– – In Runaway Bay, Texas a man found what he believed to be a chupacabra lying near hole 14 of a golf course! It’s a brown, hairless animal with inch-long toes, curved claws, long hind legs, and oversized canine teeth.
It’s neither a dog, nor a coyote…the smart money says that it’s a hairless raccoon, based on the feet, skull structure, and ears…
– – How cold is it in Florida?- -Cold enough so that iguanas are dropping off the trees!
Scientists say that when temperatures drop below 40 degrees, so do the iguanas; they essentially go into hibernation in order to survive! This fact has spawned at least one urban legend of a guy who collected some stunned iguanas and put a bunch of them in the back seat of his car, thinking them dead. – –Well, when he ran the heat in his car, the iguanas came back to life, probably asked to be driven to Taco Belle, and began crawling all over things, to catastrophic effect- -or at least so the story says!
Meanwhile, more than 140 Florida sea turtles have washed up on the shores within a 48-hour period, stunned by the cold. The turtles simply become lethargic, can’t swim anymore, and wash up on shore. The Florida Aquarium is helping some of the turtles survive…
At least we have stunned iguanas raining from trees to talk about until the new season of MonsterQuest begins!
– – We’re not talking The Wizard of Oz, either…but in 2001, police raided a local drugs gang in Atlanta, Georgia who were keeping a lion, a tiger, and a bear cub as status symbols. Well, the three predators were rescued by the Noah’s Ark Animal Rescue Centre in Atlanta, and lived in the same enclosure upon their arrival at the animal sanctuary.
They were allowed to stay living together, and an unlikely friendship flourished. Nine years later, Leo the lion, Shere Khan the tiger, and Baloo the bear are still together…Believe It, Or Not!
– – Having taken Invertebrate Zoology , I for one have long thought that some invertebrates are smarter than what we usually give them credit for being, especially higher mollusks like cephalopods.–Well, Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that gathers coconut shells for shelter, behavior which researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal!–Yeah yeah, I know about SpongeBob, but he doesn’t count…plus I find him annoying!
The scientific community has long debated about how to define tool use in the animal kingdom, being as how they don’t ordinarily have access to Black and Decker equipment. The Australian researchers defined a tool as an object carried or maintained for future use, and the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selected halved coconuts from the ocean floor chucked there by humans, emptied them out, carried them under their bodies for up to 65 feet, and then assembled the two halves together to make a spherical hiding spot!–Isn’t that totally cool?!–One biologist described himself as gobsmacked, an expression I’d like to see re-integrated into the popular culture…
This is different from what hermit crabs do as the octopus is collecting the shells for later use, showing a capability for complex behavior.–Respect your local octopus!
– – Where some see only a hog-sized jungle rodent, others see economic opportunity…or perhaps a sandwich!
Bolivia is planning to export dried meat of the capybara, the world’s largest edible rodent, to Venezuela. The capybara regularly grows to 145 pounds, and grazes on the banks of rivers and lakes. It is a shy, short-haired creature with a blunt snouth and no tail that is widely consumed in Venezuela.
Plans to export the meat of between 200 to 500 capybara a year from Bolivia to Venezuela are considered environmentally sustainable, but the meat must sell for $4.45 a pound to be profitable…
Foxes do eat rodents, but this one’s out of my size range, thank you very much…
– – And you thought that Joe Camel was bad?- -About 6.000 feral camels are rampaging through a remote Australian town, causing chaos and terrifying the 330 or so locals! The community of Docker River is said by the Northern Territory government to be “under siege!” Apparently the surreal situation began about four weeks ago with 25 or 30 camels, but more and more continued to arrive, looking for water. On a number of occasions, the camels have barged into people’s homes, tearing up bathrooms and ripping apart water pipes! At least Joe Camel only peddled carcinogens.
The camels are part of a wild herd of over a million camels which roam the central Australian desert. They are the descendants of camels introduced to the country in the 19th century when white settlers built roads and rail across the Outback, and used camels for transportation. They were set free afterwards, and have been breeding and multiplying ever since. With few natural predators and abundant land in which to roam, the camel population has soared, putting pressure on native species by reducing food resources, destroying habitat, and spreading disease.
Sadly, the camels will be culled, rounded up to be taken out of town and shot. It is said that the camel population needs to be reduced by about two-thirds to reduce catastrophic damage…a sad testimonial to what can happen when humans introduce non-native species to a fragile ecosystem…
– – The man is the picture loves fishing…I mean, really loves it! I will not speculate about what a human-Asian carp hybrid would look like. I’m afraid enough of the Asian carp…
These fish can exceed four feet in length, and 100 pounds in weight. They can eat 40% of their body weight each day. And of course being Asian, they excel at math…
…just kidding about that last attribute, of course! But these carp are crafty…they may have already penetrated an electronic barrier meant to keep them out of the Great Lakes, a barrier which cost nine million!
“We’re going to keep throwing everything we can at them to keep them out,” said the senior Great Lakes advisor to the EPA. This reminds me of a Godzilla-vintage Japanese horror movie…
…“We must stop Mega-carp!–We will throw everything that we have at it!” (footage shown of tanks shelling an enormous fish, all to no avail.) “Quickly!–Deploy the Super-X!”
…’scuse me, I lost my mind for a minute.–Anyhow, Asian carp escaped from southern fish farms into the Mississippi River during 1990’s flooding, and have been migrating northward since. They decimate species prized by anglers and commercial fishers, and are known to leap from the water at the sound of passing motors and sometimes collide with boaters! A worst-case scenario envisions them spreading “like a cancer cell.”
I dunno about you, but I’m sleeping with a light on, and an image of Mrs. Paul or maybe the Gordon fish guy in the room to protect me!
– -A bear walked into a beer department in Wisconsin…no, it really happened last Thursday! The 125-pound black bear wandered into a Hayward grocery store, went up and down the aisles, and then decided to check out the bruin, going into the beer cooler in the liquor department, and climbing twelve feet up onto a shelf! No other customers were in the store at the time, and the single store clerk just kind of blocked things off and summoned authorities.
The bear sat on the shelf for about an hour until Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources officers tranquilized the bear, and removed him unceremoniously from the store. No bottles of beer were broken…
…was the bear hangin’ with his Bud?—Hey, hey, hey!–He’s smarter than the average bear!–If the Ranger had given him one more pic-a-nic basket, this might not have happened!
— Jazz musicians have often been called cats, and Nora is literally that. This gray tabby cat was adopted from a shelter in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and when a year old climbed up onto the bench in front of a Yamaha piano in the middle of the night and began to play! She has continued to tickle the ivories on a daily basis, at times playing duets with her owner and her owner’s students; she also plays alone, gravitating towards the D-E-F range on the keyboard, and including the black keys in her playing.
Nora’s music has been characterized as being atonal, halfway between Philip Glass and free jazz; a YouTube video of Nora’s playing has received large numbers of views, and has been featured on The Today Show and CNN, among others. A composition by Betsy Alexander has been released called Fur Release: A Prelude for Paws and Hands which incorporates Nora’s music.
…now that’s one hep cat!
– – A rare vegetarian spider has been found in Central America! Most spiders are strictly predators, living on insects and other animals. Bagheera kiplingi is about the size of a person’s pinky nail, and is a jumping spider who lives on acacia shrubs.
There are about 40,000 or so spider species, but most of the big spider textbooks (I know we all read them) almost outright claimed that there were no herbivorous spiders.–Well, they’re wrong!
Now one can envision kids furtively sweeping veggies off their dinner plates to the dog or into the potted plant, and blaming their disappearance on a herbivorous spider…
FOXSYLVANIA 
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