The first great white shark of the Cape Cod summer season has been photographed just 50 yards from the coast off Chatham.

The 16-foot shark, estimated to weigh more than 2,000 pounds, was seen hunting seals near the shore by the Cape Cod Shark Hunters.

'I spotted a couple yesterday,' said pilot George Breen. 'One was about a quarter mile offshore and the bigger of the two was about 50 yards off.'

Three rare coyote attacks have people wondering why animals that usually keep to themselves are on the prowl.

The first encounter happened June 14 in Southern California near Palm Desert, according to the Riverside County Animal Services. A 69-year-old woman was gardening at 7 p.m. in her yard in a gated community when a coyote bit her.

"She thought she had been poked by a cactus in her garden," John Welsh, spokesman for the Riverside County Animal Services told ABCNews.com.

The woman suffered minor injuries. Trappers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture captured the coyote, which was humanely destroyed and sent to a lab for rabies testing.

"It is very, very irregular," Welsh said. "Coyotes don't usually bite humans. They're scared of us."

Ten days later in the same community, Amy Williams, also 69, was taking her usual morning walk at 4:30 when she felt a strange bump on her leg.

"I turned around and I looked and it was this coyote," Williams told ABCNews.com. "I really didn't know what to do because I didn't know if he was going to attack me or not. I clapped my hands and stomped my feet to scare him away but he wouldn't leave."

Many people have the impression that climate disruption is the worst environmental problem humanity faces, and indeed, its consequences may be catastrophic. But the spread of toxic chemicals from pole to pole may be the dark horse in the race. We could just pursue business as usual and count on luck to save civilization. Maybe no truly lethal synergies will turn up, or no new chemical will become global before it is discovered to cause cancer. Maybe the poisonings will not collapse ecological systems and bring down civilization. Perhaps advances in molecular biology will neutralize any dangerous new chemicals or cure any serious diseases that appear. And perhaps they won't. Is it wise to sit by and not take substantial measures? In democracies, the decision rests ultimately with the citizens; I think it is crystal clear what Rachel Carson, author of the 1962 book Silent Spring, would have recommended.

One turtle dies, an entire species becomes extinct. That's the story of 100-year-old giant tortoise Lonesome George. His death on at Galapagos National Park's breeding centre marked the end of his kind.

Lonesome George was discovered on Pinta Island in 1972, at a time when giant tortoises of his kind - known as Geochelone nigra abingdoni - were already believed to be extinct. Instead, it appeared that he was the last one.

All attempts to breed the tortoise failed.

"The plight of Lonesome George provided a catalyst for an extraordinary effort by the government of Ecuador to restore not only tortoise populations throughout the archipelago but also improve the status of other endangered and threatened species," the park said.

New research suggests that some birds may know who their human friends are, as they are able to recognize people's faces and differentiate between human voices.

Being able to identify a friend or potential foe could be key to the bird's ability to survive.

Animal behaviour experts from the University of Lincoln in the UK and the University of Vienna worked with pigeons and crows in two separate studies.

Research published in Avian Biology Research shows that pigeons can reliably discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar humans, and that they use facial features to tell people apart.

The team trained a group of pigeons to recognise the difference between photographs of familiar and unfamiliar objects. These pigeons, along with a control group, were then shown photographs of pairs of human faces. One face was of a person familiar to the birds whilst the other was of someone they had not seen before.

The experimental group birds were able to recognise and classify the familiar people using only their faces, whereas the birds without prior training failed. The results show that pigeons can discriminate between the familiar and unfamiliar people and can do this on solely using facial characteristics.

Dozens of novice monks have been taken to hospital after an attack by a swarm of bees in northern Thailand.

The monks were cleaning the Chedi Luang temple in Chiang Mai province on Saturday when the attack took place.

The Bangkok Post said more than 70 monks were admitted to hospital, quoting one doctor as saying he had seen 19 in serious condition.

Bee stings typically cause skin rashes and nausea but multiple attacks are more serious and occasionally deadly.

Temple abbot Phra Ratcha Jetiyajarn told the Post that 76 monks had been taken to three regional hospitals.

Residents of the village of Litky near Kiev in Ukraine have noticed mass deaths of horses and cows from snake bites. Until now, vipers weren't seen in this area. Villagers claim that the snakes were thrown on the pasture from a helicopter. However, a local veterinarian, Dmitry Panchenko, calls this mere legend.

All the corpses of the fallen animals were examined by a veterinary commission of Brovary. However, in the laboratory, it wasn't possible to determine the nature of the poison that killed the animals. Cattle was tested only for anthrax and salmonellosis.

Anti snake venom serum that could save the animals also wasn't found in the area. Veterinarians say it is no longer available in Ukraine.

The vet advised that the cattle be grazed in strictly limited areas only, but the villagers, although afraid of snakes, still drive the cows to pasture.

Some of you may know that in August I'm speaking at the Weird Weekend on the Flying Snake of Namibia. The other day I came across a report from the Namibian (newspaper's) web site, dated April 3rd 2012

Under the headline ' Strange Serpents' plague Tubuses, a town in Namibia. This is the story, by Adam Hartman:

Since December last year, Erongo's Tubuses settlement, north of Usakos near the foot of the Erongo Mountains,(1) has apparently been plagued by hundreds of 'large strange snakes'.

Speculation is rife, but one particular version has it that some residents claim that they saw a helicopter flying low over the area before the New Year- soon after which there was a sharp increase in the snake population. According to one resident, the snakes are not the usual kinds (like pythons, puff adders, whip snakes and mambas) found in the area. The 'new' snakes were also larger and more dangerous. "Instead of staying in the bush, these snakes are coming into the houses as if the houses belong to them" said David Nuseb. One story has it that a toddler was apparently sitting on the couch watching television, when a large serpent entered the living room and made its way to the TV where it started 'fighting' with the images on the screen. The child called his parents, the snake was cornered and killed Nuseb said.

Last month a virus broke out in several open water salmon farms in British Columbia that has the region's fish farm owners scrambling to mitigate their losses. Called infectious hematopoietic necrosis (IHN), the rabies-like virus was found among salmon in floating net pens belonging to Mainstream Canada, the biggest producer in the region. As a result, B.C. farms culled over 500,000 fish infected with IHN, which spreads rapidly and can kill up to 100 percent of a fish farm's population. And it's just the latest disease scandal to hit the province's salmon farming industry.

Critics of the industry say that the farms should have seen this coming. Their own alarm bells have been ringing ever since Rick Routledge, a professor at Simon Fraser University, claimed that wild sockeye tested by his lab in 2011 showed that another more serious virus, one that causes infectious salmon anemia (ISA), was present in B.C. waters. The government seized his samples and declared through their own testing that the virus was not present (since a verified case of the disease would be treated like other serious outbreaks such as mad cow disease under international convention, this would be devastating to the industry. In 2007, ISA caused a $2 billion loss to the Chilean salmon farming industry, and was found to be imported on Atlantic salmon eggs shipped from Norway).

Diseases like these are suspected by First Nations, activists, and fishing groups to be one cause of the drastic declines among some wild salmon populations that the province has witnessed in recent years. Home to some of the biggest wild salmon runs in the world, B.C.'s provincial government has also welcomed the salmon farming industry eagerly over the years, allowing 100 farms to be established in its waters. But activists charge that the open water pens are often located directly on the migration routes of wild salmon, where, as in the case of Chile, exotic diseases imported with the Atlantic salmon could multiply and spread into surrounding waters.

Four dead sea turtles washed ashore on beaches along New Jersey Sunday, according to the Marine Mammal Stranding Center.

Three loggerhead sea turtles and one leatherback sea turtle were among those found at beaches in Spring Lake, Island Beach State Park in Berkeley, North Wildwood and the Townsends Inlet area of Sea Isle City, said Sheila Dean, co-director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center.

The three loggerhead sea turtles found weighed between 30 and 45 pounds each, she said. The leatherback, found in Townsends Inlet, weighed about 245 pounds, Dean said.

The turtle deaths did not appear unusual, she said.