Beautiful Animals

Zap note - any of you standing, please sit down before looking at this picture! Roberta, mailed you a note asking a favor, hope it's no trouble; thanks.


http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/05/exploring-animals-emotional-experiences.html

They really know how to enjoy life, don't they?

beautiful cat

chilled out otters

the daily B & O (and the last for a while as i'm heading north and basically internetless for a while (maybe a month)

Thanks, Kevin and Mohini! Kevin tells us he and Mohini live on a campus in England ruled by wild bunnies and plant hidden cameras near rabbit holes to get shots like this one!

It's a boy! And a girl! And another boy!

The Rosamond Gifford Zoo is pleased to announce the birth of three Amur Tiger cubs. Parents, Tatiana and Toma, welcomed the trio – two boys and a girl -- in the afternoon hours on May 7, the day before Mother’s Day. Mother Tatiana, 11, and father Toma, 10, were introduced to each other this past December. It is the second litter of cubs for Tatiana.
Photo credits: Courtesty of Amelia Beamish, AB Photography

Very nice Jaguar

Amateur photographer Balakrishnan Valappil captured this picture of a stink bug in his back garden in Kerala, India. Some say it looks like Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, but we think it looks more like Groucho Marx (and we can't help wondering if it's the same type of bug that supposedly looked like Elvis last month).
Picture: BALAKRISHNAN VALAPPIL / CATERS NEWS

via boingboing.net



it's excruciating--"can he possibly make it?", but it's okay in the end.

MJ, Sloths don't have feet that were meant for walking. They were meant for hanging upside down from tree branches. Don't know why this sloth was on the ground. Something musta happened to its tree.

Here's a bit of useless sloth info: They descend to the ground once a week to take a dump. Then they rise again. Ahh, the life of a sloth is pretty slothful.

Thanks for the video. Glad he got across the road alive.

High Seas, Wonderful pic. Relaxation R Us. I'll look for the note.

dj, Gonna miss ya. Take lots of pics. And have a good time.

Arella Mae, Good to see you back here. You were missed. Gorgeous jaguar (at least I think it's a jaguar). Well, whatever it is, it's beautiful. Thanks.

Irish, A triple thudder. Those kittens are wonderful. Thanks. What a spectacular bug. A stinkbug no less.

Monterey Jack, now I'm going to lose sleep worrying if it managed to cross the road in one piece!
Poor little thing!

Just saw this under the clip.
Oh phew!!!!!!!!
The guy on the motor scooter is a hero!

Just watching Attenborough's Madagascar -

Love dem lemurs, hingehead. Thanks.

Bonobo (not a chimpanzee):

Great primate pics, hingehead. Tamarin and squirrel monkey. Thanks mucho.

I saw something about Bonobos being the least aggressive primates because of brain structure but I can't find it - but I did find this

Source

If you were drawing up a guest list for an animal dinner party, sex-mad bonobos might not be your first choice, especially as they have recently been shown to cannibalise their own offspring.

But at least they will share food with strangers.

Till now it was thought that humans were the only primates to share food in this way. Chimps, for example, won't do it. But Brian Hare of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and Suzy Kwetuenda of the Lola Ya Bonobo refuge for orphaned bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have now shows that bonobos will also "freely" share.

"It looks like bonobos share food because they like to share," says Hare. "If you only study chimps, you only get half the picture."

In an experiment at the bonobo orphanage, animals unlocked a door into their enclosure to let another hungry bonobo enter and share their food, even if the other ape was not a member of the same group and had not been encountered before.

Bonobos have been seen to share food in the wild, but it was not clear whether they did this only because they were being harassed or intimidated. In the experiment, however, bonobos chose to give the hungry animals access to food, which Hare says suggests an ability to act unselfishly.

The experiments were conducted before breakfast, when the apes were hungry.

Journal reference: Current Biology (in press)

I've read about bonobos, too, hinge. Not aggressive when compared to chimps. They're too busy shtupping to have time for aggression, although they do hunt occasionally. Read recently that the stories about cannibalism are a myth--not true.

They recognize themselves in a mirror--major sign of awareness. Sometimes I look in a mirror and say, "Who the hell is that?"

Not that much is known about their social structure, but it's believed that theirs is a matriarchal society.

Thanks for the additional info. I didn't know about the sharing.

Hi Boida

You've just reminded me of a chapter I read in a book on animal intelligence in the early 90s. It was talking about chimps and self awareness and curiosity. They gave a chimp a video camera hooked up to a monitor (as well as a bunch of other simple technology toys)...

I was fascinated by the description of the chimp who held the camera in one hand, a torch in the other, which he tried to shine down his throat so the camera could get decent light in the shot, while he maneouvred to a point that he could see the monitor to look down his own throat.

That's self awareness.