While we’ve been resting snug in our beds with glossed-over eyes and hands super-glued to our iPones, our cousins in the Animal Kingdom have been taking names and making headlines. Let’s see what they’ve been up to.
People Rejoice at Birth of Scary Demon Creature
Her name is Fady and, for some reason, the Internet finds her irresistibly cute. I know, I can’t explain it either. Although she looks like an electrocuted koala, she is actually an aye aye, an endangered lemur species native to Madagascar. Fady was born in the San Diego Zoo last September and had a doctor’s appointment this week, weighing in at 9.03 ounces. I really want join the fan club, but I can’t get past how, when Fady grows up, she’s going to dig her spindly middle fingers into trees in search of insects, have incisors that never stop growing, and look like this:
If you happen to find this baby even slightly adorable (It’s the floppy ears and bulbous eyes, isn’t it?), you should donate here to aid conservation efforts. Humans are the reason this rare species is going extinct and it’s kind of our responsibility to save them.
Bees Take Their Coffee Black
Okay, not exactly, but it does turn out that honeybees consume a significant amount of caffeine. Instead of lining up at Starbucks to get their daily buzz, honeybees get a cuppa joe in the form of a cuppa nectar.
Some plants have traces of caffeine in their nectar. This caffeinated nectar serves the double purpose of making the plant taste bitter, thus discouraging hungry predators, and drugging bees. The drugged up bees are more alert, so that they are more likely to remember the location of the plant, direct other bees to it, and return to themselves. Food for the bees. Pollination for plants. Everybody wins, right?
Wrong. According to recent research from the University of Sussex, this addiction can have negative impacts on bee behavior. Bees will spend more time feeding on a caffeinated flower, even when the plant is low on nectar and it would be in the bee’s best interest to move on. This is great news for the plan because the longer the bee spends in a flower, the more likely it is to cover itself in pollen and help spread the plant’s babies. This is not great news for the bees because they are wasting their energy and missing opportunities to eat more food. Those sneaky flowers are not the kind of buds I want rooted in my daily life…I’ll leave it at that.
Something’s Rotten In Denmark and It Might be Mufasa
Last week, a Danish zoo performed a live dissection on a dead, 9-month-old lion. If you want to see a picture of it, then here it is.
The zoo has performed dissections like this in the past using the bodies of animals that have been killed deal with overcrowding. Hundreds of people attended the event and some lucky children even got front row seats to watch the scientists cut up the King of the Jungle and explain the location and function of different body parts. “I’m never washing this parka again,” said a little blonde girl in the splash zone…probably.
I’m no child psychologist, but I don’t think skinning Simba is the best way to get our youth interested in studying science. If you have to kill a cat and use its body for a public dissection, I recommend targeting one of those volatile, 15-year-old deaf and blind cats that people keep locked in their basement and feed with a pole through a flap in the door. I’m looking at you Snowball,
Since that last fact was slightly upsetting, I’ll leave you with an animal video that’s recently gone viral. It’s of a dumb little corgi attacking a dumb little pumpkin. Enjoy:
