Tag Archives: zoology

Smithsonian: Smithsonian’s National Zoo Hosts Panda Palooza: A Giant Farewell, Sept. 23 to Oct. 1

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Smithsonian: Smithsonian’s National Zoo Hosts Panda Palooza: A Giant Farewell, Sept. 23 to Oct. 1. “The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI) will celebrate its three giant pandas before the bears depart for China later this year. Visitors are invited to join the Panda Palooza, a nine-day onsite and online series of events in honor of 25-year-old Mei Xiang (may-SHONG), 26-year-old Tian Tian (tee-YEN tee-YEN) and 3-year-old Xiao Qi Ji (SHIAU-chi-ji) from Sept. 23 to Oct. 1.”

Boign Boing: This young zoologist wants to educate you about weird organisms, prehistoric creatures, evolution, and more

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Boing Boing: This young zoologist wants to educate you about weird organisms, prehistoric creatures, evolution, and more. “Meet zoologist Lindsay Nikole, who is based in Torrance, California and who uses both short form (Instagram and TikTok) and long form (YouTube) social media to educate the public about animals of all kinds, as well as about ecosystems, evolution, and more.”

Merlin milestone: App now helps ID birds worldwide (Cornell Chronicle)

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Cornell Chronicle: Merlin milestone: App now helps ID birds worldwide. “The free Merlin Bird ID app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology just hit a major milestone: The digital field guide and ID assistant can now help users identify birds in any country – a grand total of 10,315 species.”

WAMC: Global butterfly database launched

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WAMC: Global butterfly database launched. “The Vermont Center for Ecostudies is part of a collaborative launching a digital platform that identifies and catalogues butterflies from around the world. The Center is working with the University of Ottawa and Espace pour la vie in Montréal to launch eButterfly, a database that includes nearly 20,000 butterfly species – all currently known species on the planet.”

WVXU: The Cincinnati Zoo is creating a massive behavioral database to better understand its animals

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WVXU: The Cincinnati Zoo is creating a massive behavioral database to better understand its animals. “Out of uniform and hidden from the animals, Cincinnati Zoo scientists are collecting massive amounts of information on its 400 species — like Huto the Komoto dragon, hippos Fiona and Fritz, and Nutmeg the fox — so they can live their best lives in Cincinnati.”

University of Michigan: Using the power of artificial intelligence, new open-source tool simplifies animal behavior analysis

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University of Michigan: Using the power of artificial intelligence, new open-source tool simplifies animal behavior analysis. “A team from the University of Michigan has developed a new software tool to help researchers across the life sciences more efficiently analyze animal behaviors. The open-source software, LabGym, capitalizes on artificial intelligence to identify, categorize and count defined behaviors across various animal model systems.”

To move a manatee: Museum catalogs skeletal specimen (North Carolina Coastal Federation)

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North Carolina Coastal Federation: To move a manatee: Museum catalogs skeletal specimen. “It took a lot of collaboration to get an 800-pound manatee carcass that washed up on a beach in Kill Devil Hills in early December 2021 to Lisa Gatens, the mammalogy collection manager at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. The carcass was delivered in mid-December 2021 and buried in manure to decompose, leaving just the bones. After about a year, the bones were dug up, cleaned, put in a freezer to get rid of any critters, cleaned again and, as of last week, each bone was being entered into the mammalogy collections catalog.”

New York Times: The Nicest Place Online? It Might Just Involve Identifying Sea Slugs.

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New York Times: The Nicest Place Online? It Might Just Involve Identifying Sea Slugs.. “As civil discourse online and off increasingly proves elusive, a website devoted to identifying plants and animals may be teaching humans how to get along.”

New York Times: The Animal Translators

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New York Times: The Animal Translators. “Machine-learning systems, which use algorithms to detect patterns in large collections of data, have excelled at analyzing human language, giving rise to voice assistants that recognize speech, transcription software that converts speech to text and digital tools that translate between human languages. In recent years, scientists have begun deploying this technology to decode animal communication, using machine-learning algorithms to identify when squeaking mice are stressed or why fruit bats are shouting.”

PR Newswire: EarthSnap Launches Revolutionary App to Identify All Types of Earth’s Plants and Animal Species (PRESS RELEASE)

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PR Newswire: EarthSnap Launches Revolutionary App to Identify All Types of Earth’s Plants and Animal Species (PRESS RELEASE). “EarthSnap is citizen science in action: When users upload photos of plants or animals to EarthSnap, the app utilizes a custom-built, patent-pending AI machine learning solution to identify the subject and share details like habitat, global population distribution and known history on Earth. These uploaded photos also contribute to EarthSnap’s ever-growing database – applications of which include recording animal migration habits, shifting habitats and animal behavior.”

NewsWise: The Art of Getting DNA Out of Decades-Old Pickled Snakes

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NewsWise: The Art of Getting DNA Out of Decades-Old Pickled Snakes. “Many of these specimens are decades or even centuries old, near-perfectly preserved by a combination of formalin and alcohol. But the process that preserves tissues often destroys or at least makes acquiring DNA for modern studies very difficult, which is bad news for scientists who study genetic relationships between organisms. A new study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, however, reveals new approaches for getting and maximizing usable DNA from decades-old pickled specimens, and uses these techniques to solve a long-standing mystery about a small snake from the island of Borneo.”

The Hindu: India adds 540 species to its faunal database, 315 taxa to its flora in 2021

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The Hindu: India adds 540 species to its faunal database, 315 taxa to its flora in 2021. “India added 540 species to its faunal database in 2021 taking the total number of animal species to 1,03,258. The country also added 315 taxa to the Indian flora during 2021, taking the number of floral taxa in the country to 55,048. Of the 540 faunal species, 406 are new discoveries and 134 new records to India. Thirteen new genera were also discovered in 2021. Among the new species discovered is one species from mammal, 35 reptiles and 19 species of pisces.”

BBC: Huge plan to map the DNA of all life in British Isles

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BBC: Huge plan to map the DNA of all life in British Isles. “Seventy thousand species. That’s the best guess for the tally of life, including plants, animals and fungi, found in Britain and Ireland. And it’s the target of one of biology’s most ambitious projects – scientists want to map the DNA of every single one of these organisms.”