I saw this squirrel gathering leaves for its nest in its mouth and then climbing a tree in my backyard. It repeated this many times all morning. I saw it doing so at least 5 times and likely it did so many times when I did not see it.
See more backyard wildlife posts on the Curious Cat Science Blog
Related: Squirrel Eating Holly Berries – Backyard Wildlife: Red-tailed Hawk – Backyard Wildlife: Family of Raccoons
It is wonderful to see what great things people accomplish to improve their lives using sensible, and fairly simple, engineering.
15 Year-Old Kenyan Prodigy, Richard Turere, Who Created “Lion Lights”
The astonishing aspect of this is that Turere installed the whole system by himself, without receiving any training in electronics or engineering.
This is a great video which includes good examples of the value to experimenting, learning and adapting. Iteration is a critical skill when developing solutions. Try out prototypes and learn from what happens. Use that knowledge to develop new solutions or modify the existing solutions and experiment some more. Continue to iterate and improve.
This is another great example of people using their initiative, creativity and engineering talent to create appropriate technology solutions to create solutions that improve their lives. It is great to see how these efforts continue over time, this BBC article follows up on Richard Turere several years after his initial success:
What happened to the boy who chased away the lions?
Lion Lights 2.0 costs $200 (£150) to install. Half of the money usually comes from NGOs while the rest is provided by the herder.
This version has 16 different flashing light settings and Richard’s latest update is a homemade wind turbine for days when clouds limit the solar power potential.
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But while his idea has travelled, support for Richard as a young innovator and the implementation of his own Lion Lights has stalled in recent years. He thinks Kenya could do more to help young innovators like himself.
“There are many young people in Kenya with brilliant ideas, better even than mine – they just need support,” he says.
They need someone to be there to tell them, “this idea is really nice., let’s develop it to help communities”.
The efforts of so many great young people to create solutions that make the world a better place are inspiring.
Related: Electric Wind – Beehive Fence Protects Farms from Elephants – Appropriate Technology and Focus on Improving Lives at MIT – Using The Building of Robots to Engage Students in Learning
I see red-tailed hawks in my backyard occasionally. This one has a squirrel on a high tree branch in my backyard. The video shows it fly away.
When I hear a murder of crows squawking loudly I often can spot a red-tailed hawk (or perhaps some other hawks) near my yard.
Related: Backyard Wildlife: Sharpshinned Hawk – Red-shouldered Hawk – Backyard Wildlife: Fox – Backyard Wildlife: Blue Jay
Everyone should appreciate the value of cats (as we do, honoring cats in our blog’s name); yet some people seem oblivious to the greatness of cats. In another demonstration of what we gain by associating with cats, research has shown living with cats as newborns helps protect those with a specific gene variation from developing asthma.
Mia and her wonderful cat Pippa, the cat alerts Mia’s family if their diabetic daughter is in danger (the cat can sense dangerous blood sugar levels).
Cats protect newborns against asthma
Almost one in three children in the study carried the TT gene variant, regardless of whether or not their mother had asthma.
“it looks like the effect is linked to a particular gene-variant, which goes to show just how complex the development of asthma and allergies are. It’s not only about genes and the environment, but how the two interact, and there’s so much that we still don’t know,”
The research indicates that cats reduce the risk of childhood asthma, pneumonia, and bronchiolitis in genetically susceptible subjects.
And no, dogs do not provide this protection. As with most research the scientists have new paths of inquiry to follow based on these results. Lead author Jakob Stokholm suspects that the reasons cats have this effect but dogs do not, “could be related to the bacteria that cats carry and perhaps fungi or viruses that they bring into the home”. Those questions can be the topic of further research.
Related: Cat Allergy Vaccine Created (2011) – Awesome Cat Cam – The History of Domestic Cats – Parasites in the Gut Help Develop a Healthy Immune System – Hypoallergenic Cats (2006) – The Amazing Reality of Genes and The History of Scientific Inquiry
Dr. Steve Goodman‘s work is a legendary Field Biologist and spends 9-10 months out of the year conducting research in other countries, with a focus on Madagascar for nearly 30 years. Learn more about the future of Madagascar’s biodiversity and research.
This video is from the great Brain Scoop channel with Emily Graslie; if you are not following that channel I highly recommend doing so for people interested in science.
Related: The Michael Jordan of Field Biology – Insect Architecture – New Life Form Found at South African Truck Stop – Neil Degrasse Tyson: Scientifically Literate See a Different World
Dogs and wolves share sense of fair play
The key finding was that when the partner got a high value treat, the animal doing the task refused to continue with it.
Gray Wolf by Gary Kramer (USFWS), public domain
This is a similar result as that found with Capuchin monkeys that don’t like being paid less than others.
The human impact on dogs isn’t entirely absent though. Pet dogs are less sensitive to being treated unfairly – probably because of their experience with us!
It is fun to see these results mirror aspects of our psychology. It is fun to see how these experiments test out animal’s responses.
Related: Goats Excel at Learning and Remembering a Complex Tasks – Rats Show Empathy-driven Behavior – Insightful Problem Solving in an Asian Elephants – How Wolves Changed the Yellowstone Ecosystem
This clip shows elephants learning to work together to achieve what they can’t achieve alone (from BBC’s Super Smart Animals). It is interesting to see what animals are capable of. See the related post links for more amazing animal behavior.
Related: Insightful Problem Solving in an Asian Elephant (2007) – Crows can Perform as Well as 7 to 10-year-olds on cause-and-effect Water Displacement Tasks – Beehive Fence Protects Farms from Elephants – Capuchin Monkeys Don’t Like Being Paid Less Than Their Peers – Friday Fun: Bird Using Bait to Fish
In this webcast The Brain Scoop takes an interesting look at the homes of eusocial animals and other insects. The video includes many interesting details including that adult weaver ants can’t produce the silk used to weave leaves together so they pick up their larva and use them like a glue stick.
Related: For Many Crops Ants Can Provide Pest Protection Superior or Equal to Chemicals at a Much Lower Cost – Why Don’t All Ant Species Replace Queens in the Colony, Since Some Do – Symbiotic relationship between ants and bacteria – Huge Termite Mound in Nigeria
I Contain Multitudes is a wonderful book by Ed Young on the microbes within us.
This is another book exploring the wonders of biology and the complexity of the interaction between animals and microbes.
The complex interactions within us are constantly at work helping us and occasionally causing problems. This obviously creates enormous challenges in health care and research on human health. See related posts: Introduction to Fractional Factorial Designed Experiments, “Grapefruit Juice Bugs” – A New Term for a Surprisingly Common Type of Surprising Bugs and 200,000 People Die Every Year in Europe from Adverse Drug Effects – How Can We Improve?.
Avoiding bacteria is not feasible. Our bodies have evolved with this constant interaction with bacteria for millions of years. When we are healthy bacteria have footholds that make it difficult for other bacteria to gain a foothold (as does our immune system fighting off those bacteria it doesn’t recognize or that it recognized as something to fight).
A few pages later he discusses the problem of hospital rooms that were constantly cleaned to kill bacteria and largely sealed to reduce airflow. What happened is those bacteria the sick people had in them were the bacteria that were flourishing (the number of other bacteria to compete for space was small). Opening the windows to welcome the outside air resulted in better results.
Human health is a fascinating topic. It is true antibiotics have provided us great tools in the service of human health. But we have resorted to that “hammer” far too often. And the consequences of doing so is not understood. We need those scientists exploring the complex interactions we contain to continue their great work.
Related: People are Superorganisms With Microbiomes of Thousands of Species (2013) – Bacteria are Always Living in Our Bodies (2014) – Gut Bacteria Explored as Medical Treatment – even for Cancer
Close up of the large, thin, lizard
These photos were taken across the street from my condo in downtown Johor Bahru, Malaysia. From my window I could see Singapore.
It is at least a meter long from head to tail (probably longer, the tail is really long). Still it isn’t huge since it is very narrow (more like a very thick snake with legs than anything else).
A few months before seeing the lizard in the photos I saw a really big lizard 1 block from the Johor Bahru Customs Immigration and Quarantine complex. It was easily 2 meters long (head to end of the tail) and quite large (stout). It was a different species I am pretty sure.
I was standing for awhile looking at a cool patch of wild greenery. All of a sudden I heard a noise and looked down; this large lizard probably got tired of me standing so and moved quickly into the brush. I hadn’t seen it. I would guess it was sunning itself, before I wandered over. Too bad I didn’t have my camera ready.
I took this photo of this mother Raccoon with 3 youngsters in my backyard. Raccoon’s are pretty big; it is somewhat amazing to me they manage to find enough to eat. I have seen individuals around over the years (not very often though) but only saw this family twice.
I continue to have many wildlife sightings in my backyard which is quite nice.
Related: Backyard Wildlife: Fox – Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly – Red-Shouldered Hawk – Backyard Wildlife: Turtle
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