Weird Animal Report

Would You Clone Your Dead Pet?

And how similar would its clone be to the original?

I happened to catch a show last night on TLC called "I Cloned My Pet." It followed three people who had chosen to have their pets cloned. Cloning technology has progressed to the point where a Korean lab can clone your dead pet - although it costs $50,000, and can take several months before it is successful.

Unfortunately, the show focused on the lurid "aren't these people bonkers" aspect of the story. Just like everything on TLC these days. (Remember when TLC stood for "The Learning Channel"?) Doubly unfortunately, in my opinion the show ended right when things were getting interesting.

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker: The Ghost Bird

Extinct or not?

I watched the engrossing documentary "Ghost Bird" last night. As much as I would like to believe that the Ivory-billed woodpecker is still hanging in out there, the documentary makes a pretty good case that not only is the bird almost certainly extinct, but that it's important that we stop diverting federal funds to protect its "habitat."

The case of the Ivory-billed woodpecker is an interesting one. As Rumsfeld said, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." It's impossible to verify with 100% certainty that an elusive bird like the Ivory-billed isn't still around somewhere. And I think we all remember the tale of the coelacanth, which was pronounced extinct, but later found being regularly dredged up from the bottom of the ocean.

Meat-Eating Pandas

How much do we really know about these cuddly giants?

I was a little surprised to read this Treehugger item about a panda caught on camera eating meat. Up until this morning, so far as I knew, pandas famously eat only bamboo.

It's one of the worst stories of evolutionary adaptations, too, because the bamboo doesn't grow where the pandas live. Instead, they have to hike up and down the mountains every day just to get their daily ration of bamboo. And they subsist on only two species of bamboo, despite the proliferation of thousands of bamboo species in China.

Read more about Meat-Eating Pandas

2.5 Foot Rat Killed In NYC Foot Locker

Looks like the Gambian pouched rat is here to stay!

Last fall, a gigantic three foot long rat was killed with a pitchfork in Brooklyn's Marcy Projects. Now another colossal squeaker has been found, apparently in the stock room of a Foot Locker store in New York City.

The picture which went viral on Twitter and Facebook shows a dead rat which seems to be about two and a half feet long, draped across a shovel. The rat, clearly a male, appears to have died peacefully in its sleep, perhaps of old age. (Okay - maybe it ate some rat poison.)

Hotel Shark Gives Virgin Birth

A zebra shark in Dubai has been reproducing asexually since 2007

So far, if we believe the books, the total number of human virgin births on record is one. And that was only due to holy intervention. Sharks have us way beat. They don't even need the assistance of deities to make babies as virgins. They just go ahead and do it like bosses.

Not all sharks have such a power; in fact, most don't display it throughout their lifetimes. But one zebra shark in particular is showing up everyone else by making babies on her own for four years straight.

Scientists Create Terrifying Super-Soldier Ant

It's a real "gi-ant." (Sorry.)

The prospect of "super soldiers" being created by science has been a staple of sci fi movies for ages. But this time around it's not Kurt Russell being transformed and ordered to climb the chain: it's ants.

It turns out that ants have retained the "ancient DNA" to create these super soldiers for the last 35 to 60 million years. Researchers hypothesize that super soldier ants were kind of a thing back then, but for whatever reason, most ant species evolved away from using them.

Wild Birds Imitating People Noises

Is it a mockingbird, or a Nokia phone call?

I ran across an interesting phenomenon today, courtesy of Youtube. It's well known that if you keep a parrot in your home, it will learn all sorts of people noises like swear words, the sound of a crying baby, and the Spongebob Squarepants theme song. But you may not realize that wild birds learn people noises, too.

Certain bird species have the amazing ability to mimic the sounds of their environment. Parrots are the most well-known of these, but the mockingbird is also a star in this regard.

Last summer I was out working in the yard when I heard the sound of a "crosswalk signal for the blind" signaling that the light was green. They make a distinctive "boo beep boo beep" noise, in order to let people with reduced vision know when it is safe to cross the street. The surprising thing about this is that I live in the middle of the woods. However, the next town over (about 15 miles away) employs these crosswalk signals downtown.

Colossal Asian Tiger Prawns Invade The Gulf

A situation where "giant shrimp" isn't an oxymoron

The Asian tiger prawn is a real monster of the "shrimp" world. To quote the Houston Chronicle, it is "a foot-long crustacean with a voracious appetite and a proclivity for disease." And it's starting to show up in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

Asian tiger prawns (Penaeus monodon) are, as you might suspect, a native of Asia. Their natural habitat is the western Pacific, along the coastline of Asia, Africa, and even as far south as coastal Australia. It is the "most widely cultured shrimp in the world," and for good reason. Economically, the Asian tiger prawn grows quickly and provides a lot of meat. The meat is also more flavorful than many other species, and is in high demand on the market. What more could a shrimp farmer want?

Alaska Seal Deaths May Be Connected to Fukushima

Could this strange "illness" be radiation poisoning?

In July, ringed seals began climbing out on Barrow beaches well outside the season when they normally do so. The seals had lesions on their rear flippers and around their mouths, and patchy hair loss. Many of them didn't behave normally - they were sluggish, and failed to flee when humans approached.

Necropsies showed that the seals had fluid in their lungs, abnormal growths in their brains, and white spots on their livers. So far 75 seals have been confirmed sick, and 60 dead. The same problems have been reported in Canada and Russia, and among bearded seals and walruses.

Famous Lost Yeti Finger Found - DNA Results Are In!

Spoiler alert: it's a human finger.

Back in the fifties, none other than movie star legend Jimmy Stewart became part of bigfoot lore. He smuggled a supposed yeti finger out of India, where it was studied briefly and then lost to the ages. But now the finger has been uncovered, DNA tests performed, and - to some disappointment - analyzed as being 100% human.

In 1958, a yeti hunter named Peter Byrne overheard two of his sherpas talking about the yeti. He learned that the Pangboche Monastery was said to have a yeti hand on the premises, where it was revered as a sort of holy relic. The monks refused to let Byrne have the hand, claiming that if the hand left the monastery, a curse would befall them.