How Big Can Rats Get?

Photo: Giant rat with one-inch-long teeth has been caught in the southern Chinese province of Fujian. Photo: HTTP://NEWS.163.COM

Giant Rat Caught In China -- The Telegraph

A giant rat with one-inch-long teeth has been caught in the southern Chinese province of Fujian.

The rat, which weighed six pounds and had a 12-inch tail, was caught at the weekend in a residential area of Fuzhou, a city of six million people on China's south coast.

The ratcatcher, who was only named as Mr Xian, said he swooped for the rodent after seeing a big crowd of people surrounding it on the street.

He told local Chinese newspapers that he thought the rat might be a valuable specimen, or a rare species, and had to muster up his courage before grabbing its tail and picking it up by the scruff of its neck.

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My Comment: A few years ago I saw a rat the size of a cat (in Montreal). I had to look at it a few times for it to register in my brain that what I was looking at was in fact a rat.

I am still scarred after all of these years.

Dolphin Stays For Three Days With Mate Wounded In Shark Attack - Before Escorting It To Humans For Help

Chunks of Nari's neck were literally bitten off as his flesh was torn right down to the muscle by the shark in these horrific injuries

From The Daily Mail:

A dolphin badly injured in a shark attack has been escorted by a mate into the care of human hands.

Nari sustained a hideous wound across his head and back, and when he went missing, wildlife experts feared he had died.

The 12-year-old dolphin failed to turn up for his ritual feeding off the coast of Queensland - but so did his older companion Echo.

But after three days the pair turned up with the rest of the group.

Mr Trevor Long, a dolphin expert from Sea World on the Gold Coast, said: 'We didn't see Nari again until the third day, when he turned up with Echo at his side.

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How Cobras Spit With Perfect Accuracy

Spitting cobra takes aim at a human face.
Credit: Frank Luerweg/University of Bonn.

From Live Science:

Spitting cobras don't truly spit venom. But they are incredibly accurate shooters, hitting a target — the victim's eyes — from 2 feet (60 cm) away with impressive accuracy, studies have shown.

New research confirms how they do it.

Scientists have long known that spitting cobras don't actually spit. Rather, muscle contractions squeeze the cobra's venom gland, forcing venom to stream out of the snake's fangs, explains Bruce Young, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts. The muscles can produce enough pressure to spray venom up to 6 feet (nearly 2 meters).

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Growing Bird Populations Show Conservation Successes

The Canada goose (Branta canadensis), which is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the Canadian goose, has a wingspan of 50 to 67 inches (127 to 170 centimeters) and can weigh from more than 6 pounds to nearly 20 pounds (3 kg to 9 kg). Credit: Stock.xchng.

From Live Science:

At a time when scientists are sounding ever more frequent alarms on the potential extinction of this creature or that, yesterday's collision with a flock of geese that put an airliner in the Hudson River is a reminder that some species are doing just fine.

Many birds have been faring well in the United States, even in urban environments (and in some cases especially in them), over the past few decades, say two bird experts and conservationists.

"Birds are increasing and that's good," said Kevin McGowan of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in New York. "People have worked hard to do that kind of thing. Most people like it. We don't always hear enough about the fact that a lot of things are doing well."

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Honey Bees On Cocaine Dance More, Changing Ideas About The Insect Brain

In a study that challenges current ideas about the insect brain, researchers have found that honey bees on cocaine tend to exaggerate. (Credit: iStockphoto/Florin Tirlea)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 25, 2008) — In a study that challenges current ideas about the insect brain, researchers have found that honey bees on cocaine tend to exaggerate.

Normally, foraging honey bees alert their comrades to potential food sources only when they've found high quality nectar or pollen, and only when the hive is in need. They do this by performing a dance, called a "round" or "waggle" dance, on a specialized "dance floor" in the hive. The dance gives specific instructions that help the other bees find the food.

Foraging honey bees on cocaine are more likely to dance, regardless of the quality of the food they've found or the status of the hive, the authors of the study report.

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Bees Acts As Bodyguards For Flowers By Protecting Them From Munching Insects

Photo: A bee hovers above a flower - their buzz scares off other insects such as caterpillars

From The Daily Mail:

Flowers use bright colours and strong scents to attract honeybees to their pollen. But the stripy insects also defend them from other insects, according to a new study in Current Biology.

Their buzzing noise warns off others such as caterpillars who would otherwise munch on the blooms undisturbed.

The researchers, led by Jürgen Tautz from Biozentrum Universität Würzburg, Germany, found many caterpillars possess fine sensory hairs on the front portions of their bodies that enable them to detect air vibrations, such as the sound of an approaching predatory wasp or honeybee.

'These sensory hairs are not fine-tuned,' Mr Tautz said.

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Honeybee CSI: Why Dead Bodies Can’t Be Found

Healthy hives (top) have worker bees covering most combs, but in hives with colony collapse disorder (bottom), a lot of bees leave the hive and don’t return.Credit: Custom Life Science Images

From Science News:

Virus could explain one symptom of colony collapse

There’s bad news for diehards still arguing that honeybees are getting abducted by aliens.

Beehives across North America continue to lose their workers for reasons not yet understood, a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder. But new tests suggest how a virus nicknamed IAPV might be to blame for one of the more puzzling aspects of the disorder—the impression that substantial numbers of bees vanish into thin air.

In tests on hives in a greenhouse, bees infected with IAPV (short for Israeli acute paralytic virus) rarely died in the hive. Sick bees expired throughout the greenhouse, including near the greenhouse wall, Diana Cox-Foster of Pennsylvania State University in University Park reported November 18 in Reno, Nev., at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America.

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Chinese Menus, Medicine Threatening Wildlife

Pictured is one of three lion cubs born in captivity at the zoo in Cali. November 6, 2008.
Reuters Jaime Saldarriaga (Colombia)

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

BEIJING (Reuters) – Wild animals are climbing back onto Chinese plates after the deadly SARS virus made some diners wary, and booming demand for traditional medicine is also threatening some plants, environmentalists said on Wednesday.

Nearly half of urbanites had consumed wildlife in the past 12 months, either as food or medicine, with rich and well educated Chinese most likely to tuck into a wild snake or turtle, a survey of urbanites in six cities found.

They enjoyed eating wildlife because they saw it as "unpolluted," "special" and with extra nourishing and health powers, according to a study commissioned by Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network.

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Giant Spider Eating A Bird Caught On Camera

From The Telegraph:

Photographs of a giant spider eating a bird in an Australian garden have stunned wildlife experts.

The pictures show the spider with its long black legs wrapped around the body of a dead bird suspended in its web.

The startling images were reportedly taken in Atheron, close to Queensland's tropical north.

Despite their unlikely subject matter, the pictures appear to be real.

Joel Shakespeare, head spider keeper at the Australian Reptile Park, said the spider was a Golden Orb Weaver.

"Normally they prey on large insects… it's unusual to see one eating a bird," he told ninemsn.com.

Mr Shakepeare said he had seen Golden Orb Weaver spiders as big as a human hand but the northern species in tropical areas were known to grow larger.

Queensland Museum identified the bird as a native finch called the Chestnut-breasted Mannikin.

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Chimps 90 Percent Gone In A "Final Stronghold"

A young chimpanzee is shown in Côte d'Ivoire's Taï National Park in an undated photo. (Photo from National Geographic)

From The National Geographic:

West African chimpanzees have declined by 90 percent in the last 18 years in an African country that is one of the subspecies' "final strongholds," a new study stays.

Scientists counting the rare chimps in Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) found only about 800 to 1,200 of the apes—down from about 8,000 to 12,000 in 1989-90. Before the new survey, the country had been thought to harbor about half of all West African chimps.

"We were not expecting such a drastic decrease," said lead author Geneviève Campbell, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

The 1989-90 survey had itself represented a significant decline from 1960s estimates of about a hundred thousand West African Chimps in Côte d'Ivoire.

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Pictured: The Moment A Grey Heron Catches A Baby Rabbit By The Ears, Drowns It, Then Swallows The Thing Whole

(Photo from Daily Mail)

From The Daily Mail:

These amazing pictures show how cruel nature can sometimes be as a grey heron snacks on a rabbit.

Herons mainly eat fish but will also take birds and small mammals. This one was searching for a meal when it spotted the baby rabbit emerging from a hole.

Swooping down it grabbed its prey by the ears, took it to water and drowned it - then swallowed the rabbit whole.

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Duelling Banjos Ain't Got Nuthin On Duelling Birdsong

Birds' Harmonious Duets Can Be 'Aggressive Audio Warfare,'
Study Finds -- eScienceNews

Researchers reporting in the September 4th Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, have new insight into the motivating factors that drive breeding pairs of some tropical bird species to sing duets. Those duets can be so closely matched that human listeners often mistake them for solos. They now report evidence that male and female rufous-and-white wren partners sing as a way of keeping track of one another when they are apart. But the duets, as pleasant as they may sound, also have a more sinister purpose. During confrontations with rivals, the wrens essentially duel one another with their duets.

The discovery was made possible by sophisticated sound recording technology developed by the University of Windsor and Cornell University team. That system, including eight microphones recording to a single laptop computer, allowed them to triangulate the duetting birds' positions in the dense tropical forests of Costa Rica where they live.

"Your first impression after you hear the duet of a pair of tropical birds is one of great harmony and cooperation," said Daniel Mennill of the University of Windsor. "Their duets require coordination and synchronization, and my multi-microphone recordings confirm that birds do coordinate their activities by performing duets. But there is a darker side to duetting; tropical birds also perform duets in very aggressive contexts, and respond with special aggression to rival individuals of the same sex. Their voices are beautiful harmonies, but they're also aggressive audio warfare."

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Eight Organisms That Make You Go 'Eww'

From MSNBC:

Skunk. The mere mention of the black and white mammal is enough to make people plug their noses. That's because these creatures are legendary for deterring predators with an oily, foul-smelling spray emitted from glands on either side of their anus. Eww. Some species can shoot the fetid substance more than ten feet and whatever it hits may forever carry the stench. As a defense mechanism, scientists say the stinky spray is quite effective: Most would-be skunk predators stay away unless they have nothing else to eat. Even humans are well trained to keep their distance.

When the skunk in this photo got its head stuck in a jar of salad dressing, a police officer cracked it off with a pellet gun fired from 40 feet away.

Click here for the other nine.

More Than 100,000 Rare Gorillas Found In Congo

From CNN:

(CNN) -- 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.

"It's pretty astonishing," Hugo Rainey, one of the researchers who conducted the survey for the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society, told CNN Tuesday.

The last census on the species, carried out during the 1980s, estimated that there were only 100,000 of the gorillas left worldwide. Since then, the researchers estimated, the numbers had been cut in half.

WCS survey teams conducted the research in 2006 and 2007, traveling to the remote Lac Tele Community Reserve in northern Republic of Congo, a vast area of swamp forest.

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