Real Whale in the Hudson River

Real Whale in the Hudson River

For two years in a row, Dr. Dubroff said on Tuesday, she has spotted a whale swimming outside her living room window. Last year, she didn’t quite believe the sighting was real. But she saw a whale again on Saturday — and in the same spot again on Sunday — and news reports confirmed her hunch: The Hudson River has a resident humpback.

“It was general excitement and shock,” Dr. Dubroff, 39, said, “and how thrilling that a whale can be in the Hudson, based on what we see float by sometimes.”

Chuck Bowman, the president of the Riverhead Foundation, was among those who had helped to monitor the stranded whale while awaiting guidance from NOAA.

“The good thing was 30 years ago you’d see maybe one whale off of Long Island a season,” Mr. Bowman said. “Now you see them all the time due to conservation efforts.”

But, he added, “You get a bigger population and you get a greater chance of things like this happening.”

Full article from NYTimes

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Dog Remembers More Than You Think

Dog Remembers More Than You Think

Once again, science has confirmed the suspicions of dog owners that their beloved pets know more than they are letting on. In this case, it has to do with memory, a favorite subject of researchers who study the mental abilities of other animals.

No one doubts that dogs can be trained to remember commands and names of objects. They also remember people and places. But Claudia Fugazza and her colleagues at the Family Dog Project at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest set out to see whether dogs share a more complex kind of memory.

Jonathon D. Crystal of Indiana University, who studies episodic-like memory in rats and wrote a commentary on the work that will appear in the print edition of Current Biology, said he thought the conclusions were strong, although it was very difficult to ensure that a memory was truly incidental in a training situation. He said human episodic memory is lost in Alzheimer’s disease and he and others study animal memory in hopes of learning how to combat that loss. The work on dogs offers a new technique that could be very useful, he said.

What does this mean for the dog owner? Dogs probably remember what their owners do even when training isn’t going on. And, she said, “It tells us that the dog’s memory is more similar to ours than we expected.”

Full article from NYTimes

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bats are the fastest fliers

bats are the fastest fliers

The new record-holder for fastest flying animal isn’t a bat out of hell. It’s a bat from Brazil, a new study claims. Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) can reach ground speeds of 160 kilometers per hour.

Until now, common swifts held the record of fastest fliers, soaring at up to 112 km/hr, often with help from wind and gravity. The Brazilian bats, however, reached their higher speeds with no assist. Since bat flight is rarely studied, there may be even faster bats out there, the researchers speculate.

Full article from sciencenews

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how bacteria help carnivorous plants

how bacteria help carnivorous plants

 

The carnivorous pitcher plant Darlingtonia californica releases water into the tall vases of its leaves, creating deathtraps where insect prey drown. Water in a pitcher leaf starts clear. But after about a week, thanks to bacteria, it turns “murky brown to a dark red and smells horrible,” says David Armitage of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Now, he’s found that those bacteria can help plants keep insects trapped. Microbial residents reduce the surface tension of water enough for ants and other small insects to slip immediately into the pool instead of perching lightly on the surface, he reports November 23 in Biology Letters.

Bacterial populations in a pitcher leaf are akin to those in a mammal gut or bovine rumen, Armitage’s preliminary analysis finds. The microbes can help digest the prey as well as catch it, he says.

 

Full Article From ScienceNews 

 

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