The Existentialist Despair of Henri the Cat

The French really know how to tap into the emptiness of a life without meaning and the ironic burden that awareness brings to the aimless nihility of tedium.

Husky Dog and Baby Duet

Popular Whale songs (Baby Got Humpback?)

The Telegraph

Whales 'can't resist a catchy pop tune'
Humpback whales love a good hit single, and every year a new catchy pop tune spreads among the male underwater crooners, said an Australian study released on Thursday.

6:56PM BST 14 Apr 2011
The men are the only ones who sing, likely in the hopes of making some lady whale swoon, according to the research published in the US journal Current Biology.

If there is a whale version of the King of Pop, he likely resides off the coast of eastern Australia, because that is where the popular tune of the season has always originated for the past decade, researchers said.

The hit-making tune then ripples eastward across the South Pacific Ocean, from Australia to French Polynesia, infecting genetically distinct groups of whales who all start singing the same song during breeding season.

In typical pop music fashion, the tunes are not all that original most of the time, said researcher Ellen Garland, a graduate student at The University of Queensland.

"It would be like splicing an old Beatles song with U2," Garland said. "Occasionally they completely throw the current song out the window and start singing a brand new song."

The 11-year study described itself as the "first documentation of a repeated, dynamic cultural change occurring across multiple populations at such a large geographic scale."

What remains a mystery is why the whales all sing the same song, when presumably their efforts are meant to make them stand out against the pack.

"We think this male quest for song novelty is in the hope of being that little bit different and perhaps more attractive to the opposite sex," said Garland.

"This is then countered by the urge to sing the same tune, by the need to conform."

Read the story with image and links to related stories HERE.

Recordings Aim to Capture Calls of the Wild West

yahoo/AP
University of Utah researcher Jeff Rice records the rattling sound of a Great Basin rattlesnake Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008, in Salt Lake City to add to his collection. The landscape recordings could also provide important audio snapshots that could be used for comparison later when trying to understand how animals respond to encroaching subdivisions, oil and gas development, a warming climate or other changes.
(AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac)



Recordings aim to capture calls of the wild West

By MIKE STARK, Associated Press WriterSun Oct 5, 7:51 PM ET

Rattlesnakes aren't to be trifled with, but if you're trying to collect the sound of every creature in the West that slithers, hops, flies or flops, distance isn't a luxury you can afford.

"You get yourself in some strange situations," said Jeff Rice, a soft-spoken University of Utah research librarian who's trying to create the first comprehensive — and free to the public — archive of natural sounds in the West.

Minutes later he was squatting in the hills above Salt Lake City, training his lightweight parabolic microphone toward a Great Basin rattlesnake a few feet away.

The snake, caught by wildlife agents that day in a backyard, offered a few doubtful quiet moments. Finally, though, it let loose a long dry rattle, both eerie and fascinating, that unmistakably said "keep away."

"I knew he'd come through," Rice said, grinning like he'd been given a Christmas present.

The recording, reduced to a short clip, will be added to the Western Soundscape Archive, a Web-based sound clearinghouse headquartered at the university library.

Although it's just a year old, the site already has more than 800 recordings. The goal is to catalog the nearly 1,200 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians that roam 11 Western states. It will also feature "ambient soundscapes" from wild places across the region.

The sounds will be available to teachers, scientists and anyone else interested in hearing the odd murmurings of a sage grouse, javelina, Columbia spotted frog or mountain-dwelling moose.

The landscape recordings could also provide an important audio snapshot that could be used for comparison later when trying to understand how animals respond to encroaching subdivisions, oil and gas development, a warming climate, or other changes.

Repeat photography can reveal changes in a limited area, but repeated recordings offer broader insights, said Kurt Fristrup, a scientist with the National Park Service's natural sounds office in Fort Collins, Colo.

Many of the sound clips on the archive have been donated. Some, Rice had to get himself.

He has hunkered down in Utah's remote San Rafael Swell to record the chatter of beavers; logged hours on the Nevada side of Lake Mead listening to relict leopard frogs; and visited a laboratory to tape the Northern grasshopper mouse, a pint-size rodent that perches on its hind legs to offer a shrill whistle of warning.

"It's like a squeaky door," Rice said.

In the field, animals tend to be most active in early morning and evening. Rice comes prepared with hand-held digital recording equipment and a sense of adventure.

"You leave at 2 a.m. and find yourself wandering around bleary-eyed in a swamp," he said. "Sometimes you wonder what you're doing."

The work has its own quirky challenges — he's learned not to wear clothes that ripple noisily in the wind — and an urgent, serious side too.

As natural places disappear, so do the animal sounds that decorate them.

The World Conservation Union estimates that one in three amphibian species is at risk for extinction. Rice, 41, wants to capture as many on tape as possible before they're gone.

"It's very much a race against time," he said.

He figures the library has recordings of about 75 percent of the 53 frog and toad species in the states involved — Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. It has about 70 percent of the birds and dozens of mammal and reptile recordings.

The recordings, even heard from the safety of a desktop, can stir something primal in the DNA, a sudden flight response, for instance, in the case of the rattlesnake.

"Responses to those kinds of sounds are almost reflexive," Fristrup said.

He said Rice's archive could help people learn what animals they're hearing in the wild, even if they can't see them.

"Most of us learn to ignore what our ears tell us and focus on the task at hand because we live in really noisy habitat," Fristrup said. "But in some ways, hearing is the most alerting sense, directing us to things that matter."

There are already several natural sound archives available on the Web, including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y., which says it has the largest sound and video archive of animal behavior.

The West, though, has never been fully represented, Rice said.

"I think we have a tendency to take for granted what we have in our own backyard," he said.

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On the Net:

Click HERE for the Western Soundscape Archive: http://www.westernsoundscape.org/

Bulgaria's last 3 dancing bears freed

AP
Bulgaria's last 3 dancing bears freed

By VESELIN TOSHKOV, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 35 minutes ago

After a lifetime of brutal treatment, including walking on burning embers, Bulgaria's last three dancing bears will get to rest their paws at a mountain sanctuary, in an apparent end to the centuries-old performance tradition in the Balkans.

Activists on Friday bought the freedom of Mima, 8, Misho, 19, and Svetla, 17.

Bulgaria is believed to have been the last country in the Balkans where dancing bears still performed, even though the practice was outlawed in 1993, when there were 20 to 30 such bears in the country.

The three bears will join another 20 brown bears on Mount Rila at a 30-acre sanctuary for former dancing bears 110 miles south of Sofia.

"Our aim is to make their life more bearable in their remaining years," Ioana Tomescu of the Austria-based Four Paws Foundation, which created the sanctuary, told The Associated Press.

Throughout the Balkans, families — mostly among the Gypsy or Roma community — have long earned a living through performing bears. But the techniques to train them led the practice to be banned, and animal rights activists have moved to find the bears new homes.

The bears are captured while still young. Their nose or lips are pierced, and a metal ring attached to a chain is inserted; the pain ensures instant submission.

The cubs are forced to walk on burning embers or a hot sheet of metal, and hop from one hind leg to the other in order to escape the burning, while their trainer beats a drum. The process is repeated until the bear learns to connect the drum to the pain.

Because dancing bears are illegal, authorities could simply have taken Mima, Misho and Svetla away from their owners in the eastern village of Getsovo.

Instead, the Four Paws Foundation decided to pay for their freedom by giving their owners small grants to set up new businesses. It did not reveal how much was paid. In return, the owners signed declarations pledging never to take up the bear dancing business again.

Primate warning songs

Wah, wow, hoo! Tree apes sing warning songs.

CNN/AP

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- Turns out humans aren't the only primates using songs to warn of life's dangers and travails.

White-handed gibbons in Thailand's forests have been found to communicate threats from predators by singing -- the first time the behavior has been discovered among non-human primates, researchers said Wednesday.

While other animals have been shown to use song to attract mates or signal danger, researchers writing in this month's science journal PLoS One said their study was the first to show gibbons -- a slender, tree-dwelling ape -- issuing song-like warnings to each other.

"This work is a really good indicator that non-human primates are able to use combinations of calls ... to relay new and, in this case, potentially lifesaving information to one another," said Esther Clarke, a University of St. Andrews graduate student and co-author of the study.

"This type of referential communication's commonplace in human language, but has yet to be widely demonstrated in some of our closest living relatives -- the apes," she said.

Along with Klaus Zuberbuhler from St. Andrews in Scotland and Ulrich Reichard of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, Clarke spent 2004 and 2005 at Khao Yai National Park in Thailand observing groups of gibbons.

Mostly black with a white face, gibbons live in the treetops and are known for issuing elaborate hooting sounds that echo across the forest for up to a half mile to advertise pair bonds or attract mates.

To test the primates response to danger, the team conducted a series of experiments in which they put models of predators -- snow leopards, pythons and crested serpent eagles -- near a group of gibbons and then made audio recordings of their response.

What they found, Clarke said, is that the gibbons approached the potential predator and began warbling a series of sounds -- "wahs, wows and hoos" -- that were picked up by other gibbons, who then repeated the calls to others.

The sounds made when encountering a predator were more chaotic and louder than those used to win over a mate, Clarke said. "Gibbons can rearrange their songs to denote different circumstances, much like we do with words," she said.

Thad Q. Bartlett, a gibbon expert at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said the findings were interesting and significant.

"From a cognitive standpoint, the claim that gibbon calls are digital is interesting because this is one of the hallmarks of human language, that is, the ability to rearrange discrete elements to create new meanings," he said in an e-mail.

Bartlett also said the findings provide further insight into the behavior of gibbons, contradicting earlier suggestions that their small social network -- a male, female and their offspring -- was largely a result of the apes facing few threats.

"Because large group size is often seen as a response to predator pressure, researchers have long assumed that gibbons are largely immune from predators," he said.

"To my mind, this research further demonstrates the importance of predator pressure to the evolution of gibbon social systems."

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.