Category: Wildlife

It’s Not Easy Being Green.


“Park officials initially exposed Lonesome George to random female tortoises, praying for a spark. But he showed little interest in the ladies that spent stints in his hilly, shrub-covered pen. He had a voracious appetite, and for years caretakers fed him generously, which possibly kept him from being more active during what should have been his sexual peak. ‘He was overweight,’ said Flanagan, the vet. ‘He had little or no interest because he was not fit.’“

But has he tried OkCupid? By way of Mother Jones, the Post reports in on the so-far fruitless attempts to get Lonesome George, the last Pinta turtle of his kind, to mate. “‘He’s getting to know them,’ Llerena said. ‘Lately he seems more animated.’ The females spend most of their time on the opposite side of the pen, but Llerena said he hasn’t lost hope.”

Fifty Years at Gombe.


“On the morning of July 14, 1960, she stepped onto a pebble beach along a remote stretch of the east shore of Lake Tanganyika…She had brought a tent, a few tin plates, a cup without a handle, a shoddy pair of binoculars, an African cook named Dominic, and — as a companion, at the insistence of people who feared for her safety in the wilds of pre-independence Tanganyika — her mother. She had come to study chimpanzees. Or anyway, to try.“

Fifty years after her studies began, pioneering primatologist Jane Goodall is honored (again) by National Geographic. “She created a research program, a set of protocols and ethics, an intellectual momentum — she created, in fact, a relationship between the scientific world and one community of chimpanzees — that has grown far beyond what one woman could do.”

El Siglo de Oro.


Congrats to Spain on winning the World Cup 1-0 yesterday (and to Pulpo Paul for going eight-for-eight this Cup, the most impressive run by a psychic cephalopod since the twelfth chapter of Watchmen.) I was rooting for the Netherlands going in to yesterday’s game, but after a chippy game from the Dutch, Spain probably deserved it. On to 2014!

Distracting Shot/Feign Death FTW.

“When the moose attacked them, Hans knew the first thing he had to do was ‘taunt‘ and provoke the animal so that it would leave his sister alone and she could run to safety…Once Hans was a target, he remembered another skill he had picked up at level 30 in ‘World of Warcraft’ – he feigned death.“

Anyone who’s pugged more than twice in WoW knows the phenomenon of the “huntard” — the little kid who’s not-so-adept at handling his character (almost invariably hunters, and beast-master hunters at that.) Well, it’s not this kid: A 12-year-old Norwegian boy saves his sister from a moose by employing WoW tactics. (And if he managed to Tame Beast I’d be really impressed.)

Nessie, meet Dumbo.

A new theory by Glasgow paleontologist Neil Clark suggests the Loch Ness Monster was more circus elephant than pink elephant. “‘It is quite possible that people not used to seeing a swimming elephant — the vast bulk of the animal is submerged, with only a thick trunk and a couple of humps visible,’ thought they saw a monster, Clark said in an interview Tuesday.” Adding fuel to the fire is the 20,000 pound reward for Nessie’s capture put forward by circus impresario Bertram Mills, who may well have rested his traveling circus animals along the banks of Loch Ness, in 1933.

Release the Kraken.

And, would you believe it? Boss DeLay wasn’t the only nefarious and nightmarish tentacled creature to be captured in the past twenty-four hours. For the first time ever, Japanese scientists have succeeded in photographing a giant squid in its natural habitat. (I read about this late last night and had some very disturbing dreams about it. After all, there are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world.) [Last link inspired by MysVamp.]

The Imperial March.

In a bid to spend a few hours out of the unrelenting Maui sunshine this past weekend, we exchanged Aloha for Antarctica and caught the well-received March of the Penguins. Brimming with impressive footage of the Emperor Penguins’ arduous yearly breeding cycle in the world’s most inhospitable place, and presided over by an avuncular Morgan Freeman, March definitely makes for a pleasant and diverting moviegoing experience, and seemed a great movie to take the kids to. Yet, as appealing as it is, March seems somewhat misplaced on the big screen, given that — ultimately — it’s not all that different from what you can catch on the Discovery Channel most times of the day…but given the particularly lousy crop of late-summer movie fare at the moment, perhaps there’s something to be said for quality nature docs writ large. Regardless, big-screen or small-screen, March of the Penguins is worth viewing, if only to appreciate anew how strange, delicate, unforgiving, and surprising our world can be (and to discover that there’s much more to penguins than Opus and Oswald Cobblepot.)