Monthly Archives: March 2013

http://vi.sualize.us/cute_owl_cute_bird_adorable_picture_82Eh.html

This weeks cute animal happens to be one of my favorite. So while you may not think they are the cutest animal in the world, I don’t really care. Because they’re owls. And I love owls. There are various types of owls, and they can be found all over the world. In fact, owls occupy all continents except for antarctica. Most owls fly at night, but others hunt during the day. Some live in cold climates and others live in deserts. Some owls reside in wide open spaces, but others live in dense rain forests. Though owls are extremely diverse, they have been revered worldwide for centuries as symbols of wisdom or words of warning.

Owls are built to be one of the most able winged predator. Their ears are huge holes in the owl’s skull and can help the owl hear a mouse move from up to 75 feet away. The owl’s eyes are so large that there isn’t enough room in the skull for eye muscles, so the eyes do not move. This is why the owl is able to turn his whole head almost 270° around. Consequently, this increases the owl’s visual focus, since both eyes are directed at the same place. The owl’s feather’s are even designed to be beneficial. The soft edges of an owl feather make an owl’s flight almost silent. Coarse feathers would make the owl more audible to prey, making hunting more challenging.

Owls fly low to the ground when they are hunting, and most feed off of small prey. The type of prey depends on the owl’s habitat – they can eat rodents and insects or fish if they fly over the water. There have even been instances of large owls carrying off young deer!

Most owls live solitarily because there is less competition for food. Owls can live just about anywhere, and they don’t waste time building their own homes. They just set up shop in any old nest or hole in a tree they can find. Owls only live together when it is time to mate. Mating is also the time owl calls become loudest. Male owls have to impress a female before she gets over her fear of living in proximity to another owl (even though the female is actually the larger of the two). He may leave her dead food and will wait around until she lets him near her. The female owl will lay eggs – two or three if there is scarce food and up to six eggs if food is easily obtainable. The chicks will hatch two days apart. This way, at least a few chicks will survive in the event that the female owl cannot find enough food. Owls are cared for for about three months by their mother and father, and by the time they are six months old, they are fully grown and will venture to find their own territories.

Here’s a video of a cute baby owl.

http://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/owl

The Chinese call the Giant Panda “large bear-cat,” but they’re only half right: after many years of genetic testing, scientists have determined that the DNA of Giant Pandas aligns most closely with that of other bears. They have similar appearances, walking and climbing movements and social systems. The species, however does have some differences.

First foremost, the Giant Pandas coat is unlike that of any other bear. It is stipulated that the white and black spots may serve as camouflage when the panda is in the treetops or patches of bamboo. Another theory is that the spots help pandas identify one another while on the ground. Regardless of their purpose, all panda spots are unique to each panda.

The diet and shelter of a Giant Panda are one and the same. The species relies almost completely on one plant: bamboo. Giant Pandas spend up to twelve hours each day eating bamboo, partly because the low nutritional quality of the plant requires a large amount of consumption. Their strong jawbones and cheek muscles allow the panda bear to chew the thick bamboo stalks and their teeth are useful to pull off the outer layers of the stalk. Giant Pandas also eat bamboo leaves, grasses, bulbs, fruits, insects and rodents, but bamboo makes up the largest portion of the Giant Pandas diet.

Bamboo is also an important source of shelter for the Giant Panda, who lives natively in the high bamboo and conifer forests of southwestern China. These old-growth forests are important because they provide hollow logs which Giant Pandas use as their dens, and the large tree stumps provide shelter for bamboo. Most pandas live solitarily in areas of about 2 square miles. Wild pandas are solitary because of the large amount of bamboo they consume each day. If Giant Pandas cross paths, they may get into fights, and the only time pandas live in proximity is during mating season or for the eighteen months that mother pandas have cubs.

Pandas have scent glands that release scents that relay information like sex, age and reproductive status to nearby pandas. This becomes important when a female panda is ready to get pregnant. Nearby male pandas will monitor her scent and stay nearby until it is time for mating. Afterwards, they leave to find another female panda. Meanwhile the female panda carries her cubs. The reproductive rate of Giant Pandas is very low – most Giant Pandas will only have about five litters in their lifetime and breed once every two or three years.

These cubs are helpless when they are born, and they’ll stay with their mothers until they are about a year and a half old. However, they are still fairly vulnerable to predators until they are about two and a half years old, so they spend most of their time high in trees where they are safe. Though Giant Pandas have fewer predators today then they did historically, they are still the prey of golden cats, yellow-throated martens, and weasels.

Now that you’ve learned a little bit about Giant Pandas, enjoy these videos!

http://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/giant-panda

As a college student, I am almost always tired, and sometimes, I wish I could just spend my whole day asleep. And if I was a koala, instead of a human, I could!

Koalas come from a class of animal called marsupials (like kangaroos), and are actually not bears, even though you may have referred to them as “koala bears” in the past. Koalas live in southeastern and eastern Australia, and typically have a life-span of about ten to fifteen years. They inhabit vast expanses of eucalyptus-laden forests, and, as I mentioned, sleep A LOT, sometimes as much as 20 hours a day. Koalas sustain themselves solely from the consumption of eucalyptus leaves, and they spend a long time sleeping so they can fully digest the leaves. Additionally, since eucalyptus leaves don’t provide a high-calorie diet, the excess sleeping is a way for koalas to conserve their energy.

Koalas are one of the few animals that can even eat eucalyptus leaves. The leaves are poisonous to most animals, but koalas have a bacteria in their digestive tract that can break down the toxic components of the leaves. There are actually more than 600 types of eucalyptus leaves, but koalas tend to favor only about 36 of the varieties, choosing the leaves that are the least toxic.

Since koalas get their food (and protection) from the very tall eucalyptus tree, they have many adaptations to make living in their environment possible. They have a shortened tail and curved spine to allow them to sit and sleep between the branches of the trees. They are excellent climbers due to the presence of two opposable thumbs with sharp claws and their strong arm and shoulder muscles. They have good grip on branches because of rough pads on their hands and feet. Koalas usually weigh between nine and twenty-nine pounds, depending on the species, and males tend to weigh about fifty percent more than females do.

Females usually only give birth to one child at a time, an infant called a “joey.” The gestation period is only about thirty days, but when the joey is born, it is about as small as a jellybean and could not possibly survive on its own. It therefore crawls from its mother’s birth canal into her pouch, where it resides for about six months, feeding on milk, until it is strong enough to begin venturing into the real world. Mother koalas have a pouch similar to that of a kangaroo, but it opens from the bottom, instead of the top. This is an adaptation which allows dirt to stay out of the pouch as an animal is burrowing, which koalas used to due before they discovered trees. Even after a joey grows up, it will still return to it’s mother’s pouch to sleep, and after it gets too large, it will climb onto it’s mother’s back. At about a year old, the joey can live on its own.

Now, enjoy this video of a koala!