Not much is known about this photo, but it is presumed real as New Guinea has a high population of the largest bats on the planet, known as the Flying Fox bat. This one is presumed to be a black flying fox and has a magnificent wingspan of up to 5 feet!
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Horses aren’t the only farm animal that tends to get big. Cows can grow to be unusual sizes, such as Blosom, the 6ft high bovine that weighed 2,000 lbs and produced 72,000lbs of milk per year. Blosom died in July of 2015 on her farm in Ireland, but was still awarded “world’s largest cow” by Guiness later that year.
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Weighing around 55lbs, this giant rabbit eats around $75 worth of food a week, including mostly carrots, corn, cucumbers, broccoli. He’s no Bunnicula, though, he loves his veggies and eats the entire thing!
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Gary is a 112-pound capybara rodent that lives in Texas and has his own swimming pool to keep cool (which he loves!). His owners play with him in the pool every day and he even performs tricks (or so say the owners).
So, what’s a capybara rodent? Glad you asked. Capybaras are close relatives to guinea pigs and distant relatives to chinchillas. It’s often hunted for meat and its fat is used in pharmaceutics. Now are YOU glad you asked?
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Horses can tend to get very big as they are large animals to begin with. But Poe, a horse which Shereen Thompson of Ontario, Canada rescued in 2008, has grown to be about 10ft tall with his head held high and requires a whopping two bales of hay, 10lb of grain and 75 gallons of water PER DAY to survive.
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Before Giant George passed away in 2013, he was the world’s tallest dog, and quite easily the biggest dog in the world at 7ft 3 inches, astounding audiences the world over. He was showcased on Oprah Winfrey, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Animal Planet, Regis and Kelley, and many more TV shows. He had a HUGE internet following, with many believers in an afterlife wishing him well in a place people call “Rainbow Bridge”, shedding new light on the influence of domesticated animals on their owners.
Not only is Giant George the biggest dog in the world, but his bark is definitely much bigger than his bite!
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Katie Edwards, University of Sheffield
While you’re biting the heads off your chocolate bunnies this weekend, you might wonder how cartoon rabbits became so central to our Easter celebrations. It’s tempting to assume that because there’s no biblical basis for the Easter Bunny, rabbits and hares have no religious significance – but that’s just not the case.
Leviticus 11:6 states that the hare is an unclean animal: “The hare, for even though it chews the cud, it does not have divided hoofs; it is unclean for you””, but in Christian art, it is regularly associated with rebirth and resurrection.
In fact, the symbol of a circle of three hares joined by their ears has been found in a number of churches in Devon. Like much of our cultural “bunny” symbolism, the meaning of this image remains mysterious – and The Three Hares Project has been set up to research and document occurrences of the ancient symbol, examples of which have been found as far away as China.
Rabbits and hares have also been associated with Mary, mother of Jesus, for centuries. Their association with virgin birth comes from the fact that hares – often conflated mistakenly with rabbits – are able to produce a second litter of offspring while still pregnant with the first.
Titian’s painting The Madonna of the Rabbit depicts this relationship. Mary holds the rabbit in the foreground, signifying both her virginity and fertility. The rabbit is white to convey her purity and innocence.
Linking rabbits with purity and virginity is odd, however, since they’re also associated with prolific sexual activity, a reputation Hugh Hefner appropriated for his now infamous Playboy logo. Hefner claims that he chose a rabbit as the logo for his empire because the bunny is “a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping – sexy. First it smells you, then it escapes, then it comes back, and you feel like caressing it, playing with it. A girl resembles a bunny. Joyful, joking.”
Shutterstock
Hefner’s striking sexism aside, rabbits’ reputation for fecundity has also meant that they’ve been used as a symbol of fertility for centuries and have become associated with spring.
Indeed, some folklorists have suggested that the Easter Bunny derives from an ancient Anglo-Saxon myth, concerning the fertility goddess Ostara. The Encyclopedia Mythica explains that:
Ostara is the personification of the rising sun. In that capacity she is associated with the spring and is considered a fertility goddess. She is the friend of all children and to amuse them she changed her pet bird into a rabbit. This rabbit brought forth brightly coloured eggs, which the Greek goddess gave to children as gifts. From her name and rites the festival of Easter is derived.
Indeed, in his 1835 book Deutsche Mythologie, Jacob Grimm states that “the Easter Hare is unintelligible to me, but probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara … Ostara, Eástre seems therefore to have been the divinity of the radiant dawn, of upspringing light, a spectacle that brings joy and blessing, whose meaning could be easily adapted by the resurrection-day of the Christian’s God.”
Wikimedia Commons
The myth of Ostara, then, has become a popular theory for the derivation of the Easter Bunny – although it is a contested one. Either way, it seems that the association between the Easter Bunny and Ostara began with the 8th-century scholar the Venerable Bede in his work The Reckoning of Time. Bede said that our word “Easter” stems from “Eostre” (another version of the name “Ostara”). There is, however, no other historical evidence to support his statement.
The earliest reference to an egg-toting Easter Bunny can be found in a late 16th-century German text (1572). “Do not worry if the Easter Bunny escapes you; should we miss his eggs, we will cook the nest,” the text reads. A century later, a German text once again mentions the Easter Bunny, describing it as an “old fable”, and suggesting that the story had been around for a while before the book was written.
Shutterstock
In the 18th century, German immigrants took the custom of the Easter Bunny with them to the United States and, by the end of the 19th century, sweet shops in the eastern states were selling rabbit-shaped candies, prototypes of the chocolate bunnies we have today.
So whether bunnies are unclean, symbols of prolific sexual activity, or icons of virginity, the enigmatic Easter Bunny looks likely to remain a central part of Easter celebrations – recently, one was even involved in a surreal mass brawl in a New Jersey shopping centre. Just where they came from, however, will probably have to remain a mystery. At least for now.
Katie Edwards, Director, SIIBS , University of Sheffield
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Several times this spring, coyotes made national headlines when spotted roaming the streets of New York, from Manhattan to Queens.
In recent years, a host of charismatic wild species, the coyote being only the most famous, have returned to American cities in numbers not seen for generations. Yet the official response in many areas has been, at best, disorganized, and people’s responses varied. The time has come for us to accept that these animals are here to stay, and develop a new approach to urban wildlife.
Most big American cities occupy sites that were once rich ecosystems. New York and Boston overlook dynamic river mouths. San Francisco and Seattle border vast estuaries, while large parts of Chicago, New Orleans and Washington, DC rest atop former wetlands. Even Las Vegas sprawls across a rare desert valley with reliable sources of life-giving fresh water, supplied by artesian aquifers the nearby Spring Mountains. All of these places once attracted diverse and abundant wildlife.
In the early days of urban growth, which for most American cities was in the 18th or 19th centuries, charismatic native species were still common in many increasingly populated areas. These creatures disappeared due to numerous causes, from overhunting to pollution.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the country’s metropolitan fauna had been reduced to a motley collection of exotic rodents and birds, packs of mangy dogs, and the urban environment’s most fearsome apex predator, the house cat, which terrorized any remaining native songbirds.
It is impossible to point to a precise date when wildlife began to return to American cities, but the release of Walt Disney’s Bambi, in 1942, is a good place to start.
For Bambi, people were careless arsonists and bloodthirsty predators who forced woodland creatures “deep into the forest.” Ironically, however, the film’s success helped pave the way for deer populations to explode in developed areas.
After World War II, in part due to changing attitudes toward wild animals, hunting declined as an American pastime. At the same time, suburbs spread into the countryside. Deer, which had nearly disappeared in several northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, multiplied on golf courses, ball fields and front yards.
Beginning in the 1960s, new laws sought to recover threatened species, and many states curtailed predator control programs. New nature reserves also provided spaces where wildlife populations could recover, and from which they could disperse into nearby cities.
The results were swift and unmistakable. Foxes, skunks, raccoons and possums became ubiquitous American urbanites. So did many raptors, such as peregrine falcons, which thrilled geeky birders and corner office CEOs alike with their aerial acrobatics and fondness for nesting on skyscrapers.
Don DeBold/flickr, CC BY
By the 1990s, larger mammals began to appear in the shadows. Coyotes, bobcats and black bears turned up miles from the nearest woodlot, and mountain lions prowled the urban fringe.
And there is more. Alligators bounced back from near extinction to populate creeks and ponds from Miami to Memphis. Aquatic mammals such as beavers and sea lions staged remarkable comebacks, including in urban waters. Fishers, members of the weasel family once regarded as reclusive denizens of northern forests, found homes from cushy Philadelphia suburbs to the mean streets of New York. In the Southern California city where I live, the newest addition to our urban menagerie is a small population of badgers.
How long will it be until wolves show up in the Denver suburbs?
Human residents of these cities tend to react in one of two ways — with surprise or fear — to reports of such charismatic wildlife in their midst. There are historical reasons for both responses, but neither makes much sense today.
People react with surprise because most still cling to the old belief that wild animals need wild areas. What these animals actually need is habitat. A suitable habitat does not have to be a remote wilderness or protected sanctuary; it must only have sufficient resources to attract and support a population. For a growing cadre of wild species, American cities provide a wealth of such resources.
Christina Welsh/flickr, CC BY-ND
People react with fear because they have been led to believe that any wild animal bigger than breadbox must be dangerous. Wild animals certainly deserve our respect. A little caution can help people avoid unpleasant encounters, and extra vigilance is a good idea whenever pets or children are involved. Large wild animals can carry diseases, but proper management can reduce the risks. And predators can help control diseases by consuming rodent and insect pests.
Despite their reputations, large wild animals are just not very dangerous. By far the most dangerous animals in North America, as measured in human fatalities, are bees, wasps and hornets. Next are dogs — man’s best friend — followed by spiders, snakes, scorpions, centipedes and rats. The most dangerous animal, globally and throughout human history, is undoubtedly the mosquito. Coyotes are nowhere on the list.
Nevertheless, officials have responded to coyote sightings in New York and other cities by rounding them up and moving them to more “appropriate” habitats. Usually, these efforts end with little trouble. But in at least one recent Manhattan case, the critter in question escaped after a chaotic and expensive three-hour pursuit that embarrassed the authorities and revealed the ad hoc nature of our policies.
This is an uncoordinated, unaffordable, unscientific, and unsustainable form of wildlife management.
A 21st-century approach to urban wildlife must include four elements:
All of these measures are essential if America’s increasingly urban human population is to live in peace with its increasingly urban wildlife.
Peter Alagona is Associate Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
In 2014, one rhino was killed every eight hours. That was in South Africa alone, where most of the world’s rhinos live. At this rate, rhino deaths may overtake births by 2016-2018, making the concept of the rhino’s extinction very real.
Spurred by this grim prospect, governments, businesses and governmental organizations have discussed a wide range of solutions to stop rhino poaching, the key driver of rhino mortality.
One proposal that recently generated a lot of interest is the manufacturing of synthetic rhino horn. The concept first reached the media limelight in 2012 when the company Rhinoceros Horn LLC launched a crowdfunding campaign to get the idea off the ground. While that campaign failed, the idea has recently been rekindled by Pembient, a US-based company that describes itself as “the De Beers of synthetic wildlife products.”
This bioengineering start-up plans to flood the market with synthetic 3D-printed rhino horns. The company hopes this will help save rhinos by making synthetic horns cheaper to purchase than the real thing.
Pembient is looking to develop synthetic rhino horns that not only are genetically similar but feel and smell like the real thing, so much so that consumers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. To achieve this, the company has recently embarked on a crowdfunding effort to sequence the genome of the black rhino. Pembient hopes the first synthetic horns will hit the market about a year from now.
The question, though, remains: will it work? An examination of both consumer motivations and business models behind these types of ventures exposes some pitfalls.
The best available consumer research tells us that demand for rhino horn stems largely from the social status this perceived luxury product gives to its users, tied to the (erroneous) beliefs of its medical properties. How would synthetic rhino horn fit into this picture?
In terms of its luxury status, it is the rarity and high price of rhino horn that give it its allure. As such, it is unlikely that current consumers will turn to cheaper and commonly available options no matter how indistinguishable they may be to a lay audience, much the same way that the availability and lower price of cubic zirconia has not led to a crash of the diamond trade. Diamonds carry a social value that while arbitrary keeps consumers willing to pay large premiums. Thus it seems unlikely that a cheaper synthetic alternative may replace the original product in the minds of the wealthy consumers driving the demand for rhino horn.
animalrescueblog/flickr, CC BY-NC
As far as traditional medicine goes, the push for alternative products has been tried before. Take bear bile, for example. Used in Asia for centuries as a part of traditional medicine, the trade in bear bile flourished in the 1970s with the advent of “bear farming,” in which bile is obtained from live bears.
The number of bears required to fill these farms became a threat to Asian bear populations. As a result governments, NGOs and businesses have worked for decades to promote a wide range of plant, animal and synthetic substitutes. Yet, there is little sign of the practice disappearing, with a minimum of 12,000 bears still being kept in legal and illegal bear farms in Southeast Asia. Several reasons have been put forward for this, from the preference of consumers for wild products to the reluctance of practitioners to prescribe alternatives.
Taking all this into account, it seems unlikely that this synthetic rhino horn will have an impact on the demand for the real deal. However, the circulation of a synthetic product that so closely resembles the real product could easily become the worst nightmare of enforcement agencies worldwide, as authorities will have a hard time distinguishing between synthetic and illegally obtained rhino horn.
Another related issue is that by making synthetic rhino horn widely available, Pembient faces some perverse incentives to perpetuate the idea that it has indeed some medical properties. After all, the company’s bottom line depends on there being demand for rhino horn. This can undermine the work of conservation NGOs, traditional medicine practitioners and even governments, who have spent decades trying to break the link between rhino horn and traditional medicine.
whatsthepointsa/flickr, CC BY-SA
Beyond any potential impact this initiative may or may not have, the entire business case for this enterprise is underlined by a broader moral issue. Is it ethical for a US-based company to profit from a product based on genetic material coming from several developing countries, without a clear form of compensation?
History is riddled with cases of fortunes being made by companies in the West that have developed commercial ventures based on plants or animals from some of the world’s poorest corners without any compensation, in what has become known as biopiracy. The rosy periwinkle, for example, a plant native only to Madagascar, was found to contain a chemical compound that is effective in treating several forms of cancer. Millions of dollars were made from the two drugs subsequently developed, yet no compensation was ever given to Madagascar. The list of similar cases goes on and includes the Neem tree, turmeric, basmati rice, Ayahuasca, Rooibos Tea, Quinine and Quinoa.
Rhino conservation is costly, with countries having to invest heavily in management and anti-poaching efforts. Yet rhinos are distributed across a number of developing countries with pressing needs around food security, health and education. It would be hypocritical for the international community to ban the trade in rhino horn, thus denying rhino range countries a source of revenue, while allowing private companies from elsewhere to profit from the trade in a product based on the rhino’s genetic material.
It is clear that conservation is much in need of entrepreneurship and people willing to think outside of the box – just the kind of thinking that the people behind efforts to make synthetic rhino horn have demonstrated. Yet, the context around the trade in rhino horn is very complex and simple solutions that sound too good to be true often are.
Diogo Veríssimo is David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at Georgia State University.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Climate change will have major effects on the ecology and distribution of many animal species. Now new research suggests that rabbits will be particularly hard hit as climatic changes alter their habitat over the coming decades.
Rabbits, hares and pikas could become this century’s new climate migrants – with up to two-thirds of species forced to relocate. There are almost certainly going to be extinctions among some of the more sensitive and less adaptable species.
Rabbits and their relatives hares (referred to in North America as jackrabbits) and the lesser known pikas belong to a group of mammals known as lagomorphs – of which there are 87 species worldwide.
Lagomorphs are particularly interesting to ecologists – and those of my colleagues who work in Global Food Security – as they are a major human food resource, valued game species, agricultural pests, model lab animals and key elements in food webs.
You can find rabbits, hares and pikas almost everywhere, across a huge range of environmental conditions. They’re native to all continents except Antarctica, found from the equator to the Arctic, and from sea level to the very top of the Himalayas.
Jacob W. Frank, CC BY
A quarter of lagomorphs are already listed as threatened, and 13 species are endangered or critically endangered. We were particularly interested in how predicted changes in climate would affect this already highly vulnerable group.
In our study, colleagues from Queen’s University Belfast and I collated all known records of lagomorph species worldwide. Environmental conditions such as temperature or rainfall were correlated with the sites where each species occurred to establish the suitable habitat within which each can persist. Widely accepted climate models of projected future conditions were then used to extrapolate how suitable habitat would change.
The results, published in the open access scientific journal PLOS ONE suggest that two-thirds of all lagomorph species will be affected. Rabbits, hares and jackrabbits are likely to shift towards the poles with little change in the total size of their range – the geographical area in which the species can be found.
Pikas meanwhile, are likely to shift to ever higher altitudes as the lower slopes warm up leading to huge range declines. This is likely to lead to the extinction of some such as Kozlov’s Pika Ochotona koslowi, a mysterious species unique to China.
Of course the animals won’t just remain still while the climate changes around them – moving towards the poles or to higher ground is a standard strategy to track shifts in suitable habitat. Rabbits, hares and jackrabbits can move long distances and can potentially move to cooler conditions without losing too much of their range; the effects of such shifts on ecosystems are largely unknown but likely to cause significant disruption.
Airwolfhound, CC BY-SA
The smaller and less bouncy pikas won’t be so lucky. Pikas inhabit generally cooler conditions in the high mountains of the Himalayas or Rockies and will be driven further upwards until no suitable habitat remains. My colleague Neil Reid, a conservation biologist and lagomorph expert at Queen’s, points out that “they will likely be pushed off the top of the mountains, literally, with total extinction the most probable outcome”.
Species traits can be useful indicators of potential responses to climate change, yet have rarely been linked to changes in distributions. Smaller-bodied species were more likely to exhibit range contractions and shifts to higher ground, but species capable of having large numbers of offspring were more likely to shift towards the poles.
The effect of climate change on lagomorphs is predicted to be so substantial that almost a third of the Earth’s land area (31.5 million km2) will lose at least one species by 2100. It is predicted that northern China will lose up to ten species, whereas Montana and North Dakota in North America are likely to gain up to five species – climate rabbit refugees perhaps, fleeing the ever-warming southern states and Mexico. Generally, species on islands and mountains will be the hardest hit by changing temperatures.
However predictive models are simplified versions of reality and as such are rough approximations of what seems likely to happen. Those we used did not account for the complexity of ecological systems, such as how species – like plants or predators – interact with lagomorphs.
Ancheta Wis, CC BY-SA
Moreover, small burrowing species such as the Pygmy rabbit Brachylagus idahoensis may be able to shelter from the effects of climate change, while larger species like the European hare Lepus europaeus may have to adapt to mitigate the effects of warming temperatures – for example in the way that the Antelope jackrabbit Lepus alleni uses its long ears to shed excess heat.
So we have to be careful in the interpretation of our models – but the consistency of the results across all lagomorph species does not paint a good picture of the future for the group.
Conservation strategies, such as assisted migration – where humans deliberately move species to areas of more suitable conditions, pre-empting future changes – may be one of the few options to save highly range-restricted species, even if it is highly controversial.
Collection of more species records, particularly for already rare species, as well as targeting data-deficient geographic regions (such as Russia) will be vital in increasing our knowledge of the most threatened lagomorphs and informing future conservation management.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
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