Thought this was pretty amazing. I’ve seen the clip of the crows using the traffic lights before, but this is something else. Really fascinating.
P.S: I’m really sick of video sites that don’t make it easy to embed videos using SWFObject. Flashvars are awful -_- … Now everyone on IE gets the stupid Eolas flash prompt… Other bloggers will know what I mean…
Picked this up from a NewScientist article.
Ground-living vertebrates have declined by 25%, with most of the slump occurring since 1980. Marine species held fairly steady until the late 1990s before falling sharply to give an overall drop of 28%. Freshwater species have decreased by 25%, primarily since the late 1980s.
Loh says the most dramatic declines have been observed in the tropics. Tropical ground-living species have seen an average population drop of 46%, while their temperate cousins have shown no overall change.
They don’t seem to be 100% sure on the numbers, but they could possibly even be conservative.
I picked this up from a pharyngula article this morning on “Attempted interspecies rape”… Yes thats right. But don’t jump to conclusions, there were no humans involved here. Actually just a young Fur Seal getting desperate. The BBC article is… well… something else.
De Bruyn and a colleague were on Trypot beach at Marion Island to study elephant seals when they noticed a young, adult male Antarctic fur seal, in good condition, attempting to copulate with an adult king penguin of unknown sex.
The 100kg seal first subdued the 15kg penguin by lying on it. The penguin flapped its flippers and attempted to stand and escape - but to no avail.
The seal then alternated between resting on the penguin, and thrusting its pelvis, trying to insert itself, unsuccessfully.
After 45 minutes the seal gave up, swam into the water and then completely ignored the bird it had just assaulted, the scientists report.
Oh, and there are pictures of the scene. Poor little penguin. Sexual coercion and harassment in animals is supposedly pretty common. The seal took it to new extremes though…
[ ... ] this is thought to be the first recorded example of a mammal trying to have sex with a member of another class of vertebrate, such as a bird, fish, reptile, or amphibian.
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