Black rhinos are bulky, earthbound animals—but lately, the lumbering pachyderms have taken part in some pretty impressive aerial acrobatics. Nineteen of the endangered rhinos have taken thousand-mile trips across South Africa while dangling upside down from helicopters.
The WWF’s Black Rhino Range Expansion Project was moving the animals away from poachers and into larger, safer habitats. The safest, shortest mode of transport, in a region with bumpy roads and no jet-ready runways, turns out to be suspending tranquilized, blindfolded rhinos by the ankles from a chopper—Mafia-style. You can watch the rhinos flying through the air (and hear more about the project) in this video:
Instead of a loping, lunging Tyrannosaurus rex, imagine the thunder lizard doing more of a power-walk: the clenched bum, the stiff legs, the whole shebang.
Pretty evocative mental image, right? For that, you have a recent presentation at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting to thank. Dinosaur gaits are right up there with “how did flight evolve?” and “what makes us human?” on the list of fascinating, but intangible, things scientists wish we understood, and this particular scientist, Heinrich Mallison, a palaeontologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, was leveling a criticism at traditional efforts to figure out how dinosaurs perambulated. Basically, he says that dinosaurs had such big butts that our usual method of comparing dinosaurs to small-cheeked modern animals is doomed to failure.
Dragonflies can literally be scared to death of fish. Who knew? In a study published in November in the journal Ecology, researchers found that dragonfly larvae reared in the presence of fish were four times more likely to die before reaching adulthood, compared to larvae raised in an environment without predators. Similarly, 2.5 times more dragonflies croaked when raised in the same tank as an invertebrate predator. The larvae were kept in cages in full view of the predators, although the cages kept the predators from entering, and each one contained a small cup where the larvae could hide.
The study also found dragonfly nymphs raised in tanks with a fish were 10 percent more likely to die while metamorphosing into their winged adult form that we know so well. Apparently growing up is not only stressful for humans, and being constantly reminded of one’s mortality doesn’t help. (But of course, I’m anthropomorphizing their metamorphosizing.)
So you finally got that 3D printer. It was pricey, but now you can fabricate anything you want! After making a few dozen hamster food dishes, a model of your own head, and as many toilet part replacements as you will ever (God willing) need, you’re feeling at loose ends. You need a cause to print for.
That cause, provided by Project Shellter at Makerbot, is wee little hermit crabs, who are, in turns out, suffering from a shell shortage. (more…)
A well-known paleontologist found the lair of the heretofore-mythical kraken, proving that a hyper-intelligent giant squid hunted schoolbus-sized ichthyosauruses before breaking their necks, drowning them, and bringing them home to its pad on the bottom of the sea. After feasting on the delicious sea reptile, the kraken felt artistic and made a self-portrait, arranging their bones in a pattern resembling the suckers on its tentacle.
Unfortunately, this insane story isn’t a tale from a science-fiction novel. It was actually stated in a news release from the Geological Society of America and credulously regurgitated by many news sources covering it, taking the, uh, not entirely rock-solid claims made by Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin at face value.
The marketing geniuses at Nestle will air an ad targeted directly at dogs this week in Austria, featuring a high-pitched tone designed to appeal to canines, Reuters reports. The ad features the squeaking sounds of common dog toys as well as a high-frequency tone that is “barely audible to humans,” according to the news release. Noticeably absent from the release is the fact that all TV speakers are designed by humans for humans, with maximum frequencies reaching 20,000 hertz, the upper limit of human hearing. But most speakers top out well below this. While dogs can hear sounds up to at least 40 kHz, it’s almost impossible human speakers could broadcast any special tone that would be able to alert your dog any more than, say, a six-year-old.
Those classy folks at the Annals of Improbable Research are at it again. Last night, they announced the 2011 winners of some of the most coveted awards in science: the Ig Nobels.
First off, in Physiology…from the Cold-Blooded Cognition Lab at the University of Vienna, Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandle, and Ludwig Huber for their paper No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise, published this year in Current Zoology. As it turns out, if one tortoise is yawning, its buddies won’t join in. Not even if you show them movies of yawning tortoises.
In Chemistry…Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for determining what concentration of airborne wasabi can awaken sleeping people in case of emergency. They are the inventors of the wasabi alarm, described in US patent application 2010/0308995 A1.
Your fish are probably pissed off if you keep them in a small aquarium, suggests a study published this month in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science that looked at levels of aggression in the common aquarium species Midas cichlid (Amphilophus citrinellus). Fish stored in average-sized aquariums used by most small collectors (i.e. tanks holding fewer than 100 gallons) were significantly more aggressive and violent than fish in artificial stream environments or home in their natural habitat. With 180 million or so ornamental fish in America, that’s a lot of mad fish.
“You poop on the boat, you eat the garden, and I’ll wreck the wall.”
Florida has long had a big problem with introduced exotic species like the Burmese python, which can grow up to 23 feet long and has wreaked havoc on native wildlife. But in many ways lizards are even worse, accounting for 77 percent of the non-native reptile and amphibians species that have set up breeding populations in the state, according to a study published this month in the journal Zootaxa. Green and Mexican spiny-tailed iguanas are a particular nuisance. Besides competing with the 13 local varieties of lizard, they are famous for voraciously eating gardens, damaging boats and other property with their corrosive droppings, and even destroying concrete walls by burrowing beneath them.
Pigeons are known all-too-well by city-dwellers the world over. But what you might not know is that these birds produce a substance similar to milk for nourishing their young, and researchers have begun to understand how the critters do it. The pigeon version of “milk” is produced in fluid-filled cells within their crop, a specialized part of the esophagus typically used for storing food prior to digestion. Both male and female pigeons begin producing it about two days before their eggs hatch, and dutifully regurgitate the cottage cheese-like substance into their baby’s mouths for several weeks, after which they gradually introduce softened food to ready their young squabs for the real world.
Discoblog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. Email tips and suggestions to vgreenwood [at] discovermagazine [dot] com.
“Beneful, please!”
Anger not your fish.
