Animals & Insects

It\'s raining iguanas in Flordia

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This is, ugh, interesting. I never knew you could harness “fly power”. [link]

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Interesting… BUGA, Colombia — A chicken in Colombia was born with the webbed feet of a duck. Read the story and see the photo.

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Via Reuters… TORONTO (Reuters) – An animal rights group called Tuesday for a North American theme park operator to cancel a competition in which people will try to break the world cockroach-eating record. Theme park operator Six Flags Inc, based in New York, is staging the contest as part of a promotion leading up to [...]

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Via the Indianapolis Star… Animal control and law enforcement officials were on the hunt today for two alligators spotted in the White River near downtown. Two fishermen reported seeing the alligators, one estimated at 10-12 feet and another about two feet long, south of the bridge over West Washington Street. The Indianapolis Zoo has no [...]

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More than 3,700 customers lost power for half an hour this afternoon in the northwest part of Carmel when a squirrel snuck into a substation. “There was no damage at the substation. The squirrel just made contact with the equipment, which caused the outage.” Power was lost at 2:37 p.m. and was restored at 3:09 [...]

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A pig withstood taser shots from police officers and eluded authorities for more than an hour after wandering onto Green Bay’s major highway. The 150-pound pig was spotted by a passing driver on U.S. 41 at 6 p.m. Wednesday night, Green Bay Police Lt. Todd LePine said. The animal reportedly went into traffic several times, [...]

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Something is eating cats in Carmel. In the past month, the discoveries of pets’ remains on the eastern edge of the city have prompted one family to post warnings in their neighborhood. Police investigating the deaths say residents should take heed. “If I was a pet owner, I certainly would not have my pet running [...]

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KOKOMO, Ind. — A wayward squirrel invaded a power substation and left more than 5,000 homes and businesses without electricity. Duke Energy restored the service from the South Main Street substation near Wildcat Creek after about an hour Sunday night. “We lost the squirrel and 5,039 customers for the space of an hour,” Duke spokesman [...]

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OSSIAN, Ind. — A swarm of up to 100,000 angry honey bees sent 10 people to the hospital including the driver of an SUV that hit a hollow tree in northeast Indiana, disturbing a hive. … By the time rescuers arrived, a black cloud of buzzing insects had engulfed the car, forcing firefighters to wear [...]

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In an effort to keep monkeys out of the Indian capital’s subways, authorities have called in one of the few animals known to scare the creatures — a fierce-looking primate called the langur. The decision to hire a langurwallah — a man who trains and controls the langurs — came after a monkey got into [...]

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JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Attacks on humans by man-eating lions are on the rise in Tanzania and Mozambique, raising the stakes in the conservation game as environmentalists strive to save the big cats from extinction. Lions in the area have developed a taste for human flesh because people have been sleeping outdoors to protect their crops [...]

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MICHIGAN CITY, Ind. — Spending too much of her time at work trying to rescue a squirrel led to a library worker being suspended from her job. Cindee Goetz said she was suspended last week after she contacted a friend who owns an animal-removal business about the squirrel trapped in the ceiling of a LaPorte [...]

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LONDON (Reuters) – Cows belching and breaking wind cause methane pollution but scientists say they have developed a diet to make pastures smell like roses — almost. “In some experiments we get a 70 percent decrease (in methane emissions), which is quite staggering,” biochemist John Wallace told Reuters in a telephone interview. Wallace, leader of [...]

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SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – Sam, the tiny dog whose hairless body and crooked teeth earned him a reputation as the World’s Ugliest Dog, has died. The pooch died Friday, just short of his 15th birthday, his owner said. “I don’t think there’ll ever be another Sam,” Susie Lockheed said, adding: “Some people would think that’s [...]

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – Dozens of children at a Baltimore-area elementary school were stung by bees after stumbling upon them during a science lesson on Thursday, fire department officials said. The entire second-grade class of about 100 students at Deep Creek Elementary School was studying trees in nearby woods when one child disturbed a nest [...]

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A struggle between a Burmese python and an American alligator has left both creatures dead in a Florida swamp.

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A SUNSHINE Coast university student will need to have an artificial lens fitted to his right eye after it was speared by a wild darter bird perched on a railing at Australia Zoo at Beerwah. The freak accident happened last Thursday in the open wetlands area of the zoo, which is frequented by wild ducks, [...]

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NORTH MIAMI BEACH, Florida A crocodile caused quite a scare in a North Miami Beach, Florida neighborhood when it was found in a resident’s garage. Dr. Morton Zisk’s wife found the large croc Wednesday under a car in his garage. “She came out of the carport to get the morning newspaper and saw the alligator, [...]

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After reports of an alligator in a Pike county pond, several people spent Monday searching for the animal. City officials who work in the area everyday say an alligator could be possible, but they have seen a beaver on several occassions that could be mistaken for an alligator. “Looking at it on the inside of [...]

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Did you get the e-mail with images of the big alligator purported to have been caught swimming down the street in New Orleans? You guessed it. An urban myth (but a good one, no?). [continue story...]

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ST. BLAZEY, England: The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals warned people in St. Blazey, England, to be on the lookout for an alligator sighted in an area pond. The society issued the warning to the Cornish town when Stacey Clayton said she spotted a 2-foot gator while she and her 7-month-old [...]

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Authorities on Tuesday dismissed a claim that a wrangler had nabbed a 7-foot-long alligator named “Reggie” from a city lake, where he had been dumped several months ago and repeatedly avoided capture. Earlier Tuesday, a man claiming to be wrangler Jay Young, who had been hired by the city, told several [...]

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TWO CAPE Town men had a hair-raising encounter with a great white shark when the predator attacked the surfski of one of the paddlers at the weekend. Three hours before Trevor Wright’s ordeal at Sunny Cove, Fish Hoek, the beach was closed because of a shark sighting. Wright and his paddling partner Alan Weston – [...]

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The giant lizard dines on stray cats. It menaces people with its hiss, and, with each sighting, the mystery around it grows. At least, that’s what the neighbors say. The mini-Godzilla — a Nile monitor lizard — has been lurking around their Opal Court cul-de-sac for months, possibly years. They have enough grainy photos of [...]

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ALFRED, Ont. (CP) – Cows do it, even the odd deer or moose, but it’s a rare sight to see a tiger lying in the middle of an Ontario road. But that’s what a driver near the town of Wendover, east of Ottawa, reported to police. Turns out the large cat had ambled away from [...]

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In a brief statement, Northern Territory police today said that the “provisional cause of death has been given as multiple injuries consistent with a crocodile attack”. … Police and wildlife authorities are hunting a 13-foot crocodile suspected of the attack and plan to move it to a more remote area or shoot it. [see story]

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TARENTUM, Pa. — Crocus, a 2-foot pet alligator escaped from his backyard enclosure, but was captured by a girl who used what she learned on a nature TV program. Nicki Hilliard and several friends saw the animal swimming in the Allegheny River. Hilliard said she learned how to catch the animals safely by watching the [...]

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LOS ANGELES Police in suburban Los Angeles have arrested two men they accuse of putting an alligator into a small city lake, where it’s been for nearly two weeks. [story]

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NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Was there a black cat aboard the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, placed inside a cannon by a superstitious but desperate sailor as the vessel was sinking? Conservators had hoped to verify the legend as they worked this month to extract concretelike sediment from two cast iron, smooth-bore cannons salvaged from [...]

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A cat was stomped to death in a weekend dispute between neighbors on the South Side, police said. Chicago Police said four people — two men and two women — kicked in a door of a house in the 6500 block of South Wolcott at 9 a.m. Sunday and told two people there to turn [...]

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Alligator mystery solved. Johnson County Animal Control officials say an alligator found in a White River Township retention pond was on the lam from a home in which he was being rehabilitated for transport to a Florida alligator camp. Only the alligator decided to check out some Hoosier scenery before leaving and apparently escaped from [...]

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WHITE RIVER TOWNSHIP, Ind. — Wildlife officials say a 4 1/2-foot-long alligator found near an upscale subdivision in Johnson County is most likely an abandoned pet. “A lot of people just find out that an alligator is more trouble when it’s getting to be 3 or 4 feet long than it was when it was [...]

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The Delhi High Court passed an order Thursday instructing authorities to offer 2,000 rupees ($46) per cow — an average Indian’s monthly salary — to rid the city of the traffic menace. With cows sacred to Hindus, who make up the bulk of India’s billion-plus population, an estimated 35,000 cows and buffalo roam free in [...]

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DAYTONA BEACH — A day after a shark bit a 13-year-old girl on the hand in shallow waters off Zelda Boulevard, swimmers returned to the same waters to wade and bathe, including a man floating on his back around noon today in slightly deeper waters. “I go swimming here every day. It’s beautiful,” said Aiden [...]

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A sick sea lion took a chunk out of a 13-year-old boy’s Boogie board this weekend off the northern end of Morro Strand State Beach in Cayucos. Matthew Huff said the sea lion started chasing him around 5 p.m. Saturday as he surfed the waves. [see The Tribune]

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PARKER CITY, Ind. — Two dogs attacked and killed six fallow deer at a private zoo on Monday. Officials at ME’s Zoo say the same two dogs also killed two deer Saturday. Zoo workers said they did not know where the dogs came from or how they got into the fenced fields at the facility, [...]

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POLICE are investigating the mystery slaughter of a kangaroo found decapitated in a central Queensland zoo. [see The Daily Telegraph]

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Although some officials downplay the frequency of encounters between humans and sharks, one University of North Carolina professor said he expects the number to grow in the future. From Texas to North Carolina, three shark attacks occurred in the last week alone. [see NBC 17]

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It happened at about 5 p.m. Friday evening on the 600 block of Ocean Boulevard on Holden Beach, which is about an hour away from Wilmington. Chris Humphrey said he was swimming to a friend on a raft in deeper water when a sand shark that measured about 5 feet long bit into his forarm. [...]

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INDIANAPOLIS — A pack of stray dogs has killed all the birds in an Australian exhibit at the Indianapolis Zoo, officials said. The dogs on Sunday killed two black swans, three magpie geese and three emus. It is not known how the dogs got into the zoo. [see story]

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A gibbon named Kien is adjusting to life one limb short at Lincoln Park Zoo — and providing a curiosity (and zoo officials hope a lesson) for visitors. Kien lost his right arm April 9 after he got it stuck in a screen reaching for a ChapStick a visitor had tossed near his exhibit. A [...]

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Remember Mothra? It was huge… 15,000 tons of ticked off Lepidotpera. It leveled Tokyo, scared any little kid who saw it in a dark movie house and kicked Godzilla’s tail until Big G fried it to a crisp with its bad breath, only to have Mothra’s kids tie him down with their steel-hard strands of [...]

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CRYSTAL BEACH — When Lydia Paulk’s relatives came to the beach for an annual family reunion, they likely were not expecting to spend much of it at a hospital on the island instead of the beach cottage they had rented. Still, Lydia’s aunt said not even the shark bite that put the 14-year-old in the [...]

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ISTANBUL, Turkey — First one sheep jumped to its death. Then stunned Turkish shepherds, who had left the herd to graze while they had breakfast, watched as nearly 1,500 others followed, each leaping off the same cliff, Turkish media reported. In the end, 450 dead animals lay on top of one another in a billowy [...]

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BEIJING, July 8 — Alcohol has been banned in two small Australian Aboriginal communities to stop young people from a nearby alcohol-free township from risking their lives by swimming across a crocodile-infested river to get a drink. [via Xinhua]

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A male gorilla attacked and bit an intern keeper Tuesday morning at Lincoln Park Zoo after another apparent breakdown of safety protocols placed her in an outdoor gorilla exhibit while the animals were present. Zoo officials blamed the gorilla attack on “human error” but said they have not determined whether the intern, a 32-year-old woman, [...]

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A zoo caretaker was mauled and killed by a bear yesterday when he entered the enclosure to feed the animal. Chen Chin-tsai, 41, was attacked by an Alaskan brown bear at the Leofoo Safari Park in Hsinchu, western Taiwan. [via The Taipei Times]

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SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — An off-duty lifeguard swimming in the ocean at El Capitan State Beach west of Santa Barbara was recovering after being attacked by a sea lion. [via NBC 4]

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The Globe Chicago Sun Times EiTB24 BBC Morning News Online

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A shark bit an Austrian tourist on the ankle Friday as the man stood in chest-deep water in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast, authorities said. It was the third shark attack in the state in a week. … Two other young people have been bitten since Saturday in gulf water off Florida. [...]

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A mother hen has taken four ducklings under her wing… literally. The biological mother had abandoned the small duckings before birth, leaving the job to someone else. [via ABC 4 News - video included]

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Brian Hutto said contrary to some reports, neither he nor his brother had any bait in his pocket. He said as they were walking to a sandbar, Craig felt a bump on his leg, and then the shark attacked. Brian said he hit the shark repeatedly and tried to pull his brother away from its [...]

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PITTSBURGH, Pa. — Sure, the weather’s been rather tropical this week, but it’s still surprising to come across alligators in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. A Pennsylvania man says he spotted one Monday night while driving in Butler County, outside of Pittsburgh. [via WFTV]

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – An animal rights group has called on one of the largest aquariums in the United States to stop serving fish to its visitors, likening the practice to grilling up “poodle burgers at a dog show.” “It’s easy to think of fish as swimming vegetables but of all the places in the [...]

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Beijing – An 18-year old student celebrating the end of his school exams was attacked and killed by three lions in a zoological park in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang province, state press said on Wednesday. The student was one of 10 young men who climbed over the 2m fence surrounding the lion compound at the Northern [...]

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Two of the birds fly away from their exhibit. The Sedgwick County Zoo is hoping you’ll see them and call. [via Wichita Eagle]

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South Bend, Indiana, USA “I didn’t believe him,” animal control officer Sumyr Springfield said. Then Springfield, who was first on the scene, saw the top of the kangaroo’s head. It was time to call for backup. [via The Indianapolis Star] Related… Blimey, mate. It was a kangaroo

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Belgium plans to stop Boy Scouts from slaughtering chickens and other small animals at summer camp, despite Scout leaders’ defense of the practice as a lesson in wilderness survival. [via Reuters]

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Two recent shark attacks in the Florida Panhandle, including one that cost a 16-year-old boy his leg Monday, threaten to bring back the media frenzy of 2001, dubbed the “Summer of the Shark” by Time magazine. The Carolinas are in the top five nationwide for shark violence. But unlike the attack that killed a teenaged [...]

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Cape San Blas, Florida, USA A 16-year-old boy who lost a leg following the second shark attack in three days along the Florida Panhandle was in critical condition Tuesday and facing more surgery. Craig Adam Hutto, of Lebanon, Tenn., was fishing in waist-deep water about 60 feet from shore with his brother and a friend [...]

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Eugene police officers and Lane County animal control officers responded to a report of a “small alligator” at large in northeast Eugene on Friday. [via Oregon Daily Emerald]

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Cape Coral, Florida, USA University of South Florida researches say they have finally identified the source of a thumping noise that has confounded Cape Coral residents for decades. It’s the mating call of a fish. [via WKMG]

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Lake Okeechobee, Florida, U.S.A. Saltwater sharks in freshwater Lake Okeechobee? With video footage. [via The Sun-Sentinel]

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