Animal Snippets

What tidings will the Year of the Snake bring? The New Year's season is implacably festive, but given the destructive power of the snake sign, many worry that this year will bite.

It comes naturally for us to confide in a gentle-faced dog about our traumas. Therapy dogs are invited into communities that have recently gone through crisis situations, as a way to provide emotional release.

In southern states like Texas, backyard encounters with feral swine have become routine. The pigs, ill-tempered eating machines weighing 200 pounds or more, roam city streets, collide with cars, and root up cemeteries.

Law enforcement agents often use dermestid beetles to expose skeletons when chemicals might damage evidence. The insects might give you the creepy-crawlies, but they are a great tool in forensic investigations.

This robot mimics the gait of a real salamander by using a digital neural network that is instructed to swim, crawl or walk based on the intensity of electrical signals running through its "spinal cord" circuits.

Inupiat typically leave some meat specifically for the polar bears. The predators have learned to arrive at North Slope Eskimo communities just before the hunt and whet their appetites by gnawing last year's whale bones.

In the Atlantic Ocean, locating a right whale the size of a school bus can be like finding a needle in a haystack. But a new generation of sharp-eared underwater robots can pinpoint the leviathans' locations in real time.

Huddle movement caused by the selfish behavior of individual penguins, each one jockeying for the warmest position, ends up distributing heat throughout the group and leads to benefits for everyone.

By week’s end, I hooked and lost nine tarpon at Jardines de le Reina. “You only land one out of every 10 fish that you hook,” an angling friend offered as solace. Perhaps the next one will be mine.

'Cock-a-doodle-doo' symbolizes the break of dawn in many countries. Scientists, by putting roosters under constant light conditions, have proven that their startling crows are under the control of a biological clock.