We Speak For Earth

[Trigger Warning: Animal Cruelty] Shocking Photos: PETA’s Secret Slaughter of Kittens, Puppies

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization that publicly claims to represent the best interest of animals — indeed their “ethical treatment.” Yet approximately 2,000 animals pass through PETA’s front door every year and very few make it out alive. The vast majority — 96 percent in 2011 — exit the facility out the back door after they have been killed, when Pet Cremation Services of Tidewater stops by on their regular visits to pick up their remains. Between these visits, the bodies are stored in the giant walk-in freezer PETA installed for this very purpose. It is a freezer that cost $9,370 and, like the company which incinerates the bodies of PETA’s victims, was paid for with the donations of animal lovers who could never have imagined that the money they donated to help animals would be used to end their lives instead. In fact, in the last 11 years, PETA has killed 29,426 dogs, cats, rabbits, and other domestic animals.

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Predators as Climate Helpers

In lakes and streams, fish and insects can help protect aquatic plants that gobble up greenhouse gas

Climate scientists note that Earth will suffer excessive warming if levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere get much higher. That’s why scientists have been looking for ways to encourage living organisms to act like a sponge, mopping up and storing much of that carbon dioxide. These carbon-storing species include trees, grasses and algae.

Dolphins Team Up to Rescue Injured Companion

Everybody’s favourite cetacean just got a little more lovable. For the first time, dolphins have been spotted teaming up to try to rescue an injured group member. The act does not necessarily mean dolphins are selfless or can empathise with the pain of their kin, however.

Kyum Park of the Cetacean Research Institute in Ulsan, South Korea, and colleagues were surveying cetaceans in the Sea of Japan in June 2008. They spent a day following a group of about 400 long-beaked common dolphins (Delphinus capensis).

In the late morning they noticed that about 12 dolphins were swimming very close together. One female was in difficulties: it was wriggling and tipping from side to side, sometimes turning upside-down. Its pectoral flippers seemed to be paralysed.

Life raft

The other dolphins crowded around it, often diving beneath it and supporting it from below. After about 30 minutes, the dolphins formed into an impromptu raft: they swam side by side with the injured female on their backs. By keeping the injured female above water, they may have helped it to breathe, avoiding drowning (see video, above).

After another few minutes some of the helper dolphins left. The injured dolphin soon dropped into a vertical position. The remaining helpers appeared to try and prop it up, possibly to keep its head above the surface, but it soon stopped breathing, say the researchers. Five dolphins stayed with it and continued touching its body, until it sank out of sight.

“It does look like quite a sophisticated way of keeping the companion up in the water,” says Karen McComb at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Such helping behaviours are only seen in intelligent, long-lived socialanimals. In most species, injured animals are quickly left behind.

For the love of pod

While it may seem selfless to help an injured fellow, McComb says the helper dolphins might get some benefit. Rescuing the struggling dolphin could help maintain their group, and thus control of their territory. Furthermore, if the group contains close relatives, protecting those relatives helps the dolphins preserve their shared genes.

The simple act of working together could also bond the group more strongly. “It makes a lot of sense in a highly intelligent and social animal for there to be support of an injured animal,” McComb says.

The act of helping also seems to suggest that the dolphins understand when others are suffering, and can even empathise: that is, imagine themselves in the place of the suffering dolphin. But while this is possible, McComb says the helping behaviour could evolve without the need for empathy.

There have been reports of single dolphins helping others, generally mothers helping their calves, but no cases of groups of dolphins working together to help another. Dolphins have also been seen interacting with the corpses of dead dolphins, which some researchers interpret as a form of mourning.

Journal reference: Marine Mammal Science, doi.org/kbb

rhamphotheca:

Project Bumblebee (Conservation and Citizen Science)

In the late 1990′s, bee biologists started to notice a decline in the abundance and distribution of several wild bumble bee species in North America. Five of these species (western bumble bee, rusty patched bumble bee, yellowbanded bumble bee and the American bumble bee) were once very common and important crop pollinators over their ranges. Franklin’s bumble bee was historically found only in a small area in southern Oregon and northern California, and it may now be extinct.

The dramatic decline in wild populations of these five species occurred about the time that a disease outbreak was reported in populations of commercially raised western bumble bees, which were distributed for greenhouse pollination in western North America. The timing of this suggests that an escaped exotic disease organism may be the cause of this widespread loss…

(read more: The Xerces Society)

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What You Can Do to Help Bumblebees:

1. Download our new publication: Conserving Bumble Bees. Guidelines for Creating and Managing Habitat for America’s Declining Pollinators. See this link for more information on what is covered in the guidelines.

2. The Xerces Society has collaborated with the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center to create a list of plants that are attractive to bumble bees. If you are interested in planting flowers in your garden or on your land to attract bumble bees, please consider using this valuable resource.

3. We are collecting data on bumble bee nesting habits. Please visit this site for more information and to fill out our bumble bee nest survey.

(photos: Johanna James-Heinz and Derrick Ditchburn)

(via scinerds)

mothernaturenetwork:

Before and after: What a difference a photo makes
Photography is a powerful tool. A good photo documents, explains, entices, incriminates, inspires, and even has the power to saves lives. One nonprofit working with rescue animals is hammering that point home. HeARTs Speak brings photographers and rescue groups together to help get animals out of shelters and into safe homes. These before and after images of rescued dogs like Turner illustrate what a difference having a skilled photographer on hand can make for an animal in need.

climateadaptation:

Tadpoles. New desktop background (for a little while). Click to emhugen. Via NatGeo

Bonobo Love Making

“too graceful for this shit”

(via doubledeezskuntz)

scinerds:

Phyllodes Imperialis Caterpillar

Also known as Oruga Cabeza Grande (Big Headed Caterpillar)

Image Credits: © Lui Weber/ Rex Features / plant.nerd

Looking like a cross between a skull and Squidward from Spongebob is the caterpillar of the Pink Underwing Moth (Phyllodes imperialis).

This bizarre creature is found below the altitude of 600m in undisturbed, subtropical rain forest, and survives entirely on the vine Carronia multisepalea, a collapsed shrub that provides the food and habitat the moth requires in order to breed. Due to habitat destruction and tourist disturbance, the moth is listed as nationally endangered in Australia. — (via thefeaturedcreature)

Its face looks as if it was adorned by the ‘Dia De Los Muertos’ theme, how very cool :)

Oh nature, why are you so amazing?

kbkonnected:

Live Penguin Cams added to Amazing Animal Webcams

Love these little guys! Look under the tab “Birds”.