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Fri, 24 Sep 2021
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Animals

Attention

Rarely sighted Sowerby's beaked whale washes up on beach in Lowestoft, UK

The dead whale washed up on Lowestoft North beach.
© Kevin Coote
The dead whale washed up on Lowestoft North beach.
A young dead whale has washed up on a beach in Suffolk.

The 3m-long (10ft) mammal was found on Lowestoft North Beach on Saturday morning.

Experts believe it is a Sowerby's beaked whale - a species of whale which was named after naturalist James Sowerby.

They are rarely sighted and are typically found in deep waters.


Cow

Signs and Portents: Mutant two-headed calf stuns farmers after being born in a Chinese village

The unusual baby cow has two heads, two ears, two mouths and four eyes. It was born on August 15 on a farm in a village in Dejiang County, south-western China's Guizhou Province

The unusual baby cow has two heads, two ears, two mouths and four eyes. It was born on August 15 on a farm in a village in Dejiang County, south-western China's Guizhou Province
A calf born with two heads has shocked farmers in south-eastern China.

Video footage of the cow in a village in Dejiang County, Guizhou Province, shows the mutant baby animal with two heads, two ears, two mouths and four eyes.

The calf's mother gave birth to it last Saturday after a difficult seven-hour labour, according to their owner known as auntie Zhang.

The clip, filmed one day after the calf's birth, shows the baby animal lying on the ground.


Sheeple

Massive losses of sheep in Patagonia, Argentina highlands because of intense snowstorms

“We estimate that the worse losses are along the mountainous terrain between 1,000 and 1,300 meters above sea level, while at sea level we can expect sheep mortality in the range of 30%”.

“We estimate that the worse losses are along the mountainous terrain between 1,000 and 1,300 meters above sea level, while at sea level we can expect sheep mortality in the range of 30%”.
Snowstorms and frosts in the high areas of the Argentine Patagonia Rio Negro province could cause the death of 70% of the flock, according to estimates from the provincial Livestock Secretariat, Tabaré Bassi.

Together with technicians from the Agriculture Technology Institute, INTA, officials made a first estimate of losses in the snow covered highlands next to the cordillera, but will have to wait until October to have a more exact estimate. "Any how we are talking of at least 100,000 sheep and 5,000 cattle".

Bassi called for prudence in assessing the dimension of the losses, but did admit that the victims of the intense snow fall followed by frosts are mostly small farmers, with flocks no larger than 250 head, "which makes it a serious survival challenge".

Attention

Woman dies after black bear attack north of Buffalo Narrows in Saskatchewan

bear
© Geoffrey Kuchera | Dreamstime.com
A mother of two has died of her injuries after she was attacked by a bear in a forest north of Buffalo Narrows yesterday.

Around 7:15 p.m. on August 20, police received a report an adult man, a 44-year-old woman and two children under the age of 10 were camping when a black bear attacked the female. No one else was injured.

According to a release from RCMP, the woman's injuries were significant. Medical personnel pronounced her deceased at Buffalo Narrows after she was airlifted from the area where the attack occurred.

Attention

6 bottlenose whales dead in largest live stranding in the history of Ireland

whales washed up on the beach, while the other four were left stranded in shallow water.
© Irish Whale and Dolphin Group / Nicola Coyle
Two of the whales washed up on the beach, while the other four were left stranded in shallow water.
Seven northern bottlenose whales were spotted stranded on a beach in Rossnowlagh, County Donegal, on the northwest coast of Ireland. This occurrence is considered to be the largest stranding of live animals in the history of Ireland.

The Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG) attempted to help the whales, but it was too late already, as six of them have already died. Only one managed to survive and went back to the sea. Experts believe that its survival rate is low, but Sibeal Regan of the IWDG is 'cautiously optimistic.'

The authorities believed that the acoustic trauma caused by humans perhaps is the reason for the whales to be stranded on the shore.

Regan said that although the death of the six whales is unfortunate, the only consolation to that is that they are no longer suffering. For the lone survivor, she said its survival is low given that they have come up to the shore when they are naturally deep divers.

IWDG later said that they would remain on the shore just in case the whale gets stranded again.


Binoculars

Elephant shrew 'rediscovered' in Africa after 50 years

elephant shrew
© Houssein Rayaleh
The creature lives in a dry, rocky habitat
Image copyright Steven Heritage Image caption The animal is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand

A little-known mammal related to an elephant but as small as a mouse has been rediscovered in Africa after 50 years of obscurity.

The last scientific record of the "lost species" of elephant shrew was in the 1970s, despite local sightings.

The creature was found alive and well in Djibouti, a country in the Horn of Africa, during a scientific expedition.

Elephant shrews, or sengis, are neither elephants nor shrews, but related to aardvarks, elephants and manatees.

Comment: This is just the latest in a series of rediscoveries of species thought to be 'lost':


Arrow Down

Possible serial horse killer in Texas after 5 found butchered

Horses next to the Rio Grande river
© Heavy
Horses are seen next to the Rio Grande river in January.
Law enforcement officials in Texas are warning about a possible serial horse killer in Pearland. Five horses have been found slaughtered and officials are concerned this may be at the hands of the same person. Pearland is located within the Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land metropolitan area, mostly in Brazoria County. (The photo above is of horses in Texas in January; they are not connected with the Pearland cases.)

Here's what you need to know.

In a post shared on Facebook, the Pearland Police Department warned about a possible serial horse killer after discovering five horses slaughtered since May. The most recent horses were discovered on August 8. Police have said that the killings might be the result of a serial horse killer, ABC 13 reported.

The Most Recent Horses Were Found on August 8 on Hooper Road

The police shared that two horses found August 8 on the 14000 block of Hooper Road. This was the most recent gruesome discovery.

The horses' owner arrived at her property and learned that her horses were missing and part of her fence had been cut. The horses were found dead and butchered about half a mile away, Pearland Police shared. The police said that their "backstraps and hindquarters" were removed.

Comment: This has been happening almost daily in France for the last 6 months: 'Barbaric' horse killings put French countryside on alert


Bug

99-million-year-old fossil shows how ants hunted

Fossilised Hell Ant
© New Jersey Institute of Technology
A fossil recently recovered from the age of the dinosaurs is giving scientists the most vivid picture yet of how one of the most enigmatic and fearsome groups of ants to exist once used their uncanny tusk-like mandibles and diverse horns to successfully hunt down victims for nearly 20 million years, before vanishing from the planet...
In findings published Aug. 6 in the journal Current Biology, researchers from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Chinese Academy of Sciences and University of Rennes in France have unveiled a stunning 99-million-year-old fossil pristinely preserving an enigmatic insect predator from the Cretaceous Period — a 'hell ant' (haidomyrmecine) — as it embraced its unsuspecting final victim, an extinct relative of the cockroach known as Caputoraptor elegans.

The ancient encounter, locked in amber recovered from Myanmar, offers a detailed glimpse at a newly identified prehistoric ant species Ceratomyrmex ellenbergeri, and presents some of the first direct evidence showing how it and other hell ants once used their killer features — snapping their bizarre, but deadly, scythe-like mandibles in a vertical motion to pin prey against their horn-like appendages.

Researchers say the rare fossil demonstrating the hell ant's feeding mode offers a possible evolutionary explanation for its unusual morphology and highlights a key difference between some of the earliest ant relatives and their modern counterparts, which today uniformly feature mouthparts that grasp by moving together laterally. The hell ant lineage, along with their striking predatory traits, are suspected to have vanished along with many other early ant groups during periods of ecological change around the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 65 million years ago.

"Fossilized behavior is exceedingly rare, predation especially so. As paleontologists, we speculate about the function of ancient adaptations using available evidence, but to see an extinct predator caught in the act of capturing its prey is invaluable," said Phillip Barden, assistant professor at NJIT's Department of Biological Sciences and lead author of the study. "This fossilized predation confirms our hypothesis for how hell ant mouthparts worked ... The only way for prey to be captured in such an arrangement is for the ant mouthparts to move up and downward in a direction unlike that of all living ants and nearly all insects."

"Since the first hell ant was unearthed about a hundred years ago, it's been a mystery as to why these extinct animals are so distinct from the ants we have today," Barden added. "This fossil reveals the mechanism behind what we might call an 'evolutionary experiment,' and although we see numerous such experiments in the fossil record, we often don't have a clear picture of the evolutionary pathway that led to them."

Fish

Nearly 5,000 dead fish off Barrington shore, Rhode Island

Marine Fisheries found nearly 5,000 dead fish off of Bullocks Cove and Allen's Cove on Friday.
© DEM
Marine Fisheries found nearly 5,000 dead fish off of Bullocks Cove and Allen's Cove on Friday.
Marine Fisheries found nearly 5,000 dead fish off of Bullocks Cove and Allen's Cove on Friday, the Department of Environmental Management said.

The DEM responded to a report of two fish kills in West Barrington and across the bay in Warwick Friday morning.

The fish covered about a 50-yard stretch of the beach, according to DEM Chief Public Affairs Officer Michael Healey.

Healey said although they have not determined an official cause yet, they believe the deaths relate to low levels of dissolved oxygen (DO) in the bay due to the heatwave.

Oscar

Mother dog jumps into floodwater to save her puppy in China

rescue
A mother dog jumped into floodwater to save her puppy in southwest China. The heartwarming clip, filmed in the city of Meishan in Sichuan Province on August 12, shows a police officer trying to stop a mother dog from diving into deep floodwater. But, she rescued her puppy who was stranded in the middle of the water and brought it back to the shore.