The lyre bird, not only mimics the calls of other birds, buy also man made noises such as cameras, saws and chainsaws, in an attempt to impress potential mates. David Attenborough narrates the above clip.
Related: Friday Fun: Bird Using Bait to Fish – Leafhopper Feeding a Gecko – Backyard Wildlife: Raptor – Bdelloid Rotifers Abandoned Sex 100 Million Years Ago
photo of ladybugs covering the bark of a tree near the Guadalupe Peak, by John Hunter, Creative Commons Attribution.___________________
At Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas at 8,749 feet in Guadalupe Mountains National Park I found a huge city of ladybugs. They covered the bark of many bushes and trees and crawled over rocks (as seen in the photos). They were everywhere. It seems odd to me that they would have such a huge concentration since it would seem like food would then be a problem, but there they were.
Related: Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve, Ohio Photos – Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly – North Cascades National Park Photos – Mount Rainier National Park Photos
Photo shows Fritz the Cat – see photos Fritz took.
Scientific American has a long and interesting article on: The Evolution of House Cats
Cats are Cool 
Related: Origins of the Domestic Cat – The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer – DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution – Genetic Research Suggests Cats ‘Domesticated Themselves’
Sunflower photo from WikiMedia – Helianthus Annuus ‘Taiyo’The Great Sunflower Project provides a way for you to engage in the ongoing study of bees and colony collapse disorder. The study uses the annual Lemon Queen sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), that can be grown in a pot on a deck or patio or in a garden (and they will send you seeds).
How do bees make fruits and vegetables?
All flowers have pollen. Bees gather pollen to feed their babies which start as eggs and then grow into larvae. It’s the larvae that eat the pollen. Bees use the nectar for energy. When a bee goes to a flower in your garden to get nectar or pollen, they usually pick up pollen from the male part of the flower which is called an anther. When they travel to the next flower looking for food, they move some of that pollen to the female part of the next plant which is called a stigma. Most flowers need pollen to make seeds and fruits.
After landing on the female part, the stigma, the pollen grows down the stigma until it finds an unfertilized seed which is called an ovary. Inside the ovary, a cell from the pollen joins up with cells from the ovary and a seed is born! For many of our garden plants, the only way for them to start a new plant is by growing from a seed Fruits are just the parts of the plants that have the seeds. Some fruits are what we think of as fruits when we are in the grocery store like apples and oranges. Other fruits are vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers.
Related: Monarch Butterfly Migration – Solving the Mystery of the Vanishing Bees – Volunteers busy as bees counting population – The Science of Gardening
Photograph of dolphin with a sponge it uses to hunt, courtesy of Ewa Krzyszczyk, PLoS, high resolution.Cool open access research from PLoS One, Why Do Dolphins Carry Sponges?
We compared sponge-carrying (sponger) females to non-sponge-carrying (non-sponger) females and show that spongers were more solitary, spent more time in deep water channel habitats, dived for longer durations, and devoted more time to foraging than non-spongers; and, even with these potential proximate costs, calving success of sponger females was not significantly different from non-spongers. We also show a clear female-bias in the ontogeny of sponging. With a solitary lifestyle, specialization, and high foraging demands, spongers used tools more than any non-human animal. We suggest that the ecological, social, and developmental mechanisms involved likely (1) help explain the high intrapopulation variation in female behaviour, (2) indicate tradeoffs (e.g., time allocation) between ecological and social factors and, (3) constrain the spread of this innovation to primarily vertical transmission.
The dolphins use the sponge to push along the ocean floor and disturb fish, that are hidden. Once the fish start swimming away the dolphin abandons the sponge and catches and eats the fish. Then the dolphin goes back and gets the sponge and continues.
Related: Do Dolphins Sleep? – Orangutan Attempts to Hunt Fish with Spear – Dolphin Rescues Beached Whales – Savanna Chimpanzees Hunt with Tools – Chimps Used Stone “Hammers” – open access papers
Photograph by Dr Tin-Yam Chan, University of Keelung
This squat lobster, found in waters 150 meters (492 feet) deep, is one of the new species. Eighty percent of the world’s species remain to be discovered, notes French scientist Philippe Bouchet, one of the expedition’s leaders.
A World of Crabs from One Tiny Island
Related: Most Dinosaurs Remain Undiscovered – Ocean Life – Huge Gorilla Population Found in Congo – Still Just a Lizard – 50 Species of Diatoms
Blind “Ant From Mars” Found in Amazon
The pale, eyeless ant appears to be adapted to living underground, possibly surfacing at night to forage. Its long mandibles suggest that the 0.08-inch-long (2-millimeter-long) animal is a predator, most likely of soft-bodied creatures such as termite larvae.
Christian Rabeling, a graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin, found a single specimen of the new species, thought to be a worker ant, in tropical soils near Manaus, Brazil. Rabeling’s team named the new creature Martialis heureka—”Martialis” means “of Mars
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The new species’ genes suggest that it broke away from the main ant family before the origin of all other living ant groups, which include 20 subfamilies that together contain more than 12,000 species.
Related: New Ant Species Discovered in the Amazon Likely Represents Oldest Living Lineage of Ants – Swimming Ants – Symbiotic relationship between ants and bacteria
I posted about Polar Bear and Dogs previously. Now here is a video:
Related: Tabby Cat and Black Bear – Backyard Wildlife: Fox
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