Our Animal Friends

Strange things are afoot. A frog species has moved onto the I-95 in New Jersey. Leopard frogs have taken a liking to the road. It is strange a new species could pop up in such a heavily traveled urban area and then survive. The full name of this new species of frog is the Atlantic Coast leopard frog or Rana kauffeldi and is only the second new species of frog or toad researchers have discovered in the continental United States in the last thirty years.

There is a flesh eating fungus headed our way, this is the bad part of what is happening. The good news for us is it only seems to attack salamanders, so the news is not too good for them. It was first seen in 2013 after it killed salamanders in the Netherlands. Here is the strange part. It comes from Asia, but doesn’t seem to attack amphibians from that area. It not only attacks salamanders but also newts. The fungus is called Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans and is related to another fungus which causes a similar disease in frogs which is known as Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. I guess I shouldn’t joke about this, but the first thing that came to my mind was developing a serum from the Asian salamander’s blood and vaccinating all the salamanders and newts. This is ridiculous of course, but maybe it could be done on a limited bases with some in captivity to preserve a species which is being wiped out by the disease.

Animals are turning up in places which are unusual. A wolf-like animal has been seen in northern Arizona. It was seen and photographed in Kaibab National Forest just north of Grand Canyon National Park. Authorities from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it could be part of a population of about seventeen hundred gray wolves from the Northern Rockies or a wolf-dog hybrid. They went on to say, "Our immediate concern is the welfare of this animal." The authorities want to protect these animals, Β because there are not a lot of them left. A group of fewer than 100 live in parts of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico, but they look different than the animal which was seen.

Did you ever hear about a deer with fangs? There used to be deer with fangs living in Afghanistan, but the last one was seen over sixty years ago that was before this year. Yes one has turned up again. It is called the Kashmir musk deer and was last seen in the late 1940s. This time five sightings of these deer were made. The deer was thought to have been poached out of existence, but luckily this was wrong. The reason for all the poaching was the fact the deer has scent glands which are worth more than $20,000 per pound so maybe it is best they remain hidden.

Sometimes animals can do things which we humans find disturbing and a fish called the French grunt is no exception. When the fish finds itself in a stressful situation it produces a sound which sounds to us like fingernails scraping on a blackboard. Scientists thought the fish did this by grunting, but they have discovered something different. A scared fish grinds its teeth to produce the noise. This allows it to communicate with other fish.

It turns out Koalas have something in common with humans and it’s too bad for them. They get chlamydia which is a sexually transmitted disease and it is ravaging the marsupials. Scientists have been working on a cure and seemed to have found it. Before the British arrived there were over 10 million koalas in Australia. The estimate today is there are forty three thousand. Scientists knew something had to be done or the beloved Koalas would be wiped out. The disease not only leads to death, but also blindness and infertility. Thirty Koalas were vaccinated and turned loose. None got the disease even though some were showing signs of it before being vaccinated.

There was a problem on the Galapagos island of Espanola. The population of giant tortoises were in trouble and dying. In the 1960s they were nearly all gone, but that has been reversed. In the late 1960s the number of these giant tortoises numbered only about fifteen, today there are over 1,000 self-sustaining animals. One professor stated, “The population is secure.” The animals were saved when captive-bred tortoises were reintroduced to the island about 40 years ago by the Galapagos National Park Service. I think it is a lucky thing for the animals tourists go there to see them and this generates a lot of money making it practically mandatory to save the animals. The same professor said, "But there is yet more work to fully recover the ecosystem upon which the tortoises and other rare species depend."

For years the American Natural History Museum had classified a certain sea creature as the world’s largest anemone. Recently this has changed because the museum realized this was a new order of animal, Cnidaria. According to Mother Nature Network the new order is, “a classification equal to Carnivora in mammals or Crocodilia in reptiles.” When the scientists were trying to classify which species of the 112 species of anemones this creature belonged to they realized it did not fit into any of them. It was found the DNA didn’t match. Instead the animal is more closely related to jellyfish. It is believed that the two species were the result of convergent evolution. This happens when two species develop similar traits due to the environment they are in.

Most of us love Dolphins and it seems most Dolphins love us and have been responsible for saving many a drowning person. The first new types of Dolphins to live in rivers in Brazil since 1918 have now been seen. What makes them different from other river Dolphins is the fact they have only 24 teeth per jaw instead of the 25 to 29 the others have. The river basin they are in had many things happen to it due to the intense human habitation thus threatening the newly discovered river Dolphin with extinction already. There are four river Dolphin species and three of them are listed as vulnerable to critically endangered. We are lacking enough data on the fourth species to give an opinion.