Animals
S


Wolf

Wolves close in on Berlin after more than a century

Tony Paterson
The Independent, UK
Sat, 24 Nov 2012 16:20 UTC
Image

Naturalists in Berlin have sighted a pack of wolves and their cubs just 15 miles south of the German capital for the first time in more than 100 years.

The German office of the World Wildlife Fund said yesterday that farmers had alerted its field workers to the existence a wolf pack which appeared to have moved into a deserted former Soviet army military exercise area near the village of Sperenberg south of Berlin.

Janosch Arnold, a WWF wolf expert, told Berlin's Die Tageszeitung that naturalists equipped with infra-red night vision cameras had filmed the animals in the area overnight.

"There is definitely a wolf pack with cubs and they seem to be on top of the world," he said.
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Smoking

Deer attacks two men, then takes man's cigarettes

Nicole Vowell
KETK NBC
Wed, 21 Nov 2012 12:54 UTC
Deer
© KETK NBC

Whitehouse, Texas - Joseph Rose and Cole Kellis were leaving their home in Whitehouse on Friday morning when they noticed a deer in their front yard.

Rose approached the deer and he says the deer seemed friendly. But then Kellis and Rose say the deer then charged them and started to attack.

Rose and Kellis ran to Rose's pick-up truck to try to get away from the wild buck. The deer then "poked" Rose in his ribs, so Rose jumped out of his truck into the back-bed. Rose says he left his driver-side door open and the deer climbed in and took his pack of cigarettes that were sitting in his center console.

The deer starting eating Rose's smokes, and when Rose tried to get them back, Rose says the deer got more aggressive.

They then had to call Whitehouse police and the Game Warden. When police arrived they had to tase the deer and then Rose says it took more than 5 men to restrain the buck.

KETK spoke to Smith County Game Warden, Dustin Dockery, and he says, "Admire deer from a distance but do not approach them because they can be dangerous."
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Blackbox

Scientists baffled by over 100 dead starlings in Missouri


12NewsNow.com
Wed, 21 Nov 2012 10:49 UTC
Springfield --"I can't think of any explanation for what happened." says Judy Carmicheal who lives just about a hundred feet from where a flock of starlings died. On Saturday she came out to see the birds dead in the road on Fremont and Erie Street away from power lines and trees.

"None were on the sidewalk. There weren't any in the grass. They were just all right there and I just about counted everyone." says Carmichael. She counted about 100 birds. Garrett Lane works along the intersection and when he showed up some of the birds were still alive.

"Most of the birds were standing right here just leaning up against the wall so when I walked up they wouldn't fly away so that was kind of odd to me. Why aren't the birds flying away--they just weren't able to fly." says Lane. There were no dead birds on his lawn. He doesn't know what happened to the birds that couldn't fly.

Video

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Arrow Down

Pilot whales to be shot after mass stranding


TVNZ, One News
Wed, 14 Nov 2012 21:50 UTC
Stranded Whales
© FairfaxA pod of 28 whales stranded at Farewell Spit, Golden Bay.

A pod of 28 pilot whales stranded on Farewell Spit in Golden Bay are to be shot by DOC staff.

The Department of Conservation told ONE News that it was first alerted about a beaching at 9am, and when volunteers arrived to rescue a second whale, they discovered 28 stranded on the beach.

Twelve whales died in the first hour and DOC staff said the unusually high death rate and the fact that the next high tide is not until tomorrow lunch time forced them to make the decision, along with local iwi and Project Jonah volunteers, to euthanise the rest of the stranded whales.

Staff will use a high-calibre rifle to euthanise the whales and this process will start in the next hour.

"It's really sad and not a situation we take lightly but anything else is inhumane and would prolong their suffering," DOC biodiversity manager Hans Stoffregen said.

"They don't look that flash so putting them all through another two days of this is inhumane."
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Fish

Hundreds of dead fish wash up in St Peters Billabong, Australia


The Australian
Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:00 UTC
dead fish
© adelaidenow Dead fish washed up at St Peters Billabong.
HUNDREDS of dead fish have been found washed up in St Peters Billabong.

Norwood, Payneham & St Peters Council workers were at the billabong, in St Peters Park, earlier this afternoon removing the dead fish.

A Norwood, Payneham & St Peters Council spokeswoman said a lack of oxygen in the water caused by decomposing leaves killed the fish.

She said the leaves swept into the billabong were predominantly from Second Creek.

The council was not concerned about the health of other wildlife in and around the billabong.

In 2005, hundreds of carp in the billabong were killed by dirty stormwater.

A faulty rubbish trap was believed to have contributed to those deaths.
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Fish

50,000 dead starfish found on Irish Lissadell Beach


Belfast Telegraph
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00 UTC
dead starfish
© UnknownLissadell Beach, Co Sligo, strewn with dead starfish
Extreme weather conditions have killed tens of thousands of starfish and left them strewn across a sheltered beach.

A carpet of pink and mauve echinoderms, a family of marine animals, appeared yesterday morning on Lissadell Beach in north Co Sligo.

The adult starfish, measuring between 7cm and 20cm in diameter and estimated to be up to 50,000 in number, stretched along 150 metres of the strand.

Marine biologist and lecturer at Sligo Institute of Technology Bill Crowe speculated that they had been lifted up by a storm while feeding on mussel beds off shore.

"The most likely explanation is that they were feeding on mussels but it is a little strange that none of them were attached to mussels when they were washed in," he said.

He added that if they had died as a result of a so-called 'red tide' or algal bloom, other sealife would have been washed ashore with them.
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Question

Vietnamese farmer catches strange fish with "snake head, pig tongue"

Mai Lan
Vietnam Net
Fri, 09 Nov 2012 20:47 UTC
Snakehead
© Vietnam Net

Early this week, Mr. Bui Van Nguyen, a resident of Don Village in My Hoa commune, Tan Lac district found an exotic fish under the mud while pumping water from a spring.

"The fish is very strong so I had to ask for help from my two neighbors. It took us 30 minutes to take the fish to the shore," Nguyen said.

The unknown catfish has a snake head while its body and tail look like an eel. It is 1.14m long and 4.2 kg in weight. The weird thing is that it has a pig tongue.

Many people in Don Village said they had never seen such a fish.

Dr. Nhezdoli, an expert of ichthyology, from the Vietnam-Russia Tropical Center, was very surprised when he saw the picture of this strange fish. However, the world's leading expert on freshwater fish guessed that the fish may belong to the Ophicephalidae snakehead family.

"To determine the name and species I need a specific specimen," he said.

The snakeheads are members of the freshwater perciform fish family Channidae, native to Africa and Asia. These elongated, predatory fish are distinguished by a long dorsal fin, large mouth and shiny teeth. They breathe air with gills as well as with suprabranchial organs developing when they grow older, which is a primitive form of a labyrinth organ. The two extant genera are Channa in Asia and Parachanna in Africa, consisting of 30-35 species.
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Bizarro Earth

Over 500 pigeons drop dead in Bihar village, India


The Times of India
Tue, 06 Nov 2012 05:17 UTC
Patna: More than five hundred pigeons have dropped dead at a village in Bihar's Bhagalpur district over the last four days, causing residents, some of them pigeon-keepers, to fear that something was amiss.

District officials are still to visit the site and conduct an inquiry. "We were shocked, and we cannot understand why it happened," Subodh Kumar Singh, a keeper of pigeons who lost 250 birds in two days, said. Another pigeon keeper, Mohan Singh, said, "We need some manner of inquiry into this. Why did such a large number of pigeons drop dead in a matter of days?" Other pigeon keepers like Subhit Singh, Radhe Singh and Bhumeshwar Singh said that the government ought to investigate the deaths.

While some veterinarians suspected a bird flu or poisoning, others speculated that the deaths could have been caused because of radiation from mobile phone towers. They added that that only an investigation could get to the root of the mystery. Pigeons are valued as pets here, and there is a thriving market for them.
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X

Man-eating leopard blamed for 15 deaths


Source
Sat, 03 Nov 2012 09:23 UTC
A leopard suspected of killing and eating 15 people in Nepal may have killed others across the border in India, a police official says.

The remains of the most recent victim, a 4-year-old boy, was found Saturday in a forest just over half a mile from his home, CNN reported. Police say the leopard probably seized the boy and dragged him away to eat.

Kamal Prasad Kharel, chief of police in the Baitadi district, said searchers had been combing the area, looking for the missing child. All that was found was the head.
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Bizarro Earth

Ants essentially 'gone' near some wetlands

Ben Wallace
Source
Mon, 29 Oct 2012 11:25 UTC
Linda Hooper-Bui
© Benjamin Oliver Hicks
Entomology associate professor Linda Hooper-Bui researches the effects of Hurricane Isaac on ant populations in Louisiana.

By book-ending hurricane and tropical storm landfalls with research trips to the Louisiana coast, entomology associate professor Linda Hooper-Bui and her research team have made groundbreaking discoveries in the world of ants.

Because the status of ant populations can serve as an environmental health indicator for the area as a whole, Bui has been able to see just how devastating both natural disasters and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill have been to Louisiana's ecosystem.

Before and after Hurricane Isaac, Bui and her team traveled to the wetlands of Breton Sound, just south of St. Bernard Parish and east of what's left of the Mississippi River that far south.

What they found meant two things: Isaac was more devastating than most people originally thought, and it could take several months before the ecosystem can fully recover from the destruction wrought by the slow-moving system and its massive storm surge.

The ants are missing, Bui said, which doesn't bode well for other wetland inhabitants.
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