Latest news with #predators
Telegraph
5 days ago
- Health
- Telegraph
Why cats prefer sleeping on their left side
Cats prefer to sleep on their left side to protect themselves from predators, a study has found. The pets sleep for up to 16 hours a day and often curl up or stretch out for a snooze in opportune places. But the way the animal settles down is not random, and there is an evolutionarily hard-wired logic underpinning it, according to a study from the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Scientists found cats lie on their left side around two-thirds of the time, which shows that it was done deliberately. They looked at clips on YouTube of more than 400 sleeping cats and logged which side they were sleeping on. Data revealed that 266 of the cats (66.5 per cent) were on their left side, leaving scientists to conclude this was a survival trait from their history in the wild. Sleeping on their left side means when they wake, their left eye is able to see the local area unobstructed by the cat's own body. This visual information is then processed by the right side of the brain. This hemisphere is what processes threats and is responsible for escaping danger as well as knowing an individual animal's position. This puts the cat at an advantage compared to if it was to sleep on its right side – when the information is processed by the left side of the brain, which is less specialised to aid a swift escape. Anti-predator vigilance This leftward preference is just one of the many ways in which cats protect themselves. 'Sleep is one of the most vulnerable states for an animal, as anti-predator vigilance is drastically reduced, especially in deep sleeping phases,' according to the study. 'Domestic cats are both predators and prey (e.g. for coyotes) and sleep an average of 12–16 hours a day. 'Therefore, they spend almost 60-65% of their lifetime in a highly vulnerable state. To reduce predation risks, cats prefer to rest in elevated positions so that predators are more visible to them and the cats, in turn, are more visually concealed from predators. 'In such a spot, predators can access cats only from below. Thus, their preference for resting in an elevated position can provide comfort, safety, and a clear vantage point for monitoring their environments. 'We hypothesised that a lateralised sleeping position further increases the chances of quickly detecting predators (or to identify careless prey) when awoken.' Threat-processing leftward bias Pregnant cows are known to prefer their left side while sleeping for a similar reason, experts believe. The scientists also found that the pawedness of a cat, whether it preferred its left or right side, is likely not to blame for the sleeping preference. A 2017 study found that male cats tend to prefer their left paws and females are more right-paw dominant. 'We are inclined to believe that the significant leftward bias in sleeping position in cats may have been evolutionarily driven by hemispheric asymmetries of threat processing,' the scientists add in their paper, published in the journal Current Biology.
News.com.au
7 days ago
- News.com.au
YouTuber stunned by Victorian ‘pervert park'
It has the title of 'Village of the Damned'. In rural Victoria, a two-and-a-half hour drive from Melbourne, live dozens of the state's most dangerous sex offenders. They are not locked up because they have served their time behind bars. Instead, they are free to come and go from accommodation in Ararat. Behind an electric fence and largely obscured from view by a large hill, convicted sex offenders share supervised living quarters including one, two and three bedroom homes. Pictures from inside are hard to come by and those who live there do not mingle with the public at nearby Ararat. Naturally, there is great interest in the facility and what goes on there. In a resurfaced video, a YouTuber did his best to find out. Aussie Max Caruso, who has 39,000 subscribers, made the long journey to Ararat from Melbourne with a camera and a microphone. 'I don't know if this place still exists. But we're going to head to Ararat,' he tells viewers in the 11-minute clip. Caruso describes the village as 'Australia's trailer park for predators' but admits information is hard to come by. It does not appear on any map and even locals he spoke to were unaware of its existence. 'Apparently there's a park not far from here full of child (sex offenders),' he told a man from nearby Stawell. 'Really?,' was the response he got back. Caruso did in fact locate the facility but was greeted by electric fences and security guards. 'I'm not going to lie. I thought it would be like a super accessible place and that you'd just be able to like walk in,' he says. 'Turns out that's not the case but it exists. I knew it exists. The fence is right there. Behind that fence, see those roofs, that's where all these dudes are living. My original plan was to jump the f***ing fence. That's kind of dumb. I'm pretty sure this fence is electric so we are not going to jump it.' At one point in the video, a white van pulls up next to the YouTuber. 'What's going on?' the driver asks. 'We're just filming a bit of a doco on our friends' farms and stuff. Is that alright?' 'What are you filming for?' 'We have our own individual YouTube channel.' Caruso reveals that he was told to leave and 'realised we can't go any closer without getting charged'. 'I'm not satisfied though. I will return soon and find what I'm looking for,' he says. We travelled five hours for a f***ing wall.' 'Just so we all remember, these dudes are not in prison. They've finished their prison sentence, this is just like a holiday park for them where they can just hang out with their own kind and pretty much be protected from the rest of society. 'So I just want everybody in Ararat and around there to know that they've got a f***ing trailer park full of nonces just getting let into their society because since they're not in prison, they can walk out whenever they want.' Corella Place, the official name for the village which houses the convicted sex offenders after serving their sentence, was set up in 2005. Since then, it has been home to notorious ex-inmates including child rapist Andrew Darling and Robin Fletcher — who blamed multiple rapes on witchcraft. Sean Price, who raped and murdered Masa Vukotic when the 17-year-old got off public transport in Doncaster in 2015, was released into the community a year earlier and spent time at Corella Place. Price had been detained in the Village of the Damned over prior convictions, including sex offences against seven girls and women aged between 13 and 45 in 2002 and 2003. He was supposed to be under a supervision order and subsequent electronic monitoring at the time of Ms Vukotic's murder. Victorian Supreme Court Justice Lex Lasry said he had tried, but failed, to understand the catastrophic decision to release Price, a convicted rapist, into the community in 2014 after he was placed on a 10-year supervision order in 2012. 'In a catastrophic example of mismanagement, whether on the part of the Department of Corrections or the Adult Parole Board, the decision was made to release you into the community and then the order ceased to have any protective event,' Justice Lasry said. 'You were given the freedom to commit these offences in circumstances where that should never have occurred. 'How you were permitted to be released into the community ... is astonishing.'
The Guardian
25-06-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Nairobi's lions are almost encircled by the city. A Maasai community offers a key corridor out
Nairobi national park in Kenya is the only large wildlife conservation area to fall within a capital city. It is hemmed in on three sides by human development, and unfenced only on its southern boundary – this gap providing a crucial wildlife passageway, linking the park's animals to other populations of wildlife and wider gene pools. The gap, however, is also home to a small Maasai community, where farmers face an agonising choice between protecting livestock and making space for the predators that prey on their cattle. Despite the dangers, the pastoralists are choosing to leave tracts of their land open, allowing the flow of wild animals to avoid what scientists call an 'ecological extinction' via a shrinking gene pool. 'Our forefathers found the wild animals here,' says 55-year-old Isaac ole Kishoyian, a resident of Empakasi, a small settlement overlooking Nairobi national park. 'There was enough prey before people built permanent settlements around the park.' Now, wildebeests and impalas no longer migrate from the south, he says, and lions find his cows to be easy targets. 'But we still want our children to enjoy the same wild heritage as we did.' Kishoyian has fenced off only a tiny portion of his 12-hectare (30-acre) piece of land. But lions still break through. A few weeks ago, a lion managed to enter the cattle pen while Kishoyian was away. 'My wife heard the commotion and scared the lion away before it could kill one of my cows,' he says. Less than a mile from Kishoyian's home, 68-year-old Phylis Enenoa plays with her great-grandson outside her iron-sheet home. Like Kishoyian, Enenoa has left most of her 11-hectare field unfenced, and her four cows graze alongside zebras, impalas and the occasional wildebeest. Lion sightings are frequent around her home, their intentions always clear. The flimsy barbed-wire fence around the homestead can barely keep out the hungry predators, which have been responsible for the loss of 10 sheep and three cows. 'Look at the black one,' she says, pointing to one of her cows, which survived an attack about two weeks ago. 'I don't know how long she will survive in that condition.' The lions lie in wait for the opportune time to strike. As we drive along a narrow dirt road near one of the homesteads, we freeze as our guide points to the shade of an acacia bush less than 10 metres away, where a lioness lies motionless, her amber eyes fixed on us. Before the turn of the last century, rangelands south of Nairobi, including the present-day Amboseli national park, were all interconnected, providing enough room for wild animals to roam. However, the growth of human settlements, infrastructure, commercial activity and land fragmentation have blocked this movement, largely confining wild animals to the 117 sq km (45 sq mile) Nairobi national park. Conservationists say each lost corridor around the park further restricts the trickle of fresh genes, resulting in isolated herds breeding with 'cousins' rather than distant strangers. A smaller gene pool results in fewer wild herbivores, making hungry lions hunt more livestock. 'Shrinking genetic variety does more than change pedigrees – it chips away at survival traits forged over millennia,' says Dr Joseph Ogutu from Hohenheim University in Stuttgart, Germany, who has led wildlife researchers in publishing reports about the collapse of animal migrations in Africa. 'Inbreeding can shorten lifespans, curb fertility and weaken immune systems, leaving animals less able to navigate drought, disease or the urban noise,' he says. 'Every lion cub conceived [in the park] is denied the chance to mate beyond the tightening evolutionary noose,' he adds, warning of an 'ecological extinction if the gene pool that once flowed across an open savanna is stagnating'. A single adult lion, says Ogutu, requires as much as three tonnes of meat a year – equivalent to 14 wildebeests but the park holds only a few hundred large ungulates other than buffalo and giraffe. One of his research papers says wildebeests migrating between Nairobi national park and the adjacent Athi-Kaputiei plains 'decreased from 30,000 animals in 1978 to less than 1,000 today'. As wild prey diminishes, livestock in nearby homesteads become easy pickings for predators, with the lions' hunting 'on the hungriest nights, risking confrontations with people'. But the residents are willing to tolerate this uneasy coexistence by leaving the remaining corridors open and giving up economic activities that are not in line with wildlife conservation, such as crop farming or keeping large herds of livestock, if both government and wildlife conservation organisations ramp up compensation processes for their losses while compensating them financially for protecting biodiversity. With 65-75% of wild animals in Kenya living outside conservation areas, the government relies on private landowners to host and protect wildlife. It is reviewing wildlife laws to entrench a more community-led approach to conservation. Silvia Museiya, from the state department for wildlife, says: 'If people see no benefits of hosting wildlife on their land, they will convert [the land] to other uses.' In April 2025, 256 landowners, including those adjacent to Nairobi national park, Amboseli and Masai Mara, more than 100 miles away, received $175,000 (£129,000), the first of a biannual payment earned from a pilot programme that pays landowners to keep more than 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres) open and intact. Each landowner will be paid $5 an acre each year, a modest amount that locals hope will increase as more join the programme and it attracts more finance. 'I got 6,000 shillings [£34] for my 20 acres of grassland,' says 35-year-old Daniel Parsaurei. 'The amount is not much but … if we open up the land, we can all have enough grazing areas and help increase the wild animals so that lions can also have enough food and reduce attacks on cattle.' The programme uses remote-sensing technologies developed by Andrew Davies at Harvard University to measure the extent of biodiversity within a given region and create 'biodiversity credits' to sell for its protection. Proponents of this programme say it is a more direct and immediate form of nature financing, to incentivise the individuals who directly protect such biodiversity every day. Viraj Sikand, co-founder of EarthAcre, a local startup that finds funders for biodiversity and monitors how such capital reaches local communities, says: 'Unless such payments are delivered directly to landowners, all the land will go.' According to Ogutu, without stakeholders restoring prey populations outside the park and reconnecting roaming routes, predators will remain both 'victims and villains in a drama of our own making'. 'The choice is stark,' he says, 'feed lions with functioning ecosystems, or watch them feed on livestock until neither can be sustained.'
BBC News
16-06-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Birds listen in on prairie dog calls to stay safe
If we told you that some birds listen in on the calls of prairie dogs, you might think they should keep their beaks what if we told you that they are doing it to stay safe?Prairie dogs, which are rodents and are closely related to squirrels, bark to let each other know if there are predators have found that these calls are being picked up and used by long-billed curlews too. Prairie dogs are hunted by a long list of predators from birds of prey to foxes and even large curlews are vulnerable to some of these predators too. Research, which was published in the journal Animal Behaviour, found the birds listen to the sounds of the rodents to find out if predators are on the gives them more time to react to the nearby danger. Long-billed curlews nest their eggs in short grass on the ground, and when they hear the prairie dog call, they get as low as possible and try to camouflage part of the research, a team made a fake predator, in the form of a stuffed badger on a remote controlled was then driven towards nests in Montana in the US, sometimes while playing the calls of prairie dogs, sometimes in silence. When the birds could hear the fake barks from the remote-controlled badger, theyducked down into the grass to hide when it was more than three times the distance away, compared to when no barks were played.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Yahoo
Genesee County Sheriff hosts town hall tackling human trafficking with Chris Hansen
The Brief The Genesee County Sheriff hosted a star-powered town hall tackling sex trafficking. To Catch a Predator's Chris Hansen and actress turned human trafficking advocate Marisol Nichols were part of the meeting. Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson says there's no community that's immune from it. HOLLY, Mich. (FOX 2) - A battle is raging in Genesee County and across the nation as predators target and traffic children, sometimes in plain sight. Local perspective The Genesee County Sheriff hosted a star-powered town hall tackling that threat, with To Catch a Predator's Chris Hansen and actress turned human trafficking advocate Marisol Nichols. With predators shifting their tactics, Genesee County's G.H.O.S.T. team has had to shift, focusing more on tracking offenders hiding out online. It's a silent threat many families don't even realize is happening until it's too late. Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson says there's no community that's immune from it. That reminder hit home during an intimate town hall in Holly on Thursday. Renowned journalist Chris Hansen and actress and advocate Marisol Nichols joined the sheriff, warning families of the growing human trafficking crisis and fight against predators. "Why would you think a school teacher or a gym teacher or another father or a coach is going after your kid?" said Marisol Nichols. "Because of the Internet, because of games, apps, social media, any part of it they can reach their child, period." Dig deeper The trio shared details of a G.H.O.S.T. sting they went on Wednesday night in Genesee County, exposing three predators now behind bars. "One drove an hour and a half to our operation here in Genesee County," said Swanson. "We are seeing people come from other countries that are here either illegally or, in last night's case, on a work visa since 1994 out of El Salvador. These people that do this are doing it because it's premeditated, it's intentional, and to that point, that's what needs to catch people's attention." The panel discussed the reality of more children and teens being groomed online, becoming victims of sextortion. "I've sat with multiple sets of parents who've lost their children to suicide because of this," Chris Hansen told FOX 2. "The problem's not going away, so a big part of the solution is the relationship between parents and their children." What's next Sheriff Swanson hopes this will help start those conversations at home. "The game has changed, but we've changed with it," Swanson said. The G.H.O.S.T. team says taking down just one predator can save at least 25 victims. If you or someone you know needs help, contact your local police. The Source FOX 2 visited the town hall hosted by Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson, joined by Chris Hansen and Marisol Nichols.
