Motorcyclist Chased By Wolf

 

 "To me, it was more exciting than scary, I’ll put it to you that way. In my gut, I didn’t feel threatened at all. I would have felt threatened if I was walking or on a bicycle, but I knew I could outrun it. It also didn’t have a real aggressive feel. I don’t think it was after me, it was probably after the bike. That’s just the way I felt; I could have been wrong, I’m no wolf expert."

Click here for the full story and more pics of the chase 

Cornell University's biodiversity recordings made public

The Macaulay Library is the world's largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings. Our mission is to collect and preserve recordings of each species' behavior and natural history, to facilitate the ability of others to collect and preserve such recordings, and to actively promote the use of these recordings for diverse purposes spanning scientific research, education, conservation, and the arts.

Young Gorillas seen dismantling poacher traps

"Very confident four-year-olds outsmart hunters and protect their clan."

Just days after a poacher's snare had killed one of their own, two young mountain gorillas worked together Tuesday to find and destroy traps in their Rwandan forest home, according to conservationists on the scene.

"This is absolutely the first time that we've seen juveniles doing that ... I don't know of any other reports in the world of juveniles destroying snares," said Veronica Vecellio, gorilla program coordinator at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund's Karisoke Research Center, located in the reserve where the event took place.

Eyeless Urchins “See” the Sea With Their Spines

Oh, you. You think you’re pretty fancy, don’t you, with your matching pair of eyeballs, your precious optic nerve, your oh-so-sophisticated visual cortex. You think you’re so evolved.
The sea urchins are not impressed.

Though the round, spiny marine creatures have no actual visual organs, they do have light-sensitive proteins that help them “see” well enough to move around, find shelter and avoid predators (well, at least the slow ones). Biologists now think that a sea urchin’s entire body functions as one big compound eye, where photosensitive tissue inside the exoskeleton picks up light that’s filtered by the radiating spines. And the denser an urchin’s spines, the sharper its perception of its surroundings, a new study suggests. So who’s fancy now?

Sönke Johnsen and his team at Duke University in Durham, N.C., tested the visual responses of Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, a large, purple Pacific urchin with an especially spiny exoskeleton. They placed individual urchins in the center of a tank with a dark target on one side, and they lit the tank from above.

In under a minute, the urchins began to move relative to the target. Some inched toward the dark spot and others scooted away from it, but their trajectories were definitely deliberate—each urchin was tested four times with the spot in different parts of the tank, and each repeated its behavior every time.

“Even though the group as a whole did not choose one direction relative to the target, they obviously responded to it,” the researchers wrote in The Journal of Experimental Biology. “This is analogous to a group of people each using their own compass to go a different direction.”
According to Johnsen’s team, it’s possible that urchins who were attracted to the spot interpreted it as a cave to hide in, while the ones who fled treated it as a predator like an eel or a sea star.

S. purpuratus could detect smaller targets than a previously tested species with sparser spines, suggesting to the researchers that the additional spines give it greater visual resolution. They say they’d need to test additional species to be sure.

Okay, so they still can’t recognize faces or appreciate the subtleties of a Van Gogh, but Johnsen and his colleagues say the urchins can see about as well as a horseshoe crab or chambered nautilus — and those guys have actual eyes. Not bad, right?

At least one urchin species, by the way, can live up to 200 years, so don’t even think that you’ll win in a stare down.


By Mara Grunbaum. This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.

The Whale that Ate Jaws

Off the coast of San Francisco, an unexpected killing challenged the great white shark's supremacy as the ultimate predator when one became prey to a killer whale. Whale-watchers witnessed a stunning act of nature as a killer whale rose to the water's surface with a great white in its mouth and held it there for 15 minutes. Even more amazing, biologist Peter Pyle was nearby and able to get underwater footage of two whales feeding on the shark.


My guess would be that it was an Offshore Orca since they aren't as discriminating in their diet as Residents or Transients.