Talking Fish: Wide Variety of Sounds Discovered

Increasingly scientists are discovering unusual mechanisms by which fish make and hear secret whispers, grunts and thumps to attract mates and ward off the enemy.

In just one bizarre instance, seahorses create clicks by tossing their heads. They snap the rear edge of their skulls against their star-shaped bony crests.

This and other discoveries made in recent years come as the focus on the sounds that fish make is growing beyond "really loud sounds that last a long time," fish behaviorist Timothy Tricas at the University of Hawaii at Manoa told LiveScience. "Seahorse clicks are brief, only about five to 20 milliseconds," he said.

Radio tags track wasp behaviour

Wasps fitted with minuscule radio tags have helped scientists shed light on the insects' behaviour.

Rather than just tending their home colonies, the worker wasps also buzzed into nearby relative-holding nests, helping raise the young, the team said.

The researchers believed the insects were boosting their chances of propagating their genes by nurturing relatives in multiple nests.

The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) study is published in Current Biology.

"Nest drifting, which is where individual insects move between different nests, has been described in a few different species of social insects, but it has always been a puzzle as to why they have done this," explained lead author Seirian Sumner of ZSL.

"It has also been very difficult to quantify - the standard way is to mark the wasps with paint and then carry out nest censuses - so we developed a new method."
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World's first rhino conceived by artificial insemination is born

The world's first rhino conceived by artificial insemination has been born at Budapest Zoo, officials said in a statement on Wednesday.

The female baby rhino, born at 5:55 p.m. on Tuesday, weighed in at 128 lbs. "The little one seemed active and vital. An hour after being born it stood up on its own legs," the statement said.

The baby rhino has yet to be named, said zoo spokesman Zoltan Hanga, who added the zoo hoped to find a sponsor for her.

The mother, 26-year-old Lulu, had failed to conceive naturally, even when put with a male rhino named Easyboy. A group of international veterinarians from Germany, Austria and Hungary started in-vitro fertilization and she finally became pregnant in 2005.

Gay animals out of the closet?

From male killer whales that ride the dorsal fin of another male to female bonobos that rub their genitals together, the animal kingdom tolerates all kinds of lifestyles.

A first-ever museum display, "Against Nature?," which opened last month at the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum in Norway, presents 51 species of animals exhibiting homosexuality.

"Homosexuality has been observed in more than 1,500 species, and the phenomenon has been well described for 500 of them," said Petter Bockman, project coordinator of the exhibition.

The idea, however, is rarely discussed in the scientific community and is often dismissed as unnatural because it doesn't appear to benefit the larger cause of species continuation.

However, species continuation may not always be the ultimate goal, as many animals, including humans, engage in sexual activities more than is necessary for reproduction.

Spiders prefer malaria-infested mosquitoes

Scientists say East African spiders could help control lethal disease

A jumping spider in East Africa is known to crave mosquitoes engorged with blood. Now scientists find the spider prefers a particular type of them—mosquitoes infested with the deadly malaria parasite.

These predatory spiders could help control the lethal disease, scientists say. Malaria leads to more than one million deaths per year worldwide, mostly children.

"My dream would be that people could be educated to recognize this little animal and not kill it when found inside houses, as it often is, apparently in search of food," behavioral ecologist Ximena Nelson at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, told LiveScience. "If these spiders are left in these houses, they may diminish the number of blood-fed mosquitoes leaving the house, and thus prevent someone else from becoming infected."

It Takes A Village: Female Ducks Negotiate Joint Rearing Of Ducklings

Female eider ducks are well known to team up and share the work of rearing ducklings, but it now appears that they also negotiate not only how much effort each puts into the partnership, but also profit-sharing. An international group of scientists used a long-running study of the eider population in a Finnish archipelago to test predictions about how each hen seeks to maximize her benefits from the partnership without making it so unattractive that other hens withdraw their participation.

As hens arrive at the rearing-area with their ducklings, a period of intense socializing ensues. The hens then sort themselves into cliques -- pairs, trios, or quartets -- with each hen in a group assuming a distinct role.

Singing For Survival: Gibbons Scare Off Predators With 'Song'

It is well known that animals use song as a way of attracting mates, but researchers have found that gibbons have developed an unusual way of scaring off predators -- by singing to them.

The primatologists at the University of St Andrews discovered that wild gibbons in Thailand have developed a unique song as a natural defence to predators. Literally singing for survival, the gibbons appear to use the song not just to warn their own group members but those in neighbouring areas.

They said, "We are interested in gibbon songs because, apart from human speech, these vocalisations provide a remarkable case of acoustic sophistication and versatility in primate communication. Our study has demonstrated that gibbons not only use unique songs as a response to predators, but that fellow gibbons understand them."

Top ten animal geeks

Non-humans who have made outstanding contributions to science. The list includes Ham, the first chimp in space, as well as Koko, the gorilla who learned sign language.

The world's first cloned cat, Copy Cat, has three kittens

The world's first cloned cat just became a mother _ and she even did it without test tubes. Copy Cat, who was cloned by Texas A&M University researchers in 2001, had three kittens in September. Mother and kittens are doing well, said Duane Kraemer, an A&M veterinary medicine professor who helped clone her and has been taking care of her since.

Report Defends Experiments on Monkeys

There are strong scientific reasons for British scientists to continue research using monkeys in "carefully selected research problems," especially when it is the only way to save human lives, a committee of experts said Tuesday.

"There is a strong scientific case for maintaining work on non-human primates for carefully selected research problems ... at least for the foreseeable future," the Weatherall Report said.

Animal testing causes great controversy in Britain and animal rights groups have attacked companies and individuals involved in research on animals. Each year, around 3,300 monkeys are used in scientific or medical research in Britain, about 0.1 percent of all animals used in laboratory experiments in the country.

Dog Barks Reveal Universal Language

What do dog barks have in common with bird tweets and human baby cries? All appear to communicate basic emotions, such as fear, aggression and submission, in somewhat the same acoustic way, according to a new Applied Animal Behavior Science study that suggests a primitive communication system may unite virtually all mammals.

The theory could help explain why previous research has found that many mammals, including humans, understand the vocalizations of different species.

Cats Can Succumb To Feline Alzheimer's Disease

Aging cats can develop a feline form of Alzheimer's disease, a new study reveals. Scientists at the Universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews, Bristol and California have identified a key protein which can build up in the nerve cells of a cat's brain and cause mental deterioration.

In humans with Alzheimer's disease, this protein creates 'tangles' inside the nerve cells which inhibit messages being processed by the brain. The team says that the presence of this protein in cats is proof that they too can develop this type of disease.

By carrying out post-mortem examination of cats which have succumbed naturally to the disease, scientists may now be able to uncover vital clues about how the condition develops. This may eventually help scientists to come up with possible treatments.

Wasps Squirt "Pepper Spray" From Heads in Fights, Study Says

When female bethylid wasps are losing a vicious fight, they squirt an insect version of pepper spray from their heads before beating a retreat, new research suggests.

The chemical release is undetectable to humans, but it could represent a crucial behavior that may help biologists use the parasitic wasps as natural pest controls.

Feds Collect Giant Rats in Florida

As the rising sun danced across Florida's coastal waters, government workers in shorts and T-shirts knelt in a grassy island field and plucked wriggling rats from traps laid the night before. These weren't just any rats. They were 3-pound, 35-inch-long African behemoths. They squirmed as the workers, wearing protective gloves, removed green radio collars that had been tracking the rodents' movements.

All 18 of the animals were carted away for research.

Remarkable close-up pictures of animals in the womb

Dog in the womb: at 52 days a full coat of light cream hair is visible with whiskers forming. At 39 days, the eyelids are fused to protect from contamination.





A two-hour documentary called “Animals in the Womb” will air on the National Geographic Channel next month.

Using a combination of three-dimensional ultrasound scans, computer graphics and tiny cameras, the team were able to show the entire process from conception to birth.

“These kind of images from inside animals have never been seen before,” said Jeremy Dear of Pioneer Productions, who made the film.

“We worked with dozens of zoos and animal sanctuaries across the world. There were a lot of different challenges - recording a dolphin is very different from an elephant, for instance.

High-Rise Syndrome

It takes a normal cat about a two and a half feet of free-fall to orient himself to feet-down, and it wasn't until the advent of high-speed cameras that the acrobatics were fully understood. Much like an ice skater controls her rate of spin by pulling in or extending her arms, the cat first tucks in his front legs and splays out his rear legs, allowing him to quickly situate his forequarters with the feet down. He then reverses the procedure, extending his front legs and tucking in the rear legs, allowing the hindquarters to rapidly twist into position while the forequarters turn only slightly. Rear legs re-extend when in place, and he's fully deployed.

This position is ready for landing, but it also lends the cat a limited aerodynamic–much like the flying squirrel. The ability to increase drag slows a cat's average terminal velocity from a person's 130mph to a much happier 60mph.

Chimps prefer the older woman

Chimpanzee males prefer to have sex with older females, according to US researchers, showing one of the biggest behavioural differences between humans and our closest biological relatives.

Male chimps will chase down and fight over the oldest females.

Meanwhile, the youngest female chimps are forced to beg for masculine attention, say anthropologist Assistant Professor Martin Muller and colleagues at Boston University.

Why Play Dead?

The list of animals that play possum includes not only the Virginia opossum, of course, but also some 21 snake species and plenty of other creatures as different as bison on the prairies and brittle stars in the oceans.

Many of these animals freeze when a predator appears, and standard wisdom maintains that predators lose interest in prey that doesn't move. Yet some biologists now question that truism and are looking for a fuller explanation for the roles that feigned death might play in animal interactions.