Chimpanzees are perceptive enough to understand how enormous a pint of liquid is, or the volume of another measure. That shows they have a capability to estimate the difference between continuing quantities , for example a pint or half pint of non-alcoholic fruit juice. Formerly , apes have only been known to distinguish discrete quantities , for example 8 candy over 5.
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A US research team used high tech tags to glance some of the giant sea mammals’ extraordinary hunting behavior. This tracking showed the way the whales travelled together in groups, but when they hunted, each whale “varied its role” inside the group. The analysis team declared the observations at the Sea Sciences meeting in Portland, Oregon. Professor Bruce Chum from the Hatfield Sea Science Center in Oregon led the study.
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Analysts at San Diego Zoo have been studying what’s been described as the “secret language” of elephants. They’ve been monitoring communications between animals that can’t be heard by human ears. The elephant’s trumpeting call will be familiar to most of the people, but the animals also emit snarls. Their snarls are only partially audible ; two thirds of the call is at frequencies that are too low to get picked up by our hearing. To find out more about the inaudible part of the snarl, the team attached a mic responsive to these low frequencies and a GPS tracking system to 8 of the zoo’s female elephants. The analysts could then correlate the noises the animals were making with what they were doing.
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Consumers around the planet aren’t aware that they’re “eating” rainforests, asserts Andrew Mitchell. In this week’s Green Room, he explains how many every-day purchases are driving the elimination of the crucial tropical ecosystems. Burning tropical forests drives global temperature rises quicker than the planet’s’s whole transport sector ; there will be no solution to global warming without stopping deforestation When was the last time you had a “rainforest picnic”? Or maybe, maybe, an “all-day Amazon breakfast”? Next time you are in a superstore picking up a chicken sandwich for lunch, or fancy tucking in to a good breakfast of eggs, sausage and bacon before setting off for work, spare a thought for the Amazon. A new report by Forest Footprint Discovery exposes for the 1st time how worldwide business is driving rainforests to elimination to provide things for me and you to eat. But it is doing also exhibit what companies are doing to try and lighten their forest footprint.
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Scientists dug up a large jawbone, teeth and scales belonging to the shark which lived 89 million years back. The bottom-dwelling predator had large tooth plates, which it probably going to used to smash huge shelled animals like giant clams. Palaeontologists already knew about the shark, but the new sample recommends it was far larger than formerly thought. The scientists who made the discovery, broadcast in the book Cretaceous Research, last week also released details of other recently discovered giant plankton-eating fish that swam in prehistoric seas for at least a hundred million years. But this new fish, called Ptychodus mortoni, is both bigger and more unfriendly, having a liking for flesh instead of plankton.
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