Beautiful Animals

The old hydrophone arrays of the US Navy (originally installed to track enemy submarines) have been donated to an international dolphin-and-whale research consortium. Now they track individuals, most of them known by name; each individual and group has distinctive "songs" - sometimes we know what they're saying to each other, but usually we don't:

http://whale.fm/whales

Wolverine kits:

build your own wolverine from a kit?

cool

away at a funeral the last couple of days, catching up on the daily B & O's

the RSS feed to my email has stopped responding, so i'm getting the daily B & O's directly from their respective sites, hence the new larger images, but hey, more B & O = more gooder in my opinion

Lovely, dj!

But that chunky otter, though quite fetching, should be put on a diet!

the daily B & O

It's a girl! Baby otter doing great at Seattle Aquarium
a couple of videos and pics at the link below
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/fieldnotes/2017323385_its_a_girl_baby_she_otter_doing_great_at_seattle_aquarium.html

This bear looks like it's relaxing a giant bubble bath. The animal was caught on camera as it submerged itself in the foam that had been produced by a nearby waterfall. Sergey Gorshkov, a photographer from Moscow, spent seven years among the bears near Kamchatka, Russia. He said: "This is one of my favourite images of the bear. Many people who see this picture for the first time think it was buried in the snow and only his head was left outside. I have named this picture 'Tide', after a washing powder, because it seems that the bear was sitting in a large bath with foam."
Picture: Sergey Gorshkov/Minden/solent

whadda bear face..

I wholeheartedly agree!

~~


http://www.csmonitor.com/CSM-Photo-Galleries/Photos-of-the-Day/2012/Photos-of-the-Day-01-25/%28photo%29/433712

Besotted, I am. Bs and Os, including a baby O (to die for), a sudsed up bear, and a guineafowl with a great face. You guys are da best. Thanks to you all. (Trying not to thud.)

Jackal:

http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episode/mysteries-of-the-animal-mind.html
Roberta I hope you can watch this, it's called The Mysteries of the Animal Mind.. from the Nature of Things.

Thanks, Ceili. No surprise that I'm interested. I'll catch it if I can. If I can't, I 'll catch on on-demand viewing.

I've been thinking about animal minds and emotions--especially of chimps. I'll be interested to see what the show has to say.

Baby Squirrel Sleeping by Betweenland

That's a great series - will try to watch that program as well.

Btw, if you or anyone else here has a fine ear (tone-deaf folk need not apply) he can try signing on to the dolphin-and-whale tracking project (link on top of page). All those orcas, other dolphins, pilot whales and so on being tracked, actually are known to other members of their groups by name - in their own language, naturally - which we finally figured out by listening to their calls and always getting a specific individual responding to a specific call.

There are many dimensions to signal processing for sounds (in addition to volume, tone, pitch, timber, direction, etc) and many sources of sound distortion underwater, so computer programs can't identify them all.

Link to Ms Olga's whale thread for anyone who doesn't follow it: http://able2know.org/topic/109975-53#post-4876423

HH, No warning? No nothing? Such a picture. Beautiful and cute. Thanks mucho, kid.

The UKTelegraph is featuring Maria Cano's photos of brown bears in Spain today. Here are a few from the series...

They do talk about Chimps - a male dominated society, interestingly though, they showed up Bonobos - which I'd never heard of. They are dwarf chimpanzees that live in a female dominated society. The behavioral differences are quite remarkable.

Thanks, I will check it out. I've heard whale singing before. Interestingly, the songs seem to have a choruses and different verses.
I find this all very fascinating.

Bonobos are a different species. Not nearly as aggressive as chimps. And there's a lot of shtupping going on with bonobos. Not nearly as human as chimps. Fascinating stuff. I'll look for the show for sure.

Surprised to hear you say that bonobos are dwarf chimpanzees. They never struck me as significantly smaller--just structured slightly differently.