In an unusual sight on Capitol Hill Friday afternoon, beekeepers were called in to capture and remove about 15,000 honey bees that had swarmed around the main Senate entrance of the U.S. Capitol Building, frightening onlookers before landing in a tree.

Three volunteer beekeepers, including one who is a top congressional aide, worked carefully but without protective suits to capture the queen and her thousands of offspring.

The bees had been out of their nest in search of a new, larger home, according to Rachel Perry of Capitol Bee Care, an organization that works to protect honey bee colonies that, for a variety of reasons, are dying off in large numbers. Wearing just a scarf hanging over her head, Perry sat patiently beneath the tree luring the bees into a hole in a medium-sized cardboard box that was sealed with gaffers tape, gently nudging with a brush the last stragglers inside.

Pakistani waters can no longer be deemed safe for dolphins as a staggering 12,000 dolphins are killed annually as a result of tuna gillnet operations along the coast.

A recent study conducted by the World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-Pakistan) and funded by the Australian Marine Mammal Centre, found that dolphins were frequently getting enmeshed in tuna gillnets due to Pakistan's fishing practices.

The study- An Assessment of Cetacean Mortality in the Tuna Fisheries of Pakistan ,found that the use of tuna gillnets in fishing practice was marred with high bycatch of dolphins, turtles and other cetaceans; due to operations which are non compliant to United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) regulations which prohibit the use of large scale driftnets on high seas.

Tuna fishing in Pakistan is based on large scale gillnets which increases the interaction between dolphins and the gillnet. Between Iran and Pakistan, it is estimated that there are more than 7,000 operational gillnets.

With approximately 500 vessels dedicated to catching tuna along the coast, the length of the gillnet was observed to be longer than 2.5 kilometres, much higher than the average, and large scale gillnetting is more harmful to non-target species especially cetaceans.

A male dolphin, weighing about 100 kilograms, was found dead and washed ashore on the beach of Tanjung Serai, here, on Saturday evening.

The 2.13 metre long dolphin, a rare species was found with wounds in its mouth and bruises on the bottom right flipper.

A chalet owner who found the dead dolphin is said to have brought the mammal to the Turtle Management and Information Centre in Padang Kamunting in Pengkalan Balak.

State Fisheries Department head of Fisheries Extension Division, Mohd Azam Jusoh said the department received information about the discovery of a dead fish at about 6pm on Saturday and immediately went to the scene along with four department staff.

He said the dolphin, a Irrawaddy Dolphin, was endangered and rare species is believed to have spent the last few days without food based on the wounds in the mouth caused by ulcer.

A piglet with two heads was born in Barangay San Marcos, Dingras, Ilocos Norte on Tuesday evening.

The piglet, which had four eyes, two noses and three ears, died around nine hours after it was born.

According to Crisanta Sabug, the two-headed piglet was the fourth to be born by her pet pig on Tuesday night.

Sabug narrated that they helped her pet pig during delivery after they noticed that it was having difficulty giving birth to the fourth piglet.

She said they were surprised when they saw that the piglet had two heads.

It was the only one born with defects among 10 piglets, she said.

Sabug said they immediately brought the two-headed piglet to their house and fed it milk.

A pig born with two heads and three eyes has baffled a farm owner - who could be set to earn big money from the disfigured animal.

The tiny piglet, who has two snouts and three eyes, became an instant celebrity almost as soon as it was born.

And the farmer has also been flooded with offers from people who want to buy it to use as an attraction to pull the public into their own businesses.

The animal was a huge hit on social media as pictures of the strange looking newborn went viral.

Hundreds of locals from Robles, in Colombia, have also flocked to see the little piggy who has normal black spots and pink skin.

A three-week-old baby boy has died after being bitten by a terrier inside a house.

Police were called at around 4.15am today after a report a baby had been bitten by a dog.

The boy was taken from Falkland Road, Sunderland, to hospital where he later died.

The semi-detached house where the incident happened is home to a young couple and their five children, according to locals.

Neighbours say the couple, named locally as Maria and Ryan, had the small brown terrier dog for around a year.

A police car is today parked outside the property.

Diverse animals across the globe are slipping away and dying as Earth enters its sixth mass extinction, a new study finds.

Over the last century, species of vertebrates are dying out up to 114 times faster than they would have without human activity, said the researchers, who used the most conservative estimates to assess extinction rates. That means the number of species that went extinct in the past 100 years would have taken 11,400 years to go extinct under natural extinction rates, the researchers said.

Much of the extinction is due to human activities that lead to pollution, habitat loss, the introduction of invasive species and increased carbon emissions that drive climate change and ocean acidification, the researchers said.

"Our activities are causing a massive loss of species that has no precedent in the history of humanity and few precedents in the history of life on Earth," said lead researcher Gerardo Ceballos, a professor of conservation ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a visiting professor at Stanford University.

Ceballos said that, ever since he was a child, he struggled to understand why certain animals went extinct. In the new study, he and his colleagues focused on the extinction rates of vertebrates, which include mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes.

First, they needed to establish how many species go extinct naturally over time. They used data from a 2011 study in the journal Nature showing that typically, the world has two extinctions per 10,000 vertebrate species every 100 years. That study based its estimate on fossil and historical records.

Moreover, that background extinction rate, the researchers found, was higher than that found in other studies, which tend to report half that rate, the researchers said.

Then, Ceballos and his colleagues calculated the modern extinction rate. They used data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an international organization that tracks threatened and endangered species. The 2014 IUCN Red List gave them the number of extinct and possibly extinct vertebrate species since 1500.

People walking the beaches of Chorrillos yesterday were disturbed at the sight of dead seagulls and pelicans scattered along the sand, report local media.

According to Perú21,this could possibly be due to the strong effects of El Niño this year.

The latest study from the National Study of El Niño (ENFEN) released June 9, details that this year will register a strong level of the phenomenon with warmer temperatures enduring longer.

The ENFEN of the National Service of Meteorology and Hydrography (Senamhi) says that the effect is expected to peak in mid-July with the arrival of a new Kelvin wave. In other words, the temperatures are expected to stay warmer than usual for Lima winters and into the month of July

Something weird is happening to the birds on Fraser Island.

Migratory species have not left to breed in the Arctic summer in Siberia, baffling bird watchers and scientists.

The fear is that hundreds of common terns have not been able to fatten enough to start their 13,000km migration, during which they burn most of their body fat.

Godwits, another migra­tory species, have also stayed and are now in breeding ­plumage despite not being at their Arctic breeding grounds.

Birds Queensland spokesman Mike West said four-wheel-drive vehicles might have disturbed the beach-roosting birds.

Another theory was pilchard numbers might be down, cutting food sources.

Perplexingly, other species such as migratory yellow-faced honeyeaters and little wattle birds, which usually fly north from southern states, have not arrived.

At least nine fin whales have been found dead in recent weeks in southern Alaska waters, and researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and University of Alaska Fairbanks are attempting to find out what killed them.

"We rarely see more than one fin whale carcass every couple of years," said Kate Wynne, a UAF professor and Alaska Sea Grant marine mammal specialist, and the recent rash of dead whale discoveries is "mysterious."

According to a release from UAF, the first of the whales was reportedly spotted on May 23 by crew members aboard the state ferry Kennicott, which travels between Bellingham, Washington, and ports in Southeast and Southcentral Alaska.

Over the next two weeks, boaters, fishermen and pilots reported other dead whales in the floating in the area, the UAF release said. Those reports, and the photos submitted with them, led Wynne and her NOAA colleagues to conclude that "at least nine fin whales died in a relatively small area," the release said.