Woman at the zoo: Why do they look so sad? 😔

Sign literally 10 feet away:

Poor old grizzly bear not a fan of a fan of thunder and lightning.

A study that just came out demonstrates that outdoor cats are known to prey on over two thousands species of wild animal, from mammals to birds to insects. That includes 347 species that are endangered, threatened or otherwise of concern, and they've been a key factor of the permanent extinction of over 60 species. And while cats may not always bring home what they catch, chances are if your cat is allowed to roam unsupervised outside, they're killing your local wildlife.

Why is this so important? Worldwide, wild animal populations have decreased in number by 69% in the past fifty years; that means that in my lifetime (born in 1978), the sheer number of wild animals in the world has been decreased by over half. Even "common" wild species are less numerous than before. While habitat population is the single biggest cause of species endangerment and extinction overall, outdoor and indoor/outdoor cats are a significant cause as well. In fact, they are the single biggest cause of human-caused mortality in wild birds.

Most importantly, it's very, very simple to fix this problem: keep your cats indoors, and spay and neuter them. If your cat is bored, they need more enrichment, and there are plenty of ways to make your home more exciting for them, from bringing home cardboard boxes for them to explore, to playing with them more often. If you want your cat to get some outdoor enrichment, leash train them (yes, it can be done!) If you have the space and resources, build them a catio where they can be safe from outdoor dangers like predators and cars, while also keeping local wildlife safe from them.

If you just give into their whining and pawing at the door, then they know that that's what they have to do to get their way; I know it's a tough transition, but it's worth it in the end for everyone involved. Cats are domesticated, which means they are not native anywhere in the world; there are exactly zero ecosystems in which they belong, save for the safety of your home. It is your responsibility to give them an enriching environment without taking the shortcut of letting them go wreak havoc outside.

golly, I am being wordy today.

Via Metafilter:

Someone on MeFi tagged me in and asked me to chime in in my capacity as a rodent person, so here were my thoughts and observations:

First thought, looking at that video: that is no house mouse. Not only is the head wrong--too narrow at the back, eyes are a bit big--but that very clear countershading is not something you generally see on wild house mice. So what kind of mouse is it? If this was in the US, I would assume it was a Peromyscus (deer mouse) species, which often gleefully invade our homes, but do they have Peromyscus in Wales? In North America, this is relevant because deer mouse species often have very elaborated burrowing and pair bonding systems, and this looks like nesting behavior off the top of my head. What sort of mouse is this? The Woodland UK Trust suggests that this is probably a wood (or field) mouse: Apodemus sylvaticus. (There are glorious big photos there which can help you see what I mean.) Okay, I don't know that much about Apodemus spp. behavior, so what do we know about their nesting behavior? Well, I chased a couple of false leads, then circled back to find out what is notable about wood mice, which is that they are known to not only navigate by the use of landmarks, but to organize their environments to place small objects around their environments in order to make navigation and orienting themselves across their large territories more effectively! So this mouse is probably irritably putting things back in place as an aid to its own memory of where everything is and where it can most effectively pilfer snacks, nest locations, or other useful mouse items within its environment. That is, the mouse wants a tidy shed for exactly the same reasons a human might want a tidy shed: so it can find things it's looking for when it wants to! Wood mice, by the way, are human commensals and quite common in Europe and the British Isles, so this is in no way a refutation of the idea that this behavior might have influenced human folklore and ideas about house spirits or similar. Certainly wood mice, like any mouse, are unlikely to turn up a bowl of milk if there's one put out for it--although neither are house cats, which would certainly prey on them.

rather delighted, so I'm sharing this more widely over here.

Do y’all know about Frédéric Thomas? He is a French parasitologist who heard a story about crickets in New Zealand leaping into the water even though they can’t swim, and immediately speculated this suicidal behavior was related to behavior manipulation from an internal parasite. This is before neuro-parasitology was a field at all, and before people really put much stock into parasite’s ability to control animal behavior.

Thomas was certain that studying these crickets would be a huge priority for the scientific world given the implications of a parasite controlling an animal’s actions in such an insidious way. Unfortunately, absolutely nobody would fund Thomas’ expedition to study the crickets, and his grants were all declined. In a wild move that showcases the balls to the wall, near- insanity level passion of a biologist, Thomas declared a hunger strike and wrote a letter to the president of France saying he would not eat until someone took the matter seriously and funded his study on the suicidal crickets. I feel like those of us in research can at least a little bit understand this impulse.

Well the French government actually got Thomas’ message and freaked out a bit at the negative publicity that could arise from a crazy worm scientist starving to death. So they send some government bigwigs to the university to pressure Thomas and his department heads into calling an end to the hunger strike. In the flurry of attention that resulted from this, a Swiss billionaire heard about Thomas’ plight and offered to partially fund the study. The French government was happy to get rid of Thomas and contributed funding as well so that Thomas could head to New Zealand to study his suicidal crickets. He was right about the parasites causing the behavior!

The hunger strike debacle is not even the wildest part of this story. I love biology so much

Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships with each other

Researchers from Northeastern University, in conjunction with scientists from MIT and the University of Glasgow, conducted a study exploring the impact of teaching a group of domesticated birds to communicate using tablets and smartphones. The findings indicate that utilizing video calls may assist parrots in mimicking the communication patterns observed in wild birds, potentially enhancing their behavior and overall well-being in the homes of their owners.

via smithsonianmag.com

Okay, so, you know how cats make those absolutely silly stink faces when they’re smelling something? (It’s called a flehmen response, and they do it to to pull air into the sensory receptors for a specialized organ that’s above the roof of their mouth). Most of the good photos of it online are of lions or tigers or domestic cats, right?

Not anymore! I am super excited to be able to show you you the first photos I’ve ever seen of snow leopards doing a flehmen response. They are stinking cute. Taken by a friend and shared with permission, this is Blizzard, his son Coconut, and their stink faces.

Blizzard:

Coconut:

I just can’t even.

Photo credits: M. Owyang

Car’s engine is running

Source: instagram.com

Better watch out! I'm big brave elephant.

🐘

Garter snakes make friends, organize their society around females

Finding comes from first-of-its-kind study of thousands of wild snakes

Garter snakes have something in common with elephants, orcas, and naked mole rats: They form social groups that center around females. The snakes have clear “communities” composed of individuals they prefer hanging out with, and females act as leaders that tie the groups together and guide their members’ movements, according to the most extensive field study of snake sociality ever carried out. “This is an important first step in understanding how a community of snakes is organized in the wild,” says Gordon Burghardt, an ecologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who was not involved in the research. Other experts agree: “This is a big deal,” says integrative biologist Robert Mason of Oregon State University. “It’s a whole new avenue of research that I don’t think people have really given any thought to.” Ecologists had long assumed snakes are antisocial loners that hang out together only for core functions such as mating and hibernation. However, in 2020, Morgan Skinner, a behavioral ecologist at Wilfrid Laurier University, and collaborators showed in laboratory experiments that captive garter snakes have “friends”—specific snakes whose company they prefer over others. Still, studies of wild snakes were lacking “because they’re so secretive and difficult to find,” Skinner says...

Read more: https://www.science.org/content/article/garter-snakes-make-friends-organize-their-society-around-females

Okay, so this is really cool! You have this phenomenon where some plants grow edible appendages to their seeds to entice ants to carry them underground where they can safely sprout. And then you have wasps which lay their eggs on the leaves, stems, and other parts of plants and trigger the growth of galls (swellings) which both feed and protect the wasp larvae until they reach maturity.

The boy who was watching the ants noticed they were taking wasp galls underground, too. Further exploration found that the wasp larvae were unharmed inside the galls; the only thing the ants had eaten were edible appendages similar to those on the seeds they collected. The wasp larvae stayed safe inside the ant nest, feeding on their galls, until it was time to emerge and head back out to the surface.

So it turns out that the edible portions of the galls have the same sorts of fatty acids as the edible parts of the seeds. And those fatty acids are also found in dead insects. Scientists think that the wasps evolved a way to make the galls they created mimic the edible portions of the seeds to get the ants to collect the galls. This isn't the only example of wasps making use of ants as caretakers for their young, but it's a really fascinating example thereof--especially if you consider ants evolved from wasps at least 100 million years ago.

sorry if this has already been asked/answered, but do you have any thoughts on the orcas that have been attacking boats? genuinley curious whats going on there behaviourly and paychologically

So it seems this unusual behavior started when the pod’s matriarch, known to researchers as Gladis, was struck and injured by a boat propeller. The most viable theory is that Gladis then lashed out in an act of extreme frustration. Subsequently, she either taught her offspring the same behavior or—more likely—they observed her and decided to try it out for themselves. Mimicry is a huge part of how intelligent, highly social cetaceans like killer whales learn.

Since most of the attacks are perpetrated by youngsters, I’m honestly chalking it up to kids being dumb. Orcas, especially as juveniles, are very playful and very destructive, and this is all a super fun game. Far less likely, but still possible I suppose, is that they now truly see the boats as threats and are neutralizing them.

As fun as the memes about the orca uprising have been, there is no malice or vengeance at work here. To claim so is blatant anthropomorphism (but hey, people anthropomorphizing killer whales, what else is new). Hopefully, the behavior dies down soon, before another orca is hurt by a propeller or, worse, humans decide to put an end to it.

Because if there’s one animal that practices revenge, it’s the human being.