Latest news with #SmithsonianConservationBiologyInstitute
Newsweek
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
Cat Owner Captures Exact Moment She Realized She 'Did Not Raise a Hunter'
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A viral video has shared the unexpected moment a cat and pigeon were caught rewriting the rules of interspecies relationships. Posted by @supersecretacc1818, the video captured the moment a tabby cat gently batted at a pigeon in the backyard. But in an unexpected twist, there were no claws or aggression. "I recorded 'cause it was cute," the poster wrote in a comment. "They hang out a lot. They never hurt each other." While the text overlay on the video, which has been viewed over 4.2 million times, said: "I did NOT raise a hunter." In the caption, she joked: "Like girl, why are you petting the opps?" "You raised a lover," said viewer rizzle. While Drea said: "No survival instincts from that pigeon." While viewer Melo Melo pointed out: "The fact they both are lacking instincts." Fellow cat owner Amelie shared her own experience: "My cat only goes for mice and rats, she was laying in the garden the other day and a pigeon literally walked right next to her, she just looked at it. I swear to god, cats never go for pigeons I don't know why." The moment is perhaps most surprising given the reputation cats have for their impact on wild bird life. According to a 2013 study led by researchers from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, outdoor cats kill an estimated 2.4 billion birds annually in the U.S. alone. Pictures of the cat who was unexpectedly filmed "petting" the bird. Pictures of the cat who was unexpectedly filmed "petting" the bird. @supersecretacc1818/TikTok While unowned or feral cats are responsible for the bulk of this—69 percent for birds and 89 percent for mammals—but owned pets still contribute significantly. The USDA Wildlife Services has even labeled free-ranging cats as invasive species, citing their role in disease spread and wildlife decline. Last year, another cat gained viral attention during a bird encounter when he was caught on camera sitting right next to giant bird of prey, the crested caracara, through the window. While other cats have found similar unlikely friendships, like the ginger cat who made friends with the pet betta fish and was heartbroken when the one they had passed away. While a cat rescued from a hoarding house with 77 other animals, found a happy home with two unlikely friends—a pair of golden retrievers. Newsweek reached out to @supersecretacc1818 via TikTok for comment. Do you have funny and adorable videos or pictures of your pet you want to share? Send them to life@ with some details about your best friend, and they could appear in our Pet of the Week lineup.
National Geographic
01-07-2025
- Science
- National Geographic
To ward off extinctions, scientists get creative
Marketing options Golden poison frog (endangered) Coveted by amphibian collectors, this frog has been heavily poached. Conservationist Ivan Lozano captive-breeds a naturally occurring variant of the species—black-foot terribilis, a gold frog with black feet—and believes that offering this variant may steer demand away from wild-caught frogs. Photograph By GENA STEFFENS From coaching captive animals and breeding new variants to deploying dogs and drones, conservationists aim to nurture species. This story appears in the October 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine. Some scientists contend that we're heading toward what would be the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth. Human activity has increased the rate of extinction by several orders of magnitude. A recent UN report says around one million species 'are now threatened with extinction, many within decades.' That prospect is grim but not inevitable. Across the world, scientists are using new technologies and unorthodox approaches to bring species back. From lending a hand in breeding to training dogs to sniff out rare gorillas, scientists are taking extraordinary measures to save the animals they love. Playing the Part White-naped crane (vulnerable) When Walnut the crane was brought to the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, she fixated on keeper Chris Crowe and refused to take a mate. Now Crowe (hand shown) plays that role: He mimics crane courtship gestures to get her interested, then artificially inseminates her eggs. Photograph By Lexey Swall, Grain Introducing the enemy Bilby (vulnerable) Rabbit-eared Australian marsupials are being hunted out of existence by foxes and feral cats in their environment. Now scientists are exposing bilbies to cats in a fenced reserve in hopes of sensitizing the marsupial to avoid the predator. Photograph By Queensland Government Deploying technology Kakapo (critically endangered) With fewer than 150 adults left in the wild, kakapos can't afford one bad breeding season. To monitor and encourage the birds' breeding, scientists deploy high-tech gadgets. One example: Drones deliver kakapo semen to scientists so they can artificially inseminate females in the field. Photograph By ANGELO GIANNOUTSOS Following the scent Cross river gorilla (critically endangered) Africa's rarest great ape is hard to track in its dense forest habitat. But now scientists get help from former shelter dogs, trained by the group Working Dogs for Conservation, to follow the scent of the gorilla's poop. Photograph By OROKIET/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Hindustan Times
30-05-2025
- Science
- Hindustan Times
Snakes may have once faced a vicious enemy: the humble ant
Some snakes are well-known for injecting prey with venom from their fangs. What's less well known is that they produce toxic stuff at the other end of their bodies, too. Located at the base of the tail in venomous and nonvenomous snakes alike are glands that generate foul-smelling secretions. The point of these glands has long been a mystery, but new research suggests they could stem from a time when snakes were much less impressive and needed to protect themselves from a vicious enemy: the humble ant. Scientists have known since at least the 1960s that some tail secretions are bug-repellent. One snake, a teeny, worm-like thing called the Texas blindsnake, which when coiled is no larger than a 50-pence piece, smears itself in its tail poison when raiding ant and termite nests for food, for example. Yet until now it has been unclear why all snake species, even those that seemingly never interact with ants, produce this noxious concoction. To get to the bottom of the issue, Paul Weldon of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Virginia and Robert Vander Meer of the Centre for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology in Florida collected secretions from snakes on all family branches of the serpentine evolutionary tree. The collection included a boa constrictor, a middle American burrowing python, a ball python, a timber rattlesnake, a king cobra and a unicolour cribo (a large, nonvenomous snake known as the 'lord of the forest'). The team then set up enclosures with red fire ants that have large underground colonies and make aggressive stinging attacks on intruders. In one chamber, the team allowed the stench of the snake gunk to waft in, to see if it would put the ants off. But they entered the chamber undeterred. Drs Weldon and Vander Meer next questioned whether directly interacting with the secretions would have an effect. They presented the ants with both a droplet of ordinary water and a droplet of water tainted with 200 microlitres of snake secretion. Though the ants readily encircled and drank from the ordinary water droplets, they rarely even approached the tainted droplets. Fascinated, the researchers then tested placing tiny amounts of secretions from four different species directly on a small handful of unlucky ants. No matter which snake provided the poison, the ants almost always became paralysed and half usually died within four hours. The researchers interpret these findings, reported recently in the Science of Nature, a journal, to mean that tail secretions from snakes probably evolved for insect defence long ago. Since both ants and snakes occupied subterranean environments during the Cretaceous period when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, Drs Weldon and Vander Meer propose that the secretion appeared in the earliest snakes, which were probably similar to the modern Texas blindsnake. It would allow them to respond to angry ants defending themselves from attack or predatory ants looking for their next meal. As for why formidable snakes like king cobras still produce these chemicals, the team believes that they could have come to serve a dual purpose. Past work in other labs shows that carnivorous mammals steer clear of meat streaked with snake-tail secretions. Since carnivorous mammals evolved millions of years after snakes, there is little chance that pressure from mammal predators encouraged the rise of the adaptation. What is more likely is that this built-in insecticide, just by happenstance, tasted so terrible to mammals that it put them off eating snakes. When you have no limbs, you might as well make both ends count. Curious about the world? To enjoy our mind-expanding science coverage, sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.
