Baddass Shrew Lifts Logs, Can't Be Stomped

http://animalzoon.blogspot.in/

A new species of hero shrew, recently found in Africa, is now known to be one of the strongest, sturdiest mammals in the animal kingdom.

The shrew, Scutisorex thori, measures less than a foot long and weighs only 1.7 ounces, and yet it can lift heavy logs. The appropriately named new “hero,” found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and described in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters, can also often survive attempted squishing.

PHOTOS: Animals Caught Doping Show No Remorse
Thresher Shark And 3-D Printed Duck Feet
A wicked thresher shark shows off newly observed behavior, and a very cute duck gets a new leg up in the world.
DCI
Lead author William Stanley, of the Field Museum of Natural History, explained to Discovery News that locals used to demonstrate the sturdiness of these tiny mammals to scientists. When researchers first documented the genus back in the early 1900s, locals immediately recognized the furry shrew.

“'Oh, that’s the hero shrew,' they said,” Stanley explained. “'We use it as a talisman. It renders us invincible to bullets and spears.'”

“At that point,” Stanley continued, “one of the men stood on the tiny mammal for 5 minutes. The shrew walked away unscathed.”

The new shrew, which sports thick, dark hair, appears to be just as strong.

Stanley and his team collected some of the mammals near the village of Baleko in the Congo. Detailed analysis of their body structure revealed that they are similar, yet distinctly different, from the other known hero shrew, Scutisorex somereni.

The most noteworthy feature that the shrews share in common is their unique spine.

“It’s massively reinforced, resulting in tremendous strength,” Stanley said.

Climate Change 10,000 Times Faster Than Evolution

http://animalzoon.blogspot.in/

Evolution can be fast, but not fast enough to keep up with the rate of human-caused climate change, say two researchers who have studied the evolution rates of hundreds of species in the past.

PLAY VIDEO
3 Extinct Animals Making A Comeback
When it comes to species extinction, it's not all doom and gloom.
DCI
In fact, many vertebrate species would have to speed up their evolution rate 10,000 times to match today's pedal-to-the-metal rate of global warming, according to John Wiens, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at the University of Arizona, and Ignacio Quintero, a postgraduate research assistant at Yale University.

"A big question is 'Can some species adapt quickly enough to survive?'" said Wiens. “So we looked at 17 groups of animals” comprising 540 species that included amphibians, birds, reptile and mammals, to see how they adapted to temperature changes in the past. “We estimated the rate of climate change for these species.”

How Global Warming Will Change Your Life
Specifically, they looked at when these species split into new species based on genetic data, which is a measure of their rate of evolution, and compared that to climate changes in the niches where those animals lived at those same times in geological history. What they found was that the species could handle a global temperature change of about one degree centigrade per million years. Their results appear in a paper in the latest issue of the journal Ecology Letters.

The problem, of course, is that humans are un-sequestering and burning millions of years worth of carbon-rich fossil fuels and releasing their heat-retaining gases into the atmosphere at a rate that's causing a temperature rise of perhaps 4 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. So if a species can't move to a nearby cooler habitat, it will be unlikely to evolve out of its predicament and survive.

All this seems to fly in the face of a variety of special cases of rapid evolution that have been documented in birds, reptiles and amphibians. But that's not quite so, explained evolutionary biologist Robert Holt of the University of Florida.

The rate of evolution of a particular group of animals probably has a lot to do with how big a set of genetic tools, or flexibility to develop new traits, a species has to work with. Some species have more than others, Holt said.

Dogs Remember as Well as Humans

http://animalzoon.blogspot.in/

The memory of dogs is more human-like than previously thought, allowing our furry pals to copy our actions, even after delays.

The discovery, outlined in the latest issue of Animal Cognition, means that dogs possess what’s known as “declarative memory,” which refers to memories which can be consciously recalled, such as facts or knowledge.

Humans, of course, have this ability, as anyone playing a trivia game demonstrates. But it had never fully been scientifically proven in dogs before, although dog owners and canine aficionados have likely witnessed the skill first-hand for years.

NEWS: Cats Don’t Actually Ignore Us

Claudia Fugazza and Adám Miklósi of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary conducted the study. A LOT of dog studies happen in Hungary, where people really love their pooches and some of the world’s leading canine researchers live.

The team investigated if dogs could defer imitation, which in this case meant copying what their owners were doing. Eight adult pet dogs were trained using the “Do As I Do” method. (Fugazza is a leading expert on this training method for dogs.) The tasks included copying their owners walking around a bucket and ringing a bell. Can dogs then successfully replicate what they learned after a 10 or so minute distracting break?

Fugazza described what happened next with one owner-dog pair:

The owner, Valentina, got her dog Adila to pay attention to her. She then demonstrated an activity, like ringing a bell with her hand.

Valentina and Adila then took a break, with both doing whatever they wanted to do. Sometimes they played together with a ball, or relaxed on a lawn. Adila happily sniffed around and barked at passers by.

After the break, Valentina went to her original starting position and gave the command “Do it!” Adila knew exactly what came next. The attentive dog rang the bell. Adila even did this when a human stranger, who didn’t even know what the prior activity (bell ringing) was, gave the same command.

Great White Sharks Feast on Fat After Road Trips

http://animalzoon.blogspot.in/

Footage of great white sharks often shows them ravenously feeding on marine mammals, and now a new study reveals that such feasts often occur after the sharks go on long journeys.

The study, published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B, reveals how important protection of established shark feeding grounds are, since so much concentrated feasting takes place at these sites.

PLAY VIDEO
Shark Embryos And Nature's Other Cannibals
Shark babies are cannibals. Just one more reason sharks are cool and terrifying.
DAVID DOUBLIET/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/GETTY IMAGES
PHOTOS: 5 Sharks, Rays Needing Urgent Protection
“We know from researchers observing white sharks feeding on whale carcasses that one shark can eat more than 30 kg (66 pounds) of blubber in a single feeding,” lead author Gen Del Raye told Discovery News. “This has been estimated to be sufficient energy to allow a shark to survive for 1.5 months.”

“We also know that the sharks feed fairly frequently on juvenile northern elephant seals at certain seasons,” added Del Raye, who is a researcher at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station and the University of Hawaii. “One of my co-authors, Salvador Jorgensen, for example, has identified the same shark feeding on 3 juvenile elephant seals in the course of one week.”

Del Raye, Jorgensen and their colleagues assessed great white shark fat stores over long periods by examining depth records from pop-up satellite tags affixed to sharks in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Changes in shark buoyancy served as a proxy for how much weight the toothy predators were packing.

As a shark’s single largest organ, the liver, can account for 28 percent of an adult’s body weight. Other fat is stored in the shark’s muscles. While sharks fill up on fatty food after long journeys, no shark has ever been classified as obese. Their lifestyle is probably inherently too active for them to keep the pounds on.