Mexico: Narco-pets, exotic animals owned by captured drug lords, are flooding zoos

"As Mexican authorities capture a growing number of drug gang leaders, many of their pets are being driven from their gilded cages into more modest housing in the country's zoos. That's proving to be overwhelming for some institutions."

Associated Press video on YouTube: Narco-pets Overwhelm Mexico's Zoos.

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Courteous drivers want your dead and disabled animals

Deanna found this vintage home canning and label book from the Worthington Rendering Company. "Our gift to you in appreciation of your calls" for "dead and disabled animals."

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Animals and the amygdala

As part of a cool project in blogging on Google+ ("plogging"), Nature editor Noah Gray writes about a recent experiment that found that specific neurons in the human amygdala respond instantly to images of animals. These responses were stronger and faster than when other neurons responded to those images, and stronger and faster than when the animal-centric neurons responded to other types of images.

The amygdala is well known to be involved in fear modulation and memory, as well as influencing other types of emotional processing. So is it expected that cells in this structure would respond so strongly to the sight of animals? There is a moderate precedent from the non-human primate literature. Studies in macaques have revealed strong firing of amygdalar neurons to faces, so categorical responses aren't unique in the amygdala. This is true in humans as well, but humans also maintain a different dedicated brain region for face processing, perhaps opening up some portions of the amygdala to take on additional, different roles. But why would we need a dedicated system for animal imagery, elevating this particular stimulus to such an important position in our recognition system? Well this is all speculation, but it isn't difficult to state the obvious and stress that animals were critical as prey for our ancient ancestors, as well as potential threats. Thus, early man may have developed a system to speed our reaction times to such an important category as the landscape was visually scanned for information. Placing this system in a brain region critical to emotion processing could have also more-easily mobilized action through a rapid activation of attack or flight responses.

Image: Animal Kingdom Sign, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from pixeljones's photostream

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How did animals at the National Zoo react to the Great East Coast Earthquake of 2011?

Seismic waves from this week's rare 5.8 earthquake centered in Virginia were felt by critters at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., according to a news release from the zoo. None of the animals or humans at the zoo were harmed.

But the workers who care for the animals did observe their behavior, and if this possibly tongue-in-cheek press release is to be believed, some critters appeared to have sensed the quake vibrations before humans did. Then again, it could be the case that these animals are always farting and burping and screeching (Lemurs, I'm looking at you), and that the reported behavior is nothing unusual.

Let's look at the Great Apes (a group that includes the orangutan shown above):

• The earthquake hit the Great Ape House and Think Tank Exhibit during afternoon feeding time.

• About five to ten seconds before the quake, many of the apes, including Kyle (an orangutan) and Kojo (a Western lowland gorilla), abandoned their food and climbed to the top of the tree-like structure in the exhibit. About three seconds before the quake, Mandara (a gorilla) let out a shriek and collected her baby, Kibibi, and moved to the top of the tree structure as well.

• Iris (an orangutan) began “belch vocalizing”—an unhappy/upset noise normally reserved for extreme irritation—before the quake and continued this vocalization following the quake.

Read about everyone else: Press Release: National Zoo Animals React to the Earthquake - National Zoo. Photo: "Washington National Zoo, Orangutan puzzlement." Contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by William Coyle

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