animals - SoundSage

Birds are the master vocalists of the animal kingdom. They can make a remarkable variety of sounds.

But why is a barred owl more of a baritone, while a cedar waxwing is a soprano?

And what influences a bird’s vocal range, and the kinds of sounds it can make? Beak size? Body size? Geography?

To answer some of these questions, researchers analyzed over 140,000 bird vocalizations from all over the world to try to peck out some kernels of knowledge about bird calls and songs. Their research was recently published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Flora Lichtman talks with Dr. Zuzana Burivalova, assistant professor of forest & wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison about her latest research.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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Thick-billed parrots are adorable green birds with specks of red and orange with calls that sound like laughter. They're the only surviving parrot species native to the United States — and they used to roam from Texas and Arizona all the way down into Venezuela.

Forest fires, deforestation and parrot smuggling have reduced their population drastically in the last century.

The species is now classified as endangered. The only wild population of thick-billed parrots lives in Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains, high up in old growth pine forests.

But this year, there was good news: A census of the thick-billed parrot population in the Sierra Madre showed an increase of 10% over a span of 12 years. The birds are doing better.

So how did the thick-billed parrot survive?

For years, conservation organizations like OVIS (Organización Vida Silvestre) and the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance have been collaborating on a multi-faceted conservation project to save these birds. Short Wave host Regina G. Barber and producer Rachel Carlson dive into the details of that project — and how tiny "bird backpacks" are helping to make it all happen.

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We start off in a cathedral full of animals – hermit crabs, parrots, hamsters, dogs, cats and bunnies – being blessed. We then wonder, do the animals feel grace? What do we really know about what goes on inside an animal’s mind? Do they also experience gratitude, despair or anger? How much emotionality do humans and animals share? And can we measure it?

We get the story of a rescued whale that may have found a way to say thanks to its rescuers. And then we speak to behavioral scientist Clive Wynne, and head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard, Alexandra Horowitz, to decipher the whale’s behavior.

Guests in the episode include: Mick Menago, Tim Young, James Moskito, Holly Drewyard, Clive Wynne and Alexandra Horowitz.

For more: Read “Inside of a Dog” by Alexandra Horowitz.

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Production help from Tanya Chawla. Sound mixing by Joe Plourde.

Sign up for Radiolab for Kids’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

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Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Dan Blumstein was gently holding a yellow-bellied marmot pup, conducting research, when he first heard one scream.

"I was sort of shocked by this scream and almost dropped this animal," he says. "I had this sort of emotional response to this scream."

Blumstein, a behavioral ecologist and conservation scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, leads one of the world's longest-running experiments on a wildlife population: Yellow-bellied marmots living high in the mountains of southern Colorado.

He's trapped thousands of them for his research, so he's no stranger to their sounds. Over the years, he's heard them chirp, call and even whistle. But the sound of this particular scream — a high-pitched noise almost like a baby's cry — triggered something deep in his gut. And his curiosity.

What is it about screams that make them so universally unnerving?

Blumstein listened to recordings of different animals screaming, hunting calls designed to attract predators, and horror movies. And he found that screams are different from normal alarm calls. Screams are made when a distressed mammal overblows its vocal folds, pushing air through its vocal folds faster than normal. Waveforms of screams are marked with "nonlinear phenomenon" – irregularities in the sound that are alarming and attention-grabbing across species.

Researchers have found that even some animals that don't make vocalizations themselves, like skinks and lizards, act differently when they hear those nonlinear sounds.

Screams signal urgency, Blumstein says. The irregular noise in them is meant to grab others' attention. And that attention has likely helped keep us and other animals alive.

So this Halloween, if you're scared by a neighbor's creepy display of skeletons and spiders, Blumstein says, remember: Fear is natural.

"We are who we are because of who our ancestors were — and not just our primate ancestors, but across the lineage of life," he says. "So I think we should embrace our inner marmot and be happy that we're scared by those things."

Curious about other science powering the human experience? Email us at shortwave@npr.org and we might cover your topic on a future episode!

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More than one-third of all tree species are at risk of extinction, and many wild animal species are, too. With the world's biodiversity in stark decline, delegates from nearly every country in the world are in Cali, Colombia for COP16, the UN biodiversity summit. Benji Jones, environmental correspondent at Vox, discusses the key takeaways from the conference.

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Metaphors can help us understand complicated scientific concepts. But they can also have a downside. And, a pair of musicians wrote a concept album inspired by moths—and found that humans have more in common with the insects than they expected.

How Metaphor Has Shaped Science, For Better Or WorseHere at Science Friday, we’re big fans of metaphors. They can make complicated scientific concepts easier to understand, for both non-experts and scientists themselves. For example, “the big bang” helps us visualize the beginning of the universe. Or we can understand DNA’s role better as a “building block of life.”

But some of these scientific metaphors also have a downside, and can even set research back.

Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff are the hosts of the podcast series “The World According to Sound,” and they sat down with Science Friday’s Director of News and Audio, John Dankosky, to talk about their new project, “An Inexact Science.” They discuss a special two-hour episode that explores how language and metaphor have shaped science, for better or worse.

Intertwining The Lives Of Moths And Humans Through MusicBefore the pandemic, Peter Kiesewalter didn’t think much of moths. Like a lot of people, he’d thought of them mostly as pests. But when his brother Tobi, an interpretive naturalist for Ontario Parks and moth enthusiast, showed him macro photos he’d taken of them, he was blown away. “[They were] absolutely stunning,” Peter says. “The amount of colors and hair were just extraordinary.”

Peter is a Grammy-nominated musician based in New York City. He’s composed music for ABC News, Monday Night Football, and even a “Winnie The Pooh” show. As COVID-19 spread in 2020, work for him and his partner Whitney La Grange, a professional violinist, dried up. So they hunkered down at the family cottage in Ottawa, Canada, along with Tobi’s family. Peter was looking for a new show idea, and when his brother opened up the world of moths to him, he was hooked. “I had to find a way to interpret moths artistically,” he said. “And I started to find connections between them and us.”

That led to “The Moth Project,” a concept album and stage show that combines moth science and visuals with a whole ecosystem of musical genres: 80s pop, funk, classical, covers, even spoken word. Each song ties a stage of a moth’s life (emergence, flight, migration) to a universal human experience. But for Peter, a lot of these songs turned out to be far more personal than he initially thought.

SciFri producer and host of our Universe of Art podcast D Peterschmidt sat down with Peter and Tobi Kiesewalter and Whitney La Grange to find out how this album came together and how understanding moths could better help us understand ourselves.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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El Museo del Barrio’s second large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art, Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024 is on display through Sunday, February 9, 2025. Mark Menjívar, San Antonio-based artist and associate professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University, has a piece featured in the show reflecting on the topic of migration through birds. He joins us to discuss before leading a bird walk tomorrow in Central Park at 9:30 a.m.

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Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials returns for a new season about tree stumps, squirrels, and more! Plus... an album! Producer Ana González and producer & "Song Bud" Alan Goffinski join us for a special listening party and talk about the new season, plus take calls from curious young listeners.

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The heaviest antimatter nucleus to date was spotted in a particle accelerator. It could provide new insights into the nature of matter. And, research indicates different songbird species might intentionally travel together during migration, giving each other a possible boost in survival.

Physicists Create Heaviest Antimatter Nucleus YetAntimatter is one of science’s great mysteries. It is produced all around us for fractions of a second, until it collides with matter, and the particles annihilate one another. But what is it?

Antimatter is just like matter, except for one thing. Its particles have the same mass as ordinary matter, but an opposite charge. For example, an electron has a negative charge, so an anti-electron—called a positron—weighs the same, but has a positive charge.

Antimatter is a natural product of some types of radioactive decay and cosmic ray collisions, but it can also be made in particle colliders here on Earth. But making antimatter particles this way is difficult and expensive—let alone controlling them enough to create an entire anti-atom. NASA estimates that creating a gram of antimatter would cost about $62.5 trillion.

But why does antimatter matter? It may hold the key to understanding one of the universe’s biggest mysteries: why there’s something rather than nothing. Cosmologists say that during the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. But everything around us today is mostly matter, meaning either that there was an excess of matter created, or that matter and antimatter don’t quite follow the rules physicists expect.

Recently, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider spotted 16 instances of the heaviest exotic antimatter nucleus observed to date: antihyperhydrogen-4.

To explore what this breakthrough means for antimatter research, SciFri producer Charles Bergquist talks to Dr. Jamie Dunlop, associate department chair for nuclear physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Different Bird Species May Team Up For MigrationThis season, billions of birds will take to the skies as they flock to their wintering grounds. With so many different species on the move, they’re bound to run into each other. A new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that this mixing and mingling might not be coincidental.

In fact, different bird species could have their own social networks that might boost each others’ survival.

SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with lead author Dr. Joely DeSimone, migration ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Appalachian Laboratory, about untangling avian relationships.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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Shark fishing is alive and well, but the fishermen who do it are increasingly prioritizing conservation. And, an unknown ant was spotted in Manhattan in 2011, and it quickly spread through New York City. We now know what it is.

Fishing For—And Saving—Sharks off the Jersey ShoreAt an undisclosed beach at 5:30 p.m. in New Jersey, shark fisherman AJ Rotondella and two clients wait for beachgoers to leave. Once the beach is empty, Rotondella cuts up some chunks of fish as bait, and casts lines into the water.

“I shark fish, shark fish, shark fish, eat pizza, and shark fish … that’s pretty much it,” Rotondella said. “Waking up in the morning … wide open ocean, anything could be anywhere at any time. And I think that’s fascinating. No matter how long you’ve done this, you’ve never seen it all.”

He has always loved fishing, and got into shark fishing 13 years ago, when his brother told him they could catch sharks from the beach. They caught two on their first day and could not catch another shark for the rest of the year.

“That really got me interested because I knew it was possible, but I couldn’t do it again,” he said. “I … absolutely obsessed over this.”

But Rotondella had a steep learning curve ahead of him. By trial and error, sometimes staying on a beach for multiple days, he learned how to read the tides, water temperatures, currents, and even phases of the moon to figure out how to track the sharks.

Read the full story at sciencefriday.com.

Scientists Identify The ‘ManhattAnt’ Spreading Across NYCNew York City is home to more than 8 million people. But there’s another massive population below their feet: ants.

In 2011, when surveying ant populations on Broadway and Times Square, researchers got quite a surprise: an unidentified species of ant, which was soon dubbed the “ManhattAnt.” Since then, it has become the second-most populous ant species in New York City.

Earlier this year, the first study on this unidentified species was released. It concluded that this species, Lasius emarginatus, likely hitchhiked from Europe to the US. Though their populations have grown tremendously, it’s unclear how the ants are interacting with New York’s native ants.

Joining guest host Sophie Bushwick to discuss this ant species is Dr. Clint Penick, assistant professor of insect ecology at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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A new study suggests that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs may have originated from the outer parts of the solar system. And, invasive spotted lanternflies often lay eggs on vehicles and shipped goods. Now researchers are training dogs to sniff them out before they hatch.

Asteroid That Killed The Dinosaurs Was A Carbon-Rich RockAround 66 million years ago, an asteroid slammed into the Earth, blasted debris everywhere, plummeted the planet into cold darkness, and ended the age of dinosaurs. (Though birds survived, of course.)

It might be the most famous disaster in our planet’s history, but scientists still have plenty of questions about it. Like, what was the asteroid made of? And where did it come from? A new study in the journal Science offers up some long-awaited answers.

Guest host Rachel Feltman speaks with study author Dr. Mario Fischer-Gödde, a geochemist at the University of Cologne in Germany.

Training Dogs To Stop The Spread Of Spotted LanternfliesIn 10 years, the spotted lanternfly has gone from non-existent in the U.S. to being established in at least 16 states. They’re quite distinct: The adults measure about an inch long, they’ve got striking red and black markings, and are, as the name suggests, spotted. And they’ve got a worrisome tendency to chow down on certain plants, including grapevines, and some fruit and hardwood trees.

Spotted lanternflies are able to spread so effectively in part because they tend to lay eggs on things that travel from state to state: shipping supplies, vehicles, and lumber.

There’s a new tactic to detect spotted lanternfly eggs before they can hatch: training dogs to sniff them out. Guest host Rachel Feltman speaks to two researchers behind this project: Dr. Nathan Hall, director of the Canine Olfaction Research and Education Laboratory at Texas Tech in Lubbock, and Dr. Erica Feuerbacher, associate professor of applied animal welfare and behavior at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Read the full story here.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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Eels have fascinated humans for thousands of years, even captivating big thinkers like Aristotle and Freud. Despite having been around for some 200 million years, eels are still rather mysterious creatures. For example, scientists still aren’t sure exactly how they spawn.

But those unanswered questions haven’t stopped humans from wanting to eat them. So much so that they’re now endangered in some areas—and a lucrative criminal enterprise has risen up to poach baby eels from the wild.

Guest host Rachel Feltman talks with Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of Slippery Beast: A True Crime History, with Eels about her journey into the wild world of eels.

Read an excerpt of Slippery Beast: A True Crime History, with Eels.

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Your teeth don’t just chew your food—they connect you to the deepest of deep history on Earth. Teeth have existed, in some form, for half a billion years, making them more than 250 million years older than dinosaurs. They came before the evolution of warm bloodedness, eggs, and even limbs. From that very first set of chompers emerged a bewildering and diverse group of teeth, including narwhal tusks, sharks’ pearly teeth, snake fangs, and, of course, ours.

Now teeth are the subject of a new book called Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth from Hagfish to Humans. Guest host Maggie Koerth talks with zoologist and author Dr. Bill Schutt about how teeth evolved, why they’re so neat, and what we can learn from studying them.

Read an excerpt of Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth from Hagfish to Humans.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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Think about the sounds you hear on a daily basis. Air conditioners whirring, keyboards clicking, cars honking, mosquitos buzzing, dishes clanking. Now picture yourself in a jungle. What do you hear? How do you make sense of it?

Today on Radiolab for Kids, we eavesdrop on the world of animals. We bring you a story of two humans decoding animal sounds in nature. Science journalist Ari Daniel Shapiro tells us about Klaus Zuberbuehler and his time in the Tai forest of Africa, where he worked to uncover what a Diana monkey is trying to say. We then head to a prairie, where Con Slobodchikoff dives into the world of prairie dogs chirps. Both researchers decipher the “words” these animals are using to communicate to figure out what they talk about.

See more:

Klaus Zuberbuelher and his work in the Tai Forest of West Africa.

Con Slobodchikoff and his work on prairie dogs.

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Production help from Tanya Chawla. Sound mixing by Joe Plourde.

Visit the Terrestrials website to learn more about the show, meet our team, listen to the songs and discover fun activities, drawing prompts, music how-tos and games that educators, parents and families might enjoy together.

If you’d like to “badger” a future expert, suggest story ideas or feedback, email us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

Listen to just the songs from Terrestrials.

Sign up for Radiolab’s newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up here.

Radiolab for Kids and Terrestrials are supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Follow Radiolab on Instagram, X and Facebook @radiolab.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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New York: The city that never sleeps, the concrete jungle where dreams are made of and more recently ... home to a mysterious ant spreading across the city — before continuing across metropolitan and even state lines.

Scientists first noticed this ant — now dubbed the ManhattAnt — in 2011. Nobody knew where it came from, and it was largely ignored until it began taking the streets by storm. Now, these ants have become true New Yorkers: Climbing high-rises and speed walking across the city. They're even giving other ant species in the city some competition and researchers think they could spread from Maine to Georgia.

Read more of science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce's story here.

Interested in hearing more animal news? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

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New research suggests that polymetallic nodules found 13,000 feet deep produce “dark oxygen” by electrolyzing water. Also, at higher altitudes, the air is less dense, which makes it harder for birds in flight to generate lift. The turkey vulture has a solution.

Deep-Sea ‘Nodules’ May Produce Oxygen, Study FindsAn international team of researchers recently discovered that some 13,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, oxygen may be produced through natural electrolysis. The group found that small lumps called polymetallic nodules at the bottom of the ocean appeared to act as geo batteries, producing enough electricity to break down water and make oxygen.

That observation challenges the idea that photosynthesis is necessary to produce enough oxygen for living organisms. The researchers hypothesize that this could be a source of oxygen for deep-sea creatures. But while it gives some answers as to how life can thrive at the bottom of the sea, it also raises a lot of new questions.

Science Friday guest host and producer Charles Bergquist is joined by the lead electrochemist of the study, Dr. Franz Geiger, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, to answer some of these questions.

One Bird’s Physics Trick For Flying At High AltitudesIf you’ve ever taken a trip to a higher elevation, you know that the air gets thinner as you go up. If you’re not acclimated to the altitude, it can feel harder to breathe. That thinner air also makes it more difficult for birds and airplanes to fly, because it’s harder to produce the lift forces in thinner air. But it turns out that turkey vultures have a way of dealing with that problem.

Researchers observed turkey vultures in flight at different altitudes and found that rather than flapping harder or more rapidly to deal with decreased lift, the turkey vulture exploits the lower drag in thinner air to fly faster, using increased speed to help balance the lift equation. Dr. Jonathan Rader, a postdoctoral research associate in biology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and an author of a report on this research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, joins SciFri’s Charles Bergquist to explain how flying things work to adapt to different flight conditions.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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Radiolab for Kids is back!

Is there such a thing as a good cage? Happy gorillas, deft landscape architects and neurologists show us that there just might be. We go back to the late 1970s to relive the moment when zoos began to change—literally the moment that the modern zoo was born, as embodied by a few tentative steps of a gorilla named Kiki. That story, told by zoo director David Hancocks, architect Grant Jones, and gorilla keeper Violet Sunde.

Also check out:

Marina Belozerskaya's book

The Medici Giraffe

Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Ellen Horne, senior producer. Lulu Miller assistant producer. Production executive Dean Cappello, Production support by Sarah Pellegrini, Bret Baier, Scott Goldberg, Alaska Keyville, Sam Leviander, Avir Mitra, Ryan Scamole and Jacob Weinberg. Also, very special thanks to Tamar Llewellyn, and Amy Bush's class at Northstar Academy for their musical contributions.

Visit the Radiolab for Kids/Terrestrials website to learn more about the show, meet our team, listen to the songs and discover fun activities, drawing prompts, music how-tos, and games that educators, parents, and families might enjoy together.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.

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As the James Webb Space Telescope marks two years of operations, NASA unveils a new image of two galaxies interacting. And, new research shows that cats’ tendency to scratch is affected by stress, certain kinds of play, and how active they are at night.

Galaxies ‘Dance’ In Stunning New JWST ImageThe James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful telescope created by humans, has been successfully operating in space for two years now. Since its launch, the telescope has dazzled astronomers and the public with new kinds of scientific data about the universe and with stunning, highly detailed pictures. And on its two-year anniversary, the telescope continues to return impressive visuals: NASA released a mesmerizing image today of two intermingling galaxies nicknamed the Penguin and the Egg.

Jason Dinh, climate editor at Atmos, joins guest host Kathleen Davis to talk about that and other top science stories of the week, including a new study that shows that children with autism have a unique microbiome, new FEMA rules that factor in climate change when rebuilding in flood-prone areas, and how invasive insects use hitchhiking to spread their populations.

Why Some Cats Scratch Furniture So MuchIf you have a cat, you’ve probably endured your fair share of unwanted furniture scratching. Maybe you’ve purchased scratching posts, rearranged your furniture, or played with your cats before bed, to try to prevent it. And yet, you wake up to shredded upholstery or bedding.

Furniture scratching is often a stress response, and cats who live with kids or are more playful and active at night are more likely to scratch.

SciFri producer Kathleen Davis spoke with Dr. Yasemin Salgirli Demirbas, a physiology professor at Ankara University in Turkey and visiting fellow at the Atlantic Veterinary College at the University of Prince Edward Island, about her recently published study which tracked why some cats are more prone to scratching destruction than others and explored the best way for cat owners to achieve a mostly intact living room.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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Earlier this year, the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington announced that pandas would be returning to the capitol. This news was met with great fanfare because the zoo’s resident pandas had returned to China last fall, leaving the District panda-less for the first time in more than 50 years.

After the pandas left D.C. in the fall, SciFri producer Rasha Aridi and journalist Aja Drain dug into the juicy political history of panda conservation and how it shaped panda research. In this segment from December 2023, they look back at 80 years of panda conservation, and how “panda diplomacy” paved the way for groundbreaking science. And they try to answer the multi-million dollar question: Was it all worth it?

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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A new study used machine learning to analyze elephant vocalizations and identified “contact rumbles” that appear to function as names. Also, on a hike in the Badlands, a family found a dinosaur bone sticking out of a rock. It joined the few teenage T. rex fossils ever discovered.

Elephants Seem To Use Names For Each OtherScientists have long known that elephants exhibit some advanced social behaviors that we humans find familiar, including tool use and funerals.

And a new study from Colorado State a university offers compelling evidence that African savannah elephants might engage in another human social behavior: having names for each other. Researchers applied machine learning to a database of 600 elephant vocalizations, which included “contact rumbles,” vocalizations that researchers observed that other elephants responded to. The algorithm identified repeated sections of those recordings that might represent names.

When the researchers played these possible “name” sections of audio to pairs of elephants—one of which was the suspected owner of the name—the appropriate elephant responded at a rate significantly better than random chance.

Guest host Annie Minoff is joined by Tim Revell, deputy editor at New Scientist, to talk about this and other science stories from the week, including the possible effects a freezing interstellar cloud had on Earth a few million years ago, the biological effects of short term spaceflight on private citizen passengers on SpaceX flights, and a new species of pterosaur found in the Australian outback with a killer tongue.

Kids Discover Extremely Rare T. Rex FossilFor one family, a summer hike in the badlands of North Dakota turned into the discovery of a lifetime when they spotted a fossil jutting out of a rock. Two brothers, their dad, and a cousin found the fossil, and with the help of some dinosaur experts, they eventually learned it was a T. rex.

The fossil wasn’t just of any T. rex, but a teenage one. These fossils are incredibly rare—there are only a handful of them in the world.

Guest host Annie Minoff discusses this dino discovery and what it means for science with 12-year-old Jessin Fisher, a budding paleontologist and one of the brothers who discovered the fossil, as well as Dr. Tyler Lyson, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Colorado who helped excavate the fossil.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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For the first time, scientists have recorded how salps form chains and swim in corkscrews to reach the ocean’s surface each night. Also, a wind utility company in Wyoming is trying to make wind turbines more visible to birds by painting just one blade black.

The Small Jelly Creatures That Link Up And Swim in CorkscrewsSalps are small, transparent barrel-shaped jelly creatures. They are sometimes confused with jellyfish, but they are so much more complex. Salps have nervous, circulatory, and digestive systems that include a brain, heart, and intestines.

Salps are known to link themselves together in long chains. And each night they journey from the depths of the ocean to the surface to feast on algae. New research shows that the key to their efficiency is swimming in corkscrews.

Ira talks with Dr. Kelly Sutherland, associate professor of biology at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Oregon, about her work studying salp swimming patterns.

Painting Wind Turbine Blades To Prevent Bird CollisionsWind energy is expected to be a big part of the transition away from fossil fuels. But that comes with consequences, including the potential for more deadly collisions between turbines and birds and bats. One experiment underway in Wyoming is studying a potentially game-changing—and simple—solution to this problem.

In the Mountain West, large and iconic avian species—such as owls, turkey vultures and golden eagles—are consistently colliding with the human world. At the Teton Raptor Center in Wilson, Wyo., veterinarians, avian scientists and volunteers often treat birds for lead poisoning, crashes into infrastructure, gunshot wounds or other injuries.

For the center’s conservation director, Bryan Bedrosian, his work is about preserving the wildlife that makes Wyoming special.

“We should be proud of the fact that we in Wyoming have some of the best wild natural spaces and some of the best wildlife populations,” he said. I think, unfortunately, it comes with a higher degree of responsibility.”

Wyoming is a critical habitat area for many species, especially golden eagles. Tens of thousands live here year-round and the state is also a huge migration corridor between Alaska and Mexico. Unlike its cousin the bald eagle, the golden eagle population is stable at best and could potentially decline in parts of the U.S. Bedrosian said wind energy growth is a threat for a species that has always been “at the top of the food chain.”

Read the full story at sciencefriday.com.

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NEW YORK — A Michigan dairy worker has been diagnosed with bird flu — the second human case associated with an outbreak in U.S. dairy cows.

The patient had mild eye symptoms and has recovered, U.S. and Michigan health officials said in announcing the case Wednesday. The worker had been in contact with cows presumed to be infected, and the risk to the public remains low, officials said.

A nasal swab from the person tested negative for the virus, but an eye swab tested positive, "indicating an eye infection," the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement.

The first case happened in late March, when a farmworker in Texas was diagnosed in what officials called the first known instance globally of a person catching this version of bird flu from a mammal. That patient also reported only eye inflammation and recovered.

Since 2020, a bird flu virus has been spreading among more animal species — including dogs, cats, skunks, bears and even seals and porpoises — in scores of countries. The detection in U.S. livestock earlier this year was an unexpected twist that sparked questions about food safety and whether it would start spreading among humans.

That hasn't happened, although there's been a steady increase of reported infections in cows. As of Wednesday, the virus had been confirmed in 51 dairy herds in nine states, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department.

Fifteen of the herds were in Michigan. Health officials there have declined to say how many people exposed to infected cattle have been tested or monitored.

The virus has been found in high levels in the raw milk of infected cows, but government officials say pasteurized products sold in grocery stores are safe because heat treatment has been confirmed to kill the virus.

The new case marks the third time a person in the United States has been diagnosed with what's known as Type A H5N1 virus. In 2022, a prison inmate in a work program picked it up while killing infected birds at a poultry farm in Montrose County, Colorado. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered. That predated the virus's appearance in cows. Copyright 2024 NPR

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She was nimble, she was oh-so-very quick – with the perfect moniker to match.

A 6-year-old canine from of Ellicott City, Md., named Nimble beat out 350 competitors to become the first mixed-breed dog to win the Westminster Kennel Club's Masters Agility Championship in New York.

"I was surprised," Nimble's handler Cynthia Hornor told NPR. "But she proved that she's the little engine that could."

Nimble, who finished the race in a blistering 28.76 seconds, is a first in more ways than one: She also became the first dog from the 12-inch height division to take home the top prize since the agility competition — itself the first WKC event to allow mixed breeds to compete — was introduced in 2014.

Dogs compete in the 8-inch, 12-inch, 16-inch, and 20-inch categories. The top 10 dogs from each height category go on to compete in the championships.

While she made two firsts, Nimble also had at least two big aces in her paws.

Despite coming in an underdog — as part of the non-purebred category the WKC refers to as "All American Dogs" — Nimble is a combination of two pedigrees made up of winners: a border collie-papillon mix. Border collies have won eight of the last 11 agility titles, while the top three finishers in this year's competition were all papillons.

Nimble's second secret weapon: her owner and handler Hornor, who won the Masters Agility title in 2023 with her other dog Truant, a 20-inch border collie.

"This is going to be a fun run," a Fox Sports announcer predicted on Saturday as Nimble eagerly waited for the clock to starther final run.

When it did, the pointy-eared black and white pup rocketed her way through a series of hoops, seesaws, ladders and more with hardly any cueing needed from Horner.

"I said it was going to be fun, but I didn't know it was going to be an e-ticket!" the announcer said halfway through Nimble's race, with eager crowds cheering in the background.

Hornor says she hopes Nimble's big win will be enough to put to bed any false ideas that mixed breeds can't be as fast as purebred dogs.

"Agility is the equalizer," Hornor said. "Mixed-breed dogs can be just as fast as purebred dogs."

Nimble's reward for proving it?

"She got steak, and she got to play," said Hornor. "She just really loves playing, so her reward is being able to go run and play."

And if there's one lesson Hornor wants other dog owners to take away from Nimble's big win, it's that agility is a great way for owners to bond with their dogs.

"It's the thing I enjoy the most about this sport," said Hornor, who has been an agility trainer for more than 20 years. "When I see my students, I love seeing their bond grow with their dogs because of agility." Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Pulitzer Prize finalist Tommy Tomlinson's new book, Dogland, is an inside account of the iconic Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. In the book, Tomlinson explores the question: Are those dogs happy? The question takes him on a deeper quest to understand the enduring relationships between dogs and humans. Tomlinson joins us to discuss. Plus, we hear from listeners about their love for their canine companions.

This segment is guest-hosted by Kousha Navidar

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When a critter meets its end at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, it ends up on a necropsy table—where one of the zoo’s veterinary pathologists will take a very close look at it, in what is the animal version of an autopsy. They’ll poke and prod, searching for clues about the animal’s health. What they do—or don’t—find can be used to improve the care of living animals, both in the zoo and in the wild.

On stage in Washington, D.C., Ira talks with Dr. Kali Holder, veterinary pathologist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, about her work, and they embark on a case of CSI: Zoo.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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We look into the engineering reasons why the Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed after a ship crashed into it. Also, a new analysis finds that more viruses spread from humans to animals than from animals to humans.

The Engineering Behind Why The Bridge In Baltimore CollapsedOn Tuesday, a large section of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed after an enormous container ship lost power and collided with the structure. Two people were rescued from the water, two bodies were recovered, and four others are unaccounted for and presumed dead.

The structural failure of the bridge, which cut off a key roadway and a major international shipping port, has many wondering why this happened. Does the fault lie in aging infrastructure or in the manner the container ship struck one of the bridge’s main supports?

Guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks to journalist Swapna Krishna about the engineering reasons behind why the bridge collapsed and other top stories in science this week, including rockets NASA is launching during next week’s solar eclipse, new research about how Homo sapiens traveled out of Africa, and visualizing the magnetic field of the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Mapping Out How Viruses Jump Between SpeciesIn the world of emerging infectious diseases, one of the looming threats comes from the so-called zoonotic diseases—pathogens that somehow make the jump from an animal host to a human one. This includes pathogens such as COVID-19 and avian influenza, a.k.a. bird flu, which can sometimes cross the species divide. But a new analysis published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution finds that when it comes to viruses, more viral species appear to have jumped from humans to animals than the other way around. And even more cases of interspecies transmission don’t involve humans at all.

Cedric Tan, a PhD student in the University College London Genetics Institute and Francis Crick Institute, joins guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross to talk about the analysis, and what it tells us about our place in a global web of viruses.

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A baby reticulated giraffe at a Tennessee zoo made international headlines last month when word got out that she was born without her spots. It was thought to be the only living giraffe in the world to hold the title — that is, until a wild spotless giraffe was, well, spotted at a reserve in Africa.

The Giraffe Conservation Foundation announced in a Monday news release that the spotless giraffe was found roaming around the Mount Etjo Safari Lodge, a private game reserve in Namibia. The foundation says the Angolan giraffe is the first ever spotless giraffe found in the wild.

"Before the discovery of the Namibian spotless Angolan giraffe, there were only two records of such [a] brown giraffe, both in zoos in Japan in 1972 and most recently in the USA," the news release says.

Giraffes are born at 6 feet tall and with a unique set of spots, meaning no two giraffes have the same coat pattern. As for babies born without spots? Scientists aren't quite sure.

Julian Fennessy, the foundation's co-founder and director of conservation, said in the news release that "The lack of spots could be caused by genetic mutations or recessive genotype in one or more genes related to the pattern, but without detailed genetic analysis, these are mere speculations."

Kipekee, which means "unique" in Swahili, is the spotless baby giraffe who was born on July 31 at Brights Zoo in Tennessee. She is a reticulated giraffe that is found in northern and northeastern Kenya, and possibly parts of southern Somalia and southern Ethiopia, according to the foundation.

The giraffe found in Namibia is an Angolan giraffe, which make up about half of Africa's giraffe population, and are found in central Botswana and most parts of Namibia, with scattered populations throughout Zimbabwe.

Unfortunately, seven of the nine subspecies of giraffes are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, many of which are vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. The Giraffe Conservation Foundation says there are approximately 117,000 giraffes in Africa, which means there's only one giraffe for every four African elephants left in the wild.

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A handful of wildlife enthusiasts were probably hoping to catch a glimpse of Katmai National Park's famous brown bears when they logged on to a livestream of a remote Alaska mountaintop last Tuesday. But the resident celebrities were nowhere to be seen when a distressed hiker walked into view instead and pleaded for help.

The scene unfolded on the Dumpling Mountain livestream, one of 12 camera views operated by Explore.org inside the Katmai National Park.

Around 3:30 p.m. local time on Sept. 5, a man in a green rain jacket, wet and disheveled, appeared on screen and looked straight into the lens, clearly mouthing the words "help me." He returned a few minutes later, giving a thumbs-down signal.

"There is someone distressed on the camera," one viewer posted in the rolling comments beneath the stream. That message was seen by a volunteer chat moderator, who in turn messaged a Katmai Park Ranger.

After reviewing the footage, the ranger mobilized a search and rescue team, which found the man just about three hours later, not far from the site of the web camera.

The man was ultimately unharmed, Cynthia Hernandez, a spokesperson for the National Park Service, told NPR in an email. She added that the rangers were notified of the distressed hiker directly thanks to the concerned viewers.

When the chat moderator shared this news with the viewers, there was a flood of kind words and a sweet celebration.

"Aaaand I'm crying because I'm so relieved," posted the user who originally flagged the man's appearance. "Those rangers made it up there fast!"

Dumpling Mountain isn't typically a popular livestream The cameras have been around since 2012, but really started to take off in 2014, with the advent of Fat Bear Week — a delightful man-made tournament in which the public votes on which of the park's bears has grown the most rotund as preparation for their winter hibernation. (This year's Fat Bear Week has yet to be announced, but the competition usually lands in early October).

Roughly 10 million people tuned in to the Katmai live streams last year, according to Mike Fitz, a naturalist with Explore.org who previously worked as a ranger at the park.

But most of those views went to the cameras trained on Brooks Falls, where the bears make daily stops during salmon spawning season.

Sitting about 2,200 feet above sea level, the Dumpling Mountain camera is more of a "scenery cam than a wildlife cam," Fitz said.

The camera auto-pans across a sweeping vista: Colorful alpine tundra shrubs dot the landscape while the largest lake in a U.S. national park (Naknek) stretches out in the foreground. Some of Katmai's 14 active volcanoes are visible in the distance.

But that height comes with tempestuous weather, which can often obscure the view and offers little in the way of shelter and food for the kind of big-ticket animals viewers crave. When NPR checked the stream on Friday morning, only 12 people were watching.

The camera itself is about 2 miles away from the nearest trail, which is described by the National Park Service as a "strenuous hike" featuring "steep portions" and some overgrown areas.

The climb rises 800 feet over 1.5 miles and ends about 2.5 miles from the actual summit of the mountain, but an unmaintained footpath continues on for a while before petering out.

Fitz says that makes it "a great place to find some quick solitude away from the river, away from the bears," but also shrouds the path in danger.

It's still unclear how the hiker found the remote camera Cell service and shelter can be hard to come by on the rounded and short-shrubbed mountain peak.

And, during poor conditions, like the kind that set in on Sept. 5, "You really have no sense of direction," Fitz said. "The landmarks you saw on the way up disappear when the clouds come down."

The 4.1-million-acre Katmai National Park is tucked between the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea, making it a prime spot for storms in any season.

Rain and wind were detectable on the camera Tuesday. Due to fog, the visibility appeared to be about 50 feet or less.

It's still unclear how the hiker found the camera installation. Fitz says the collection of solar panels and wind turbines sticks out amid the short vegetation, but it still isn't huge — maybe about 20 to 30 square feet total.

"This was certainly a first for us," Fitz said of the hiker asking for help, though wildlife viewers around the world have flagged pressing emergencies before, like an injured elephant at a Kenyan wildlife sanctuary.

"Our webcam viewers, collectively, are very sharp-eyed and they don't miss much," he added.

That was evidenced again on Sunday, when Dumpling Mountain's viewers, still recovering from the stress of seeing the hiker, caught sight of a big thing in a slim six seconds of the stream: A brown bear, rambling across the camera's view, miles away from his typical hangouts.

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The Australian government is looking for public feedback on a plan to tackle one of the country's most hairy issues: stray cats.

Stray cats — or "feral" cats, as they're called by Australian officials — kill more than 1.5 billion native mammals, birds, reptiles and frogs as well as 1.1 billion invertebrates in the country each year, the government says. They can also carry disease.

Tanya Plibersek, Australia's Minister for the Environment and Water, announced last week a plan offering a raft of possible new strategies to tame the country's feral cat population, including regional laws that would impose curfews on pet cats and require that owners keep their pets indoors.

"When domesticated cats are living inside our homes, snuggled up at the end of our beds, we rightly love them. But feral cats are the opposite of adorable. They are walking, stalking, ruthless killers," Plibersek said in a statement.

"We are declaring war on feral cats. And today, we are setting up our battle plan to win that war."

One recommendation in the wide-ranging proposal is to enact state- and territory-wide legislation to "require responsible pet cat ownership." That could include things like curfews as well as neutering and limits on the number of cats per household.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Victoria allows councils to mandate that pet cats be kept inside during certain hours and the Australian Capital Territory sets a curfew for cats purchased after July 1, while New South Wales and Western Australia have no restrictions.

Australia has long struggled to contain its stray cat population, which authorities say currently threatens several species such as the bilby and the numbat and has cost the government millions of dollars to combat.

Not everyone is on board with Plibersek's plan.

The Cat Protection Society of New South Wales said in a statement that the minister was creating a "moral panic" about cats and "demonising a single species" while failing to address other issues plaguing the environment.

The predicament is not specific to Australia. One study estimated that stray and outdoor pet cats in the U.S. kill between 1.3 and 4 billion birds and between 6.3 and 22.3 billion mammals in the country each year.

Yet some critics doubt that the research is strong enough to warrant efforts to combat the stray cat population and question the ethics of using lethal means to do so.

But Bill Lynn, a researcher and founder of the animal ethics think tank PAN Works, says the main causes of biodiversity loss around the world are the activities of human — not cats.

He adds that cats have helped protect threatened species in some areas by eliminating their predators, and notes that though there are proven instances of cats harming local wildlife, there is a lack of evidence to blame the animals for widespread ecological damage.

"If you look at the reasoning and the evidence for the scientific case against cats, it's extraordinarily weak," Lynn said. "Not that it's weak in specific instances. It can be very strong in specific instances, but one example will become generalized to the landscape overall."

Australia's plan is open for public comments through December.

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Maia the dog was found exhausted but in good health on Saturday after three weeks of evading capture at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport — the busiest in the world. She had escaped from her crate while it was being loaded onto a flight from Atlanta to the Dominican Republic.

Paula Rodriguez was traveling from her home in the Dominican Republic to San Francisco for a vacation on Aug. 18 when things took a turn for the worse. Her visa was canceled, CNN reported, and she had to spend the night in a detention center before a return flight home the following day.

But when Rodriguez went to board her flight home, Maia was nowhere to be found, and border enforcement officers demanded she get on her flight without her dog. Two days later, Delta Air Lines told Rodriguez the dog was on her way to the plane when staff opened her crate and she escaped, CNN reported.

Delta said in a statement to NPR that the airline worked with airport staff to search for the dog, including "around-the-clock" visual searches as conditions allowed and nighttime searches with night-vision goggles.

According to a GoFundMe page started by Rodriguez's sister, Maia and her owner had been inseparable for almost seven years, "which is probably why Maia so desperately broke through her kennel bag when they were separated," the page reads. "Maia needed to get back to Paula, especially after a very stressful travel."

Robin Allgood, who is known as a volunteer animal recovery specialist, created a Find Maia Community Facebook page at the end of August to help reunite Rodriguez with her beloved pet. She also posted signs for the lost dog, which paid off when a call came in at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday from a FedEx cargo worker who had spotted Maia.

"He told me he had seen her at 5pm on Friday, he saw her on Thursday and several other employees had seen her during the week," Allgood wrote on Facebook. "I jumped out of bed and headed straight to the airport."

She spent the rest of the day getting the runaround from airport security and staff, Allgood said, bouncing back and forth between the FedEx cargo facility and the Delta terminal at the airport. It wasn't until approximately 6 p.m. that another call had come in that Maia had been spotted, and Allgood was eventually allowed onto the airport grounds to try and capture the missing dog.

Allgood took the matter into her own hands, literally, crawling under a cargo rack to finally catch the dog.

"I got to her and she still hadn't noticed I was behind her...I took a deep breath and just grabbed her around the waist without hesitating," she wrote. "The next thing I hear is someone yell Robin's got her!"

The Atlanta airport shared the good news over X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sunday morning.

Maia and Rodriguez were finally reunited on Sunday and have since returned home to the Dominican Republic, Allgood posted on Facebook.

According to the Department of Transportation's 2022 Air Travel Consumer Report, more than 188,000 animals were transported by airlines in 2022, during which time seven animals died and one was lost. And although incidents like Maia's are rare, they often make headlines.

A Bengal cat named Breezy escaped from her carrier at Denver International Airport in mid-August and spent several days roaming the airport grounds before she was caught and returned to her owner, NBC 9 News reported.

NPR previously reported that a 4-year-old cat named Rowdy went missing in Boston's Logan International Airport in late June 2022. Rowdy got loose from her carrier after flying in from Frankfurt, Germany. Airport staff, animal shelter volunteers and construction workers spent three weeks trying to catch the cat before she was successfully apprehended.

And in May 2022, a dog named Rocky roamed around the Tampa International Airport for more than a week before he was caught and reunited with his owners. Rocky had slipped out of his collar while at the curbside baggage claim, Tampa Bay 10 News reported, and was eventually found hiding in bushes outside the airport.

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Flamingos have been popping up in the most unusual of places since Hurricane Idalia blew through parts of the U.S. Southeast last week.

In recent days, dozens of sightings have been reported from Texas to Florida, as far north as Ohio and most states in between. And though flamingos can be found in parts of Florida, it's safe to say they don't frequently hang out farther north in states such as Kentucky, Tennessee and North and South Carolina.

The birds likely got caught up in Hurricane Idalia last week, according to Nate Swick, the American Birding Association's digital communications manager. That's a "fairly common phenomenon" for birds, but not for flamingos, he said.

"We're seeing flamingos all over the place. We're seeing them in places that we didn't expect them," Swick said. Elated bird watchers have been searching high and low for them. "... and then once the pair of birds were found in southern Ohio, sort of everything kind of broke loose."

According to counts on the American Birding Association's Rare Bird Alert Facebook page, there have been sightings in Florida, Ohio, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas and Kentucky.

Though American flamingos are native to Florida, the birds were hunted to near-extinction at the beginning of the 1900s and make up a mere 1% of the global flamingo population, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. That's why Swick and other bird enthusiasts were shocked to see flamingos hanging out on the Florida panhandle as well.

However, there is a sizable population of American flamingos on the Yucatan Peninsula, which separates the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, Swick said.

And photos of the flamingos found in Florida have tags linked to breeding populations in the Yucatan, Swick said. "So, we do know those birds mostly came from the Yucatan Peninsula. And they, you know, they got caught up in the storm and just kind of went with it."

In terms of how the flamingos navigated a major storm, Swick said there's no definitive explanation. He said they could have gotten caught in the storm and flown with the wind, or perhaps had been in the eye of Idalia and moved with it until the storm broke apart.

What likely happened, Swick explained, is that the birds were either in Yucatan or on their way to Cuba when the storm hit them. The flamingos went with the winds instead of fighting them, as the eastern portion of the storm drove the birds up the western side of Florida.

But flamingos are big, strong birds, more than capable of making their way back home, Swick said, like they did in 2019 following Hurricane Barry. That storm hit the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico and drove a small handful of flamingos to western Tennessee and Missouri.

"They kind of hung around there for a little while, and then eventually started making their way back," Swick said. "I think the flamingos are likely to start heading towards the coast, whether or not they know which direction to go, I don't know. Birds are capable of things that we cannot imagine." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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The rare baby giraffe that was born without any spots and has taken the world by storm now has a name: Kipekee.

The moniker, which means "unique" in Swahili, was revealed Tuesday morning on the Today show.

David Bright, director of the Brights Zoo in Limestone, Tenn., said nearly 40,000 people from around the world voted to name the 5-week-old calf, believed to be the only one of its kind on the planet.

The public had four options to choose from, including Firyali, meaning unusual or extraordinary; Shakiri, which translates to she is most beautiful; and Jamella, signifying one of great beauty.

Bright said, Kipekee won by approximately 6,000 votes.

"A lot of guests said it was the easiest name for a child to say," he told viewers.

Bright had previously told WJHL that the zoo looked at thousands of names and their meanings before settling on the four choices.

"Those four are the four the family are all really attached to," Bright said.

So far, he said, the spotless superstar is "very laid back, still curious about everything, checking everything out every day."

According to the zoo, giraffe experts believe Kipekee is the only solid-color reticulated giraffe living anywhere in the world. Reticulated giraffes are a subspecies of giraffes native to the horn of Africa.

Standing 14 to 15 feet tall, the creatures are the tallest land mammals in the world. When mothers give birth, the calves are already 6 feet tall, and apart from especially rare occasions, they're born covered from hoof to horn in brown spots. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Finally old enough to drink, this bantam hen had a rough start to her record-breaking life.

Who is she? Peanut is a 21-year-old hen who has spent her days on a farm in Waterloo, Michigan. Earlier this year, she was crowned the world's oldest living chicken by Guinness World Records, and was recently profiled in The Washington Post.

For context, the average lifespan for a chicken is around 5-10 years, but it can vary a lot.
And Peanut didn't have the easiest start in life. Her guardian, Marsi Parker Darwin, told All Things Considered's Mary Louise Kelly the story of how she was abandoned by her mother shortly after hatching from her shell:

"Her mother had hatched several chicks and was busy with them and the egg was cold, and I assumed dead. So I walked down to our pond to pitch it in the water where it wouldn't attract animals. And just as I was about to pitch it into the water, I thought I heard a noise, and I held the egg up to my ear. And sure enough, the egg was chirping — and against all odds, because I'm sure it had been sitting in the nest for at least a day. It was cold to the touch, but somebody was alive and well inside. And so I just decided I had to peel it out, and so I did."

As it turns out, Peanut was missing a part of her beak in development called the egg tooth, which allows chicks to break free from their egg.
From then on, Peanut was nursed to health, and taught how to chicken by Parker Darwin, who runs Darwin's Eden, a farm in Waterloo.

Listen to the full conversation with Marsi Parker Darwin by tapping the play button at the top.

What's her secret to a long life? Aside from regular TLC, Parker Darwin isn't quite sure.

She treats her hundreds of birds with plenty of attention and care, and makes sure they have a nutritious diet.
But she admits it is possible that Peanut may have gotten some special treatment, due to her unusual personality.
"Peanut was definitely a favorite, partly because she didn't think she was a chicken," Parker Darwin said. "She would jump into my arms every chance she got. She liked to ride in my pocket if possible."

How can you prove a chicken's old enough to buy a beer?

They were able to prove her age mostly using pictures, Parker Darwin said. As she's documented her family growing up, Peanut's presence has been proof for her world record.
"I took pictures from day one, through the years, and I photographed her with my nieces [and] nephews that loved to hold her, and she loves to be held. So she's just really an attention monger. So I had a lot of pictures of a lot of people holding her."

So, what now?

The Guinness world record for the oldest chicken ever recorded is still held by Muffy, a red quill muffed American game chicken, who died in 2011 at the age of 23.
Parker Darwin thinks Peanut may get there: "I'm really hoping! I mean, she's arthritic, she dawdles around a bit, and she falls over now and then, but so do I, you know. So I think she's going to be fine."

Learn more:

Under the Henfluence: The delightful science of chickens
I got 15 mail-order chicks. They ended up changing my life
'An Immense World' dives deep into the umwelt of animals

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Ah, what simple times those were. Back in March, before the catastrophic wildfires and record temperatures of summer, before the Wagner insurrection, the plummeting plane, the many indictments in the U.S. ... goats were in the news. Four or five of them (accounts vary) were seen running wildly through the streets of San Francisco. Because of our blog's name, we felt obliged to cover this important story and make the very important point that goats do not fare well on noisy, busy city streets. At the time there were a couple of theories about the escape: Maybe they busted lose from a herd of goats who are hired out to eat weeds. Or maybe they engineered a dramatic exit from a truck bound for the goat slaughterhouse.

I did my best, dear readers. I tried to crack the mystery of the runaway goats.I spoke to several grazing companies — businesses that have a ... staff ... of goats who are rented out to eat weeds on various properties in the San Francisco area.

No one took responsibility for the mid-March escapees.

Here's what Deb Campbell, spokeswoman for San Francisco Animal Care and Control, told me: "I don't think it was conclusive whether they were part of a local company that provides goats for grazing or being transported as meat goats and got loose. I don't think we ever concluded." Either way, she says, the runaway animals were "either ushered back to where they belong or picked up by the people who own them." And presumably they have recovered from their urban trauma.

Because they did look traumatized in the video footage. "Those goats were very upset, they were animals in crisis state," says Genevieve Church, executive director of City Grazing, which sends out groups of goats from their 110 or so ruminants on weed-ingesting jobs in San Francisco.

Church says those escaped goats were not from her herd, but she says there was an escape from a City Grazing group a few weeks later. A human "cut through one of the park department fences and chased our goats out of a grazing areas. Suddenly there were about 40 goats on the hillside, on the street up above Ghirardelli Square on Fisherman's Wharf. The manager grabbed a bale of hay, put it on his shoulders and you can watch those goats following him back up the hill into the pen within 30 minutes. That is what rewards-based training is all about."

She also says the City Grazing goats are raised in a home base in the city of San Francisco so they are acclimated to urban stimuli. Her escapees were very well-mannered, she reports. "They weren't panicked like those goats [in mid-March]. For all the world it looked as if our goats were stopping at a stop sign."

Since the various goat escapes of spring, Campbell reports, "We haven't had any more goats running amok. Knock on wood, they're all around the city doing their duty. What better way to clear brush than to have happy goats getting snacks and getting to places where people can't go. They enjoy their work."

And when I get to write a story about goats, can I just say I enjoy my work too!

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TORONTO — Police west of Toronto on Wednesday warned drivers to keep their car windows closed after a truck spilled crates carrying 5 million bees onto a road.

Halton Regional Police said they received a call around 6:15 a.m. reporting the bee crates had come loose from a truck and spilled onto Guelph Line, north of Dundas Street, in Burlington, Ontario, just west of Toronto.

It was "quite the scene," Constable Ryan Anderson said.

"Crates were literally on the road and swarms of bees were flying around," he said. "The initial beekeeper that was on scene was apparently stung a few times."

The scene prompted police to warn drivers to close their windows as they passed by and for pedestrians to avoid the area.

About an hour after police put out a notice on social media, several beekeepers were in touch with police offering to help. Six or seven beekeepers eventually arrived at the scene, Anderson said.

By around 9:15 a.m., police said most of the 5 million bees had been safely collected and the crates were being hauled away. Some crates had been left behind for the uncollected bees to return to them on their own.

A colony of honeybees in summer has around 50,000 to 80,000 bees, according to the Canadian Honey Council, a national association of beekeepers.

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Seventy miles inland from the Bering Sea, on roadless lands beside the Kuskokwim River, three Yup'ik villages are perfect examples of the educational challenges faced in Alaska.

Teacher turnover in the state runs 25% to 30% a year, and poor attendance and low test scores have been constant issues in many rural schools.

In the mid-1980s, the villages of Akiachak, Akiak and Tuluksak, broke away from a bigger district to form the Yupiit School District. They wanted to provide an education that more fully embraced traditional Yup'ik Native knowledge.

This year, the district was allowed to operate on an academic calendar that's aligned with seasonal subsistence harvests. School leaders spent much of 2022 working to get it approved by the state.

It starts a week later than other districts in the state, and classes finish 10 days earlier. They make up the difference with an extra half hour of instruction each day.

Students can now take part in the fall moose hunt and the spring migratory bird harvest. The strategy is to pass along traditional knowledge that cannot be gained in the classroom, and attendance was already poor during seasonal harvests.

Summer culture camp In the summer, Yupiit schools offer culture camp.

On an overcast day this June, teachers and elders meet students at a large cutting table near teacher housing near the river. Originally, the morning catch of salmon was supposed to be processed at a nearby community fish camp, but those plans were scrapped because a black bear was hanging around.

Literacy coach Evelyn Esmailka wields a large ulu as she explains the differences between chum, chinook, and sockeye salmon to the small group of children. After this lesson, the kids will board drift boats to go fishing for salmon on the river.

"They're getting ready to go out. This will be for the winter supply of fish, [to] supplement the lunch program," Esmailka said.

After the fish are cleaned, they are loaded into the back of a beat-up truck to be dropped off at the school's walk-in freezer. Salmon blood, to be returned back to the river, sloshes around in plastic totes as the truck lurches along Akiachak's heavily potholed main drag.

Woody Woodgate, the school district's federal programs director, said that staff favor indigenous foods in the district's cafeterias.

"Not really taking anything away from the [United States Department of Agriculture] and the school lunch program, but most of that stuff that's on those menus is designed for people in big cities, the lower 48, and a lot of it just goes into the trash can because kids don't wanna eat the food," Woodgate said. "So if we can supplement with fish and moose, and especially fish and moose that the kids catch."

Taking part in the harvest With the exception of sockeye, the salmon runs on the Kuskokwim River are crashing, and the day the kids were out was one of the limited opportunities to fish for them. As time ticked away on the 12-hour salmon fishing opener, the order of the day was making sure that every student gets a chance to take part in the harvest.

Barron Sample was in charge of the drift net fishing component of the summer culture camp. He is in his third year as principal at the Akiachak School.

"For some of them, it's the first time actually out here on the river doing this, and the first time they're actually pulling a net," Sample said.

The 24-foot boat is one of three owned by the school district.

"There's three schools in our school district: Akiak, Tuluksak, and us, Akiachak. So, kind of in a little competition, like, 'how many did you catch today?'" Sample said.

After a 150-foot gillnet was unfurled, the boat drifted slowly down the river. The children intently watched a line of buoys for signs of life.

"Fifteen more minutes and then we're gonna reel it in," a fourth-grader informs the crew.

While the first drift only yields two fish, the second brings in around a dozen: a mixture of reds, kings, and chums. The students scream in delight as the squirming salmon are picked from the net, landing with a thud in a plastic tote.

"I wanna fish again. This is actually a good spot to fish," a fourth-grader chimes in.

After two drifts, there are plenty of fish to be processed and stored at the school for the coming winter. All the kids can talk about is going out again.

During the narrow window when fishing was allowed, the village of Akiachak felt like a ghost town. But along the river, the fish camps buzzed with activity as families processed the day's harvest in a way that has changed little over the centuries.

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Becoming invisible usually requires magic.

For some thumb-sized squid, though, all it takes is a little genetic tweaking.

Once these squid are genetically altered, "they're really hard to spot," even for their caretakers, says Joshua Rosenthal, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.

"We know we put it in this aquarium, but they might look for a half hour before they can actually see it," Rosenthal says. "They're that transparent."

The see-through squid are offering scientists a new way to study the biology of a creature that is intact and moving freely.

"It changes the way you interpret what's going on in this animal," says Caroline Albertin, a fellow at the lab. "You can look through and see their three hearts beating, you can see their brain."

The transparent squid is a genetically altered version of the hummingbird bobtail squid, a species usually found in the tropical waters from Indonesia to China and Japan. It's typically smaller than a thumb and shaped like a dumpling. And like other cephalopods, it has a relatively large and sophisticated brain.

The see-through version is made possible by a gene editing technology called CRISPR, which became popular nearly a decade ago.

Albertin and Rosenthal thought they might be able to use CRISPR to create a special squid for research. They focused on the hummingbird bobtail squid because it is small, a prodigious breeder, and thrives in lab aquariums, including one at the lab in Woods Hole.

"You can see him right there in the bottom," Rosenthal says, "just kind of sitting there, hunkered down in the sand."

The squid is one that has not been genetically altered. So it is camouflaged to blend in with the sand. That's possible because of organs in its skin called chromatophores. They contain pigment that can be manipulated to change the squid's appearance.

Albertin and Rosenthal wanted to use CRISPR to create a bobtail squid without any pigment, an albino. And they knew that in other squid, pigment depends on the presence of a gene called TDO.

"So we tried to knock out TDO," Albertin says, "and nothing happened."

It turned out that bobtail squid have a second gene that also affects pigment.

"When we targeted that gene, lo and behold we were able to get albinos," Albertin says.

Because even unaltered squid have clear blood, thin skin, and no bones, the albinos are all but transparent unless light hits them at just the right angle.

The team described their success in July in the journal Current Biology.

Lots of labs would like to use the see-through squid. So in the lab at Woods Hole, a team of technicians is putting in long hours to create more of them.

Albertin lets me look over the shoulder of a technician who's looking through a microscope at a squid embryo smaller than a BB pellet.

She's using a pair of forceps to gently remove the "jelly layers" that surround the egg sac. Later, she'll use a quartz needle to inject the embryo with genetic material that will delete the pigment genes and create a transparent squid.

Early on, Albertin and Rosenthal realized these animals would be of interest to brain scientists. So they contacted Ivan Soltesz at Stanford and Cristopher Niell at the University of Oregon.

"We said, 'Hey, you guys, we have this incredible animal, want to look at its brain," Rosenthal says. "They jumped on it."

Soltesz and Niell inserted a fluorescent dye into an area of the brain that processes visual information. The dye glows when it's near brain cells that are active.

Then the scientists projected images onto a screen in front of the squid. And the brain areas involved in vision began to glow, something that would have been impossible to see in a squid with pigment.

"The evidence that they were able to get from this made all of us kind of jump through our skins," Albertin says. "It was really exciting."

Because it suggests that her see-through squid will help scientists understand not only cephalopods, but all living creatures.

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The tale of two brothers saving hundreds of birds — the carnivorous black kites injured by glass-coated strings on kites flown in the skies of Delhi — was nominated for an Academy Award this year. The film All that Breathes, directed by Shaunak Sen and featuring the bird-saving siblings Nadeem Shehzad and Muhammad Saud, was a critical darling. Even though it didn't garner an Oscar, it won both the Golden Eye award for top documentary in Cannes and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2022. It's currently available for viewing on HBO and Max.

NPR caught up with the brothers over a video call from their home to find out how their lives have changed since their Oscar run.

Nadeem Shehzad calls the weeks after mid-July "a blood bath." It's an ideal time for kite-flying in Delhi — windy but not too windy. Instead of taking in their usual 10 or so injured birds a day, they contend with as many as 20 to 30.

The birds they save are black kites (named because their brown feathers make them appear to be black as they fly overhead). The brothers have a soft spot for this meat-eating, misunderstoodbird from the hawk family. People think of them as vicious hunters but they hunt only when they need to, say the brothers. For the most part, the birds are scavengers, feeding off scraps from slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants that pile up in Delhi garbage dumps. Because they're not considered attractive and feed on rotting flesh, they're an unloved bird. Some people are even scared of them.

At this time of year, the brothers take in bird after bird, their wings torn and bodies bleeding, to the bird hospital they run from their home. There's a reason for the carnage, a scourge with an innocent reputation and an ironic name: the kite. As in, the kind humans play with.

Many people in Delhi engage in a popular kite-fighting game in which they aim to slice through the strings of an opponent's kite. They use the manja, a kite whose cotton or nylon spool thread is coated with shards of powdered glass. The kite-flying craze reaches an annual crescendo when a popular festival kicks off in the capital city on August 15, India's Independence Day; the season lasts till mid-September.

It's a game with lethal consequences, as the glass-covered thread can cut through more than other kite strings. It can slice through flesh and bone – a danger for birds and, occasionally, humans. Earlier this year, a 7-year-old girl riding with her father on a motor scooter got tangled in a stray kite string and died, her throat slit.

For years, the brothers have tried to build awareness about these deadly kites while struggling to save the bird victims. They worked out of their cramped basement, with only one employee, close friend Salik Rehman. In the documentary, the elder of the brothers, Nadeem (who prefers to go by his first name) says poignantly, "Birds are plummeting from the sky. Delhi is a gaping wound and we are a tiny band aid on it." They also rescue birds affected by pollution.

After the success of the documentary, All that Breathes, that band-aid has become a little bigger.

Donations come flying in "This year, we have more help," says younger brother Saud.

After the documentary was nominated for an Oscar, the producers, Tangled Bank Studios, donated $25,000 to Wildlife Rescue, the non-governmental organization that the brothers have been running since 2010 to fund their work. Other donations poured in from all over the world, leaving the brothers feeling utterly overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. They've received another $25,000 through small donors alone, says Nadeem. He says 50 to 100 people reach out to him on social media every week, asking how to help. These contributions often take him by surprise, he says, such as the $500 sent by the folks at the Rolling Hills Pet Clinic Hospital in California, urging him to treat his hardworking staff to a night out and dinner. He plans to do so in September, after a busy summer of tending to injured birds.

"I haven't been able to thank everyone who's donated yet. I'm still responding to emails," he says.

The money has been put to use. The brothers have been able to move the bird hospital out of their home and into a single-story building they've rented next door. They've hired four more people,including a veterinarian. The donations not only support the salaries but also help cover the transportation costs for injured birds.

The brothers collect injured kites from five other bird hospitals across Delhi. Those hospitals say they aren't equipped to house and feed carnivorous birds like the kites. So far this year, the brothers say they've saved 2,246 birds — a big jump from the 1,000 or so treated in a typical year.

"Earlier, we'd pick up the birds every alternate day," says Nadeem. Ballooning transport costs meant that they couldn't go every day, and inevitably, some birds would die.

"Now we can hire an uber or autorickshaw for a daily pick up," says Saud. "So we can get to the birds a lot faster for treatment." The brothers say their dream is to have their own dedicated bird ambulance.

During filming, the brothers had a makeshift bird enclosure on the second floor of their home, covered in green mesh. They've now moved the enclosure to the terrace on the third floor and rebuilt it with tiles and stainless steel, making it easier to clean. Blue tin sheets line the roof.

This is a kind of rest stop for birds that have healed and been released, says Nadeem. Every day, nearly 50 kites that they've cared for flit in and out of the area, eating, drinking and resting in the shade. It's a kind of bridge between the hospital and the birds' wild world.

"It's a space where they can get stronger, test their wings before they take flight," says Nadeem.

The brothers have also invested in cameras, scanners, computers to document their rescues.

A deferred dream At the end of the documentary, Nadeem was preparing to study veterinary science in the U.S. He was accepted at a private university in North Carolina but wasn't able to go because his $5,000 scholarship would only cover 10% of the costs. "It's always been a dream to study in the U.S.," he says.

He still hopes to get formal scientific training to supplement the knowledge he and his brother have gained on their own. For example, the manja kite strings cause such deep and complex wounds to birds' wings that some can never fly again. Many veterinarians told them that these wounds simply cannot heal completely. However, Nadeem says they've devised their own technique for aligning muscle, bone and tissue. They have photographed and documented how many of the birds they have treated, even those with the worst of injuries, were able to fly again. Nadeem hopes to embark on research and share his knowledge with the wider community of veterinarians and rescuers.

A flutter of hope The brothers say the birds they can't save weigh heavily on their minds, but they take heart that they can help with most injuries.

It's a sentiment that many wildlife rescuers are familiar with, says Dr. Ulrike Streicher, rehabilitation director and veterinarian at the Cascades Raptor Center in Oregon. When the film was shown at the annual National Wildlife Rehabilitators Symposium in March 2023, she says, many in the audience felt the brothers' pains and struggles very strongly. "It is a tough crowd — people who see sad, heartbreaking and horrifying things every day," says Streicher. "Seeing that [the brothers] did this work under such very limited conditions and in the face of political and social unrest and insecurity brought them to tears," she says.

Today, the brothers' children are beginning to take an interest in their rescue work. Nadeem's daughter, Inayaa, is 6. Saud has an 8-year-old son named Aalif and a daughter, Zara, who is almost 2. The girls love birds, Nadeem says.

Aalif appears in the documentary, and after the Oscars ceremony he received a special award from school for helping his dad and uncle. Saud says his son was enormously proud. "It meant more to him than the Oscars."

Kamala Thiagarajan is a freelance journalist based in Madurai, Southern India. She reports on global health, science, and development, and her work has been published in the New York Times, The British Medical Journal, BBC, The Guardian and other outlets. You can find her on twitter @kamal_t

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Countries Seek To Return To The MoonOn Wednesday, the Indian space agency ISRO celebrated as its Chandrayaan-3 craft successfully made a soft landing at the lunar south pole. This is the first mission to explore the region around the moon’s southern pole, and a major success for ISRO. The mission plans to use a robotic rover to conduct a series of experiments over the course of about 2 weeks, largely centered around the availability of water and oxygen-containing materials.

Less than a week earlier, a Russian craft, Luna-25, crashed onto the moon. It would have been Russia’s first moon landing in 47 years. The cause of the crash is not yet known. Maggie Koerth, science journalist and editorial lead for CarbonPlan, joins guest host Flora Lichtman to talk about the two lunar missions and whether the flurry of activity signals a new space race.

They’ll also discuss other stories from the week in science, including a new analysis of the Y chromosome, work on the camouflage skin of the hogfish, and a setback in a mission to clear up space junk.

What’s The Human Cost Of Alaska’s Mineral Boom?A dusting of snow clings to the highway as Barbara Schuhmann drives around a hairpin curve near her home in Fairbanks, Alaska. She slows for a patch of ice, explaining that the steep turn is just one of many concerns she has about a looming project that could radically transform Alaskan mining as the state begins looking beyond oil.

Roughly 250 miles to the southeast, plans are developing to dig an open-pit gold mine called Manh Choh, or “big lake” in Upper Tanana Athabascan. Kinross Alaska, the majority owner and operator, will haul the rock on the Alaska Highway and other roads to a processing mill just north of Fairbanks. The route follows the Tanana River across Alaska’s interior, where spruce-covered foothills knuckle below the stark peaks of the Alaska Range. Snowmelt feeds the creeks that form a mosaic of muskeg in nearby Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge, a migration corridor for hundreds of bird species.

To read the full article, visit sciencefriday.com.

Salmon Flourish After Mine Damage Restored In AlaskaOn Friday, July 28, there were hundreds of juvenile salmon clustered in a pool, in clear water surrounded by a bank of fresh woody debris. Not 100 yards away, a spinning drum processed sediment to extract gold.

This land is managed by a mining company, but it’s also the site of a major stream restoration project. Thousands of salmon are returning to this stream in Hope, more than 100 years after aggressive gold mining affected the path of the river. The project to restore Resurrection Creek has brought together a coalition of stakeholders, including the present-day mining company that occupies the site.

The restoration of Resurrection Creek began in the early 2000s. The goal was to correct habitat damage caused by historic mining.

More than 100 years ago, heavy mining activity in the gold rush town affected the stream pattern, turning it from a meandering creek to a straight ditch. Jim Roberts is vice president of Hope Mining Company, and he said hydraulic mining in the early 1900s fundamentally changed the waterway.

To read the full article, visit sciencefriday.com.

All About Sea OttersLast month, a rowdy sea otter was stealing surfboards off the coast of Santa Cruz California, biting chunks out of surfboards, and even catching a few waves.

It’s rare for a sea otter to get so close to humans in the wild. Authorities are trying to capture the otter, named 841, for her safety and that of the surfers. But, a month later, she remains at large.

Guest host Flora Lichtman talks with Jessica Fujii, sea otter program manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to get the 411 about Otter 841, and talk all things sea otter—including their sophisticated use of tools, carrying food in their armpits, and busting myths about hand holding.

To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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Off the coast of California is an unusual "octopus garden" — the largest congregation of deep-sea octopuses ever discovered on Earth, where over 6,000 octopuses huddle around an extinct underwater volcano in the black, cold ocean depths, almost two miles below the surface.

Most are brooding females that spend their days doing nothing but guarding nests full of eggs, a tedious task which can take nearly two years.It would take even longer if not for the warm water seeping from the seafloor that speeds upthe growth of their babies, according to new research that suggests this natural incubator is why octopuses gather there in such huge numbers.

The discovery, published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday, highlights how low-key hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor can create isolated patches of cozy warmth, hidden in the darkness, that could play an outsized role in supporting deep-sea life. Thousands of such spots could be dotted up and down coastlines, researchers say.

"It's definitely a special site for these animals. It's a breeding site for this octopus. It has effects for the entire community nearby that then has spillover effects beyond that," says Jim Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, the lead researcher for this work. "So it's regionally important and we still know very little about it. How many more of these are there?"

A surprise in shimmering water Scientists found this site about five years ago, when a submersible vehicle got sent to explore some underwater hills around Davidson Seamount, a submerged mountain off the coast of central California that once was a volcano.

While the seamount was well-studied, the surrounding areas were not, and researchers were shocked when the vehicle's headlamps suddenly revealed large groups of purple octopuses, Muusoctopus robustus, that were crouched over nests of eggs.

Octopuses generally are antisocial loners that would rather fight another octopus than live in close quarters. And yet biologists had stumbled onto an enormous octopus garden, a trippy scene straight out of a Beatles song.

"They thought, 'Well, let's get a really close look.' And as they zoomed into these octopus, then they saw this shimmering water and they realized this is a thermal spring, this is warm water coming out. And that was somewhat of a surprise because this is an inactive volcano," explains Barry.

The first time scientists ever observed a bunch of deep-sea octopuses gathering together was about a decade ago, in another place where warm water seeped out of the seafloor, off Costa Rica. But researchers studying that rocky outcrop didn't see any viable eggs and thought that perhaps the higher temperatures there had harmed their development.

Just this summer, however, another expedition revisited that outcrop and saw that it was actually an active, successful nursery.

"It really kind of blew my mind because it is so drastically different and they're taking observations in the exact same places that we had been looking at," says Anne Hartwell, with the Center for Coastal & Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center at the University of New Hampshire, who visited the Costa Rica site in 2014.

Hartwell is part of the team that recently spent months doing robotic work to study the octopus garden near California, to figure out what role warm water might play in drawing octopuses together.

"The robots we use are so advanced and they have such great technology and cameras and dexterity with their mechanical arms," says Hartwell. "They enable us to not quite be down there in person, but get a lot done as if we were."

The researchers mapped an area the size of a few football fields in detail, installed a time-lapse camera that watched octopuses continuously, and visited individual octopus nests again and again while monitoring water temperatures with probes.

"We found 6,000 animals in just a small area, and that was just a portion of where the octopuses are distributed. So we're estimating, I don't know, up to 20,000 animals may be there," explains Barry. He adds that the female octopuses are so focused on tending their nests that they mostly ignored the investigators.

"We can drive up to within eight inches of them and hold a camera right there. They don't do a thing," he says.

The allure of rare warmth in the deep The ocean water at this depth is normally about 35 degrees Fahrenheit, but the spa-like waters seeping out of cracks and crevices got up to about 51 degrees Fahrenheit—and that's where the octopuses wanted to brood.

"The females only nest in warm sites. As far as we can tell, we could find none in cold waters," says Barry. "There are plenty of nesting sites available, but they don't nest on just any bare rock. They only choose those sites where there's a nice warm pool. And in fact, if one female leaves, we found that another one will jump in there within a couple of weeks."

What's more, he says, the octopus eggs matured much more quickly than one would expect, based on what's known about other octopuses that live in the cold ocean depths.

Brood times for nesting females there seemed to be about 1.8 years, while previous observations of a deep-sea octopus in cold water showed that it took 4.5 years for its eggs to hatch, a length of time longer than any other animal.

Biologists know from prior research that warming generally speeds the pace of octopus embryo development. Barry says that having a shorter brooding period should give the offspring a greater chance of survival, since the female octopuses and their developing embryos would spend less time in an immobile, vulnerable state.

"Seeing that they are getting a brooding time of 1.8 years is awesome. It shows that there's an advantage to these octopus breeding their eggs in the warmer water," says Beth Orcutt of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, who has studied the octopus populations off Costa Rica. "That's the first time we've been able to look at that with this kind of data."

Janet Voight, an expert on deep-sea octopuses at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, says it's astonishing to her that the California site has "a concentration of predators that exceeds any reasonable expectation. It's like, whoa."

But these female octopuses have given up their predatory life to reproduce and, instead, they themselves are being eaten when they die. The octopus garden seems to support a teeming variety of other life such as crustaceans, anemones and snails. "These are all parts of an ecosystem that's sustained by the octopus being there and dying in there," Voight says.

Despite the richness of this ecosystem, it could easily have been missed by explorers, because the ocean bottom is so vast and dark, illuminated only for brief moments by the lights of slow-moving exploration vehicles.

"When you think of the deep sea, it's kind of muddy and flat and nothing too much conspicuous around," says Voight. "Then you stumble upon something like this and it's like a bonanza."

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A female reticulated giraffe was born at Brights Zoo in northeastern Tennessee late last month — but unlike her mother she was born without any spots, a rarity.

Standing 14 to 15 feet tall, giraffes are the tallest mammals in the world. When mothers give birth, the calves are already 6 feet tall, and other than on especially rare occasions, they're born covered from hoof to horn in brown spots. Brights Zoo in Limestone, Tenn., announced that it welcomed the birth of a reticulated giraffe without any spots on July 31, WJHL 11 News reported.

"Giraffe experts believe she is the only solid-colored reticulated giraffe living anywhere on the planet," the zoo told WJHL.

The zoo's director, David Bright, said zoo staff have been reaching out to zoo professionals across the country inquiring about how rare the giraffe could be. So far, zoo officials say the only record of a reticulated giraffe being born without spots was in Japan in the 1970s.

Pictures of the calf can be seen on the Brights Zoo Facebook page, standing next to her mother in stark contrast without her spots. The zoo is asking the public to help name the newborn by voting on one of four names available on the zoo's Facebook page by Labor Day.

The Swahili names and their meanings are: Kipekee, meaning unique; Firali, which means unusual or extraordinary; Shakiri, meaning she is most beautiful; and Jamella, which means one of great beauty.

Bright told WJHL that the zoo looked at thousands of names and their meanings before settling on the four available to vote on. "Those four are the four the family are all really attached to," Bright said. "So if she's named one of those four, we're very happy."

Votes will be talliedand announced on Sept. 4.

According to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, there are only an estimated 16,000 reticulated giraffes left in the wild — a more than 50% drop from approximately 36,000 giraffes 35 years ago. There are approximately 117,000 giraffes across four species and nine subspecies, many of which are designated vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered.

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A salmonella outbreak in 11 states has been linked to small turtles, the CDC announced last week.

Twenty-six people have fallenill from the bacteria, including residents in California, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. Nine of those people have been hospitalized.

People started to get sick beginning in October 2022; the most recently recorded case was from this past July.

Of the 20 infected people who shared with the CDC how they contracted the infection, 16 reported having contact with a pet turtle.

"The true number of sick people in an outbreak is likely much higher than the number reported, and this outbreak may not be limited to the states with known illnesses," the CDC said. "This is because many people recover without medical care and are not tested for Salmonella."

"Pet turtles of any size can carry Salmonella germs in their droppings even if they look healthy and clean. These germs can easily spread to their bodies, tank water, and anything in the area where they live and roam," the CDC said.

Symptoms of salmonella infection include diarrhea, vomiting, fever and stomach cramps.

Dos and don'ts of owning a pet turtle Turtles with shells smaller than four inches wide cannot be kept as pets, per federal law, as they are particularly prone to causing illness. For that reason, the CDC does not recommend turtles as pets for people under age 5 or over 65, or people with weak immune systems.

Of the 13 people who shared information with the CDC about the size of the turtle they had been in contact with, 12 reported the turtles had shells smaller than four inches wide.

You should always wash your hands after handling a turtle or touching the area it lives in. You should not kiss or cuddle a turtle and should not handle food or beverages around it.

When cleaning your pet's items, use a specially designated basin and sponge. If you clean the items in a bathtub or sink, disinfect it after.

If you no longer want your turtle, do not release it into the wild. Instead, call a local reptile rescue, pet store or shelter to discuss rehoming options.

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Lolita, the oldest orca held in captivity, died on Friday — less than five months after the Miami Seaquarium announced plans to release her back into her native ocean waters.

The Seaquarium said Lolita, believed to be about 57 years old, began to exhibit "serious signs of discomfort" over the last few days. Despite medical treatment, the orca died on Friday afternoon after suffering a what appeared to be a "renal condition," the Seaquarium said. The aquatic park was closed on Saturday for the staff to mourn the loss.

"Those who have had the privilege to spend time with her will forever remember her beautiful spirit," the Seaquarium said in a statement.

The Seaquarium did not immediately respond to NPR'srequest for comment on more details of her death.

The orca, initially known as Tokitae or Toki, was 4 years old when she was captured from the Pacific coast near Seattle. Over the next five decades, Lolita became the the star attraction at the Seaquarium, preforming about twice a day until she was retired in 2022.

Female orcas typically live about 50 years "but can live up to at least 90 years in the wild," according to NOAA Fisheries.

In March of this year, the Seaquarium announced plans to return Lolita back to the the waters of the Pacific where she could spend her final days. The decision came after years of pressure from animal rights groups to allow the aging orca to spend her final days swimming freely in her natural habitat.

But months later, Lolita remained at the aquarium. The Dolphin Company, which owns the Seaquarium, had said that the orca would be relocated sometime between October 2024 and April 2025.

Eduardo Albor, the CEO of the Dolphin Company, said he was heartbroken by the loss, adding that his affinity for the orca was "love at first sight."

For many, the news of her death also came as a surprise because the Seaquarium had said on Tuesday that Lolita was in "current stable health" and her condition was "improving." Signs of her deteriorating health appeared the next day, according to the aquarium.

Save Lolita, a group that had campaigned for the orca's release, said Lolita may never have experienced the freedom she deserved but she played a major role in bringing attention to the ethical concerns around captivity.

"Her story will forever remind us of the urgent need to protect our oceans and the magnificent creatures that call them home," the group said in a statement.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said Lolita's mistreatment was "unforgivable."

"You were so close to freedom at a sanctuary, but time ran out. Now you're finally free from all the pain and suffering," PETA wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

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Bzzzz... Do you hear that? That's the sound of a mosquito nearby, its wings fluttering rapidly, generating the sound waves that reach your ears and send signals to your brain.

When you hear that distinctive buzz you know it's time to move, swat, spray or else get bit by the nasty bugger. But when another mosquito hears that buzz, it means something totally different – that it's mating time.

It might be hard to believe, but those tiny mosquitoes have complex and powerful ears. Males can use their ears to tune into the specific frequency of females in a swarm and locate them to mate.

Scientists have known that mosquitoes are attracted to sound for almost 150 years but didn't fully understand how that worked. Now, new research published in Nature Communicationsreveals more about how a mosquito's amazing ears work. And the findings mean that a mosquito's so-called ears could be targeted by insecticides to keep them from mating.

You've likely never seen ears like this before There's no denying that ears come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes.

Elephant ears, cat ears and human ears are all distinct, yet very recognizable. But Joerg Albert, a zoologist at the University College of London and the University of Oldenburg, Germany, says that "most people on the street wouldn't be able to identify ears on the body of the mosquito or know that they have ears in the first place."

It's true! Instead of roundish holes surrounded by flesh, mosquitoes "hear with their antennae, which are these long flagellar projections from the head capsule," Albert says. Those antennae act like "inverted pendulums" which vibrate as sound waves pass through the air.

And just like your hirsute old uncle, male mosquitoes have really hairy ears that make them distinct from females. Those hairs on their antennae are called fibrillae, and they help the males tune into the frequency of the females during mating.

Those structures are so unlike human ears that Albert says there's some disagreement about whether we should even be using the word "ears" to describe what mosquitoes have, though he says there's no logic to that argument "unless you have a very mammalian or human-centric definition of a sensory organ."

Mosquito ears are certainly intriguing for scientists like Albert, but there's good reason to study them beyond satisfying an intellectual curiosity. Mosquitoes can carry all sorts of nasty diseases, like malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus and zika virus, just to name a few.

And because the hearing of mosquitoes is so important for mating, "in principle, if you stop them from hearing or somehow you impair their auditory abilities, that would have a big impact on mosquito mating and reproduction," says Marta Andrés, a vector biologist at the University College of London, who along with Albert helped direct the new research.

Put simply, if you can stop mosquitoes from mating by disrupting their hearing, then they won't be around to spread disease.

Andrés and Albert think they might have uncovered a way to do that.

Mosquito ears have a 'hair-raising' trick Let's take a step back to better understand how mosquitoes mate.

Mosquito mating is a highly regulated and time-sensitive event that only happens for about 20 minutes at dusk. At that time the mosquitoes begin to swarm – and that swarm is mostly male mosquitoes, with just a few females flitting around.

Locating those females in the swarm is the first step in mating for the males. But it's incredibly loud in the swarm, so they need a way to tune into the distinctive slow wingbeat sound of females. This is where their hairy ears come in.

The fibrillae on the male ears, which are soft throughout the day, become erect during swarm time. The erect fibrillae then act like a tuning fork, resonating with the frequency of the female wingbeat.

What Andrés and Albert found is that the process of fibrillae erection is regulated by a neurotransmitter called octopamine — a chemical signal sent from the brain to control the mosquito ears.

"What we think is happening is that octopamine is preparing the organ [mosquito ears] for swarm time," says Andrés. With that knowledge, the research team thinks they can disrupt that highly time-specific process of fibrillae erection by messing with the octopamine pathway. "It is a clear route for insecticidal action," says Albert.

One insecticide already has the potential to do this – amitraz. "We could very beautifully show how this insecticide was going to act in the same way as octopamine in the mosquito ear," Andrés says.

Amitraz is the generic name for an insecticide that used to be used against fleas and ticks but was banned by the EPA due to concerns it was toxic to humans. The research team showed, however, that it can cause the fibrillae in mosquito ears to go erect, perhaps at a time when they aren't supposed to.

And if you're a mosquito, ear hairs that go erect at the wrong time can mean you won't be having any fun in the swarm. "If you're slightly off or if your system is somehow confused, you might miss out on reproduction for that day," says Albert. The mosquito mating system is so time dependent that any little changes to throw off its timing can disrupt the whole thing.

That's an entirely new concept for the development of an insecticide. "Exploiting the system of swarming behavior, mating and hearing as a potential target for [mosquito] control, that's something that is not done at all currently," Andrés says.

It's unlikely that amitraz itself will be used to control mosquito populations, but it demonstrates that there's potential for insecticides like it to work on the mosquito hearing pathway.

Such insecticides are a long way off but could provide a "new tool in the toolkit"

"The idea that you could use hearing to target different parts of the mosquito's life as a way of controlling them is a really important area of research," says Lauren Cator, a mosquito biologist at the Imperial College of London who was not involved in the research.

An insecticide that disrupts mosquito hearing to prevent mating would be a non-lethal option, whereas current insecticides "pretty much only kill host-seeking females," Cator says. "Taking an approach where you might be able to target males or different subsets of the population is a really worthwhile thing to explore."

But why develop a non-lethal insecticide when we have several working, lethal insecticides now? Cator says the problem is that "there's massive resistance to those [insecticides] because they work" and that they may not work forever.

Cator, Andrés and Albert are all in agreement, however, that there is a long road ahead before an insecticide that targets mosquito ears actually gets used for mosquito control.

"It's interesting as kind of a first step into looking at possibilities to disrupt mosquito hearing," Andrés says. "We don't know yet if this is something that could be directly applied to the field."

Everybody is optimistic though that this research could lead to something greater on the horizon. And Cator thinks it's important to keep trying new things: "The more things we have in our toolkit, the better off we are."

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Agriculture officials are raising the alarm after an invasive yellow-legged hornet was seen near Savannah, Ga. The insects are devastatingly effective at preying on honeybees and other pollinators.

"This is the first time a live specimen of this species has been detected in the open United States," the Georgia Department of Agriculture said, after confirming the insect's presence with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Georgia.

The yellow-legged hornet, Vespa velutina, is native to Southeast Asia. It's a close cousin of the northern giant hornet, Vespa mandarinia, also known as the Asian giant hornet — or, more frighteningly, "murder hornet," for the deadly and violent havoc it wreaks on bee colonies.

The hornet is a threat to honey producers and farmers The yellow-legged hornet poses a threat not only to honey producers but also to the farming industry. Honey bees play important roles in producing a number of crops, such as almonds, cherries, oranges and other fruits.

Noting agriculture's importance as Georgia's largest industry, the state agency says, "it is imperative that these invasive pests are tracked and eradicated."

Bee pollination adds some $15 billion to crops' value, the Food and Drug Administration said in 2018.

"About one-third of the food eaten by Americans comes from crops pollinated by honey bees, including apples, melons, cranberries, pumpkins, squash, broccoli, and almonds," the agency said.

The Georgia agriculture agency says it's working with the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and the University of Georgia to trap, track and eradicate the new threat to pollinators.

The newly spotted hornet can be identified by its yellow-tipped legs and dark abdomen, which has yellow bands that widen toward the insect's rear. Georgia officials are asking the public to report possible sightings.

These are not the wasps you're looking for "Vespa are known as the 'true hornets' and are exceptional predators," according to Clemson University's Land-Grant Press, referring to the genus that includes both the yellow-legged hornet and the northern giant hornet.

They're distinct from North America's wasps. While common U.S. insects such as yellowjackets and the bald-faced hornet are sometimes called hornets, they're not in the same genus as the Asian hornets. Crucially, those homegrown bugs don't wage gruesome warfare on bee colonies.

"This species happens to prefer honey bees," experts from the University of Florida's extension service said of yellow-legged hornets.

The two invasive hornet species pose a number of problems for bees, particularly North American and European populations that haven't evolved alongside the predators. They're bigger and stronger than honey bees, and they have a thick exoskeleton that protects them from stings. They're also social insects, with their own nests — and when they find a food source like a bee hive, they use pheromones to call other hornets to join the feast.

"Most hornets prey on other insects' larvae, and many species of hornets target nests of other social bees and wasps," the Land-Grant Press says, adding that after killing the worker bees defending a hive, the hornets move on to collect bee larvae.

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California wildlife officials say they've confirmed a new gray wolf pack in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife said Friday the pack was found in Tulare County — the farthest south a pack of wolves has been detected in the state in more than a century.

In July, the department had received reports of wolf sighting in the Sequoia National Forest, roughly 200 miles south of the nearest-known pack in northeastern California.

CDFW visited the area and found tracks, scat and hair, and their DNA analysis found that all 12 collected samples came from gray wolves. The analysis found the new pack has at least five female wolves not previously detected in California.

One of the wolves is a direct descendant of OR7, a wolf that crossed into California in 2011, becoming the first detected in nearly a century to cross into the state from Oregon before returning.

Gray wolves used to roam most of North America before being hunted, trapped and driven out of most of the continental U.S. by the early 1900s.

But wolves have been making a slow comeback in many western states, including California, which has at least three confirmed packs mostly in the state's far north.

Wolves remain protected federally by the Endangered Species Act.

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed to continue releasing red wolves into the wild in order to settle a lawsuit brought by conservation groups.

According to court filings, the USFWS committed on Wednesday to an eight-year plan to boost populations with captive-born animals in eastern North Carolina, the species' only remaining range. Just over 30 of the animals are estimated to be left in the wild, which is only a fraction of what the population was a decade ago.

The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Red Wolf Coalition, Defenders of Wildlife and the Animal Welfare Institute. The groups claimed that USFWS had violated the Endangered Species Act, putting red wolves at risk of extinction to appease politicians and ranchers.

Ramona McGee, a senior attorney and leader of the SELC's wildlife program, celebrated the settlement as a "path to restoring the red wolf to its rightful place as a celebrated success story."

"We hope to see America's wild red wolves rebound again, with generations born free and wild, as a result of this agreement," McGee said in a statement Wednesday.

A spokesperson for USFWS responded to NPR's request for comment by saying the agency had already been working to recover the red wolf population for decades.

"We are committed to increasing transparency and communication for red wolf releases and adaptive management actions," USFWS said. "The success of the Eastern North Carolina Red Wolf Population sets the stage for the Service's ability to fulfill our responsibility to recover the species — which we cannot do without the local community and our conservation partners."

Red wolves once inhabited much of the Eastern U.S. but were driven to near-extinction by hunting, habitat loss and the growth of local coyote species, which competed for resources and space.

Today, red wolves occupy only five counties in North Carolina. Just over 30 are left in the wild, according to a June 2023 count.

A USFWS program to recover the species to the wild was launched in 1987 and successfully boosted the population to around 100. That population remained stable through 2012.

But in 2015, the agency suspended its practice of breeding and releasing captive red wolves, saying it had planned to update its recovery program with more input from scientists and resume in 2020.

The Associated Press reported that the timing of the pause coincided with "pressure from conservative politicians and landowners who deemed wolves a nuisance."

Another round of litigation in 2018 blocked the USFWS from a plan to shrink the 1.7 million-acre territory set aside for red wolf conservation.

The SELC filed its lawsuit in 2020, amid a three-year span in which no red wolf pups had been seen in the wild — "an indication of the dire state of the red wolf population at that time."

As few as seven red wolves remained in the wild at the time, according to court filings. Another 250 were estimated to be living in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries as part of the captive-breeding program.

In 2021, a judge granted SELC a preliminary injunction requiring the USFWS to resume releasing some of those captive red wolves, including by placing captive-born pups into wild litters.

Of the three wolves released to the wild in 2021, one was found dead within months, falling victim to a vehicle strike, according to SELC. But the surviving wolves may have played a role in the current population upswing: Wild red wolf pups were seen in the wild again in 2022.

Under the latest settlement, the USFWSwill work with scientists and experts to set metrics to measure performance on all red wolf recovery plans.

In addition to releasing captive wolves, the agency will continue its adaptive management strategies, aiming to decrease human-caused mortality, as well as sterilizing some local coyote populations.

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The end of a quiet residential street in Glendale, Calif., is just one of many battlegrounds in the state's annual fight against wildfire season. And it's being waged by goats.

About 300 of them are spread out along the foothills and steep ridges of the Verdugo Mountains, which loom over multi-million dollar homes at the end of a cul de sac. The goats are busy chomping away on the dried-out vegetation that's exploded after this year's drought-busting rains.

Seemingly oblivious to the 94 F heat, the animals are hard at work devouring several acres of dead, yellowed grasses, scrubby bushes and cactus, as well as some of southern California's most invasive plants, including star thistle and black mustard.

"There's very little they won't eat. Even things that seem impossible. I don't know how their digestive systems deal with it, but they do," Michael Choi told NPR, squinting out at his herd from under a brown felt cowboy hat.

Choi, 30, is the owner of Fire Grazers Inc., a service that uses its herds of goats to clear brush from hillsides, flatlands and other hard-to-climb terrain.It's a family business that he took over from his father a few years ago and now runs with two other brothers.

Even after more than a decade in the business, he is still confounded by how the goats make such easy work of an array of prickly and painful plants.

"It's mind boggling that they'll even eat star thistle, considering it's so painful to grab," he said. "It's invasive. It just spreads everywhere. And if you try to weed whack it, you wind up getting poked in the face and then all over the body. But goats will come up to that and they'll just eat it up because it tastes good to them."

Choi's company is busier than ever this year after the drought-breaking rains of this pastwinter. The downpour led to more growth, which has led to greater demand. That, Choi said, has extended his season by a couple of months, from March through what potentially could be the early weeks of October.

"There's so many more people who need the goats. And, we're moving slower than we normally would, because a goat doesn't care if there's more food. They eat at their pace. So we actually had to purchase more goats just to keep up with the jobs we have," Choi explained, noting that he's added a couple hundred more goats to his total "trip," bringing them up to about 900.

It's the herd's last day on this plot of land. Over two weeks, they've cleared about 14 acres of the vegetation that fuels wildfires. (They eat about one acre a day.)

And in a few hours, Choi will be transporting the group to their next job in Rancho Palos Verdes, another wealthy enclave surrounded by tough-to-climb terrain. It's one of about five sites the company has going. So far, Fire Grazers Inc. has been contracted by the cities of Torrance, Hidden Hills, Westlake Village, Orange County and even private homeownerswith sprawling estates in Beverly Hills and Calabasas.

While the practice of targeted grazing goes back centuries, it has been pushed aside by machines and chemical herbicidesin the modern era. But following the unrelenting barrage of blazes in recent years, which have ravagedan average of nearly 400,000 acres of land each year, it's become a bigger part of California's strategy to reduce wildfire risk. Last year, the state's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection issued a grant for a pilot program testing whether goats can lower the risk of wildfires in a state preserve.

Anything you can do, goats can do better Patty Mundo, vegetation management inspector for the Glendale Fire Department, said it was local residents who suggested the idea of the goats two years ago. Since then, she's brought Choi and his goats back for an annual "Bleat and Greet" event, where the community is invited to get to know the fire-fighting heroes.

It's a great way to raise awareness about the importance of proper land management, Mundo said.

"We've had many fires in that exact same hillside where the goats are," she told NPR. "And because it's right next to homes, the purpose of it was to create a buffer — a fire break — so that if we were to ever have a fire in that area, it'll stop or at the very least, slow it down."

Mundo has been working for the city since 2018, and she said there's been a fire "every single year" with the exception of 2022.

If it were up to her, she'd lease the herd for a much longer stretch, she said. The city owns about 500 parcels of land, and with the budget that's allocated to fire prevention — $62,000, plus another $14,000 specifically for the goats — they can only afford to clear a fraction of it every year.

"It's not fair," Mundo acknowledged. In her role, she said, "I'm holding people accountable to clear their brush, but yet we can't keep up with ours."

The worst is when she gets calls from homeowners wondering when her department plans to eliminate dangerous overgrowth. "They call us to tell us they're concerned ... and it just kills me," she said.

City officials have applied for a series of grants that could more than triple Glendale's fire prevention budget, according to Mundo. That would mean more money to pay for the goats to graze for longer periods.

As it stands,Mundo said the goats have saved the city precious financial resources. Brush crews are far more expensive because they rely on power tools, which need fuel. "They have to use heavy equipment like chippers. And sometimes they have to take the vegetation to a landfill. So that's just an added cost," she said. There are also additional fees to remove poison oak, which is common in the Verdugo Mountains.

In contrast, all the goats need is water,mineral and salt blocks, and a large Anatolian shepherd dog to ward off coyotes. They can also climb up steep mountainsides, eat the poison oak and work under the blazing sun without suffering from heat stress or heat exhaustion.

Targeted grazing is just one of many tools to fight wildfires Lynn Huntsinger, a professor of rangeland ecology and management at the University of California, Berkeley, noted targeted grazing works best when it's used in combination with other wildfire reduction measures, especially prescribed burning.

"In an ideal world, we would have used goats or sheep or even cows, after the big fires we've had in recent years," Huntsinger told NPR.

That would have had the greatest impact in eliminating noxious and invasive plants, because the animals would consume any regrowth of the unwanted vegetation, she explained.

And even in places where there has not been a fire, regular grazing routines over time can eventually exhaust the root stock, preventing them from resurfacing and permanently changing the biomass of the space. That's for the better, according to Huntsinger.

She added: "When we think about wildfire risk reduction and good land management, we need to be thinking like artists, using a wide palette of all of the tools at our disposal."

Back in Glendale, Choi said he's proud to be a part of the effort to make California's urban and rural communities safer.

Reaching down to caress the head of an insistent 7-month-old goat rubbing up against his leg, Choi took in the fire break visible from the bottom of the mountain.

"That line right there could save these houses. It could help save lives. It could give firefighters just enough time to save the people in this community," he said.

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A large black bear who is believed to be a notorious bandit and a hungry, uninvited houseguest was apprehended by wildlife biologists on Friday.

Authorities in the town of South Lake Tahoe, Calif., have been on the lookout for exceptionally large animals since February 2022, after they reported that one single, male bear had been the cause of "152 reports of conflict behavior," including 28 home break-ins. They referred to the animal as "Hank the Tank," setting off the internet's affection.

But it turns out those initial assessments, based solely on visual information, were conflating three bears with a similar pattern of behavior — and incorrectly assuming that all of the bears were male.

DNA testing confirmed that the bear captured on Friday, who is formally known as Bear 64F, was a female behind at least 21 cases of breaking and entering. What's more, she was trespassing with three young cubs in tow, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW).

The agency typically euthanizes so-called "conflict bears" due to the significant risk they pose to the community. But Bear 64F is no ordinary conflict bear.

The more homes that were vandalized in the ritzy waterfront community of Tahoe Keys, about 100 miles east of Sacramento, the more the public came to the defense of "Hank the Tank," blaming the bears' behavior on unsecured garbage cans and habitat encroachment.

The CDFW cited "widespread interest" in Bear 64F as the reason it intends to relocate her to a Colorado sanctuary once she has received veterinary clearance. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis welcomed the move in a tweet, saying he'd welcome "Henrietta the Tank".

The three male cubs who tagged along on several break-ins will also be relocated and rehabilitated and CDFW hopes it can one day be returned to the wild, having regained a fear of humans. One of the cubs appeared to have suffered serious injuries from a vehicle strike earlier this month, according to the agency.

Given her diet, it's perhaps no surprise that Bear 64F chose the space under a Tahoe Keys home for her den. After she was discovered there in March, local biologists used the moment to immobilize her, collect her DNA, attach an ear tag and affix a satellite tracking collar.

The collar slipped off two months later, but the data collected helped differentiate Bear 64F from an ursine population numbering roughly 500 in the Lake Tahoe region.

The average female black bear weighs up to 275 pounds, according to CDFW, but it's not uncommon for males to weigh more than 500 pounds. Much of the bears' diet is plant-based, consisting of berries, seeds and insects, but their ability to adapt based on their environment is part of what makes them a top predator.

According to one resident of the area, at least one of the "Hanks" had a hankering for dessert: The bear ate a 2-gallon tub of ice cream from her neighbor's trash can.

Dr. Staci Baker, a veterinarian who works with the local nonprofit BEAR League, says that it's instinctual for bears to search the landscape for food. So that makes it the responsibility of residents — the human ones — to maintain a "bear-safe" community, she said.

"Securing garbage is huge. Bear-proof containers work. If everyone did not leave garbage, the bears would go somewhere else" she told NPR's Weekend Edition back in 2022.

The community of Tahoe Keys has since revised a policy that previously forbade residents from using temporary storage structures, including bear boxes.

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Authorities have been unable to find the grizzly bear that killed a woman just outside Yellowstone National Park late last month. Last week, they called off the search. That fatal attack has renewed calls to remove Endangered Species Act protections for grizzlies, so there are fewer bears on the landscape.

The latest data shows the population of grizzly bears in and around the park at 965. That's more than quadruple the number that existed when they were first protected by the Endangered Species Act in 1975.

Despite their fearsome reputation, though, grizzly bears would rather avoid people than attack them. By the numbers, visitors to the heart of grizzly country in Yellowstone National Park have about the same likelihood of being killed by a falling tree as being killed by a grizzly.

That's despite a lot more people in the area. A record 5 million people visited Yellowstone National Park in 2021. Even more frequent the surrounding mountains and forests. In that enormous region, the animals have killed a total of 10 people since 2010.

"When you think of that, and you combine that with a population of almost a thousand grizzly bears, it is actually remarkable that there are so few serious incidents," said Frank van Manen, who leads the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team. He said attacks are still so rare that statistically, the data doesn't show any kind of an upward trend at all. His group of federal, state, and tribal biologists has documented how the growing number of grizzlies has expanded into territory that's three times larger today than it was 50 years ago. That's only been possible because people who live here have been willing to learn and adapt.

"It's totally possible for people and bears to coexist on the landscape," van Manen said. "I think in the greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, we have shown that that is the case."

Human responsibility For rancher and retired educator Hannibal Anderson, coexistence is part of daily life. "It's the human responsibility to figure out where the risks are," he said.

He lives about 30 miles northeast of where the hiker was attacked and killed, and he's walking to where bears have been grazing on his ranch just outside Yellowstone National Park. He says a sow and her cub have been here just about every night. He points to an area where bears have clawed away dirt, almost like tilling the soil, to get at the roots of a non-native plant called caraway that flourishes in the area. The bare patch of earth is a stark contrast to the lush, green grass extending to the jagged peaks above.

Anderson's family moved here in the 1950s. Growing up, he says grizzlies weren't much of a concern. But starting in the 2000s, as other food sources like Whitebark pine declined, grizzlies showed up in droves, searching for that tasty caraway. Grizzlies are ordinarily solitary creatures. But at the right time of day, at the right time of year, he says 15 or more grizzlies could be grazing within sight.

Walking back to his barn, he bumped into Ellery Vincent, a range rider. It's her job to spend time with Anderson's cattle herds. Riders can help fend off bears, and also help just to perceive what's going on across the landscape. Today, she saw something potentially alarming.

She says she got a funny feeling as she was riding. Not long after, "I saw the runny scat and then all the birds everywhere." She had a hunch that might indicate that a grizzly's killed one of their calves.

Anderson says they've lost cows before. But not many. "Not enough to raise alarms with regard to the number of bears," he said.

But he does recognize their negative impacts. All the digging creates conditions ripe for unwanted plants to colonize. He's never personally had a scary encounter, but he's acutely aware that grizzlies have attacked elk hunters nearby. Even walking out the back door at night these days is an exercise in caution.

In response, Anderson's family has changed the way it ranches. In addition to employing range riders like Vincent, they raise slightly older, larger cows, keep them close together to activate their herd instincts, and move them to different places at different times. All that makes them harder for grizzlies to kill. It's a lot more work. But he sees it as a deeper alignment with his belief system.

"I don't see the world as a place where humans just get to trump everything else," he said. "I consider it a really fundamental responsibility of being human to serve the ecological integrity of wherever we live."

For Anderson, grizzlies and other predators, like wolves, are a crucial part of that ecological system.

But most elected leaders in the states surrounding Yellowstone don't see it that way. They say people have done enough adapting to bears and it's time to "delist" them, or remove federal endangered species protections. After last month's attack, two Montana congressmen tweeted exactly that. They suggested state management could reduce grizzly numbers and potentially prevent tragedies like that one.

Grizzly biologist Frank van Manen says there are a number of bureaucratic hurdles to clear in order for delisting to occur. But he said the Endangered Species Act was created to recover populations and then remove protections when they're no longer needed. Today, he said the population is well over the target numbers set by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He added that the data shows a striking trend recently. That rapid growth of both population and range has slowed down in recent years. The population, he says, is starting to regulate itself.

"From a biology or an ecology standpoint, recovery to me means bringing a population back to what the habitat supports and that's basically where we are right now," he said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has removed protection for Yellowstone-area grizzlies twice since 2007. Bear advocates sued, and courts overturned both attempts at delisting. But this year, the agency launched a new analysis on grizzly recovery for bears in and around both Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Politicians from the region have introduced legislation to delist through Congress, too.

A little north of rancher Hannibal Anderson's property, a coalition of hunting groups has erected a billboard that reads: "Delist grizzly bears to support a conservation success story."

Anderson says delisting wouldn't make much of a difference in what goes on on his ranch. But he's heard both sides of the debate go at it for years.

"I'm not sure one or the other is particularly right or wrong," he said. "The bigger question to me is: what kind of relationship do the humans, wherever they are, want to have with the grizzly bear?"

So whatever happens, Anderson will keep putting his values into practice, trying to create a landscape that nourishes both people and bears.

"It's a lot easier said than done, I understand."

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Have you seen any dead butterflies lately?

If so, the U.S. Geological Survey wants you to mail them their way, along with deceased moths and skippers. The agency is collecting specimens from six states — Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas — to test if contaminants are leading to declining insect populations.

"There are some questions that can't effectively be answered without help from a lot of people. It's what makes citizen science so special and valuable," Julie Dietze, the USGS scientist in charge of the project, said in a press release. "Collections like this one are important because they have the potential to provide scientists now, and 20 years from now, access to specimens."

The states were chosen because they either are on the migration path of monarch butterflies, are in the Corn Belt where pesticides are heavily used or have a large presence of industrial farms that raise animals for consumption.

To send in an insect, it must be larger than two inches wide and not be listed as a protected, endangered or threatened species under state or federal law. (Within the six states in the pilot program, the Mitchell's satyr butterfly is currently the only protected species and it's found in Alabama.)

The insect should be placed in a resealable plastic bag, put in a sealed envelope and mailed via USPS or delivered in person to: USGS LRC, 1217 Biltmore Drive, Lawrence, KS 66049. Freeze the dead insects if you can't ship them within three days.

It is acceptable to send in damaged insects.

The pilot program began in April and will continue until Nov. 1, but "based on the response and number of specimens received so far, the collection efforts may continue beyond November into 2024," USGS said.

The specimens will be made available to all USGS scientists for research. Dietze said she hopes the pilot is successful enough to expand to other states and include other kinds of insects.

She also urges the program to be used within K-12 schools.

"I think community science projects like this one can be really impactful for just teaching students about science and how they can help, and other opportunities within USGS," she said.

Insect populations are on the decline The insect world at large has been threatened over the years by climate change, habitat loss and pesticide use.

The easily recognizable black-and-orange monarch butterflies were listed as endangered last year by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, putting them two categories away from extinction.

Scientists estimate that their numbers have dropped between 22% and 72% in the last decade.

A 2019 study published in Biological Conservation estimated that 40% of the world's insect species could be extinct in the next few decades.

Insects, while they may be considered pests by many, serve an important function to the environment — they break down waste materials, pollinate foods and are prey to larger animals.

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What's four-legged, furry, and often serves up a quick little mood boost?

That's right, a dog. It turns out even short, friendly interactions with canines can be good for our health.

I started pondering the power of dogs during one of my daily strolls around my neighborhood. Almost invariably, I'll run into at least one person walking their dog. If I get the OK to pet the pooch, it's a joyous moment of cooing and sloppy kisses.

I always walk away from these canine exchanges feeling just a bit more relaxed, and happy. And that got me wondering, could these short interactions with other people's dogs actually be good for me?

"Absolutely. I think it is safe to say that animals are beneficial to our mental and physical health," says Nancy Gee, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Human-Animal Interaction at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Gee says evidence is accumulating that levels of the stress hormone cortisol drop in people after just 5 to 20 minutes spent interacting with dogs — even if it's not their pet. "Also, we see increases in oxytocin, that feel-good kind of bonding hormone," she says.

And it's not just humans that benefit from these brief exchanges. "What I love about this research is that it's a two-way street," Gee says. "We see the same thing in the dogs, so the dogs' oxytocin also increases when they interact with a human."

Now, the therapy dogs used in research are screened for things like friendliness, good behavior and responsiveness to their handler's cues. And of course, not everyone's a dog person, whether because of temperament or allergies or other factors. "Pets are not a panacea," Gee says. "They're not necessarily going to be great for every single person. But for people who really get it, who really connect with the animals, they really can make a big difference," Gee says.

Dog ownership has also been linked to positive health outcomes, including better heart health and increased physical activity. But Gee acknowledges that some of the evidence is mixed. She attributes that in part to differences in methodology and the fact that studies of pet ownership can't prove cause and effect, since you can't just randomly assign one person a dog as a pet and another a horse.

Research on the health benefits of human interactions with animals – especially with dogs – has exploded in recent years, thanks to funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Waltham PetCare Science Institute. Though the field is still young, Gee says the quality of the evidence is improving all the time, including more randomized controlled trials looking at short interactions. "We're seeing really nice effects," she says.

For example, there's some evidence that brief bouts of puppy love may help us think better. Gee collaborated on a randomized controlled trial of 8 and 9-year-old school children in the U.K. She and her colleagues found that kids who had twice-weekly, short exchanges with dogs in the classroom had less stress and improved executive functioning – the cognitive processes that allow us to do things like plan, stay on task and block out distractions. And she says those benefits lingered.

"We actually saw [those effects] one month later. And there's some evidence that [they] may exist six months later," Gee says.

So what is it about hanging out with dogs that helps us chill out and focus? Megan Mueller, an associate professor at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, says dogs prompt us to experience the world more like they do.

"Animals, and dogs in particular, live in the moment. They're experiencing their environment with wonder and awe all the time, and they're not bringing up what happened to them earlier in the day or what they're thinking about in the future. They're there right now," says Mueller.

Mueller, whose research focuses on the psychology of human-animal relationships, says watching dogs sniff the grass or explore the world around them cues us to pay more attention, too. "They sort of pull you out of your phone and into whatever environment that you're in."

She says there's some evidence that the act of actually touching a dog might be an important part of their calming effect. For instance, one study done in Canada found that college students reported less stress and reduced feelings of homesickness after brief interactions with dogs, and that effect was much bigger in those who actually got to pet the animals. She's currently running a study that's finding similar results.

"Some of the initial research has shown that physical touch might impact our nervous system in a way that's beneficial," Mueller says.

But it's not just how we cue into dogs that makes the relationship special. Gee of Virginia Commonwealth University says over thousands of years of domestication, dogs have developed a wondrous ability to read us humans.

"They really can connect with another human being. And they do it in a very unassuming way," Gee says.

And they do it without the ability to use words. As my dog-loving 9-year-old recently told me, dogs just have a way of speaking to our hearts.

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The first time Nicola Veitch went to a soccer game, she danced on the field in a white lab coat alongside a colleague inside a giant tsetse fly costume. Most of the fans applauded. Some were baffled.

Neither was auditioning to be the new team mascot.

Rather, Veitch, who's a lecturer in parasitology at the University of Glasgow, put on this somewhat weird performance as a pilot for sleeping sickness street theater — using a theatrical event to teach people about a disease that affects about 1,000 people each year in Africa.

In Malawi's two endemic districts where the disease is spread by local tsetse flies, the number of people falling ill from sleeping sickness has declined in recent years, but cases still persist. Last year, there were only 40 cases across the country. But Veitch points out the disease is "often unpredictable," which means that the possibility of resurgence remains a persistent threat.

More than a year after that Scottish match, the group brought the theatrical event to soccer games in Malawi where people cheered while learning about how to protect themselves from this tiny killer. Veitch calls it an innovative intervention in remote, hard-to-reach communities with few smartphones.

At the time of the performance, she says a clinical trial was underway for a new drug that "seems to be very promising in terms of treating sleeping sickness." If successful, people with the disease could take the medicine at home instead of relying on the current method of treatment for late-stage sleeping sickness — the intravenous administration of a toxic drug that often leads to complications and is occasionally fatal itself. The new drug would represent "a massive change," she says. But in the meantime, knowledge is one of the best ways to fight the disease, and the performance seemed to offer the spectators important information.

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Sleeping sickness is found in communities in Malawi that border nature or game reserves. Those areas were where the performances were held. "So we are targeting the people that are really affected," says Janelisa Musaya, a parasitologist involved in the project and the associate director of the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Clinical Research Programme, instead of "just throwing the message all over the country." In other words, she says, it's a way of allocating resources wisely.

Targeting a 'hypnotic' parasite Sleeping sickness, also called African trypanosomiasis, is caused by a parasite. "It almost looks like a worm," says Veitch. But it's not a worm. It's a single-celled protozoan of the genus Trypanosoma.

The parasite relies on the tsetse fly to shuttle it around. When an infected fly bites someone, the parasite can slip into their bloodstream. It causes a little trouble there, says Musaya, "but when it crosses the blood-brain barrier and goes to the central nervous system, it can affect your sleeping cycle. That's why it's called the sleeping sickness." (The disease is often confused with malaria since the symptoms of fever and lethargy are similar.)

When Veitch looks down the microscope at the parasite that causes sleeping sickness, she says, "it's very hypnotic the way it moves and quite beautiful. I think that only a parasitologist can say that."

That beauty was what got her thinking several years back about alternative ways to inform people about the disease — which many people in Malawi are still not aware of, Veitch says. She has a family member who works for SURGE, a Scottish art, theater and circus organization that runs an annual performance festival that brings cutting edge work to the streets and spaces of Glasgow. The sketches tend to be short, sharp, and interactive, she says.

One year, Veitch was drawn to an outside act that had repurposed an ambulance to teach people how to respond to someone having a cardiac arrest through engaging movement and comical water balloon antics. "And I thought to myself, we could be using street theater to engage people with parasitology," she says. So she approached SURGE and said, "We could maybe work together on something to do with parasites. I think we could create something really cool."

Veitch isn't alone in her thinking. A few years back, the World Health Organization published a report on the role that the arts — including theater — can play in improving our physical, social, and psychological health and well-being, a particular concern in under-resourced countries.

Arts activities facilitate social interaction, says Nisha Sajnani, the co-director of the Jameel Arts and Health Lab at New York University, who wasn't involved in the sleeping sickness project. She adds that performance is just the right platform and artform to "increase a sense of self-efficacy — a feeling of being able to do something about a problem."

Veitch's conversation with SURGE kickstarted a multiyear effort for her and her colleagues in Scotland and Malawi, including an arts and theater group called Voices Malawi that educates people about various illnesses, including COVID-19 and malaria and that uses street theater as a teaching mode.

First, the team had to dream up a way to depict sleeping sickness through street theater. Musaya was excited to get involved. After studying sleeping sickness for 15 years, there was still a missing link for her — "how do we educate the community not to get infected?" She hoped this theatrical foray might provide an answer.

Bwanalori Mwamlima, senior health promotion officer in the Rumphi district of Malawi, says that developing the performance was an act of co-creation among scientists, health workers, performing artists and individuals who'd survived the disease. He explains that the messages they wanted to communicate were, "How is it transmitted? What are the [symptoms]? How can it be prevented? And what are the current interventions?"

Tsetse fly theater has its Malawi premiere When the show rolled out in Malawi in the fall of 2022, here's what it looked like.

Communities were told that local football and netball teams would descend upon a particular field to play. Then, the day of the event, the performers (a team of nurses, clinicians, students and researchers) drove through town in a truck with music blaring. That got people to leave their homes and follow the truck to the edge of a soccer field. "We wanted to gather a crowd," says Veitch.

Before the soccer game, they offered their theatrical vision of sleeping sickness — mainly visual with some narration. They gave red t-shirts to the audience and asked them to put them on to simulate the human bloodstream. The performers who were dressed as scientists in white lab coats waded into the crowd, each one carrying a giant net. "They were supposed to be scientists looking for infection," says Veitch.

Once the crowd was sufficiently warmed up, the person dressed as the tsetse fly emerged. (The fly costume was made in Scotland by the costume designer regularly employed by SURGE. She'd made outfits for "all sorts of weird and wonderful performances," says Veitch, but this was her first tsetse fly — which had massive wings and limited vision for the person inside the fly's head, so you "need someone to be at your side when moving around.")

The fly threw beach balls into the crowd, representing the infectious parasite, which audience members batted around.

The beach balls were different colors, a metaphor for the way in which the parasite changes its outer protein coat to evade the human immune system. "It's very difficult to create a vaccine to something that undergoes this variation," says Veitch.

The people dressed as scientists ran around to catch the balls of infection in their nets. And finally, they brought out a large net, enveloping the giant fly, escorting it offstage and bringing the performance to a close. In reality, this net is highly effective at attracting tsetse flies because of its blue color and the bottle of urine-smelling liquid placed beside it. "It's just a simple bit of material that has insecticide" in it, Veitch says.

But sometimes people in nearby villages take down the nets stationed in game reserves because they don't know what they are or why they're there. Therefore, "one of the ideas behind the performance," says Veitch, "was to get people to really consider they're very effective at catching tsetse. And if you leave them up, it's beneficial to everybody and that will prevent disease." In addition, by showing researchers helping to capture the parasites, the performers hoped to demonstrate to the public that scientists and their work can be trusted.

Afterward, spectators received additional guidance during a question and answer session. They asked what differentiates a tsetse fly from a housefly (its size, color, and resting wing position), how long it takes for symptoms to appear (typically 2 to 4 weeks) and perhaps most important, how to prevent getting bitten in the first place (avoid nature reserves; don't wear blue or black, which attracts the flies; wear long sleeves; apply insect repellent).

Musaya hopes the audiences walked away with an improved understanding of the disease and how they would contract it. "Many people who attended the performance said they didn't know about the disease," Veitch says. "They had heard of tsetse, but didn't know of the disease it carried, and didn't know of the symptoms to look out for."

"There's something about the dramatizing of the concept that increases the understanding," she explains.

Mwamlima, who dressed up as the tsetse fly for one of the performances in Malawi, was surprised by the success of the theatrical approach, "considering that this is the first time to bring theater performances to teach science," he says. "So I wasn't sure whether it would work," but he's glad that it seemed to. Evaluations showed the audiences were engaged and felt confident asking questions. But long-term, Veitch says they'll know if the performance was successful "if more tsetse nets are left in place and if more people come forward for diagnosis and treatment."

In addition, the medical professionals and researchers, many of whom had never done anything like this before, found this to be a meaningful way to connect with communities. "It really improved people's confidence in terms of thinking about public engagement," Veitch says, "and they would do it again."

"It's a great example of how participatory theater offers a compelling, energizing, pleasurable way of bringing people together to clarify community concerns, feel empowered to make a difference, problem solve," says NYU's Sajnani.

"I think it's a remarkable approach," agrees Kartik Sharma, the founder of the organization Public Arts Health & Us, which translates health and environment research into film and art, including theater pieces. He wasn't associated with the sleeping sickness project. Sharma argues that a performance "converts research into something which people can see and feel in a more personalized way." The result, he says, is that "you can actually use it the next day in your life. So I think it's a very powerful strategy."

For those who missed the show, Veitch says that video recordings will be used as part of Malawi's mobile cinema program, which ranges from big televisions on the back of land rovers to large screens set up next to marketplaces and other public gatherings. It's a common way to publicize health messages in Malawi. The goal, says Veitch, is to "extend the legacy of what we've been doing."

However, despite all the fanfare and promise of the program, Veitch, who says she wasn't into soccer when this program began, admits that she's still not a football fan.

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Scientists have discovered a worm that managed to stretch its short life expectancy — by tens of thousands of years.

A tiny roundworm was revived after it was frozen in Siberian permafrost 46,000 years ago, when Neanderthals still walked the Earth.

The worm, a previously unknown species of nematode, survived after entering a dormant state known as cryptobiosis, during which the animal doesn't eat and lacks a metabolism. The finding was detailed in a recent study published in the journal PLOS Genetics.

The most stunning part of the discovery was the length of time the worm had endured cryptobiosis, said Philipp Schiffer, one of the study's authors and a group leader at the Institute of Zoology at the University of Cologne in Germany.

Nematodes are among the planet's most ubiquitous life forms. Scientists had known that some could survive long periods of suspended animation in subzero environments. One Antarctic species spent over 25 years in frozen moss before resuscitation, the previous longest record of cryptobiosis recorded for a nematode.

"Nobody had thought that this process could be for millennia, for 40,000 years — or even longer," Schiffer said. "It's just amazing that life can start again after such a long time, in the stage between life and death."

Scientists used radiocarbon dating to determine that the soil from the permafrost sample was 46,000 years old.

Some nematodes are also known to survive parched climates, like in Chile's Atacama Desert, the driest nonpolar desert on Earth. One species was revived after spending nearly 40 years desiccated in a dry herbarium.

"Everything seems to be possible for these animals and that's what makes them so fascinating," the scientist said.

Schiffer says his worm lab in Cologne was able to analyze and identify the novel worm, which researchers named Panagrolaimus kolymaensis, using genome sequencing.

The nematode was found about 130 feet deep within the permafrost inside a burrow once home to Arctic gophers. After the chunk of frozen sediment was taken to the lab to thaw, the resurrected nematode crawled out and started making babies. The nematode, a female-only species, reproduces asexually, after about eight to 12 days.

The original worm, found five years ago, has died. Scientists are using its descendants to continue their research on the species, which will primarily involve investigating the genetic machinery behind these organisms to learn how these worms evolve to adapt in extreme environments.

That work could reveal how other animals might harbor the genetic superpowers to adapt to extreme environments today, as climate change drives more frequent heat waves and uninhabitable environments, Schiffer says.

"You might learn a lot about how and what's happening right now on Earth, and maybe even inform protection of endangered species," he said.

One challenge in researching the DNA sequences of this particular species, he adds, is how quickly the nematode evolves during its short life. The lifespan of Panagrolaimus kolymaensis is just one to two months.

Unless, of course, it happens to get frozen in time.

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Scientists estimate that 800 great white sharks could be swimming in the waters off the Cape Cod, Mass., coastline, according to a study published Thursday.

From 2015 to 2018, researchers took 137 trips to Cape Cod and saw 393 sharks by using commercial spotter pilots and video cameras. Some sharks were left out of the count because videos of them were not crisp enough, they did not have distinct enough features to rule them out as duplicates or they did not return to the area year after year.

Researchers used the actual population counted and applied a model to reach the estimate.

Sharks go to that area to hunt seals, and they usually appear the most infrequently in June and July and peak in August and September, the study says.

Researchers encountered slightly more males, which could be because they are more easily identifiable by their reproductive organs. Most of the sharks were also juveniles and "subadults," the study said.

While great whites are known to hang around Cape Cod's waters, they have been difficult to track because of their elusiveness and smaller populations.

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MANILA, Philippines — The race to save the dozens of pilot whales still alive after a pod of nearly 100 stranded themselves on a beach in Australia two days ago is now over, with wildlife officials saying they will euthanize the survivors.

The pod stranded itself on Tuesday on Cheynes Beach near the city of Albany in Western Australia. More than 50 of them died overnight and officials and hundreds of volunteers worked throughout Wednesday in an attempt to save the ones that had survived.

At one point, after hours of work, the volunteers managed to get the remaining whales pushed back into the shallows, but the pod only re-stranded itself farther down the beach.

By the evening, veterinarians along with officials with the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions decided to euthanize the remaining whales.

"Sadly, the decision had to be made to euthanise the remaining whales to avoid prolonging their suffering," the Parks and Wildlife Service of Western Australia wrote on its Facebook page. "It was a difficult decision for all involved, however the welfare of the whales had to take precedence. We thank everyone who assisted with the attempt to save the whales over the last two days."

Wildlife experts say pilot whales are very social animals and stranding themselves could indicate illness or stress within the pod, The Associated Press reported.

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PERTH, Australia — Volunteers worked frantically on a second day Wednesday to save dozens of pilot whales that have stranded themselves on a beach in Western Australia, but more than 50 have already died.

Nearly 100 long-finned pilot whales, stranded themselves Tuesday on the beach by the city of Albany, on the southern tip of Western Australia, south of Perth.

They were first spotted swimming Tuesday morning near Cheynes Beach east of Albany. As the day progressed, the pod began moving closer to the beach, sparking the concern of conservation officers. By 4 p.m., a large stretch of the shoreline was covered in beached whales.

Reece Whitby, Western Australia's environment minister, said it was particularly frustrating because it's not known why the phenomenon occurs.

"What we're seeing is utterly heartbreaking and distressing," he told reporters. "It's just a terrible, terrible tragedy to see these dead pilot whales on the beach."

Fifty-two whales had perished, and volunteers are doing what they can to try and save 45 still alive, he said.

"People are committed to doing what they can to save as many whales as they can," Whitby said.

Western Australia state's Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions set up an overnight camp to monitor the whales.

Peter Hartley, a manager from the department, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the volunteers were trying to get the living whales back into the water and encourage them to swim away.

"We are optimistic that we will save as many as we can," Hartley said.

The team tasked with helping the whales includes Perth Zoo veterinarians and marine fauna experts. They have been using specialized equipment, including vessels and slings.

Hundreds of volunteers also offered to help — so many that officials said they had enough registered volunteers and urged other members of the public to stay away from the beach.

Drone footage released by the department showed the whales clustering and forming into a heart shape before stranding themselves on the beach.

"This is just an amazing event," Joanne Marsh, the owner the Cheynes Beach Caravan Park told the ABC. "We've never seen anything quite like this."

Wildlife experts said the unusual behavior of the whales could be an indicator of stress or illness within the pod. Pilot whales are highly social animals and often maintain close relationships with their pods throughout their lives.

Macquarie University wildlife scientist Vanessa Pirotta said the drone footage could suggest the whales had become disoriented, although she said the exact reasons for mass strandings remain unclear.

"The fact that they were in one area very huddled, and doing really interesting behaviors, and looking around at times, suggests that something else is going on that we just don't know," she said.

She said she thought it unlikely the whales were trying to avoid a predator.

"They often have a follow-the-leader type mentality, and that can very much be one of the reasons why we see stranding of not just one but many," Pirotta added.

The incident is reminiscent of one in September, in which some 200 pilot whales died after a pod stranded itself on the remote west coast of Tasmania, off Australia's southeastern coast.

The following month, nearly 500 pilot whales died after stranding themselves on two remote beaches in New Zealand.

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President Biden's dog Commander has found himself in the doghouse after a series of incidents where he bit Secret Service officers on duty at the White House.

The German shepherd bit several Secret Service agents a total of 10 times during the four-month period between October 2022 and January 2023, records show. One incident resulted in an agent getting sent to the hospital for treatment.

Tipped to the incidents, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit to get access to 194 pages of emails and texts where Secret Service agents and officials described aggressive encounters with Commander.

For example, on Oct. 26, Commander charged at an agent while on a walk with first lady Jill Biden.

"The First Lady couldn't regain control of Commander and he continued to circle me. I believe it's only a matter of time before an agent/officer is attacked or bit," an email about a Secret Service official said. The names of most agents and officials were redacted.

Days later, on Nov. 3, Commander bit an officer twice, once on the arm and then when the officer stood up, on the leg. The officer said they had to use a steel cart as a shield from another attack, and they were in pain after the incident.

The next month, the president himself was walking Commander in the Kennedy Garden, where he let the dog off leash. Commander ran to an agent and bit them twice, once on the left forearm and once on the thumb. The emails said Biden "seemed concerned" about the special agent, who continued to work the rest of their shift.

The Bidens had another dog that bit agents, too The Bidens brought two German shepherds with them when they moved into the White House in 2021: Champ, who died at age 13 that year, and Major, a younger dog adopted from a shelter.

But after a couple of biting incidents — and consultations with experts — Major was sent to a live with family friends of the Bidens, for safety reasons. (Judicial Watch had obtained hundreds of pages of records concerning Major's behavior, as well.)

Commander came to the White House as a puppy in December 2021, a birthday gift from Biden's brother James.

But by the end of the year, Commander's behavior had been brought to the attention of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, the emails show.

The Secret Service said in a statement that it takes the safety and security of their employees "extremely seriously."

"For the past several presidential administrations, the Secret Service has navigated how to best operate around family pets and these incidents are no exception," spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement.

Past incidents involving first family pets were also treated as workplace injuries, he said. "While special agents and officers neither care for nor handle the first family's pets, we continuously work with all applicable entities to minimize adverse impacts in an environment that includes pets," he said.

The Bidens are trying to work on new protocols for Commander The Bidens are "working through ways to make this situation better for everyone," said Elizabeth Alexander, communications director for first lady Jill Biden, in a statement

"They have been partnering with the Secret Service and Executive Residence staff on additional leashing protocols and training, as well as establishing designated areas for Commander to run and exercise," Alexander said.

Alexander noted that the White House complex can often be a stressful environment for family pets.

Bob Brandau, a canine behavior expert based in Florida, said animals are very sensitive to their environments.

"Just being in that facility in itself is a stressor, all by itself, because of the level of activity, the level of people moving in and out, the level of security protocols, and then all of those areas of the building that are restricted," Brandau told NPR in an interview.

Brandau, who trains dogs and has served as an expert witness in court cases about aggressive dogs, said dogs like Commander can become more comfortable attacking and biting over time.

"There was no apparent intervention that seemed to be working in any way to prevent that behavior from occurring again because the dog had these multiple incidents," said Brandau, who reviewed the Secret Service emails. At this point, Brandau said he thinks it's unlikely there is more that can be done to train Commander.

"If the dog's got a muzzle on him and he's on a leash, he's safer," Brandau said. "This dog could lash out at any time... it's not a question of will this dog bite again, it's who's he going to bite next? And how seriously are those injuries going to become?"

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Authorities are investigating the death of a woman who was found dead Saturday on a hiking trail outside Yellowstone National Park in an apparent bear encounter.

The woman's body was found on the Buttermilk Trail, located about eight miles west of the gateway community of West Yellowstone, Mont., which borders Yellowstone National Park as well as the Custer Gallatin National Forest. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (MFWP) said Sunday that grizzly bear tracks were found at the scene and that the investigation is ongoing.

The U.S. Forest Service issued an order Sunday closing the area until Aug. 25, for human and bear safety.

The grizzly bear is a protected species under the Endangered Species Act and can be found throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which encompasses parts of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming as well as Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

The National Park Service says the odds of being attacked by a grizzly bear within the park are about 1-in-2.7 million. But those figures are park-specific.

A West Yellowstone local, 40-year-old Charles Mock, was mauled by a grizzly while fishing along the Madison River north of the town in 2021 and ultimately died from his injuries. According to an MWFP news release, that bear was shot and killed when it charged seven officials and bear specialists who were trying to chase it out of the area.

Conservation efforts have brought the species back from 136 in 1975 to an estimated 1,063 as of 2021. With the bear population bouncing back, MFWP and the Forest Service advise people to take proper precautions before venturing out.

This includes carrying bear spray (and knowing how to use it) and traveling in groups. As with other wild animals, making noise while traveling along the trail will alert the bears to your presence, giving them ample time to scamper off instead of being startled.

If you come across a bear in the wild, don't approach it, and certainly don't feed it; that's illegal. Bears that are fed by people become food-conditioned, according to MFWP, which becomes a safety risk for humans as well as the bears.

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A community in South Florida has an adorable problem on its hands.

Dozens of domesticated bunnies have overrun parts of Wilton Manors, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. Two years after a resident let loose lionhead rabbits from their backyard, according to local lore, the number of rabbits now outnumber the 81 homes in the Jenada Isle neighborhood.

The furry invasion has divided the neighborhood's residents. Some have allegedly threatened to shoot the animals or feed them to their snakes. Some want to let the bunnies roam free. Others, concerned about the rabbits' safety, are racing to raise money to save them.

East Coast Rabbit Rescue, a nonprofit organization, is spearheading an effort to rescue and rehome the bunnies. The group managed to rescue 19 rabbits on Friday, three of which are pregnant.

The volunteer-run outfit began rounding up the rabbits after partnering with city police to complete the mission.

The big challenge in trapping the rabbits has been the residents, says ECRR President Monica Mitchell.

"Our hope was to rescue up to 45 — that was our goal yesterday," she said on Saturday. "But, unfortunately, we encountered lots of issues there ... because the residents were so hostile. Some residents didn't want us to take the bunnies."

An officer from the Wilton Manors Police Department was present during the mission to provide protection, but Mitchell is asking the city to do more.

"The city needs to approach the residents in a different way," she said, and "say, hey, you guys need to allow the rescue to come and get the rest of the bunnies. They haven't done that."

The lionhead rabbits, a fluffier species noted for their thick mane (or double mane or full mane) circling the head, aren't built for suburban Florida, Mitchell says.

The animals, which are prone to heat stroke, she says, have been digging holes in the ground to escape the oppressive heat, to the irritation of some residents. Lacking a proper source of clean water or food, the rabbits have been grazing on lawns that could be treated with toxic pesticides. The rabbits are also at the mercy of the area's predators and cars.

The West Palm Beach-based group says it will need at least $40,000 to be able to capture, neuter and spay, vaccinate and microchip the over 100 rabbits-and-counting. So far, it's raised over half of that goal. The WMPD has not yet committed funds toward the effort, a spokesperson told NPR.

The costs are quickly adding up, Mitchell says.

Care for each rabbit costs between $200 to $300, she says, not including any extra medical attention she says several bunnies need.

The rabbits require care from exotic veterinarians, which are rarer and costlier than vets who treat the common pet. Rabbit Rescue is preparing for high vet bills, which in some cases will include surgery to treat the animals, the group's president said.

"Sometimes the vet that is willing to or capable to do the surgery is like 3 to 4 hours away from us," she added.

During an April 25 city council meeting, Wilton Manors councilmembers were concerned that drafting policies to solve the problem would set a precedent for the need to curb other invasive animals, including iguanas and ducks.

Mitchell says that according to neighbors she's spoken to, the rabbits descend from pets kept by a former resident who illegally let them loose when she moved out of state two years ago.

Naturally, they've since reproduced, multiplying like rabbits.

Mitchell's rescue group is calling on the community to help with donations, supplies and fosters to care for the captured rabbits.

"Please contact us if you can foster some bunnies and live in West Palm Beach area," ECRR wrote in a post on its Facebook page. "We will provide everything, you just need to love them."

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An otter in California is on the run from local and federal authorities, wanted for aggressively confronting locals and stealing surfboards at a popular beach. But its outlaw status has turned the slippery sea otter into an international icon, with growing support to leave her in the wild.

The 5-year-old female otter, known officially as otter 841, has been deemed a public safety risk by state and federal wildlife officials because of her "unusually aggressive" behavior along the Santa Cruz coast. As a result, wildlife officials and Monterey Bay Aquarium staff are attempting to capture and rehome the otter to an aquarium or zoo, according to a joint news release. But support for a live-and-let-live approach is growing with each unsuccessful attempt.

Mark Woodward is a local Santa Cruz photographer who has chronicled 841's adventures for over a month on Instagram. Last week, he snapped a photo of an activist dressed as an otter holding a surfboard that read "Keep 841 free." Another local, Ann Stadler, voiced her support for otter 841 in a letter to the editorin the Santa Cruz Sentinel published on Thursday.

"I don't have all the facts and history of the incidents but it just seems to me to be yet another example of humans feeling that they have the right of way on the earth and that other contemporary species and their rights to their native habitats are expendable," Stadler wrote.

There are several petitions circulating online in support of 841's freedom, one of which has gathered over 50,000 signatures.

The otter's antics have become a viral sensation in recent weeks, generating a multitude of memes shared across social media platforms. Santa Cruz's most wanted even has an Instagram fan page, @thesurfingotter, home to a series of parody images, including one that compares otter 841 to Batman in Christopher Nolan's 2008 film The Dark Knight.

"She's the hero Santa Cruz deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt her. Because she can take it," the meme reads. "Because she's not our hero. She's a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark night."

However, the agencies charged with catching 841 have maintained their stance that capturing and rehoming her is best for the otter and humans alike. Biologists say catching the otter could take days or weeks because of environmental conditions like water clarity. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) told NPR that capture efforts could be "suspended or halted entirely" if the otter continues to elude officials and stops interacting with people.

Wildlife experts remain uncertain about why the otter is behaving this way. Monterey Bay Aquarium spokesperson Kevin Connor previously told NPR that otter 841 was born in the aquarium approximately five years ago, where she was raised by her mother and minimally cared for by staff disguised in black rubber suits and welding masks to hide their human appearance.

She was successfully released into the wild in June 2020 and appeared to be doing well, until last September, when her interactions with humans were first documented in the area.

The CDFW says the otter could be behaving this way because of positive interactions with people, such as feeding, which would explain why she's not exhibiting a healthy fear of humans. Officials want to catch the otter so she can be thoroughly examined at the Monterey Bay Aquarium before finding her a new home, all but certainly in an approved zoo or aquarium.

Like her current summer escapades, otter 841 was caught harassing surfers in Santa Cruz last September. CDFW and aquarium staff were able to drive her away from the area, but she returned to her stomping grounds and resumed her unusual behavior last month.

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Officials in the town of Kleinmachnow, Germany, called off a massive, two-day hunt for what they believed was a lioness at large, saying the large animal may have actually been a native specimen of wild boar.

The creature in question was first spotted around midnight Thursday (local time) in a wooded area on the southwest outskirts of Berlin, according to a statement from the Brandenburg Police.

A passer-by captured a video of what they believed was a large cat chasing a wild boar, then shared the footage with police, who agreed that the presence of a lioness was "considered credible."

A massive search of the flat, forested area between Berlin and the surrounding state of Brandenburg carried on for over 36 hours, with authorities urging residents to stay indoors and keep a close eye on their pets and children.

More than 30 patrol cars, as well as helicopters, veterinarians and hunters were on the scene. Riot police stood by to help protect the local population. Warnings were broadcast to the public via loudspeakers, warning apps and social media.

But, since the start, officials had been puzzled over the predator's origins. None of the local zoos, circuses or animal rescue facilities said they were missing a feline, police and local media reported.

Then, on Friday, Kleinmachnow Mayor Michael Grubert told reporters that it may not have been a lion all along.

A computer analysis of the mobile phone footage revealed that the creature lacked the long, curving neck characteristic of big cats, Reuters reported. What appears to the eye as a long and bobbed tail could have just been a shadow. And the animal's light coloring? That's found in some wild boars as well, Grubert said.

"Following another convincing tip this morning, police and hunters visited a small area of forest," the mayor added. "We only found a family of wild boar."

Female lions can grow to lengths of 9 feet and weigh between 265 and 395 pounds, according to the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. A male Central European boar, in contrast, averages about 4'11" in length and might weigh up to 441 pounds, according to the European Landowners Association.

But the species is still dangerous to humans, with sharp teeth capable of killing hunters and harassing local residents.

A warning to stay indoors was lifted Friday and search efforts would be considerably scaled back, Grubert said. Though, he added, police would be prepared to react if the situation changed.

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One of the most storied horses in thoroughbred racing history, Funny Cide, died this week at the age of 23.

Small in stature, the feisty chestnut was an unknown when he was entered into the Kentucky Derby in 2003. Funny Cide faced 12-1 odds — the definition of a longshot. A New York state-bred horse had never won the big race.

But when the gates opened on that May morning at Churchill Downs, Funny Cide ran strong.

"I could not believe my eyes," one of his co-owners, Harold Cring, recalled in a 2007 interview with North Country Public Radio. "That's our horse out front. I kept waiting for something to fall apart."

Funny Cide held on to win. It was a life-altering moment for the horse's owners, a group of high school friends from a tiny town called Sacketts Harbor in northern New York who had taken up horse-racing as a hobby.

"We were just sitting around having a couple cocktails as we were often doing, and the idea came up to buy a horse," said Jon Constance, the village's former mayor and another of Funny Cide's co-owners. "From that day forward, our life has changed."

The Kentucky Derby win was also a pinnacle moment for veteran jockey Jose Santos, who retired in 2007. "I came all the way from Chile chasing a dream and I got the dream, you know, and I did it with Funny Cide," Santos said.

At first, the win in Kentucky seemed like a fluke. It was widely portrayed as a feel-good story about a blue-collar horse owned by a bunch of small-town guys who got lucky.

Then two weeks later at the Preakness Stakes, Funny Cide won again, dominating the field by almost 10 lengths.

In the end, Funny Cide wasn't able to capture the Triple Crown. A larger, more pedigreed thoroughbred called Empire Maker won the Belmont Stakes that year.

Still, it was an epic run. By the time Funny Cide retired in 2007, he'd won more than $3.5 million for his owners.

"Funny Cide just loved to run," Constance recalled in an interview with NPR this week. "He loved to get out there and loved to show the rest of them. He might have been small but he was powerful."

The former mayor of Sacketts Harbor said many of the horse's co-owners who experienced that remarkable year together still live in the village.

"We seldom go a week without going to somebody's house. We're all very close. And by the way, I live on Funny Cide Drive now," Constance said, noting that the village named a new street after their famous horse.

Funny Cide spent the last 15 years of his life in comfort at a horse farm in Kentucky before passing this week of complications linked to cholic.

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CANBERRA, Australia — Wildlife authorities have killed the leader of a pack of dingoes that mauled a jogger on a popular Australian tourist island in a ferocious attack that a rescuer said could have been fatal.

Sarah Peet, 23, was attacked by three or four Australian native dogs on Monday as she jogged along a beach at Queensland state's K'gari, the world's largest sand island formerly known as Fraser Island.

The Brisbane resident was flown by helicopter to a mainland hospital in a stable condition. The health department refused to provide an update on her condition Thursday, citing patient confidentiality.

Wildlife rangers captured and humanely euthanized the leader of the pack on Wednesday, the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service said.

"Euthanizing a high-risk dingo is always a last resort and the tough decision by the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service was supported by the island's traditional owners, the Butchulla people," a service statement said.

The dingo was the second on the island in recent weeks to be killed for biting and threatening behavior. Authorities blame dingoes' increasing fearlessness on tourists who ignore rules by feeding them or encouraging them to approach in order to post social media images.

Wary young dingoes avoided humans when pandemic travel restrictions were first eased in late 2021. But their dangerous human interactions are increasing with tourists' encouragement as visitor numbers rise.

Peet did not deliberately encourage dingoes to approach her. But visitors to the World Heritage-listed Great Sandy National Park are warned against running or jogging outside fenced areas because of the risk that dingoes will chase them.

The dingoes forced Peet into the surf, deploying the same hunting strategy that rangers say they use against large prey such as kangaroos and wallabies.

Tourists Shane and Sarah Moffat were driving along the beach in their SUV when they saw Peet being attacked.

"We've seen two dingoes hanging off the side of her," Shane Moffat told Nine News television.

"She was walking towards me with a hand up yelling out, 'Help, help,'" Moffat said. "I could see fear in her face, that she wasn't in a good way."

Moffat said he ran to Peet, forcing himself between her and the pack leader. Moffat bloodied his fingers on the dingo's fangs as he punched it.

Moffat said Peet's injuries included a chunk of flesh missing from her right upper-arm and bite marks to her legs.

He doubted she would have survived if he had arrived at the scene any later.

The pack leader was one of three dingoes on the island fitted with tracking collars because of their high-risk behavior.

When he was collared in April, he was around 2-year-old and weighed 17 kilograms (37 pounds) which was heavy for a dingo and indicated he had been fed by humans, authorities said.

The dingo killed by authorities in June after separate attacks on a 7-year-old boy a 42-year-old French woman was the first to be destroyed on the island since 2019.

Rangers said that dingo was the offspring of a collared mother that had taught her pups their dangerous ways.

K'gari is home to some of Australia's purest dingoes because domestic dogs have long been banned. Dingoes are a protected species and authorities are considering how they can more safely coexist with humans on the island.

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Janna Clinton was sitting on her back porch watching her son Charlie, 11, fish in a pond near their house in Oklahoma this past weekend when he suddenly started yelling for her.

"He was screaming, 'Oh my God, mom! Oh my God!' " Clinton told NPR.

"I thought he was just being dramatic, to be honest," she added.

Then she got a close look at Charlie's alarmingly weird catch.

"Obviously being in a neighborhood pond, we're used to just catching a few bass or catfish," she said. "I mean, nothing with human-like teeth."

It turned out that Charlie had landed a pacu, a fish that's a cousin of the piranha — and whose outsized teeth have long struck fear in swimmers. The pacu is a native of South America, but this one was swimming in a small pond in the Clintons' suburb north of Oklahoma City.

"He said it put up a heck of a fight," Janna told NPR, saying her son reeled the fish in on his own. "He was the only one down there fishing and he did a great job."

The pacu was released back into the water The Clintons posted a photo of the unusual fish to their neighborhood Facebook page and got in touch with a game warden. But before learning of its provenance, they returned the pacu to the water.

"It's a catch and release pond," Janna said, "so we unfortunately did release it back because we didn't know any better at the time."

People who later recognized the fish said it was invasive and shouldn't be released, she said, adding, "We made a mistake there."

Since then, Charlie has been stalking the fish.

"He did stay at the ponds pretty late that night trying to catch it again," Janna said, adding that her son has been rising early and staying at the pond late, hoping to get another bite from that pacu.

If Charlie succeeds, a neighbor has offered to eat the pacu. But Janna Clinton has other ideas.

"If he catches it again, we're going to get it mounted for him. I think that's a heck of a prize and he deserves it," she said. "I told him we'd make it look like the fish was smiling so you could see its teeth."

The wildlife agency blames a pet owner for the pacu's presence Game wardens believe the pacu was a pet that outgrew its tank and was released into the wild.

"How dare you," the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation said, addressing the fish's previous owner via Twitter and setting off a lively exchange with surprised members of the public.

"WHY DOES IT HAVE HUMAN TEETH," a dismayed commenter asked. "IDK WE DIDN'T MAKE THEM," the wildlife agency replied.

When asked what kind of bait Charlie used to entice the pacu to bite, his mother said, "You're going to laugh. It was just a piece of bread."

Pacu have been found in Oklahoma before Not only is this not the first pacu caught in Oklahoma — it's not the first time one's been hooked by an 11-year-old in the state. Charlie follows in the footsteps of Kennedy Smith of Lindsay, Okla., who caught a pacu five years ago.

"These fish are generally harmless to humans, but the practice of dumping unwanted pets in waterways can be incredibly harmful to native wildlife," the wildlife agency said via Facebook. It warned that pacu can grow to sizes up to 3.5 feet and 88 pounds.

As for whether the invasive pacu is becoming more common in Oklahoma, Kelly Adams, a communication and education supervisor at the agency, told NPR, "This is not an increasing trend. I'd say every couple of years we get a report."

Anyone who catches a pacu should keep the fish and contact a game warden, Adams said.

The fish also has a scary nickname Along with its creepy appearance, the pacu has a troubling nickname: "the ball cutter," a label that stems from its purported habit of attacking men's testicles. That dubious distinction prompted warnings for skinny-dippers in Scandinavia after one of the fish was caught in the wild in 2013.

"It's not normal to get your testicles bitten off, of course, but it can happen, especially now in Sweden," fish expert Henrik Carl said at the time, although he warned that people were still more likely to die from drowning than from a pacu attack.

In reality, the red-bellied pacu and related species actually rely on nuts and seeds from fruit trees and plants as a main food source, according to Animal Diversity Web, a project by the University of Michigan's school of zoology. Still, the animals are omnivores — and their appetite grows with their size.

If one pacu is a nuisance, multiple pacus are a problem. Their feeding behavior revolves around "bite events," the Michigan website says, "with each event containing a number of individual bites, which is similar to the feeding behavior observed in true piranhas."

They're supposedly delicious The fish is known for having a mild, slightly sweet flavor. And in some cases, rogue pacu have been suspected of reaching far-flung waters after being imported by fish farmers.

A 1997 U.S. academic study found the taste of pacu to be "comparable to that of hybrid striped bass, tilapia, and rainbow trout, but superior to catfish."

As for what it's like to catch a pacu, it's not easy. They're known to be very elusive.

Here's how British fisherman Jeremy Wade, who once caught a 40-pound pacu in Papua New Guinea, described the experience in 2011:

"When I reeled it in, it had this mouth which was surprisingly human-like, it is almost like they have teeth specially made for crushing.

"They are like human molars and the fish have powerful jaw muscles. They are very deep bodied and solid like a carp, with strong muscles."

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When dinosaurs ruled the Earth, we tend to think of the mammals at the time — including our distant ancestors — as small and quivering in the shadows.

"We've always had this picture of mammals as the literal underdogs," says Elsa Panciroli, a paleontologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. "They're being trampled. They're cowering in the darkness at night, just trying to avoid being eaten."

But a remarkable new fossil, originating in the early Cretaceous some 125 million years ago and now described in the journal Scientific Reports, conjures a rather different possibility. It consists of two intertwined skeletons — an upstart mammal sinking its teeth into a much larger dinosaur.

"Our best guess is that the mammal was in the middle of attacking the dinosaur," says Jordan Mallon, one of the authors of the new study and a paleobiologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature.

If true, such a revelation shakes our traditional view of dinosaur domination and mammal submission. It suggests a more complex ancient food web in which certain dinosaurs were prey and some mammals were predators.

In the case of this particular fossil that was unearthed in modern-day northeast China, "this mammal appears to have been particularly gutsy or voracious," Mallon says.

A fossil that tells a story The fossil is preserved in stunning detail due to the nearby eruption of an ancient volcano, which caused ash and sudden mud flows to preserve everything in the area. They would have buried the early horned dinosaur and mammal instantly, Mallon says, in the middle of the attack.

Often, a fossil is a pile of scattered bones. It's rare for a fossil to record a behavior like this because a behavior, unlike a bone, tends to leave no trace.

But here, a story leaps out to Mallon — one of combat preserved in rock.

"The dinosaur is called Psittacosaurus," says Mallon, "what we call the 'parrot-beaked dinosaur' because it has a beak much like a parrot for ingesting plant matter. It was about the size of a small to medium-sized dog."

In the fossil, Psittacosaurus is on its side, its skeleton curled in a semicircle. Tucked up against the dinosaur is a mammal called Repenomamus, which Mallon calls "maybe a badger-sized animal."

Repenomamus was among the largest mammals of its day. But it's only a third the size of Psittacosaurus.

Mallon points to the way that one of the mammal's paws is clutching the dino's lower jaw, while another grips a hind leg. "And the lower jaw of the mammal is biting onto some of the dinosaur's ribcage," he says.

For Mallon and his Chinese and Canadian colleagues, the conclusion is clear — Repenomamus was attacking an herbivorous dinosaur three times its size.

'An ecosystem full of ninjas' Elsa Panciroli, who wasn't involved in the research, isn't ready to commit to that conclusion.

"The jury might be out a little bit for me as to whether the dinosaur had already died, maybe only just recently," she says, "or was in a very, very weakened state rather than it having been hunted down by this mammal."

The study authors say that the mammal wasn't scavenging the dinosaur because its bones have no bite marks. And they say that the position of the bodies suggests an active attack was in progress.

"We already knew that mammals did occasionally prey on at least baby dinosaurs," says Mallon. "What's new here is even a fully grown Psittacosaurus wasn't necessarily safe from these smaller mammalian predators."

And Mallon points to other modern-day analogs of smaller animals attacking and preying upon larger ones: a wolverine taking down a caribou "if it's desperate," or a ferret attacking a larger hare.

Regardless of the interpretation of the fossil, Panciroli says it bears witness to a more elaborate Cretaceous food web. "It's just a lot more complex and rich than that oversimplified narrative that we used to rely on."

It's unlikely that this kind of interaction — of a smaller mammal attacking a larger dinosaur — was all that common. Usually, it was the dinosaurs gobbling up the mammals.

"It was almost like, an ecosystem full of ninjas," says Mallon, referring to raptor dinosaurs like Daliansaurus, Graciliraptor and Sinovenator.

That's what makes this particular specimen all the more special.

"These fossilized moments in time," says Mallon, "really allow us to make these quantum leaps in our inferences to be able to reconstruct these ancient ecosystems."

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A new sign has appeared outside the gorilla habitat at the Toronto Zoo.

"For the wellbeing of gorilla troop," it admonishes, "please refrain from showing them any videos or photos as some content can be upsetting and affect their relationships and behaviour within their family."

The zoo grew concerned after a 14-year-old gorilla named Nassir seemed especially dazzled by videos held up by visitors on their cellphones.

"I'm not really sure what the content of the videos was," Maria Franke, the zoo's director of wildlife welfare, told us. "Was it gorillas in the wild? A cartoon? I don't know. But it was like Nassir was a little boy. All he wanted to do was watch. It made him be distracted, not interact with his family, or, you know, be a gorilla. He was just so enthralled with the phones and the videos."

Does this sound familiar? Our human DNA is a 98% match to gorillas, after all.

There have been similar stories in recent months about gorillas at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, and the Louisville Zoo, captivated by onscreen diversions.

"Gorillas get bored in captivity," explains Rob Laidlaw, a biologist who is executive director of Zoocheck, a Canadian animal welfare organization. Even in wildlife sanctuaries that give animals sunlight, greenery and room to roam, "they're looking for any opportunity they can find to engage intellectually."

This is a challenge for zoos. They keep animals safe, for conservation and research, and so visitors can marvel at and care about them. But how do they make zoo life a little more engaging for the animals?

Maria Franke says the Toronto Zoo shows their gorillas nature programs: classy documentaries from the CBC and BBC. They seem to especially enjoy watching other gorillas.

I've tried to imagine which movies might make wholesome screen entertainment for great apes.

King Kong? I'm not sure I'd risk their reaction. But Gorillas in the Mist, about Dian Fossey, who famously said, "The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people"? Of course. The Planet of the Apes films, in which gorillas eventually overthrow their malicious human captors? I think they would offer two opposable thumbs up.

I don't know if gorillas would enjoy The Godfather. But I wonder if any silverback who screened it would tell their family group, "Take the banana. Leave the cannoli."

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As oppressive heat continues to blanket much of the U.S., it's especially crucial to take precautions to protect yourself and your loved ones — furry friends included.

Heat waves can pose the same kinds of risks to animals as they do to humans, says Michael San Filippo, a spokesperson for the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA).

"If it's hot outside for you, it's most likely even hotter for your pet," he tells NPR over email.

Generally, he says, pets with longer or darker fur and those with flat or pushed-in faces, like pugs or Persian cats, may have extra trouble managing heat. Pets that are older, obese or have certain medical conditions could also face a higher risk of heat stroke.

Experts recommend limiting pets' outdoor exercise and activities if it's too hot. But what happens when Fido needs to use the bathroom or gets restless at home?

There are precautions you can take, like keeping your pet off hot asphalt, out of parked cars and shielded from the sun (dog sunscreen is real!). And there are other activities you can do indoors to keep them active and stimulated.

Read on how to keep your pets safe in the heat — and how to tell if they're not.

Watch out for hot pavement Experts advise limiting walks to the cooler early morning or evening hours, in part because hot asphalt can put dogs at risk for burned paw pads.

Sy Woon, aFlorida representative for the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association, recommends feeling the pavement with the back of your hand to see whether it's tolerable for dogs.

"We sometimes think that they can walk across any surface and fare well, but actually, they can be quite sensitive," she told NPR last summer.

Try to keep your pet on grass or at least avoid dark-colored pavement. Using dog booties can also help prevent accidental injury, San Filippo says.

Make sure to give your pet access to shade and cold water while outside. The Humane Society advises adding ice to water when possible, and says tree shade and tarps are ideal because they don't obstruct air flow.

"A doghouse does not provide relief from heat," it adds. "In fact, it makes it worse."

Pets can get sunburns, too Sunburn is another summer pet safety risk that many owners may not be aware of, San Filippo says.

All dogs and cats may be susceptible, he says, though those that are hairless, have white or thin coats or light-pigmented noses and eyelids are especially at risk.

"There are special sunscreens available to protect pets from sunburn," he writes. "It's very important that you only use formulas that are specifically intended as sunscreen for your type of pet."

And while the hot temperatures may scream summer haircut, San Filippo advises caution.

He says shaving breeds with a "double coat" (like golden retrievers, Pomeranians and huskies) is actually not recommended. Their coats provide protection from the elements, including heat, so shaving increases their chance of overheating and sunburn.

The AVMA recommends asking your vet whether your pet would benefit from a warm-weather haircut or sunscreen.

Fleas, ticks and other bugs are also more active in warmer weather, which San Filippo says is another reason to be careful.

"It's important that pet owners work with their veterinarians to develop a flea and tick prevention strategy, and also be aware of other critters in their area that may pose a risk to their pets," he adds.

Optimize your indoor spaces Experts advise leaving your pet at home if you'll be out and about. And while they're indoors,there are things you can do to make your pet as comfortable as possible.

The American Red Cross recommends keeping all doors and unscreened windows closed, and securing screens tightly, to keep pets from getting out.

The AVMA recommends providing different "temperature zones" throughout the house for your pet's comfort. And the Humane Society notes that fans don't cool pets off as effectively as people, since they respond to heat in different ways.

Make sure to provide them with water, and consider whipping up pet-friendly "pupsicles" as a refreshing treator buying a cooling body wrap, vest or mat.

And never leave your pet in a parked car, since temperatures can quickly rise to dangerous levels even in the shade or with the windows down.

On an 85-degree day, for instance, the temperature inside a car with the windows slightly open can reach 102 degrees within 10 minutes, and 120 degrees after half an hour — which can cause irreparable organ damage or death.

If you come across a dog in a parked car this summer, the Humane Society recommends asking any nearby businesses to make a loudspeaker announcement or, if the owner can't be found, calling the non-emergency number of the local police or animal control and waiting for them to arrive.

Keep them busy with other activities Even if it's too hot for your pet's regular outdoor activities, it's still important that they get some kind of mental and physical stimulation to keep them happy and healthy, San Filippo says.

"While walks or trips to the dog park might be out of the question, there are some easy alternatives," he adds.

If you have a yard, consider setting up a kiddie pool in a shady spot or a sprinkler your pet can run through. He says you can also splash your dog with a garden hose — just make sure the water is cool and that they don't drink too much of it, which could cause vomiting.

You could also consider a doggy day care, which San Filippo says can provide "the same thrills and excitement as the dog park," just in an air-conditioned environment. Some facilities have outdoor spaces, so he recommends asking about their policies for hot days.

There are also plenty of indoor exercise and enrichment activities anyone can try at home, from hallway fetch to food puzzles.

You could hide treats or food around the house to let your pet practice their foraging skills, he says, as long as you help them out at first and adjust their meals to account for the calories. Or build your own obstacle course using pillows, boxes and other household items.

San Filippo says it's also a good time to teach your pet a new trick or brush up on some old ones.

"These activities are a great way to bond with your pet and learn more about what kinds of activities they're interested in or capable of," he says. "The more you play, the more you both will learn!"

Recognize the signs of heat stroke If your pet has been out in extreme temperatures, make sure to watch for signs of heat stress or heat stroke.

Symptoms include anxiousness or restlessness, excessive drooling and panting (even when lying down), vomiting or diarrhea, abnormal gum and tongue color (like deep red or purple), unsteadiness or collapsing. Cats might also experience open-mouthed breathing.

If you suspect heat stroke, experts recommend taking your pet's temperature rectally.

Anything above 105 degrees means you need to cool the animal down (and stop when they reach 103 degrees), according to the Red Cross.

"If you see signs of heat stress in your pets, the best thing to do is get them into a cool, shady area and give them water to drink," San Filippo says.

You could also run cool hose water over them, apply ice packs or cold towels to their head, neck and chest and let them lick ice cubes.

But be careful — San Filippo says cooling a hyperthermic animal too quickly can cause their blood vessels to constrict, which will actually make it harder for them to get cool. That's why it's crucial to use cool water or wet towels, instead of cold ones, and fan your pet to help encourage evaporation.

Once you've taken immediate action, experts recommend bringing your pet to the vet as soon as possible — especially if their symptoms don't improve quickly.

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A cruise line is apologizing to passengers who witnessed the killing of dozens of pilot whales near their docked ship this week in the Faroe Islands.

Passengers aboard the cruise ship Ambition, owned by the U.K.-based Ambassador Cruise Line, had just arrived Sunday in the port of Tórshavn in the Danish territory when they caught the spectacle, part of a long-standing and highly scrutinized local tradition.

Among those passengers were conservationists with ORCA, a marine life advocacy group that seeks to protect whales and dolphins in European waters. Since 2021, Ambassador has paid for ORCA staff to join their cruises in order to educate tourists on marine wildlife and collect data on the animals.

In an account shared by ORCA and confirmed byAmbassador, the conservationists said over 40 small boats and jet skis herded the whales to a beach where 150 people worked to haul the animals ashore with hooks and slaughter them with lances.

In total, the hunt lasted about 20 minutes, ORCA said. Some of the animals, which included nine calves, took over 30 seconds to die.

Ambassador Cruise Line said it was "incredibly disappointed" that the hunt unfolded near the ship and that it continues to "strongly object to this practice." The companyasks their guests not to support the hunters by purchasing local whale and dolphin meat.

"We fully appreciate that witnessing this local event would have been distressing for the majority of guests onboard,"Ambassadorsaid in a statement to NPR. "Accordingly, we would like to sincerely apologise to them for any undue upset."

A representative for the Faroe Islands government did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment on Sunday's hunt.

Long-finned pilot whales, which are technically a species of dolphin, are a medium-sized marine mammal that dwells in the North Atlantic, known for their bulbous head and sickle-shaped flippers. They'reprotected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, but not currently listed as an endangered species.

The mammals live in social pods of up to 20 individuals, organized into a larger school of hundreds of animals — a social structure that makes them easy targets for whalers, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In the Faroe Islands, the hunting of pilot whales is known as the "grindadrap" or "grind." The Faroese view the tradition as central to their cultural identity and a sustainable way to gather food, according to a local government website.

The government says the killing is not highly commercialized. Each catch is "distributed for free in the local community" but "in some supermarkets and on the dockside, whale meat and blubber is occasionally available for sale."

Multiple hunts can occur throughout the year, and each is carried out by people with a required license and supervised by elected officials. Local legislation stipulates the killing must be carried out as "quickly and efficiently as possible."

The government says the average catch is around 800 animals, an insignificant impact on the overall pilot whale population, which it says is around 778,000 animals.

But a record single-day killing of more than 1,400 white-sided dolphins in 2021 brought the practice into intensified scrutiny. The chairman of the Faroese Whalers Association told the BBC that the size of that killing was purely accidental.

That Sunday's slaughter unfolded near the cruise ship made it seem as if the whalers were "flaunting the hunt and taunting the tourists," many of whom were hoping to catch a glimpse of marine life in the wild, ORCA CEO Sally Hamilton said.

"It defies belief that the Faroese authorities allowed this activity to take place in clear sight of a cruise ship packed with passengers," she wrote in a statement shared with NPR. "At some point, the Faroese authorities will have to decide if its marine life is a more attractive tourist proposition when it is alive than when it is being killed."

The cruise ship was docked for a stop in Tórshavn, the main harbor of the 18-island territory between Iceland and the Shetland Islands. While the local government has invested more into its tourism sector, fishing and marine-related industries still remain the region's top economic driver.

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A 19-foot Burmese python — the longest ever recorded — was caught by local hunters in South Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve this week. To put the catch into perspective, the snake is as long as an adult giraffe is tall.

It was caught on Monday by 22-year-old Jake Waleri, who brought the python to the Conservancy of Southwest Florida in his hometown of Naples, the conservancy said. Officials there measured the snake at 19 feet and 125 pounds, and said it set a new world record for length.

A video of Waleri's record-breaking catch on Instagram shows the python lunging at Waleri as he pulls the snake onto the roadby its tail. Waleri and the snake wrestled on the ground until others joined in to help peel the snake off the hunter.

Burmese pythons are one of the largest snakes on the planet. They're also an invasive species running rampant through much of southern Florida. They're wreaking havoc on the state's native animal populations because the pythons have no natural predators in Florida, which is why Waleri spends his nights hunting these monstrous predators.

"It's awesome to be able to make an impact on South Florida's environment," he said in the news release. "We love this ecosystem and try to preserve it as much as possible."

The previous record was set in 2020, by a python caught in the Everglades stretching 18-feet-9-inches and weighing 104 pounds. The record for the heaviest Burmese python ever captured was set by one caught by the Conservancy in June 2022, at a whopping 215 pounds, the conservancy said.

According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, these pythons pose such a big threat that hunters and residents alike don't need a permit to kill them. The reptiles are, however, protected by anti-cruelty laws, which require hunters to humanely kill the snakes.

Burmese pythons feast on Florida wildlife big and small, from rabbits and house pets to foxes and white-tailed deer. And one Instagram clip from 2022 shows Florida scientists removing a 5-foot-long alligator from an 18-foot python during a necropsy.

The state hosts an annual competition, the Florida Python Challenge, in efforts to keep the populations at bay. The competition attracts professional hunters and armatures alike, competing for prize money ranging from $1,000 to $10,000.

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An aggressive sea otter in California is hassling locals by riding boards she stole from surfers in the lineup.

Steamer Lane is a legendary point break nestled along the rocky shores of Santa Cruz, home to swaths of experienced surfers, as well as a 5-year-old female sea otter with a growing reputation for repeatedly confronting surfers and kayakers.

Videos across social media show theotter hoisting itself out of the ocean and onto boards while surfers sit back in awe. At times she's chewed on the boards or forced surfers to surrender their boards altogether.

Onlookers in the videos can be heard laughing in jest at surfers' misfortune, but officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say the otter poses a public safety risk.

"While there have been no confirmed reports of injury, due to the highly unusual behavior of this otter, kayakers, surfers, and others recreating in the area should not approach the otter or encourage the otter's interactions," the USFWS said in a statement.

Sixty-year-old Santa Cruz native and photographer Mark Woodward said he has photographed hundreds of otters over the years, but has never seen something like this. He's witnessed the otter bully surfers three times in less than a week.

"I saw the first incident on June 18 and I didn't know what was happening," Woodward told NPR. "... It was quite astounding."

The USFWS said the otter's behavior is "concerning and unusual," and though the exact cause is unknown, officials said it could be associated with hormonal surges or being fed by humans.

Southern sea otters are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act and are protected under the Marine Mammal Act as well as California law, the USFWS said. After being hunted to near extinction for their fur in the 1700s and 1800s, the population has rebounded since becoming a protected species and is a key predator in California's coastal ecosystems.

A team from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and the Monterey Bay Aquarium is looking for the otter to catch and rehome her. Unfortunately once the otter is caught, Monterey Bay Aquarium spokesperson Kevin Connor told NPR, she won't be able to return to the wild.

The animal, officially known as otter 841, was born in captivity — because it's mother had also been too friendly with humans — and then successfully released into the wild in June 2020, Connor told NPR. It wasn't until September 2022 that she started exhibiting her bizarre behavior at Steamer Lane.

At the time, CDFW and aquarium staff were able to drive the animal out of the area, a process called hazing, in hopes of deterring her from interacting with people. But her most recent interactions show she's no longer afraid of humans, Connor said.

"Trying to recapture the otter is an effort to avoid anything more drastic. If the otter were to harm or bite a person, the USFW, which is responsible for managing the population of these animals, would have to begin discussions of euthanizing the animal," Connor said. "That's the reality, and nobody wants to see that."

Once caught, she will be taken to the aquarium for an exam before being moved into her forever home at an USFWS-approved location. Like her mother before her, otter 841 has been deemed un-releasable, Connor said.

The southern sea otter was believed to be gone forever, until a family of 50 were found in Big Sur in 1938, Connor said. Today, they number approximately 3,000, a mere 30% of what scientists believe the original population was before their near brush with extinction.

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Fourteen Angolan giraffes walk into a truck ... and then travel more than 800 miles to their historical homeland, where they had been locally extinct for decades. The migrant giraffes rode unsedated for more than 36 hours this week from Namibia to their new home in Iona National Park, in Angola.

Who are they?

These 14 juvenile giraffes come from a private game farm in Namibia. At an estimated 2-3 years old, they stand about 3.5 meters high. (That's roughly 11 1/2 feet tall.)
Giraffes' height and plant-based diet means they play an important role in managing ecological balance and pollinating trees and shrubs.
Giraffe populations in general have been on a decline due to "habitat loss, poaching, and other human-induced factors" according to African Parks.

What's the big deal?

It's a logistical feat years in the making to arrange the transfer of animals this large. Once herded, they had to be loaded into a specially designed truck, and then driven very carefully across national borders to their final home – not to mention the politics involved in getting the government support and permits needed for the endeavor.
It's a step toward restoring biodiversity at the parks. Thirty years of civil war in the region took its toll, so the return of these giraffes is also symbolic of recovery.
The Giraffe Conservation Foundation estimates an Africa-wide population of about 117,000 giraffes. That's one giraffe for every four elephants, for context. With proper protection by the national parks, hopefully that number grows.

What are people saying? Stephanie Fennessy, executive director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, spoke to NPR's Adrian Florido about the initiative.

On what happened to the giraffes in Angola:

They used to live in Angola, Namibia, Botswana and parts of Zambia. But during the civil unrest and civil war in Angola, giraffes are really easy animals to poach, and there's a lot of meat on them. So they were really war fodder and went extinct during the civil unrest in the country.

On the importance of returning these giraffes to their native territory:

I mean, obviously, any animal is important for biodiversity and for conservation and to have the right mix of animals in the country. So giraffes are landscape shapers, they're pollinators, so they're an important part of the ecosystem. But it's also obviously a prestigious project. I mean, Angola without Angolan giraffes sounds a little bit ridiculous, doesn't it?

On their release into their new habitat:

It's always amazing to see giraffes put their first steps into a new environment, where they have been locally extinct for a long time. I mean, it's really emotional. Obviously, the move has been really stressful years in the making. We started with feasibility studies basically two years ago. So when it finally happens, it's just a big relief and you're exhilarated. It's really, really exciting. And yeah, the giraffes are doing well. We tagged most of them with the GPS satellite tracker, so I can sit now here in my office and look where they move and they are just exploring their new habitat and finding their feet.

So what now?

Now that Angola is peaceful again, conservationists hope this move is just the beginning of efforts to reintroduce wildlife — here and at other African parks. These 14 giraffes will need to be monitored to ensure they're thriving, but there are ongoing discussions on bringing other animals into the park. "Fourteen is a great start," says Fennessy. "But to really have a feasible, satellite population, it would probably be helpful to bring some more. But let's first see how these ones go and then be taken from there."

Learn more:

Drought is driving elephants closer to people. The consequences can be deadly
A historic treaty protecting endangered species turns 50. Is it still an effective tool?
When detecting land mines, the nose knows - or, in this case, the trunk

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It looked like something out of an apocalyptic movie.

Over the past few weeks, droves of sick and dying sea animals have been washing up along the coast of Southern California, including beaches in Santa Barbara and Ventura.

The devastation has been caused by an outbreak of toxic algae on a scale never before seen in the region, according to NOAA Fisheries' West Coast branch.

As of last week, local officials had estimated that over 100 dolphins and over 500 sea lions had been killed by the algal bloom. It appears that the toxins are slowly spreading to Northern California.

Samuel Dover, who leads Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute, has witnessed six algal blooms during his career and described the current one as the worst yet.

"The bloom is so much larger," he told NPR. "This time, it's in the center of the channel, where a lot of animals are."

What is an algal bloom? Algae are usually benign plants, commonly seen in the form of pond scum or kelp. But under certain conditions, they can grow out of control and generate deadly toxins.

When that happens, it is known as a bloom. It tends to be a problem for U.S. states near the country's coast and the Great Lakes. Over the years, algal blooms have contaminated tap water, forced beaches to close, discolored coastal waters and led to the demise of countless animals.

Although algal blooms are considered a natural phenomenon, climate change and human activities do play a role in their frequency and intensity.

In California, the algae outbreak is believed to have resulted from wind pushing water full of nutrients toward algae, making them grow. That process is not typically related to climate change, but it does not rule it out as a factor either, according to scientists at NOAA Fisheries' West Coast branch.

What are algae doing to the sea lions in California? The bloom in California is producing domoic acid, which generally doesn't affect humans but is poisonous to animals.

When a sea creature suffers from domoic acid poisoning, it affects the animal's brain and causes seizures, erratic behavior, bulging eyes and foaming at the mouth. Beachgoers have been warned to stay at least 50 feet away from sick animals in case they turn aggressive.

There is no antidote or specific remedy for domoic acid poisoning. Veterinarians have been giving some animals antiseizure medicine and keeping them hydrated in hopes that the toxins will flush out of their bodies. The problem is that the longer the toxins are in an animal's system, the more difficult it becomes to treat the poisoning.

Adult pregnant sea lions have been the most severely affected by the outbreak, according to Dover, of Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute.

When will it get better? When Southern California was struck by an algal bloom last year, it lasted about six weeks, Dover said.

Similarly, the current outbreak, in its eighth week, appears to be improving, and fewer sick animals are appearing on shores.

To compare, Dover said lately his volunteer group has been receiving about 40 to 50 reports of sick animals per day. A month ago, they were receiving 40 to 50 reports per hour, though many reports tend to be duplicates of the same animal.

While that is a good sign, not much can be done to speed up the process. Harmful algal blooms are nearly impossible to clean, especially at the scale that has emerged near California.

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Texas officials to beachgoers: Watch your step.

Small and blue tentacled creatures have been spotted along the shores of Galveston Island State Park on the western Gulf Coast, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said this past week.

The porpita porpita — also known as the "blue button jellyfish" — looks like a jellyfish, stings like a jellyfish, but is not in fact a jellyfish.

The blue button is actually a colony of many small animals known as hydrozoan polyps, according to the American Museum of Natural History.

"When you find one, look but don't touch," reads a Facebook post by the local chapter of the state wildlife department's master naturalist program.

The blue button isn't deadly to humans, experts say, but the stinging ends of its tentacles can cause skin irritation.

In case you need another reason to leave them alone: The creatures release their waste through their mouth.

The blue button has two main parts: The inch-wide center "button" keeps the organism afloat, said the Natural History Museum. The hydroid colony makes up the tentacles.

Texans can expect to see more in the coming weeks: Turquoise blue button sightings along the Galveston Bay coast are most common in the summer months, according to the naturalist group. The organisms are attracted to the shore, where they feed on free-floating plankton.

A handful of people commented on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's post saying they had seen the marine animal on local shores recently.

"They look beautiful!" one person wrote. "But usually, when I see something like that, I panic by moving far, far away from it!"

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Have you ever felt stuck in a bad situation that you couldn't get out of, through no fault of your own, and all you could do is just make the best of it?

Such is the life of the Devils Hole pupfish.

This small, iridescent blue-or-green fish swims in the hot waters of an inhospitable fishbowl made of rock in a Nevada section of Death Valley National Park, where it somehow got trapped thousands of years ago.

The deep cavern that is this fish's only home is surrounded by a chain-link fence, razor wire, and other security measures designed to protect this incredibly rare endangered species.

In 2013, its population hit a low of only 35 fish. But over the last couple of years, the Devils Hole pupfish has bounced back, thrilling and somewhat baffling wildlife managers who still are trying to figure out how this tough little fish manages to make a go of it.

Last year, in the spring, they counted 175 observable fish. This spring, the count was the same, which means that the population has been holding steady.

A wild population of just 175 fish doesn't sound like a lot. But this is the best the Devils Hole pupfish has been doing in about two decades.

"Times are good now with Devils Hole pupfish, compared to how they've been in the past," says Jenny Gumm, a fish biologist with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Exactly how the pupfish have recovered to this point is a bit of a mystery.

"The question that I receive and my colleagues receive is, 'Why?' And you know, we're trying to answer that," says Kevin Wilson, an aquatic ecologist at the National Park Service.

A fish that's able to cope Wilson first learned of this iconic fish as a kid back in the 1970s, when he tagged along with his geologist mom on a field trip that stopped by Devils Hole.

"I just remember as a young lad just laying down on this wooden observation deck, looking down into this immense hole in the ground and was fascinated," says Wilson.

At the bottom of the hole is the pool where the fish swim. No one knows how deep it is — scuba divers have explored to a depth of over 400 feet.

The pupfish, which are only about an inch long, have no natural predators. Without fear, they'll curiously swim up to inspect divers or anything else that enters their isolated world.

The fish tend to hang out near the top of the pool, swimming around in the shallow water that covers a rocky ledge. There, they feed on algae and spawn.

The water isn't exactly cozy. "It's 93 degrees fahrenheit all the time," says Wilson, and its oxygen levels are low.

Plus, for about four months in winter, the pool remains entirely in shadow, which is not good for the tiny plants that the fish eat.

"It's not a great place to live if you're a fish, that's for sure," says Gumm.

The reduced amount of food in winter is thought to be why spring counts of this fish have historically been lower than counts done in the fall. Last fall, researchers observed 263 fish. The next count will come in September.

"I'm hoping that we cross the threshold of 300," says Wilson.

Earthquakes and flash floods Part of this fish's recent revival may be due to some dramatic events that have shaken up life in Devils Hole.

In July of 2021, a rare flash flood poured in an enormous amount of muddy water.

"The volume of water that went into the habitat was just so much," says Gumm, who worried the fish would die from a change in water chemistry — or even just the sheer violence of the flood and its churning debris.

It was the first time Gumm felt like these fish really might go extinct on her watch. She recalls going to the hole just after the flood.

"Walking into it, we just weren't sure what was going to be there," she recalls. "And the water looked like chocolate milk. You couldn't see any fish."

She mentally prepared for the worst. But then she saw a few fish, and then a few more the next day.

It turns out that the flood may ultimately have helped the species, by bringing new nutrients into their environment.

And a couple of days after that flood, the fish got hit by another unusual whammy.

A magnitude 8.2 earthquake struck Alaska. Even though the epicenter was more than 2,000 miles away, it created a mini-tsunami inside Devils Hole.

Video cameras caught the water sloshing around. All that sloshing may have helpfully redistributed materials brought in by the flooding.

Another mini-tsunami happened last year, when a magnitude 7.6 earthquake in Mexico caused 4-foot waves inside Devils Hole.

Wilson says that these kinds of disturbance events can clean off the precious rocky shelf that the fish depend on, benefiting the fish by basically hitting the reset button for the whole system.

Video from one earthquake shows pupfish streaming past the camera, as if the fish knew what was happening and where to go to be safe, says Gumm.

"They've been living here for a lot longer than we really comprehend," she says, with the best estimates suggesting they've been in the hole for about ten thousand years.

"They are used to it. And they know what to do."

'It's had a huge impact' The fish have gotten some help from humans. Wilson says they're now fed supplemental food, since at one point they looked emaciated.

"It was somewhat controversial to start feeding the fish," says Wilson.

The pupfish also enjoy the extra shelter of some plant material that wildlife managers attached to their rocky ledge, to give them increased shade and more options for hiding — because the older fish aren't above eating the young'uns.

"I think society has a duty to protect species that humankind has negatively impacted," says Wilson. He points out that groundwater pumping lowered the water level in Devils Hole, and the top of the pool is about six or eight inches below the historical pre-pumping level.

The Devils Hole pupfish is famous in conservation circles. It was one of the first species to be listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. After nearby development threatened to siphon water away from its lonely refuge, lawsuits aimed at saving it went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court.

"It's had a huge impact on water conservation and water rights throughout the western United States," says Steve Beissinger, a conservation biologist with the University of California, Berkeley.

Over the decades, several efforts have been made to set up a captive population of these fish in a separate tank, as a back-up insurance policy in case the wild fish met an untimely end. Past attempts all failed for various reasons, such as mechanical issues.

"The approach that we take now for the refuge population is a much larger scale," says Gumm, who manages a fish conservation facility located near Devils Hole. There, its unique ecosystem has essentially been recreated in a 100,000-gallon tank.

"Most of it is actually underground, simulating that cave environment of Devils Hole," she says.

The fish's all-important rocky shelf was faithfully copied by the tank's designers. "They actually went out and 3-D scanned the shallow shelf of Devils Hole and carved it out of styrofoam," she says. "It is an exact replica of the habitat at Devils Hole."

The refuge tank has a population of about 300, created from eggs taken from the wild. An additional 100 or so fish live in smaller tanks that are kept for breeding.

Climate change could make Devils Hole even hotter, and that's a concern for the future. Still, Beissinger thinks the fish could keep on keeping on, as long as they continue to get help.

"You can never relax with a small population like that," he says.

Not everyone thinks that so much time and money should go into safeguarding these fish. Once someone told Wilson that "they should just drown those fish."

Drown the fish?

"I had to shake my head," he recalls. "You know, it's tough, and it's about water."

But love them or hate them, Beissinger thinks everyone should at least respect the tenacity of these beleaguered fish.

"It's certainly, in many ways, an inspiring story of survival," says Beissinger. "You've got to admire that, something that can cling on and adapt to such a difficult environment — with nowhere to go."

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Climate change is undeniably bad for the animal kingdom. But some animals are able to adapt — so far — by changing their behaviors or even their bodies. In this special series all about animals, we travel the world to learn about medicine for cats in Turkey, invasive bees in Spain, the status of bullfighting in Colombia and a frog so small it can't jump. Also, a tiny owl was discovered on Príncipe Island in Africa, and now it is endangered. And, we hear the story of two brothers in India who are going out of their way to protect black kites, the most-hated carnivorous raptor in the country. Plus, we remember biologist Roger Payne and his "Songs of the Humpback Whale."

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Customers in New Zealand already are expected to bring their own shopping bags to grocery stores. Now they also will be asked to carry their own reusable bags for fruits and vegetables.

New Zealand is considered the first country in the world to ban single-use produce bags at supermarkets. The measure officially went into effect on July 1.

Single-use plastics can cause a multitude of problems, including clogging storm sewers, littering landscapes and killing wildlife. New Zealand Secretary for the Environment James Palmer anticipates that the new ban will eliminate 150 million plastic produce bags from circulation each year.

"That's 17,000 plastic bags, every hour," Palmer said in a statement.

In 2019, New Zealand no longer allowed stores to provide single-use plastic shopping bags. This measure takes waste-reducing efforts a step further by banning recyclable, biodegradable or plant-based plastic. Instead, customers are encouraged to carry mesh, paper or canvas bags to hold their produce.

Countries across the globe slowly have been moving away from single-use plastic bags — either imposing fees to use them or banning them from stores.

Through the United Nations Environment Assembly, representatives from 175 nations are working through the end of 2024 to forge an international plan to end plastic pollution.

As of 2021, eight U.S. states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon and Vermont — had passed laws that prohibited stores from providing single-use plastic shopping bags.

The produce bag ban isn't the only new plastic restriction going into effect in New Zealand. The country also banned the manufacture, sale and distribution of single-use plates, bowls and cutlery, and stores will only be allowed to offer single-use plastic straws to people with disabilities or health needs.

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I never realized how fuzzy a bumble bee is until I got to hold one between my fingertips. It feels like a furry black and yellow bear, buzzing with its tiny body, wriggling with its legs.

The conservation biologist Leif Richardson, who handed me this bee a moment ago, has some advice for holding it. "You're going to squeeze harder than you think you need to, but not so hard that you hurt him."

And luckily the bee can't hurt me either, because this is a male bee, and males don't have stingers. But they do have a scent, Richardson explains.

"Your fingers are going to smell like a male bee when you're done. It's a little like geraniums, a little bit cheesy, sort of like cheddar cheese in a way."

We are out in the wilds of far western Malibu, in the home range of a native bee called Crotch's Bumble Bee, or Bombus crotchii. That bee is protected by state law, and it's one of the many species under survey for the California Bumble Bee Atlas.

The Atlas is a sort of census for the state's bumble bees, and Richardson helps lead the project for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Over three years, hundreds of volunteers will fan out across the state to do surveys like this one, with the goal of piecing together a picture of where wild bees live, and which species are in trouble.

"This is real data of the highest quality that's been collected by these trained amateurs," Richardson says, "and it is the best available data we have for making decisions about the conservation and management of these very important animals."

Our journey begins at a mountain trailhead in Leo Carrillo State Park. It's a cloudy morning, and Richardson's dressed in a checkered flannel shirt, black-rimmed glasses, and a "Middlebury" cap. (He moved here recently from Vermont). We set off for a short hike, armed with bee nets, vials and a cooler to chill any bees we catch. It's a harmless way to temporarily sedate the bees, to allow for more careful study and snapshots.

Coastal sage scrub frames the trail, and poison oak is everywhere too, fresh from all the winter rain. Other dangers are harder to see. "I wanted to just say rattlesnakes are a possibility," Richardson warns.

Just a minute later, as he's wading into a meadow bursting with red and yellow deerweed – prime bumble bee habitat – I hear him yell out something unprintable, followed by "rattlesnake!" It's a huge, meaty snake, several inches thick, lying just a yard from his foot, its scales perfectly camouflaged against the brush. He stands there motionless for a moment, before backing away towards the trail, while the snake slithers off.

We're a little more sober about the possibilities now, as we prepare to catch our first bees. They're not hard to spot – I can hear them whizzing everywhere, in surround sound, and soon Richardson says it's time for me to catch one.

He tells me to pinch the tip of my net and hold it upright – like a witch's hat – while slowly lowering it over a flower where our bumble bee prey is foraging. As soon as the bee realizes what's going on, it buzzes furiously inside my net, and then slowly climbs up the fabric towards the tip – right where my finger is. Richardson tells me to grab the wide part of the net with my other hand, slowly choking my hand up the net until the bee is trapped in the tip.

It all seems like a really good way to get stung. But Richardson assures me I'll be fine – he says the bumble bees aren't likely to sting us, and he's got an EpiPen just in case. He tells me that my obsession with the stinger is not all that unique.

"A lot of people who want to participate in the California Bumble Bee Atlas, their first question is really, will I get stung?" He points out that a lot of people tend to think of bees only in terms of the danger they pose to humans – rather than seeing them as whole animals, with interesting lives and behaviors.

"They have this rich ecological life history. They have interesting mating biology," he says. "Another one is social biology. The biology of the nest is absolutely fascinating and it gives us a model for understanding social behavior in other bees and also other insects and vertebrates like us. There's a ton of interesting things about bees, if you look beyond the hypothetical dangers of being stung by one."

Talking to Richardson, it feels easy to look beyond those hypotheticals. But the next step in this bee-catching process seems far from a hypothetical. Richardson tells me to insert a small plastic vial up into the net with my bare fingers, right where the bee is, and somehow convince it to "fall" inside the vial, before popping a cap on. As my fingertips get closer to the bee, it feels like I can hear it buzzing louder and louder.

Richardson performs this whole process in seconds, by the way, with the confidence of someone juggling blindfolded. For me, on the other hand, it's a grueling act of intense concentration. But it pays off – and soon, I've got my very first bee!

It's that male I mentioned earlier. His yellow hair is the color of a hard-boiled egg yolk, and as we hold him, Richardson points out the bright bushy beard on his face – one of the telltale signs of a male. But he wriggles out of our hands before we can get him back in the vial – perhaps in search of queens.

We too are in search of queens, as Richardson reminds me, and still hoping to find that species he mentioned – Crotch's bumble bee – so we head back down the trail to another meadow.

As we head up a hill of dry brush, we pass by big plumes of purple sage, and Richardson suddenly sweeps into action, his net flying through the air with an acrobatic swing and twirl. A second later we hear an enormous buzzing from the net – he's netted something big.

It turns out he's caught not one, but two Bombus crotchii – and one of them's a queen! Then the bee transfer begins. "So this is a way people get stung. I have a bee in the vial and a bee in the net ... so my fingertips are in there with the extra bee." But he's a pro – he does this literally thousands of times a year – so no stings here.

He tucks the queen into a vial with a sprig of sage flowers, and just as we're all admiring this regal bee, I start to feel a tingling sensation in my leg – almost like my skin is crawling. I look down, and realize in horror that there are hundreds of thick black ants streaming up my leg, outside my pants, but inside too. I must have stepped on a nest during the excitement.

The ants have reached my back and backpack as well, and it feels like they're starting to latch onto my skin. Richardson, ever-mindful of the queen, stashes her in a cooler, as I furiously brush the ants off my pants and skin. It takes about 10 minutes of vigorous brushing to get them off, and I still find a few in my shoe later on down the trail.

Being stung may have been my top concern starting out this morning, but clearly the mountains had other hazards in mind. And the dangers we encountered today on this small sampling expedition are a vivid reminder of the sheer scale and ambition of this project.

Surveys like this are happening in more than 250 parts of California, with the help of twice that many volunteers. And this California project is part of a much larger continent-wide Bumble Bee Atlas, which stretches from Alaska to Maine to Georgia. About a quarter of North America's 50 bumble bee species are at risk, according to the Xerces Society, and Richardson says this huge constellation of surveys is one of the best tools scientists have for guiding the conservation of these charismatic animals.

"There's intrinsic value to these native animals that occur here and have been here co-evolving with these plants for millennia," he says. But beyond that – for those who might need another reason to care about wild bees – he points out their value as pollinators of wild plants and crops.

"These wild bees are tremendously important to maintenance of healthy ecosystems, which human beings depend on, and to the human food supply, which we obviously depend on. So we've got both utilitarian and kind of intrinsic reasons to conserve bees."

The magnificent queen bee is still sitting on ice in the cooler, and as we walk back to the car, it's time to photograph her, and let her go. Richardson gently dumps her into the palm of his hand, along with the worker bee he caught with her. At first they just lie there, groggy, and we slowly pet the hairs on the queen's back.

She's waking up fast though, and pretty soon we hear an energetic fluttering from her wings, before she lifts off into the sky. "They're really good at using landscape features to find their way," Richardson says. She circles a few times, before zooming off towards the sage where we caught her.

And thus, our queen journeyed home unharmed – and thankfully, so did we.

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Who are they? Squirrels. As climate change is making extreme heat events more common, these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed critters are "splooting" to cope.

Splooting is behavior some animals use to cool their body temperature. Squirrels are finding cool surfaces and lying on their stomachs, legs spread, to cool off.
Think of it like finding the cool side of the pillow when you're trying to fall asleep. Sunny Corrao of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation says it's about transferring the heat away from their bodies:

"They're trying to find a cool space, and if they can put as much of their core body on to a cool space, then the heat is going to transfer from their bodies to the other surface. So in the case of squirrels, you'll often see them maybe on a shady sidewalk, or a park path, or in the grass, just splayed out."

With much of the Southern U.S. under heat advisories, millions of people are facing dangerous, extreme temperatures – and when you're uncomfortable with the heat, the wildlife probably is too.
When humans are hot, sweating cools us down. But animals that can't sweat have to resort to other behaviors to cool off. Dogs pant. Birds dunk themselves in water. And squirrels sploot.
But it's not just squirrels that sploot:

What's the big deal? Splooting squirrels are popping up all over social media. And while it may seem goofy and cute (it is), splooting can be a sign that squirrels are experiencing temperatures much higher than what they're used to. Climate change is making things worse.

Carlos Botero, an associate professor of integrative biology at University of Texas at Austin, says "the temperatures we're experiencing right now are a little bit beyond the typical ability of this animal to withstand."
Temperatures in Austin have blazed past previous records. The heat index values, or "feels-like temperature," reached their highest ever at 118 degrees. And experts say this is not normal.

What's next? You can expect to see more splooting while extreme heat persists. But splooting can only do so much to cool squirrels down.

Animal physiologist Andrea Rummel, an incoming assistant professor of biosciences at Rice University, says splooting is likely enough to keep squirrels cool for now. But it might not be if temperatures continue to rise, she says, because "there's only so much one avenue of heat loss can do."

"Just like with humans. Sweating works really well a lot of the time. But if it's too humid outside and the water won't evaporate, you can sweat all you want but it won't evaporate off you and draw that heat away."

"For every kind of thermal regulatory mechanism, there is a point at which it doesn't work anymore, and that depends on environmental temperature. So it's going to get harder and harder for squirrels to sploot effectively – for humans to sweat effectively – as temperatures rise."

Learn more:

Global heat waves show climate change and El Niño are a bad combo
What — And Who — Is To Blame For Extreme Heat?
How to stay safe and cool in extreme heat

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Scooter isn't what many would call a conventional beauty.

The 7-year-old Chinese Crested dog, with reversed hind legs, is nearly bald but for a shock of white wispy hairs.

But it's those kinds of peculiarities that endeared the pooch to judges at the "World's Ugliest Dog" contest in Petaluma, Calif., where he took home the grand prize on Friday.

Scooter's pink, wayward tongue may be drooping from his mouth. The contest's title, however, is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. The nearly 50-year-old event is held to show that these dogs are uniquely beautiful by celebrating "the imperfections that make all dogs special," and to advocate for adoption.

"From the second he sits his hairless little booty and backward legs on your lap, you feel his warm, huggable power to change the meaning of the word ugly," said NBC host Gadi Schwartz, one of the competition's judges, in an interview with Today.

Catherine Liang, another judge, told The New York Times: "In the cutest way possible, he kind of reminds me of a hairy hippopotamus."

Scooter, now celebrated for his peculiarities, once faced death for his deformity. He was born with two deformed hind legs that hindered his ability to walk, according to his biography on the contest's website.

As a new puppy, Scooter was saved by a volunteer from the Saving Animals From Euthanasia (SAFE) rescue group after a breeder brought him into animal control in Tuscon, Ariz.

"He knew that this pup might have a chance at finding a good home and a fairly normal life with the support of our rescue group," the biography said.

Linda Elmquist adopted Scooter seven months ago from a man with the rescue group, reported Today.

When the 7-year-old gets tired from navigating on his front feet, he props himself up on his butt, "which he uses as a tripod," according to his bio.

Scooter recently got a new cart to help with his mobility. He's now able to zoom around the park like the other dogs, and "welcomes any outstretched hand."

When the wheels are off, Scooter can do what most dogs can't: walk while balancing on his two front legs.

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Giant African land snails are back in Florida, spurring intensive efforts to destroy the invasive mollusks before they spread and wreak agricultural and environmental destruction.

After one of the large brown snails was spotted earlier this month north of Miami, the state has declared a quarantine and treatment area over a few square miles in the Broward County city of Miramar. The quarantine joins two others already underway in the state: one in Lee County, which is home to Fort Myers, and one in Pasco County, north of Tampa.

"The giant African land snail is one of the most damaging snails in the world, consuming at least 500 different types of plants," the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services declared this week. "These snails could be devastating to Florida agriculture and natural areas as they cause extensive damage to tropical and subtropical environments."

They've also been known to attach to houses and eat the stucco walls.

The Miramar quarantine means it's illegal to move the snails and lots of other things — including plants, soil, debris and building materials — through or from the defined area without explicit permission.

Giant African land snails contain both male and female reproductive organs, and they don't need a mate to reproduce. Reproduce they do, quickly and profusely – laying up to 500 eggs at a time, according to a factsheet from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The USDA warns of serious health risks to humans: the snails can be carriers for rat lungworm, a parasite that can cause a rare type of meningitis in humans.

At full size, the snails grow up to 8 inches long and almost 5 inches in diameter, about the size of an adult fist. They have a brownish shell that covers about half their body.

This isn't the first time Florida has dealt with these snails Last summer, a master gardener in Pasco County spotted one of the snails in the city of New Port Richey, leading to a quarantine in the area.

Why do these snails keeping arriving? Officials suspect they were brought in as pets, which is illegal. "Invertebrates may seem interesting to keep as pets in a terrarium, but many are illegal to own because they could harm U.S. agriculture and the natural environment if they escape," the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service warns.

Alternatively, the snails might be brought in as snacks: They are considered a delicacy in West Africa. In March, customs officials at Detroit Metropolitan Airport seized six live snails in the suitcase of a traveler arriving from Ghana.

Florida has eradicated the highly invasive snail before, according to the USDA. The snail arrived in downtown Miami in 1966, and wasn't declared eradicated until 1975. In that time, the state destroyed more than 18,000 snails and thousands of eggs – at a cost of more than $3 million in today's dollars.

The snail popped up again in Miami in 2011. After efforts from the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and the state of Florida, the snail was once more declared eradicated in 2021. The cost to destroy 168,000 snails and countless eggs was far greater this time around – more than $23 million.

The eradication process that begins now in Miramar will be lengthy. The state will treat properties in the area with a molluscicide (snail bait) 26 times, followed by several surveys — including one performed by a dog specially trained to detect the snails.

The quarantine will remain in place throughout this process, the state's agriculture department says, in order to "safeguard Florida's agriculture industries and natural resources along with ensuring there are no international trade implications enforced due to the establishment of this detrimental pest."

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Think of a monarch butterfly, and a distinctive image pops up: black-and-orange wings, with a sprinkling of white spots around the black edges. Those white spots may actually help monarchs complete their long-distance migration by altering the air flow around their wings.

Or, at least, that's the provocative new claim from a team of researchers that has analyzed hundreds of monarch wings collected along its migration route.

"If you have larger white spots, you're simply more successful at reaching Mexico," says Andy Davis, a researcher at the University of Georgia.

He and his colleagues believe that the pattern of color could interact with sunlight to create subtle temperature differences on the wing that can alter airflow, easing the butterflies' flight.

They're working on experiments that will test that by flapping real butterfly wings in a test chamber that will let them track the movement of air.

Other butterfly scientists have reacted to their work with both enthusiasm and skepticism.

"It, as far as I can tell, is a totally new idea. And I think it's quite exciting," says Marcus Kronforst, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago who was not involved in this study.

"I've worked on butterfly color patterns my whole life, basically, and never, never considered this," says Kronforst. "It's never crossed my mind that it might influence how the butterflies fly."

One of the most famous migrations Monarch butterflies definitely need to fly well to complete their annual fall migration of up to 3,000 miles.

"It's one of the most famous migrations of any insect in the world. Monarchs from as far north as Canada fly south every fall all the way to some mountain top sites in central Mexico," says Davis.

"One of the things that makes it so captivating as a scientist," he says, "is how something so small and so delicate-seeming can make such a tremendous journey."

In the spring, monarchs leave their over-wintering grounds and move north, laying eggs as they go. These summer monarchs live for only weeks, but successive generations of them move the species steadily northward until it is time for the autumn migration.

Then, one much-longer-lived generation of monarchs postpones breeding and resolutely heads south. "Those monarchs fly for about two months, flying all the way down there, or they die trying," says Davis.

Davis previously observed that monarch butterflies with darker, redder coloration seemed to fly better in lab studies. "We didn't really know why at the time," he says.

Most research on butterfly coloration focuses on its use for camouflage or as a warning to predators. Since monarchs eat milkweed that contains toxins, their bright orange color serves as a signal that they're unpalatable prey.

So his report linking a darker wing color to a better flying ability caught the attention of Mostafa Hassanalian, a biomechanics expert at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Hassanalian had studied the black-and-white patterns on migrating birds, and concluded that black coloration could affect temperature and airflow in ways that might improve their flight performance.

So the researchers teamed up and decided to look at the black and white coloration in the edge of monarch wings. Their group included Brenden Herkenhoff of New Mexico Tech, as well as Christina Vu and Paola Barriga at the University of Georgia.

They studied nearly 400 wild monarch wings from different locations along the migration path.

What they found is that the wings of the summer monarchs that aren't migrating have less white, while those that are migrating but haven't made it all the way to Mexico have more.

And monarchs that successfully reached Mexico have even more white, according to a report in the journal PLOS ONE.

The researchers also looked at white spots on closely related butterfly species that either don't migrate or only semi-migrate.

"We compared the monarchs versus all these other relatives," says Davis. "And sure enough, the monarchs had slightly larger spots than everybody else."

Meanwhile, other research has suggested that having more darkness on monarch wings in the spring might be an advantage for butterflies, by increasing heat absorption during cooler days, says Davis.

"It might be that there's sort of dueling selective pressures on the monarchs during the spring versus the fall," he says, with white dots being beneficial during the southward migrations and darker coloration being an advantage for generations that move northward.

Putting monarch wings to the test Hassanalian says they're working on experiments that will attach monarch wings to a mechanism that flaps them. This will let them experiment with flapping different colored wings in a testing chamber that lets them visualize airflow around the wings.

"We have currently built the setup for birds' wings with a flapping mechanism, and we plan to make the same approach for butterflies," he told NPR in an email.

Without that kind of demonstration of a real effect on airflow, some researchers are skeptical.

"I'd be really interested in more aerodynamic measurements," says Mary Salcedo, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University who studies insect wings. "I'd love to see aerodynamic tests on their lift and drag coefficients."

After all, the white spots might have no effect, or be related to something else entirely.

Maybe the white spots somehow help monarchs evade bird predation, for example, and monarchs that migrate in the fall need this protection more because they live longer than summer monarchs and get exposed to more of this threat.

"I do think that this aerodynamic explanation is exciting. It's definitely different," says Kornforst. "I just think there are potentially some other explanations that could be explored."

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Last June, flooding in and around Yellowstone National Park upended the lives of nearby residents, damaging homes, ranch properties, and roads. It also damaged boat ramps and fishing access sites, and made some parts of the Yellowstone River unrecognizable to guides who have been fishing in the area for years.

But, from an ecological perspective, the flooding benefitted fish habitat. And for fly fishing guides, relearning the river, with its new gravel bars and channels, means there are some uncharted areas to look for fish.

Matt Wilhelm is a burly mid-westerner who's been guiding fishing trips on the Yellowstone for 20 years. On a recent visit to its banks on a private ranch near the town of Livingston, surrounded by snow-capped peaks, he points out some of the changes last year's flood brought.

"That is a new channel, that's a pretty significant channel right there," he said.

When huge amounts of water barreled through here last June, it cut a new pathway through what was grass and cottonwood trees.

"There were all sorts of new challenges," he said. "It was a brand new river in a lot of places."

Woody debris the flooding river deposited now overhangs the river, providing new habitat where fish can more easily hide

When the water receded, Wilhelm and his guiding friends hopped in a boat and set out to re-learn the river. Familiar sandbars were gone. Sometimes, they had to get out and pull their boat over freshly created gravel bars or navigate hazardous new whirlpools. They brought a chainsaw in case they had to cut through trees.

"A lot of people will just breeze past it and not drop anchor, but if you're willing to get out of the boat and explore these channels you can have some dynamite fishing," he said.

More than 400,000 visitors a year fish while they're in Montana. They contribute about $1.3 billion in spending.

Wilhelm guides around 50 clients a year on the Yellowstone River through his Yellowstone Fly Fishing School.

While he's excited to bring them to this new stretch of river, he hopes there are still enough fish to keep his clients happy. The floods hit right after Rainbow Trout finished spawning last year.

"Those rainbow trout eggs were just hatching at that time and what I'm worried about is if those fish got washed downstream or if they were injured or hurt or killed or all three," he said.

Scott Opitz, a fisheries biologist with Montana, Fish, Wildlife & Parks, says it's too early to say how the floods affected the Yellowstone River's fish populations, but he's not expecting devastation.

"In terms of the fish world, a big event isn't always negative. A lot of times it can be a really good thing in terms of moving and loosening up that stream bed, so that those areas can be used more efficiently for fish to spawn," he said.

Opitz says the fresh rainbow trout eggs were susceptible to damages from the flood, but there would have to be multiple years of losses to really put a dent in the population.

"The one saving grace with the Yellowstone and a lot of our other systems in Montana is that those fish aren't restricted to just spawning in the Yellowstone River," he said.

Last year was a once in 500-year flood event, but Opitz anticipates fish populations will follow historic flood trends on the Yellowstone River. There may be some declines initially, followed by a rapid rebound.

Opitz compares what happened with the flood to a wildfire event: there can be some negative impacts, but it's also a reset for the system that later brings rejuvenation.

Fly fishing Guide Matt Wilhelm says he's excited to get back out on the river this summer and look for fish in some of the habitats the flood created.

"There's no prettier place to be than on a river or a lake trying to catch a fish, just being outside it's a great way to earn a living and a great way to be outdoors at the same time," he said.

This year, the Yellowstone River crested in late May. It will likely be fishable by the end of the month, but with all of the sediment still there it might take a little longer for the visibility to be clear enough for good fly fishing.

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Walt Disney World is celebrating the birth of two rare cotton-top tamarin monkeys that arrived last week — the first new births of the species at the Florida destination since 2001.

So far, workers don't know if the white-haired twins born on June 12 are male or female, so they don't have names yet.

But the four-inch-long newborn monkeys living at Disney's Animal Kingdom Theme Park have already been spotted clinging to their mom and dad, who will carry the babies around on their backs for up to 14 weeks.

Cotton-top tamarins are native to the tropical forests of northwestern Colombia, and park officials say there are fewer than 7,500 left in the wild.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the species is critically endangered due to factors such as habitat loss and the illegal pet trade, and their population is declining.

But the addition of the newborn twins, which weigh about as much as a "common chicken egg" and will grow to be roughly the size of a squirrel, have been a welcome addition to the threatened species.

Cotton-top tamarins forage for fruit and insects in the forest canopy where they live and use at least 38 different calls to communicate with each other, the park said.

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Do fish bay at the moon? The answer to that question may also point to a way to protect the ocean's damaged coral reefs.

That's a vital goal for the approximately one billion people – most of them in low and middle income countries – who depend on coral reefs. These complex ecosystems are, of course, a breeding ground for fish that are a major source of protein and income. But because reefs provide a barrier between the ocean and land, they also offer crucial protection against the rising sea levels and violent storms wrought by climate change.

Now an intriguing effort is underway to study and protect the reefs. NPR spoke with one of the leaders, Aran Mooney, a marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He's part of a network of scientists who've set up underwater microphones across the planet to essentially eavesdrop on marine life.

"It's just really striking what we can learn without actually visually observing," says Mooney. "Just by listening — quiet listening — we can observe what the animals are doing out there in the ocean."

One of their coolest findings is just how many fish live by the lunar cycle – ramping up the sounds they make depending on the phase of the moon.

Some are loudest when the moon has waned. Take these long thin fish called "cusk eels" recorded off the coast of Cape Cod. They're strumming their muscles against their swim bladders – that's the organ that helps them float – like a bass drum.

Why do this during the new moon? One clue may lie in the fact that the noise they're making is almost certainly a mating call. The fish equivalent of putting on a Barry White record.

"Yeah," says Mooney chuckling. "It's probably a lot of males trying to entice the females into spawning with them, because when the eggs and the sperm are released into the water they're going to get dispersed pretty quickly. So it has to be an extremely coordinated event."

And what better time, he adds, than when it's too dark for predators to swoop in and eat the eggs? "These predators can't see, but the sound is traveling really well," says Mooney. "So it's a way to hide from the predators, but at the same time communicate with each other."

Other fish are noisiest when the moon is full. These tiny ones were recorded by other scientists in the network, off the coast of Southern India. The engine-like chugging the fish are making is the sound of their swim bladders vibrating, possibly as they're eating a kind of plankton that glistens in the moon's rays.

"So eating animals that are associated with light?" posits Mooney.

The international group of scientists is racing to record these soundscapes at reefs and other ocean habitats threatened by climate change and pollution.

Consider this coral reef off the U.S. Virgin Islands recorded in 2013, when it was thriving. Snapping shrimp pop bubbles. Whales and fish call out.

A year ago, the scientists recorded a reef in the same area that had been degraded by pollution run-off from nearby coastal communities. This time most of the sounds were gone.

"It's going to be hard for you to hear," says Mooney. "It's just going to be quieter."

Though officials have now put environmental protections on that reef, it's too late: The animals have long departed – starting with the tiny larvae that are needed to build up new coral.

But Mooney and his collaborators have started an experiment: Setting up underwater speakers to broadcast their recordings of the old, healthy reef from 2013 in hopes of luring back the coral larvae.

Mooney explains that these tiny jelly-fish like animals get released from healthy reefs and then float for a while in the sea looking for a place to settle. "They're not Olympic swimmers, but they are swimmers," says Mooney. "A healthy habitat is super important for them because that's going to be their permanent location for the rest of their life. Once they attach themselves at the bottom, there's no chance of moving."

To the scientists' delight the effort seems to be working. Compared to a degraded reef where they're not playing sounds, says Mooney, "the reef that we're acoustically enhancing, we get more coral settlement." Specifically, about two to three times as much settlement.

It will take a few more years to see if, as the coral gets re-established, more fish return as well. But Mooney says the results so far suggest an encouraging possibility: All these recordings that the scientists are making don't have to be one more memento of a vanishing world. They could be a key to restoring it.

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Scientists and sailors say orcas, also known as killer whales, are stepping up "attacks" on yachts along Europe's Iberian coast, with one skipper who's been pursued by the marine mammals on two separate occasions suggesting that their tactics are becoming more stealthy.

Delivery skipper Dan Kriz, who had to be towed into port after orcas destroyed the rudder on a boat he was on in 2020, had an almost identical experience in April.

"My first reaction was, 'Please! Not again,'" Kriz told Newsweek.

Unlike last time, the orcas made a stealthier approach without the characteristic squeaks they normally use to communicate, he says. They made quick work of the two rudders on the catamaran Kriz was delivering. "Looks like they knew exactly what they are doing. They didn't touch anything else," he said.

Most marine scientists have characterized hundreds of encounters between boats and orcas that have sunk at least three vessels and damaged dozens of others over the years as a "fad," implying that the animals will eventually lose interest and resort to more typical behavior.

But if that's the case, there are few signs this behavior is going out of style anytime soon. According to a June 2022 study published in the journal Marine Mammal Science, orcas have stepped up the frequency of their interactions with sailing vessels in and around the Strait of Gibraltar, the busy waterway that links the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean.

Some researchers think it's merely playful behavior As NPR first reported last August, many scientists who study orca behavior believe these incidents — in which often one or more of the marine mammals knock off large chunks of a sailboat's rudder — are not meant as attacks, but merely represent playful behavior.

One hypothesis put forward by Renaud de Stephanis, president and coordinator at CIRCE Conservación Information and Research, a research group based in Spain, is that orcas like the feel of a boat's rudder.

"What we think is that they're asking to have the propeller in the face," de Stephanis told NPR last year. "So, when they encounter a sailboat that isn't running its engine, they get kind of frustrated and that's why they break the rudder."

In another recent encounter, Werner Schaufelberger told the German publication Yacht that his vessel, Champagne, was approached by "two smaller and one larger orca" off Gibraltar.

"The little ones shook the rudder at the back while the big one repeatedly backed up and rammed the ship with full force from the side," he said.

The Spanish coast guard rescued Schaufelberger and his crew, towing Champagne to the Spanish port of Barbate, but the vessel sank before reaching safety.

The encounters could be a response to past trauma Since 2020, there have been more than 500 encounters between yachts and orcas in the area, according to one of the study's co-authors, Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal and a representative of the Grupo de Trabajo Orca Atlántica, or Atlantic Orca Working Group.

López Fernandez believes that a female known as White Gladis, who leads the group of around 40 animals, may have had a traumatizing encounter with a boat or a fishing net. In an act of revenge, she is teaching her pod-mates how to carry out revenge attacks with her encouragement, researchers believe.

"The orcas are doing this on purpose, of course, we don't know the origin or the motivation, but defensive behavior based on trauma, as the origin of all this, gains more strength for us every day," López Fernandez told Live Science.

It's an intriguing possibility, says Monika Wieland Shields, director of the Orca Behavior Institute.

"I definitely think orcas are capable of complex emotions like revenge," she says. "I don't think we can completely rule it out."

However, Shields is not ready to sign on to the "revenge" hypothesis just yet. She says that despite humans having "given a lot of opportunities for orcas to respond to us in an aggressive manner," there are no other examples of them doing so.

Deborah Giles, the science and research director at Wild Orca, a conservation group based in Washington state, is also skeptical of the hypothesis. She points out that killer whale populations in waters off Washington "were highly targeted" in the past as a source for aquariums. She says seal bombs, small charges that fishers throw into the water in an effort to scare sea lions away from their nets, were dropped in their path while helicopters and boats herded them into coves.

"The pod never attacked boats after that," she says. "It just doesn't ring true to me."

Shields says it's important to remember that whatever the motive is for the behavior of the orcas off the Iberian coast, it isn't being transmitted to pods in other parts of the world.

"We've had folks here in Washington [asking] 'is it safe to go out in the water here with these orcas?'" she says. "While this is kind of an ongoing situation in that specific place, I don't think there's any reason to think it's going to start spreading to other populations of orcas."

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Over the past weekend, troves of dead fish appeared on the shores of multiple beaches in southeast Texas, after struggling to find enough oxygen underwater.

Quintana Beach County Park announced on Friday that dead fish were washing up by the thousands. The department warned the public to stay clear of the local beaches until all the fish had been cleared, due to risk of being exposed to bacteria and sharp fins.

Crews are continuing to clear the carcasses of dead fish, which park officials described as "shredded skeletons." The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's Kills and Spills Team responded to the situation and determined the cause of the massive die-off was a "low dissolved oxygen event," meaning fish essentially suffocated.

Here is what to know about what happened:

What caused the Texas fish kill When asked what contributed to the fish deaths, Quintana Beach County Park officials said it was a "perfect storm" of factors.

First, warm water is not ideal for fish. It tends to hold less oxygen. That is especially true in shallow water, which heats up quicker. So, a school of fish likely found themselves deprived of oxygen as they swam though shallow waters in the summertime.

Another problem was that seas near county beaches were quite calm over the past few weeks, meaning there were few waves and winds to help redistribute oxygen in the water.

Over the past few days, the skies above the the beaches were cloudy. That is an issue for phytoplankton, which help produce oxygen in the water by using photosynthesis. That process is driven by sunlight. So, the less they are exposed to the sun by way of overcast, the less oxygen phytoplankton produce.

Why these dead fish aren't necessarily a bad thing Most of the fish found dead were Gulf menhaden. They travel in large schools, which can explain how thousands washed ashore at the same time.

Over 32 different predators feast on the tiny fish, including sea birds, sharks and even some fish like mackerel and sea trout, according to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. They provide predators with nutrients. Gulf menhaden also serve as filter feeders, meaning they consume impurities in the water.

Because this species is a popular snack for sea animals, there are potential benefits to the massive die-off, according to Katie St. Clair, the manager of the sea life facility at Texas A&M University atGalveston.

"The flipside is that with this die-off of fish, there is a huge nutrient pulse into our environment," she said. "It's kind of a circle of life."

How climate change plays a role in fish kill Fish kills are common in the warmer months, like summer time. But oceans at large are heating up because of human-caused climate change.

"Water can only hold so much oxygen at certain temperatures, and certainly we know that seawater temperatures are rising," Clair said. "It is concerning and something that needs to be monitored."

Warmer oceans trigger a cascade of other changes to the ecosystem and the economy. One study from the SeaDoc Society at theUniversity of California, Davis found that starfish were more susceptible to disease because of warm water anomalies. The Environmental Protection Agency also found that fish species are leaving their natural habitat in search for cooler waters, disrupting the fishing industry.

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Horseshoe crabs used to be everywhere. Millions of years before dinosaurs roamed the planet, each spring, the hard-shelled creatures gathered to mate in massive mounds along the beaches of the Atlantic coast. Later, migratory shorebirds like the robin-sized red knot learned to fly up from South America to join them for a feast. The crabs' eggs gave the birds the energy they needed to keep flying north to breed in the Arctic.

But humans began to want something from the crabs, too – their blood. In the 1960s, scientists discovered that the sky blue blood inside horseshoe crabs would clot when it detected bacterial toxins. Vaccines, drugs and medical devices have to be sterile before they're put inside people. A better toxin detection system meant less contamination risk for patients, so fishermen soon started collecting and selling the prehistoric animals to be bled.

A synthetic alternative was later invented and has since been approved in Europe as an equivalent to the ingredient that requires horseshoe crabs. But in the U.S., the blood harvest isn't shrinking. It's growing. Five companies along the East Coast, with operations in South Carolina, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Maryland, drained over 700,000 crabs in 2021. That's more than any year since officials started keeping track in 2004. Since then, the number of crabs bled by the industry has more than doubled. At least 80 million tests are performed each year around the world using the blood-derived ingredient.

As the industry has expanded, coast-wide regulation has been limited and the companies have become increasingly secretive. Records obtained by NPR indicate that in some states, fishermen paid by the bleeding companies have handled crabs in ways that research has shown to cause harm or have violated harvest laws without punishment. Meanwhile, the process of approving the alternative in the U.S. has stalled even as the number of birds in the sky has plummeted.

The federal government designated one of the migratory shorebird species that depends on horseshoe crab eggs, the red knot, as threatened. About 94% of red knots have disappeared over the past 40 years. Horseshoe crabs have become moderately depleted along the Atlantic coast, the International Union for Conservation of Nature determined. The ones around New England are noted as particularly vulnerable to extinction.

"We're up against this system that really prioritizes money over the health of the stock," said Larry Niles, a wildlife biologist and leader of the nonprofit Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition. "And the consequences show it."

A profitable gray area Depending on which state they're harvested in, the crabs are either taken by hand from the beaches or pulled up from the bottom of the ocean with nets. Hundreds are piled on top of each other in boats, loaded into trucks and delivered to bleeding facilities. There, lab technicians pierce the crabs through their hearts and drain them alive, sometimes for eight minutes, which can deplete them of more than half their volume of blue blood. In Massachusetts, some of the bled crabs are then sold to be killed and used as bait. In states like South Carolina and New Jersey, the animals are delivered back to the fishermen, who return them to the ocean.

That makes the bleeding business unique among the industries it straddles. It's an unusual fishery, because the animals are not sold to be eaten. It's an atypical utilization of animals in medicine, since the crabs are not bled in the research stage, and they're not warm-blooded. They're not even crustaceans – horseshoe crabs are more closely related to scorpions than they are to snow crabs.

The business is also different from extractive industries like mining and logging, because the harvested natural resource is supposed to be returned to the environment alive.

"They sort of fall through the cracks a little bit in terms of what you could call the regulatory imagination," said Rich Gorman, a research fellow at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in England. "Everyone assumes that everyone else is regulating it."

Family businesses used to own many of the smaller facilities in the earlier days of bleeding. Now, the industry is dominated by giant multinational firms, like a facility in Virginia owned by the Japanese conglomerate Fujifilm, and Charles River Laboratories, a publicly traded company based in Massachusetts that took over a local operation in South Carolina.

Federal laws require some animals used by biomedical industries to be treated humanely. The Animal Welfare Act protects some warm-blooded animals, like monkeys, that are used in scientific research. The Health Research Extension Act covers other vertebrates, like mice, that aren't included in the Welfare Act.

But coast-wide regulations regarding humane treatment of the crabs are virtually nonexistent or unenforced. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission manages stocks of fish meant to be quickly killed, like sea bass and flounder. It also manages horseshoe crabs, though the animals can spend dozens of hours alive above water during the harvest and bleeding process.

"Thinking of horseshoe crabs as a fishery, it really complicates and muddies the debate," said Gorman. "The aftercare that's involved in any scientific procedure that's carried out on an animal is really important."

The fisheries commission does publish a description of "Best Management Practices" for the industry, but those are guidelines, not laws. And they're often disregarded.

NPR obtained audio recorded during a meeting in January when those best practices were being discussed. Participants on the call can be heard mentioning that research shows picking crabs up by their tails harms the animals. That can prevent the crabs from being able to right themselves up if they've flipped on their backs, which can eventually kill them.

"Picking up by the tail is not proper handling technique," said one participant on the call. "Damage to the tail can increase their chances of not being able to flip over and dying when coming up to spawn."

But Benjie Swan, the head of a smaller company that bleeds crabs in New Jersey, can be heard admitting to that and opposing changing the practices to make it more clear that fishermen shouldn't.

"My people do pick the crabs up by the tail," she said. "I just think that if we give too much detail, we're opening ourselves up for scrutiny."

A biologist at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Steve Doctor, added that fishermen in his state typically handle crabs by the tail "all the time." Videos from South Carolina show fishermen grabbing the crabs by the tail and tossing them on top of each other into boats. Since at least 2020, instructions from the state's Department of Natural Resources have said not to pick up horseshoe crabs by their tails.

A representative for the fisheries commission on the call reminded the group that even if the guidelines were changed to appear stricter, they would not be required to follow them. State governments, however, police the industry as they choose. Those restrictions can vary widely.

In Maryland, fishermen are not allowed to begin harvesting female crabs until after June 6, when Doctor, the biologist, says many of the crabs have finished mating and the birds have had a chance to devour some of their eggs.

"It's less stress on them if they're done spawning," said Doctor. "We're trying to give them the most opportunity possible."

Other states operate differently. Charles River Laboratories is one of the industry's biggest players: It reportedly provides half of the world's supply of the blood-derived test, called limulus amebocyte lysate. Regulations in South Carolina have allowed fishermen for the company to harvest in the early spring – when the crabs are beginning to mate and the migratory birds have started looking for eggs. The fishermen have also been permitted to keep an unlimited number of male crabs trapped in holding ponds located off the beaches before they're delivered to the bleeding facility. Fishermen are not required to feed the crabs while they're there.

Environmental groups are now suing the company and state.

'A black box of information' Charles River Laboratories has been scrutinized for how its suppliers treat animals before. The company is currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its shipment of monkeys from Cambodia, which it suspended in February after links to a smuggling ring were revealed. In South Carolina, fishermen supplying crabs to the company were repeatedly caught taking horseshoe crabs from off-limits islands along the coast and inside a national wildlife refuge.

But after two environmental groups sued the company and the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources in 2022 for allowing horseshoe crabs to be kept away from the birds in secluded holding ponds, the agency asked the court to allow it to keep details about the industry confidential in the court documents. The judge agreed.

"It's just really a black box of information," said Catherine Wannamaker, a lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.

Still, not everything was kept secret. NPR reviewed a redacted copy of the documents submitted in court. Though some of the words are excluded from the documents, the files indicate fishermen for Charles River broke permit requirements last year. Only male crabs were allowed to be kept in the ponds. But the documents indicate something else happened.

Additional documents obtained by NPR from the state's Department of Natural Resources through an open records request reveal that no fishermen were punished for breaking those rules. Wannamaker said that is not unusual.

"Historically, those conditions have not been enforced or complied with," she said.

The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. Charles River Laboratories declined an interview with NPR. In an emailed statement, a company representative said they do their work with a "healthy respect for the need to protect the horseshoe crab population for generations to come."

The company also declined to allow reporters to visit its facilities. But NPR purchased photos from one of the last photographers allowed to witness the bleeding process, in 2014.

This year, fewer horseshoe crabs from South Carolina will likely be harvested. Though both the state and Charles River Laboratories denied liability in the lawsuit, the judge found the evidence against them convincing enough to pause the collection of crabs from 30 of the state's beaches in 2023. But Charles River is now paying harvesters in other places. This season, fishermen for Charles River are harvesting crabs from Cape Cod, Mass., and Chincoteague, Va.

Those states also withhold information about the bleeding industry. When NPR requested annual reports from the five states where the bleeding facilities are based, the state governments often redacted the number of crabs collected and the numbers left dead owing to the process. Most leaned on exemptions in public records laws that allow trade secrets or business information to be kept hidden.

In response to an open records request from NPR, New Jersey redacted the number of crab deaths and crabs collected despite a court orderfrom a previous case that required the state to provide that information to the public. When asked why the state did not share those numbers though the courts required it before, a representative from New Jersey did not respond with a comment by the time of publication.

The states are not the only ones with access to the collection and mortality numbers. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission also knows them. But the group doesn't share the numbers publicly, either. Instead, it publishes an estimate derived from research studies that tried to mimic the bleeding process. Since some of the mortality numbers published in those studies varied, the commission settled on an approximation of 15%. That would amount to over 100,000 dead crabs in 2021. But some scientists say that underestimates the long term consequences of the process. Other research has shown the crabs mate less after they're bled. And few of those studies tracked how many crabs bled by the industry died more than two weeks after they were released back into the ocean.

"It could be that they're bleeding so many crabs, they're not only killing, but they could also be preventing crabs from spawning," said Niles, the biologist from New Jersey. "We just don't know."

Representatives from the bleeding industry have said horseshoe crabs are not harmed by the bleeding process. When NPR reached out, however, all the companies either declined interviews or did not respond.

When turning down NPR's request for an interview in an email, one representative took the opportunity to mention a new product his company had recently started selling: a synthetic, recombinant copy of the clotting ingredient inside horseshoe crabs that requires no blood to keep vaccines free of contamination.

"It has been an exciting couple of years indeed," wrote Brett Hoffmeister, the lysate production manager of a company that bleeds crabs in Massachusetts, Associates of Cape Cod.

But the standard-setting body in the U.S. tasked with approving the synthetic tests has stalled, and few pharmaceutical companies are using them.

'We have seen that it is better' As the pandemic raged, the experts at the European Pharmacopoeia were poised to take action.

It was those scientists' job to determine whether there was enough data to conclude the synthetic tests worked just as well or better than the crab-derived ones. By 2017, they had already decided the research did support that. And in 2020, Eli Lilly, a major pharmaceutical company, was putting the science into practice. The company produced all its COVID-19 antibody medications using the newer method.

"It's actually been cost advantageous for us," said Jay Bolden, the scientist that pushed Eli Lilly to use the synthetic, a move that required additional approval from the FDA since the U.S. Pharmacopoeia does not recognize it as equivalent. "Then from a quality perspective, we have seen that it is better."

Using the synthetic also made sense for making the production of medicines more sustainable, Bolden added, since the old method relied on diminishing natural resources. When the European Pharmacopoeia announced its decision to approve the synthetic as an equivalent in July of 2020, it made the same point.

"The world currently relies on a single source of lysate, the horseshoe crab family," the European Pharmacopoeia told the press. The approval was "a significant step towards alleviating the need for animal resources."

As Europe took steps, the U.S. Pharmacopeia appeared stalled. In 2020, it published a statement defending its expert committee's decision to wait for more evidence. The horseshoe crab-derived product had kept American patients safe for 30 years, the group said, so it was reasonable to hold on until more data supported the alternatives. Two years later, after almost no public updates on its progress, the Pharmacopeia suddenly dismissed everyone on the committee.

Jaap Venema, the Pharmacopeia's Chief Science Officer, said that considering the synthetic is a priority for the 20 new members that started to meet in 2023. But as it was with the experts those people replaced, the pace they move at is up to them. As of June, there were no upcoming deadlines or votes scheduled, the Pharmacopeia confirmed to NPR.

It's also up to pharmaceutical companies to determine whether and when they want to switch to using synthetic tests before the U.S. Pharmacopeia takes more action, like Eli Lilly did. This year, Roche Pharmaceuticals began using the synthetic in its manufacturing processes and has started preparing to test some of its medicines with it, too.

"Ultimately, patient safety is our number one priority," said Lindsey Silva, a senior scientist involved with the project. "We've been able to confirm that it's fit for its intended use and safe for patients."

Still, most pharmaceutical companies continue using the tests that require horseshoe crabs to be bled alive. Conditions generally evolve faster for species that are complex and mammalian like humans, said Rich Gorman, the researcher at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School. But the crabs underpin the global pharmaceutical industry. He believes the best way to improve their situation – and that of the birds that depend on them – is to have more open debate about the consequences of how they're used.

"It remains this really shadowy area," Gorman said. "For the horseshoe crab, it is time to begin to think about the welfare implications of this a lot more openly and honestly."

The audio for this story was produced by Monika Evstatieva and Meg Anderson. It was edited by Barrie Hardymon with research by Barbara Van Woerkom. Photo editing by Emily Bogle. A portion of the audio of the red knots was provided by the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

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When the spreading coronavirus pandemic prompted lockdowns in the early months of 2020, people stayed home and traffic volume quickly plummeted.

As a result, many animals started traveling longer distances, and were willing to venture closer to roadways, according to a new study in the journal Science.

Researchers looked at the movements of over 2,000 animals from 43 mammalian species that were being tracked with GPS devices around the world. This included everything from pumas in California to elephants in South Africa to reindeer in Norway.

It turns out that, on average, the animals traveled 73% farther during the initial COVID lockdowns than they did during the same time period a year earlier. The animals also crept 36% closer to roadways.

The findings offer new insight into the ways that everyday human behavior can directly impact the lives of wild animal populations.

From pandemic lockdowns, an experimental opportunity Marlee Tucker, a researcher with Radboud University, says that she and her colleagues knew from previous research that animals living in places with a high human presence tended to move around less.

"We weren't really able to tease apart why that was," says Tucker, who says that roads and other human structures might act as physical barriers, for example, or human activities might affect the availability of food resources.

When the lockdowns started, she says, "we thought, 'Oh, this is quite a sort of unique opportunity that we can actually disentangle or separate the effects of human mobility.' "

While they saw some variability between species and individuals, their study shows that many mammals can quickly adapt to sudden changes in the amount of traffic on roads.

"This was quite sort of exciting to see," says Tucker, "because it shows that animals still have the capacity to change their behavior in response to us changing our behavior."

Clues for managing wildlife The work caught the attention of Colleen Cassady St. Clair, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta, who was not involved in the study but wrote a commentary accompanying its results.

"It's not usually possible to separate the effects of the road infrastructure from the effects of traffic. So in a sense, this was a huge global experiment, on a scale that's never been done before," says St. Clair.

Understanding how animals respond to road traffic can be important for the management of wildlife and protected areas, she says. In Canada's Banff National Park, for example, temporary road closures were recently shown to improve the quality of habitat available to wildlife.

"Changes in road traffic," says St. Clair, "can profoundly affect other species and their use of landscapes."

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Octopuses are curious and clever. They can solve mazes and puzzles, use tools, and are masters of camouflage. These complex abilities are powered by their sophisticated and giant brains.

Now, in the journal Cell, researchers report that octopuses are able to edit genetic information to quickly resculpt those brains when confronted with changes in their environment.

These findings cast new light on the incredible adaptability of these shape-shifting creatures and may help scientists design therapeutics for problematic mutations in our own bodies.

Octopuses are considered one of the smartest invertebrate animals on the planet, with sophisticated brains and complex nervous systems. In other animals, such big brains typically need to be treated with care.

Just think about your own fragile brain. It's encased in a skull, bathed in oxygen, and tuned to work at a relatively stable body temperature. "We spend a ton of energy maintaining a constant temperature," says Josh Rosenthal, a neurobiologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. "And a lot of that is so that our nervous system can operate more efficiently."

Too hot (with a fever) or too cold (with hypothermia) and our brains sputter and begin to fail — and that's just several degrees off the norm. So our bodies keep everything at a steady temperature.

Octopuses don't have that luxury. Their brains require just as much safekeeping as ours, but they're in squishy bodies swimming in water whose temperature can fluctuate by some 20 degrees.

"It's difficult to maintain a complex nervous system in the face of changing temperature," says Rosenthal. "And that presents challenges."

Tweaking genetic recipes on the fly Octopuses have overcome that challenge with a unique trick hidden inside their cells. It has to do with a molecule called RNA, which is used to help translate DNA into the proteins that make up our bodies. To use an analogy, let's say you want to make a loaf of bread and you walk into a library filled with cookbooks.

"That cookbook itself, it's already printed and I can't change the book," says Matthew Birk, a biologist at Saint Francis University. "But what I can do is make a copy, take it home to my kitchen," and bake the bread there.

Here, the cookbooks are the DNA, which is hard-coded and doesn't change, the bread is the protein your body wants to make, and the RNA is the copy of the recipe that explains how to do it. RNA doesn't tend to change all that much. It's just the messenger.

But what if you're missing an ingredient — like butter?

"If those are the instructions you have, you're kinda sunk," says Rosenthal. "But if you know that oil would work just as well — if you could edit that recipe and put that in, then that gives you flexibility."

In the brains of most animals — from fish to birds to bees to people — only a few percent of the RNAs get edited. But inside the brains of octopuses and their relatives, it's happening on a massive scale, affecting more than 60%.

The researchers wondered if something in these animals' environment might be driving all this tweaking, like temperature. Birk decided to run an experiment with help from the California two-spot octopus, which, when scrunched up, is about the size of a football.

"They look very much like your typical octopus," says Birk, "although it does have two iridescent blue spots to try and scare a predator away." He says they're mischievous and good at camouflaging. And their coastal habitat in southern California and northern Mexico swings between warm summers and cool winters.

In the lab, Birk placed half his octopuses in cooler water and half in warmer water. After a few weeks, he collected RNA from their brains.

"We found that there were over 20,000 different locations on various different proteins that were edited," says Birk, with more tweaking in the cooler conditions.

That is, in response to changing temperatures, the octopuses remodeled their brains, presumably to keep them functioning properly. The same thing was true in the wild, where Birk collected individuals in the summer and winter by flushing them from their underwater dens with squirts of vinegar.

The octopuses are capable of making these edits in less than a day. Compare that to DNA, which takes generations to change. RNA provides a more flexible alternative.

Tweaking RNAs — editing the temporary copies of the recipes — leads to alterations in the proteins that they instruct the cell to make. For octopuses, there's no single, preferred version of a protein. Rather, there are multiple versions of numerous proteins in the animal's brain, each one suited to a different scenario.

"This study shows for the first time that in the same organism, under different conditions, it expresses different proteins from the same gene," says Eli Eisenberg, a physicist at Tel Aviv University. "And they have different functional behavior that is presumably suited to the external temperature."

The inner life of an octopus It's still not clear how these changes might impact an octopus in its daily life.

"What would be nice to see in future is what types of behaviors are affected by these different types of changes — their reaction speeds, their ability to camouflage," says Robyn Crook, a neurobiologist at San Francisco State University who wasn't involved in the research.

Because the octopuses do more editing in cooler temperatures, Crook also points out the strategy may not help them in the face of a changing climate and warming oceans. Though these octopuses can operate across a range of temperatures, she says it may not be "a viable mechanism for escaping environmental change as a result of human activity."

Despite octopuses living such different lives than we do, their unique brains may one day prove useful to us.

"We're trying to figure out how to capture this ability to use it towards therapeutics," explains Birk, like pain reduction or repairing harmful mutations that cause disease.

Octopuses, he says, have a lot to teach us.

"They are fascinating and interesting, not just on the outside, where we can all see," Birk says. "But also on the inside."

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For decades, American courts have had to take it on faith that drug-sniffing dogs were impartial. Testimony by a dog's handler, along with training records and credentialing by a local K-9 organization, were usually enough. But the recent spread of body cameras now threatens to upend that faith.

A newly filed federal lawsuit in Texas shows cameras' potential to undermine K-9 unit legitimacy. Houston resident Alek Schottaccuses Bexar County Sheriff's deputy Joel Babb of pulling him over on Interstate 35on false pretenses, and then, when he refused to give permission to search his pickup truck, he says K-9 unit deputy Martin A. Molina III prompted his dog to "alert" to the scent of drugs.

"These guys are trying to destroy my life" Historically, that claim would have been nearly impossible to prove. But in this case, Schott requested and received the officers'body camera footage, giving himalmost the same view the K-9 handler had — including the moment the handler's right hand made a gesture toward the attentive dog, which then jumped up on the pickup's door.

"It's clear to me that he's telling the dog to alert," Schott says. "I thought, 'These guys are trying to destroy my life.' "

No drugs were found in Schott's pickup, and the county later reimbursed him for damage done during the search — including dog scratches outside and inside the truck. The sheriff's office would not comment to NPR on the case, citing "pending litigation."

Thirty-seven-year-old Schott, who works for his father's company supplying the oil and gas industry, is represented by Christie Hebert, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, a civil liberties organization focused on search and seizure. She says they're pursuing the lawsuit because they believe the deputies violated Schott's rights — and did so in part by relying on the dog.

"You think of a dog as not having an agenda," Hebert says. "But the fact is, they're influenced by their handlers' agenda and they want to please their masters."

That's long been a nagging doubt about drug-sniffing dogs: that handlers might influence them to alert to a scent that may not be there. Research has shown handlers may not even realize they're doing it. Some K-9 trainers have called for "double-blind" testing of the dogs, in which the location and existence of test drugs are randomized, unknown even to the dog's handler. But that approach has been slow to catch on, and is often met with hostility.

"That appears to be a cue of some sort that he gives the dog" Former K-9 officer and trainer Andy Falco hopes the spread of body cameras will change that.

"I think it's good for the K-9 units that these things are out there," he says of cameras. "It'll make them train harder, and perhaps even some of them that weren't doing double-blind sniffs will start doing double-blind sniffs!"

Falco works as an expert witness in cases involving sniffer dogs, and he says the number of legal challenges based on close-up video has exploded. Most cases involve cameras, now, and close-up reviews of every gesture and move of handlers and dogs. In one case he worked on, the Idaho Supreme Court threw out a drug conviction because it decided the K-9 "trespassed" on a vehicle with its paw — a degree of after-the-fact scrutiny that would have been impossible before body cameras.

And when Falco is shown the video from Bexar County, he sees why Schott is suing. "The right hand facing up, and then moving it upward — that is the command to sit. There's not any reason why he would be doing it where he's doing it, so it is out of place," he says. "That appears to be a cue of some sort that he gives the dog."

Other K-9 trainers say the video isn't a slam-dunk, and that there could be innocent explanations for the gesture. But one thing is clear to them: going forward, K-9 units should expect their every move and gesture could come under review after the search is over.

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He's thought to be a young creature roaming in search of a partner. Relatable!

Who is he? While he hasn't been given a formal name, the California wolverine is a creature of mystique and intrigue.

The critter, that is presumed to be a male (and single!) was officially identified earlier this month, after numerous reported (but unconfirmed) sightings.
The only other confirmed sighting of a wolverine in the golden state in the last 100 years was when researchers tracked one from 2008, after it was spotted near Lake Tahoe and had made the journey from the Rocky Mountains.
This new sighting has both shocked and delighted conservationists and scientists, in an event that Daniel Gammons, a wildlife biologist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, called "extraordinarily rare."
There is no indication yet on where this wolverine came from, but Gammons says there is some potential for a connection between the last wolverine's journey from the Rockies.
The wolverine was spotted in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains, the Inyo National Forest, and in Yosemite National Park, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
This wolverine has been rather camera shy. Hugh Jackman, however, just posted a new photo on Instagram.

What's the big deal? You know that one friend who you never see because they're always busy? Imagine they just showed up to your party. But it's been 100 years, and your friend is a furry mammal in the California mountains, and they also can't speak English or go near people.

While wolverines can be found in a number of countries — as well as Alaska in the U.S. — they were presumed extirpated in the state of California around the 1920s. That means that while they weren't necessarily extinct, they probably didn't exist in that given locality anymore.
Excessive hunting for their silky pelts throughout the 19th and 20th century is one of the more obvious causes, but Gammons says there are still many questions about the exit (and return!) of the species.
"There's not a very good understanding of how abundant wolverines ever were in California," Gammons said. "So, consequently, there's not a really good understanding of how they went from however abundant they were to presumably excavated."

Here's what Gammons told us about the wolverine:

On whether there could be more than one:

As far as we know there's likely a single animal. Obviously, it's very hard to prove a negative. So it's possible that there could be more than one. But based on the rarity of the sightings over the last 100 years, the rarity of the confirmed sightings, how we know that wolverines have tremendous dispersal capabilities, and they can move many, many, many miles during a day, we suspect that there's just a single animal at this time. We assume that it's likely a male, but we don't even know that.

On how an animal can make a comeback like this:

It could be through natural processes, with animals dispersing from a different population where they currently exist and just coming on their own and colonizing with wolverines, and that happens with various species at different times.

Colorado may be contemplating a reintroduction program that would be the obvious other way, in that it could occur assisted by people. So basically capturing animals in a place where there's a harvestable surplus and bringing them in.

On next steps with the wolverine:

We're looking for scats. If we get a detection, we know where it's at. This is generally almost always going to be in snow conditions that make tracking a little bit easier.

So if we can track it, basically kind of get a hot lead on where it was last seen, [we can] mobilize some people to go out there and track it ... And then the other method is to set up bait sites where we're trying to lure the animal in to climb a tree, and grab a bait that we've set for it. And below the bait we'll set gun cleaning brushes, kind of like a bottle brush, and those are designed to just pull a hair or a handful of hairs off the animal.

And once we have the hair, the follicle in that hair can be sent off to a lab and they can run the genetics on that and answer questions such as, is it male? Is it female? What's the likely population of origin, by comparing the DNA to samples collected in those other areas. It's pretty low impact.

Want more on the environment? Listen to Consider This on why melting ice in Antartica is a big problem for coastal Texas.

So, what now?

Gammons isn't holding his breath: "It's certainly too early to say anything really conclusive. It certainly raises the possibility that [wolverine habitation] may be possible here, but I think at this point, there's a lot more questions than there are answers."
Gammons says there's a chance that it isn't seen or tracked again. Such a rolling stone.

Read more:

Here is the first livestream from Mars — a rare, almost real-time look into space
How one scientist is demystifying the rise of the dinosaurs
Climate change stresses out these chipmunks. Why are their cousins so chill?

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MAYAGÜEZ, Puerto Rico — Mundi, the Puerto Rico zoo's prized African elephant, was scheduled to board a cargo jet to her new home at a sprawling elephant refuge in southern Georgia. But there was a problem. She was afraid to enter the massive transport crate in which she'd soon be making the trip.

The Georgia refuge's founder, Carol Buckley, had arrived on the island a week earlier to get Mundi comfortable with the cage, and at first had no trouble coaxing her in with her favorite foods. But now, two days before the May 12 flight meant to ferry her to a better life, something had made Mundi skittish. She'd enter the crate for only a minute or two before retreating back into the small fenced yard where she'd been on exhibit for 35 years.

For the team coordinating the 8,000-pound elephant's move, it was one more hurdle to overcome in a mission that had already grown so tense that armed federal agents had been brought in for Mundi's protection. She was just one of the hundreds of animals being evacuated from Puerto Rico's long-deteriorating and now-shuttered zoo. But for decades, Mundi had been its main attraction and a symbol of Puerto Rico's more prosperous past, so her impending evacuation had unleashed a torrent of emotion on the island: joy, but also sadness, anger and — among some people — fierce resistance.

Buckley, a slight 68-year-old with a calm but purposeful demeanor, was well aware of the intense feelings swirling around her arrival on the island to take Mundi away. But for now she really just needed the elephant to feel comfortable in the crate again. She sat on a chair at one end offering chunks of watermelon with an extended hand. Mundi entered to scoop a couple of bites up with her trunk, but then backed away.

"Come on, good girl," Buckley cooed. "Watermelon is her absolute favorite, and for her to walk away from it, she's never done that. But since what happened yesterday, she is now questioning everything in her environment around this crate."

The previous evening, Mundi had been eating her dinner inside the crate when something startled her from behind. She thrashed her body in a panic and used her trunk to grasp at her hind leg.

Buckley suspected that someone trying to sabotage her departure had shot her with a pellet gun from just beyond the zoo's outer fence.

In recent days tensions at the zoo had reached a fever pitch. Protesters had blocked the zoo gates to try to prevent some of its animals from being driven to the airport, and as Mundi's departure date approached, Buckley and other members of the transport team started getting online threats. On social media, people made plans to bang pots and pans outside the zoo gates so Mundi would be too spooked to enter the cage. The federal agents brought in to patrol the zoo grounds confiscated a drone they caught flying overhead.

It had all started in February, when the U.S. Justice Department ordered Puerto Rico's zoo permanently closed and set a six-month deadline for its more than 300 animals to be moved to sanctuaries across the United States. Many Puerto Ricans rejoiced, because the zoo's years-long decline had left many of its animals suffering in cramped cages, losing weight, and dying from lack of care.

But for others, Mundi's departure and the permanent closure of the zoo — once a leading attraction of Puerto Rico's picturesque western coast — felt like just one more loss in their fight to save their island's cultural treasures from the ravages of recent natural disasters and the cascading effects of the island's debilitating debt crisis.

"Mundi became the symbol of a struggle," said Raquel Quiñones, who spent years volunteering at the zoo. "Her going away is devastating for all of us. And what I feel is rage — and embarrassment — that the government of Puerto Rico allowed it to come to this."

Raquel Braña, a longtime animal rights activist in Puerto Rico, called the zoo's closure a momentous and long awaited liberation.

"This is a huge triumph for Puerto Rico and its animal rights movement," she said. "Because there were many moments when we thought achieving something like this would take a lot longer, and that many more of the zoo's animals would die before we succeeded. But we prevailed, and there's going to be more to come."

The zoo's steady decline For more than a decade, Braña and other animal rights activists had been sounding alarms about worsening conditions at Puerto Rico's only zoo. It opened in the western city of Mayagüez in 1964 and had long been a source of pride for the city's residents. But by the mid-2000s, the U.S. territory's emerging debt crisis began to decimate the budget of every public institution on the island.

Visitors complained about dilapidated facilities at the government-run zoo, and animals that looked sick and poorly cared for. Federal inspectors documented long lists of animal welfare violations. Paying visitors plummeted, Braña said, as Puerto Rico's economic crisis drove young people and families off the island. Then in September of 2017, Hurricane Maria's 155 mph winds devastated the zoo's facilities. It lost federal permits months later, and never reopened to the public, though the animals and their caretakers remained.

"And I can tell you all the ways that they suffered," Braña said. "And the ways in which so many of them died."

Sitting at her dining room table, Braña, who runs an activist group called Puerto Rico Without A Zoo, ticked off many of the zoo's once majestic animals that had died since the zoo closed its doors. The tigers Angel and Osiris. A lion named Olosi. A zebra that succumbed to a digestive condition. And Nina, a black bear who lived her final months in a cramped cage with poor ventilation before dying of a heart attack earlier this year.

"A lot of people were saying, but we'll all die eventually," Braña said. "And yes, that's true. But it's the manner in which they were dying. These animals didn't die of old age. They died because they were sick and didn't get the care they needed."

At times, the zoo's veterinarians would not report to work because the government delayed in paying them. Over the years, Braña and other activists filed lawsuits to compel the government to be more transparent about the care it was providing for the zoo's less high profile animals.

"I confess," Braña said, "that in this fight, Mundi the elephant was not the most important for me. It's not that she was OK, because she wasn't. But among all the animals, she was the favorite. She wasn't going to go hungry the way other animals did. And it's those animals that didn't get the chance Mundi is now getting that I mourn for the most."

A lonely life Now 41, Mundi arrived in Puerto Rico in 1988 as a 6-year-old calf. She had been part of a group of more than 60 baby elephants whose lives had been spared by African governments that at the time were slaughtering wild elephants to control their populations.

Mundi ended up on a private farm in Florida, blind in her right eye after an encounter with another elephant's tusk. At the same time, the zoo in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, was on the market for an elephant of its own. It acquired Mundi through a broker, and she became an instant icon — the primary attraction for the zoo's visitors at a time of prosperity in Puerto Rico's economy.

Carol Buckley said it was clear that Mundi had been loved by her zoo caretakers all these years. She ate well, was showered with affection and often got birthday parties. Even so, Buckley, an internationally recognized expert on caring for elephants in captivity, said Mundi had lived a lonely life in a tiny enclosure far too small for an animal of her size and emotional capacity.

"Elephants are incredibly mobile, and their social lives are so rich," she said. "They live in extended families their entire lives. And Mundi has lived in this small space without another elephant for 35 years. It's like a forcing a person to live alone in a closet for 35 years."

Buckley first agreed to take Mundi to her elephant sanctuary — Elephant Refuge North America — in 2017, after island officials, already struggling with the zoo's upkeep, approached her after the then-governor's wife expressed concern about Mundi's emotional health. But before Mundi could be moved off the island, the government abruptly canceled its contract with Buckley amid a political backlash.

When the possibility of taking Mundi resurfaced this year after the Justice Department ordered the zoo closed, Buckley said she hesitated, wary of wading into the politics again. "But in the end," she said, "I made my decision based on what was best for Mundi."

Buckley's refuge — in Attapulgus, Ga., just north of the Florida border — is 850 natural acres, intended to mimic an elephant's native habitat. It's home to two other elephants, but designed for up to 10.

Buckley said that along with some of the hostility she encountered when she arrived in Puerto Rico, many people on the island had thanked her.

"People have very mixed emotions about Mundi leaving, because they love her," Buckley said. "But it has been amazing the number of Puerto Ricans who have messaged me, talked to me, crying. They love Mundi so much, but they say, 'Please take her and give her a better life.' And that is the best of the human race."

She went on: "There are other people who have not quite been able to let go. But I hope that over time, after she leaves and they realize she's gone, and they see how well she's doing, that they'll begin to heal."

A failed effort to save the zoo Lynette Matos had hoped the day of Mundi's departure would never come, and she worked hard to prevent it. It was not long after the zoo closed to the public that she realized she'd have to.

"After Hurricane Maria, there was a lot of talk about closing the zoo forever," she said. "And we thought, if we don't do something, it might never reopen, because our government was not capable of doing what needed to be done."

Matos, who runs a local radio station in Mayagüez, was a lifelong lover of the zoo and thought that with enough investment, it could once again become a great tourist draw while supporting wildlife research and conservation. So she established a foundation to help save it.

Through her grassroots "Save the Zoo Foundation," she organized volunteers and got the Puerto Rico government to allow them in to maintain the grounds. They raised money for food and medical care. And the volunteers painted murals and streamed videos from inside the zoo featuring its animal keepers and veterinarians.

"Because of the hurricane, there was a lot of federal money available to rehabilitate," Matos said, referring to the more than $6 million in disaster reconstruction funding allocated for the zoo after Maria. "And our goal as volunteers was to keep the zoo in good condition so that once that money did arrive, the USDA and the Fish and Wildlife agency would grant the federal permits for the zoo to reopen."

But Matos said she was constantly frustrated that officials seemed unmotivated to make things better. Work orders placed by zoo staff were rarely or only slowly filled, she said, and suggestions from volunteers and veterinarians were often ignored. Last year, she said, the government kicked the volunteers out.

"That led us to really question what the government's vision was for the zoo's future," she said. "Because by that time we were the only ones really doing anything for the zoo."

Matos said it was painful to watch how the disinvestment led to so much animal suffering. Her group had recently been finalizing plans for a new veterinary clinic.

So she was shocked when, in late February, the federal U.S. attorney for Puerto Rico, Stephen Muldrow, announced that his office had struck a deal with the Puerto Rican government to permanently close the zoo and move all of its animals to U.S. sanctuaries within six months. Federal prosecutors said that as part of the deal, they would not pursue investigations against island officials for the many animal welfare violations inspectors had documented at the zoo for more than a decade.

"It was an institutional problem," Muldrow said when announcing the agreement. It was not intentional malice, he said, but "a lack of resources and training that resulted in the government's inability to guarantee the well-being of these animals."

Anaís Rodriguez Vega, the island's natural resources secretary, said she was grateful that her agency's deal with prosecutors would mean a quick and efficient departure for the zoo's hundreds of animals, because "we all want the same thing: the well-being of all of these species."

Matos and her volunteers, though, were devastated. "We really had been hoping for a different outcome," she said, her voice quivering. "We always described the zoo as the jewel in Puerto Rico's crown, but it was a diamond that our government failed to polish."

Raquel Braña, the animal rights activist, said she was equally shocked, but instead elated, by the government's announcement. "It's shame that in Puerto Rico we would let animals live in desolation just because the zoo represented a jewel or a status symbol," she said. "Animals are worth much more than that."

A massive operation Mundi the elephant would not be traveling alone. Joining her on the chartered 747 cargo flight on May 12 would be two somewhat stubborn hippopotamuses named Cindy and Pipo, a rhinoceros named Felipe who liked to be pet by humans, a tranquil donkey named Chevy, and an impala.

The job of finding new homes for all of the zoo's animals fell to Pat and Monica Craig, who run the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Colorado and have coordinated large animal rescues in many parts of the world, including lions they recently evacuated from zoos in war-torn Ukraine.

After issuing its closure order in February, the U.S. Attorney's Office asked the Craigs to take charge of the transfer of the more than 300 animals at the zoo, plus roughly 300 more living in a government detention center for confiscated exotic animals — snakes, monkeys, hedgehogs, eels, a lungfish.

"We've handled large numbers of animals before," Pat Craig said. "But this is by far the largest we've ever done."

By the time the last animal has been flown off of Puerto Rico in late June, it will have cost upwards of $2 million, Craig said, funded entirely by his nonprofit's private donors.

"When you're saving animals from an island, there's no cheap way to do it," he said. "They have to fly just like people do."

The chartered 747 carrying Mundi and the other animals cost more than $500,000 alone.

Island officials and the U.S. Attorney said they planned to ask the Federal Emergency Management Agency to use the hurricane disaster recovery funds that weren't spent on the zoo's reconstruction to reimburse the Craigs' nonprofit. But they said there's no guarantee FEMA will approve that request.

A flying elephant On the day she was scheduled to be driven to the airport, Mundi was still hesitant to enter her crate. As evening fell, the transport crew had to gently force her in by fastening a rope around one of her front feet.

Once she was secured inside, a crane loaded the crate onto the back of a flatbed truck. The crates containing the hippos, the rhinoceros, the donkey and the impala were loaded onto their own trucks, and shortly before midnight, the caravan of wild animals, accompanied by dozens of police officers, began the 23-mile drive to the main airport serving Puerto Rico's west coast. People lined the route to wave goodbye.

The cargo jet landed just before 2:30 a.m. on May 12, but it would be hours before Mundi would be onboard. As she waited on the airport tarmac, she began to grow restless, swaying back and forth inside her cage, lightly rocking the truck bed. Carol Buckley climbed up to reassure Mundi through the bars.

"She's getting a little impatient," Buckley said. "All the other animals are on the plane, and it's her turn now."

Mundi's turn finally came shortly after sunrise. A crane hauled her crate up to the platform protruding from the massive open door on the side of the jet, and Mundi disappeared inside. Buckley stood back with tears in her eyes.

"I really am so grateful to the people of Puerto Rico for making this sacrifice to let Mundi go," she said, before boarding the plane herself. "This is an amazing gift that they've given her."

At 41, Mundi could still live another 20 to 30 years at Buckley's refuge.

For many Puerto Ricans, that knowledge has helped soothe the pangs of guilt over a lifetime she spent, alone, in her small enclosure. And it's provided a measure of comfort to the sting of losing her.

At the airport, a small crowd of well-wishers congregated just beyond the runway's fence to watch Mundi's plane take off.

Miriam Nuñez was there, overcome, she said, by that bittersweet emotion familiar to every Puerto Rican who's said goodbye when someone they love has been forced to seek a better life off the island.

"I visited Mundi at the zoo many times," Nuñez said, tears streaming down her face after Mundi's plane had disappeared over the horizon. "And I felt I had to be here. I'm happy today because I know she is going to be better off. Yet I'm also sad — because she left. But I know, in God's name, that she's going to be OK."

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Watching Netflix's new docuseries Chimp Empire is a trip. It feels like being dropped in the middle of the Ugandan forest and suddenly becoming roommates with chimpanzees. It's incredibly immersive. You get to know the chimps as individuals, each with their own personalities and goals. And you get a glimpse of the inner workings of chimp society, complete with its fluid hierarchies and deadly power struggles.

Chimp Empire was filmed over a year in Uganda's Kibale National Park. The filmmakers embedded themselves with the Ngogo chimpanzees, the largest known chimpanzee society. While these chimps once lived in relative peace and harmony, they now have split into two warring clans, which scientists refer to as the Central and Western factions.

For us at Planet Money, what's particularly fascinating about this conflict is that economics seems to be at the center of it. The Central and Western chimp clans are competing for the ownership of a scarce resource: fruit trees, which are their primary source of sustenance. At the beginning of the series, the Central chimps have control over some of the most coveted fruit trees. They even patrol their borders to ensure that the Western Chimps don't encroach on them. But — without giving away too much — the Western Chimps do exactly that, and the territorial conflict turns violent.

The apes in Chimp Empire also display other behaviors that are interesting from an economic perspective. Alpha males use the spoils from their group's hunts strategically, giving meat to allies while excluding those who pose a threat to their dominance. The chimps also engage in a kind of grooming barter system. Ticks and other parasites are a serious problem in the jungle, and the chimps spend hours grooming each other to ensure that they don't get sick. It's literally you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours. However, in the docuseries, there are stories of low-ranking chimps grooming higher-ranking chimps but not getting groomed in exchange. In this way, this grooming barter system communicates power, kinship, and rank.

Chimpanzees, as a species, are our closest relatives in the natural world. Scientists have compared their DNA to ours, and they find that more than 98 percent of our genetic code is identical. Research suggests that humans and chimps both share a common ancestor species, and somewhere between six and nine million years ago, we diverged and started evolving into the distinct creatures we are today.

Given our primal connection to chimpanzees, social scientists have long been interested in our behavioral similarities and differences — including when it comes to our economic behavior. By understanding how this more primitive species behaves, the thinking goes, maybe we can gain a better understanding of how humans behaved in the ancient past, and how we've evolved and changed with civilization.

Chimpo Economicus

In the classic model of neoclassical economics, human beings are portrayed as selfish creatures who always do the best that they can to maximize their own wealth and happiness. The model assumes that people are rational, meaning that they will logically pursue their goals and not get systematically tripped up by their quirks, shortcomings, or emotions. Economists call this stylized version of humans homo economicus.

Over the last few decades, the field of behavioral economics has shone a bright spotlight on the fact that human beings often don't behave like homo economicus. They engage in all sorts of behaviors that can result in them failing to maximize their own wealth or happiness. Sometimes they do so because of irrationality, or errors in their thinking. Other times they do so because they choose to do so. For example, humans, perhaps because of innate empathy or socialization, tend to be more generous and altruistic than the crude, simplified economic model of the past suggests we are. And, this, evolutionarily speaking, makes a lot of sense. We are, after all, a social species: the more we cooperate, the more we thrive.

With this model of behavior in mind, social scientists have long been interested in researching whether chimps are more or less selfish than humans. For decades, researchers conducted lab experiments with chimps that suggested they were, indeed, almost completely selfish. They found in laboratory experiments that chimps tended to hoard food and were unwilling to hand over snacks to fellow apes, even when it didn't really cost them anything. This made it seem like maybe kindness and concern for others was more of a human trait, and that chimps were closer to the crude model of selfish homo economicus than we are.

However, more recent experiments have found that, in fact, chimps are actually more generous than once thought, and even that they are more social and evolved than selfish homo economicus. In one experiment, researchers Michael Tomasello and Felix Warneken put two chimps in two different rooms. Both primates had a clear view of mouth-watering fruit in a third room. The scientists gave one chimp the capability to open the door for the other chimp to go and get the fruit, even though the chimp with control over the door wouldn't get to feast. The researchers found that the chimp opened the door for the other chimp around 80% of the time. Pretty generous!

Other studies have found similar behaviors. Chimps warn their compatriots about imminent dangers. They give tools to their compatriots when they request them. So while humans may be more generous than apes, researchers find that concern for others is not a uniquely human trait.

The Endowment Effect

Chimpanzees also display some of the same quirks that humans do. Behavioral economists have long found that humans, quite irrationally, tend to value an object more after they have gained possession of it. For example, we might think a coffee mug is worth only $5 when we buy it at the store. Then, after we buy it, we value it more. Someone could offer us like $8 or $9 for it. But, we're like, "No way! This is my precious mug!" From a purely rational economic perspective, this behavior doesn't make sense.

Richard Thaler, a founder of behavioral economics, called this tendency to value things in our possession more "the endowment effect." He connected it to a broader human quirk, which is called loss aversion. The basic idea is that we experience more pain from losing something than pleasure from gaining that exact same thing. We see this behavior everywhere, whether it's our romantic relationships or our consumer decisions. You may sort of like getting something, but you'll really hate losing it!

What's interesting is that a group of researchers has found that chimpanzees exhibit the exact same behavioral quirk, particularly when it comes to food. "These findings suggest that many seeming deviations from rational choice predictions may be common to humans and chimpanzees and that the evaluation of these through a lens of evolutionary relevance may yield further insights in humans and other species," the researchers conclude.

So maybe, apart from human cognitive ability, language, advanced technology, and civilization, chimps aren't so different from us after all. At the very least, we're both much more interesting, social, and quirky than the creatures portrayed in old-school economic textbooks. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Could Restoring Animal Populations Store More Carbon?Did you know that land and ocean ecosystems absorb about half of the carbon dioxide we emit each year? But what if the earth had the capacity to absorb even more? With the help of some furry, scaly, and leathery critters, maybe it can.

A recent study in the journal Nature Climate Change claims that by restoring the populations of just a handful of animals—like gray wolves, bison, and sea otters for example—the Earth could capture around 6.41 more gigatons of CO2 each year. This idea of restoring wildlife is called rewilding.

Ira talks with the co-author of this study, Dr. Trisha Atwood, an associate professor at Utah State University, based in Logan, UT. They chat about what critters make the rewilding list, and how they fit into the carbon cycle.

Allergy Season Is Blooming With Climate ChangeSpring is in the air, and for many people that means allergy season is rearing its ugly head. If it feels like your allergies have recently gotten worse, there’s now data to back that up.

New research shows that since 1990, pollen season in North America has grown by 20 days and gotten 20% more intense, with the greatest increases in Texas and the Midwest. This is because climate change is triggering plants’ internal timing to produce pollen earlier and earlier. It’s a problem that’s expected to get worse.

SciFri producer Kathleen Davis speaks with William Anderegg, assistant professor at the University of Utah’s School of Biological Sciences about pollen counts, and pollen as a respiratory irritant.

Why This Scientist Shares Vulnerable Career MomentsDr. Rachel Lupien, a paleoclimatologist at Aarhus University, makes it a point to be honest about the challenges she runs into at work. She hopes that other scientists can learn from them. So last year, when a paper she wrote was rejected from journals five times, she tweeted about the experience.

While the responses ranged from supportive replies to harsh emails, Rachel says that it feels good to talk about professional headaches with peers who understand. Digital producer Emma Gometz interviews Rachel about why it’s important to be honest about setbacks as a scientist, and how transparency helps all professional scientists do better work.

Read more personal stories from scientists, including Rachel’s experience working as a paleoclimatologist across the world, and building mentorship networks of her own, on SciFri’s six-week automated email newsletter, “Sincerely, Science.”

To learn more about Sincerely Science and read Rachel's paper, visit sciencefriday.com.

To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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A man has pleaded guilty to handling a bison calf in Yellowstone National Park in an incident that ultimately led to the calf's death, officials said on Wednesday.

Clifford Walters, a Hawaii resident, was charged with "one count of feeding, touching, teasing, frightening, or intentionally disturbing wildlife," according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Wyoming.

Walters paid over $1,000 in fines, including a $500 community service payment to Yellowstone's wildlife protection fund, the attorney's office said.

According to an initial report from the National Park Service, the newborn bison had been separated from its mother on May 20 as its herd was crossing the Lamar River.

Walters, observing the scene, tried to help the calf by pushing it up the bank, into the roadway, NPS said.

Park rangers repeatedly tried to reunite the calf with the herd, but the herd resisted, which is common when humans interfere with wildlife, NPS said.

The calf was later euthanized by park staff because it was "causing a hazardous situation by approaching cars and people along the roadway," according to a press release.

In reviewing the report, the attorney's office said there was nothing to suggest Walters "acted maliciously."

NPR made several attempts to contact Walters for comment but could not confirm reliable contact information for him.

Why did Yellowstone have to euthanize the calf?

As the initial news of the calf's death broke last week, thousands of NPR readers responded on social media with concern, frustration and confusion. Many wanted to know: Did park rangers really need to euthanize the animal?

In a follow-up statement, NPS firmly defended its decision, saying that it made the choice "not because we are lazy, uncaring, or inexpert in our understanding of bison biology" but because "national parks preserve natural processes."

Even before news of the calf started gaining traction online, Yellowstone was clear on its policy of not rescuing and rehabilitating animals. It lists only a handful of situations in which it might intervene, including if Congress directs it to or if the long-term health of an ecosystem is at risk.

The fate of a sole bison calf — one of roughly 5,900 bison in the park — falls outside of that list.

"In fact, as many as 25% of the bison calves born this spring will die, but those deaths will benefit other animals by feeding everything from bears and wolves to birds and insects," NPS said in its second statement.

"Unfortunately, the calf's behavior on roads and around people was hazardous, so rangers had to intervene: but the calf's body was left on the landscape," the agency added.

Why couldn't the park bring the calf to an animal sanctuary?

NPS also pointed out that it's illegal to transport bison out of Yellowstone "unless those bison are going to meat processing or scientific research facilities."

The states of Montana, and, to a lesser extent, Wyoming, limit the transport of live bison in order to protect local livestock. Mass migrations of the species could damage local property, compete for local food supplies and spread brucellosis, a bacterial disease that only marginally affects bison but causes infertility and low milk production in domestic cows.

Brucellosis cases spiked in the U.S. in the mid-1900s, causing the U.S. Animal and Plant Inspection Service to implement nationwide livestock testing and vaccination requirements.

Today, the spread of brucellosis among Yellowstone's free-ranging bison is one of the issues monitored by the Interagency Bison Management Plan, a cooperative of eight groups, including federal agencies and tribal nations.

That group has agreed to start transferring some live bison to tribal nations as a way to restore herds outside of Yellowstone and manage the size of the park's own healthy herd. But any transferred bison have to first be quarantined and tested for brucellosis.

The testing process can be lengthy and expensive. (It took 17 months for the first transferred group to be tested in 2019 — and that was on top of eight years of working out the legal logistics to make it happen, NPS said.) In the end, only about 30% of animals qualify for the program.

"A newborn calf that's abandoned and unable to care for itself is not a good candidate for quarantine," the park said last week.

For anyone still looking for a good takeaway about preventing another unfortunate animal death, Yellowstone wants to underscore this one: "Give animals room to roam." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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A beluga whale long believed to be a Russian spy has surfaced in Sweden, fueling concerns about his well-being and efforts to protect him from dangerous boat traffic.

Hvaldimir — a combination of the Norwegian word for whale (hval) and Russian President Vladimir Putin's first name — has spent the last several years swimming south down the coast of Norway, where he was first spotted by fishermen in 2019.

He had been wearing a harness labeled "Equipment St. Petersburg," which led many to believe he'd been trained by the Russian navy for intelligence purposes. (Russia and the U.S. are among the handful of countries that have military training programs incorporating aquatic mammals.)

Hvaldimir has become something of a local celebrity in the years since, with viral videos showing him picking up a woman's dropped cell phone and stealing and retrieving a kayaker's GoPro.

"He is a friendly, tamed, displaced, formerly captive whale who relies on humans for social interaction," says OneWhale, a nonprofit established specifically to protect Hvaldimir. "Belugas are highly social whales and he has been living all alone the past four years."

But those interactions can come at a cost. Hvaldimir has been injured by boat propellers, sharp objects, fishing hooks and foreign items being placed in his mouth — and faces heightened danger in Sweden, which has more people and fewer fish than Norway.

OneWhale said Monday that it is working with Swedish authorities to protect him, even closing a bridge to limit access by the public and help their team get on site faster.

President Rich German told NPR in a phone interview that OneWhale's short-term goal is to protect Hvaldimir, "whose life is in clear danger."

Their ultimate goal is to create a 500-acre marine reserve in northern Norway where they can rehabilitate him before releasing him into a wild population of beluga whales — and they envision him being the first of many inhabitants.

"The silver lining to Hvaldimir's sad story is that that reserve will also be a home for whales that are also living in captivity in marine parks and places like that all around the world," German says. "Hvaldimir's story has the chance to transform from being one of extremely inhumane animal treatment to him being a global ambassador for compassion and love between humans and animals."

How — and why — did he get to Sweden?

For years Hvaldimir hung around industrial salmon farms, getting valuable social interaction from the workers and sustenance from the plentiful wild fish (and, OneWhale says, posing a workplace hazard and environmental liability in the process). But he recently, and suddenly, took off south.

"He traveled about 900 miles in the last two months, and in the previous two years he traveled about 375 miles," German says.

No one knows exactly what spurred Hvaldimir's journey, though experts have a couple of theories.

German says he might have been following some sort of instinctual migration pattern. Sebastian Strand, a marine biologist with OneWhale, told NPR's Rob Schmitz that he thinks Hvaldimir is lonely.

"A big part of our goal is also reuniting him with others of his own species," he said.

Hvaldimir is believed to be 13 or 14 years old, "an age where his hormones are very high," Strand told The Guardian, which reports that he is not believed to have seen another beluga whale since April 2019.

"It could be hormones driving him to find a mate," Strand added. "Or it could be loneliness, as belugas are a very social species — it could be that he's searching for other beluga whales."

German says it could be that once Hvaldimir got far enough away from the salmon farms he just continued moving south in search of food.

Whatever the reason, the organization is concerned about the toll his travels have taken. It says Hvaldimir has lost weight from swimming so far in such a short period of time while eating less. And it's not clear where he might go next.

"He's always kind of hugged the coastline so he will probably continue to do that," German says. "Whether he's looking for fish, social enrichment, he'll probably keep going. We can't say for sure, but that's the trend that he's followed."

Conservation experts are hoping for a ripple effect

Hvaldimir's story gained renewed attention last week when he was spotted in the waters off Norway's capital of Oslo, with its major industrial ports, murky waters and heavy boat traffic.

German described it as a "perfect storm of danger." OneWhale said at the time that Hvaldimir's chances of further injury or death had significantly increased, with relocation being his best chance of survival.

Hvaldimir somehow skirted those waters, to the relief of many, and ended up in Sweden. German says authorities there were proactive and empathetic, with the local fire department immediately reaching out to his team and taking action.

"We've been working to protect him for years now, but all of the sudden I think everybody else stepped up and was like, 'This is a dangerous situation ... some type of intervention probably needs to happen,' " he adds.

Just because Hvaldimir is in Sweden doesn't mean he's safe, German says.

The country has more people than Norway, fewer fish and heavier boat traffic, among other risks. OneWhale shared an Instagram video of the whale swimming through a narrow canal, calling it "hard to watch."

It says plans are still underway to transport Hvaldimir north to arctic waters, though German says there aren't any major updates just yet.

And while Hvaldimir's suspected spy past is certainly buzzy, German says it's old news. What matters, he says, is that the whale is still in danger — and represents something bigger.

"The story of this one whale, we believe ... can change the lives of other whales and really how humans look at how we treat animals," German adds. "Putting animals into military service to protect ourselves from ourselves is something I think we can really take a long look at why we do that, plus having whales in marine parks for profit and entertainment. I really feel he is a chance to change the world in many ways." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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If it seems like your seasonal allergies are getting worse over time, you're probably not wrong. Estimates are that 30 to 40% of the world's population now have some form of allergy, and medical anthropologist Theresa MacPhail says allergic reactions — including everything from hay fever to eczema and asthma — are growing in the U.S. and around the world.

MacPhail is an associate professor of science and technology studies at Stevens Institute of Technology. In her new book, Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World, she explores some of the theories behind the rise in allergies — including the theory that excessive emphasis on hygiene (and perhaps even showering) can contribute to the development of sensitivities.

"You've probably heard that we don't let kids eat enough dirt. They don't play in enough dirt. They're not around enough germs," she says. "We have seen that people who send their children to daycare centers, there's something about being in a daycare center that is also protective."

Other explanations for the increase in allergic reactions include the shift in our diets over the years toward more processed foods and less fiber, which affects our microbiomes. MacPhail also posits a link between allergies and a rise in exposure to environmental toxins, which could reduce the skin's ability to ward off potential allergens.

MacPhail's interest in allergies is personal: In August 1996, her father was riding in a car in rural New Hampshire when a bee flew into his open window and stung him on the neck, triggering an allergic reaction.

"Before long, my father's cells were just emitting histamine," MacPhail says. "My dad started to have trouble breathing, ... his neck started to swell up. ... Within 30 minutes he was dead on arrival at the hospital."

MacPhail says what happened to her dad is an example just how extreme the body's reaction to an allergen can be. She likens immune cells to bouncers or curators whose job it is to scan foreign objects (such as tree pollen or bee venom) and "make split-second decisions about whether or not that thing is OK."

While most allergic reactions are not deadly, MacPhail says that regardless of how mild or severe an allergy is, it inevitably impacts a person's quality of life. That might mean spending a lot of money on treatments, such as air purifiers or antihistamines of allergy-free foods, or just simply not feeling well.

"Most people with mild allergies don't sleep well, so their sleep is affected, which means they're not as productive," she says. "Their mental health suffers, like most people with a moderate allergy have some form of depression or anxiety. We can say that that's correlation and not causation, but if you're constantly lacking sleep and you're constantly not feeling your best, it takes a toll after a certain amount of time."

Interview highlights

On how, when it comes to allergens, the immune system acts like bouncers at a nightclub

T-cells are the police officers of our body, they're constantly circulating and finding things in our body that shouldn't be there. So if a T-cell comes into contact with an oak pollen, say, and it says, "I don't like the looks of this. It's gotta go." It gives that information to a class of cells called B-cells. Think of them as nightclub managers in your body, on the street that the T-cell is patrolling. And he shows a picture of this oak pollen and says, "Hey, I really don't like this guy. If you see him, let me know. Let's contact some people. We gotta get it out."

And so these B-cells ... produce cells called IgE or little proteins, Y-shaped proteins, and those are like the bouncers. But ... every IgE is unique to the perp. So at the nightclub entrance, you've got a bouncer ready to spot oak pollen, but you've got 50 bouncers out the door all looking for specific things. And so when they see it or something similar to it, they send out the signal. They alert all of the other immune cells that something's up, you got to come and take care of this guy. So that's basically going on in your body all the time.

On the hypothesis that hygiene and allergies are connected

This British researcher [David P. Strachan] did a meta-data study. So he kind of looked at all the factors involved in developing an allergy. What he found was that in families that had multiple children, the youngest children had much lower rates of allergic disease. And so he posited that that was probably because they had older siblings who got sick a lot. And so they would bring home all of these bacteria and viruses and the littlest ones would be exposed to a whole bevy of things that maybe the eldest didn't have the same exposure to. ... There was something about being the youngest that was protective.

And it's probably the same theory that you're just getting exposed to more germs on a day-to-day basis, and that, at a young age, that's actually helpful because it helps to train your immune system so it's not going to be oversensitive when the kid gets a little bit older.

On studies that show early exposure help with tolerance

By around [age] 3, your immune system is kind of set up and it's very hard to change it after that point, but it's very malleable before that point, which is why early exposures to things seems to be so protective. The landmark studies that support the hygiene hypothesis were done actually in Switzerland and Germany, where they [studied] children who were regularly exposed to dust in animal barns — and it's interesting because the animals seem to be a key component. So if you're living on a farm with livestock and you're a baby and you're being carried by your mom in and out of this barn where there are pigs and cows and ducks and dogs and whatever, you tend to have very low rates of sensitization and allergic response in those adults once they grow up. ...

It could be the allergens in the air mixed with certain types of bacteria that would be in a barn. But the animals do seem key. And I will say that if you grow up with a dog in particular, dogs seem to be protective. So people who grow up in a household with a dog also tend to have a slightly lower rate of allergies than people who grow up in a household without pets.

On exposing babies to potential food allergens

Prior to 2016, when the advice changed, we were, as just normal best practices, telling parents to not only avoid certain allergenic foods like peanuts, strawberries, eggs, milk when they were pregnant, but also to avoid giving them to their younger children until after the age of 3 — and it turns out that was exactly the wrong advice. And the way we figured that out is there is a researcher from Israel [who] actually noticed that in places that supplemented their young children's diet with ... peanut paste, they actually had incredibly lower rates of allergy to peanuts.

And so he did a more official study and did find that the early exposure seemed to be protective. But the tricky thing is it's not protective for everyone. So if you give a six-month-old baby a trace amount of peanut butter, say some of them will learn to tolerate it and some of them will still react because they might already have been sensitized through their skin. And so it's a dice throw, and the best practice now is we tell them, expose [the baby] to a tiny amount and see what happens. But we could also be seeing an earlier reaction because they've been pre-sensitized. So that's the best advice we can give for now, but it's not perfect advice.

On our diet's effect on our microbiome

Billions, trillions of bacteria live inside of our intestinal tract. Our guts are just replete with things that are not us, but that help break down foods and are the reason that we can eat food and turn them into [nutrients] and stay alive, basically. One theory about the rise of allergies is that over the last 200 years, our diets have gotten dramatically different in terms of what we eat, the types of food we eat, so more processed foods, less fresh fruit and vegetables, different foods. ... We cook differently, we manufacture differently, we grow differently ... which is a problem for the microbiota that have co-evolved with us.

So for millennia, for thousands of years, [the microbiota] got the same diet or a similar diet, and now suddenly they're being flooded with a lot more fats, a lot more sugars, a lot less fiber. ... Fiber is necessary for a lot of those good, healthy bacteria that are helping us to digest food. And so the theory goes, without all of that, there has been a difference in the composition of what types of bacteria are thriving or what ones are accidentally being starved, because they're not getting the right types of food from us anymore. And so if you change that balance in our gut microbiome, then you're throwing off the immune system itself.

On how our skin acts as a defense against allergies — and why showering less frequently can be a good thing

If you'd like to think of your skin as part of the immune system, you should, because it's basically the first line of defense. It's what keeps things out, mostly. And what we've found is if you use harsh detergents, if you put a lot of things on your skin, you are either stripping the skin ... you're killing off the good bacteria or you're disrupting the delicate balance between fungi and bacteria on your skin, causing a huge problem. Or you are just adding more things that the immune cells in your skin have to deal with.

So probably most people don't realize that there are 85,000 chemicals on the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Control Substances Act watch list. That's a lot of different chemicals that we've introduced into our environment that we're inhaling or we're coming into contact with through our skin or eating. ...

So we're just coming into contact with all of these things and our skin is a barrier. And so one of the theories of allergy causation is the barrier hypothesis. So if you have "leaky skin," so if your skin is more porous or is irritated, things are more easily going to get introduced into your immune system. And possibly your immune system is going to decide that thing is not great.

On house pets developing allergies

I think the fact that we are doing something that is also affecting our pets is the best evidence we have that we're really causing allergies, full stop. There is no evidence that we have that we know of, that any animal in the wild develops allergic responses. So all mammals, all animals have immune systems, but only the ones that live with us are negatively reacting the way that we are. ... So in dogs, it will be a lot of scratching, a lot of itch. In cats it can be scratching, but it can also be wheezing. A lot of cats get asthma just like we can get asthma. For birds, it's the same. It's asthma, an itch. And for horses, it's asthma and itch also.

I actually went to Cornell to their veterinary school ... and they said it's absolutely the fact that there's more allergies in pets, except that it's less diagnosed and less surveyed, so we don't have solid numbers, but they've been seeing an increase in rates and it's becoming a larger problem. Their hypothesis is that it is directly linked to lifestyle, since our pets are living exactly like we're living and we are also changing their food. So a lot of this is that we're producing their food exactly the way we produce our food.

On municipalities planting more male trees, which increases pollen

Female trees tend to be messier. So they have seeds falling and things like that, so they're harder to clean up after. And so for years it was thought, oh, well, let's just have the trees that don't have that problem except that they're pumping out pollen to pollinate the female trees. And so you accidentally got this imbalance of pollen-producing trees.

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Carmel Wroth adapted it for the web. Copyright 2023 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air.

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This time of year, there are a lot of seasonal visitors to our nation's capital — the avian kind, that is. Washington, D.C., is rated as having the nation's best city park system, and migratory birds flock here on their journey north, many of them having traveled thousands of miles to nest and breed.

Early on a Sunday morning, I meet up with a few fellow birders to catch the tail end of spring migration. We gather in Fort Slocum Park, which formed part of the city's defenses in the Civil War. Just a few blocks long, it's set among brick rowhouses in the heart of D.C. But step into the park, up a slight hill, and the city quickly vanishes; you find yourself under a thick canopy of towering oaks and elms.

Tykee James, the president of the DC Audubon Society, comes here often. "Pros and cons of being in here," James says, "it's very dense, so it's really great migratory stopover habitat. But –"

He pauses, detecting the high sweet song of an eastern wood-pewee. "Oh! 'peweeeeee,' " he sings along. "Nice. But yeah, you're going to hear more than you see."

That little eastern wood-pewee has likely migrated all the way up from South America to breed.

"'Peweeeeee!' Once you hear it, you can't unhear it," says our fellow birder, Emmie Bhagratti, who works for a federal agency and is a bird guide for DC Audubon. "People think when you're birding in a big city, you can't get to places like this," she says, gazing up at the dense green canopy. "But honestly, with the exception of some ambient noise, I mean, would you know that you're in D.C. right now? This is just a beautiful, beautiful spot."

In the early morning sun, the birds are stirring into song. We hear the buzz of a blue-gray gnatcatcher, the burbly "cheerio" of red-eyed vireos, and the insistent "teakettle, teakettle" song of the Carolina wren. "One of the smallest birds, but also one of the loudest!" Bhagratti says with a laugh. "It's a loud bird, singing with all of its might!"

Pretty soon, we hear the raucous rasp of a great crested flycatcher, and we find the bird perched on a nearby branch: It has a sporty grey crest and a pale yellow belly.

Erin Connelly, an environmental educator for a local nonprofit, has joined us with her 10-month-old son, Louis, strapped to her front. She spots two male eastern towhees deep in the underbrush. "Really beautiful bird," she says. The male towhee is black on top, with a white belly, burnt-orange sides and white patches along the wings and tail. Their trilling song sounds like a polite command: "Drink your teaaaaa!"

Suddenly, we hear an excited "Oh! oh! oh!" from our birding companion Jo Stiles. As luck would have it, she's spotted one of my all-time favorite birds: a spectacular male American redstart. He's jet black, with stunning, bright orange patches on his sides, wings and tail that flash in the sun. Despite the redstart's name, "it's not red to me at all," says Bhagratti. "It's very much like a Halloween orange and black palette."

Birders will often talk about their "spark" bird — the one that first got them hooked. For James, it was a belted kingfisher: specifically, a female he saw flying across a creek, displaying the chestnut-colored "belt" across her belly and calling out with the bird's trademark noisy rattle. "That call is in my head! It's very loud," he says approvingly. "Has a nice mohawk crest situation, pretty sizeable beak."

Stiles, who works on Capitol Hill for her hometown congressman, is especially fond of loons. She grew up hearing loons on summer trips to Lake George in New York's Adirondacks, and she and her sisters learned how to imitate the loon call from their mother and grandmother. "It's a very melancholy call, which is very beautiful," she says. To demonstrate, she cups her hands to her mouth, and a convincingly mournful loon call echoes through the woods.

So convincing, in fact, that it fools the Merlin bird app, which identifies the audio of bird songs and calls. Merlin "hears" Stiles's call and reports that there's a loon nearby.

James looks at the app on his phone and laughs: "It came up as a loon!"

"No way!" Stiles says. "That's awesome!"

In the end, after about an hour and a half in the park, we've seen or heard 23 species in all, loon excluded. Not bad for a morning's amble in the heart of Washington, D.C.

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They got through college together — and when Grace Mariani took to the stage to receive her diploma at Seton Hall University this week, her service dog, Justin, was right beside her.

Her fellow graduates cheered as school President Joseph Nyre handed Mariani her diploma. She earned a B.S. in education, graduating magna cum laude.

Then Nyre held out a diploma for Justin, and the crowd inside the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., erupted. The scene was captured on video by the school.

Justin paused before accepting the white cylinder, glancing over to Mariani. Then he mastered the moment, grasping the tube in his mouth, his tail wagging while Mariani grinned.

The pair left the stage together to a chorus of cheers, and more than a few barks.

As it shared footage from the ceremony, Seton Hall noted that the 6-year-old dog, a mix of yellow Lab and golden retriever, had attended all of Mariani's classes with her.

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A zoo in Miami has apologized for offering an "encounter" in which zoo guests could physically touch a kiwi, the flightless bird that is a national symbol of New Zealand, after social media videos sparked outrage.

"On behalf of everyone at Zoo Miami, please accept our most profound and sincere apology for the stress initiated by a video on social media depicting the handling and housing of 'Paora,' the kiwi bird that is presently under our care," the zoo said in a statement issued Tuesday.

The concerns expressed "have been taken very seriously and as a result, effective immediately, the Kiwi Encounter will no longer be offered," the zoo added.

The kiwi encounter with Paora was offered as "a one of a kind experience you'll be sure to cherish forever," the zoo's website said before that encounter was removed. The kiwi encounter was previously offered four times per week.

A video advertising the encounter was posted to Zoo Miami social media accounts in March.

"Are you ready for a once-in-a-lifetime encounter?" a voiceover said, adding that Zoo Miami was the only place in the U.S. that offered such a "close-up" encounter. Footage showed people stroking and scratching the kiwi's head in a well-lit room.

A separate video, posted on TikTok by a zoogoer who had experienced the encounter, showed a handler luring the kiwi — which are nocturnal — into a dark box, only to open the lid to show the guests.

Capturing international attention

Both videos have since been deleted — but only after going viral and eventually becoming national news in New Zealand, where TV stations repeatedly replayed the footage of people handling the bird. An online petition to "save Paora" collected more than 10,000 signatures after it was posted earlier this week.

Ultimately, officials from the New Zealand Department of Conservation said they would "be discussing the situation" with the U.S.-based Association of Zoos and Aquariums to address the concerns.

"I am not going to make any excuses. When I saw the video myself, I said, 'We have made a huge mistake here,'" said Ron Magill, the zoo's communications director, in an interview with Radio New Zealand this week.

"I immediately went to the zoo director and I said, 'We have offended a nation. This is something that has to stop immediately,'" Magill said.

A best practice manual for handling kiwi published by New Zealand's Department of Conservation says the "preferred model" for public events with kiwi is for people to have their photograph taken standing or sitting next to a kiwi that is being held by an accredited handler, rather than allowing members of the public to handle one themselves.

"Kiwi are more delicate than they appear because they lack the sternum and associated musculature that is present in most other birds, which protects the ribcage and vital organs," the guide states. "Kiwi must not be regularly taken out of their burrows just for the purposes of allowing people to see and touch them."

Zoo officials said that Paora's exposure to light, as shown in the social media videos, was "minimal but still wrong."

"I'm embarrassed that we are in this position. This was not well-conceived," Magill said.

A brief history of the kiwi

Kiwi have lived in New Zealand for tens of millions of years. The brown kiwi is classified as "vulnerable to extinction" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which estimates that roughly 27,000 brown kiwi remain in the wild. The birds struggle to survive to adulthood without human intervention.

The birds are considered a national treasure of New Zealand and the Maori people indigenous to the island nation.

Kiwi are rare outside New Zealand. A breeding program based at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute provides fertilized eggs to zoos around the U.S., including Zoo Miami.

Paora hatched at the zoo in 2019, becoming the first kiwi to hatch in the state of Florida. A naming ceremony that year was attended by Maori leaders Chis McKenzie and Paora Haitana — the bird's namesake — along with New Zealand's ambassador to the U.S., Rosemary Banks.

Having had "the honor" of hosting that ceremony made it "especially painful" to have offended New Zealanders, zoo officials said.

Paora is now being kept in a secluded area where he has a dark place to stay during the daytime. The zoo plans to build a special habitat that will provide him shelter "while respecting and supporting his natural instincts," officials said Tuesday.

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Stars can be glimpsed in such unexpected places.

Chonkasaurus was at rest on a pile of rotting river pylons and rusty chains along the Chicago River just below Division Street early last weekend when Joey Santore and Al Scorch captured their image on video.

"Look at the size of that effing thing," Joey Santore announced, and he didn't say effing.

"Oh my God, it's a massive turtle. Is that a snapper? He's a snapper, " Al Scorch added, civic pride suffusing his voice. "It's a Chicago River snapper!"

The video they posted on YouTube, in which they dub the snapper Chonkosaurus, has reached hundreds of thousands of viewers, including me, who have shortened the turtle's name to Chonk. There's even merch — T-shirts and sweatshirts — emblazoned with Chonk's sturdy frame.

The turtle looks broad and strong, as if embodying the spirit of the concrete city that booms above their river perch. Snapping turtles can weigh up to 75 pounds, and Chonk's steady girth seems to be part of what has endeared them to so many.

Think of Chonk as being in rhyme with Carl Sandburg's poem, "Chicago":

"Stormy, husky, brawling,Turtle of the Big Shoulders."

Put a Chicago Bears jersey on Chonk, and they could be a middle linebacker.

In times beset with much dispiriting news, there's something encouraging in Chonk's robust appearance on a bed of rusted chains. The Chicago River was an industrial dumping ground for decades; it caught on fire several times. Fires, you may recall, have an especially harrowing history in Chicago.

But 70% of the water in the river now comes directly from wastewater treatment plants. Officials still don't recommend you take a river swim. But Margaret Frisbie of Friends of the Chicago River, who organize groups to pick up litter and help look after wildlife, says the river is the cleanest today that it's been in 150 years.

Joey Santore tweeted when he posted his video of Chonk, "Great to see this beast thriving here on what was once such a toxic river, but is slowly getting cleaned up and restored."

If you ever despair about the possibility of progress, you might want to think of Chonk the Snapper, flopped out and sunning on a berth of greenish, old pylons as boats pull past, and the city rises around them. A river, once described as "a wave of poo," is now healthy enough to be a home. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Carvana promoted itself as a new and innovative way to shop for a car. What if you took that idea and made it work for adopting a pet?

Kayla Delcoure runs social media for Pippi's Place, a cat rescue in Atlanta. She came up with a creative social post inspired by the online used-car retailer to help find its felines new homes.

Those up for adoption include a "2014 Furrari" named Arlis (black exterior, power napping) a "2015 Furcedes" called Buddy (custom grey saddle kit, seat heater) and Cassie, a "2022 Meowzda" (custom multicolor exterior, self-cleaning).

It all started with the search for a truck

"My inspiration for CatVana is humorously uneventful," Delcoure wrote NPR in an email. "My husband has been wanting to buy a truck for months, and occasionally brings me his phone to show me the listings. On Tuesday morning while I was brainstorming cute ways to display all nine of Pippi's Place's available cats in one post, my husband walked into my office to show me a truck listing."

Although Delcoure wasn't super interested in the truck, the image with detailed information about the year, make and model got her creative wheels spinning.

She said she pulled up the Carvana website and modeled a page with multiple cat listings off the car search. "Different amusing descriptions kept popping up in my head, like the 'four-paw-drive', 'rear air vent', and the rest of them, so I went ahead and made the individual listings as well," Delcoure wrote.

Pippi's Place was started two years ago and is named after director Vicki Grizzard's black kitten, who she found abandoned and needing help. She named her Pippi, after the mischievous book character.

Sadly, Pippi the cat passed away following an accident, but Pippi's Place lives on as her legacy. It's a place "where the light of love is always on shining on our loved ones and serving as a beacon to those in need," Delcoure tells NPR.

Kitten season keeps volunteers very busy

"Right now, we're working through kitten season, so we have a high volume of tiny kittens who are too young to be adopted out and some with illnesses and injuries that need to be treated before going to furever homes," Delcoure said. "Our volunteers are working literally around the clock (every four hours) to care for these kittens."

Grizzard thought the CatVana social post was adorable. Delcoure shared the post on Reddit, where it gained 65,000 up votes and has over 1,500 comments. Both Grizzard and Delcoure were awestruck by the response.

"We've received an outpouring of encouragement. People have even been asking to donate," Delcoure says. And the organization has received an adoption application for "Furrari" Arlis, a sweet older cat, from a family in Canada. "They're willing to go through the adoption and transfer process to bring him home!"

Delcoure says her favorite ad is for Mr. Goodbar, "the 2023 Mini Pooper."

"His listing was the last one I needed to create and I knew I wanted it to be something adorable and relative to his size," she said. "I happen to own and adore a Mini Cooper and I knew the 'mini' part would fit him perfectly, so that's what I went with!"

Delcoure said the volunteers who keep Pippi's Place running and make sure all the kittens find homes deserve all the credit.

"We have many more volunteers who work countless hours giving their blood, sweat, and tears for these cats," she wrote. "I wouldn't have anything to post if they weren't doing such an amazing job caring for our kitties." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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When Vicky Barlow picked up a rock along the Cornwall shore recently, she suspected something special might be underneath.

Barlow was rock pooling, an activity in which people scour a coastline for aquatic wildlife living in the gaps in the seashore that remain filled with water when the tide goes out.

"It was quite a large, heavy rock, covered in various seaweeds, and once lifted something extremely bright and unusual caught my eye," Barlow said in a blog post.

"Having been reading up on nudibranchs a lot recently I knew exactly what the colourful blob in front of me was!" she added, referring to the group of unshelled mollusks.

What Barlow found was a rare rainbow sea slug, or Babakina anadoni.

The brightly colored creatures are typically seen in the warmer waters off the coasts of Spain, Portugal and France, she said, but one was also found in United Kingdom waters last year.

Barlow, a team member with the nonprofit Rock Pool Project, briefly put the slug in a pot to get a better view of its vivid pink, purple and yellow body before returning it to the rock pool where it was discovered.

"Like most nudibranchs it had quite the personality," Barlow said, "rearing up to get a better look at its surroundings, and using its tentacle-like 'cerata' along its back to make itself appear bigger if one of our hands got too close." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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A group of aggressive bees descended on passersby in Los Angeles this week and sent at least two people, including a police volunteer, to the hospital.

Local TV news footage showed a man in uniform staggering down a street as he attempted to swat away droves of bees before he lost his balance and fell to the ground on Monday.

The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed that one of its volunteers suffered "dozens of bee stings" during a call for service in the Encino neighborhood and was transported to the hospital, where he was in stable condition. A second man was also transported to the hospital with multiple stings, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.

Though bee stings are common, images of throngs of honeybees attacking people on a busy, residential street are less so.

James Nieh, a professor of ecology, behavior and evolution at UC San Diego, told NPR that the attack could have started when someone disturbed a hive of feral bees. According to CBS Los Angeles, the bees may have originated in a hive affixed to a home in the neighborhood.

"Somebody may have come close to the nest, maybe vibrated the tree that the bees were in. Something kind of set them off," Nieh said.

Bees sting to defend themselves or their colony. When they sting, their stinger releases an alarm pheromone with a subtle, banana-like odor that attracts other bees nearby.

Nieh said that can set off a chain reaction that can quickly escalate from one bee sting to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of bees bombarding a single person.

"This process can rapidly amplify based upon just one bee initially stinging you because there was a disturbance to their nest or because somebody just got too close," he said.

What to do — and what not to do

Nieh has several pieces of advice for people under siege from bees. Run away as fast as you can. Don't cover your face, because you won't be able to see where you're going. And don't play dead, because bees are attracted to the alarm pheromone left by other bees' stingers and may continue to sting you anyway.

"You can actually outrun them — especially if you're motivated — when you're being stung," he said. "You cannot play dead and escape bees. That's actually the worst thing to do."

Bees are attracted to dark areas such as hair, Nieh said, which is why they'll sting you around your head and why beekeepers wear white suits and footwear.

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Akito Kawahara remembers being eight years old when he went on a special tour of the insect collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He marveled at the vast array of pinned bugs before stopping in front of a large picture of the butterfly family tree.

A number of spots on that tree, he saw, were curiously blank.

"Just looking at it, realizing that scientists at these museums still don't know these basic things — I'll never forget that day," Kawahara says.

That moment sparked a lifelong passion in Kawahara to fill in those blanks and determine where these charismatic insects originated. Now, he's gotten a little closer to an answer. His latest research shows that butterflies probably first flapped their wings in present-day western North America or Central America.

"We were surprised," says Kawahara, now the curator of butterflies and moths at the University of Florida. Before this, "people had thought that butterflies originated somewhere in Asia."

This shift probably took place some 100 million years ago when a rogue lineage of moths moved dayward. The findings, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, shed light on the origins of this remarkable group of insects that now populate the globe with 19,000 different species.

Butterflies first evolved from moths when they began feeding on the nectar of new species of flowering plants usually available during the day. That shift allowed these insects to shed their earth tones in favor of the riot of colors they're known for today, which often act to attract mates or warn predators that they're poisonous.

Origins of a butterfly scientist

The new discovery about these insects' beginnings is as much an origin story of the world's butterflies as it is of Kawahara.

When he was a boy, he and his dad, artist On Kawara, went looking for butterflies every weekend. One day when he was eight years old, Kawahara was standing beside his dad in a neighborhood in Tokyo.

"And this unusual brown butterfly lands near the road," recalls Kawahara. "My dad said, 'Oh, it's a snout butterfly.' I was like, 'Oh my gosh. I've read about these things, but I've never caught one.' So my hands were trembling. I had my butterfly net in my hand. I ran up to it and I caught it."

That was the beginning of Kawahara's butterfly collection. "I still have that specimen," he says. "And the handwriting from when I was eight years old is on the label. It's a very important specimen for me."

Kawahara split his childhood between Tokyo and New York where, later that same year, his father took him on that fateful trip to the American Museum of Natural History.

"I remember walking through those amazing collections," he says, "and seeing all these butterflies and moths in these drawers."

That family tree he spotted on the office door revealed the gaps in scientists' knowledge that even a wealth of gossamer-winged specimens had yet to fill.

He credits his dad for shaping his life and for inspiring him to turn his passion for these insects into a profession. In the intervening years, those questions of where butterflies first emerged, how they evolved, and how they spread across the world only grew in importance to him.

"There's a lot of butterflies right now that are threatened," Kawahara explains. "And understanding how these butterflies are related to each other, it serves as a framework to help us conserve them."

It's also important for conserving the flowers and plants that rely on butterfly pollination, and the species of birds that depend on butterflies for food.

"When we lose our butterflies, we lose our birds," says Adriana Briscoe, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine who wasn't involved in the study.

A worldwide research effort

To piece together that butterfly family tree, Kawahara worked with close to 90 colleagues from six continents to collect DNA from all kinds of butterflies.

"I felt like I was a kid all over again," he says.

He traveled to the Amazon rainforest, the dry savannahs of Mozambique, and back to Tokyo. He climbed the Andes to look for rare species. He even nabbed a yellow sulfur butterfly the size of a silver dollar right outside his office in Gainesville, Florida.

All he and his team needed for the DNA analysis was a tiny portion of one of each butterfly's six legs. "It's not harmful," says Kawahara. "And oftentimes, we can release the butterfly and this butterfly's still okay."

The bulk of the butterflies the research team studied were pinned specimens in museum collections. The oldest one was from 1946, a brown butterfly fringed in white captured in South Africa.

They used four supercomputers to run the genetic analysis of the DNA they'd gathered from 92% of all butterfly groups. And after nearly a decade of work, Kawahara had the family tree that he had been longing for since he was a boy.

This result — combined with knowing where butterflies are found today, plus the age and location of a few rare butterfly fossils — helped him and his colleagues zero in on where butterflies began some hundred million years ago.

"We were able to tell that where the butterflies originated was likely North or Central America," he says. "Conclusively, it's not Asia, it's not Africa, it's not Europe."

When butterflies first evolved, they fed on legumes. They likely then fluttered their way to South America, dispersing in waves across Asia, Australia, India, Africa and finally, 30 million years ago, Europe. This radiation resulted in the kaleidoscope of butterfly species we know today.

"It's an extremely rich view of the movement of butterflies — some of the most beautiful organisms on the planet," says Briscoe. She adds that it'll be worth analyzing the few remaining groups of butterflies that didn't make it into this analysis. "These missing groups," she says, "might help pinpoint where exactly in the Americas butterflies originated."

Briscoe says she has another reason for being excited about these findings.

"More than any other place in the world, butterflies were sacred to the ancient people of Mesoamerica," she says. "They were thought to be the souls of ancestors."

For Kawahara, the ancestor who's front of mind is his father, of course. He told his dad about this project right as it was beginning in 2014. "He told me, 'That's wonderful,'" recalls Kawahara, "and he wished me luck."

That was the last time the two men spoke. His dad died two days later.

Kawahara says that one way he remembers him is through his personal butterfly collection, which now has 20,000 specimens. "It's kind of like your diary," he says. "It's really touching."

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At the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival, the "Sheep to Shawl" challenge is simultaneously cut-throat competitive and warm and fuzzy.

Each team is made up of one sheep and five people: one shearer, three spinners, and a weaver. The team has three hours to shear the sheep, card the wool, spin the wool into yarn, and then weave that yarn into an award-winning shawl.

Preparation is the secret to success, says Margie Wright, team captain of The Fidget Spinners. She spent months looking for the perfect sheep for her team. "The hard part is finding a sheep that's not too greasy," she explains.

Because the competitors are spinning wool that hasn't been processed, it still has lanolin in it. This makes the wool greasier and more difficult to spin, so the ideal is finding a sheep with less lanolin to begin with. The teams also spent hours getting their looms ready for weaving. Wright explains this can take as long as seven hours to do.

One group of people hoping to weave their way to glory this year was much younger than the others. Four high schoolers from a local Quaker school participated as part of their fiber arts class.

"Learning to weave was the most difficult thing I'd tried in my life," says 18-year-old Caitlyn Holland. She and her teammates started learning just six months ago, and their teacher, Heidi Brown, says they're already impressive spinners and weavers.

Brown adds that this is the second junior team that has ever competed in the Sheep & Wool Festival. The first team was in the 1970s. She is already planning to continue the program for her students next year.

It takes a lot more than just speedy spinning to win the competition though. Former competitor Jennifer Lackey says the contestants are also judged on the quality of their shawl, teamwork and less fiber-arts related aspects such as the team's theme and costumes.

This year's teams were all enthusiastically prepared to earn points for themes and shawl quality alike. The high school students, competing as The Quaker Bakers, wore aprons and made rainbow cupcakes to match their rainbow-themed shawl. The Fidget Spinners chose "I Love Ewe" as their theme and covered their shawl in hearts. The third team, which arguably should have won an award just for their name — "Mutton but Trouble" — wore crocheted acorn hats and made a fall-colored shawl to represent their theme of squirrels.

Of the three teams competing for three awards, The Quaker Bakers placed third, Mutton But Trouble came in second, and The Fidget Spinners took home the first prize.

Overall, it's fair to say, a competition less wild than wooly.

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Sharks are among the best swimmers on the planet, but new research suggests that even they sometimes "hold their breath" while diving deep underwater.

The reason is that sharks are ectothermic, or cold-blooded, and their body temperature essentially matches the waters they swim in. To do deep dives, they must conserve body heat, and the best way to do that is to tightly close their gill slits.

It all makes sense, but the idea of a fish holding its breath underwater "still shocks and baffles me," says Mark Royer, a researcher at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, who led the study.

We don't need a bigger boat

Royer set out to study the diving habits of a species of sharks called scalloped hammerheads. They're known for swimming in coastal waters with warmer temperatures, but earlier studies showed they can also dive to more than 2600 feet (800 meters) below the surface. At those frigid depths, the water temperature drops to as low as 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius).

It'd be a shock to anyone's system, Royer says: "Imagine you're on a warm sunny beach, and then you hop out of the warm water and immediately plunge into an ice bath."

But for these sharks, the drop in temperature is a matter of life and death. Because a shark can't generate its own body heat, it begins to freeze the deeper it goes. Its muscles, eyes and brain become sluggish. If it gets too cold, it can't swim. And if it stops swimming, water doesn't move across its gills. It can't breathe. It essentially drowns.

Some other large fish have specialized anatomy that allows them to stay warmer at great depths, but scalloped hammerheads do not, Royer says. That raised an obvious question: "How is it that a coastal, warm tropical species is able to go down into these deep depths and survive?"

To find out, Royer and his colleagues went to the bay near their lab where the hammerheads swim. They used a small boat, "because we want to be able to lean over and get as close as possible." They briefly caught the fish and attached an electronic sensor package to each shark's fin.

"This is essentially like putting a Fitbit on the shark," he says. The sharky Fitbit would release itself from the fin after several weeks under water.

The deep dive

When Royer and his colleagues later analyzed the data, what they found amazed them: The sharks dive, spend just a few minutes at depth (probably hunting squid), "and then they pitch themselves upward at an 80-degree angle and shoot towards the surface."

What's really wild is that their body temperature doesn't drop. It stays steady until they start coming back from the deep. Royer quickly realized what was going on: "They were closing their gill slits and preventing the water from flowing across their gills that would cool their body down," he says.

The sharks then reopened their gills once they got closer to the surface. The finding was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

The behavior is seen in marine mammals (and humans, obviously), but unlike animals with lungs, the sharks don't return to the surface to breathe. Instead they simply go to a depth where it's warm enough for them to feel comfortable and open their gills again.

Scalloped hammerheads may not be the only ones doing this. "This strategy could be widespread," write Mark Meekan and Adrian Gleiss, two Australian marine scientists not affiliated with the study, in an accompanying commentary on the new research.

The work, they wrote, is another example of how new electronic tags and sensors are helping to explain "the extraordinary persistence of these animals across 400 million years of changing ocean environments." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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ASWAN, Egypt — Dozens of zoo animals in Sudan's capital — including an elderly crocodile, parrots and giant lizards — are feared dead after street battles between the country's rival forces made the location unreachable.

At least 100 animals, all kept inside enclosures, will have gone more than three weeks without food or water, said Sara Abdalla, the head zoologist at the zoo, which is part of the Sudan Natural History Museum.

Millions of people in Sudan have endured shortages of food, water and medicines after the conflict halted the most basic services. But as the sounds of explosions ring across the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, Abdalla has been wracked with worry over her animal charges, particularly those that are increasingly rare to find in their natural habitats in Sudan.

"I feel a great deal of misery and sadness, as well as helplessness," she said in a telephone interview from Khartoum. "I have assumed that we lost the birds and mammals."

The zoo is home to species including an African grey parrot, a vervet monkey, giant lizards known as Nile monitors, a desert tortoise, a horned viper snake and a Nubian spitting cobra. Prior to the fighting, these were all fed twice a day. But the last time they received their meals and for some, medications, was on April 14, the day before fighting broke out, according to Abdalla.

The conflict, which capped months of tensions between Sudan's rival generals, pits the Sudanese military, led by Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, who is the head of the ruling sovereign council, against the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The RSF is commanded by Burhan's deputy on the council, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. Abdalla said neither has heeded appeals to allow access to the zoo.

The conflict has turned much of Khartoum and the adjacent city of Omdurman into a battlefield, with both sides using heavy weapons, including artillery and airstrikes, inside urban areas. The urban combat has badly damaged infrastructure and properties and poses great risk to civilians trying to move in the city streets.

Residents fleeing the capital have described seeing bodies littering sidewalks and central squares, particularly in areas not far from the museum. Roughly 500 civilians have been killed in the fighting so far, according to Sudan's doctors' syndicate, though the true number of dead is believed to be higher.

The zoo, which is housed inside the University of Khartoum, is one of the oldest in Sudan. The facility was established about a century ago as part of Gordon Memorial College, an educational institution built in the early 1900s when Sudan was a part of the British empire. It was annexed to the University of Khartoum two years after Sudan won independence in 1956.

Its current location is close to the military's headquarters, where fighting has been heavy, preventing access to the museum.

Abdalla, who teaches zoology at the University of Khartoum, began working at the museum in 2006, and was appointed director of the facility in 2020. It was a job she had dreamed of since she visited the museum as a child. Now, trapped at her home in southern Khartoum with her husband and their two children — 9-year-old Yara, and 4-year-old Mohamed — she worries about the animals that have already survived years of unrest, economic collapse and pandemic lockdowns.

Neither the military nor the RSF responded to requests for comment on the plight of the animals and their caretakers.

"Unless someone released the animals early on when the clashes started, I don't see how any would or could have survived for over two weeks with no care," said Kamal M. Ibrahim, a biology professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in an email. He is familiar with the museum and its work, having graduated from the University of Khartoum and spending a sabbatical there.

The museum documents the wildlife of Sudan and its neighbor South Sudan. The facility serves both scientists and the general public. It also contains hundreds of valuable preserved animal specimens, some of which are now extinct, according to Abdalla.

Both Ibrahim and Abdalla are particularly worried about a Nile crocodile, raised from an egg at the facility since 1971. Abdalla said the crocodile was on a regimen of medicine and vitamins due advanced age. The crocodiles are increasingly rare to find in the Blue and White Nile rivers that cut their way through the country.

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A petit basset griffon Vendéen named Buddy Holly won best in show at this year's Westminster Kennel Club dog show on Tuesday, a first for his breed. The 6-year-old bested six other finalists, including Rummie the Pekingese, Winston the French bulldog, Ribbon the Australian shepherd, Cider the English setter, Monty the giant schnauzer and Trouble the American Staffordshire terrier. "I never thought a PBGV would do this," handler and co-owner Janice Hayes said, referring to the acronym for the dog breed. "Buddy Holly is the epitome of a show dog."

PBGVs belong to the hound group. They are from the French region of Vendée, known for their rabbit-hunting abilities and "a happy demeanor and durable constitution," the American Kennel Club says. They typically get along well with other dogs and small children, according to the AKC. To be a finalist for best in show, a participant has to first be the top dog in its breed, and then win its group, such as hounds or terriers. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Australian scientists have begun vaccinating wild koalas against chlamydia in an ambitious field trial in New South Wales.

The aim is to test a method for protecting the beloved marsupials against a widespread disease that causes blindness, infertility and death.

"It's killing koalas because they become so sick they can't climb trees to get food, or escape predators, and females can become infertile," said Samuel Phillips, a microbiologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast who helped to develop the vaccine.

The scientists' initial goal is to catch, vaccinate and monitor around half of the koala population in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales — that means vaccinating around 50 animals.

The safety and effectiveness of the single-shot vaccine, which has been designed specifically for koalas, has previously been tested by vaccinating a few hundred koalas brought to wildlife rescue centers for other afflictions.

Now scientists want to understand the impact of vaccinating a population of wild koalas. "We want to evaluate what percentage of the koalas we need to vaccinate to meaningfully reduce infection and disease," said Phillips.

The first koalas were caught and vaccinated in March, and the effort is expected to last about three months.

Researchers use binoculars to spot koalas in eucalyptus trees, then construct circular enclosures around the tree bases with doors leading into cages. After a few hours or days, the koalas will eventually climb down from one tree to seek tasty leaves on another, and wander into the harmless traps.

"It's hard to confuse a koala with any other animals — they're pretty easy to spot," said Jodie Wakeman, veterinary care and clinical director at Friends of the Koala, a nonprofit that runs a wildlife hospital where the koalas are being brought for vaccination.

After a check-up to make sure the animals are in good condition, researchers administer anesthesia and shots of vaccine, then keep them under observation for 24 hours after they wake up, to confirm there are no unexpected side effects, Wakeman said.

The goal is to vaccinate healthy koalas to prevent them from becoming infected with chlamydia.

Before release, the researchers mark the koalas with a dab of pink dye on their backs, to ensure the same animals aren't caught twice.

When the first vaccinated koala was returned to her habitat on March 9, the scientists placed her cage at the base of a tree and opened the door. She quickly emerged and bounded up the tree trunk.

Koalas are iconic Australian marsupials, like wombats and kangaroos. They spend most of their time eating and sleeping in eucalyptus trees, and their paws have two opposing thumbs to help them grasp and climb up trunks.

Australia's wild koala populations have declined steeply in the past two decades.

Last February, Australia's federal government declared koalas "endangered" in the eastern regions of New South Wales, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory.

Facing compounded threats from disease, habitat loss and road collisions, koalas could become extinct by 2050, according to a 2020 assessment from the New South Wales government.

Around half of wild koalas in Queensland are already infected with chlamydia, scientists estimate.

In deciding to vaccinate, the scientists are balancing the risk of disturbing the animals against the danger of allowing the disease to spread. The trial was approved by multiple government bodies, including Australia's agriculture department and New South Wales' planning and environment department.

The origins of chlamydia in koalas aren't confirmed, but scientists believe it's likely the marsupials initially caught the disease from exposure to the feces of infected sheep and cattle. Then it's spread sexually, or passed from mother to offspring.

While humans and livestock infected with the bacteria that causes chlamydia can be treated with antibiotics, it's not so simple for koalas.

The "complex" microbes inside the stomachs of koalas are designed to neutralize toxins in eucalyptus leaves that are their main food source, said Mathew Crowther, a conservation biologist at the University of Sydney. But their digestive systems can also neutralize some medicines so "that means they don't respond well to antibiotics treatment," he said.

Crowther has been monitoring a population of koalas in northern New South Wales for more than a decade. In 2008, 10% of animals tested there were infected with chlamydia. Today that rate is 80%.

"It's been devastating — there's very, very low fertility," he said. "You hardly see any babies."

The other threats koalas face — including habitat destruction from land clearing and climate-enhanced wildfires — may increase their stress levels, weakening their immune systems and making them more susceptible to diseases including chlamydia, said Crowther.

Rebecca Johnson, now chief scientist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., previously led the Koala Genome Consortium in Australia. She said that seeing the effects of the disease up close was heartbreaking.

A necropsy of one koala with advanced chlamydia that was euthanized revealed "ovaries completely encased in cysts" and "intestines full of hard lumps of food, evidence that she couldn't properly digest food," recalled Johnson. "She was obviously infertile and in pain."

There are only a handful of other examples worldwide of scientists attempting to catch and inoculate endangered wildlife for conservation. In 2016, scientists began to vaccinate Hawaiian monk seals against a deadly strain of morbillivirus. Two and a half years ago, biologists in Brazil began to vaccinate golden lion tamarins against yellow fever.

"Vaccination for wildlife is certainly not routine yet," said Jacob Negrey, a biologist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "But whether it should be used more often is a fundamental question that conservation biologists are really wrangling with right now."

The Smithsonian's Johnson said the benefits are likely to outweigh the risks for koalas. "Vaccination is an incredibly resource-intensive thing to do. Koalas live high up in trees," she said.

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The 149th Kentucky Derby may be over, but questions about what led to a string of horse fatalities at its famed track have just begun.

Over the past week, a total of seven horses died in the lead-up to the final race on Saturday — prompting an investigation into the deaths and fueling outrage from animal rights activists.

The disturbing death toll seen at Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby, is the latest scandal to hit the horse race industry despite recent efforts to make the sport safer for animals.

Joseph Grove of the group Animal Wellness Action said the death toll was alarming.

"As a native Louisvillian, I get the passion people here and across the country feel about this iconic race," Grove said in a statement. "But the care of the horses must be our first priority, and this cluster of horse deaths is startling. Lamentations are not enough."

Here's what to know:

Four out of the seven horses were euthanized after sustaining injuries

The first death occurred on April 29. Code of Kings, a 3-year-old gelding, repeatedly kept flipping and broke his neck before a race, his trainer, Tim Glyshaw, told Daily Racing Form. Glyshaw added that his horse appeared to be fixated on the lights at a nearby DJ booth prior to turning over.

On Tuesday, a horse named Take Charge Briana was euthanized after getting hurt during a race. Two days later, another horse, Wild on Ice, was also euthanized following an injury during training, Louisville Public Media reported.

Two horses, Parents Pride and Chasing Artie, also died this past week under mysterious circumstances, Churchill Downs said. Their trainer, Saffie Joseph Jr., has been suspended indefinitely for the "unexplained sudden deaths."

On Saturday, two more horses, Chloe's Dream and Freezing Point, were euthanized after sustaining racing injuries which appeared irrecoverable.

Chloe's Dream, who competed in the second race of the day, suffered from a right front knee injury, trainer Jeff Hiles told The Associated Press. Freezing Point's left ankle was badly hurt during the eighth race, trainer Joe Lejzerowicz told the AP.

Kentucky racing officials launch investigation into deaths

Churchill Downs described each horse fatality as "unique" — adding that there was "no discernable pattern detected in the injuries sustained."

Still, the group said it will partner with Kentucky Horseracing Commission and the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority to investigate the incidents and learn how to improve the safety of the sport.

"We will rigorously work to understand what caused these incidents," Churchill Downs said in a statement.

The University of Kentucky will be conducting post-mortem examinations on the racehorses, said Kristin Voskuhl, a spokesperson for the Public Protection Cabinet which includes the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission.

"The KHRC is committed to the health and safety of every horse and rider and will follow the robust investigative procedures in place for issues of safety and racing integrity," Voskukl said in a statement, Louisville Public Media reported. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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KARACHI – Noor Jehan, the African bush elephant, should have been in her prime. She was just a teenager, about 17. But a mysterious incident left her painfully dragging about on her two front legs. The zoo neglected to help her until animal rights activists raised the alarm on social media. Then, in mid-April, she fell into a concrete pool in her dusty enclosure. She had to be winched out with a crane and could no longer stand independently. Zookeepers laid Noor Jehan on a mound of sand beneath the only tree in her enclosure.

"We are all absolutely heartbroken," said Mahera Omar, cofounder of the Pakistan Animal Welfare Society, which dispatched volunteers and local vets to bolster Noor Jehan's care, overseen by the Austrian-based animal charity, Four Paws International. "We are trying to do our best to keep her comfortable." Volunteer Jude Allen urged the elephant to eat stalks of sugar cane. "Good girl," he crooned, "You can do it."

Noor Jehan's tragedy captivated Pakistan, with journalists delivering rapid-fire updates. In her enclosure – roughly the size of four tennis courts, a section was lopped off with rope to accommodate the some dozen television news cameras that trained on her for days.

And for some, the elephant's plight became something more. "Noor Jehan has become a symbol for the state of our own country" says Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a conservationist with an outsize profile as the grandson and nephew of two of Pakistan's most beloved prime ministers. He was volunteering to bathe and feed Noor Jehan on a recent day. "She has been caged, starved, abused, exploited. And this is the state of Pakistan."

Despite the last-ditch efforts to save her, the elephant died on April 22.

Poached from the wild, popular in Pakistan

Noor Jehan was always big news.

When she first arrived at the zoo as a plump toddler, nearly 15 years ago, Pakistanis flocked to see her. To add to her allure, zoo officials named her after the beloved Pakistani diva Noor Jehan.

But activists say her life has been anything but glamorous. She arrived to Karachi after a Pakistani poacher captured her from her herd in Tanzania, along with three other baby elephants. Her new home was an enclosure at the crumbling Karachi Zoo, near a busy road.

Elephants live in matriarchal herds, and in the wild, female elephants stay close to their mothers their whole lives. But Noor Jehan's only company has been a fellow captive female elephant, Madhubala.

Omar, of the Pakistan Animal Welfare Society, gestured to the concrete shed where the two used to sleep. For years, they were shackled while they slept – it's unclear why, Omar said. "I don't know how one can sleep if you know your three legs are chained – two in the front, one in the back."

It's not just the elephants that suffer at the zoo. On a recent spring day, boys chipped off cobblestones to hurl at a crocodile huddled in a concrete pool. Others threw chips and chocolate at baboons in a tiny enclosure, gleefully watching them gobble them up. A gorilla sat quietly in another cage, entirely alone.

The zoo's current director, Kanwar Ayub, told NPR he couldn't comment on Noor Jehan's neglect, her living conditions or even that of other zoo animals, as he had only been appointed to manage the institution in early April. Since then, he told NPR, he was dealing with Noor Jehan's decline. Local media reported he was appointed in the wake of the previous director's dismissal for negligence after several zoo animals died and Noor Jehan's mysterious injuries went untreated.

A discussion of animal — and human — neglect

As the details of Noor Jehan's neglect came to air, the revelations sparked an online conversation about the widespread neglect and abuse of animals in Pakistan.

"I regret to say this, but I think Noor Jehan can only find peace when she dies," said Pakistani singer Natasha Baig in an Instagram story republished in the Pakistani daily, The Express Tribune. "Pakistan is truly incapable of showing mercy to animals," she continued. "Noor Jehan's story also raises the question of whether countries like Pakistan are even capable of operating zoos," wrote local publication, Global Village Space.

Activists hope the conversation will continue, because they say, the situation is dire for Pakistan's animals.

"What I have seen in Pakistan as far as animal abuse goes, I have never seen in any other country," says Ayesha Chundrigar, founder of the Pakistani charity, ACF Animal Rescue, which rescues about 20 animals a day, ranging from tortured stray cats and dogs, a donkey forced to swallow acid and a monkey whose arm flesh was burnt off, leaving only a bone.

Chundrigar spoke to NPR on a recent day in the working-class district of Korangi, where she was overseeing a medical camp for donkeys who cart heavy loads, like scrap metal across the city. It is the only welfare check available for Pakistan's thousands of work donkeys. "There's this notion that violence toward vulnerable living beings in Pakistan is considered to be" — the former psychotherapist fished for the word — "asserting dominance."

Others have made a connection between animal abuse and the broader plight of Pakistan's downtrodden. "Time and time again this country fails the vulnerable," wrote Alia Chughtai, a journalist and social commentator in Karachi, on Twitter. "You could be a woman, child or animal. No one cares enough. But please carry on fighting on TV shows," she tweeted, referring to political deadlock in Pakistan which has unraveled the economy and pushed food prices into hyper-inflationary territory, sending millions into hunger.

Chughtai is not the only one who has been reflecting on the parallels.

Back in Noor Jehan's enclosure, the conservationist, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, tells NPR that he can't stop thinking about an incident in March where hundreds of people, just a few miles from the Karachi Zoo, rushed into a factory complex where managers were distributing free food. As they jostled, 16 women and children were killed in a stampede. "The animals in this zoo are part of this system. It's an interconnected system," he says. "I think as a nation, we need to understand that if animals are not living a dignified life, it translates into also how we see other human beings."

Days after I visited Noor Jehan, on April 22, she developed a raging fever and died.

Her demise has put pressure on zoo officials, who promised to speedily shift her enclosure mate, the elephant Madhubala, to the nearby Karachi Safari Park, where she will have more space to roam. The provincial government ordered an investigation into zoo conditions.

Calls for kindness toward animals

There have been other recent measures to reform animal welfare.

Last June, Pakistan's federal government banned live animal testing in the capital Islamabad, and included animal rights in the school curriculum, said Salman Sufi, the head of the strategic reforms unit at the prime minister's office.

"I am a strong believer of having no zoos at all," said Sufi, a prominent progressive. But he said it needed to be an incremental process.

International attention has helped move things along in the past – like when the entertainer Cher advocated for the release of a lonely elephant who lived in the Islamabad Zoo. A local lawyer took up the case on behalf of the international welfare group Four Paws. In the end, the Islamabad High Court ordered the elephant, Kaarvan, to be shifted to a sanctuary — and the zoo to shutter.

Sufi said international attention on Pakistan following Noor Jehan's plight certainly added pressure. "But mostly, this is being down for our own conscience," Sufi said. "If our generation has not done what it should have, at least our future generation can be kinder toward animals than we were." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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California's record-setting winter is providing a much-needed boost for wildlife, including blooming wildflowers and the fish and ducks that depend on thriving rivers and streams.

Still, for other animals, the rising waters are perilous. Just ask the bunnies.

In the Central Valley, evacuations are underway for endangered riparian brush rabbits. The small brown cottontails, only about a foot-long, are finding themselves stranded on small areas of dry land as nearby rivers overtop their banks.

A team from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has captured and moved more than 360 rabbits to higher ground, in an effort to protect a species that's coming back from the brink of extinction. Given the low numbers, a flood can be devastating for the population.

Very little riverside habitat is left in California's Central Valley, so the rabbits lack higher ground to move to when waters rise. Wildlife officials say with climate change bringing bigger weather disasters, it's an example of how the country's wildlife refuges may need to expand to help animals handle bigger extremes.

Rabbit search and rescue

To find the rabbits, the Fish and Wildlife team heads out into the San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge in aluminum boats. The wide, sprawling river is rushing with meltwater from the Sierra Nevada snowpack, spreading far into the surrounding groves of cottonwood trees. It's a rare scene – this river often runs completely dry some years, because it's so heavily used by farmers and cities.

The riverside habitat is the only place in the world where riparian brush rabbits are found. Today, less than one percent of the habitat remains, after much of the land was converted into agricultural fields. The San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge is among the few pockets left.

Refuge manager Eric Hopson pulls the team's boat onto a sandy bank covered in shrubs.

"So we have this strip of high ground that isn't flooded, but some of this is going to be flooded when the water comes up another two or three more feet," he says. Most of California's record-breaking snowpack has yet to melt, meaning the flood risk could stretch for months.

Ahead, he spots a wire cage hidden in the brush – a baited trap his team set for the rabbits. He checks and finds a rabbit waiting inside.

"In the late 1990s, they were thought to be near extinct," Hopson says. "In fact there was a period of time when they were actually thought to be extinct."

After small groups of rabbits were discovered, a captive breeding program began to reintroduce them here. But major floods, like the ones this year, can take a toll on the highly endangered population.

Hopson's team has rescued dozens of rabbits clinging to the branches of trees and shrubs, the only place they could climb to after the floodwaters rose. This rabbit will be loaded into a cat carrier and relocated to higher ground. It will also be vaccinated against rabbit hemorrhagic disease, a deadly virus that has recently spread here.

Making wildlife refuges climate-ready

These rabbits didn't always need rescuing. Historically, flooding was the natural cycle of Central Valley rivers, which seasonally swelled when the snowpack would melt. When that happened, the rabbits would simply move to higher ground. But now, the farm fields surrounding the rabbits provide no cover from predators. With no place to move to, the rabbits are trapped.

Hopson says the refuge is looking at acquiring more land to provide higher ground for species, but it can be challenging in a prime agricultural area.

"Very few farmers are willing to sell that land and when they are, it's very highly priced," he says.

Still, as the climate changes, California will likely see bigger weather extremes, with wet winters and hotter temperatures creating a greater risk of flooding. National refuges may need to grow and shift to provide habitat that will help wildlife adapt and be more resilient to rapidly changing conditions. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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HELSINKI — A walrus that became a global celebrity last year after it was seen frolicking and basking in a Oslo fjord before it was euthanized by the authorities has been honored with a bronze sculpture in Norway.

The life-size sculpture by Norwegian artist Astri Tonoian was unveiled Saturday at the Oslo marina not far from the place where the actual 600-kilogram (1,300-pound) mammal was seen resting and relaxing during the summer of 2022.

The walrus, named Freya, quickly become a popular attraction among Oslo residents but Norwegian authorities later made a decision to euthanize it — causing public outrage — because they said people hadn't followed recommendations to keep a safe distance away from the massive animal.

Norwegian news agency NTB said a crowdfunding campaign was kicked off last fall to finance the sculpture. The private initiative managed to gather about 270,000 Norwegian kroner ($25,000) by October, NTB said. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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The guide starts up the Land Rover, then calls for attention from his excited passengers.

"All right, We're going into the bush!"

We're at the gateway to Botswana's safari country – one of the most glamorous tourist destinations in the world. But this isn't one of the $5,800-per-day excursions for international visitors that this guide normally leads.

This is a field trip for about 35 sixth graders from a village of mud-walled huts.

The village is called Habu, and you won't find it on Google maps. There are no paved roads here. No shops. And almost no jobs. Most of the 800 or so people who live in Habu survive on unemployment checks worth about $2 a day – supplemented by crops that they grow in their gardens, and a few cattle that they raise at posts in the wilderness surrounding the village.

The safari guide, Moreetsi Tsile, asks the kids which animal they're most hoping to see.

"Tau!" they call out in Botswana's Tswana language. "Ah," says Tsile, laughing, "the lion!"

But the focus of this drive is actually an animal these kids are a lot more familiar with – elephants.

This field trip is the high point of one nonprofit's multi-pronged effort to shift the dynamics of a delicate conflict:

Botswana is home to one the world's last thriving populations of wild elephants. At more than 130,000, it's the largest in any country. But as the elephants' habitat has shrunk, and the number of people in Botswana has grown, this region has become an epicenter of a clash between humans and wildlife that's threatening all sides.

I ask the kids if anyone has had a personal encounter with an elephant. The hands go up.

A tall boy named Fortune Kalafo is the first to share, even though he's so shy he squeezes his eyes shut as he speaks.

In a halting whisper he explains that his family grows maize and pumpkins on their land. And the elephants are always coming in to eat the crop — ruining it before it can be harvested. When his parents see elephants they beat drums to scare them. But the elephants keep coming back.

A few months ago, says Fortune in Tswana, "my uncle went after the elephants with a gun."

Another boy – this one with a huge, confident grin – waves for my attention. His name is Kaurihongua Ngaazire. He says that just a few days ago he and his older brothers were on their donkeys, picking the tiny, sweet-tasting orange fruits from what's called a Shepherd's tree, when a herd of elephants passed by.

Kaurihongua and his brothers set their dogs after the elephants, hoping to shoo them off. Instead, one of the elephants – a mother protecting her calf – turned around and started charging at the dogs. "We had to race into the house to escape it," says Kaurihongua in Tswana.

But it's a girl with a grave expression named Lorato Andreck who describes the most serious encounter. She says she was visiting her grandmother in a nearby town a few months ago, when she heard screams.

"People saying, 'Elephant! Elephant!' " she recalls.

A large male had wandered directly past the house. Lorato watched as her uncle, who had an intellectual disability, approached it – and the elephant attacked.

"Took him, threw him, hit the house, took him again," she says.

"People were screaming, 'Hey! The elephant is killing somebody! The elephant is killing somebody!' "

He was dead in minutes.

A new view of elephants

Today's safari drive is about trying to see elephants in a different light.

The Land Rover lurches forward.

"Vroom!" shouts Kaurihongua "Go ... to ... elephants!"

Soon we're speeding through the flat scrubland, past towering termite mounds. An acacia tree's thorny branches scrape the sides of the truck, sending the kids ducking and squealing with delight.

Kaurihongua calls down to the girl Lorato, sitting in a front seat: "You've got so many leaves in your hair!" They collapse into giggles.

When he's in a classroom Kaurihongua struggles. In fact, his grades are so low his teacher worries he'll drop out before high school. But he has bigger goals: "I want to get into BU," he says – Botswana University – "then become a teacher." And out here on safari, he's the most outgoing, engaged kid in the truck, calling out landmarks as we pass them as though he were a guide himself:

"Garden!" Kaurihongua shouts, pointing out a communal garden. It's surrounded by the kind of metal fencing that people here usually can't afford. It's been newly built with the help of Wild Entrust, the nonprofit dedicated to conservation that has organized today's safari drive. Xigera Safari Lodge – a luxury outfitter that lent its guides to lead the drive – is also contributing funds to the garden. The plan is for the villagers to eventually earn money by becoming one of Xigera's vegetable suppliers.

"Trust! Trust of Habu!" Kaurihongua exclaims next, as the truck rumbles through a gate and pulls to a stop. We're now on a vast tract of land managed by a community trust.

Wild Entrust, the nonprofit, is also working with Habu's leaders here – hiring scouts who will be scoping out locations for campsites and a new road network so the community trust can eventually open a safari business on the land. It will most likely be a no frills set-up for tourists driving in with their own vehicles. But they're hoping it will bring in yet more jobs and income.

A woman approaches the Land Rover with some water bottles. "Hey guys!" she says as she passes them out to the kids. "Did you see the termite mounds?"

She's Lesley McNutt, a Canadian anthropologist who co-founded Wild Entrust. McNutt says the garden effort and the camping safari business are among a raft of projects the nonprofit is collaborating on with Habu's leaders in order to meet two simultaneous goals: alleviate Habu's pervasive poverty; and protect elephants and other wildlife by making it easier for villagers to at least co-exist with the animals – and ideally make a living off them.

Yet after decades of researching and working on conservation in Botswana, McNutt has also concluded that even when people have those kinds of economic interests for safeguarding wildlife, it's often not enough.

"I was looking at, so for example, a cheetah eats your cow – What do you do?" says McNutt. "Do you apply for compensation [from the government]? Do you go out of your way to try to corral your cattle differently? Or do you shoot the cheetah?"

"What I found was, even though people understood there was monetary value coming back to them from the [wildlife] tourism industry – were even employed in the tourism industry – there wasn't any shift in behavior when there were situations of conflict."

Instead, McNutt reasoned, what really makes the difference is when people also have empathy for the animals. The kind of appreciation and even cherishing that, she thought, could come from studying them from childhood.

And so, over the last several years McNutt has been developing an educational program that's now delivered to every primary school in this province of Botswana, starting in fifth grade and running through seventh. Each year Wild Entrust staffers, or "coaches" as the nonprofit refers to them, come in to give a lesson on a different endangered animal – not just elephants but for instance, vultures, wild dogs and rhinos. They talk to the kids about the ways the animal benefits Botswana's ecosystem as well the challenges it faces. Then they play specially designed games in which the kids are encouraged to identify with the animal by emulating its qualities on the sports field.

In most cases these sessions consist of a two-and-half hour visit. But for a handful of schools, McNutt has raised enough money to add on what she considers the ideal pairing: a day-long safari drive.

"You can sit in a classroom, you can learn for months and months," she says, "and it may not have as much impact as one day on the back of a vehicle seeing an elephant in terms of changing your worldview about caring about them. It's the aha moment. It's a trigger. It's a switch. Because they're impressive. They're amazing!"

How to react when you see an elephant

And the awe is certainly there as the truck starts up again ... and the kids spot the first wild animal of the drive: A species of antelope with impressively large spiraled horns called a kudu.

"Wow!" says Fortune Kalafo, the shy boy. He is especially transformed – his reserve melting away as he shouts out the names of the creatures bounding past.

"Impala!" he calls out.

"Or maybe a Springbok?" says another kid.

"Definitely impala," says Fortune.

He's always loved animals. Especially rabbits. They're so clever, he says.

The animals are coming ever faster now.

"Springbok!" intones one of the guides, Ike Mogalakwe, pointing.

"Springbok!" the kids repeat in unison.

But what about the main object of this safari – the elephants?

Mogalakwe slows the truck as he spots some fresh tracks. "Yeah, on the right hand side. At the bottom," he says. "Evidence of an elephant that was here."

Lorato purses her lips. Her mother is one of the teachers at the school. So her house is a step up from the other kids' — it's brick instead of mud and thatch. Still she dreams of getting away from Habu. So boring, she says.

She leans forward and taps Mogalakwe on the shoulder.

"What is the safe thing to do when you see an elephant?" she asks.

"Don't run!" says Mogalakwe.

"Stand like a statue?" says Lorato.

"Yeah, stand still. Don't run," he answers.

Their elephant encounter

Soon after, the kids get to put that advice into practice when they pull up to a waterhole for a lollipop break.

Suddenly a huge elephant ambles over ... and starts to drink.

Mogalakwe motions for silence.

"I want you to come down one by one," he whispers. "But very quietly."

Lorato is the last to climb out of the truck.

She gives a nervous chuckle. "I'm a little bit scared."

"Okay," says Mogalakwe. "Let's go together. SLOWLY."

He steps closer and closer to the elephant – the kids creeping behind him. Then he motions for a halt.

"So you should never give elephants your scent," he says. The key, he explains, is to remain upwind.

He picks up some sand from the ground and slowly releases it. "It will show you the wind is blowing that way," he says.

Then Mogalakwe gets to the heart of the lesson: If you approach the elephant this way, it's a calm animal.

"We are still here," he notes. "And look how long we've been here."

As the kids suck on their lollipops, Mogalakwe starts to point out all the cool features of this elephant: The finger-like projections at the end of its trunk. How its ears are shaped like the continent of Africa.

"Right at the bottom, this is where Botswana is," he says.

All of the things stacked

On the ride home the atmosphere is giddy as the kids rehash every moment, the details growing in the re-telling. "It was humongous!" says Kaurihongua in Tswana, "A beast!"

The rest of the afternoon passes in a whirl of further diversions: A helicopter lands in the field by the school to whisk the guides from Xigera back to their lodge as the kids cheer. One of Wild Entrust's coaches passes out new activity books on elephants as another, Lefentse Oscar Xhao, goes through the highlights: "See how when the elephant digs that hole, when it rains it will create more space for water collection," he says, "and that means more animals will benefit."

And there is game after game. "Okay guys, get inside this circle," says Xhao, the coach. "You are elephants and imagine around you this is a river infested with crocodiles." The challenge is to grab water bottles outside the circle beyond the reach of any one kid. The children try forming a chain, hanging on to the leg of a girl at the end so she can dangle forward over the edge of the circle. "What are you going to use that you learned from elephants?" says Xhao, shouting over the shrieks and giggles. "Teamwork!"

McNutt maintains that these exercises are essential to expanding the initial connection that kids can feel when they watch an animal on safari into a deeper, more durable interest in protecting wildlife. "You have this amazing experience," of effectively meeting the animal in a new way, she says. Then, through play, "you mimic those characteristic behaviors of the animal and you think, 'Wow, I can actually learn something from an elephant.' Because of all those connections you come out the other end in a relationship of empathy."

And McNutt stresses that the shift is a cumulative process, as the seventh grade sessions move into more brainstorming on actions kids can take to help animals. "It's a combination of all of the things stacked," she says.

What did the kids make of it?

The next day I meet up with the kids back at their school to find out what the takeaway was for them.

Lorato ticks off facts she learned. "Elephants are smart and they beautify the country," she says.

And she tells me she appreciated the tips on how to stay safe. "I feel like I can be brave now and not be afraid of elephants," she says.

But it hasn't changed her opinion of them.

"Yes, I can protect myself from elephants," she says. "But love them – No! I don't like elephants at all. I hate them."

Kaurihongua, the outgoing boy who had set his dogs on elephants, says he won't ever do that again. Now he feels sorry for elephants. "We're always taunting them," he says.

But what about the very rational fear that people in Habu have when they run into an elephant, I ask. "What's the solution?"

Kaurihongua sighs heavily. "None," he says.

And then there's Fortune, the shy animal lover.

He says watching that elephant on the safari changed his thinking. He'd never seen an elephant so calm.

"I was surprised that if you don't provoke it, It won't harm you," he says.

He talks of becoming a soldier, "because they watch over and protect animals." And he muses about solutions to the elephant problem in Habu. "Maybe we could dig waterholes for them," he says. Away from our fields?

Because Fortune still doesn't see people and elephants coexisting in Habu itself.

"Most people, when they see the elephants, they'll want to chase them off," he says.

But Fortune says he is going to talk to his own family. Tell them, when the elephants come by, let's not do things that just rile them up, like beating the drums.

"Do you think they will listen to you?" I ask. "I mean, you're a kid."

He nods.

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BOISE, Idaho — Why did 2,500 sheep cross the road? Because the grass was greener on the other side.

In Idaho, it's not unusual to see ranchers moving a bleating herd of sheep up to higher elevation at this time of year. But the sight of 2,500 wooly beasts trotting across a highway earlier this week brought a crowd about 300 people.

It was the largest turnout that Steve Stuebner, spokesperson for the Idaho Rangeland Resources Commission, has seen in 15 years.

"It's a novelty. Maybe they've never seen anything like that before, but it's real typical in Idaho," he told KTVB-TV. "When you're out in rural parts of Idaho in the spring and summer, or fall, you could run into a cattle drive or a sheep drive."

Curious onlookers lined the road as the animals sheepishly entered the highway, guided by ranchers and steered by sheepdogs. They traveled up the road a little ways, the fluffy white herd obscuring the yellow-painted centerline amid a chorus of "baas" and the lead ewe's jangling bell.

Leaving the open road behind, they will journey through the sagebrush-dotted foothills for a few weeks to their summer home in the Boise National Forest.

This trip up to higher elevations is a tradition dating back around 100 years, the Boise-area TV station reported, and having the sheep graze in the forest helps prevent fires and invigorates plant growth.

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Once upon a time, Polly just wanted a cracker. Nowadays, Polly might want a Zoom call.

A recent study took 18 pet parrots and examined whether video calls could help them fulfill their social needs.

Parrots are incredibly socially complex creatures, and surpass 6- and 7-year-old children in puzzle tasks and memory skills, says Jennifer Cunha of Northeastern University, who co-authored the study.

"They have high mental needs that aren't always catered to very well in companion situations," she said.

And pet birds of a feather shouldn't always flock together, according to another lead researcher, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas from the University of Glasgow.

"A very high percentage of them have diseases which can be transferred when in-person interaction takes place," Hirskyj-Douglas said.

So Hirskyj-Douglas and Cunha got together with lead author Rébecca Kleinberger, also of Northeastern University, to see if parrots in captivity could find companionship through video calls.

They taught them to ring a bell, after which a tablet would be presented. One or two images of fellow parrots would appear on a phone or tablet, and using their beaks or tongues, the parrots would choose.

To see how much the parrots actually wanted to spend time on video chats, researchers measured engagement and agency.

"So how frequently they rang the parrots when the system was available and then how quickly they use the system," Hirskyj-Douglas explained.

They were prepared to see negative reactions from the birds, like aggression. But instead, they say they saw a lot of social behaviors they would potentially see between birds that were together or in the wild.

"So mirroring behaviors where they might move in the same kind of way, dancing, singing together," Cunha said. "They really seem to, as one owner said, come alive during the calls."

Kleinberger said while there was potential for connection between animals through the screen, there were also unknown risks of exposing the birds to a new technology, so they had to be careful in training the owners and monitoring the video chats closely. But the researchers did conclude that video calling technology could reproduce some of the social benefits of living in a flock, even between parrot species.

And Cunha said some of the birds still ask to chat with their pals.

"Some of the birds continue to call each other. So I think that there's a lot of long-term potential for these kinds of relationships," she said.

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Back in October, I was working at my desk when the phone rang. "Your order arrived. And the box is making a lot of noise," he said. "You better get over here."

I hopped into the car, rushed to the post office and sure enough, as I walked up to the counter, I could hear the box – or what was inside it – literally chirping.

When I returned home and opened up the box, a pile of baby chicks – just a few days old – rolled onto the floor. They looked like 15 black-and-white fluff balls, jiggling around. Goodness, gracious! They were so cute!

"Well," I said to my husband, "we're now chicken people."

That's right, I ordered 15 chicks in the mail. I didn't do it just for the eggs. Don't get me wrong: Fresh eggs are wonderful! But holy smokes, it is an expensive – and stinky – way to get breakfast.

Instead, our family began to raise chickens because I thought they might help with our mental health. They give us a reason to go outside every morning and evening, often around sunrise and sunset, to feed them, give them water and make sure they're safe in the coop for the night. They've also helped my family learn how to swap negative emotions, such as anger, for positive emotions, such as wonder and awe.

Want to feel more wonder? Start practicing

In the past decade, neuroscientists have begun to change how they think emotions arise in our brains.

Our brains generate emotions in order to react and respond to a situation we're in. For a long time, scientists thought these emotions were hard-wired and uncontrollable. But, as NPR has reported, neuroscientists now realize that's not true, and people have more influence on which emotions arise than previously thought.

Specifically, our brains select an emotion as a response to a situation, and that selection depends heavily on which emotion it has selected in the past.

This idea is extremely powerful because it means people can, in a way, choose to feel positive emotions, such as awe and wonder, more frequently. All you need to do is practice having these positive feelings, and then over time, these emotions become easier to access. When you start to feel an unproductive emotion, such as anger, you can more easily swap that negative feeling for a positive one, such as awe, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University. "It may sound hokey in the abstract, but I guarantee it, that if you practice awe, that practice is essentially helping to rewire the brain. So that you can make that emotion much more easily in the future," she says.

And that's where the chickens come in. Chickens are an enormous source of wonder and awe.

Cultivating poultry and wonder

Wonder and awe are the emotions you feel when you encounter something so vast or so extraordinary that it makes you literally stop what you're doing and think, "Wow, what is that?" You can't explain it entirely because it doesn't fit neatly into your knowledge of how the world works.

Psychologist Michelle Shiota and her colleagues have found that feeling wonder and awe does a bunch of good things to our bodies and minds. It makes you pause a bit, which in turn calms your nervous system.

"I've found evidence that activation of our fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system dials back a little bit," says Shiota, who's at Arizona State University. "People feel an impulse to stop moving and really just take in the information about what's happening before acting next."

The feeling can also reduce stress, studies have found, because it makes you think beyond yourself and your own problems. It puts your problems into perspective, Shiota says..

Take, for example, looking up at the night sky. "You can look at that sky and think, 'Wow, that's bit,' " she says. " 'That's so much bigger than me. So much bigger than my problems.' No matter how real they are.

When you remember how little you truly know about the world, that can be humbling and give you a new perspective, she says. "It seems to just help us calm down a little bit in a powerful way."

The night sky generates this feeling because it's physically vast. But wonder and awe can also come from things that are conceptually vast, says psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo.

Consider a petal on a rose flower. If you stop and try to understand how that petal is made, you may start to realize there's way more to this tiny, soft petal than you previously thought. "It's almost like you're peering into a world that you hadn't seen before. Something is opening up to you," says Valdesolo, who's at Claremont McKenna College.

And that's exactly what has happened with my family and the 11 beautiful hens we now have in our backyard (unfortunately, not all 15 chicks survived the journey to henhood).

Chicken surprises

Over the past seven months, my husband, daughter and I have come to realize there's way more to chickens than we previously thought.

Every day the lady birds do mysterious and mesmerizing things. "Like taking dirt baths," says my 7-year-old daughter, Rosy. "Basically they dig a hole in the ground and rub their bodies in the dirt."

One evening, around 8 p.m, we found one of the hens – we named her Carmel – on our roof.

"How did she get up there? Do chickens fly?" My husband asked.

I had no good answer for him but instead just enjoyed the wonder at it. (Then the next night, while we were making dinner, I kid you not, Carmel, came to the kitchen window and just stared at us.)

Chickens have an uncanny ability to put themselves to bed – on time – every night. "When the sun goes down, they all go up into the coop and go to bed," Rosy explains. "Nobody has to tell them it's bedtime."

And despite the fact that a chicken's brain is the size of a few peanuts, each of the hens has a distinct and full personality. For example, Marshmallow, a white and fluffy hen, loves people. She comes over to you and almost jumps in your lap. While Marmalade is feisty. Very feisty. She'll let you pick her up, but then she flaps her wings violently until you let her go.

For me, the most wondrous thing about chickens is their sounds – in particular, one very strange and mysterious sound.

Chickens are noisy. And most of the time, they make a sound that reminds me of a clown horn honking. But then, all of a sudden, when the chickens turned 5 months old, they started to make another very distinct sound. It goes like: buh, buh, buy, bah-gawk, with a strong emphasis on the gawk. The pattern repeats over and over for a few minutes straight.

When I heard this sound I immediately stopped what I was doing and thought, "What on Earth are they trying to tell me?" (i.e., I felt wonder.)

Then one day, when I heard this special sound, I ran outside to the coop and looked inside. It was amazing.

Inside the coop, two hens (Chocolate and Milk) were sitting down, laying eggs. A third hen (Caramel) was in the door of the coop, broadcasting the special sound.

I realized at that moment: This strange noise is the way chickens signal that a member of the flock is laying an egg! It's the egg-laying signal. (Why would chickens want to signal such a vulnerable and important time? I have no clue. I think only the chickens know.)

Now when I feel anger rising in my body or my daughter feels frustrated, I sometimes remind us all of the egg-laying noise: buh, buh, buy, bah-gawk, buh, buh, buy, bah-gawk. buh, buh, buy, bah-gawk. And I kid you not, it brings a smile to everyone's face.

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Even before the reign of the dinosaurs ended in a mass extinction event about 65 million years ago, mammals had already gotten a humble but solid foothold.

That's just one of the findings from a close examination of DNA from 240 different mammalian species, an ambitious effort to understand how hairy, milk-producing mammals — including humans — evolved to have such an astonishing array of sizes, shapes, and special abilities.

Scientists know of around 6,500 living mammal species, inhabiting practically every environment on Earth — from frigid oceans to high deserts. This international project, called Zoonomia, set out to collect genetic material from across the entire mammalian family tree.

Researchers obtained DNA from all kinds of mammalian critters, like caribou, armadillos, bats, and bison. Their genetic menagerie eventually included 52 endangered species, like the giant otter and the Amazon river dolphin, as well as primates like chimps and humans.

"We're still only looking at a tiny portion of mammals, but it is the largest project we've ever done like this," says Elinor Karlsson, director of the Vertebrate Genomics Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who notes that 80 percent of the mammalian families are represented in their collection.

After determining the sequence of chemical "letters" that made up the genetic code of each species, researchers then "aligned" those sequences so that they could be comprehensively compared. That let them spot which genetic regions had been unchanged over millions of years of evolution, suggesting that these contained essential biological instructions for making mammals.

They were also able to tease out genetic differences between mammalian species, which allowed them to probe the possible genetic underpinnings of unique traits such as the ability to hibernate, or an extremely sensitive sense of smell.

"It turns out that there's a weird little South American rodent that nobody seems to know very much about that has a huge number of olfactory genes and receptors," says Karlsson. "It sort of points out what we can discover when we are just looking at everything."

She and her colleagues have now published 11 research reports in the journal Science that lay out some of their first efforts to understand what exactly, at the genetic level, makes a mammal.

And intriguingly, they found some clues about how one mammal, Homo sapiens, evolved to have such a unique brain — the kind of brain that can ponder mammals and devise complex computational programs to compare and contrast the massive amounts of data in all of this genetic code.

When mammals started to emerge

Scientists have long debated exactly when mammals first appeared on Earth and how and why they began to diversify, eventually establishing themselves in almost every possible habitat and ranging in size from tiny bats to enormous whales.

"The reality is, from an evolutionary point of view, we don't know as much about mammals as we do know about how birds diverged," says Nicole Foley of Texas A&M University.

In the past, many researchers used the fossil record to insist that all of the real action for mammals occurred after the mass extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, she explains.

But this vast new collection of mammalian DNA gave Foley and her colleagues a chance to look at this in a different way, by analyzing so-called neutrally-evolving sites, where random changes in the genetic code over time can serve as a kind of clock.

"With all of this data, we can kind of get to the point where we have a much more accurate timeline for mammalian diversification," says Foley.

What they saw indicates that the earliest mammals were walking around under the feet of the dinosaurs — even though mammals hadn't really had a chance to take off yet.

"Mammalian evolution kind of starts off slow back in the Cretaceous, but it's there," says Foley. "Mammals are established in the Cretaceous."

These creatures may have been small, and found in low numbers, but they were the predecessors of everything from bats to primates, says Bill Murphy, also of Texas A&M. "They only started to look like the modern bats and the modern primates," he says, "once the dinosaurs were gone."

From hibernation to a hero dog

Today's mammals share many features, but they also differ in important ways. For example, only some can hibernate, which Karlsson notes is an amazing activity.

"Basically animals are able to get super obese, climb into a hole, not move a whole lot for months on end. And then they lose all that weight and they come out and they don't have blood clots and they don't have strokes and they don't have diabetes," she says.

That's why one of the first things the researchers did is compare the genetic code of hibernating species to their non-hibernating relatives. "And that ended up finding some genes involved in some interesting traits, including aging," says Karlsson.

Researchers also tried to use the information in their mammalian DNA collection to see if they could make predictions, such as exploring what species might be susceptible to the pandemic coronavirus. Some of their predictions, such as the likelihood that deer would be affected, did indeed pan out.

One group of researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, used this dataset — along with hundreds of genomes of modern dogs — to try to find out something about a very special dog from the past.

They collected DNA from a sled dog named Balto, who famously helped transport precious medicine across Alaska during a diphtheria outbreak in 1925. A statue of him stands in New York City's Central Park, and his stuffed body is in a Cleveland museum.

It turns out that Balto was less inbred than dogs from modern breeds, and possibly had adaptations that helped him stay active in harsh conditions. For example, he had variants in genes related to things like joint formation and skin thickness.

What's missing in humans

The uniqueness of humans has long fascinated scientists, and researchers have compared human DNA to that of our close relative, chimpanzees, as well as other species to try to learn what sets the human brain apart.

Steven Reilly of the Yale School of Medicine says that he and his colleagues wanted to know what bits of foundational mammalian DNA had been lost in humans.

"We asked, what has been around across millions of years of evolution, and that if you look in a dolphin or you look at a dog or you look at a donkey, it's all there, but then suddenly in humans — poof! — we don't have it," explains Reilly.

They identified about 10,000 bits of DNA that exist in most other mammals but not humans, and most of these deletions occurred in parts of the genetic code that are thought to be in regulatory regions, where they can act like dimmer switches that turn the activity of other genes up or down.

Many of the human-specific deletions occurred near genes related to the development of the brain, says Reilly, but it wasn't clear which of them might actually be doing something.

So his group then did experiments in a wide range of cell types, to see which deletions could actually produce changes in gene activity. They found about 800 cases where the human version of the DNA produced a different outcome than the chimp version.

When they took a cell from a human nervous system and added a deleted bit of DNA back in, they could sometimes see wide-ranging effects. For example, they saw that the activity of one gene went down, and this had a cascading effect on the activity of around 30 other genes, ones that are associated with the formation of a kind of insulation around brain cells — a process called myelination. The brains of humans and chimps are known to differ markedly in the speed of this myelination (humans go slower).

"The fact that this one change seems to cause a reduction in all of these genes that would promote myelination means that this might be one of the genetic links towards this known difference between humans and chimps," says Reilly.

He called it "almost a little humbling that we don't have a lot of new fancy bells and whistles to build a brain. It's largely using the same building blocks that go into making a chimp brain. Just in a slightly different way."

Where genetic changes speed up

But some parts of the human genome do seem to have evolved particularly quickly. That was the focus of one study that wanted to understand the stretches of DNA that are nearly identical among humans, but that differ from all other mammals.

Scientists have looked for these regions in the past, but this new collection of mammalian genomes gives that search new power.

It turns out that many regions of accelerated genetic changes in humans cause DNA to fold differently compared to other primates, says Katie Pollard, director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology in San Francisco. That's important because different kinds of folding can dramatically affect what genes get turned on and off and how they all interact.

"DNA is a very long, skinny molecule. You can think about it as a thread and imagine taking more than a meter of thread and trying to scrunch it down into the nucleus of a cell," says Pollard. "It doesn't just get randomly scrunched in and folded up. It actually folds in a concerted way. And the way it folds is predictable from the sequence of the DNA."

Many years ago, says Pollard, biologists thought that human genes might be radically different from chimp genes. Instead, what they've learned is that the protein-producing genes themselves are pretty similar, but the way they're regulated and even packaged-up in three-dimensional space might be profoundly altered in humans.

"I think it's important to remember that what makes us human is not one change, but many, many changes," says Karlsson.

What's more, she says, humans have traditionally been very good at studying humans and other primates, "but when you get out into a lot of other species, we know surprisingly little about them and what they can do." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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John Hume has been trying to save the white rhinos of South Africa before they're poached into extinction. Now, he says, he can't afford the upkeep of his crusade.

On Wednesday, Hume, who is estimated to own somewhere between 13% to 15% of the world's white rhinos, launched an auction to sell off the 2,000-strong herd in an online sale that's starting at $10 million.

Hume established the Platinum Rhino Project, a sprawling 21,000 acre ranch about 100 miles southwest of Johannesburg, in an attempt to legalize the trade of rhino horns, which is banned in most countries. His plan was to create a breeding farm where the horns could be safely sawn off a living rhino and sold on the open market. (Rhino horns are made of keratin – the substance in human fingernails – and can grow back at a rate of about 7 cm per year.)

His argument, and that of other private breeders, is that a legal rhino horn trade will drive down black market prices, which the World Animal Foundation estimates is between $15,000 to $30,000 per pound. By being able to dehorn the massive pachyderms in a humane way and ensuring their survival, Hume said the Platinum Rhino Project would generate enough revenue to cover the large costs associated with managing and conservation of the species.

While Hume successfully sued the South African government in 2017 to reverse a decades-old moratorium on the domestic sale of rhino horns, the overall effort proved to be less lucrative than he'd projected.

The ranch's website states that Hume, a hotel mogul, has invested more than $150 million of his own money into the Platinum Rhino Project since it opened its doors in 2009. In 2017, he told National Geographic that he spends $170,000 a month on security, feed and veterinary services.

Now, he says, "the ideal buyer is a person or foundation with a passion for conserving rhinos and the means to keep the breeding project going."

An auction page on the site adds, "With 200 rhinos born a year, the project has the power to make a significant difference and bolster declining rhino populations on the African continent."

"We have so much rewilding power here," said the project's wildlife veterinarian, Michelle Otto.

She believes the ranch's rhinos "could repopulate the whole of Africa, where we lose hundreds of rhinos each year to poaching."

The WWF estimates there are 15,942 white rhinos around the world. The species is classified as "near threatened."

Demand for rhino horn comes mostly from East Asian countries — primarily China and Vietnam — where it's traditionally been used for medicinal purposes and carved into figurines. According to the World Animal Foundation, the poaching crisis took off in 2008 and reached a peak between 2013 and 2017, when more than 1,000 were slaughtered every year. Even now, the organization estimates one rhino is killed every 12 hours. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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The Velella velella, a name so nice you gotta say it twice.

Who are they? The tiny disc-like critters are colonial hydrozoans, classified under the phylum of cnidaria, and their eponymous genus of Velella (not a Game of Thrones reference).

Formally titled the Velella velella (say that five times fast) you may know them as by-the-wind sailors.

The sailors are a couple of inches long, and vary in striking shades of cobalt and baby blue while they're alive.

They have a similar build to jellyfish, but have a small sail protruding from their bell, explaining the name and their migratory patterns.

What's the big deal? California beachgoers have reported seeing thousands of the Velella velella along the shoreline recently, though they typically live far offshore.

And their sails can explain it! They rely completely on the wind and ocean currents to move around, and when the conditions are just right, like with recent storms, they can get pushed up onto shore.

They also lose that beautiful blue hue once they leave the embrace of ocean waters and die onshore, typically becoming grayish or transparent. And with no exoskeleton to keep their shape propped up, they shrivel up to resemble plastic.

Their top predators include gloriously hued sea slugs and a special breed of predatory snail.

Want more on oceans? Listen to the Consider This episode on why melting ice in Antarctica is a big problem for coastal Texas.

What are people saying? Marine biologist Julianne Kalman Passarelli is the education and collections curator at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro, California, and spoke with NPR about the mysterious blobby dudes.

On how they reproduce:

Hydrozoans are just really bizarre because they do something called alternation of generations. That's how they reproduce. And they go back and forth between a polyp stage, a colonial polyp stage, and a medusa stage.

On the structure of the Velella velella and its ecosystem:

[The Velella velella is] a colony of animals. And if you look really closely, all those little things hanging down that look like tentacles are all different organisms within the same colony, and they all work together, kind of like coral, and they all have a different purpose. One is for reproduction, one is for feeding, and one is for defense.

On the textures of the sail:

If you were to touch the top of the sail, it feels like plastic. It's quite thick. And actually what's in there is chitin. And that's the same material that is in the exoskeleton of crustaceans. So it's notoriously hard and protective, but you definitely don't want to pick them up and touch them because they are cnidarians. Their sting is not known to be as toxic as their relatives, the Portuguese man o' war, or even their more distant relatives jellyfish, sea nettles, things like that. But they can cause irritation. I wouldn't suggest picking them up with your bare hands.

So, what now?

As long as the conditions are right, the Velella velella will continue to wash ashore, until winds push them elsewhere. Real go-with-the-flow type guys.

Though it's not every year, seeing these tiny frisbees of the sea isn't the most unusual thing. "I've lived down here for over 20 years and I've seen them at least 10 times," Kalman Passarelli said.

Learn more:

Meet the worm blobs in the bowels of the Earth

This floating ocean garbage is home to a surprising amount of life from the coasts

California's destructively wet winter has a bright side. You'll want to see it

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CARRIZO PLAIN NATIONAL MONUMENT, Calif. — The roads are still rutted where rainwater carved them and farms are still flooded down the valley, but here in California's largest remaining grassland, the benefits of the state's destructively wet winter are on full display.

And they're spectacular.

Wildflowers — yellow, purple, blue and orange — are splattered across the landscape in sweeps and pools like a clumsy airbrush painting.

A superbloom. Seas of wildflowers so vast they can be seen from space.

"This is definitely one of the benefits to a wet year like we just had," said Gabe Garcia, the head of the Bakersfield field office for the Bureau of Land Management, standing amidst a field of purple phacelia and yellow goldfields, hillside daisies and tidy tips. "For perspective, last year this area [looked like] it was mowed. No vegetation coverage. Almost like dirt."

Now the flowers reach his knees.

The flourish of color and buzz of new life does little to alleviate the suffering thousands of Californians have experienced in recent months. Estimates for economic damages from one series of storms in early January are in the billions of dollars alone. The state has proclaimed states of emergencies for 47 counties since the start of February. And in some parts of the state's Central Valley, a national agricultural hub, people are preparing to be flooded, possibly, for years.

"I try to look at it as: these floods are devastation for some but they're also opportunities," said Matt Kaminski, a regional biologist for Ducks Unlimited.

Wetlands, long severed from the rivers and streams that nourished them, are being flooded with freshwater. Biologists are seeing baby salmon, fattened by new food sources in flood plains, make their way to sea. Endangered birds and waterfowl are nesting next to flooded fields.

"When we see water spread across the landscape, as you're driving through the Central Valley, you think of this as a really negative thing," said Carson Jeffres, a researcher at the University of California Davis's Center for Watershed Sciences. "And yet there are so many benefits that happen because of it."

California is a state of extremes

California, more than any other state in the U.S., is a place of climatic extremes. Weather whiplash. "Going back-and-forth between extreme dry and extremely wet," said Julia Kalansky, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

For centuries, Native Americans learned to live with the changing conditions, moving with the ebbs and flows of inland lakes. Plants and animals evolved to withstand periods of extreme dryness. Bulbs for many of California's native wildflowers can lie dormant for years, outlasting invasive species while waiting for rainy winters and springs like this.

While those natural cycles in the climate continue — intensified, scientists say, by human-caused climate change — the landscape they're occurring on has dramatically changed.

Where waters from rivers like the Kern, Kaweah and Tule used to spill out of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains, spreading across the desert in alluvial fans and coalescing in basins like Tulare Lake, they now meet a highly engineered system. Dams slow and collect snowmelt. Streams are channeled into canals, carrying water to a vast grid of orchards and farms.

In normal years, most of the water that comes down from the mountains is used up by agriculture. Low-income rural communities, wetlands and riparian areas are lower in the water pecking order. Years of drought forced California to cancel its $1.4 billion salmon fishing season, earlier this year, for just the third time in history. Some wetlands, "oases of habitat," Kaminski said, haven't received surface water during the drought either, relying instead on landowners like duck hunting clubs to pump groundwater to the surface.

"The only wetlands that are on the landscape here now are when big floods happen, sort of recreating the wetlands that were here historically," he said, driving along a water and bird-filled wetland northeast of Bakersfield. "And then these duck clubs that traditionally have drilled wells and pumped groundwater to flood their wetlands."

This year, the few wetlands that remain are getting their share of water up and down the Central Valley, helping alleviate the flood risks to the towns and farms that are slowly displacing them.

Idling along a levee on the wetlands edge, along the channeled waters of Poso Creek, Kaminski gestured to the south. The levee on the other side had breached a couple weeks earlier, as rainwater filled the creek, flooding part of a dairy farm.

"I look at that [and see] devastation for some," he said. "But then for other conservation-minded people, there's opportunities."

Opportunities to show the value of wetlands in flood mitigation during wet years like this. Opportunities to provide habitat for the migratory birds that travel the Pacific Flyway from South America to Alaska. And opportunities to see what once was.

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Organizers of a New Zealand hunting contest are pawing their way out of controversy after canceling an event that would have seen children 14 and under compete to kill the most feral cats.

The North Canterbury Hunting Competition is open to both kids and adults, and aims to manage invasive species and raise money for local causes — specifically, a school and pool in the rural village of Rotherham.

Last year, more than 250 children killed 427 animals, mostly possums, hares and rabbits, according to The Guardian.

Organizers added a new category this year, announcing in a since-deleted Friday Facebook post that whoever could kill the most feral cats between mid-April and late June would win the equivalent of $155. And they warned that anyone who produced a microchipped cat — meaning one that belonged to someone — would have their entire entry disqualified.

That prompted an immediate outcry from animal rights groups like SAFE, who pointed out that feral cats don't necessarily look different from strays and pets. Worried that house cats would suffer, they called on organizers to cancel the category.

"Disqualifying dead cats with microchips is too little too late," said SAFE spokesperson Will Appelbe. "It's not even an ambulance, but a grave at the bottom of the cliff."

The competition changed course on Tuesday.

"Our sponsors and school safety are our main priority, so the decision has been made to withdraw this category for this year to avoid further backlash at this time," organizers wrote on Facebook. "We are disappointed and apologise for those who were excited to be involved in something that is about protecting [our] native birds, and other vulnerable species."

That post received a mix of supportive and disapproving reactions, with some reiterating the threat that feral cats pose and others arguing there are better ways to respond to it.

The contest didn't actually break any laws, as the Canterbury chapter of the New Zealand SPCA noted on Facebook, adding that it was still "extremely concerned." Event organizers stressed that all hunters are required to abide by the country's firearm and animal welfare acts.

They added that the school and others involved had gotten "vile & inappropriate emails and messages," and stressed that the hunting competition is run independently by volunteers and for an important cause.

"This fundraising effort is critical in aiding the local school to employ a board funded third teacher and gives our local community and kids greater opportunities," organizers wrote.

The rest of the categories will continue as planned the weekend of June 23.

Feral cats are wreaking havoc on wildlife

There's no question that feral cats are harmful to New Zealand's native species.

New Zealand's Department of Conservation says feral cats — defined as those that live in the wild and have none of their needs provided for by humans — are widespread throughout the country.

There could be as many as 2.5 million, which is about double the number of domestic cats in the country, according to conservation organization Forest & Bird. A pest controller told the news outlet Stuff last year that feral cats were at "plague" levels in Canterbury.

Feral cats can grow larger than house cats in the right conditions but don't tend to live as long. They're similar in appearance to typical tabby, tortoiseshell and black house cats, authorities add.

Their diet depends on their habitat, and they can live anywhere from coastal areas and sub-alpine environments to forests, farmland and islands. They feed on rabbits, birds and bird eggs, rats, hares, bats, lizards, mice and other insects, which officials say has a "major impact."

For instance, feral cats have reduced Grand and Otago skink populations to critically low levels in the Central Otago district and decimated populations of endangered kakī/black stilt, wrybill and black-fronted terns in the central South Island.

Helen Blackie, a biosecurity consultant who studied feral cats for two decades, told Radio New Zealand that they were responsible for killing up to 100 million birds across the country every year. Feral cats also carry toxoplasmosis, a common cause of contagious abortion in sheep.

"Historically, we know that feral cats were responsible for the extinction of six bird species and are leading agents of decline in populations of birds, bats, frogs and lizards," Blackie said.

The question is, what should be done about it?

Animal rights groups want to see them handled humanely

The hunting category controversy has highlighted the debate over how best to handle pest control in New Zealand.

The SPCA was one of the groups that opposed the event, saying there was a good chance someone's pet could be killed.

It noted that children often use air rifles in these events, which increases the likelihood of an animal's suffering and prolonged death.

"SPCA advocates that, instead of organised killing events, education around humane and compassionate practices can better prepare young people to appreciate and protect the biological heritage of New Zealand," the organization said.

Without a national effort to reduce the feral cat population, regional councils can only introduce piecemeal local measures and the Conservation Department can act only on public conservation land, according to charitable trust Predator Free New Zealand.

New Zealand does have "Predator Free 2050," a federal plan to eliminate its most pressing predators: rats, stoats and possums. There are calls for cats to be added to that plan, a politically contentious issue.

Some advocates, including Forest & Bird, are calling on the government to establish a national Cat Management Act for owners that would, among other things, make desexing and microchipping mandatory and institute a limit of three cats per household.

Appelbe, the SAFE spokesperson, tweeted that cat management strategies that "actually work" include "trap, neuter, release," "mandatory microchip, registering, desexing" and adopting instead of shopping for pets.

He added that there are other ways to raise money for the Rotherham school and pool, "and sending children off to kill cats shouldn't be one of them." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Spring is here and temperatures are heating up. That means cases of tick-borne illnesses, particularly Lyme disease, are on the rise in the U.S. And the problem is only being exacerbated by prolonged warmer weather across a wider swath of the country, driven by climate change.

In the Northeast, upper Midwest and northern Pacific Coast, the warming climate enables ticks to become active earlier in the spring and then remain active later into the autumn or winter months, extending the window of tick-borne disease risk each year.

With that in mind, NPR is here to help you avoid blacklegged ticks that cause Lyme disease and offer tips on what to do if you've been bitten.

What is Lyme disease and how is it transmitted?

Blacklegged ticks, also called deer ticks, are not insects, but rather arachnids, and they can carry more than a dozen rare diseases, including anaplasmosis, which is a bacterial infection that in extreme cases can cause respiratory failure, organ failure, bleeding problems and even death. They can also transmit hard tick relapsing fever, Powassan and Heartland viruses.

But the most common by far is Lyme disease. Typical symptoms of the illness include fever, chills, headache, fatigue, muscle and joint pain, swollen lymph nodes and a skin rash that often appears as a bull's-eye or a solid red oval rash.

About 476,000 people are diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year in the U.S., according to estimates reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It's on the rise in places where it was once fairly rare. A 2018 report by Quest Diagnostics said cases in California shot up by 195% from 2015 to 2017 and that the infection that causes the disease was found in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

Ticks on their own do not carry the bacterium that causes Lyme. For that to happen, they need to draw blood from a mammal host that can harbor B. burgdorferi. On the East Coast, that is commonly deer and white-footed mice. In California, that would include deer, as well as western gray squirrels, voles and mice.

An infected tick latches onto a human by digging its mouth into the flesh where it can feast for three to 10 days, depending on whether it's a young tick or an adult female. It takes at least 24 hours before Lyme bacteria start swimming out in the saliva the tick drips into its host.

Melissa Prusinski, a research scientist and laboratory supervisor at the New York State Department of Health, warned that it can be tricky to discern if someone's exhibiting Lyme disease symptoms. People often mistake them for the flu or even COVID-19, she told NPR.

If you start to experience symptoms, Prusinski warned not to wait around to spot the tick or for a rash to appear before contacting a physician.

For one, ticks, especially if they're in the nymph stage, can be really hard to see. They can be the size of a poppy seed or as tiny as a period on a computer screen.

Second, "not everybody has the rash," she explained, adding that "sometimes the rash is in an area that you can't easily see, like on the scalp."

"It's better to be safe than sorry, especially if you have spent time outdoors and know that there's the potential that you could have received the tick bites," she advised. In such cases, she suggests seeing a doctor as quickly as possible and mentioning that you might have a tick-borne illness.

How to remove a tick

The best way to find out if one of these tiny critters has burrowed its way into your body is by doing a full body search, preferably naked.

"One of the things that [researchers] have found that really reduces your risk of tick-borne illness is to bathe or shower as soon as possible after going indoors," Prusinski said. Ideally, she added, that would be within two hours.

"That helps to either wash off ticks that haven't become attached, or you're more easily more apt to find ticks that may be on you because you can do a full body tick check."

And don't forget about your clothes. Experts say 15 minutes in a dryer on high heat is enough to kill any remaining tourist ticks.

If you do find a tick on your body, don't panic.

Just because you may have been bitten, it doesn't mean you've contracted Lyme disease. The New York State Department of Health says in most cases, a tick must be attached for 36 hours or more before the bacteria can be transmitted.

The safest way to pluck one off your body is with a pair of fine, pointed tweezers.

"It's best to grab the tick as close to the skin as possible, near the head or mouthparts where it's going into the skin, and then pull slowly and steadily in a direction away from the surface," Prusinski said.

Once it's out, wash the bite with an antibiotic soap or rubbing alcohol. After that, note the date of bite and monitor the bite site for signs of a rash or other symptoms.

What you do not want to do is to grab the tick with your bare hands and squeeze. And definitely do not attempt to force the tick out by applying home remedies, including Vaseline, fire, or rubbing alcohol. While those may cause the tick to pull itself out of the skin, they can also potentially increase the risk of a tick-borne illness.

Most of the bacteria and other pathogens that cause the potentially deadly illness live in the gut of the tick, and when it is irritated it can regurgitate its contents into the skin, Prusinski said.

And after it's been removed, don't throw it away!

Lia Gaertner, director of education and outreach for the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, recommends wrapping it in a moist paper towel, putting it in a plastic sandwich bag, and dropping it in the mail to a tick testing laboratory. Within three days, she said, they can tell what kind of tick it was, how long it had been feeding, and what kind of diseases it was carrying. "That's super important information for people to share with their doctors," Gaertner said.

Other steps to follow to avoid ticks altogether

Hikers and outdoor enthusiasts should swap out dark pants or leggings for light-colored clothing to make it easier to see even the tiniest creatures. People heading outside can also use permethrin tick repellent on bags, shoes and socks, which should always be pulled over pants cuffs to prevent direct access to one's legs.

Keeping the backyard tidy can also help reduce ticks in your yard.

Ticks live in forested areas at ground level and in low vegetation. They generally move around the landscape by hitching a ride on animals that they also feed on, including mice, chipmunks, birds, as well as white-tailed deer.

Prusinski suggests raking up and removing fallen leaves, mowing the lawn, and frequently clearing tall grass and brush from around your home. If you've got bird feeders, she said it's safest to move them to the edge of the yard.

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Scientists studying a giant collection of plastic trash floating in the middle of the open ocean have found some unexpected inhabitants: dozens of marine species that usually stick close to the coast.

Among the plastic debris, the researchers found all kinds of nonnative species, from anemones to worms to little crustaceans.

"To find that many coastal species on a relatively small sample size was shocking," says Linsey Haram, a marine ecologist who did this research while working at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

The findings, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, should help overturn the long-held idea that the open ocean is a barrier that most coastal species could never breach.

Haram and her colleagues made this discovery after examining 105 items of debris collected from an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This region between Hawaii and California has become a giant garbage soup, because currents drag in floating debris that accumulates over time.

Most of the plastic trash from there that was examined by researchers showed signs of being colonized by coastal species.

"As we started going through the plastics, it ended up that we saw coastal species on 70% of the 105 debris items," says Haram.

Even though biologists knew that coastal species can occasionally travel on ships or floating debris, scientists had long thought that coastal species couldn't live long-term out at sea or establish new communities there.

That's because differences in temperature, salinity, and the available nutrients found in these two watery environments all seemed like potential deal-breakers.

But the March 2011 tsunami in Japan forced marine biologists to rethink their old assumptions. Identifiable junk from Japan started turning up in places like Hawaii years later, carrying coastal species that had somehow managed to survive.

So Haram and her colleagues decided to sample some of the garbage out in the Pacific, with the help of a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup, which had gone out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in November of 2018 and January of 2019.

The researchers asked for common plastic trash items like buckets, crates, bottles, household items, ropes, and parts of fish traps. "And then we had a wild-card category, which was if they came across anything that was super weird and interesting but couldn't necessarily be categorized otherwise," explains Haram.

Examining the trash back in the lab, researchers found hundreds of marine invertebrate specimens – and 80% of the species were coastal.

Species already known to live in the open ocean were thriving on the plastic garbage too, says Haram, but "we also saw this very prominent and diverse group of coastal species that honestly, we just wouldn't have expected to find."

What's more, some of the coastal species were reproducing on their makeshift, floating plastic homes. One Japanese anemone, for example, clearly had been making more copies of itself.

"Definitely anemones were the weirdest thing that we saw. We didn't expect to see them because they didn't have a very big signature in the Japanese tsunami debris work," says Haram.

Over two-thirds of the time, there were coastal and open-ocean species living together on the same piece of trash, she says, which means they must now be routinely interacting.

"What that interaction looks like, we're unsure, but there's definitely competition for space, right?" says Haram.

The unlikely neighbors also probably compete for food, and may eat each other. The researchers spotted coastal anemones that were eating a kind of purple snail that's native to the high seas.

The kinds of small creatures examined in this study often serve as food for larger species, so Haram says these findings have possible implications for all kinds of animals higher up the food chain like turtles, fish, and marine mammals.

"I was surprised that they saw such high numbers of coastal species," says Sabine Rech, a marine biologist with the Universidad Católica del Norte in Chile, who has studied life on ocean garbage in the South Pacific. "Beyond the surprise, I think the implications could be huge."

The tsunami event showed that coastal life could survive a long trip at sea, but that was a dramatic, one-off event, she says.

"With the latest research, we see that it's just something that is normal now, that is happening all the time," says Rech. "Coastal species are traveling on a regular basis, all the time, away from their habitat."

That could increase the risk of species finding new places to take hold and become invasive, she says, adding that the idea that coastal species are able to make a go of it out at sea if they just have something durable to anchor onto is "a little revolution" in scientists' thinking.

"It's a bit scary," she says, as well as fascinating.

Rech and her colleagues didn't see such a diverse array of coastal life when they studied dozens of pieces of debris from the South Pacific, but she says it may be that this is a more harsh, nutrient-poor environment.

On the other hand, says Rech, this study makes her wonder whether the South Pacific really has small numbers of coastal species out there – or if researchers just haven't found them yet.

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A 1-year-old Australian shepherd took an epic trek across 150 miles (241 kilometers) of frozen Bering Sea ice that included being bitten by a seal or polar bear before he was safely returned to his home in Alaska.

Mandy Iworrigan, Nanuq's owner who lives in Gambell, Alaska, and her family were visiting Savoogna, another St. Lawrence Island community in the Bering Strait, last month when Nanuq disappeared with their other family dog, Starlight, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

Starlight turned up a few weeks later, but Nanuq, which means polar bear in Siberian Yupik, was nowhere to be found.

About a month after Nanuq disappeared, people in Wales, 150 miles (241 kilometers) northeast of Savoonga on Alaska's western coast, began posting pictures online of what they described as a lost dog.

"My dad texted me and said, 'There's a dog that looks like Nanuq in Wales,'" Iworrigan said.

She reactivated her Facebook account to see if it might be her wandering hound.

"I was like, 'No freakin' way! That's our dog! What is he doing in Wales?'" she said.

The events of Nanuq's journey will likely always be a mystery.

"I have no idea why he ended up in Wales. Maybe the ice shifted while he was hunting," Iworrigan said. "I'm pretty sure he ate leftovers of seal or caught a seal. Probably birds, too. He eats our Native foods. He's smart."

She used airline points to get her dog back to Gambell on a regional air carrier last week, a charter that was transporting athletes for the Bering Strait School District's Native Youth Olympics tournament.

Iworrigan filmed the happy reunion when the plane landed at the air strip in Savoonga, with both she and her daughter Brooklyn shrieking with joy.

Except for a swollen leg, with large bite marks from an unidentified animal, Nanuq was in pretty good health.

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Pearl the pint-sized chihuahua got big news this week when Guinness World Records (GWR) officially certified her as the world's shortest dog.

The two-year-old measures exactly 3.59 inches tall and 5 inches long, according to her vet, Dr. Giovanni Vergel of Crystal Creek Animal Hospital in Orlando, Fla. Put another way, she's shorter than a Popsicle stick, barely the height of a credit card and about as tall as a toilet paper roll.

Pearl is "small like a ball" and "a child at heart," says her owner, Vanesa Semler.

She's also the niece of the previous record holder, Miracle Milly, who measured 3.8 inches tall and was known for her big personality, including sticking her tongue out in photos. Milly, who also belonged to Semler, died before Pearl was born in Sept. 2020.

Pearl and Milly both weighed less than an ounce at birth, GWR says. Pearl has since bulked up to 1.22 pounds.

Semler says Pearl is "a bit of a diva," who counts chicken and salmon among her favorite foods and loves "dressing up nice."

A three-minute video posted to GWR's Twitter account features a montage of Pearl going about her daily routine — taking walks, getting groomed, playing with teeny toys — in a series of fashionable outfits, including embroidered sweaters, a ballerina tutu and a heavy-looking bejeweled collar.

The pair enjoyed a shopping spree during a recent trip to Milan, where Pearl made her big-screen debut on GWR's Italian TV program Lo Show dei Record. She was carried onstage in an Easter egg-shaped basket and stayed remarkably calm in front of the live studio audience, GWR reports.

"We're blessed to have her," Semler told the record keeper, "and to have this unique opportunity to break our own record and share with the world this amazing news."

How Pearl measures up (literally)

Vergel, the vet, says he took Pearl's measurements three consecutive times with short breaks in between, which she spent "walking on the wee wee pad."

"In compliance with the rules of the record, each measurement was taken from the base of the front leg foot up to the top of the withers (the ridge between the shoulder blades) in a straight vertical line," GWR explains.

Pearl now takes her place in a long line of short dogs.

The title-holder before Milly was Boo Boo, a long-haired chihuahua who measured 4 inches tall. In 2007 Boo Boo had a made-for-TV meetup with the world's tallest dog, a harlequin Great Dane named Gibson who had a whopping 40 inches on her.

Boo Boo came after two tiny chihuahuas, Ducky (4.9 inches tall) and Danka (5.4 inches). But other breeds have held the title too.

Before them, in the early aughts, the world's shortest dog was a Yorkie named Big Boss who measured 4.7 inches tall and weighed 1 lb 1 oz.

GWR says the shortest dog ever recorded was a dwarf Yorkshire terrier owned by Arthur Marples, the United Kingdom-based former editor of Our Dogs weekly newspaper. Her name was Sylvia, according to Yorkie experts.

"The fist-sized dog stood at ... 2.8 in. in height and measured ... 3.75 in. from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail," GWR adds. "It died in 1945, just before its second birthday." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Just when you think we might have more than enough to worry about, something else appears: Super Pigs.

Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan's Canadian Wild Pig Research project have told Field & Stream that these invasive hybrids of domestic pigs and European wild boars now roam over hundreds of thousands of square miles of central Canada. And, they have begun to cross into the United States.

I'm amazed, by the way, that algorithms pushed articles from Field & Stream to my news feed. Field & Stream is an online magazine for people who hike, hunt, fish, camp and love the outdoors: essentially, everyone but me.

But, I clicked, and learned that these wild super pigs were bred by farmers to thrive in the extreme winters of the Canadian Prairies. "Large body animals survive the cold better and have better reproduction in those conditions." Dr. Ryan Brook of the Wild Pig Research Project told Field & Stream - whose site I have now bookmarked.

But larger bodies and more prolific reproduction created new problems. Progress often does. The larger pigs began to meet, date, discover mutual interests, fall in love and start families. (I am perhaps being a touch romantic here.)

To quote the original Jurassic Park movie, "Life, uh, finds a way."

The population of wild super pigs began to swell. Inevitably, some pigs broke through their fencing. Now they prowl the prairies. And they're hungry.

Wild super pigs are not fussy eaters who ask, "Excuse me, chef. Are these scallions or ramps?"

"Wild hogs feed on anything," says Dr. Brook. "They gobble up tons and tons of goslings and ducklings in the spring. They can take down a whitetail deer, even an adult, not to mention the crop damage."

Dr. Brook says it would be impossible to eradicate the super pigs. But researchers in the U.S. and Canada have begun a program they call "Squeal on Pigs," which urges people to report any wild pig they may glimpse, say while walking the dog or outside the Denny's. And they have fixed GPS collars around some, to track them back to their friends. Who's squealing now?

Experts thought cross-breeding domestic pigs with wild boars would develop a hardy new stock. But now these super pigs range so freely, and wreak such mayhem, it might remind us that bold new solutions to current problems often shine brightest on paper, on screen or in a lab. Then they run smack into real life. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Marble Canyon, Ariz. — Three California condors have died from avian flu in northern Arizona and authorities are trying to determine what killed five others in the flock, the National Park Service announced Friday.

A sick female condor suspected of having lead poisoning was found dead on March 20 and testing showed it had Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), the park service said.

Two other birds later found dead also tested positive, while test results aren't yet completed for five others, the park service said.

The birds are part of a population that moves throughout northern Arizona and southern Utah, including Grand Canyon National Park, the park service said.

The Peregrine Fund, which manages the Arizona-Utah flock, also captured five other birds that seemed ill and sent them to a wildlife rescue in Phoenix. One bird died and the other four have been quarantined, officials said.

Exposure to the virus is expected to rise during the condors' northward spring migration.

HPAI hasn't been detected in other populations in California or Mexico's Baja California, according to the park service.

Avian flu occurs mainly in birds including domestic chickens, but it has been found in other animals, wild and domestic, in all U.S. states except Hawaii.

Humans are considered to be at low risk from HPAI, although there have been reported infections.

The California condor is one of the world's largest birds with a wingspan of up to 10 feet (3 meters). The birds once patrolled the sky from Mexico to British Columbia. Condors can live for 60 years and fly vast distances, which is why their range can extend into several states.

The population plummeted to the brink of extinction in the 1970s because of hunting, habitat destruction and lead poisoning from animals eating shot with lead bullets.

In the 1980s, wildlife officials captured the last remaining 22 condors and took them to the San Diego and Los Angeles zoos to be protected and bred in captivity. The birds were then released into sanctuaries and national parks where they can be monitored.

The birds have been protected as an endangered species by federal law since 1967 and by California state law since 1971.

California condors have been making a comeback in the wild and now occupy parts of California's Central Coast, Arizona, Utah and Baja California, Mexico. The total wild population now numbers more than 300 birds. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Chinook salmon fishing off the California coast will be called off until next spring in anticipation that a near-record-low number of fish will return to the state's rivers to spawn.

The recommendation was made by the Pacific Fishery Management Council, a federal commission that oversees West Coast fisheries. It will need to be approved by the National Marine Fisheries Service by May 16.

The measure, unseen in 14 years, would temporarily ban both commercial and recreational salmon fishing in the state. Much of the fishing off the coast of neighboring Oregon would also be canceled until 2024.

Chinook salmon are the "largest and most highly prized" of all the salmon in the Pacific ocean, according to the council. But over the years, the species has become increasingly endangered as a result of drought, heat waves and agriculture.

The decision to cancel the salmon fishing season is expected to take a toll on the $1.4 billion fishing industry, which supports 23,000 jobs in the state.

"The economic impact of closing a good portion of the west coast ocean salmon fishery will negatively impact the people that participate in the fishery, and the small businesses in coastal communities that rely on the salmon fishery," Merrick Burden, the council's executive director, said in a statement.

2009 was the last time salmon fishing was halted in the region

Salmon depend on clean and cold water, particularly in rivers and streams where they migrate and spawn. But there is less of it as a result of California's extreme drought. Farming and grazing, which tend to contaminate waterways with sediments and chemicals, have also taken a toll on fish.

Federal researchers predict that fewer than 170,000 adult fall Chinook salmon will return to the Sacramento River this year — which is one of the lowest forecasts recorded since 2008. Similarly, fewer than 104,000 are expected to reach the Klamath River — which is the second lowest estimate since such research began in 1997.

The last time that the region shut down its salmon fishing season to help the population recover was in 2009. At the time, about 122,200 adult fall Chinook salmon were forecast to return to the Sacramento River.

The Klamath River fall-run Chinook salmon were declared overfished in 2018. According to federal researchers, the Sacramento River fall Chinook salmon are also approaching an overfished condition.

"This is a decades-long trend, and the past few years of record drought only further stressed our salmon populations," Charlton H. Bonham, the director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said in a press release about the findings.

At large, about 23 out of the 31 genetically distinct kinds of salmon and trout in California are at risk of going extinct sometime in the next century, according to a 2017 report published by the University of California, Davis, and the conservation group California Trout.

The recent wetter weather in California has been "good news," fishery scientists described earlier this week. Federal and state agencies are also working on the largest river restoration and dam removal project in the country's history at the Klamath Basin in California to help recover the salmon population.

Amy Souers Kober, a spokesperson for American Rivers, which monitors dam removals and advocates for river restoration, estimates that more than 300 miles of salmon habitat in the California river and its tributaries would benefit. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Of all the things to go wrong midair in the cockpit of a plane, finding a venomous snake under the pilot's seat must surely be one of the worst scenarios.

So spare a thought for South African pilot Rudolf Erasmus.

"I felt this little cold sensation underneath my shirt where my hip is situated — but basically where you've got your little love handles," he tells NPR.

When he looked down, the pilot was surprised to see a highly venomous Cape cobra under his seat.

Erasmus felt the slithering stowaway as he was piloting a private flight from South Africa's Western Cape to the northeastern town of Nelspruit on Monday.

"As I turned to my left and looked down, I could see the head of the snake receding back underneath my seat," he says. "At which point there was a moment of stunned silence, to be brutally honest."

Erasmus decided to turn the light aircraft around and make an emergency landing at the closest airport of Welkom.

"I then informed my passengers of what was going on... but everybody remained calm," he recounted.

A Cape cobra bite can kill someone in as little as an hour. Erasmus says his first thoughts were for his passengers.

"I was more afraid of what the snake might do. Luckily it didn't strike anyone, otherwise that would have changed or complicated the whole situation," he says.

The incident has drawn comparisons to the cult 2006 film Snakes on a Plane, in which an FBI agent played by Samuel L. Jackson lets loose an expletive-laden tirade when he discovers the plane he's on is full of venomous snakes.

Erasmus says he'd seen the movie some time ago and the tirade was playing out inside his own head. "That's how I felt at some point," he says, laughing.

Erasmus has been praised by South African civil aviation commissioner Poppy Khosa, who called him "a hero" and said he "saved all lives on board."

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About one-fifth of the world's entire population of North Atlantic right whales were all spotted hanging out in Cape Cod, Mass., heading into the weekend.

Between 60 to 70 right whales, including a mother and calf, were seen feeding outside the east end of the Cape Cod Canal in the Cape Cod Bay on Friday, according to the Massachusetts Environmental Police.

Scientists believe that fewer than 350 North Atlantic right whales, an endangered species, remain.

The wildlife officials sent out two patrol vessels to protect the whales from boat traffic.

By Saturday, the whales had seemingly moved on. The MEP did not provide details about where they might have been headed.

"No right whales have been spotted in the vicinity of the Canal today," the officials said in an emailed statement.

The New England coast, a foraging area for the marine mammal, is one of the North Atlantic right whale's two critical habitats designated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries. The other critical region — where some right whales migrate in the fall for feeding, nursery and calving habitat — spans from coastal waters off of southeast North Carolina to northeast Florida.

Meanwhile, crews have been working to untangle a North Atlantic right whale wrapped in fishing rope in the Cape Cod Bay. A team from the nonprofit Center for Coastal Studies managed to remove 200 feet of rope from the whale, the center said on Friday, but the whale remains entangled. The rescue team is monitoring sea and weather conditions for another attempt to untangle the whale.

While right whale casualties are not well documented, entanglement in fishing gear is one of the greatest threats to the animal, according to NOAA, killing at least nine right whales since 2017. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Human attempts to kill cockroaches with sugary poison have had an unintended consequence: It has cramped the bugs' sex lives.

But now, some roaches appear to have tweaked the recipe for the sweet substance that males use to woo females — allowing the bugs to be fruitful and multiply once more.

The discovery, which scientists described in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, offers a window into a surprising adaptation from one of humanity's most intractable foes.

"Cockroaches are more than just pests," says Jessica Ware, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History who wasn't involved in the research. "This is a beautiful evolutionary ecology example."

Blattella germanica, the German cockroach, has evolved to live only in human environments. It's our top indoor pest, a species that keeps managing to adapt to our attempts to eradicate them.

Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, is very familiar with these insects — and with the trappings of roach romance.

In his lab, he deposits a female German cockroach in a dish. After a few minutes, he adds another roach.

"There we go, I just introduced a male," he says. Each insect is the size of a lima bean.

A pheromone wafts off female roaches like this one like an intoxicating perfume, which lures males in. It seems to be working here. "See, he's starting to follow the female," Schal observes.

Once the two make contact, he raises his wings. This exposes a gland on his back, from which he secretes a "nuptial gift" — a sweet chemical slurry that the female consumes. But to lap it up, she needs to mount the male.

"That places the female in a perfect position," Schal explains. "While she feeds, the male has this telescoping penis. He extends that penis to the end of the female and inserts it."

The penis has a hook on it, which the male uses to lock onto the female's genitalia for 90 minutes — the length of time it takes him to create a sperm package, which he then transfers to the female.

So when it comes to making baby roaches, having a tasty nuptial gift is key. That's why these gifts are often full of glucose, a simple sugar that's a basic source of energy for many living things.

Female cockroach accepts nuptial gift

Credit: Ayako Wada-Katsumata

And it's this love for glucose that pest controllers started exploiting in the mid-1980s. They made baits laced with an insecticide that were brimming with glucose or other sugars that quickly break down into glucose. The results were immediate: lots of dead German cockroaches.

But then, a few years later, a pest-control company noticed something unsettling. "A population of cockroaches in a Florida apartment just could not be controlled," says Schal.

It turns out that some of the roaches had evolved a glucose aversion. Glucose no longer tasted sweet to them. It was bitter. "And therefore," Schal says, "they refused to eat the bait."

"In the last 10 years, there's been a dramatic increase in the use of baits," he says. "And therefore, I suspect that populations of glucose-averse cockroaches have increased dramatically."

This alteration gave German cockroaches a major leg up in their arms race against us. But it also created a problem for them: Any glucose in the male's nuptial gift is now repulsive to these glucose-averse females.

"Now this female, she immediately interrupts feeding and dismounts the male," says Schal. "She simply walks away. So this poor male has just lost his opportunity to copulate with the female. Suddenly, this adaptive trade becomes maladaptive in a context of sexual interaction."

Female cockroach rejects nuptial gift

Credit: Ayako Wada-Katsumata

But if there's one thing you can count on, it's that roaches beget more roaches. So when facing an existential crisis like the inability to woo a partner, they always seem to find a workaround. In this case, their solution consists of two genetic changes.

"The first one," says Schal, "is that the male changed the chemistry of the nuptial gift that he offers the female."

That is, he's tinkered with the recipe, reducing the amount of glucose and another simple sugar. And he's elevated the amount of a sugar called maltotriose, which the females love and which doesn't break down into glucose as readily. This means the gift stays sweet.

The second change involves the amount of time it takes for the male to lock onto the female's genitalia. Usually, it takes three to four seconds. But the males have managed to shave off more than a second "before the female senses the presence of glucose in her mouth," says Schal.

"Overall, the male solution is to buy more time but speed up his copulatory attempt," he says.

Ware, the entomologist who wasn't involved in the research, applauds the new work.

"It shows how this elaborate behavior [of this nuptial gift], which evolved presumably over hundreds of millions of years, has in just a short period of time been altered dramatically by humans," she says.

So perhaps now is a good time to reformulate the bait, maybe by adding some kind of fat, says Schal. However, even if we succeed in tricking the roaches once more, it probably won't be long before their numbers begin to crawl upwards again. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Nearly five decades after being captured and held in the Miami Seaquarium, Lolita the orca will finally be able to return to the Pacific to live out the rest of her days.

During a news conference Thursday, the Miami Seaquarium announced its plans to move the nearly 5,000-pound killer whale — who was initially called Tokitae, or Toki — to her original home in the waters of the Pacific Northwest.

And after years of growing pressure from animal rights activists calling for Lolita's release from the Miami aquarium, officials announced their plans for the "process of returning [Lolita] to her home waters."

The news conference was held in part by Miami Seaquarium, the Florida nonprofit Friends of Lolita and the philanthropist and owner of the NFL's Indianapolis Colts, Jim Irsay.

"This is a very special day," Eduardo Albor, CEO of the Dolphin Company, said during the news conference. "It is amazing to see how many things you can achieve in one year when actions take place of words."

The Seaquarium signed a deal with Friends of Lolita to relocate the orca, in addition to receiving financial assistance from Irsay.

"I'm excited about being part of Lolita's journey," Irsay said. "Ever since I was a little kid I've loved whales, just loved whales because [of] the power, the greatness of them and how gentle they are."

Irsay told reporters that the cost to relocate Lolita could be a "big number," as officials haven't disclosed a specific budget or number tied to her relocation. As of now, the plan for Lolita is to build her an ocean sanctuary with netting, where she will receive constant care from trainers.

"She's lived this long to have this opportunity and my only mission ... is to help this whale to get free," Irsay said.

Lolita was captured from the Pacific coast near Seattle nearly 50 years ago at the age of 4. The orca, who is believed to be 57 years old, was finally able to retire last spring from exhibition shows under an agreement with federal regulators.

She is currently the oldest orca to be held in captivity.

Over the last decade, animal rights groups have held demonstrations and filed lawsuits seeking to improve Lolita's conditions at the Seaquarium. Members of the Lummi Nation in Seattle have even threatened to sue for her release. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Federal law enforcement is investigating a group of 33 swimmers who allegedly harassed a pod of dolphins in Hawaii, the state's Department of Land and Natural Resources said this week.

Drone videos and photographs allegedly show the group swimming in the Hōnaunau Bay on Sunday and "aggressively pursuing, corralling, and harassing the pod," the DLNR said.

Officers with the DLNR's Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement flagged down the group while they were in the water and alerted them of their violation. When the swimmers got back to land, officers from the DLNR and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were there waiting.

DLNR officers are authorized "to enforce federal marine laws, such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act," which was amended in 2021 to prohibit swimming, approaching or being within 50 yards of a Hawaiian spinner dolphin within two nautical miles of the shores of the main Hawaiian islands and other designated waters. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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In 2011, a farmer in Oklahoma had a bunch of sick pigs. The animals had what looked like the flu.

"Just like a person with respiratory disease, the pigs had labored breathing, maybe a runny nose, cough and potentially a fever," says virologist Benjamin Hause.

At the time, Hause was working at the company Newport Laboratories, which develops custom vaccines for livestock. "We would detect and isolate pathogens from animals. Then we would grow the pathogens in the lab, kill them and formulate vaccines," says Hause, who's now an executive at Cambridge Technologies, another vaccine company.

The Oklahoma farmer took a few samples from the pigs' noses — a bit like how you swab your nose for an at-home COVID test. He sent the samples to Hause so he could figure out what was making the pigs sick.

Hause immediately thought that the regular flu virus was infecting the pigs. "We expected to find influenza A," he says, "because that's the most common problem." It's also the same type of virus that often causes the seasonal flu in people.

But when he and his colleagues grew the virus in the lab, they quickly realized they were wrong. Hause was shocked by what he saw.

"I thought, 'What is this thing? We've never seen anything like this before,' " he says. "Right away, we were concerned that this virus could infect people."

Most infections are a mystery

For decades, scientists thought that animal viruses seldom jump into people. They thought these spillovers were extremely rare. But in the past few years, studies have been showing that this thinking is wrong.

"I don't think [spillover] is extremely rare," says evolutionary virologist Stephen Goldstein at the University of Utah. "I mean, we know this because when people start looking, people find it."

In fact, there's likely a whole group of animal viruses making people sick all over the world that doctors know nothing about. They've been hidden. They masquerade as a regular cold, flu or even pneumonia.

For example, if you have a respiratory infection in the U.S., doctors can identify the pathogen causing the infection only about 40% of the time. There's growing evidence that the other 60% of infections could be caused by animal viruses such as a dog coronavirus found in Malaysia, Haiti and Arkansas, or even possibly the same virus Hause and his colleagues found in those pigs. Recent studies have made clear that this virus floats in the air at farms and is likely infecting people who work there.

It's everywhere they looked

Hause and his colleagues eventually figured out that they had stumbled upon an entirely new influenza virus, unrelated to the ones known to infect people. "It's completely different than influenza A," says virologist Feng Li at the University of Kentucky, who co-led the discovery of the new virus.

Once scientists started looking for signs of infections in other animals, besides pigs, they found it nearly everywhere they looked: in sheep, goats, camels, horses.

But Li says they hit the jackpot when they looked in one particular animal: cows.

"The percentage of cows in the U.S. that have antibodies to influenza D is way, way high," he says. "Whenever you look at herds, about 50% of individual cows have high levels of antibodies to this virus. That was really surprising."

And it's not just cows in Oklahoma but across the whole country, from west to east and north to south, Li says. "From California to Vermont, and North Dakota to Texas, cows are infected with this virus. They are the primary reservoir for the virus."

On top of that, this virus is incredibly stable, Li says. "It can survive at high temperatures and in acidic environments," he says. "That's why scientists have found influenza D in the air at airports in the U.S." They've also found it in the air at chicken farms in Malaysia.

And so the question has become: If this virus can infect so many different animals and is found in so many cows, does it make people sick? Especially the people who work closely with cows on dairy farms or ranches?

Look what they found in human noses

In 2019 and 2020, scientists at Boston University ran a small and simple experiment. They went to five dairy farms in the West and Southwest, and they washed out the workers' noses before and after their shifts working on the farms. Then they looked for influenza D inside the washes.

The researchers studied only 31 workers over the course of only five days. But they found quite a lot of the virus. "We found about two-thirds of the participants were exposed to influenza D at some point during our study period," says environmental epidemiologist Jessica Leibler, who led the study. They published their findings in November in the journal Zoonoses.

While Leibler and colleagues tested only a small number of workers, the high percentage who had the virus in their noses suggests that influenza D is quite likely common on dairy farms in the Southwest. If the virus was rare on the farms, then finding it at such high levels by chance would be highly unlikely. "To me, the findings suggest that if you look for influenza D, you probably will find it," she says.

Now Leibler and her team looked only for an exposure to influenza D. But previous studies have looked for signs of infections in cattle workers in Florida. Specifically, the study tested for influenza D antibodies in the workers' blood.

"They found a really, really high percentage of workers with influenza D antibodies," Leibler says. "Again, it was again a small study, but more than 90% of the workers had antibodies to influenza D, which implies these workers weren't only exposed, but they were also infected."

In contrast, the prevalence of influenza D antibodies in people who don't work on farms was much lower. Only about 18% of the general population showed signs of being infected, researchers reported in the Journal of Clinical Virology.

Now, no one knows yet if influenza D causes any symptoms in people. But altogether, these studies indicate influenza D is likely what's called an emerging virus, Leibler says. It's jumping into people who work with animals, such as dairy farmers, but it's not likely spreading much beyond that.

"This doesn't seem to be something, right now, that the general public is exposed to in a large way," she says. "But it's something that's a concern for these front-line workers exposed on farms."

That's because there's a real risk that the virus could adapt to people as more and more workers are infected, she says. "Influenza viruses mutate rapidly and frequently. So, over time, influenza D can evolve. It could increase its ability to infect humans and be more easily transmitted among humans or it could become more virulent" and start making people sicker.

For that reason, Leibler and her colleagues are calling for more research on, and surveillance of, this new flu to ensure the safety of the dairy workers but also to ensure that the virus doesn't surprise the world as SARS-CoV-2 did.

In fact, Stephen Goldstein of the University of Utah says, to stop the next pandemic before it occurs, scientists and officials should focus on these viruses that have already made the jump into people instead of cataloging viruses in wild animals.

"Doing virus discovery in wild animals is interesting from a scientific standpoint, but from the standpoint of predicting pandemics, I think it's a ridiculous concept," he says. "Instead we need surveillance – active surveillance – in humans and also in domestic animals."

Currently, at least one company – Cambridge Technologies – is working on a vaccine against influenza D for animals. But in general, very few farms are looking out for the virus in animals or workers, Jessica Liebler says.

For comments on this topic, NPR reached out to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the lobbying group for cattle ranchers. A spokesperson referred us to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in emails that, at this point, there isn't any evidence that Influenza D is causing significant harm to livestock, so there aren't currently any surveillance systems in place for livestock or workers.

As Liebler points out, officials and scientists had a similar view of coronaviruses for a long time – that they weren't a major concern because they only caused a cold.

"Sometimes an animal virus doesn't seem to make people very sick and so scientists brush it away as not really important," Leibler says. "That's what scientists thought about coronaviruses for a long time — that they weren't a major concern because they only caused a cold.

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Ralphie the "fire-breathing demon dog" has been adopted again, and hopefully this time for good, after a series of unsuccessful attempts, his former shelter said Friday.

Among more than 700 email inquiries, a man named Jason who trains dogs for the Department of Energy in Tennessee, will be Ralphie the Frenchie's new caretaker, the Niagara SPCA in New York said.

Jason also owns another Frenchie, a Dachshund and a German shepherd. The latter two had biting problems before living with Jason, according to the SPCA. The shelter previously said a household with other pets would not be a good fit for Ralphie, but he was sent to a six-week training program and that has helped him overcome "his reactivity around other dogs," the shelter said.

The Niagara SPCA said it believes Jason will provide Jason with structure and a proper outlet.

Ralphie was sent back to the shelter three times before being adopted by Jason. The first time, his owners took him to boarding and training classes, but the shelter said Ralphie insisted on being the boss of everyone. The second time, his new owners said he had a tendency to annoy their older dog and he was rehomed two weeks later. The third time, in February, a woman adopted Ralphie, but only kept him for two weeks when she realized he was more than she could handle, according to an SPCA post.

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The Latest IPCC Report Is Full Of Warnings—And HopeIt’s that time of year: another IPCC report has hit the presses. These reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are like a check up—to let us know how we’re doing on the climate front and what Earth’s future is projected to look like. And to no one’s surprise, this year’s report is full of warnings. But also, it has a lot of room for hope.

Maggie Koerth, senior science writer at FiveThirtyEight, joins guest host Charles Bergquist to talk more about the report and other science news of the week. They chat about a 3D printed rocket that didn’t quite make it to space, the mysterious Oumuamua space object, the rise of dangerous fungal infections in the U.S., why researchers are so excited about figuring out Beethoven’s cause of death, and—of course—new research about octopuses’ brain waves.

An Underwater Volcano Off The Oregon Coast Sheds Light On EruptionsA thick blue-white haze envelops the Research Vessel Thompson as it floats 250 miles off the Oregon coast. Akel Kevis-Stirling’s orange life vest and blue hardhat are vivid pops of color in the fog. “You guys ready to go?” he calls into his radio. The person on the other end crackles an affirmative. “Copy that,” he says and looks up across the rear deck of the research ship. “Alright, straps!”

The crew of the ROV Jason jumps into action, removing the straps that secure the cube-shaped submarine to the deck. The remotely-operated sub, with a base the size of a queen mattress, is loaded with scientific instruments it will carry down to the seafloor. Kevis-Stirling gets final permission from the Thompson’s bridge for the launch. “Ok, here we go. Jason coming up and over the side,” he calls. “Take it away Tito!” The crane operator, Tito Callasius, lifts the submarine and swings it over the side of the ship into the water. A plume of fine bubbles rises through the waves as Jason starts its mile-long descent to the Axial Seamount, a deep-sea volcano that’s erupted three times in the past 25 years.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

March Mammal Madness Wants To Hear You RoarWhen mid-March rolls around, your news online—and maybe your conversations with friends and colleagues—can sometimes get taken over by discussions about the tournament. From debating your bracket selections to conversations about last night’s matchup, or celebrating big upsets and debating whether this is finally the year the bat-eared fox goes all the way, it can feel all-consuming.

March Mammal Madness is an exercise in science communication involving a 64-animal bracket and nightly simulated combat matchups between animals—where the outcomes are determined by chance and specific species traits found in the scientific literature. This is the 10th year of the tournament, which this month has some 650,000 students around the world predicting battle outcomes on the road to the Elite Trait, the Final Roar, and the championship match.

Dr. Katie Hinde, a biological anthropologist in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, and ringleader of March Mammal Madness, joins SciFri’s Charles Bergquist to talk about the keys to success in the tournament. Want to participate yourself? It’s not too late—you can find the tournament bracket and more information about March Mammal Madness on the ASU Libraries site.

Listen To The Ethereal Sounds Of SpaceYou’ve probably heard that if you scream in space, no one will hear a thing. Space is a vacuum, so sound waves don’t have anything to bounce off of. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that space is silent. A team of researchers are taking data from a variety of telescopes and assigning them sounds, creating song-length sonifications of beloved space structures like black holes, nebulas, galaxies, and beyond.

The album, called “Universal Harmonies” aims to bring galaxies to life and allow more people, such as those who are blind and low-vision, to engage with outer space. Guest host Flora Lichtman talks with two of the scientists behind “Universal Harmonies,” Dr. Kimberly Arcand, visualization scientist at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, and Dr. Matt Russo, astrophysicist and musician at the University of Toronto.

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A trap door with silken hinges might sound like something out of a fairy tale, but it's actually something that comes out of some spiders — and there's a new species to add to the list. Researchers in Australia discovered a rare, giant species of trapdoor spider found only in Central Queensland.

Its name, Euoplos dignitas, comes from the Latin word meaning dignity or greatness, "reflecting the impressive size and nature of the spider," the Queensland Museum said in a statement.

"It's a big, beautiful species," Michael Rix, the principal curator of arachnology at the Queensland Museum Network, said in a video announcing the finding. The researchers' goal was to "formally, scientifically document this new species."

A spokesperson for the Queensland Museum said the spider is more than an inch long, or about the size of an Australian 50 cent coin, which is slightly larger than an American half-dollar.

Euoplos dignitas lives in open woodland habitats, building burrows in Central Queensland's black soils. Like many species of trapdoor spiders, it constructs its burrows with silken-hinged doors, and it feeds by opening the trap door and snatching passing insects.

These tropical and subtropical spiders are timid and not dangerous to humans, though trapdoor spider bites may cause pain and swelling.

Much of the newly discovered spider's habitat has been lost to land clearing, meaning it's likely an endangered species. The species "is now known to everyone and can be protected," said Jeremy Wilson, a research assistant in arachnology at the Queensland Museum Network, in the announcement video. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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A wolverine has been spotted outside its usual roaming range for the first time in more than 30 years, according to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The animal, which is the largest member of the weasel family and classified as a threatened species in Oregon, was spotted by two people fishing in the Columbia River near Portland on Monday. The animals typically reside in the Wallowa Mountains in northeastern Oregon, and have not been seen outside that area in decades.

"Given the proximity to Portland, we were very surprised when this report came in and elated when we were able to verify the sighting," ODFW district wildlife biologist David Keiter said.

ODFW and nonprofit Cascadia Wild set up cameras and hair-collecting devices to try to cross-reference other wolverine genetic samples to see where it came from. Though, the wolverine is not likely to return to the area, as they travel up to 30 miles a day, ODFW said.

"It is likely that this animal was dispersing as the habitat in the area doesn't meet the life history requirements of wolverines," it said.

Wolverines are mostly found in Alaska and Canada, but have populations in Oregon, Wyoming, Montana, Washington and Idaho. They were thought to be eradicated in Oregon in 1936, and while there have been some reports since then, their numbers are still low in the area. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Last month, Chloe Veltman reported on artists who've found inspiration in their pets: Pablo Picasso made studies of Lump, an adored dachshund; Frida Kahlo's catalogue is packed with self-portraits featuring her pet monkeys and parrots.

We were curious to see what other pet-inspired artworks were out there, so we asked you to share some of yours, and dear readers, you did not disappoint. Below is just a small sampling of the hundreds of masterpieces we received. (Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

As a student of photography and an animal lover, Andrea Jones of Urbana, Ill., says she always loved Eadweard Muybridge's Animals in Motion series. So she enlisted her husky, Lucy, to riff on those famous images.

"I often took pictures of Lucy from a balcony inside my house that overlooked the living room floor, where Lucy frequently lay sleeping," Jones explains. "Sleeping Lucy is very much not in motion, but with the images of her many different sleeping positions strung together, it looks like she's performing some impressive gymnastics."

Also in the "let sleeping dogs lie" (but then make art out it) category was this cozy portrait of Nelson curled up in his favorite chair, by Chana Snyder of Massachusetts.

The clothes make the dog for (from left) Murphy Moo, Chloe the Yorkie and Countess Ravioli.

Murphy Moo is a pug beagle mix. Murphy's human, Michelle Wickstrom of Green River, Wyo., is a high school art teacher who made this small acrylic on canvas as an example for her class. "I painted Murphy as a Tudor gentleman," Wickstrom says.

Krista Nussey of Fort Worth, Texas, painted the center portrait for a good friend. Chloe the Yorkie is getting up in years, "but she's always had the most vibrant, sassy personality," Nussey says. "I think I captured her essence with this painting."

And as for Countess Ravoli, Ryan Parker of Portland, Ore., says the Old English bulldog "definitely deserves the royal treatment in gouache, watercolor, and pencil in the style of classical portrait masters. ... She's always the life of the party and produces equal parts affection and slobber."

A horse is a horse of course of course unless of course that horse is also your muse, as was the case for Samantha Reeves of Lexington, Ky., and Kate Kosnoff of Indiana.

"I carved and tooled a portrait of my wife's draft horse filly, Praline," Reeves explains, of the artwork on the left. "The base is vegetable-tanned leather, cut, stamped and sculpted to her portrait. Then I hand-painted the alcohol dyes to match her color, with a touch of white paint for her markings. As a bonus, I took a lock of Praline's hair, braided it, and sewed it onto the portrait as a keepsake."

On the right, you can see Bambino, an 8-year-old Hanoverian gelding. "In this photo, he is wearing a dried floral garland, handmade with flowers grown in Indiana," Kosnoff says. "He is reaching for a cookie, held by a handler just outside of the frame."

In creative portraiture, Joan Neubecker of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, took a page from 19th century photography when she set up this scene of herself shrouded, with her 11-month old Lynx Point Siamese, Wiley, on her lap.

"Back in the 19th century it was common for the photographer to photograph the mother hidden beneath a blanket and holding the baby," Neubecker says. "Often because the baby would not sit still unless held by the mother and it also put emphasis on the baby."

On the right, The Mona Lisa holds Gravy the cat — Hannah Little of Nevada, adds Gravy into famous artworks, and then puts these revised masterpieces up on her Instagram.

The Great & Powerful Oz ("Ozzie" for short) is a citron-crested cockatoo with an illustrious history. "We got Oz 40 years ago, tamed him and trained him to be in our magic act," writes Dianne Gerard of Cleveland, Ohio. "We performed in 25 states and have traveled to 40 countries. While he has been retired for a long time, he is still very entertaining!"

Doopers the cat is so sweet he inspired a cookie in his likeness. "An innovative sculptural form, this cookie represents commitment, enduring loyalty and candy," says Allison Raeck of Lansing, Mich. "I like to think the Tootsie Roll hair and Swedish Fish lips were a creative touch."

Also thinking beyond the canvas, Maria Bida of Dedham, Maine, made a snow sculpture of Tipper, a childhood dog (left), while Carlos Ferreira of Katonah, N.Y., immortalized Dominic the cat in Legos (center).

On the far right, is a cross stitch homage to Baku, a "notorious seat-thief" by Jamie Riley of De Pere, Wisc. "When I learned my cat (at age 14) had an inoperable tumor in his jawline, I started working on something to remember him by," Riley explains. The cross stitch sits on Riley's dresser. "I think of him daily — 2 1/2 years after his death."

Katherine Howard ("Kitty" for short) is named after Catherine Howard, the fifth (and ultimately beheaded) wife of King Henry VIII. Sabrina Burgoyne at Brigham Young University-Idaho, made this etching of Kitty using an X-ACTO knife on a black scratchboard.

In feathered friends, Rayah Jaymes lives in the San Francisco Bay area and has landlords who don't allow pets, but Jaymes' friends have parakeets (left). "I love all of my friends' pets and love to draw them!" Jaymes says. "Meet The Tonyas — they're so precious and animated!"

Across the country, are Nautilus, Green Bean, Nimbus and Nocturne, (right), four budgies shown in miniature paintings by Vivian Rosalee of Lowell, Mass.

Laura Kuisle of Rochester, Minn., made this photograph of her cats Luna (left), and Allie. "I caught both cats looking up, trying to smell the fresh spring air though the screen at the top of the door," Kuisle says. "It looks as through they are recharging in the sunlight."

There were so many extraordinary textures in the artworks you sent it was very hard to choose, but here are two of our favorites:

Zizu, left, is "brother, best friend and autism service dog," for Harrison Huguenin of New Jersey. "He likes to walk with me and sit by me in school (which I attend virtually) and when I do art. He is a big furry Great Pyrenees. I like to paint using different things. I painted this picture of Zizu using a fork. It was a lot of fun!"

And, on the right, Jess Burton of Ypsilanti, Mich., made this rendering of Remy, a standard poodle, using ink on watercolor paper.

Benny, Petey and Billy — collectively known as "The Goatie Boys" — graced the front of a holiday greeting card one year. Sandra "Sam" Adkins of Kalamazoo, Mich., says the Goatie Boys are "handsome, friendly and smart" and "fun to draw."

Lori Theis of Alameda, Calif., says she doesn't consider herself particularly artistic, but a year after she lost Chuckie (left), at age 14, she stumbled onto a class focused on making a mosaic of your pet. "I was still very sad and missed him greatly," Theis says. "I was so very pleased with the finished product and I think it captures his lovely spirit. I have it proudly on display in my dining room and smile each time I see it."

Whiskers, a domestic tuxedo cat who died of cancer, is immortalized in stained glass (right). "I made a kitchen cabinet door with her likeness," explains Steven Taschereau of Burrillville, R.I. "The eyes are painted on the back sides of glass beads so that it looks like she's watching you as you move around the room."

Each year, Jillian Emmons of Providence, R.I., makes a tree ornament for her twin boys who were born just before Christmas. "The ornament must represent something from the past year, is stamped with the year, and is presented to them on their birthday. The idea is that over time the tree will be covered in memories of life. ... Decorating the tree has become a trip down memory lane that we all cherish." This ornament shows Bucket, the family's miniature Australian Shepherd.

And last, but certainly not least, Louie was adopted from the Washington Humane Society (now Humane Rescue Alliance) when he was about a year old. "He was super skinny, he had a tail that had been broken and healed incorrectly, and they told us he had been living on the street," says Laura Smythe of Cheverly, Md. "I did this portrait of him when we'd had him for about two years and I wanted to capture his sweet, scrappy and curious nature."

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ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Gopher tortoises imperiled by loss of habitat largely caused by human development should be placed on the endangered species list in four southern states, environmental groups said Wednesday as they prepared to sue the federal government over the issue.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Nokuse Education filed a notice of intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its decision last year not to list the gopher tortoise as endangered or threatened in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and eastern Alabama.

The center noted there are some state-level protections for the burrowing tortoises but those generally require the animals to be moved from a development site and do not protect their habitat overall. The tortoises have lost 97% of the longleaf pine savannas where they lived for millions of years in the South.

"Without lifesaving Endangered Species Act protection for our gopher tortoises, urban sprawl will keep driving them ever closer to extinction," said attorney Elise Bennett, the center's Florida director.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has projected that 75% of the current gopher tortoise population will be lost by 2100. The burrows they dig with shovel-like front legs, which can extend 30 feet (9 meters) underground, also support an estimated 360 other species that use them.

The tortoises are listed as endangered in parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and western Alabama but efforts to list them in their eastern range have proved futile.

The Fish and Wildlife Service concluded in October 2022 that "the risk factors acting on the gopher tortoise and its habitat, either singly or in combination, are not of sufficient imminence, scope, or magnitude" to warrant threatened or endangered status. That decision led to the pending lawsuit.

Gopher tortoises once inhabited more than 92 million acres (37 million hectares) of land in the southeastern U.S. but now have only a fraction of that space due to human development, agriculture, climate change, invasive species and other issues, according to the center's lawsuit notice.

They can live up to 80 years but reach reproductive age slowly.

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A pod of eight dolphins washed ashore in New Jersey, all of which have died, according to a local animal rescue organization.

Two common dolphins, an adult and a calf were first found on a sandbar in Sandy Hook Bay last Wednesday. The adult had already died and will be buried on the scene, but rescuers with the Marine Mammal Stranding Center were able to lift the calf from the sandbar onto the pier amid winds exceeding 40 mph and temperatures in the low 30s. It was then determined the calf was too weak to survive and would need to be euthanized, the organization said.

By Tuesday, six additional dolphins were reported ashore.

"The remaining six dolphins were assessed by our veterinarian and their conditions were rapidly deteriorating," Marine Mammal Stranding Center said. "The decision was made to humanely euthanize the dolphins to prevent further suffering, as returning them to the ocean would have only prolonged their inevitable death."

All eight dolphins have been sent to the New Jersey State Lab for necropsies, or animal autopsies.

"We share in the public's sorrow for these beautiful animals, and hope that the necropsies will help us understand the reason for their stranding," the agency said. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Badgers burrowing under rail tracks have halted trains in the northern and southern Netherlands, forcing lengthy cancellations on at least two lines.

All trains were halted Tuesday afternoon on a busy line between the southern cities of Den Bosch and Boxtel after the animals dug into a dike carrying rails. The national railway company said the line would be out of service for at least a week.

The digging means "the rails can subside and then the safety of train traffic can no longer be guaranteed," ProRail, the company that maintains the Dutch rail network said in a statement.

Earlier this month, badgers also burrowed under tracks near the northern village of Molkwerum in Friesland province, knocking a line out of service until next month while workers seek permission to shift the animals.

Badgers are protected animals in the Netherlands, so rail operators have to get permission to move them or disturb their habitat before repairs can begin.

John Voppen, CEO of ProRail, the company that maintains Dutch railroads, appealed for a speeding up of the procedures.

"In the interests of travelers and carriers, more space is needed to be able to take action more quickly," he said in a statement. "We are of course in urgent consultation with the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management about this."

ProRail says that badgers like digging into the steep sides of earthen dikes that carry many Dutch train tracks. That can cause the tracks to subside, endangering trains.

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Nobody ever said turtles worked quickly.

Though it took him nearly a century, the 90-year-old radiated tortoise known as Mr. Pickles is finally a dad.

The Houston Zoo announced on Thursday that he and his partner, 53-year-old Mrs. Pickles, recently welcomed three tortoise hatchlings: Dill, Gherkin and Jalapeño.

The births are a "big dill," says the zoo, because the radiated tortoise, native to Madagascar, is a critically endangered species whose numbers are in decline.

Radiated tortoises produce few offspring, according to zoo officials, and the species suffers from over-collection for illegal sales on the black market. Captive breeding programs have produced new radiated tortoises, but experts say the reptiles may go extinct in the wild.

First-time father Mr. Pickles is considered the most genetically valuable radiated tortoise in the Association of Zoos and Aquariums' Species Survival Plan.

Mr. and Mrs. Pickles have been an item since her arrival to the zoo in 1996.

It was only by chance that a herpetology keeper at the zoo saw Mrs. Pickles laying her eggs one recent day at closing time.

The zoo's animal care team uncovered the eggs and moved them to the Reptile & Amphibian House. Officials said otherwise the eggs likely wouldn't have hatched on their own, because Houston's soil isn't hospitable to Madagascar native tortoises.

Dill, Gherkin and Jalapeño are now living in the Reptile & Amphibian House until they grow big enough to join their parents.

The trio can be told apart by their shells, the zoo said: Jalapeño has the darkest shell, Dill's shell is lighter and Gherkin's lighter shell has a white dot in the center. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Most snails move slow, but these illicit gastropods crossed the Atlantic at hundreds of miles per hour.

Customs officials at Detroit Metropolitan Airport recently found six living snails inside a suitcase of a traveler who flew from Ghana, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced Friday.

Agriculture specialists confirmed that the creatures with dark brown stripes were indeed giant African snails — a prohibited, invasive breed that the U.S. diligently has worked to eradicate from the country for more than 50 years.

While they appear harmless, these land snails — usually the size of an average adult fist — are considered voracious pests that can feast on more than 500 types of plants and produce, including peanuts, beans and cucumbers. When those are not available, they will consume flowers, tree bark and even the paint and stucco off of houses.

Giant African snails also are known to carry parasites that can lead to meningitis and other diseases in humans. And they reproduce quickly, laying as many as 1,200 eggs in a single year.

When the snails were found living wild in southern Florida back in the 1960s, it took more than 10 years and $1 million to eradicate them. The were found to have invaded the state again in 2011, launching another decade-long removal effort.

Over the years, the animal has stubbornly reappeared in the U.S. — partly because they are a local delicacy in West Africa. When cooked properly, these snails can serve as finger food or bar snacks, Miami member station WLRN reported back in 2013. They're also sometimes kept as pets, the USDA says.

Today, giant African snails are believed to be in the wild in Florida, Hawaii and parts of the Caribbean, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

If you stumble on these creatures, federal authorities recommend contacting a local state department of agriculture or a local branch of the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Millions of dead fish have been found dead in an Australian river due to dangerously low oxygen levels in the water caused by receding flood waters, government officials said.

The fish were found in the Darling River, near the town of Menindee, and are mainly bony herring, though other species, such as murray cod, golden perch, silver perch and carp also died in an "ongoing" event, the agency said.

"The Bony Herring species typically booms and busts over time," the Department of Primary Industries in New South Wales stated in a social media posting. "It 'booms' in population numbers during flood times and can then experience significant mortalities or 'busts' when flows return to more normal levels

A heat wave in the area has further exacerbated the lower oxygen levels.

Mass fish kills were observed in late February on the Darling-Baaka River, The Associated Press reported. Additionally, mass fish kills occurred on the river at Menindee during severe drought conditions in late 2018 and early 2019. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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The World Health Organization is asking Chinese officials to release data that may show a link between raccoon dogs and the coronavirus. That left many wondering — what is a raccoon dog, anyway?

First, here's why we're talking about them. They were being sold at a seafood and meat market in Wuhan, China, where researchers found evidence of the coronavirus in January 2020. Data that was briefly posted on, and then removed from, an international database appeared to show that genetic material from raccoon dogs showed up in the same swabs as the virus that causes COVID, implying the animals could've been an initial host.

OK, so what are they?

In simple terms, they're a wild dog whose face looks like a raccoon's. In slightly more scientific terms, raccoon dogs are a member of the canid family with fur markings and head shapes similar to those of raccoons.

The omnivorous animal is native to East Asia, including parts of China, Korea and Japan. Breeding from the fur farming industry introduced thousands of them throughout the former Soviet Union, and they're now a widespread invasive species throughout northern and western Europe.

They prefer to live in forests and dense vegetation, as well as areas bordering water.

They're more closely related to foxes than to domesticated dogs. Raccoon dogs are a completely different species from coonhounds, which are a domesticated breed of scenthound also known as a coon dog.

Have they been linked to other diseases?

Yes. Raccoon dogs and related mammals sold for food at a a live animal market in China in 2003 were found to carry a coronavirus similar to the virus found in humans during a SARS coronavirus outbreak at the time. In 2004, Chinese health officials ordered the slaughter of 10,000 animals set to be sold at market, including raccoon dogs, after a man tested positive for a novel strain of the SARS virus and raised fears of another outbreak.

One 2022 study took samples from about 2,000 animals of 18 different species from across settings in China — including natural habitats, zoos and fur farms. It found that wild animals known to be eaten by humans, including raccoon dogs, carried 102 different viruses from 13 viral families.

Twenty-one of those pose a high risk to humans, researchers said, either because they had infected people before or had a history of jumping between species with ease.

Raccoon dogs specifically carried four canine coronaviruses that were genetically similar to those found in humans. They also carried enteric viruses, or viruses that are transmitted when infected fecal matter enters the mouth or nose.

Researchers said this evidence confirms the danger of live markets like the one in Wuhan.

"It's hard to think of a more effective way to ignite and fan the flames of an epidemic," evolutionary biologist and co-author of the study Edward Holmes told the journal Science. "We keep allowing these things to flourish and it's only a matter of time before we get another outbreak and perhaps another pandemic."

Still, they're so cute! Can I keep one?

No.

Raccoon dogs are wild animals, not domesticated pets. They live in large home ranges, meaning they need lots of space and are difficult to manage in enclosures or other small spaces, according to the U.K.'s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

They also have a strong odor because they use scent to communicate, making them a poor indoor house guest.

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Famous naturalist John James Audubon "did despicable things" and supported his work by buying and selling enslaved people — and that's according to the organization that bears his name. But the National Audubon Society's board of directors rejected the idea of changing its name this week, setting off resignations amid plans from local groups to rename themselves anyway.

This week's vote focused on whether the nonprofit should to decide whether to keep Audubon's name or change it. No new names were considered as possible alternatives.

The organization cited two main reasons for keeping Audubon's name: it's grappling with the critical challenge facing birds and other wildlife due to climate change and other pressures; and it believes the name of the group, founded some 50 years after Audubon's death, "has come to represent so much more than the work of one person."

Still, it added, "We must reckon with the racist legacy."

3 board members resigned

The debate over how to approach that legacy seems to have divided people at its highest levels: In an email to NPR, the society confirmed board members had resigned after the name decision.

While the NAS did not name the members individually, a leadership page on the group's website is currently missing the names of three board directors who were listed earlier this month: Sara Fuentes, Erin Giese and Stephen Tan, who served as a vice chair.

The three former board members did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.

In a message to NPR, National Audubon Society Board Chair Susan Bell said the body is "disappointed to lose these directors and the wisdom and dedication they brought." She cited the "diverse and reasoned perspectives that these directors – and others – have brought to this difficult conversation for our organization."

Local groups are nixing Audubon's name

Those criticizing the continued use of the Audubon name include leaders of the D.C. Audubon Society a chapter in the nation's capital that is moving ahead with a plan to rename itself.

"I think it is disappointing, but not surprising that the National Audubon Society decided to not change their name," chapter President Tykee James told NPR member station WAMU/DCist. "They don't listen to their chapter leaders, and I believe that this will divide the network even further."

Some of that division was seen on the national body's Facebook page, where commenters debated how the group's history should fit into the reckoning of America's racist legacy that has taken place in recent years.

"It's a missed opportunity to move away from an exclusive white male club shotgun ornithology image," one commenter wrote, "to something more appropriate to the times we live in."

A patchwork of conservation groups carry the Audubon name across the U.S.; some are local chapters affiliated with the national society, while others are independent. So far, at least five groups have dropped the Audubon name or are in the process of doing so.

The first to ditch the name was the Audubon Naturalist Society, based just outside of Washington, D.C. — it's now called Nature Forward. Others planning similar moves include Seattle Audubon, Chicago Audubon and Portland Audubon. In some cases, they've put a slash mark through Audubon's name where it appears on their websites.

Historical review isn't kind to Audubon, the man

The NAS board decided against a name change more than a year after it said it would consider shelving its longtime eponym. Its review process was "robust and inclusive," the group said, adding that more than 2,300 people had provided input. The process, the NAS said, emphasized "reaching people of color and younger people."

The NAS commissioned a historical review of Audubon's life and views. The picture that came back was not a flattering one. Even before that evaluation, the NAS had published articles that depicted Audubon as an influential painter, promoter and cataloger of nature — and someone whose views of Black and Indigenous people were deeply rooted in racism.

"His contributions to ornithology, art, and culture are enormous, but he was a complex and troubling character who did despicable things even by the standards of his day," the National Audubon Society says on its main page about Audubon.

The bio page reels off a list of transgressions, from Audubon's repeated buying and selling of enslaved people to his criticisms of emancipation and allegations of plagiarism. Audubon also lied about his own heritage: his mother was French or Haitian Creole, despite his claim that she was a wealthy Spanish woman, as a 2021 article notes.

In a 2020 contribution to Audubon magazine, biographer Gregory Nobles filled in more details:

"In early 1819, for instance, Audubon took two enslaved men with him down the Mississippi to New Orleans on a skiff, and when he got there, he put the boat and the men up for sale. The Audubons then acquired several more enslaved people during the 1820s, but again sold them in 1830, when they moved to England, where Audubon was overseeing the production of what he called his 'Great Work,' The Birds of America, the massive, four-volume compendium of avian art that made him famous." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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The World Health Organization is calling on officials in China to release data that may show a link between animals and the virus that sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.

The data was posted briefly on an international database but then abruptly taken down over the weekend.

The data was from environmental samples collected at a Wuhan seafood and meat market in the early days of the pandemic. International scientists spotted the material online and made copies of it before it was taken down. The information appears to show that genetic material from raccoon dogs and the virus that causes COVID were found in the same swabs, implying that the animals may have been an initial host.

"A scientist on the team noticed the data come online by happenstance, and because they often check the GISAID database," says Alexander Crits-Christopher, senior scientist in Computational Biology at Cultivarium, a nonprofit group focused on open source tools for research. "She shared the data with an international team and realized the relevance and importance of the data. This team then immediately contacted the data generators in the hopes of open communication and collaboration. The team then immediately alerted the WHO about the presence of the data, and the WHO has helped mediate that communication. All three of the parties above have iterated a shared goal of making data and analyses as open as possible, as soon as possible."

"The big issue right now is that this data exists and that it is not readily available to the international community," says WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove, who along with the head of the WHO is calling on Chinese officials to release all of the data they have around the potential origins of COVID. She adds that this information should have been shared years ago: "Any data that exists on the study of the origins of this pandemic need to be made available immediately."

She stressed that many more studies need to be carried out: "These studies have been recommended over many years, looking at the source of the animals of the market, looking at potential intermediate hosts, looking at breaches in biosafety biosecurity. These studies have yet to be conducted, and until they are conducted, until we have the data, we aren't able to conclusively say how this pandemic began."

Since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic began three years ago, its origin has been a topic of much scientific — and political — debate. Two main theories exist: The virus spilled over from an animal into people, most likely in a market in Wuhan, China, or the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and spread due to some type of laboratory accident.

But there is in fact a substantial body of evidence, first published in 2022 and covered by NPR at that time, pointing to the raccoon dogs as a likely starting point for the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

In particular, scientists published two extensive, peer-reviewed papers in Sciencein July 2022, offering the strongest evidence to date that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in animals at a market in Wuhan, China. Specifically, they conclude that the coronavirus most likely jumped from a caged wild animal into people at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where a huge COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019.

Neither of the Science papers provide the smoking gun — that is, an animal infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus at a market.

But they come close. They provide photographic evidence of wild animals such as raccoon dogs and a red fox, which can be infected with and shed SARS-CoV-2, sitting in cages in the market in late 2019. What's more, the caged animals are shown in or near a stall where scientists found SARS-CoV-2 virus on a number of surfaces, including on cages, carts and machines that process animals after they are slaughtered at the market.

The data in the 2022 studies paints an incredibly detailed picture of the early days of the pandemic. Photographic and genetic data pinpoint a specific stall at the market where the coronavirus likely was transmitted from an animal into people. And a genetic analysis estimates the time, within weeks, when not just one but two spillovers occurred. It calculates that the coronavirus jumped into people once in late November or early December and then again few weeks later.

At this exact same time, a huge COVID outbreak occurred at the market. Hundreds of people, working and shopping at the market, were likely infected. That outbreak is the first documented one of the pandemic, and it then spilled over into the community, as one of the Science papers shows.

At the same time, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention found two variants of the coronavirus inside the market. And an independent study, led by virologists at the University of California, San Diego, suggests these two variants didn't evolve in people, because throughout the entire pandemic, scientists have never detected a variant linking the two together. Altogether, the new studies suggest that, most likely, the two variants evolved inside animals.

Evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey helped lead two of the studies and has been at the forefront of the search for the origins of the pandemic. He has spent his career tracking down the origins of pandemics, including the origin of HIV and the 1918 flu.

Back in May 2021, Worobey signed a letter calling for an investigation into the lab-leak theory. But then, through his own investigation, he quickly found data supporting an animal origin.

When the studies were first published online, NPR spoke to Worobey, who's at the University of Arizona, to understand what the data tells us about the origin of SARS-CoV-2; how, he believes, the data may shift the debate about the lab-leak theory; and the significance of photos taken five years before the pandemic. Here are key points from the conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.

Live animals that are susceptible to COVID-19 were in the market in December 2019

It's clear-cut these wild, live animals, including raccoon dogs and red foxes, were in the market. We have photographic evidence from December 2019. A concerned customer evidently took these photos and videos of the market on Dec. 3 and posted them on Weibo [because it was illegal to sell certain live animals]. The photos were promptly scrubbed. But a CNN reporter had communicated directly with the person who took the photos. I was able to get in touch with this reporter, and they passed on those photos from the source. So we don't completely verify the photos.

Live susceptible animals were held in a stall where SARS-CoV-2 was later detected on a machine that processed animals in the market

We analyzed a leaked report from the Chinese CDC detailing the results of this environmental sampling. Virtually all of the findings in the report matched what was in the World Health Organization's report. But there was some extra information in the leaked report. For example, there was information not just on which stalls had virus in them — or had samples positive for SARS-CoV-2 — but also how many samples in a given stall yielded positive results.

We found out that one stall actually had five positive samples — five surfaces in that stall had virus on them. And even better, in that particular stall, the samples were very animal-y. For example, scientists found virus on a feather/hair remover, a cart of the sort that we see in photographs that are used for transporting cages and, best of all, a metal cage in a back room.

So now we know that when the national public health authorities shut down the market and then sampled the surfaces there, one of the surfaces positive for SARS-CoV-2 was a metal cage in a back room.

What's even weirder — it turns out that one of the co-authors of the study, Eddie Holmes, had been taken to the Huanan market several years before the pandemic and shown raccoon dogs in one of the stalls. He was told, "This is the kind of place that has the ingredients for cross-species transmission of dangerous pathogens."

So he clicks photos of the raccoon dogs. In one photo, the raccoon dogs are in a cage stacked on top of a cage with some birds in it.

And at the end of our sleuth work, we checked the GPS coordinates on his camera, and we find that he took the photo at the same stall, where five samples tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.

So we connected all sorts of bizarre kinds of data. Together the data are telling a strong story.

Earliest known cases of COVID-19, even those not directly related to individuals who had been in the market, radiate out from the market

With a virus, such as SARS-CoV-2, that causes no symptoms or mild symptoms in most people, you don't have any chance of linking all the early cases to the site where the outbreak started. Because the virus is going to quickly spread to people outside of wherever it started.

And yet, from the clinical observations in Wuhan, around half of the earliest known COVID cases were people directly linked to the seafood market. And the other cases, which aren't linked through epidemiological data, have an even closer geographical association to the market. That's what we show in our paper.

It's absurd how strong the geographical association is [to the market].

NPR: Absurd? How? In the sense that the seafood market is so clearly bull's-eye center of this outbreak?

Yes. And I don't understand how anyone could not be moved, at least somewhat, by that data and then take this idea [of an animal origin] seriously, especially given the other things we've found in these studies.

The virus jumped into people right before the outbreak in the market

For example, our new genetic analysis tells us that this virus was not around for very long when the cases occurred at the market. For example, the earliest known patient at the market had an onset of symptoms on Dec. 10, 2019. And we can estimate that at that point in time, there were only about 10 people infected with the virus in the world and probably fewer than 70.

So if the pandemic didn't start at the market, one of the first five or 10 people infected in the world was at the market. And how do you explain that?

You have to remember: Wuhan is a city of 11 million people. And the Huanan market is only 1 of 4 places in Wuhan that sold live animals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, such as raccoon dogs.

It's highly unlikely that the first COVID-19 outbreak would occur at the market if there weren't a source of the virus there

Step back and think, "Where is the first cluster of a new respiratory infection going to appear in this city?" It could appear at a market. But it could also appear at a school, a university or a meatpacking plant.

NPR: Or a biotech conference?

Yes. In Washington state, SARS-CoV-2 first appeared in a man who had traveled back from China. In Germany, it was at an auto-parts supplier.

There are thousands, perhaps 10,000, other places at least as likely, or even more likely, to be the place where a new pathogen shows up. And yet, in Wuhan, the first cluster of cases happens to be one of the four places that sells live animals, out of 10,000 other places. If you're not surprised by that, then I don't think you're understanding the unlikelihood that that presents.

NPR: So what is the likelihood of that coincidence happening — that the first cluster of cases occurs at a market that sells animals known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, but the virus didn't actually come from the market?

I would put the odds at 1 in 10,000. But it's interesting. We do have one analysis where we show essentially that the chance of having this pattern of cases [clustered around the market] is 1 in 10 million [if the market isn't a source of the virus]. We consider that strong evidence in science.

The analyses that we've done are telling a very strong story.

The evidence is amongst the best we have for any emerging virus.

NPR: Really?

It's important to note we haven't found a related virus from the intermediate host. But we have a bunch of other evidence.

And the data zeroing in on the Huanan market, to me, is as compelling as the data that indicated to John Snow that the water pump was poisoning people who used it. [John Snow was a doctor in London who helped launch the field of outbreak investigations by figuring out the source of a cholera outbreak in the city in the mid-19th century.]

Making these findings brought tears

Sometimes you have these rare moments where you're maybe the only person on Earth who has access to this kind of crucial information. As I just started to figure out that there were more cases around the market than you can expect randomly — I felt that way. And no exaggeration, that moment — those kinds of moments — bring a tear to your eye. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Stop Flushing Your Health Data Down The ToiletYou could be flushing important information about your health right down the toilet—quite literally. Pee and poop can tell you a lot about your health, so what if your waste…didn’t go to waste? What if, instead, it could tell you more about your health? Like number one, it can catch a condition like diabetes early. Or number two, check out what’s going on in your gut microbiome.

That’s the goal of the smart toilet—a device that gets all up in your business to tell you more about your health. Ira talks with the inventor of the PH Smart Toilet, Dr. Seung-min Park, instructor of urology at Stanford’s School of Medicine in California, about how the toilet works, how it can be used to catch diseases early on, and the ethical implications of such a device.

50 Years Later, Reflecting On The Treaty That Controls Wildlife Trade50 years ago this month, a collection of nations met in Washington and reached agreement on a way to regulate international trade in certain wildlife species—from orchids to gorillas. That agreement came to be known as CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. The treaty has come to cover over 30,000 different plants and animals. Some, listed in Appendix 1 of the treaty, are under a complete ban on commercial use, while other species have their trade tightly regulated via a system of permits.

Dr. Susan Lieberman, the vice president for international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, has attended the last 13 meetings of the CITES signatories. She joins Ira to talk about the convention, and what it has meant for conservation over the last 50 years.

This Skin-like Robot Can Heal ItselfThink of a robot, and the image that may come to mind is a big, hulking body building cars or working in factories. They battle each other in the movies. But a growing field called softbotics focuses on thin, flexible materials—closer to human skin than to a Transformer. There’s been a breakthrough in this field out of Pittsburgh: softbotics that can not only conduct electricity, but can heal itself from damage. This replicates the healing abilities of organic materials, like skin, but can happen in seconds. Dr. Carmel Majidi, mechanical engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, joins Ira to break down possible futures for this material, including a new generation of prosthetics.

Naked Mole-Rats Are Eternally FertileThere may be no stranger—or more impressive—critter than the naked mole-rat. They may look unassuming, but they can defy aging, have an astonishingly high pain tolerance, and are resistant to cancer. And their list of superpowers doesn’t stop there. Scientists recently discovered yet another way these rodents reject the mammalian status quo: by producing egg cells, and staying fertile, until the day they die. This makes them unlike humans, whose ovaries eventually stop producing eggs. So what can we learn about fertility from these strange critters? Ira talks with the lead researcher of this study, Dr. Miguel Brieño-Enriquez, assistant professor at the Magee-Womens Research Institute and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine’s Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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The city of Denver has donated 35 bison to several Native American tribes and one memorial council in Colorado, Oklahoma and Wyoming. The transfers marked another example of Indigenous people reclaiming stewardship over land and animals their ancestors managed for thousands of years.

After a ceremony on Wednesday, the animals were loaded onto trucks and moved to tribal lands.

The city's Parks Department transferred 17 bison — which many, including Tribal members, commonly call buffalo — to the Northern Arapaho Tribe and 12 to the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, both located in Wyoming. Five went to the Yuchi Tribe of Oklahoma, which will use the animals to establish a new herd. One will go to the Tall Bull Memorial Council in Colorado.

"Our tribes, our ancestors were buffalo people," says Jason Baldes, a Tribal buffalo program senior manager at the National Wildlife Federation and executive director of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative. "We want to ensure that our young people today also have that historical and contemporary connection to this animal."

That means restoring each tribe's herd to the point that Indigenous people can "get them back into our diet, provide those animals for our cultural and spiritual belief systems," and provide educational opportunities for young people, Baldes says.

The Shoshone and Arapaho Tribes restored their herds with 10 animals each in 2016 and 2019, respectively, Baldes says. Both tribes' herds have now grown to several dozen animals.

In the Denver Mountain Parks system, Denver Parks and Recreation maintains two conservation herds that are descended from the last wild bison in North America, according to a press release. The herds were originally established in Denver's City Park by the city and the Denver Zoo, then moved to a park west of Denver in 1914.

Since 2018, the city has donated 85 surplus bison to Native American tribes instead of selling them at auction, which the Parks Department says "kept the herd at a healthy population size and promoted genetic diversity within the managed bison population."

By 2030, the city will have donated about 300 bison to tribes, says Scott Gilmore, deputy executive director of Denver Parks and Recreation.

The first donation came from Gilmore's relationship with Bill and Rich Tall Bull of the Tall Bull Memorial Council, when he asked the brothers if they would be interested in a bison donation.

"We auction them off anyway," Gilmore remembers telling them. "This is what we should be doing."

The city of Denver reads a land acknowledgement at all of its events, acknowledging the tribes that once called the area home. But those are just words, Gilmore says, and "we're not checking a box here in Denver. We are following through."

"The bison, the buffalo are part of the land," Gilmore says. "We are returning the land to these individuals, these tribal members, and we're returning them to their homeland." That, he says, is far more important than the money the city would get from auctioning the animals off.

The transfer is part of a nationwide movement to increase Indigenous bison stewardship

Tens of millions of bison used to live in North America. By the late 1800s, however, "bison were nearly driven to extinction through uncontrolled hunting and a U.S. policy of eradication tied to intentional harm against and control of Native American Tribes," according to the Department of the Interior.

Thanks to conservation efforts, the North American bison population has rebounded to about half a million, but the majority are raised as livestock in commercial herds. Only about 30,000 live in conservation herds, according to the National Park Service.

This most recent transfer came two weeks after U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland issued a conservation order to restore large bison herds to Native American lands. She also announced that the department would invest $25 million in building new herds and supporting bison transfers to tribes.

The InterTribal Buffalo Council, a coalition of 80 tribes nationwide, has restored 25,000 buffalo to 65 herds across Native American land in 20 states, according to Baldes, who sits on their board. In recent years, herds have grown as federal, state and local governments, private ranches and other tribes transfer animals to reservations.

The work in Denver "sheds light on the larger issue of how important it is for the federal government to support efforts like this," Baldes says. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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As the editor of a blog called "Goats and Soda" (see our name origin story here), I am always interested when goats make the news. Plus, I'm a Capricorn.

So naturally I was curious about the four or five goats seen dashing through the streets of San Francisco this past week. They made national news via videos viewed by many thousands of folks on social media.

Where did the goats come from? One theory: They escaped from a herd hired to eat weeds in city parks. Another theory: They escaped as they were headed to slaughter. That appears to have more credence due to the type of goat spotted in San Fran — "a breed ... typically used for meat," according to sfgate.com.

Free range urban goats raise concerns and questions for me. Mainly: Is a city an okay place for goats to hang out?

For insights, I turned to goat specialist Alan McElligott, associate professor of animal behavior and welfare, City University of Hong Kong, who answered questions via email.

So first off, goats don't necessarily need to stick to one pasture, right?

Goats prefer to browse rather than graze. [Editor's note: And that's why they do an excellent job clearing unwanted vegetation, including ... poison ivy. They like to roam and eat rather than stay in one place.]

And in theory they can browse for food in a city...

I have seen reports of small herds of goats being used to eat vegetation in city parks in the U.S.

What do you make of the San Francisco goats?

The goats just looked really scared. They must have been been released by humans — somehow (intentionally or unintentionally). Goats are really good at escaping from enclosures (or maybe even a transport vehicle).

Would it be easy to catch them?

Goats are highly food-motivated so maybe they could be enticed into an enclosure in that way. But it's difficult if they are running and scared.

Is it unusual to have goats just, you know, hanging out in a city without supervision?

Urban goats — to my knowledge — are very, very rare. I am not aware of any truly urban-living goats. The ones if Llandudno, Wales mainly live outside the town.

Goats do not normally walk around towns and cities, but it does happen in a few places. It can be quite risky for goats--e.g. traffic accidents. Conflict [with humans] can occur if they go in private gardens to eat flowers or vegetables.

In conclusion, goats are not city critters...

Free-roaming goats do not belong in a town or city — really not a suitable location for them. They will be scared and stressed by the noise and unfamiliar humans. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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With its compact frame, smushed face, bat-like ears and wide smile, the French bulldog has just become the most popular dog breed in the U.S.

The American Kennel Club announced Wednesday that the crinkly-faced canine was the top breed in 2022, overtaking the Labrador retriever, which had held the No. 1 spot for a whopping 31 years.

"They're comical, friendly, loving little dogs," French Bull Dog Club of America spokesperson Patty Sosa told the Associated Press.

The pint-sized French bulldog was first recognized as a breed in 1898, and has a "charming and adaptable nature" and "generally quiet demeanor," the AKC said. Those qualities have boosted demand for the breed among families and single people living in homes both large and small.

Yet despite the breed's popularity, French bulldogs can have a raft of health issues.

They are one of several breeds known as brachycephalicdogs, which means their shortened skulls and snouts make them more prone to respiratory, eye, skin and spinal problems.

The Netherlands announced in 2019 that it would enforce a ban on the breeding of short-muzzled dogs. Norway banned the breeding of bulldogs until it was overturned by a judge last year. And in 2017 the president of the British Veterinary Association said people should not buy brachycephalic dogs.

Still, the dogs that originated in England and later served as companions in late 19th-century French brothels are now among the top breeds favored by celebrities and are even one of the most hashtagged pooches on Instagram in recent years.

That explosion in popularity has also made the valuable dogs targets for thieves. A man was sentenced to 21 years in prison in December for shooting Lady Gaga's dogwalker while stealing two of the pop star's French bulldogs in 2021.

The AKC says it has the world's largest registry of purebred dogs, which it uses to come up with the annual rankings.

After French bulldogs and Labrador retrievers, the next-most popular dog breeds last year were — in order — golden retrievers, German shepherds and poodles. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Veterinarian Karen Fine continues to be amazed by her patients, despite the fact that she's been in practice for 30 years. Take, for instance, the feral cat she had to capture in a net, who was suffering from an overgrown claw that had punctured and infected his paw pad.

"I knew that I could give him antibiotics for the infection, but it wasn't going to stop until I trimmed that claw," Fine said.

Just as Fine was contemplating how to best access the infected paw, her feline patient stretched it out to her through the net, spreading his toes and staying perfectly still. It was as if the cat knew what he needed and was asking for help — which she provided.

"I think there's so much we don't know and understand about animals, she says. "And I think there's a lot that we sort of assume that we know, but that they really have skills and senses that we don't. I feel that I learn from my patients all the time."

Fine notes that one common veterinarian abbreviation — ADR — stands simply for "ain't doing right," which she describes as "can't put my finger on it. They're not themselves." She says she prefers to visit her patients in their homes, because it gives her a more complete picture of their lives and their owners' habits.

"And at the clinic, people don't remember the name of the food," she says. "You can't tell how much [the pets are being fed]. At home someone might say, 'Oh, he only gets a little bit.' And I can look across the kitchen and see three overflowing food bowls."

Fine reflects on her experience treating pets and counseling their owners in her new memoir, The Other Family Doctor. A big part of the job, Fine says, is witnessing suffering — not just of animals, but also of their owners. It can take an emotional toll; suicide rates among veterinarians are disproportionately higher than those of other professions.

"There's been a big focus on wellness, that veterinarians should try to take good care of ourselves and get enough sleep and eat right and exercise," Fine says. "And I kind of feel like that's a very good start. But we also need to try to focus on why this work is so difficult and how bonded people are to their animals and how intense some of these interactions are. ... I think people, too, need to maybe understand how difficult this work can be."

Interview highlights

On practicing acupuncture and Chinese medicine on animals

I use acupuncture quite a bit and I find that it works well for a lot of chronic conditions [that] Western veterinary medicine maybe either can't really address well, or can address with medications that have other side effects. And in some cases, acupuncture just works better — like, often, for arthritis. That's one of the main things that I use it for, and I really enjoy using it. I feel like it's another way to look at the patient. ...

I use some Chinese herbal formulas and supplements. And the theory is pretty much there's not a magic bullet that we're looking for. We're not saying, take this supplement, it's going to fix everything. It's sort of a holistic approach, looking at everything in the animal's life -- let's look at lifestyle and let's look at diet and those types of things. So sometimes I'll use Chinese medicine and Western medicine together with the same goal, and sometimes I'll be able to use less Western medication or no Western medication because of the Chinese medicine, because of the acupuncture.

On how she figured out her cat had headaches

The first thing he did was he attacked my dog, which was incredibly out of character. He was a very gentle cat. And he was 15 at the time. And when my husband and I talked about it afterward, we realized we had seen him, what we call, "head-pressing." So he had sort of put his head down and pressed his head into her body before he attacked her. And she may have just moved away or something like that. ... Headaches are so universal among people that we would think, why wouldn't animals have headaches? And they're not going to kind of put their paw on their head or something like that. What they're going to do is they're going to isolate themselves. They're going to close their eyes. They're going to go to a quiet, dark place. So when people say, "My animal's hiding," sometimes we think, OK, they're not feeling well. But it may be a headache. ... It's not a very common symptom, this head-pressing. But I think that's what he was doing and that's why he attacked my dog. So then I took him for an MRI and he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

On helping people make hard decisions about how much to pay for care

That is one of the main curses of veterinary practice and pet ownership, really. It's very difficult. And I myself have been in situations, as have most of my clients, where you're trying to consider, do I have this money? Is it worth spending? And there are so many factors. One is, whether you have it or not, but also how old is the animal? Is it likely to give them a short amount of quality time, a long amount of quality time?

If you have an animal with a broken leg, say [a] cat that had an amputation: Now that cat's likely to live a normal life span, and cats do fine with three legs. So that's a very fixable problem. If someone doesn't have the money for that, then a lot of times you're looking at euthanasia and that is one of the reasons, I think, why veterinary practice is so stressful — even though we may want to, if it's our clinic, maybe do things for less cost or whatever, our bills are very expensive and our debts are expensive. The student loan is incredible and we have to pay bills. And there's almost an expectation, I think, among some clients that we should be doing things for free. And these services, even, say, the blood work, the costs have gone up a lot. It costs us money. So there's very little that's really free and it's a very difficult thing.

On her 16-year-old cat, Daiquiri, being ready to die

We had a little half-bathroom upstairs, which had no windows, and he retreated there. But unlike when he was sick before and I felt that he was having headaches, he seemed comfortable. He was lying there. He was purring. He had stopped eating, which, for him — this was a cat who would eat the house. So the fact that he stopped eating, that's when I really knew that something was wrong. And he just was so calm and serene. And I really felt that he was ready.

And I've felt that from many animals, when I see animals that are near death, that I feel like I see this recognition in them, that there's this process going on. And it made me really think, you know, that they're having this mind-body connection and that their body's breaking down and their mind is accepting that, and that's what they're experiencing.

Sort of like — if you think of an animal giving birth. No one's explained to them, "You're pregnant and you're going to have puppies and this is what's going to happen." They listen to their body and they kind of intuit what to do. And I think death is a similar situation for animals, and that is my opinion after watching so many animals die and be near death.

On the euthanasia process

One of the things I do is I often ask the person: "Have you seen this done before?" I'm trying to gauge their comfort level with it. And some people say, "Oh yeah," and they kind of know what to expect. Some people say no, and then I kind of walk them through it a little bit, that I'll often give [the pet] a tranquilizer injection first, and then the other injection goes right into the vein. It's usually a painless injection. but sometimes they don't like the needle, or their leg being held, or whatever.

It's a whole different thing when their person isn't there. Then it's just me giving an injection and the person holding (usually there's a staff member holding them), and we are very much aware that this is not like any other injection. We're very much aware this is a euthanasia — and there's sort of a respectful silence. It's a strange situation to be euthanizing your patients, I have to say, even after all these years. It's a strange thing. And I feel like I have a lot of respect for that. I want people to feel supported. I know that even though this injection may bring this animal so much peace, if they're suffering, it may bring the person in the room with me or the people much pain and anguish. So it's really sort of a delicate dance in terms of supporting the person. I certainly want to make sure that the animal is comfortable, but we really try hard ... for it to be a good experience, certainly for the animal, but also for any people that are watching.

On when pets grieve a fellow pet

They're very deeply affected, I think sometimes more than people, because we often leave and go to work or go take a walk or socialize or whatever. And our animals are often more confined to the house and they're not watching TV, they're not listening to podcasts. So they are more, maybe, in tune with their environment. And, just like some people, some animals adjust more easily and some really have a difficult time with it. ...

We often see animals grieving. [I recommend keeping] them on a schedule. And sometimes it's a new schedule, sometimes it's keeping up a little bit with an old schedule. If it's a dog, say, get them out of the house. If they don't have their playmate anymore, try to go somewhere where they can see another dog so that they can kind of keep doing a little bit of what they're doing and just allowing them that time and space to grieve, because it is a normal process.

On how to change veterinary medicine to ease the mental health strain

Many of us are perfectionists and, if you're an animal [physician] — just like a human physician — you think, well, if your patient dies, is that a failure? So, kind of, really talking about some of these things and reflecting on them [can help you process that]. And I really feel that reflection, and looking at some of our work, is important. And in human medicine, there's more of a history of that.

Certainly not every physician is necessarily reflective, but you have the medical humanities, which really looks at "What does it mean to be a doctor; what does it mean to be sick?" And we don't have that with veterinary medicine. We're just starting to have a couple of people talking about veterinary humanities and that sort of thing, and about how we can reflect upon our work.

Audio interview produced and edited by: Lauren Krenzel and Thea Chaloner. Audio interview adapted to NPR.org by: Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Deborah Franklin. Copyright 2023 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air.

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"Get ready for a silly question," one reader wrote in response to our series on "hidden viruses" that jump from animals to people.

"I love my pups very much – and I think they love me too because I get lots of kisses. Is that bad from a spillover virus perspective – for me or my dogs? Should I train my pups to be less ... kissy? That's gonna be tough. I may just accept the risk :)"

This question isn't silly, at all. The vast majority of time that you get sick, you''re infected by another human. But that's not always the case. You can absolutely catch viruses from your pets, including dogs and cats.

And it isn't just from getting pet kisses. If you're physically close with your dog or cat – like snuggling on the couch together or sleeping in the same room, you're exposed to their viruses even without the saliva directly on your face. So kissing isn't really adding that much more exposure.

One virologist tried to figure out what new viruses his own cats might be carrying. "One of them likes to sleep on my head," says John Lednicky, who's at the University of Florida.

And he wasn't disappointed.

For years, Lednicky had a cat named Gibbs. "He was named after the singer Barry Gibb." And Gibbs loved to bring Lednicky "gifts."

"He used to bring me presents every single day. Rodents. Half-eaten rabbits. Snakes, birds, frogs. He was also making friends with opossums, too. So who knows what viruses my cat might be bringing into our home."

Lednicky's cat had a few ticks. "My backyard is full of raccoons and deer, which carry ticks," he says. He plucked a few ticks off the cat and took them into his lab and looked to see what viruses lurked inside.

"I pulled out Heartland virus from the ticks," he says. Scientists first identified Heartland virus back in 2012 in Missouri. Although thought to be rare in the U.S. the virus can cause a serious illness that can require hospitalization.

According to the Centers for Disease and Prevention, the U.S. has recorded about 60 cases of Heartland virus – and none in Florida. But Lednicky thinks some people in the state have probably caught Heartland, perhaps from ticks on their pets. "It's probably been diagnosed as a flu or something else," he says. Lednicky doesn't think Heartland is a major concern in Florida. He just thinks it's a bit more widespread than previously thought. "Just because I found it doesn't mean it's a problem." It just means some cases are going undetected.

Of course, dogs carry ticks, too. And they can also carry some interesting viruses.

As we explained in a previous article in our series, scientists think a new coronavirus – found in Arkansas, Haiti, Malaysia and Thailand – likely jumps from dogs into people.

"The virus probably circulates widely around the world, but no one has paid attention to it," Lednicky says. And if you've been around dogs frequently, he says, you might have caught this virus, which has a very technical name: CCoV-HuPn-2018.

But that doesn't mean you necessarily fell ill. The vast majority of time, these viruses from your pets don't make you very sick or even sick at all. For example, the new coronavirus that Lednicky cited may cause pneumonia in younger children but, in adults, it causes only mild symptoms, which resemble a cold or mild flu, or no symptoms at all. So you wouldn't probably even realize your dog infected you.

And as Lednicky points out, being exposed to viruses from your dogs, such as the new coronavirus, probably gives you immunity to that virus and similar ones.

Also, what viruses your pets have depends largely on their behavior. If your cat or dog is a homebody, who eats mostly from a can or bag stored in the kitchen, then they will likely not be infected with Heartland virus or some other exotic virus – except, that is, for the viruses you bring into the home.

Yes, we spill over our viruses to animals all the time, Lednicky says. It's called reverse spillover or reverse zoonosis. People don't realize how often we, the humans, pass along viruses to our pets, Lednicky says. "We don't understand reverse zoonosis well."

Take for instance, he says, what happens to cats after graduate students have parties at the University of Florida.

"I hear the same story over and over again from grad students: 'We had a party and my cat is now hiding in the closet," Lednicky explains, seemingly because the large number of people freaked out the cat.

"I always ask, 'How do you know your cat's not sick?' Sick cats hide because they don't want other members of the species to see them as weak."

And so, finally, Lednicky tested his hypothesis. He took samples from a hiding cat and tested it. "The cat turned out to have influenza virus – a human influenza." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Rancher Robert Puga's cattle had been stranded and starving in the snow for weeks.

"We've never seen record snow like this, ever. And we're losing cattle left and right," Puga said.

His ranch is in the far north of California in Trinity County, in an area that's been hit especially hard by the state's recent wave of unprecedented snowfall.

The spring is calving season, and normally there's plenty of grass to feed newborns. But this year, the grass has been buried by up to seven feet of snow on some ranches. Puga was running out of hay when he got a call offering his herd a lifeline.

State, federal and local officials from neighboring Humboldt County had put together an emergency rescue operation to airdrop stranded cattle bales of hay. They called it "Operation Hay Drop."

Humboldt County Supervisor Michelle Bushnell says lots of cows in the area are going hungry because of the snow.

"They have absolutely no feed," she said. "There's no grass growing."

Bushnell, who also raises cattle, said she called other ranchers in the area to check in on them, and when she learned some hadn't been able to reach their cattle for over a week, she realized she had to do something.

A longtime Humboldt County rancher John Rice had told Bushnell that when the area faced a similar storm in 1989, they called in the Coast Guard to drop hay from helicopters to stranded cows.

So Bushnell called Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal and proposed a helicopter rescue for starving cows. Honsal went to the Coast Guard with the idea, and by midday Sunday, March 5 Operation Hay Drop was a go.

Authorities gathered coordinates of stranded herds, then flew out, looking for cows.

"The pilots are looking essentially for tracks in the snow," said Honsal. "They'll drop the hay in the area where they are, and what they found is [the cows] start coming out from under the trees and going towards the hay as soon as the helicopter takes off."

So far, Operation Hay Drop has been a success, said rancher Puga. The mission covers about 2,500 head of cattle over several miles.

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You've probably heard of Cocaine Bear, the box-office hit about a black bear's drug-fueled feeding frenzy. But have you heard of "cocaine cat?"

The phrase started trending on Twitter on Thursday. Like the movie, it's based on a true story — only this one is about a wild cat that was captured in Cincinnati and turned out to have cocaine in its system.

Unlike the movie, this story isn't set in the 1980s — it happened earlier this year. It was only made public recently for legal reasons, explains Ray Anderson with the Cincinnati Animal Care shelter.

"Coming on the heels of the Cocaine Bear movie, we're not surprised it has gone viral," he told NPR via email.

The protagonist of this particular tale is a serval named Amiry.

The capture

The big cat was kept as a pet and escaped from his owner's car during a police stop in January, according to Anderson.

That's when Hamilton County Dog Wardens (a division of Cincinnati Animal Care) got calls about what was thought to be a leopard spotted up in a tree.

Responders were able to retrieve Amiry and bring him back to the shelter, where the medical team called in an expert (whose credentials include working on the "Tiger King" case and the Zanesville tragedy) to identify his species.

The expert suspected Amiry was actually a serval, a long-legged, big-eared wild cat that is native to sub-Saharan Africa and illegal to own in Ohio. To confirm that, the medical team took a DNA sample — and also tested him for narcotics.

"Amiry tested positive for exposure to cocaine and the DNA test concluded he was indeed a serval," Anderson wrote.

The cocaine

Why did the shelter test Amiry for drugs in the first place? The short answer is a capuchin monkey named Neo.

Last year, local animal control seized the monkey from his Cincinnati home after a veterinarian who saw videos of him believed he had ingested Xanax and/or cocaine and was in need of medical care.

Neo tested positive for amphetamines, underwent treatment and is now "safely in an undisclosed location," according to Anderson. His owner was indicted on animal cruelty charges.

Since then, Anderson says it's become standard protocol for the shelter to test for narcotics for any animal that is more "exotic" than the usual household pet.

"Of course, we also test for narcotics on any dog or cat displaying behaviors that would lead us down that path," he added. "Amiry was extremely agitated at the time he was with us, which is understandable given what he had been through that morning, but we were able to sedate and treat before transporting to the [Cincinnati] Zoo."

Anderson declined to elaborate on the specifics of the toxicology report, and said authorities are still looking for specific evidence that would indicate how the cocaine got into Amiry's system.

"Given the nature of his capture, we cannot currently say if this intentional or environmental," he added.

The cat

The shelter that rescued Amiry is not equipped to house wildlife, so it sent him to the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden.

"Our top priority was getting Amiry safely and legally placed as quickly and efficiently as possible," Anderson said.

Amiry is doing "very well" there, and Anderson said the zoo is hoping he can become a member of its Cat Ambassador Program, which aims to educate visitors about the importance of wild cat predators and raise money for cheetah conservation efforts.

Anderson acknowledged it can be difficult to find placement for servals and credits the zoo for helping the shelter out of a tough spot.

"With that in mind, we've been very respectful of their privacy while working with Amiry and eagerly await their official word regarding his future," he said.

NPR has reached out to the zoo for comment.

The case

Amiry's owner willingly signed Amiry over to animal authorities and has cooperated with their investigation, Anderson said, which is why they are not pursuing charges at the time.

"His owner was cooperative and paid for Amiry's care until all ownership transfers were finalized, which is when this story went public," Cincinnati Animal Care noted in a Facebook post on Thursday.

However, it says the case remains open pending additional evidence and that the Ohio Department of Agriculture is investigating as well.

The Hamilton County Dog Wardens are asking anyone with information to call them at 513-541-7387.

The conclusion

There have been a number of recent instances of wild animals gone, well, wild in the U.S.

A pair of emperor tamarin monkeys were stolen from (and returned to) the Dallas Zoo in January, while an Eurasian eagle owl escaped from the Central Park Zoo last month (and remains free to this day). Plus, Cocaine Bear.

That's not necessarily cause for concern, but Anderson advises caution. If you do happen to encounter an exotic or agitated animal, keep your distance as much as possible and contact local animal control.

"Do not approach, do not wait to get pictures or videos, stay safe as it could not only be a life or death situation for yourself, but the animal as well," he added. "Let professionals handle the situation and get the animal to safety if possible."

There's another lesson his organization wants people to take away from Amiry's story, as it wrote on Facebook.

"We remind our community that there will be thousands of dogs, cats, and other animals in need of rescue entering our facility this year who will not receive this level of publicity," it wrote, urging people to visit their county animal shelter when searching for their next pet. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Towering around nine feet tall – half of that neck – and weighing in at more than 300 pounds, ostriches are the biggest birds on the planet today.

But there once was an even bigger bird, which roamed Madagascar before dying out roughly 1,000 years ago: the elephant bird.

Scientists don't know much about these massive birds. But a study recently published in Nature Communications has revealed new details about their lives – through a novel analysis of fossilized eggshells.

"[Elephant birds] weigh well over 1,000 pounds ... they lay an egg that's about a foot and a half in length," said Gifford Miller, a professor at University of Colorado, Boulder and one of the co-authors of the study.

The birds once had the ability to fly, Miller said. But when they landed in Madagascar, they likely encountered few predators, evolving into flightless birds and ballooning in size.

"They must have very flexible DNA that allows them to grow big fairly quickly. And they're at a size where they could sort of defend themselves from any natural predator who might be out there," Miller said.

The birds have remained somewhat of a mystery to scientists because there isn't much left of them to study.

"The skeletal fossil record is pretty patchy. There's not a lot of complete bones," said Alicia Grealy, a researcher with Australia's national science agency and another co-author on the study.

So instead of bones, the team analyzed fossilized shards of eggshells, which litter sand dunes and beaches throughout Madagascar today.

"It was pretty exciting," Miller said. "We had a Malagasy guide with us at all times that could help us get around and negotiate with [locals] to get permission to be on the land, and then to wander around and find these."

"The eggshells look like pottery. They're so strong – they're not at all fragile."

The shells have preserved the bird's DNA, as well as "stable isotopes," atomic signatures that the researchers used to study the birds' diets.

Miller and Grealy's team found preliminary evidence for a previously unknown lineage of the birds in northern Madagascar.

"That was kind of surprising, because no skeletons have ever been found there," Grealy said.

As for what happened to the elephant birds?

The scientists say no one knows exactly why they disappeared. But they did vanish sometime after the first humans arrived on Madagascar, suggesting some combination of hunting and habitat change might have made humans a predator that even elephant birds were unable to match. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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It was tiny when it left the zoo and nearly 8 feet long when it returned: A Texas woman says she got an alligator from a zoo some 20 years ago, and has been raising it in her backyard ever since.

The woman, who lives in Caldwell County in central Texas, told Texas Parks and Wildlife officials that she treated the alligator as a pet, naming it Tewa. Authorities did not release the woman's name.

It's not clear whether the large reptile came when it was called. But, Texas Game Warden Joann Garza-Mayberry told NPR, "The gator was compliant with her as she had raised it since a hatchling."

It was Garza-Mayberry who first spotted the unlikely pet last month. Videos from the scene show the gator was living in a fenced-in area with an artificial pond — the type of water feature often found in a landscaped garden.

"I observed the alligator when I visited the house unannounced during an unrelated law enforcement hunting investigation," she said.

Texas Game Wardens — the agency that handles law enforcement for the state's Parks and Wildlife Department — released videos showing the gator being carried to a truck. From there, it was taken to the Animal World and Snake Farm Zoo in New Braunfels, near San Antonio.

The woman who raised the alligator used to volunteer at that same zoo. She apparently took the gator home with her at least 20 years ago, when it was either an egg or a hatchling, the zoo said in a video on its Facebook page.

Texas law forbids anyone from possessing live alligators without also having an alligator farmer permit — a hurdle that comes with a number of requirements. After determining that the woman wouldn't be able to get the needed permits to have an alligator on her property, the state agency reached out to the zoo, which sent staff members to help transport the reptile to its new home, where it now lives among other gators.

The wildlife agency says the alligator was apparently well taken care of, according to TV station KHOU. But its erstwhile owner is now facing two tickets for illegal possession of the alligator, each with a maximum fine of $500, Garza-Mayberry said.

"Alligators naturally shy away from humans," the wildlife agency notes in its guidelines on the animals. "Problems arise when alligators are fed by people. The alligator loses its fear of humans and begins to associate people with food." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Caitlyn Mercado was doing homework in her dorm around midnight when her phone rang. It was the farm manager who told her to report to the farm immediately: her sheep was going into labor.

"I saw the first lamb being born and we thought that was it," Mercado says.

"We were packing up. And then my sheep laid down again and we were like, 'She's still going,' So she stood up and then the second one just kind of came out."

Sheep Management is one of the better-known classes at the University of Maryland — so popular they have to limit it to students in the Animal Sciences program. It was the reason Mercado decided to attend the University of Maryland.

When the lambs are coming, you bolt to the farm

Throughout the semester, each student is paired up and assigned to care for a pregnant ewe.

"You're on call. You have your phone with you at all hours of the night," Balcom, who taught the class for the last 12 years, said of her students.

There are a few signs that a sheep is about to give birth: they stop eating their grain, separate themselves from the flock and show other signs on their bodies. But it could happen at any hour of the day or night, and many of them will give birth overnight, Balcom says.

"They told me stories of running out of work, running out of a nice meal, waking up in the middle of the night and driving 45 minutes and trying hard not to speed, because you're never quite sure if the cop's going to believe you, that you're going to the birth of your lamb," Balcom says.

"They have run out of tests. They have left social gatherings to come and see their lambs, but they all absolutely love it."

The syllabus calls for boots that can withstand an acid wash and coveralls that get washed by the farm

After the lambs are born, students spend the rest of the semester learning the basics of raising them on a farm: giving vaccinations, trimming hooves, checking for parasites and keeping records.

Mercado said taking the temperature of the animals is a delicate and often challenging maneuver: a thermometer right in the rear end.

"It sounds easy, but when they don't want you to be doing that, then it's a lot harder to dodge when they're trying to kick you or pee on you," Mercado says.

Students always wear gloves while handling the lambs, but Mercado was surprised that the sheep weren't white and fluffy.

"I had never worked with sheep before, so I was expecting them to be really soft. But they are really oily and greasy," says Mercado. "I was not expecting my hand to come back brown from grease."

Learning by doing

Mercado says she felt prepared by the classroom instruction before stepping foot on the farm. For one, she learned to never chase a sheep when taking their measurements. If one was reluctant or running away, just wait until it comes back.

One of Mercado's classmates' lambs got sick from eating too much grain and too little grass. It went blind and had to be bottle fed. One time, Mercado had to feed it.

"For someone who's just going in to work with cute animals and things, you're not expecting these kinds of things to happen," Mercado says. "It took me like over an hour to try and get her to drink barely any milk."

Ellee Noonan-Shueh took the class as a sophomore and was most surprised by how much control they needed to exert over the lambs.

"I mean, they're not wild animals. They are domesticated, but they still have very much their own free will," Noonan-Shueh says. "You obviously don't want to hurt them or do anything bad, but you're not going to."

Noonan-Shueh says they were assigned cleaning out the lamb quarters after a birth had taken place.

"That can be kind of gross because there's all these placental-like fluids and birth fluids everywhere and it's just mixed with hay and stuff," says Noonan-Shueh.

Classroom learning isn't for everyone ... but raising lambs might be

The hands-on format makes the class so well-loved.

"I have several learning disabilities and teaching in the classroom by sitting at a desk and taking notes has never been my strong point," said Claire Jennings who took the class last spring as a sophomore and is now a Teaching Assistant.

"I have to adapt and do all sorts of different things in order to be able to process the information. But a lot of the hands-on classes I take, I get it in one go because actually doing something with my hands rather than sitting and trying to retain something just works so much better for me."

Professor Balcom says both the instructors and students get closer with the animals than is typical for a commercial farm.

"At some point we have to kind of start distancing ourselves from them because we are going to sell them some for breeding and some for meat," Balcom said. "And that can be really hard on students whose primary experiences have always been with pets." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Next time you're having trouble solving a tricky puzzle, consider asking a nearby bumblebee.

A new study in the journal PLOS Biology finds that these humble insects can actually learn to solve puzzles from one another, suggesting that even some invertebrates like these social insects have a capacity for what we humans call "culture."

"These creatures are really quite incredible. They're really, really good at learning despite having these tiny, tiny brains," says Alice Bridges, a behavioral ecologist at Anglia Ruskin University in England.

In the past couple of decades, a growing body of evidence has accumulated to show that animals like chimps and birds show evidence of culture, "by which we really mean just that animals learn from each other," says Andy Whiten, a cognitive ethologist who studies wild animal minds at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. This learning can range from navigating a migratory route to using a tool to access a particular food.

"If what they learn lasts for a long time," says Whiten, "then we might be prepared to call it a tradition. And culture is made up of multiple traditions."

These behaviors tend to be passed down from one generation to the next. It's the same thing with humans. Some of us learn from more experienced individuals how to make matzo ball soup or dance the merengue, and then we pass that down to our children.

Whiten likens culture to a second, more flexible form of inheritance.

Bridges agrees. "It actually functions much faster" than genetic inheritance, she says, "because you can learn a new behavior to overcome a problem from someone else."

Since culture can be incredibly useful to a species and it seems to be increasingly common across the animal kingdom, Bridges wondered whether bumblebees might have a capacity for it.

"Nobody's really thought to look at it in invertebrates before," she says. Not even in bumblebees, which are social insects that spend a lot of time together. "They have some of the most intricate, complex behavioral repertoires in the animal kingdom. Yet people assume that they're mostly driven by innate factors."

Bridges set out to prove them wrong.

To study culture in bumblebees in the lab, she first had to train a few industrious bees to perform a novel behavior. She opted for solving a puzzle box.

"But trying to design this box was kind of crazy because bees are really, really smart, sometimes frustratingly so," Bridges explains. "They're always looking for a more efficient solution and invariably it won't be the one that you want."

The bees were always "hacking" the puzzle by, for example, squeezing through unintended gaps in the device to reach the tasty prize inside.

Finally, Bridges landed on a design the bees had to play straight. She holds up the result.

"Basically, I built it out of Petri dishes," she says, triumphant. The base of the Petri dish held the reward: a drop of super sweet sugar water. Bridges cut a small hole in the lid "to form a rotating top that can be spun by pushing either on this red tab clockwise or the blue tab anti-clockwise."

She trained some bees to head-butt the red tab to get the sugar water and trained others to push the blue tab. Then, Bridges placed these tutor bees inside different colonies, along with the puzzle boxes.

It wasn't all fun and games: Fiddling with all these bees resulted in Bridges getting stung multiple times. The fourth sting sent her to the hospital with anaphylaxis.

"So I had to wear a bee suit after that during a heat wave to do the experiments, which was miserable," she chuckles. "I used to put a little electronic fan inside the hood."

Bridges persevered, however, and the experiment ultimately played itself out. In colonies where the tutor bee had originally learned to push the red tab, the other bees in the colony usually pushed the red tab. In colonies where the tutor bee was trained to push the blue tab, their fellow bees tended to do the same.

"We found that the behaviors spread among the colonies," she says. "They copied the demonstrators' behavior even when occasionally they discovered that they could do the alternative."

In the control colonies where there were no tutors, the bees sometimes learned how to open the boxes, but never as efficiently or reliably. "Most of them would do it once or twice and then never again," Bridges explains. "They perhaps [had] not understood what they had done or they hadn't quite made the link between their behavior and the reward."

The conclusion, Bridges and her colleagues at Queen Mary University report in their new study out today, is that bumblebees can transmit certain behaviors — culturally.

"We were taught that a lot of insect behavior was kind of hardwired," says Jessica Ware, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History who wasn't involved in the research. "And what this paper does is kind of turn that on its head. I mean, who knows what grasshoppers are capable of doing — or the lowly cockroach."

Because bumblebee colonies collapse before winter, there's little chance a tradition could get passed down from generation to generation. So Bridges is planning future work on insects that live in colonies that last for years, like stingless bees.

Of course, insect culture might look rather different from the culture seen among other animals, particularly humans. It's a question of degree, says Whiten, who wasn't a part of the study either. "Cultures vary enormously across species in ways which I think have different implications for the complexity of brains that are involved," he says.

Still, Bridges argues that her work with bumblebees shows that perhaps culture isn't that unusual.

"Maybe it doesn't require very, very complex cognitive mechanisms," she says. "Maybe it's not some pinnacle of cognition that only a few species have. Maybe it's actually very widespread."

Ware agrees.

"Many of us consider ourselves and our fellow primates to be rather special... because we have culture and we can learn and we're social," she says. But now that "it turns out even the bee also has culture, that is an uncomfortable truth."

That truth, summarizes Whiten, is that "all we have discovered about animal culture means that human culture, once thought unique," he says, "did not emerge 'out of the blue' but has obviously built on deep evolutionary foundations." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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After nearly two decades of planning and negotiations, members of the United Nations have agreed on an international treaty to protect biodiversity in international waters, which cover nearly two-thirds of the ocean.

The agreement, finalized late Saturday, lays the groundwork for global collaboration to tackle the ocean's persistent threats like biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change.

"I believe that this treaty is like a second chance for the ocean," said Gladys Martínez, the executive director of AIDA, a group focused on protecting the environment, primarily in Latin America and has been involved with treaty discussions.

The historic treaty is a major step toward the goal to protect at least 30% of ocean areas by 2030 — a target President Biden laid out for the U.S. in 2021 and part of a broader land and marine conservation U.N.-led commitment known as 30x30.

Here's what to know about why this treaty matters:

Right now, international waters are largely unregulated

The ocean is facing threats on multiple fronts.

Commercial fishing operations span more than half the world's ocean and have been detrimental to species and their habitats. According to the World Wildlife Fund, more than a third of all sharks, rays and a shark-like fish called chimaera are at risk of extinction because of overfishing.

The organization also found that almost every species group in the ocean has encountered plastic pollution, often swallowing or being entangled by it.

Additionally, manmade climate change causes the ocean to get hotter, threatening marine life and coastal communities.

Those problems are compounded by another dilemma: right now, international waters are largely governed by a fragmented patchwork of global agreements and organizations.

"There was no way to coordinate between these kinds of organizations," said Elizabeth Mendenhall, a marine affairs professor at the University of Rhode Island who researches ocean governance.

"So areas get overburdened, overexploited, they get more than they can handle because there isn't like a coordinated, holistic perspective," she added.

Another issue is that there is no international body committed to preserving biological diversity in regions outside territorial seas or ground rules on accessing genetic resources found in international waters, Mendenhall said.

The treaty has four main objectives

Lisa Speer, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's International Oceans program, told NPR's A Martínez on Morning Edition the biggest conservation-related accomplishment of the new treaty is that it paves the way to establish large-scale marine protected areas, which the NRDC describes as the "ocean's equivalent of a Grand Canyon or Yellowstone National Park."

That means, in about 30 percent of the world's oceans, damaging human activities like commercial fishing and oil gas drilling could be prohibited or limited.

"And the science tells us that is the single most important thing we can do to enhance ocean resilience in the face of growing threats related to climate change," Speer said.

The treaty will also regulate countries and companies who can access and benefit sharing from the commercialization of "marine genetic resources," which can be useful for the creation of pharmaceuticals or cosmetics.

According to Speer, who was part of the U.N. negotiating team, ensuring those resources will be shared in a fair and equitable way was a major point of tension in the negotiations.

"Who gets to decide what happens in this global commons was a fundamental issue on the table during the negotiations," she said.

Similarly, the treaty is aimed at making research conducted in international waters more accessible and inclusive, especially for developing countries.

A fourth major component of the agreement is setting global standards for environmental impact assessments on commercial activities in the ocean. These evaluations will also consider cumulative impact, or combined and incremental impacts, resulting from different activities.

Countries will need to work together

Speer from the NRDC said that implementing the treaty is not only crucial for the waters outside national jurisdictions, but also for the regions and countries within it.

"It's important because billions of people around the world rely on the ocean for basic needs — their food, their jobs, their income, their sustenance, culturally as well as economically," she said.

After the yearslong effort to finalize the treaty, it is now up to countries to decide whether they will adopt the treaty into domestic law.

For example, the U.S. has yet to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was the last international treaty on ocean protection signed over 40 years ago.

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LOS ANGELES — Tribal leaders, scientists and conservation advocates buried Southern California's most famous mountain lion Saturday in the mountains where the big cat once roamed.

After making his home in the urban Griffith Park — home of the Hollywood Sign — for the past decade, P-22 became a symbol for California's endangered mountain lions and their decreasing genetic diversity. The mountain lion's name comes from being the 22nd puma in a National Park Service study.

The death of the cougar late last year set off a debate between the tribes in the Los Angeles area and wildlife officials over whether scientists could keep samples of the mountain lion's remains for future testing and research.

Some representatives of the Chumash, Tataviam and Gabrielino (Tongva) peoples argued that samples taken during the necropsy should be buried with the rest of his body in the ancestral lands where he spent his life. Some tribal elders said keeping the specimens for scientific testing would be disrespectful to their traditions. Mountain lions are regarded as relatives and considered teachers in LA's tribal communities.

Tribal representatives, wildlife officials and others discussed a potential compromise in recent weeks, but a consensus was not reached before P-22 was buried in an unspecified location in the Santa Monica Mountains on Saturday.

"While we have done everything we could to keep the carcass intact, the Tribes and agencies involved are still working toward a conclusion about some of the samples," the state Department of Fish and Wildlife said in a statement Monday. "What is important to understand is that the Tribes and agencies involved all agreed on moving forward with the burial and it was a moving ceremony. We have come to a better place of understanding and we look forward to continued growth from this place."

It was not clear whether the unspecified samples might also be buried with the animal in the future or if the tribes have agreed to let scientists keep some specimens for additional testing.

Saturday's traditional tribal burial included songs, prayers and sage smoke cleansings, according to Alan Salazar, a tribal member of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians and a descendent of the Chumash tribe.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where the cougar's remains had been kept in a freezer before the burial, called the burial a "historically significant ceremony."

"The death of P-22 has affected all of us and he will forever be a revered icon and ambassador for wildlife conservation," the museum said in a statement Monday.

Salazar, who attended the ceremony, said he believes P-22's legacy will help wildlife officials and scientists realize the importance of being respectful to animals going forward.

Beth Pratt, the California executive director for the National Wildlife Federation who also attended the ceremony, wrote on Facebook that the burial " helped me achieve some measure of peace" as she grieves the animal's death.

"I can also imagine P-22 at peace now, with such a powerful and caring send-off to the next place," she wrote. "As we laid him to rest, a red-tailed hawk flew overhead and called loudly, perhaps there to help him on his journey."

Los Angeles and Mumbai are the world's only major cities where large cats have been a regular presence for years — mountain lions in one, leopards in the other — though pumas began roaming the streets of Santiago, Chile, during pandemic lockdowns.

Wildlife officials believe P-22 was born about 12 years ago in the western Santa Monica Mountains but left because of his father's aggression and his own struggle to find a mate amid a dwindling population. That drove the cougar to cross two heavily traveled freeways and migrate east to Griffith Park, where a wildlife biologist captured him on a trail camera in 2012.

His journey over the freeways inspired a wildlife crossing over a Los Angeles-area highway that will allow big cats and other animals safe passage between the mountains and wildlands to the north. The bridge broke ground in April.

P-22 was captured last December in a residential backyard following dog attacks. Examinations revealed a skull fracture — the result of being hit by a car — and chronic illnesses including a skin infection and diseases of the kidneys and liver. The city's cherished big cat was euthanized five days later.

Los Angeles celebrated his life last month at the Greek Theater in Griffith Park in a star-studded memorial that featured musical performances, tribal blessings, speeches about the importance of P-22's life and wildlife conservation, and a video message from Gov. Gavin Newsom.

To honor the place where the animal made his home among the city's urban sprawl, a boulder from Griffith Park was brought to the gravesite in the Santa Monica Mountains and placed near P-22's grave, Salazar said. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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The harmful "red tide," which has been known to discolor coastal waters and kill marine life off the coast of Florida, has returned for another year.

The toxic organism that paints the waters red was detected in February and was found at higher-than-normal levels in several Southwest Florida counties in recent days, state officials said.

Since it returned, grisly photos of dead fish washing up on Florida beaches have proliferated, and federal authorities are warning people of the possibility of respiratory irritation from contaminated air.

Why it's called "red tide"

Oceans and other bodies of water are filled with algae, a small number of which are toxic but often exist in such small concentrations that they pose little danger to people and marine life around them.

When those toxic aquatic organisms multiply, they can form what are known as harmful algal blooms, which have been reported in every coastal U.S. state.

Though there are dozens of potentially dangerous algae species, one known to make an appearance each year along Florida's Gulf Coast is called Karenia brevis, a microscopic organism with "whip-like appendages" called flagella it uses to swim.

When Karenia brevis algae multiply in large numbers, they can form blooms that turn the water a reddish-brown hue, giving the phenomenon the moniker "red tide."

Red tides have been documented along Florida's Gulf Coast as far back as the 1840s, state officials said.

Scientists can't predict when red tides will occur, but experts in Florida are researching prevention and mitigation measures to minimize their impact.

The toxic algae can kill fish and make humans sick

Karenia brevis produce what are known as brevetoxins, which can kill marine life and birds.

The red tide organism can also cause health problems in humans, such as skin irritation. Brevetoxins that have become airborne may cause those near the beach to develop a cough or congestion.

People who eat shellfish affected by brevetoxins can also come down with Neurotoxic Shellfish Poisoning, which can lead to gastrointestinal problems, tingling feelings in the mouth, the reversal of hot and cold sensations and other symptoms.

Florida's Fish And Wildlife Conservation Commission warns people to not swim in or around red tide waters over the possibility of skin irritation, rashes and burning and sore eyes. People with asthma or lung disease should avoid beaches affected by the toxic algae.

If you come into contact with red tide water, Florida health officials recommend washing off with soap and water and going to an air-conditioned space.

What's happening in Florida

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said Friday that it had received reports over the previous week of respiratory illness in humans and dead fish in Pinellas, Manatee, Sarasota, Charlotte, Lee and Collier counties. The incidents were suspected to be caused by red tide.

Local TV stations showed footage of dead fish washing up on beaches, and other marine life has also been reportedly affected by the toxic algae.

The threat to humans was still present, too. The National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science on Monday was forecasting a high risk of respiratory irritation from red tide at certain beaches in Charlotte, Manatee, Pinellas and Sarasota counties.

According to the TV station Bay News 9, local businesses were concerned that the red tide would drive away tourists and negatively impact south Florida's economy. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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WILLOW, Alaska — The race to Nome began Sunday for 33 mushers in this year's Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska.

Jessie Holmes. an Alabama native living in the Alaska community of Brushkana, was the first musher to leave across a frozen lake about 70 miles (112 kilometers) north of Anchorage. Holmes works as a carpenter and appears on the reality television show "Life Below Zero."

Other mushers left in two-minute intervals. They will travel nearly 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) over the unforgiving Alaska winterscape, climbing over two mountain ranges, mushing on frozen rivers and streams and across the treacherous Bering Sea ice. The winner is expected to drive their sled dog team down Nome's Front Street to the iconic burled arch finish line in about 10 days.

Leading the charge will be defending champion Brent Sass, a kennel owner and wilderness guide who lives on a homestead about a four-hour drive northwest of Fairbanks.

Also competing is Pete Kaiser, the 2019 champion. The 33 mushers in the race is the smallest field ever. The very first race, held in 1973, had 34 mushers, but the average number of starters in the first 50 races was 63.

Only having two former champions in the race this year is a rarity.

Several veteran mushers have decided to retire or take a break from the Iditarod, including five-time champion Dallas Seavey, four-time winners Martin Buser and Jeff King and three-time champ Mitch Seavey. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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A tribal woman called Bellie walks barefoot through the lush forests of the Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary, a national park in the state of Tamil Nadu, hot on the heels of a baby elephant.

In a soft voice, she says, "I have experienced many losses in my life. My ex-husband was killed by a tiger. This left me feeling scared of the forests. I get scared when I see a tiger." But, she says, "I am a tribal woman, and our people come from the heart of the forest."

She is part of the Kattunayakan community, a tribal group that, for generations, has devoted itself to caring for elephants. "For us Kattunayakans, the well-being of the forest is all that matters," she says.

With stunning visuals of Tamil Nadu's nature, The Elephant Whisperers tells the story of this loving relationship — and earned an Oscar nomination in the documentary short film category.

It was a chance meeting with that same baby elephant in October 2017 that changed filmmaker Kartiki Gonsalves's life and spurred her to make the film.

Gonsalves spent her childhood in and around nature in southern India. "My family explored streams and beaches, natural history museums and aquariums. My parents would bundle us up — my sister and I — and would take us out to state parks and camping sites," she says. Her mother loved animals and her father was a photographer. Her grandmother led school trips to local nature reserves. Gonsalves followed in their footsteps.

After graduating with a degree in visual communications from GRD College of Science in the southern Indian city of Coimbatore in 2007, Gonsalves went on to study photography, specializing in wildlife, travel and culture. She then worked in advertising and other jobs but yearned to get back to her passion — photographing nature and wildlife and telling stories of indigenous people and their role in conservation.

The chance elephant encounter came when Gonsalves was making that career transition. "I was in the process of moving back to my hometown of Ooty," she says. And she stopped at the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, close to the Theppakadu Elephant camp. It was established more than a hundred years ago, and she'd been visiting it since she was a child. "While driving home, I met Raghu as a three-month-old calf," she recalls.

Gonsalves was pleasantly surprised by how playful Raghu was. She started talking to Bomman, Raghu's other caregiver, who invited her to return and get to know the animal.

"This documentary was made because I fell in love with Raghu first," she says. "The three of us would happily splash along the river, and I would spend hours scrubbing him and rubbing his tongue. He absolutely loves his tongue being rubbed. He enjoyed pulling my hair and splashing around in the water. We would stick our tongues at each other."

In the film, Gonsalves steps aside and takes viewers to the heart of Theppakadu Elephant camp in a landscape that is the one of the largest undisturbed spaces for the Asian elephant. Here, the Kattunayakan and forest rangers work together to care for abandoned elephants. The documentary follows the journey of Bomman and Bellie and baby elephant Raghu, whose herd wandered into a village searching for water where, after his mother was electrocuted, he was abandoned by the herd. Climate change has caused water supplies in the region to dry up, sending the elephants into areas of human habitation in search of a drink.

The forest department found Raghu in a dire state--he'd been attacked by stray dogs and had maggots in open wounds. The forestry workers tried, unsuccessfully, to reunite Raghu with his family. No one thought Raghu would survive, but they gave him to Bellie and Bomman to try.

As Bomman and Bellie nourish Raghu, their own relationship thrives. The 40-minute documentary was whittled down from more than 450 hours of raw footage and painstakingly filmed over the last five years, says Gonsalves.

She wanted people to understand what beautiful beings elephants were and to recognize and respect their intelligence. That understanding, she hopes, would help protect their habitat — which the Asian elephant is losing at a rapid pace. Studies cite encroachment, climate change and India's hunger for development as reasons.

In The Elephant Whisperers, Bomman and Bellie care for Raghu and one other abandoned calf – sunny and bright Ammu. When elephants reach adolescence, just like human teenagers, they can go through a phase when they're stubborn and don't tend to listen. "If they're allowed to continue that behavior, it doesn't end well in the long run," says Gonsalves. An elephant calf needs love and affection while growing up, but even in a wild herd, the adult elephants discipline the adolescent elephant, Gonsalves says. The forest department takes Raghu away from Bomman and Bellie to give him to another caretaker who had more experience handling adolescent elephants. The separation anxiety, however, is intense, and Bomman and Bellie miss Raghu desperately.

And just like their human partners, the animals show great emotion. In one scene, baby elephant Ammu wipes away Bellie's tears when she is heartbroken over Raghu moving away. In another scene, Ammu reaches out and curls her arm around Bomman's, who is about to fetch her some milk in the early hours of the dawn, drawing him closer. These are some of Gonsalves favorite moments in the footage.

The elephants are a part of the tribe's larger community, too. Raghu even plays football with neighborhood kids.

"A lot of these moments were unexpected and that is the true beauty of telling a story as it unfolds," she says. "With a documentary, there is no script. Only spontaneous moments caught when life is lived."

"I wanted the audience to stop seeing animals as the 'other' and start seeing them as one of us," she says. "The Elephant Whisperers helps people understand more about the elephants and their human caretakers, how they love and understand each other, how they've learnt to adapt and co-exist. I chose to focus on the positivity of that co-existence, rather than the negative aspect of man-animal conflict. I wanted The Elephant Whisperers to reflect that selfless cooperation, to be that beam of hope." Kamala Thiagarajan is a freelance journalist based in Madurai, Southern India. She reports on global health, science, and development, and her work has been published in the New York Times, The British Medical Journal, BBC, The Guardian and other outlets. You can find her on twitter @kamal_t Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Horseback riding was likely a common activity as early as 4,500 to 5,000 years ago, according to a provocative new study that looked at human skeletal remains for small signs of the physical stress associated with riding horses.

People first started keeping horses about 5,500 years ago, initially for their meat and milk, researchers believe. But how and when horses became a transformative mode of transportation isn't so clear.

"Cattle and sheep and goats were domesticated thousands of years before horses were. And horses are different from cattle and sheep and goats, in that they are essentially a transportation technology," says David Anthony, an emeritus professor of anthropology with Hartwick College.

Horses began living with humans before the invention of the wheel, and horse-drawn chariots first appeared around 4,000 years ago. About a thousand years later, there's an explosion of horses and horse-related themes depicted in artwork. And scientists have tried to collect other forms of evidence to home in on when horse riding may have first emerged.

Some researchers, like Anthony and his partner, archaeologist Dorcas Brown, have examined the teeth of ancient horses, to check for wear patterns caused by bits. The trouble is, there's not that much material out there to study, says Anthony.

"My wife and I have looked at museum collections for horse remains and been very disappointed on Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary," he says, noting that the Eurasian steppe was where wild horses lived and were available to be domesticated.

The other limitation with finding horse teeth with bit wear, says Alan Outram with the University of Exeter, is that "what you've demonstrated is harnessing. You haven't specifically demonstrated riding."

So now a team led by researchers at the University of Helsinki has taken a different approach and turned to the human side of the horseback riding relationship.

Specifically, they went searching for human skeletal remains with features that could come from the kinds of physical stress associated with horseback riding, especially bareback riding that requires the legs to keep a firm grip.

The scientists examined the skeletal remains of 24 individuals from archaeological sites in southeastern Europe, checking them for six different kinds of damage that horseback riding could potentially cause in the backbone, pelvis, and leg bones.

In the journal Science Advances, they report that nine of the individuals had at least four of these tell-tale physical signs, suggesting that they likely rode horses.

"It's really important to get this evidence from the human side, which has not really been systematically analyzed before," says Anthony, one of the authors of this study. "It just shows that riding could emerge at a very early stage in the domestication process."

Everything this research team did looks valid and it makes sense theoretically, agrees Outram, who was not part of this research group. He does caution that it's possible some other kind of unknown physical activity might exist that could have created these features.

"It's not an absolute 100% proof, but the quality of the paper is very good," says Outram, who notes that it is the nature of archaeological evidence to have some ambiguity.

"What's fair to say is that it is, at the moment, the earliest evidence that could indicate horse riding," says Outram.

He notes that until the development of the steam train, horses provided the fastest means of land transportation, dramatically changing people's conception of distance and their ability to travel.

Pre-modern horses, however, were likely nervous and easily spooked, so their initial uses might have been modest.

"They probably were not suitable to be ridden into anything like a violent confrontation," says Anthony, suggesting that people on horses could have just herded larger groups of sheep or goats, and that it wasn't until much later that horses became a powerful weapon in warfare and conquests.

But who first had the bright idea of trying to ride a large, potentially dangerous animal like a horse? Anthony thinks it's something that would only occur to someone looking for a thrill, someone who wouldn't mind repeatedly getting thrown off.

"If you were, say, 12 years old, you know, and your sense of fear was not as highly developed," says Anthony, adding that he thinks the first people to ride horses "were probably adolescents who were challenging each other to try again." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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BOGOTA, Colombia — Colombia is proposing transferring at least 70 hippopotamuses that live near Pablo Escobar's former ranch – descendants of four imported from Africa illegally by the late drug lord in the 1980s – to India and Mexico as part of a plan to control their population.

The hippos, which are territorial and weigh up to 3 tons, have spread far beyond the Hacienda Napoles ranch, located 200 kilometers from Bogota along the Magdalena River. Environmental authorities estimate there are about 130 hippos in the area in Antioquia province and their population could reach 400 in eight years.

Escobar's Hacienda Napoles — and the hippos — have become a sort of local tourist attraction in the years since the kingpin was killed by police in 1993. When his ranch was abandoned, the hippos survived and reproduced in local rivers and favorable climatic conditions.

Scientists warn the hippos do not have a natural predator in Colombia and are a potential problem for biodiversity since their feces change the composition of the rivers and could impact the habitat of manatees and capybaras. Last year, Colombia's government declared them a toxic invasive species.

The plan to take them to India and Mexico has been forming for more than a year, said Lina Marcela de los Ríos Morales, director of animal protection and welfare at Antioquia's environment ministry.

The hippos would be lured with food into large, iron containers and transferred by truck to the international airport in the city of Rionegro, 150 kilometers away. From there, they would be flown to India and Mexico, where there are sanctuaries and zoos capable of taking in and caring for the animals.

"It is possible to do, we already have experience relocating hippos in zoos nationwide," said David Echeverri López, a spokesman for Cornare, the local environmental authority that would be in charge of the relocations.

The plan is to send 60 hippos to the Greens Zoological Rescue & Rehabilitation Kingdom in Gujarat, India, which De los Ríos Morales said would cover the cost of the containers and airlift. Another 10 hippos would go to zoos and sanctuaries in Mexico such as the Ostok, located in Sinaloa.

"We work with Ernesto Zazueta, who is the president of sanctuaries and zoos in Mexico, who is the one who liaisons with different countries and manage their rescues," said the official.

The plan is to focus on the hippos living in the rivers surrounding the Hacienda Napoles ranch, not the ones inside the ranch because they are in a controlled environment and don't threaten the local ecosystem.

The relocations would help control the hippo population, and though the animals' native habitat is Africa, it is more humane than the alternate proposal of exterminating them as an invasive species, said De los Ríos Morales.

Ecuador, the Philippines and Botswana have also expressed their willingness to relocated Colombian hippos to their countries, according to the Antioquia Governor's Office. Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Coen Elemans was waiting for his flight to take off at the Copenhagen Airport. Numerous safety and passenger announcements cascaded out of the intercom.

"They normally never say anything at this airport!" observed Elemans, a bioacoustician at the University of Southern Denmark. "They're very vocal today."

He says the airport is as good a place as any to listen to the different ways people vocalize.

"What I hear is a lot of people talking," he notes. "They're mostly using what's called the chest register." That's our typical speaking voice.

Then, Elemans notices some music playing. It's the situation where we most often hear our higher-pitched vocal register on display — falsetto.

We also have a lower register, below the frequency range where we usually talk. That's vocal fry. In English, it's usually regarded as an affect — something that changes the emotion or attitude of what's said. Certain people are known for it, like Kim Kardashian or Leonard Cohen. In other languages like Danish, Elemans says it alters the meaning of words.

We produce all these sounds — the vocal fry, the chest voice, and the falsetto — by sending air across our vocal folds in the larynx (a structure that allows air to pass from your throat to the rest of your respiratory system). And the vocal folds vibrate differently for each register.

"In a vocal fry register," explains Elemans, "your vocal folds are mostly slack, so they're thick and heavy, and they vibrate at their lowest frequencies. And in the falsetto register, they're stretched very long and the tension is very high. And this leads to the highest frequencies."

Elemans wondered whether a similar thing might be at play in toothed whales (like bottlenose dolphins, orcas, and pilot whales) to allow them to produce their diverse array of vocalizations. Such sounds range from whistles to bursts (the sounds we associate with Flipper) to echolocation clicks — the sound pulses used to hunt for prey. These clicks operate "more or less like a flashlight," says Elemans, "to search their environment with a very focused beam."

Toothed whales have a larynx but it doesn't produce sound. Rather, they evolved a "new structure that's located in their nose that generates the sounds — what's called phonic lips," says Elemans.

For decades, it's been hard to observe the phonic lips in action. The technology hasn't been up to the task and we can't yet observe the whales at the depths where they often feed. But Elemans and his colleagues developed several experiments to peek inside these animals. They report their findings in the latest edition of the journal Science.

First, they lowered an endoscope into the blowholes of a few trained, captive dolphins and porpoises. The small camera didn't need to go deep; it just had to get to where it could film the phonic lips at high speed. "And we show that there's definitely movement of the [lips] while they make echolocation clicks," summarizes Elemans.

For their next experiment, they needed animals that had recently died.

"That's really difficult," explains Elemans. "Typically when they die, they sink. So it's very hard to study their physiology because you don't have access to fresh tissue."

But Elemans and the others worked with marine mammal stranding networks, especially in Germany, to collect harbor porpoises that had died in the wild. Then then blew air across their phonic lips.

"What we've been able to show," says Elemans, "is that these phonic lips [are] not moved by muscle control like, for example, in cat purring. But instead, they're made just like a human voice by airflow. And that's a really striking parallel."

Additional experiments involving vocalization analysis and a kind of CT scan suggested that toothed whales likely have separate vocal registers that generate their numerous sounds, just like we do.

On top of that, the different registers have different functions. For instance, through audio recording the sounds of wild animals during their dives (by attaching acoustic tags to individual animals) as well as those of trained porpoises and dolphins, the research team determined that it's the vocal fry register that's responsible for echolocation in toothed whales.

"The strength of this work," says Kelly Benoit-Bird, Science Chair at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, "is that it reconciles field observations of [toothed whale] sounds and laboratory studies of physiology with our understanding of the evolution of marine mammals to provide a clear, complete picture of how dolphins produce the wide repertoire of sounds that is critical for their survival."

Benoit-Bird, who wasn't involved in the study, points to the way the researchers tackled this scientific challenge from a variety of angles.

"This work took all the fragments of the puzzle, figured out exactly how they fit together, and filled in the gaps, finally making the picture of dolphin sound production clear," she says.

Agnese Lanzetti, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Birmingham who was not part of the research, agrees.

"This is the very best research that shows how the sounds are made mechanically," she says, "and to prove that these sounds are generated by air."

The physics of air in the bodies of toothed whales plays out differently than it does for us on land. When an animal like a sperm whale dives a few thousand feet below the surface of the water, its lungs collapse under the pressure. But inside the bony structure of the nose, air can continue to move around and power echolocation.

"By moving all the air into the nose," says Elemans, "these toothed whales are able to generate much higher pressures to drive the system. And with that, they can make basically the loudest sounds any animal can make on the planet."

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Wildfires pushing tigers towards Sumatran villages. Drought prodding elephants into African cropland. Hotter ocean temperatures forcing whales into shipping lanes.

Humans and wildlife have long struggled to harmoniously coexist. Climate change is pitting both against each other more often, new research finds, amplifying conflicts over habitat and resources.

"We should expect these kinds of conflicts to increase in the future," said lead researcher Briana Abrahms, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington. "Recognizing that climate is an important driver can help us better predict when they'll occur and help us [intervene]."

Human-wildlife conflict is defined as any time humans and wildlife have a negative interaction: a car hitting a deer; a carnivore killing livestock; a starving polar bear going into a remote Alaskan village looking for food.

Abrahms, who studying large carnivores in Africa and humpback whale entanglements off the Pacific Coast, started to notice examples of human-wildlife conflict that appeared to be influenced by the effects of climate change. She and a team of researchers looked at three decades of published research on human-wildlife conflict on six continents and five oceans, looking to see if there was a climate connection.

They found 49 cases that all followed a similar pattern, Abrahms said. "There's some climate driver that's changing what people do or what animals do and that's leading to these increased conflicts."

The most prominent driver of conflict they found involved a shift in resources. On land that frequently meant the availability of water.

Climate change is disrupting precipitation patterns around the world. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says roughly half of the world's population is experiencing severe water scarcity for at least one month per year due to climatic and other factors.

The shortages are forcing both people and wildlife to look for new sources of water, often bringing them into conflict. Many of those interactions, the new paper says, have resulted in human deaths or injuries, as well as property damage and loss of livelihoods. The findings were published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

In Zimbabwe and southern Africa, for example, rainfall patterns have become more unpredictable and droughts have intensified as the climate has warmed.

"Local communities not only have to contend with unreliable precipitation patterns that make them food insecure in the first place," Narcisa Pricope, a professor of geography at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, told NPR last summer. "But on top of that, they have to live with wildlife in very close proximity as a result of the shrinking of water availability throughout the landscape."

At least 20 people were killed in confrontations with elephants last year, according to Zimbabwe's National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority.

Drought has also been connected to increases in wildlife-vehicle collisions in Australia and North America. In California, drought and massive climate-fueled wildfires that damaged millions of acres of habitat forced deer, elk, black bears and mountain lions to seek out new habitat. The state's transportation agency warned in 2021, putting the animals and motorists at increased risk.

Collisions between vehicles and large mammals cause an estimated $8 billion in property damage and other costs every year, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

Knowing that these kinds of conflicts are likely to increase as the climate continues to warm, Abrahms said, it's important for policymakers and people to look at solutions.

Take an acute drought, for example. Knowing that animals are going to be dealing with natural food shortages, she said, "let's make sure we are locking up our cars and putting food away in campsites."

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The Wall Street Journal added to that debate this week when they reported that the U.S. Department of Energy has shifted its stance on the origin of COVID. It now concludes, with "low confidence," that the pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.

The agency based their conclusion on classified evidence that isn't available to the public. According to the federal government, "low confidence" means "the information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information."

And at this point, the U.S. intelligence community still has no consensus about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Four of the eight intelligence agencies lean toward a natural origin for the virus, with "low confidence," while two of them – the DOE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation – support a lab origin, with the latter having "moderate confidence" about their conclusion.

But at the end of the day, the origin of the pandemic is also a scientific question. Virologists, who study pandemic origins, are much less divided than the U.S. intelligence community. They say there is "very convincing" data and "overwhelming evidence" pointing to an animal origin.

In particular, scientists published two extensive, peer-reviewed papers in Science in July 2022, offering the strongest evidence to date that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in animals at a market in Wuhan, China. Specifically, they conclude that the coronavirus most likely jumped from a caged wild animal into people at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where a huge COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019.

Virologist Angela Rasmussen, who contributed to one of the Science papers, says the DOE's "low confident" conclusion doesn't "negate the affirmative evidence for zoonotic [or animal] origin nor do they add any new information in support of lab origin."

"Many other [news] outlets are presenting this as new conclusive proof that the lab origin hypothesis is equally as plausible as the zoonotic origin hypothesis," Rasmussen wrote in an email to NPR, "and that is a misrepresentation of the evidence for either."

So just what is the scientific evidence that the pandemic began at the seafood market?