mammals

Mammals

Anthropoid (5)
Aquatic mammal (349)
Artiodactyl (5)
Bats (213)
Bear (481)
Camels (180)
Canine (1814)
Chevrotain (4)
Deer (593)
Edentate (148)
Equine (612)
Feline (1466)
Giraffa (96)
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Lemur (186)
Mammal (466)
Marsupial (253)
Mastodon (4)
Musteline (234)
Pachyderm (1335)
Perissodactyla (1)
Primates (1788)
Prototherian (71)
Rabbit (106)
Raccoon (432)
Rodent (1353)
Ruminant (142)
Tapir (31)
Tarsier (6)
Ungulate (12)
Viverrine (47)

Once a year, it is host to the breeding of hundreds of northern elephant seals. From 1976 onwards, marine scientist Marianne Riedman, together with her colleague Burney Le Boeuf, studied adoption among the seals oe and why it was happening.

It's a crowded beach, with bad weather, high tides and rough surf, which perhaps explains why one-quarter to two-thirds of pups each year were separated from their mothers at least once oe some permanently.

it's easy for elephant seal pups to get separated from their parents (Frans Lanting/Mint images/SPL) The researchers counted a total of 572 orphaned pups over the course of the four consecutive breeding seasons.

Intriguingly, some adult seals were more likely than others to become foster parents. For one thing, all the foster parents were female.

Some adult elephant seals are more likely to adopt a pup than others (Frans Lanting/Mint images/SPL) Elephant seal pups aren't the only ones to win adoptive parents either.

Adoption is also fairly common among nonhuman primates. It's been seen in red howler monkeys in Venezuela,

black-fronted titi monkeys and woolly spider monkeys in Brazil, and even among chimpanzees. But in all of those cases the adoption has always been within species. Storks adopt stork chicks,

howler monkeys adopt infant howlers. In captivity, there are occasionally cross-species adoptions, such as between rhesus and Japanese macaques or among different types of marmoset.

But these species are related closely, and have similar behaviour. Given that, perhaps the most striking instance of adoption in the wild was between completely different types of monkeys.

In 2004, researchers noticed an infant marmoset travelling with a group of capuchin monkeys at the Green Wing Valley wildlife reserve in Brazil.

For at least 14 months the marmoset was raised by its adoptive capuchin group, alternating between two primary female foster mothers.

In one strange case, a marmoset (pictured) was adopted by much bigger capuchin monkeys (Thinkstock) One reason the adoption was

so surprising is because marmosets and capuchins are so different. For one thing, a fully grown capuchin weighs perhaps 3-4kg (7-8lbs),

but a fully grown marmoset maxes out at less than 500g (1lb). The two species also have different feeding patterns

and different parenting styles. Despite those differences, the juvenile marmoset became wholly integrated into its adoptive social group.

It travelled and fed with the group, responded to alarm vocalisations given by members of the group,

and played, the researchers wrote in the American Journal of Primatology. During social play with their unlikely friend, the juvenile capuchins actually adjusted the force of their movements to account for the puny marmoset's size and strength.

And the adult capuchins, including the dominant male, were extremely tolerant of the impostor. The marmoset would patiently watch the adults crack nuts between two rocks and sneak an occasional snack

Capuchins travel by leaping from tree to tree. Given its size, the marmoset often struggled to keep up.

The capuchins all but ignored the marmoset's distress cries, despite being within hearing distance. Like many human adoptions,

the match wasn't always perfect. How did it happen? It's likely that the adult capuchins were predisposed simply to care for young primates.

They're also extremely tolerant of infants in the first place. In addition, given how small the marmoset is compared to the capuchins,

they didn't need to give up too much of their own food so that it might survive. A female capuchin would barely notice a tiny marmoset clinging to her fur,

making it reasonable to assume that the infant didn't slow her down at all. It seems as if the drive to care for helpless infants is fairly universal among species that care for their own young oe and even between different animals.

What else could explain our own species'obsession with puppies kittens and other baby animals?

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How salmon help keep a huge rainforest thrivingthe Great bear Rainforest is vital to the health of the planet.

This enormous habitat covers 32,000 Â sq km (12,000 Â sq Â mi) on the Pacific coast of Canada,

The forest is the scene of one of nature's most impressive migrations; the perilous journey of the Pacific salmon from the sea through the forest rivers to spawn in its creeks.

The salmon run draws carnivores such as bears and wolves to the river bank, where they gorge on the migrating fish.

The bears who feast on the spawning salmon don't eat on the river oe they drag the carcasses far into the forest.

Sea otters: Saving kelp forests and our climatethe kelp forests fringing the North Pacific coast are one of the richest marine ecosystems On earth.

One of the kelp forest's most endearing denizens, the sea otter, is an important key to its survival.

Dr M Sanjayan, reveal how sea otters eat sea urchins which would otherwise devour the kelp and disrupt the rich web of life that relies on it.

So the otters are helping the forests to store as much carbon as they can. We tend to think that we can deal with the challenge of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by planting more vegetation,

but it turns out that animals like sea otters are providing another solution by helping to keep forests growing.

if chimpanzees have theory of mind. At the time, researchers thought that deception might be a good way to get at the question,

if chimpanzees could be taught to deceive fellow chimpanzees. If a snack was hidden in one box,

The researchers only managed to teach two of four chimpanzees to do this, and it took them a whopping five months to get it right.

Chimpanzees have trouble comprehending the pointing gesture in the first place. Pointing with their hands and fingers is not part of their own behavioral repertoire.

Â Then, in 1987, science writer Virginia Morell witnessed a now-classic example of apparent chimpanzee deception while visiting Jane Goodall at Gombe National park in Tanzania.

The two were hiding in a feeding station, a spot where Goodall and her team sometimes handed bananas out to passing chimps.

standard behavior for a chimpanzee. After promptly devouring the whole bunch oe chimpanzees tend not to share food,

even with their infants oe Beethoven settled down for an afternoon nap, leaving a hungry Dilly to groom him.

as chimpanzees normally do watched, but simply as Goodall placed the banana outside on the ground.

Â And it certainly was a stretch to say that this meant chimpanzees had theory of mind.

Â One way that researchers tried oe experimentally oe to get at the question of chimpanzee theory of mind in the subsequent years was"gaze-following Â. Could a chimpanzee tell what you're looking at by following your gaze?

In 1996, psychologists Daniel Povinelli and Timothy Eddy gave some juvenile chimps a test: the apes were given a choice to ask for food

either from a human who could see them clearly, or from to a human whose eyes were hidden,

It seemed that the young chimps didn't care whether a human was actually able to see them

Â If chimps couldn't even understand what others could and couldn't see, then it seems unlikely that they could deceive, let alone attribute more sophisticated goals and intentions to others.

and Eddy had thrust their chimpanzees into a strange situation. The experiments had arbitrary conditions that were perhaps not obvious to the chimps,

such as the rule that they were allowed only to make one choice per trial. From the chimp's perspective, it could actually be quite reasonable to beg from everyone until someone hands over a tasty treat.

The flaws of such experiments led evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare to develop a more naturalistic,

species-appropriate test for chimpanzees. That meant he had to think like a chimpanzee. What he devised was a clever situation in

which a subordinate chimp could compete for food with a more dominant chimp. Â In his experiments, Hare set up enclosures containing two chimps, one at either end.

He placed food in the centre. Thanks to well placed barriers, sometimes both chimps could see the food;

sometimes only one. Â In one instance, Hare allowed a dominant and a subordinate chimp to watch as he put food in the middle.

However, the food was obscured from the dominant one once it was placed down. Â As is typical for chimpanzees in this sort of scenario,

the subordinate all but ignored the food, leaving it for the dominant. Subordinate chimps know better than to take food from dominant group members,

just as Dilly knew not to let Beethoven catch her eating that banana. Even though the dominant couldn't see the food,

it knew where it was. Then Hare added a twist: when the dominant chimp was replaced with a second dominant who hadn't seen the food oe all she could see was opaque barriers oe the subordinate had no problem gobbling it down.

The conclusion? Chimpanzees don't just know what others see; they also know what others know.

Animal trickery Â The so-called Hare task has since been adapted and modified for a wide range of animals.

A clever experiment in which rhesus monkeys could steal food either from a silent box or from a box outfitted with bells showed that they anticipated

Well, researchers know dogs can be sneaky. In one experiment, dogs were instructed not to take food from boxes, a few

of which were rigged with noisy bells. Yet when a researcher wasn't looking, the dogs would steal a meal,

and would deliberately avoid the boxes with bells to avoid detection. The evidence gathered so far suggests that many clever animals are capable of deception,

In Cairns, Australia, the local master plan embraces tropical urbanism that conveys a sense of place through landscaping features,

dog owners who fail to clean up after their dogs can face hefty fines. Ours is not the only species that goes out of its way to avoid exposure to disgusting things like excrement,

Horses leave the parts of their fields where they eliminate ungrazed as well. Wild reindeer also selectively forage in uncontaminated areas,

as do many primates. But not all species explicitly avoid contact with yuck-inducing substances.

In fact, some actually seem to seek out faeces. Patrick Walsh and Amy Pederson from the University of Edinburgh, UK, together with Erin Mccreless from the University of California, Santa cruz, noticed that the related wild white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus)

Turd fansthe researchers conducted three different experiments to see whether the mice truly prefer being near the smelly stuff Their first finding was that, like sheep,

they could not distinguish between the droppings of parasitised and healthy mice. But the second finding was a complete surprise:

the mice were more likely to choose to spend their time in an enclosure containing faeces than in a clean one.

When given a choice, they preferred cotton previously used by other mice to unused cotton for nest-building.

Perhaps most surprising the mice even preferred parasitised cotton balls to clean ones. These preferences also applied to their foraging behaviour.

The mice were no less likely to eat seeds that were found near faecal material oe

whether infected or not oe than to eat seeds that were clean. In a way, the mice were the opposite of the sheep.

Neither animal could distinguish parasitised from healthy droppings yet sheep responded by playing it safe,

while the mice took a gamble. The crucial question is why? At first glance, their actions might seem like a bad idea, given the high costs of becoming infected.

What is really interesting is domesticated that rodents, such as mice and rats bred for laboratory use

or for the pet trade, do avoid faeces. As wild reindeer and primates also avoid faeces,

domestication isn't the key, so what is it? Walsh and colleagues believe that for their wild mice,

the presence of faeces from other mice at a potential nesting location or near food suggests safety from predators.

When the wrong move could land you between the teeth of a bigger animal, perhaps the risk of infection from faecal matter is the lesser of two concerns.

or some dog waste on the sole of your shoe. It probably won't make them smell of roses though.

and perhaps the most disgusting is the male greater sac-winged bat, Saccopteryx bilineata. Colonies of up to 60 of these bats are found from northern Argentina to southern Mexico.

This continues until both sacs have a sufficient amount of bat perfume. The process lasts 30 to 60 minutes.

Voigt and other bat scientists think that the perfume must therefore play other social roles,

more generally oe plays a fundamental role in the social communication of this species. It also means that bat noses,

whether there might be potential in"eau de bat Â, Voigt describes its smell as sweetish, with a touch of bitter almond.

Why wet dogs are a Mars rover's best frienda Golden Labrador shaking itself dry may sound like a mundane topic for a film.

and mammals can face hypothermia pretty quickly, so it's vital to get dry as quickly as possible.

when he published his work showing how furry mammals, from mice to brown bears, shake their bodies

when wet oe the frequency being directly related to their size. A bear, for instance, needs to shake from side-to-side four times per second.

The loose skin on its large frame whips around its body with enough force to shed the water quite easily.

A mouse on the other hand has such a small frame, it needs to shake proportionally faster to generate the same forces to break the surface tension of water on its fur oe up to 33 times per second,

as well as adding a few of their own into the mix oe a colleague's pet rat called Coco, a pygmy hedgehog,

The first guinea pig was, well, the hedgehog. It didn't work. It looked spectacular surrounded by falling water droplets but ultimately, even in slow motion,

Then it was the turn of the rat and the dog oe both are found across much of the world and in wet and cold environments.

In theory, they should have evolved to dry off as quickly as possible. And it proved to be the case.

and camera equipment oe perhaps hardly surprising following Dickerson's findings that dogs can get rid of 70%of the water on their fur in just four seconds.

But shaking dogs may also have a practical application. Dickerson has used his insights to create a"wet dog simulator Â;

a rotating device that looks at the speed wet brushes need to spin to rid themselves of water.

So, perhaps in the not too distant future, Mars rovers will shake their circuits in a similar way to a dog emerging from a pond.

bringing us closer to monkeys and apes, for example, which are traded internationally for bushmeat and pets.

In fact, a surprising amount of wildlife now depends on the human-made environment, from the clouds of huge Sydney fruit bats to London's wily foxes,

there are now new varieties of urban rat, housemouse and cockroach. If you would like to comment on this story

when Elliott and Weinstock first found that helminths protected mice against colitis, news spread fast.

six lions lay dead in the dim headlights of an old land cruiser. Just hours earlier, dozens of Maasai men had descended upon them with sharpened spears in a fit of anger and frustration."

whose four goats had been killed by the lions.""The lions come again and again. Â Over the past several years, residents of the Kitengela plains have had an enormous problem.

The area lies on the edge of popular tourist destination Nairobi National park, a beautiful game park just 7 kilometres (4. 6 miles) from Nairobi's City Centre,

brimming with lions, rhinos, giraffes, cheetahs, and other wildlife. While the park is secured by an electric fence on three sides oe those that border the city oe the open end allows wildlife to spill out into Kintengela,

Lions have been straying outside the park at night and snacking on their form of convenience food oe local residents'cattle,

As a result of conflicts like this, Kenya has been losing on average 100 lions a year, and there are now just 2, 000 remaining in the country.

is scared of the lions oe and for good reason. He's only 13, and small for his age oe no match for a hungry feline on the prowl.

But that didn't stop him at the age of 11 from wanting to find a way of protecting his family's livestock.

and maths class oe Richard cleverly invented a completely hacked yet remarkably effective system to keep the lions away,

he noticed that lions would stay away when he walked around with a flashlight. Light fantasticthe system, called"Lion Lights Â is about as basic as you can get,

constructed from LED bulbs from broken flashlights, an old car battery, a solar panel, and a motorcycle turning light indicator box.

According to Dr Charles Musyoki, a senior scientist in carnivore issues for Kenya Wildlife Service, the flickering lights is applied an ingenious design intervention that introduces a"serious risk consideration Â for the lions.

While a steady light will not scare lions flickering lights from multiple sources confuses them, and indicates the presence of something larger than them,

although Lion Lights may seem simple, "no one else in Kenya had imagined putting the lights in this context.

and most of all is effective in keeping lions away, has impressed truly local residents. Richard has installed seven Lion Light systems for his neighbours,

and people all over Kenya have begun copying his approach. Crowdsourced conservationwith increasing pressures on land and resources,

near Amboseli, a game park in southwestern Kenya, the Kenya Wildlife Service has collared Â several lions with tracking devices that send text messages to cell phones of rangers

Another service called Elephant 911 crowdsources information on incidents involving elephants oe such as suspected poacher activity

or elephants trampling crops-via SMS, allowing agencies to track hotspots of conflict or poaching.

The Save the Elephants organisation has fitted elephants with high-tech collars, which emit mobile phone and satellite signals, allowing rangers to track them via Google earth.

which hosts four of the world's last remaining seven northern white rhinos, owners plan to start test-flying a $75, 000 drone to live-stream information on the rhinos to rangers on the ground.

The cameras also have thermal imaging, allowing night patrols. Yet despite all of these efforts, Paula Kahumbu, a Kenyan conservationist and CEO of Wildlifedirect, says that sometimes it's the local, homegrown technologies like Lion Lights that work best."

"Technology can be gimmicky, Â she says.""There is a tremendous need to recognize local and practical ideas.

Take giraffes, for instance. Males, called bulls, make casual visits to various groups over time in search of a cow who might mate with him.

While giraffes'social decisions are ruled by urine, hippos appear to rely on dung. The function and purpose of dung-showering is still only partially understood, according to biologist Richard Despard Estes.

What's clear is that dominant males defecate in order to mark the boundaries of their territories.

But there's more to hippo dung than simple territory demarcation. When territorial males approach females they respond in a manner known as submissive defecation.

alongside the customary techno-utopian or counterintuitive visions of the future, was a champion camel-jumper,

who boasted of clearing seven camels in one leap, and the head of a pigeon-racing club, who described a recent competition where some of the unfortunate competitors were eaten by predators

Why animals also seek teenage kicksif you are an otter who wants to play a game of"chicken Â,

this treacherous bit of sea is known as the triangle of death for good reason oe the considerable threat of great white sharks is increased by the conspicuous absence of kelp that otters normally use to hide.

and a shark has the perfect recipe for a sea otter snack. Oh, and the waters are teeming with the dangerous parasite Toxoplasmosa gondii.

Doting otter parents do their best to keep juveniles from venturing into the triangle of death,

The only otters foolish enough to attempt an incursion into the triangle are adolescent males oe it turns out that human teenagers aren't the only animals that make bad decisions during the awkward transition between childhood and maturity.

Â Not to be outdone by sea otters young Thomson's gazelles (Gazella thomsoni) make their own kinds of risky decisions.

When a group of gazelles detects nearby stalking predators such as cheetahs or lions, zoologist Clare Fitzgibbon discovered that instead of running they sometimes approach

Lions and cheetahs stalk before they ambush prey, and if the gazelle make clear their awareness of the predator's presence,

-and-ambush strategy oe gazelle do not follow hyena, despite the fact that more gazelle die from predation by hyenas than by cheetahs or lions.

While it isn't only the juveniles who follow their predators oe adults do it too oe the younger gazelle face a much higher risk.

while following a cheetah is one in 5, 000 for mature gazelle, but only one in 417 for teenagers.

allowing them to better predict future encounters with cheetahs and lions. Boyz n the hoodthis falls in line with the current thinking in humans;

Human teenagers don't die at the hands (or jaws) of predators, like adolescent otters or young gazelle,

Like otters, males are more likely to die than females for every year between the age of 12 and 19,

During this period of transition, male elephants leave the female-dominated groups into which they were born,

While elephant males become sexually mature by age 17, they usually don't successfully mate until their late 20s or early 30s, after their first musth, a period of pronounced sexual activity in male elephants

which is the result of especially high levels of testosterone. Despite being sexually mature by their late teens

males don't typically undergo musth in all-male elephant groups for at least another decade, and elephant teenagers generally behave themselves.

But a peculiar group of teenage males in South africa paints quite a different picture. As these elephants aged out of adolescence,

they began successfully breeding by age 18, a full decade before what is ordinary for their species. For typical 25-30 year olds,

targeting white rhinoceroses in particular. What made these male elephants so dangerously aggressive and so unusually sexually active?

When the young were growing up in South africa's Kruger National park in the 1980s, the mature males and females of their social groups were the victims of culling programmes.

An assessment of this and other stressed communities which had all been subject to elephant culling showed that male-male aggression accounted for almost ninety out of every hundred male deaths

rebellious teenagers are kept in line by the elder pachyderms. The adolescents lose the physical signs of musth minutes or hours after an aggressive interaction with a higher-ranking musth male Â larger,

The wanton slaughter of white rhinoceroses was eliminated entirely. It seems as if elephant society evolved to account for the bad decisions associated with adolescence,

by having older males suppress the hypersexuality and hyperaggressiveness of younger males. Throughout the animal kingdom, adolescence is a tightrope Act as they gradually lose the care

or cheetah or killed at the hands of their friends. Most efforts to establish the root of risky decisions made by human teenagers focus on the underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for mental processes like long-term planning and judgement.

compared to humans or elephants. Perhaps concerned human parents can rest a bit easier knowing that their worries echo throughout the animal kingdom.

If sea otter parents could, you can be sure they too would punish their offspring for breaking curfew

"All that was lacking from my visit was an appearance from Ernst Blofeld clutching a white Persian cat.

or battery or charger for each device or brand of electronic equipment they buy, from phones to laptops to toothbrushes,

but they must also buy a new charger or adaptor when they upgrade from an iphone 4 to the iphone 5, for example.

Chimpanzees perform even better in their maths tests, succeeding in this sort of task 90%of the time.

In one experiment, researchers placed a chimpanzee in front of two sets of bowls that contained chocolate pieces.

the chimps had to select the set that had combined the largest number of chocolate pieces,

But the real maths wizards of the animal kingdom are the ants of the Tunisian desert (Cataglyphis fortis). They count both arithmetic and geometry as parts of their mathematical toolkit.