Category Archives: Critters

errr, I mean, Lynx

AUBURN HILLS, MI — The first full week of the new year was shark week at Great Lakes Crossing Outlets in Auburn Hills as half a dozen sharks were released into the soon-to-be-open Sea Life Michigan aquarium Thursday, Jan. 8.

Sea Life Michigan welcomed six small sharks — one nurse shark, two bonnethead sharks, and three blacknose sharks — into its waters in preparation for its upcoming grand opening on Thursday, Jan. 29.

The blacknose and bonnethead sharks were put into the aquarium’s ocean tank, which is 3.5 meters deep. They joined dozens of tropical marine fish (snappers, tangs, grunts, trigger fish, angel fish, and butterfly fish), a moray eel, stingrays and cownose rays. The nurse shark was put into a different tank.

Sea Life Michigan Website

Kentucky will help Wisconsin boost its elk herd by providing 150 elk cows, calves and yearling male elk over the next 3-5 years.

A Half-and-Half Common Archduke Butterfly (Lexias pardalis) is better known as the “brush-footed” butterfly.

Chris Johnson, a volunteer at a butterfly exhibit at Drexel University in California and a retired engineer, first discovered this bizarre feature of the specie.

Johnson found it when he was removing butterflies from the chamber where they first emerge from their chrysalises, or the stage during which it turns into an adult. The butterfly then revealed its characteristics by spreading the wings, which showed its two genders.

Its two right wings were of female of its species — large and brown with yellow and white spots. Meanwhile, its two left wings sported a darker green, blue and purple coloring, a pattern archetypal of males.

“It just gave me goosebumps, it was a total surprise, something I never expected to see,” Johnson said.

This extreme condition is called bilateral gynandromorphy. It happens when there’s a problem during cell division when an insect forms after an egg is fertilized, resulting in female chromosomes in one daughter cell and male in the other.

A rare half-female, half-male northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis, pictured with female plumage on the left and male plumage on the right) spotted a few years ago in Rock Island, Illinois.

This bird might look like a holiday ornament, but it is actually a rare half-female, half-male northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis, pictured with female plumage on the left and male plumage on the right) spotted a few years ago in Rock Island, Illinois. Researchers have long known such split-sex “gynandromorphs” exist in insects, crustaceans, and birds. But scientists rarely get to extensively study a gynandromorph in the wild; most published observations cover just a day or so. Observers got to follow this bird, however, for more than 40 days between December 2008 and March 2010. They documented how it interacted with other birds and even how it responded to recorded calls. The results suggest being half-and-half carries consequences: The cardinal didn’t appear to have a mate, and observers never heard it sing, the researchers report this month in The Wilson Journal of Ornithology. On the other hand, it wasn’t “subjected to any unusual agonistic behaviors from other cardinals,” according to the paper. Intriguingly, another gynandromorph cardinal sighted briefly in 1969 had the opposite plumage, they note: the male’s bright red plumes on the right, the drabber female feathers on the left.

An albino bottlenose dolphin, recently spotted off the east coast of Florida, was caught on video flashing its white dorsal fin above the water’s blue waves.

The rare white dolphin is the star of an amateur video filmed by Danielle Carter, a volunteer with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Carter took the video when she unexpectedly noticed the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) swimming along the Indian River in Central Florida on Dec. 10.

The footage shows the white dolphin swimming in shallow water near the shore, a strategic place to catch fish such as sea trout, pinfish or mullet, said Blair Mase, the Southeast region marine mammal stranding coordinator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“A lot of times when they act that way, they are herding fish into the shallows [to feed]” Mase told Live Science.

The video only provides several glimpses of the dolphin, but the animal looks like a healthy subadult, meaning it’s likely a few years old, Mase said. In spite of the dolphin’s white body, it’s difficult to say whether the animal is a true albino, Mase added.

In addition to white or fair skin and hair, other telltale signs of albinism include pink or red eyes and impaired vision. Albinism in marine creatures is rare, and most of scientists’ knowledge of the condition comes from human studies, Mase said. People with the genetic predisposition lack the melanin pigment, usually because they inherited recessive genes from both of their parents, or in rare cases, from just one parent.

For animals in the wild, albinism can cause problems, Mase said. Albinos are also particularly sensitive to the sun and sunburns, and their white skin can make it hard to camouflage themselves against predators, she said.

Jaya the Sumatran Tiger has her paws full as she keeps up with her three cubs, born on October 8 at the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium.

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