– – Australia has acquired two giant pandas on loan from China, and the couple has been publicly encouraged to, err, be fruitful and multiply! Wang Wang (“Net Net”) and Funi (“Lucky Girl”) were encouraged by leaders at the Adelaide Zoo to “Look after yourselves, keep healthy and active, eat your greens and maybe, when the time is right, think about starting a family.”
Pandas are notoriously poor breeders, with females having only three days a year in which they can conceive. Artificial insemination has accordingly become a standard practice in breeding captive pandas, of which 120 are in Chinese breeding facilities and zoos and about another 20 in zoos outside China. Only about 1,600 pandas exist in the wild.
We can, I suppose, be grateful that The Captain and Tennille never wrote a song called “Panda Love…”


— Tigers could become extinct in the wild in two decades unless conservation efforts are stepped up to halt the decline in their population, wildlife experts said on Wednesday…
– – MonsterQuest finally came up with their long-awaited episode on the Yeti on October 25th after previous ho-hum episodes on wild dogs and rats.- –
– – 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.
– – A 19-1/2 foot, 103 pound squid was netted by accident in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana in late July, with the photos just released. Researchers were trawling 1,500 feet below the gulf’s surface to study dietary habits of sperm whales when the squid was brought to the surface, not surviving the rapid ascent through the changing depths.
— It’s getting increasingly hard to find anywhere in the world where the foot of man has not trod, and erected a Starbucks…but even in today’s world, explorers are still able to find a few undiscovered places and new species along with it!
— Hmm…you go looking for a megalodon, and find…a whale shark! Somehow, the thrill is gone…
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