The verocious giant water bug devoring a baby turtle
One night while exploring the japanese ricefields in search for water bugs, Dr Shin-ya Ohba managed to record a bizarre behaviour never seen before.
Bar-headed geese on their way to their breeding grounds in central Asia. Photo: {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/12915728@N00/}srikanthgp{/link}
Bar-headed geese are known for their exhausting migration route over the Himalayas, reaching extreme heights up to 10,175m and traveling distances of 1500km in a single day. Although it was already known these high-flyers are physiologically and biochemically adapted to flying at these altitudes where oxygen levels and temperatures are both extremely low, it remained unclear how they performed this incredible energy-costly feat.
Humpback whales are famous for their extraordinary songs, which are amongst the most complex in the animal kingdom. Now researchers from the University of Queensland have revealed that multiple song types spread rapidly and repeatedly like cultural waves, eastward across the Pacific Ocean.
The plaintive song of the humpback whale can travel for great distances underwater. Photo: Dr. Louis M. Herman/NOAA
Alaskan Bar-Tailed Godwits just look like an ordinary shorebird. Recent research however has discovered that these waders are the new world record holders for non-stop flight. Every autumn, these extreme migrators fly an astonishing 11.000km from Alaska to New Zealand without any stopovers to rest or refuel. This roughly doubles the previous maximum known non-stop distance for migratory birds.
Sloths are mostly known as rather slow-moving adorable creatures that spend their days eating leaves and sleeping. However, a recent paper in the journal Mammalian Biology shows they might actually have a side to them that makes them a little less adorable. Heymann and colleagues (2010) reported that two-toed sloths were found to have developed the charming habit of climbing into an outdoor toilet and eating its contents! This unusual feeding habit was observed at a research station in the Amazon rainforest of North-eastern Peru.
A sloth coming out of a toilet! Picture: M. Stojan-Dolar
In the summer of 1995, Kees Moeliker, a dutch researcher, was sitting behind his desk in the glass building of the Rotterdam Natural museum. Suddenly he was alerted by an unusual loud bang coming from the direction of the window. Outside the building, a male mallard (the common wild duck) was found dead, laying on its belly in the sand.
Next to the dead duck, another male mallard was present that forcibly picked the dead duck’s head for a few minutes after which it mounted the corpse and began forcefuly copulating with it. The male mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes(!), including two short breaks, before the author disturbed the cruel scene and secured the dead duck.
Recent research published in Biology Letters revealed that female cane toads (Bufo marinus) can inflate themselves to prevent them from passionate males. This unusual behaviour suggests that female frogs and toads may have more power to select their mate than usually thought.
Male toads often graps the female to only let go because of rival males
The brilliant pink flamingo is often seen while standing on one leg. Although being heavily hypothesized, it has remained unclear, why they do this. Recent research by scientists from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia may explain why.
Why do flamingo's stand on one leg?
Already half a decade ago scientists found that some species of lizard do not need males to reproduce. However it has remained unclear how they can do this since asexual reproduction goes together with almost no genetic variation and higher disease vulnerability. A new study published online in Nature on the 21st of February reveals how.
Two Desert Grassland Whiptail lizards engaged in pseudocopulation. Photograph: Tino Mauricio
Part of the reason oral sex is rarely mentioned in the popular and scientific media is shyness about the issue. However, it may be more common in the animal kingdom than we realise. A recent study published in PloS ONE revealed that about 70 per cent of female fruit bats licked their partners genitals during sex. Interestingly, the licking of the female led to longer sex with each second of licking resulting in 6 extra seconds of copulation!
Tool use is generally considered a sophisticated behaviour that is limited to mammals and birds. However, australian scientists discovered that some octopuses carried coconuts to later use as shelter. This unusually sophisticated behaviour for an invertebrate animal was published last week in the journal of Current Biology.
Cephalopods (octopuses, squid and cuttlefish) are widely regarded as the most intelligent of the invertebrates. Not only do they have their dramatic and complex colour and shape change abilities, recent observations show unexpected behavioural flexbility and the capacity to physically manipulate their environment.
Hi, I'm Jolle Jolles, the guy behind Mudfooted! With a great curiosity for natural history, Mudfooted.com is my journal where I report about our weird and fascinating natural world. Learn more...
