Animals & Insects

Discover, January 3 2011.

Even the best-planned documentaries can go wrong, especially when there are curious polar bears involved. In this case, the BBC was spying on the polar bears of the Arctic islands of Svalbard for a documentary called “Polar Bear: Spy on The Ice,” but their spy-tactics could have used a bit of help.

The cameras were “camouflaged” as icebergs and snow drifts, but that didn’t fool these curious bears, who caught on pretty quickly that snow and ice aren’t supposed to move that quickly.  Read More >

Discover, January 3 2011.

Like some kind of gruesome confetti, Mother Nature rained down more than 2,000 dead blackbirds on a half square mile of Arkansas on New Year’s Eve. The birds fell over Beebe, Arkansas, but no one is sure what killed them.

At around 11:30 p.m. the reports started coming in from residents of the central Arkansas town–worried citizens described the birds falling, dead, from the sky. The birds showed signs of physical trauma, Arkansas bird expert Karen Rowe told CNN Radio. Read More >

Discover, November 29 2010.

In late November, Indian dentists set to work filling the largest cavity they have ever seen. Their patient, Devidasan the elephant, had a 20-inch-long crack in his tusk that had caused him pain for over five years, kept him from participating in festivals, and posed an infection risk.

Dentist CV Pradeep performed the unprecedented operation, which took two and a half hours to complete. The dentistry team used 47 times the amount of resin they would have used to fill a human tooth, and they modified their tools for use on the elephant’s tusk. Read More >

Discover, January 7 2011.

Since Monday’s news that a few thousand birds fell from the sky on New Year’s Eve over Beebe, Arkansas, the world has gone a little crazy with talk of the “aflockalypse”: the mass bird deaths that have been documented worldwide. Bird die-offs have been reported in not only Arkansas but also in Italy, Sweden, Louisiana, Texas, and Kentucky. Die-offs of other animals, including thousands of fish in Arkansas, Florida, New Zealand and the Chesapeake Bay have also been noted, while dead crabs washed up on UK shores.

Causes ranging from UFOs, monsters (our personal favorite), fireworks, secret military testing, poison, shifting magnetic fields, and odd weather formations have been blamed for the deaths, but researchers are saying these types of die-offs are normal. Read More >

Discover, January 6 2011.

Toddlers can learn, cats can be taught–so why not take the next step and potty-train our livestock? Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Administration is encouraging its pig farmers to do just that with the countries’ six million pigs. The move will clean up the farms and help prevent water pollution, they say.

To keep the pig waste from flowing into the rivers (and to save water on cleaning up farms), the pigs are trained to relieve themselves in a trough. The “toilets” are smeared with feces and urine to attract the pigs–kinda like that spot on the carpet where the dog keeps relieving itself. Read More >