Animals Are Awesome

Commonly stereotyped as the lowly cretins of the African plains, spotted (“laughing”) hyenas are surprisingly intelligent.

From wikipedia: “Like primates, spotted hyenas use multiple sensory modalities, recognise individual conspecifics, are conscious that some clan-mates may be more reliable than others, recognise 3rd party kin and rank relationships among clan-mates, and adaptively use this knowledge during social decision making. Also, like cercopithecine primates, dominance ranks in hyena societies are not correlated with size or aggression, but with ally networks.”

A pregnant lioness.

Lions are capable of going into multiple estrus cycles, and thus can reproduce outside of any set season. However, lionesses within a pride will often intentionally synchronize their mating cycles so as to birthe their cubs close together. Food competition in a pride is fierce, and smaller cubs stand little chance against another litter of older half-brothers and -sisters. By keeping their gestations close together the lionesses can further ensure the collective success of their offspring.

These days, much of the scientific community considers bears to be not only true hibernators, but super hibernators!

Unlike other, smaller mammals who must wake often to eat and pass waste, and to keep their temperature from falling too low, grizzly bears are able to hibernate without waking for an entire season if need be.

During hibernation a bear is able to live entirely off its fat, despite an average hibernating BMR of 8000 kcal a day. The bear is able to break down the urea that accumulates as a byproduct of fat metabolism, and the resulting nitrogen is used to build protein. This allows a bear to maintain organ and muscle mass under circumstances that would normally lead to severe muscle atrophy. Overall, a bear will lose 15-30% of its weight during hibernation.

Ursus arctos horribilis, better known as the grizzly bear, is distinguished by its humped shoulders, long claws and concave facial profile with heavy brow (think Winnie the Pooh).

Bears did not used to be considered true hibernators, because other deep hibernating mammals typically go through a drastic decrease in body temperature, whereas a bear’s core temperature remains above 88ºF during hibernation (normal for a bear being ~100ºF). Whereas smaller mammals may experience core drops to as low as 40ºF. This enables the bear to more quickly awaken and react to threat. Easy to see why stumbling into a bear cave even in the dead of winter can have a dangerous outcome.

Storm-petrels are sea birds that feed on planktonic, drifting crustaceans and tiny surface dwelling fish. They do so by standing on the surface of the ocean using their webbed feet, while facing into the wind, wings raised, to catch the air currents. The air causes drag opposed to that of the water, which keeps the birds stationary (or floating slowly backwards, depending on the wind strength and water currents). In a lack of wind, storm-petrels will rapidly flutter their wings to remain above the water.

Because it is disadvantageous for penguins to leave the nest to relieve themselves, they instead turn away from the nest and, taking wind trajectory into account, shoot their excrement away from the nest to a distance of ~40cm.