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Just now, CaaC (John) said:

You wonder why the 'King of the Jungle' the lion is not amongst that lot but then you look at the size of an Elephant & Hippo and you sort of guess why, I have seen videos of lions hunting in packs attacking Hippos, Lions or even Rhinos but never really successful and come out on top unless the latter was injured or ill, even a Giraffe with a long neck can kill an animal with the swipe of its neck or kicking its feet. 

Yeah, hippos are overly aggressive and unpredictable. Imagine a 3 ton monster charging at you at full speed :o

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xD

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8 minutes ago, nudge said:

Yeah, hippos are overly aggressive and unpredictable. Imagine a 3 ton monster charging at you at full speed :o

Imagine in the film Jaws, the music playing the DODADODADODA....and suddenly this popped up with his buddy Jaws, fuck that...:eek:

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Israeli photographer captures unique bird spoon image

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An Israeli wildlife photographer has captured a remarkable momentary image of a flock of birds forming the shape of a spoon with a heap of sugar.

The illusion happened during what is known as a murmuration, where thousands of starlings fly and swoop in clusters.

Albert Keshet also snapped what appeared to be the spoon bending, posting it on social media.

The images caught the attention of famed Israeli spoon bender Uri Geller, who has framed them in his museum.

Mr Keshet took the images when he went on an early morning excursion to a spot in the northern Jordan Valley to photograph wild plants and birds.

"When I was in the valley looking for birds, I met the flocks of starlings. I stayed there for about five or six hours, watching and following them in order to capture some beautiful pictures," he told the BBC.

"At one point they began to ascend to the sky and began the dance of starlings. To my huge surprise, in the space of only about five seconds the starlings formed the shape of the spoon. They held it for a few seconds then the shape changed to a bent spoon - just like the one Uri Geller is famous for!

 

"In the 10 years that I have been travelling and taking photos, this is one of the most amazing pictures of starlings I have ever taken!"

After posting the images on social media, Mr Keshet was flooded with messages from people expressing amazement.

Among them was Uri Geller, who is renowned for bending spoons apparently with the power of his mind. He called it a "phenomenal unique never again moment", and a "natural gift" for his 75th birthday just days earlier.

The self-described "mystifier" and psychic has placed the blown-up images in his recently opened museum in Jaffa, in southern Tel Aviv.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-59748062

 

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Why the thistledown velvet ant is one of nature’s strangest creatures

Despite the name, this fuzzy insect isn't an ant at all - it's actually a type of wasp.

This creature is a misnomer wrapped in a cloak of punky, white fuzz. It’s a misnomer because the unusual critter is not an ant, it’s a parasitic wasp that’s native to the desert regions of the American Southwest.

The white, fluffy females are wingless, and so superficially ant-like. In contrast, males have wings and a classic wasp livery of orange and black. This vibrant attire warns potential predators that the wasps are not to be crossed – velvet ants have one of the longest stingers (relative to body length) of any bee or wasp.

However, the female’s appearance has been something of an enigma. Females look like the fuzzy seeds of the scrubby creosote bushes that grow where the wasps live, so experts had presumed that the insects had evolved their appearance as a form of camouflage. But genetic analyses revealed that the wasps preceded the arrival of the creosote bush to the American Southwest by around five million years.

Cue experiments placing white-coloured and vibrantly-coloured ants under heat lamps, and it seems that the female’s white spiky coat helps it not to overheat. Proof, beyond doubt, that the punk look remains as cool today as it ever was!

https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/thistledown-velvet-ant/

 

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Anglia Ruskin scientist makes 'once-in-a-lifetime' insect find

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A scientist who has discovered a new species of insect immediately "knew it was something very special".

Dr Alvin Helden of Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, found the leafhopper on a student field trip to Kibale National Park, in west Uganda.

He named the metallic-sheened insect Phlogis kibalensis.

Dr Helden said it is from an "incredibly rare" group of leafhoppers, whose "biology remains almost completely unknown".

FULL REPORT & PHOTOS

 

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Who’s new in the jungle: 224 new species discovered in the Greater Mekong

Report shows the hidden depth of biodiversity in Southeast Asia.

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In an age where humans have mapped the Earth’s surface in increasingly detailed resolution, it can be hard to imagine that there are still treasures out there to be unearthed, but a newly released report detailing the discovery of 224 new species in the Greater Mekong region shows us there are still mysteries awaiting us in the wilderness.

With a complex geological and climatic history, and home to an astonishing diversity of landscapes, the Mekong region is a hotspot of global biodiversity. This new list, compiled by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), is the latest contribution to an ongoing assessment of the region’s floral and faunal richness, a project that began in 1997. Altogether, the project has identified more than 3000 new species.

Let’s meet some of these new faces.

FULL REPORT & PHOTOS

 

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Chimps self-medicate using bugs

Watch a chimpanzee apply an insect to her son’s wound.

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For the first time, researchers in West Africa have observed chimpanzees putting insects on their wounds.

The research team first spotted this behaviour in November 2019, when they watched a chimpanzee called Suzee inspect a wound on her son, Sia. Suzee then caught an insect out of the air and placed it in her mouth to immobilise it before rubbing it over the surface of Sia’s wound.

“In the video, you can see that Suzee is first looking at the foot of her son, and then it’s as if she is thinking, ‘What could I do?’ and then she looks up, sees the insect, and catches it for her son,’” says Alessandra Mascaro, a volunteer at the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project in Gabon, West Africa.

This video shows a chimp named Suzee inspecting a wound on the foot of her adolescent son, Sia, then catching an insect out of the air, putting it in her mouth, pressing it between her lips, and applying it to the wound while her daughter, Sassandra, observes her. Credit: Alessandra Mascaro

While the Ozouga project had been studying this group of chimps in Loango National Park for seven years, it had never seen this behaviour before.

Now, in a new paper published in Current Biology, the team describes 76 cases of these wound-tending behaviours documented over 15 months, with chimps looking after both their own and others’ wounds. Sometimes insects were applied multiple times to the same wound.

Previous research has shown that bears, elephants, moths and bees also self-medicate, but not with insects.

Simone Pika, a cognitive biologist at Osnabrück University in Germany and co-author of the paper, argues that tending the wounds of others is an example of a prosocial behaviour – which in humans is linked to empathy.

“This is, for me, especially breathtaking because so many people doubt prosocial abilities in other animals,” says Pika. “Suddenly we have a species where we really see individuals caring for others.”

She adds that the team isn’t quite sure exactly how insects could help a wound, or even which species of insects the chimps are using, though they appear to be winged flying insects.

“Humans use many species of insect as remedies against sickness – there have been studies showing that insects can have antibiotic, antiviral and anthelmintic functions,” says Pika.

Pika and team suggest that insects might perhaps provide pain relief.

The team now plans to identify the insects used by the chimps, and to continue to document which chimps apply insects to each other.

“Studying great apes in their natural environments is crucial to shed light on our own cognitive evolution,” says co-author Tobias Deschner from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

“We need to still put much more effort into studying and protecting them and also protecting their natural habitats.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/animals/chimpanzees-self-medicate-insects-wounds/

 

Edited by CaaC (John)
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