All posts tagged "Animals"

Conservationists said Saturday that they plan to bomb a remote South African island with tons of pesticide-laced pellets to kill mice that are eating albatrosses and other seabirds alive.

Hordes of mice are devouring the eggs of some of the world’s most important seabirds that nest on Marion Island, about 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) southeast of Cape Town, and have started eating live birds, leading conservationist Mark Anderson said.

This includes the iconic Wandering Albatross, with a quarter of the world’s population nesting on the Indian Ocean island....

After years of charming millions of people around the world with their furry bodies and clumsy antics, foreign-born giant pandas are adapting to new lives in China.

The fluffy envoys are loaned to overseas zoos as part of Beijing’s “panda diplomacy”, with the offspring returned to China within a few years of their birth to join breeding programmes.

And as they sit among leafy surrounds in conservation centres in southwest China chomping on bamboo, they are oblivious to their diplomatic roles — or the crucial part they could play in saving their species from extinction....

Periodical cicadas spend 99.5% of their life underground. Most of them live in large broods that go underground for cycles of 17 or 13 years — though some have different timings. During these periods, they live as nymphs that feed on fluids from the roots of trees. When the time is right, the individuals in a brood emerge, all at once, and live overground for only a few weeks. Cicadas likely developed this evolutionary strategy to avoid predators. Using prime numbers for their emergence makes it difficult for predators to adapt. Furthermore, the synchronized, mass emergence of the cicadas, ove......

Nuremberg Zoo plans to cull individuals from its troop of baboons to manage the population and to counter inbreeding, director Dag Encke announced in the southern German city on Thursday. The troop had become too large and inbred, resulting in problems with the gene pool and social structures, Enke said. Sending the animals to other zoos, whether in Germany or abroad, was not an option, he said. Nor was rewilding. The zoo has sent a proposal to the city council, and Encke is to follow up with an explanation the week after next with the aim of initiating a public discussion. The zoo has previou......

PHILADELPHIA — Ralphie fell in love with lobster at first bite. Steak too. But the pounds started creeping up. And up. In time, Ralphie’s doctor confirmed what his family already knew: At 30% overweight, the time had come for the South Philly Bullmastiff to go on a serious doggie diet. In the Keystone State, Ralphie is far from alone. Pennsylvania’s dogs are the most overweight in the country, according to a survey conducted by Veterinarians.org, a veterinarian-informed information group on pet issues. The study found that Pennsylvania dogs carry over 18 excess pounds on average. (A typical Ne......

Seminole County has long been known as Florida’s epicenter for bear encounters in residential neighborhoods. But now there’s a new hairy beast in town: coyotes. Over the past four years, the number of calls to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission from residents to report the skinny pointy-eared canines in the Seminole area has more than doubled, from 35 in 2020 to 75 last year. That’s among the largest jumps in coyote sightings in the greater Orlando region. And along with the sightings comes an increase in nuisance behavior, ranging from pesky— coyotes knocking over trash can......