarre voyeurism. Duck penises are a wonderful example of the strange things that happen when sexual conflict shapes the evolution of animal…
Safaris are all about the big game. But even though elephants, leopards and rhinos (oh my!) fill your lens and retinas on a daily basis, it's still just as wonderful to watch a squirrel scamper through a tree. This species is known in South Africa simply as a tree squirrel, or Smith's bush squirrel more broadly. Its golden coat with tinges of rust and green make it a far more handsome creature than the common grey squirrels that run through London's parks. It lacks none of their characteristic agility either, as the video below will demonstrate. I spent a good half-hour watching this…
tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
The feather is an extraordinary biological invention and the key to the success of modern birds. It has to be light and flexible to give birds fine control over their airborne movements, but tough and strong enough to withstand the massive forces generated by high-speed flight. It achieves this through a complicated internal structure that we are only just beginning to fully understand, with the aid of unlikely research assistants - fungi. At a microscopic level, feathers are made of a protein called beta-keratin. The same protein also forms the beaks and claws of birds, and the scales and…
Octopuses are masters of camouflage that can change their shape, colour and texture to perfectly blend into their environment. But the soft bodies that make them such excellent con artists also make them incredibly vulnerable, should they be spotted. Some species have solved that problem with their fierce intellect, which allows them to make use of other materials that are much harder. The veined octopus, for example, dons a suit of armour made of coconut shells. The veined octopus (Amphioctus marginatus) lives in sandy, exposed habitats that have little in the way of cover. To protect…
There's a great octopus story coming your way tomorrow. For that reason, I thought it was about time to republish this - the first ever post I wrote for Not Exactly Rocket Science, about the ever-amazing mimic octopus. This article was a game-changer for me. I submitted it to the Daily Telegraph's Young Science Writer competition in 2004, while still struggling with a failing attempt at research. It was awarded a runner-up prize - not a win, but enough to convince me that I could actually write and that I enjoyed it. Looking back on it now, it's decent but a bit rough. It also took forever to…
tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
A few years back, I was in a zoo looking at some ostriches. The man standing next to me was imparting knowledge to his children with tremendous pomp and circumstance, telling them about all things ostrich. He noted that despite their comical appearance, they are very powerful birds. So far, so good. He said that they had a powerful kick - also accurate. He said that they have a sharp, retractable claw on each foot that they can use to disembowel lions. No... that's Velociraptors. Perhaps I'm being too harsh. Ostriches, being the largest living birds, are formidable indeed and their toe…
I've got a new story up in New Scientist about the discovery of a gene called p53 - the so-called guardian of the genome - in one of the simplest group of animals, the Placozoa. A vital gene that defends us against cancer has been found in one of the simplest of animals - a flat, amoeba-like creature called a placozoan. The discovery shows that p53, sometimes described as the "guardian of the genome", has been around for over 1 billion years Placozoans are so simple that it's hard to conceive of them as animals at all. They have no tissues or organs, no front or back, no left or right. They…
On Nicobar Island, in the Indian Ocean, a most unusual hunting party is searching for food. Through the branches of the forest, the tiny Nicobar treeshrew scuttles about searching for insects. They're followed by the racket-tailed drongo, a small bird that picks off juicy morsels flushed out by the foraging treeshrews. So far, this isn't unusual - many distantly related animals forage together, either because they net more food or because they can watch out for predators. But this alliance has a third an altogether more surprising member - a sparrowhawk. This bird of prey is five times…
Many human languages achieve great diversity by combining basic words into compound ones - German is a classic example of this. We're not the only species that does this. Campbell's monkeys have just six basic types of calls but they have combined them into one of the richest and most sophisticated of animal vocabularies. By chaining calls together in ways that drastically alter their meaning, they can communicate to each other about other falling trees, rival groups, harmless animals and potential threats. They can signal the presence of an unspecified threat, a leopard or an eagle, and…
There's nothing like going on safari, rounding a corner in your open-top jeep and catching a glimpse of your first wild animals. Which will almost certainly be impala. Much camera-clicking, oohing and aahing ensues. Three days later... you have seen enough impala for a lifetime. They are everywhere. Sometimes, you'll drive for an hour, see nothing at all, catch a glimpse of movement, hurry towards it only to find yet another herd of impala. You start to resent the impala for not being something more interesting, for deigning to be commonplace when they could be, say, hunting dogs. You…
tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. Two years ago, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center found that brown capuchin monkeys also react badly to receiving raw deals. Forget bananas - capuchins love the taste of grapes and far prefer them over cucumber. If monkeys were rewarded for completing a task with cucumber while their peers were given succulent grapes, they were more likely to shun both task and reward. That suggested that the human ability to compare own efforts and rewards with those of our…
We're less than a month away from the end of the year (the decade, even). In past years, I've done a review of the year, where I select my favourite posts. But those were more innocent and less productive times. This year, I have written 245 posts and counting and it's now easy to narrow these down to a manageable number. So I thought I could get you to do it, and we could have some in the process Throughout December, I will be getting you lovely readers to vote for the top stories covered on this blog over the last year. I've selected the ones that have interested me the most and divided…
In the forests of Germany live large numbers of blackcaps, a small species of songbird. They all look very similar, but they actually belong to two genetically distinct groups that are becoming more disparate with time. For the moment, the best way to tell them apart is to wait for winter. As the cold sets in, one group of blackcaps flies southwest to Spain, while a smaller group heads northwest towards Britain. If the prospect of spending winter in Britain rather than Spain seems odd to you, you're not alone. Indeed, blackcaps were hardly ever ventured across these shores before the 1950s.…