From nature.com: Early bird gets the better song.

Birds that come from the earlier eggs in a brood are more likely to be better singers, scientists have found.

In most bird species, song is used by males to demonstrate their fitness to potential mates, and many studies have shown that the healthiest males tend to sing the longest, loudest and most complex songs. [continue]

From NewScientist: Wasps have a good memory for a face.

Wasps can remember each other after a busy week apart, according to new research. It’s a level of social memory never seen before in insects, which were long thought to be too small-brained for such a feat. [continue]

From the BBC: Bumblebees outwit robotic spiders.

Scientists have found that bumblebees learn from their "near-death" encounters with crab spiders and adapt their future foraging strategies.

They watched real bees in an artificial meadow — containing yellow "flowers" and robotic crab spiders.

Bees that had been "captured" spent longer inspecting flowers during subsequent foraging trips.

They may outwit the spiders — but at the expense of [continue]

How did I miss this? From the Times: Just right for the garden: a mini-cow.

It’s the little cow with a big future. Rising supermarket prices are persuading hundreds of families to turn their back gardens into mini-ranches stocked with miniature cattle.

Registrations of the most popular breed, the Dexter, have doubled since the millennium and websites are sprouting up offering “the world’s most efficient, cutest and tastiest cows”.

For between £200 and £2,000, people can buy a cow that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer. [continue]

Some of us would love to have a mini-cow here. Others, not so much.

Continue reading →

From the BBC: Cattle shown to align north-south.

Have you ever noticed that herds of grazing animals all face the same way?

No, actually. They do?

Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction.

Wild deer also display this behaviour — a phenomenon that has apparently gone unnoticed by herdsmen and hunters for thousands of years.

In the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences, scientists say the Earth’s magnetic fields may influence the behaviour of these animals. [continue]

Oh, too cute! A greyhound puppy has adopted a baby owl. From the Mail Online:

In the childhood fairytale it was the owl and the pussycat who were the very best of friends.

But in real life it is this greyhound and owl who have formed a rather bizarre friendship at an animal centre.

The six-month-old dog, Torque, adopted tiny baby owl Shrek when she was taken from her mother for her own protection after just three days.

Keepers feared Shrek’s mother would eat her first clutch if she became stressed.

Adoptive dad Torque is now guarding the rare bird at the home of head falconer John Picton.

They spend their evenings together watching Eastenders and Coronation Street. [continue, see photos]

Link found here at Uncertain Times.

This delights me. From the Beeb: Wild dolphins tail-walk on water.

A wild dolphin is apparently teaching other members of her group to walk on their tails, a behaviour usually seen only after training in captivity.

The tail-walking group lives along the south Australian coast near Adelaide.

One of them spent a short time after illness in a dolphinarium 20 years ago and may have picked up the trick there.

Scientists studying the group say tail-walk tuition has not been seen before, and suggest the habit may emerge as a form of "culture" among this group. [continue]

From the Beeb: Small shrew is heavyweight boozer.

A tiny tree-shrew that lives on alcoholic nectar could — pound for pound — drink the average human under the table, scientists have discovered.

Malaysia’s pen-tailed tree-shrew waits until nightfall to binge on fermented nectar from the bertam palm.

The animal could give insights into how humans’ alcohol tolerance first evolved, the scientists say. [continue]

From EurekAlert: Migrating songbirds learn survival tips on the fly.

Migrating songbirds take their survival cues from local winged residents when flying through unfamiliar territory, a new Queen’s University-led study shows.

It’s a case of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," says biologist Joseph Nocera, who conducted the research while working as an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen’s under the supervision of Biology professor Laurene Ratcliffe.

Avoiding predators can substantially increase a bird’s chances of survival during migration, notes Dr. Nocera. But to do that, it first has to recognize who its predators are. "We believe some prey use social cues from other animals to gain information about potential predators," he says. [continue]

From discovery.com: Apes Plan for the Future.

What goes on in an ape’s mind might be more similar to our own way of thinking than previously realized, suggests a new study that found chimpanzees and orangutans plan for their futures. [continue]

From Carl Zimmer at The Loom: Stockholm Syndrome For Moths.

A caterpillar’s life is not an easy one. The plants that it eats make toxins to make it sick. Birds swoop in to pluck it away and feed it to their chicks. But the most horrific threat comes from wasps that use caterpillars as hosts for their young. These parasitoid wasps are among my favorite creatures (see my post on the emerald cockroach wasp, which attacks cockroaches like a neurosurgeon). So it was with eye-popping delight that I read a new paper in PLOS Biology One about how another species of wasp in Brazil attacks another caterpillar. Glyptapanteles glyptapanteles is more than just cruel to its host. It also gives its host an extreme case of Stockholm syndrome.

The fun begins when [continue]

I love this kind of stuff! I’d never heard of Carl Zimmer before coming across The Loom. Turns out that he’s written a book that looks plenty interesting: Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures. Tempting. I might have to order that one.

Continue reading →

From discovery.com: Olympic Swimmers Learn From Sharks, Dolphins.

When winning an Olympic gold medal in swimming is the goal, it helps to take inspiration from some of the best swimmers in the world — sharks and dolphins — and that is exactly what U.S. Olympic team swimmers have been doing as they train.

From suits to strokes, coaches, researchers and other advisers are making sure that their athletes benefit from fish and marine mammals’ natural swimming abilities.

"Some of our athletes are now [continue]