but there are many ways that listening to plants already bears fruit. When the bubble bursts Scientists first recognized in the 1960s that listening to leaves revealed the health of plants.
when they sense a bat's sonar clicks. Earthworms flee the vibrations of oncoming moles.
#Strange Ancient Ape Walked On all fours A bizarre ancient ape whose gait has stumped researchers for decades walked on all fours
Oreopithecus bambolii an ape that lived on an isolated island 7 million to 9 million years ago in
Their conclusion detailed online July 23 in the Journal of Human Evolution overturns an earlier hypothesis that the mysterious ape independently evolved bipedal or two-legged walking.
The ape went extinct after a land bridge connected their island to other land allowing large saber-toothed cats
whether it was an ape or a monkey. Apes have longer arms for swinging through trees
and monkeys often have tails that let them grab branches). O. bambolii had apelike arms odd teeth with ridges more like a monkey's
and feet that each had one backward-pointing toe similar to those found on birds.
Image Gallery: Our Closest Human Ancestor It's always been a kind of controversial beast. It's an ape that's not closely related to any living apes at all said William Jungers a physical anthropologist at Stony Brook University in New york who was involved not in the study.
In the 1990s one group of researchers took a second look at O. bambolii's pelvis
Because no other mammals aside from humans and their ancestors routinely walked upright anthropologists use bipedal adaptations to determine which fossil apes are in humans'direct evolutionary lineage said study co-author Liza Shapiro an anthropologist at the University
Prior research suggested this specimen had a wider pelvis compared with apes 'and a unique lower-back curvature called lordosis. Both of these features give humans better balance
That doesn't mean the ancient ape never walked on two legs just that it wasn't its dominant mode of transport.
A chimpanzee with an armful of bananas can stand up on two legs and run quite a distance Sanders told Livescience.
And though it wasn't intentional Watson even shared his species with his dog. Watson brought home some bioluminescent ctenophores (comb jellies) to show his wife then left them on the lawn.
His dog ate them. The most amazing barf I have seen ever said Watson a professor at the University of New hampshire.
I usually taste all the toxic plants that my wood rats and pikas eat. They are usually unworthy of a second tasting Dearing said.
Mammoth straddles the line between digestible and disgusting. The stories of people eating mammoth go back more than 100 years
but are more legend than truth. That's because the animals emerge from their icy tombs looking like furry freezer-burned jerky thanks to decomposition
and attracted by the opportunity to chow down on our study organisms said Nalini Nadkarni an ecologist at the University of Utah.
Sometimes as a real treat we ate the occasional fruit bats they caught. They would singe the fur off in the fire and then skin out the meat.
This is the unintended consequence of a longstanding federal policy symbolized by Smokey Bear to stamp out forest fires.
Deer lose edge habitat. Threatened owls and raptors can't navigate through increasingly dense thickets.
and Pavlov's dogs have something in common: Both can learn to associate two things they've never seen together before.
Learning to bee Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov became famous in the early 1900s for discovering that dogs could be conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell they associated with food.
He also found that he could get dogs to drool at a completely unrelated stimulus they'd never seen alongside food.
Very quickly dogs would start salivating at the sight of the black square which they associated with the metronome
Lots of animals from sea slugs up to primates learn by copying she said and the researchers hope to learn
Chocolate-Covered Elephant Ivory Seized in Macau Ivory poachers go to sometimes-absurd lengths to smuggle prized pieces of elephant tusks across borders.
From September to December 2012 more than 90 ivory seals were found hidden in chocolate packages being sent from South africa to Taiwan according to WWF.
Based on the amount of ivory seized worldwide in 2011 some researchers have estimated that up to 50000 African elephants were killed that year for their tusks.
A truck in Wagontire Ore. swerved to avoid a deer in 2008 spilling hundreds of gallons of molasses over the highway.
In 2004 a whale carcass exploded while being transported from a beach where it died to a laboratory in the Taiwanese city of Tainan according to BBC News. Gas buildup inside the decomposing cetacean was thought to be responsible for the explosion
which took 13 hours and 50 workers to clean up. When a truck carrying construction glue collided with a bus in Chengdu City China it dowsed the street with its sticky contents.
However Maratus vespertilio is probably a close second. I do think it is extraordinarily cute and
We have used stable isotopes to quantify African elephant diet over time as it relates to rainfall history
which is useful information for elephant conservation. Typically after rainfall grasses become more abundant and constitute a greater portion of an elephant's diet.
Using carbon isotopes in hair we can see exactly how much grass these animals are eating
Similarly we have used carbon isotopes in fossil soils to determine the fraction of woody cover sites that bear hominin fossils a problem that has implications for the history of our species
Anything from Modest Mouse to Johnny cash to classical depending on the mood of the day. Editor's Note:
Krampus dragging bad children to the underworld pine trees kissing Santa lighting a cigar off a Christmas tree anthropomorphic mice decorating trees and cats tossing snowballs.
Researchers tested a high dose of garcinia cambogia extract on obese male rats. The good news? The rats lost weight!
The bad news? Extremely high doses seemed to cause testicular atrophy and toxicity. Yikes! If you do decide to hop on the latest bandwagon
And as researchers saw in the 2005 study on rats there may be consequences to taking large doses. Until we have more research to draw from we can't know what is truly safe.
I want to climb with the lemurs. I'm fascinated with the primates in Madagascar and would love to get up there
and join their troop for a few days. This article originally appeared as The Adventures of a Professional Tree-Climber in the magazine Sierra.
Here's a look at some of the wackiest animal mothers. 1. Kangaroo adopters The roo riding around in a kangaroo's pouch may not be her own.
Female kangaroos sometimes adopt baby kangaroos though it might be accidental. Such an accidental adoption doesn't happen often
but when it does a mother kangaroo will care for a changeling roo for the rest of its pouch life
and nurse it for several months afterward during the young-at-foot stage when the juvenile kangaroo permanently exits the pouch.
A Pouchful of Cute While there have been a few cases of marsupials fostering babies in captivity such cases are less common in the wild.
Still some animals such as sea lions have been known to adopt in the wild. 2. Cuckoo sneak When it comes to rearing young female cuckoo birds farm the task out to others.
but transferring fluids may be a form of social behavior in the ants scientists say. 4. Monkey baby killers Some animals head off motherhood before it starts to spare their babies undue hardship after they're born.
When a male gelada baboon takes over a breeding group from a previous male he usually kills any babies of the former union.
The phenomenon was discovered first in 1959 in mice by biologist Hilda Bruce and is known as the Bruce effect.
It has since been reported in other rodent species but was known not to exist outside the lab until scientists observed it in geladas. 5. Spider cannibals The female Stegodyphus spider is the ultimate selfless mother.
Before leaving the nest some of the ravenous babies cannibalize each other. 7. Bonobo wing-moms Unlike human males bonobo males hang out with mom
For low-to mid-ranking bonobos one of humans'closest relatives in the primate world have more opportunities to mate
Mother bonobos expose their sons to females in her social circle and scare off rival males.
#Tiger Tracker: Tales from a Conservation Biologist Elephants really really hate camera flashes. When conservation biologist Firoz Ahmed installs camera traps in Kaziranga National park in northeastern India's Assam state he
and his colleagues must return every day to check on the reinforced metal boxes. Often the cameras have been torn down and trampled.
Because the traps are installed in pairs to capture each side of a passing tiger Ahmed has photographic evidence.
We've got kung-fu elephants. They just come and kick our camera traps Ahmed said.
Even a heavy steel box weighing 30 pounds (12 kilograms) isn't elephant-proof because tusks can poke inside a camera lens opening Ahmed said.
We have to have equipment that can sustain an elephant trampling for an hour he said.
Ahmed is a full-time tiger tracker and staff biologist for Aaranyak a nonprofit organization dedicated to wildlife conservation.
How have improved camera traps our knowledge of tiger populations? Firoz Ahmed: The stripes of a tiger can never lie.
The pugmarks footprints can lie. The same individual tiger can have different pugmarks. In some places where there were no tigers people made pugmarks out of their own plaster casts.
Personnel were expected to locate tiger tracks and obtain plaster casts or tracings of the pugmarks.)Now they cannot do that
because they have to show tigers from their own camera traps. Iconic Cats: All 9 Subspecies of Tiger OAP:
Do tigers try to avoid the cameras? FA: They recognize the cameras. When we resampled an area we had less population density
and we believe it is recognized because they the camera traps. Initially what we used had a very bad focusing flash
and they figured it out. We're not using those anymore. They are very cunning
and they know their habitat very well. When we put up a camera they come and look at it
and they remember that place. They think I know there is a camera here and I don't like it.
and monitor our cameras we see signs of a tiger moving around then we see them go around the camera behind the camera
You snapped a well-known tiger photograph in Kaziranga in 2010. How did you get the shot?
because in Kaziranga you don't see a tiger. The tiger can see you but you don't see a tiger.
This tiger we saw it from a distance and we went close to him and took this photograph.
Then he realized that there was somebody around and he sped off. OAP: How do you navigate through the forest?
FA: We put cameras mostly on the roads and paths because the tigers don't like to go through the grass.
In the grassland they can't go through the grass on their own. The holes that the elephants and the rhinos and the buffalos make that becomes the highway
and then the other animals follow. We also carry a laptop into the forest and
if we put a camera trap there we will get tigers. We always put a camera trap in a place where there is a maximum likelihood of getting a tiger.
So this place has rhinos more than 2000 of them and we always pray in the morning I don't want to see a rhino.
OAP: What are some of the threats faced by tigers in India? FA: This is a human-dominated place.
In some places the population is from 13 to 300 people per square kilometer 0. 4 square mile
and there is pressure on the resources because of that. These forests have been opened in a number of places.
What should people in the United states know about tigers in India? FA: They should know that the tigers are very important.
They should know they are disappearing from large tracts of forest in India and other range countries and try to help as much s they can.
and volunteer and help local villagers understand the importance of tigers in the area. They can do home-stay instead of staying in big lodge
In the last two weeks we lost four rhinos to poachers and in the last six months we lost about 20 rhinos to poachers.
We killed only two poachers. The area is not remote it is in the middle of the state
Kaziranga has about 2200 Asiatic one-horned rhinos India's biggest conservation success story. We also got poachers.
They killed a rhino on Jan 14 2011 and we thought maybe we got them on camera
#Too much Deer Pee Changing Northern Forests The booming deer population in the northern United states is bad for the animal's beloved hemlocks a new study finds.
During Michigan winters white-tailed deer converge on stands of young hemlocks for protection from winter chill and predators.
The same deer return every year to their favorite clumps of the bushy evergreens called deeryards.
The high concentration of deer in a small space saturates the soils with nitrogen from pee according to a study published online in the journal Ecology.
While deer pee can be a valuable source of nitrogen a rare and necessary nutrient for plants some deeryards are now too rich for the hemlocks to grow.
Herbivores like deer interact with the ecosystem in two ways. One is by eating plants
but deer overpopulation is a factor he added. With the reduced hemlock cover available for deer the booming white-tailed deer population means more deer crowd into the remaining forest.
The researchers found more than 100 deer per square mile (2. 6 square kilometers) in popular deeryards.
And young hemlocks have a tough time recovering from the deer nibbling and browsing. In the eastern United states an invasive sap-sucking bug called the adelgid is also killing off hemlocks.
The Upper Midwest represents one of the last strongholds of hemlocks Murray said. Email Becky Oskin or follow her@beckyoskin. Follow usâ@OAPLANET Facebookâ & Google+.
#Understanding Your Dog's Training, One Treat at a time (Op-Ed) Mary Burch is certified a applied animal behaviorist receiving her Ph d. at Florida State university in 1982 s a board-certified behavior analyst
and is director of the American Kennel Club's (AKC) Canine Good Citizen program. She contributed this article to Livescience's Expert Voices:
In my experience as an animal behaviorist many dog owners have approached me with questions specifically relating to their pets'fears.
and better understanding of the historic theories of Pavlov otherwise known as classical conditioning can be the difference in comprehending your dog's behavior
 Understanding conditioning and your dog's behavior Modern theories of behavior began with the work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov who was awarded the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for his work.
In the course of studying digestion in dogs Pavlov observed that dogs would salivate before he placed food in their mouths.
To test the theory that dogs were associating the sound of the door opening with getting food he introduced the sound of a metronome just before feeding the dogs.
Before long the sound of the metronome without food present caused the dogs to salivate. Salivation is a reflex
Pavlov's theories explain why your dog might drool on your clean kitchen floor as soon as his food dish is rattled
What does this have to do with my dog? Classical conditioning relates to your dog in two ways:
positive and negative events. On the negative side if your puppy experiences pain and associates the pain with a particular object your pup may develop a fear of that object.
Honey was a 6-month-old cocker spaniel puppy. Hoping that she would someday become a therapy dog Honey's owner took the dog to meet a person in a wheelchair.
Without warning the person quickly moved the chair unaware of how close Honey's paws were to the wheels.
How classical conditioning can benefit dog owners As an example of classical conditioning related to a positive experience
Pairing the dog's favorite treat with the object while it is still a neutral stimulus
and before the dog becomes afraid will result in a dog that has a positive reaction to the stimulus. Dog owners who understand both classical conditioning
and which situations and stimuli are likely to cause fear can use the method to benefit their dogs.
The basic-training series and test are open to all young dogs. By setting up experiences in training classes where puppies meet new people
and other dogs pups soon learn that meeting new friends human or animal is a good thing.
We designed the AKC's Canine Good Citizen program a training series that typically follows the completion of S. T. A r. to reward dogs that have good manners at home and in the community.
Here dogs are exposed to distractions such as loud noises and moving objects. Experienced Canine Good Citizen instructors found across the country can teach dog owners how to use classical conditioning to both address behavioral issues
and prevent them. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.
#US Crushes Its Stockpile of Elephant Ivory Six tons of carvings jewelry trinkets and tusks were being reduced to powder Thursday afternoon (Nov 14) as the United states for the first time destroyed its ivory stockpile.
Poachers kill more than 30000 African elephants for their tusks each year according to some estimates. Â See Photos of the Seized Ivory Some argue that the seized ivory should be sold to alleviate the demand for ivory Dan Ashe director of the FWS wrote in a blog post today.
and China the Xaysavang Network facilitates the killing of endangered elephants rhinos and other species for products such as ivory Kerry said in a statement.
but Ashe said on his blog that the FWS hopes it will be used to design memorials to educate the public and build awareness about the plight of elephants.
and wildlife traffickers federal officials had planned to pulverize 6 tons (5. 4 tonnes) of illegal elephant ivory this week
which has imperiled rhinoceroses elephants and great apes. Black market Horns: Images from a Rhino Bust The Colorado ivory crush will be rescheduled
but a spokesman said the agency will not be able to make a decision about when until the Fish and Wildlife Service resumes normal operations.
If we're going to solve this crisis we have to crush the demand driven by organized crime syndicates who are robbing the world of elephants
So we hope this encourages other governments to take bold decisive steps to curb the demand for illegal elephant products.
But a CITES report published last year found that elephant poaching has been on the rise
According to some estimates at least 25000 elephants were killed in Africa last year. Traffickers sometimes go to great lengths to circumvent the law and sell ivory on lucrative global markets.
#US to Destroy 6 Tons of Ivory This Week In a first U s. officials are going to destroy their massive stockpile of illegal ivory this week hoping to send a zero-tolerance message to elephant poachers.
But a CITES report published last year found thatâ elephant poaching was at its highest level in a decade and rising.
Follow Denise Chow on Twitter@denisechow. Follow Livescience@livescience Facebookâ & Google+.+Original article onâ Livescience v
what we interpret to be a habitable environment where water was good enough for us to drink Melissa Rice of the California Institute of technology in Pasadena said after a presentation on imaging results from Curiosity s workhorse Mastcam instrument.
Follow Denise Chow on Twitter@denisechow. Follow Livescience@livescience Facebookâ & Google+.+Original article onâ Livescience v
#Whales Trap Dinner with Mouthful of Swirling Bristles Humpback and bowhead whales create their own food nets from specialized bristles in their mouths to more efficiently nab fishy morsels a new study of baleen whales suggests.
When these whales feed some open their jaws wide to gulp mouthfuls of seawater whereas others swim with half-open mouths (called ramming or skim-feeding).
The new study published today (March 13) in The Journal of Experimental Biology shows that the baleen of bowhead whales
and humpback whales is not the passive structure it was thought to be but forms a tangled mesh in water that streams through it as the animals swim.
And how the baleen gets morphed is different depending on the specific whale's feeding style the study found.
Whales typically have about 300 plate structures on either side of their mouths perpendicular to the direction that water flows.
The whales'tongues wear away the inner edges of the plates to create a fringe that traps krill and other tasty morsels.
 Baleen biomechanics Werth wanted to compare the biomechanics of the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) with that of the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae.
He placed pieces of baleen from these whales in a giant tank and pumped water
whale swimming speeds. Werth also varied the angle of the baleen between parallel and perpendicular to the flow.
But baleen isn't found in single plates in a whale's mouth it's found in rows
Now the bristles formed a tangled net in the flowing water with most beads being trapped at about 28 to 31 inches/s (70 to 80 cm/s) exactly the speed bowhead whales swim
Humpback whale baleen was shorter and coarser than bowhead baleen and captured fewer beads. Feeding styles The findings reveal how the baleen of bowhead whales
and humpbacks differs biomechanically. Those differences explain the specialized feeding styles of the two types of whales:
Bowheads feed by continuous ram feeding at slower speeds whereas humpbacks feed in intermittent gulps at higher speeds.
The baleen of humpback whales performed best at the same speed as that of bowheads despite the fact that humpbacks typically swim faster than bowheads when feeding.
This is a fascinating study marine ecologist Ari Friedlaender of Duke university who was involved not in the study told Livescience in an email adding he was surprised  that the bowhead whale baleen functioned better at higher flow speeds than the humpback whale baleen.
We think of bowhead whales generally as slow-feeding animals that are basically mowing the lawn and that humpback whales are more energetic
and feed faster Friedlaender said but it appears humpbacks may actually be moving at a similar speed while feeding.
Werth also hopes to explore how pollutants affect the whales'baleen. I'm really worried about
what would happen if the filter gets clogged with oil or debris he said. Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter@tanyalewis314. Follow us@livescience Facebookâ or Google+.
+Original article onâ Livescience. com Â
#What and When to Eat to Build Muscle (Op-Ed) Katherine Tallmadge M. A r. D. is registered a dietitian author of Diet Simple:
195 Mental Tricks Substitutions Habits & Inspirations (Lifeline Press 2011) and a frequent national commentator on nutrition topics.
This article is adapted from one that first appeared in the Washington post. Tallmadge contributed this article to Livescience's Expert Voices:
Op-Ed & Insights. One of my 50-something clients recently lost 20 pounds through a combination of a few nutrition eating and behavior modification tricks
Follow Denise Chow on Twitter@denisechow. Follow Livescience@livescience Facebookâ & Google+.+Original article on Livescience. com
This wonderland of wildlife east of Africa is home to all of the world's lemurs a diverse group of primates most
Lemurs descend from animals that arrived on the isolated island between 50 million and 60 million years ago.
Since humans arrived about 15 to 20 of these lemur species have gone extinct likely due to habitat loss
whose males grew nearly as large as gorillas. But these die offs happened over the course of hundreds and thousands of years.
As Malagasy populations rise humans threaten the remaining species of lemurs and thousands of other species with extinction at an accelerating rate said University of Illinois primatologist Paul Garber.
Currently 93 lemur species are endangered critically endangered or threatened mostly due to the clearing of the island's forests according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) a global environmental organization.
That's 91 percent of all lemur species for which data is available. Deforestation has sped up in the second half of the 20th century
Since the breakdown of civil order following a 2009 coup in the country species such as collared lemurs have been taken from forests to be sold in the illegal pet trade
 The plight of Madagascar's lemurs is just one example of how a rising population of humans is contributing to the sixth-largest mass extinction in the history of the planet most biologists say.
Some of Earth's most iconic animals like the lemurs are threatened with habitat loss displaced by growing human populations and increased demand for agricultural products.
For instance just 1500 golden lion tamarin a magnificent primate covered in red fur are left in the wild the Smithsonian National Zoological Park reports.
and replacing them with big swathes of palm tree monocultures threatening the future existence of orangutans said Lee Hannah a senior fellow in climate change biology at Conservation International a global group devoted to saving endangered
There are only about 6000 wild orangutans left and about 1000 are being killed each year primarily from habitat destruction according to the Orangutan Project an environmental group
whose mission is to save the animals. Â The same is happening in Peru where forests are being cleared to make way for palm tree plantations said Clinton Jenkins a conservation scientist at North carolina State university.
This has driven an epidemic of poaching especially of elephants for ivory and rhinos for rhino horns that appears to be said worsening Hannah.
Tigers lions and other big cats have also increasingly been poached due to demand for various body parts like their iconic fur.
Rhino poaching for example has doubled more than since 2010 in South africa according to the country. And this year rhinos went extinct in the adjacent country of Mozambique according to news reports.
It's hard to imagine that animals like African elephants and rhinos will survive unless countries where they live do more to protect them Hannah said.
Such measures will have to include better protection by game wardens and perhaps more protected areas for wildlife Jenkins said. 7 Iconic Animals Humans Are Driving to Extinction The most effective way to fight poaching would be to decrease demand said Kenyan scientist and conservationist Richard Leakey at a conference
on wildlife crime this May at Rutgers University. One way to do that would be to better educate people in China
and Southeast asia who buy these products most of whom don't know that elephants and rhinos are being driven to the brink of extinction said Leakey who is the son of famed paleontologist and fossil hunters Louis and Mary Leakey.
When Richard Leakey headed the Kenya Wildlife Service in 1989 he came up with the idea to burn 12 tons of elephant tusks to bring public attention to poaching
which had flared up in the late'80s. The ploy worked cutting the value of ivory by a factor of 30
and almost single-handedly suppressing elephant poaching for nearly two decades. Perhaps a similar gambit could work again Leakey said
Botswana is one of the few countries where populations of lions and other large animals may be relatively stable he added.
These forests are home to 21 primates not found anywhere else such as the wooly spider monkey according to the group.
But most of these people don't realize you have to kill an elephant to get its ivory
Dereck and Beverly Joubert have made more than 25 films about large wildlife like lions usually with a message about the importance of conservation.
In their latest film Game of Lions to debut Dec 1 on Nat Geo Wild they show just how hard it is for male lions to survive only one in eight survive to adulthood giving people a reason to not want to shoot them as trophies Dereck said.
If materials such as rubber or palm oil could be manufactured in cities for example there would be less incentive to cut down pristine forests like the ones in Borneo where orangutans live for agriculture Weissburg said.
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