SE : Swedish uni project on cat communication fair play to her, it is not easy to record a cat meowing, as they often can sense if any recording equipment is aroudn) one of our cats (normally a noisy one) would go totally silent no matter what sort of recording equipment I used, even if I tried to use analogue tape in case the minidisc gave a high frequency he could hear...
538 vocalisations from three domestic cats were collected and used in a phonetic pilot study in order to test some recording and analysis methods normally used with human speech.
Based on auditive analysis, the vocalisations were categorised into five types and analysed for duration and F0. The most common type was a combined murmur and miaow. Similar
mean type durations were found in all three cats. Mean, minimum and maximum F0 showed an overall high variability, due to the large number of intonation patterns used in each
type. One might speculate that cats signal paralinguistic – perhaps even linguistic – information by varying their F0. Neither the recording techniques nor the analysis tools used here
were judged to be optimal for cat vocalisations. Future work includes a larger study of cat vocalisations, including intonation and formants, with adapted recording and analysis methods.
(warning this is 8 megabyte file, don't click on the link if you are on a smartphone)
http://person2.sol.lu.se/SusanneSchotz/Publications_files/Schoetz_2012%3DDomesticCatVocalisations.pdf
IN : Primates in pants get Arab smugglers busted! Two of the men were found with slender lorises concealed in pouches in their briefs, a customs official at Indira Ghandi International Airport told the BBC.
The men were transit passengers, en route to Dubai from Bangkok.
The animals were uncovered when security guards noticed a bulge in their underwear during a frisk.
Even a slender loris is about the size of a Norway rat.
Slender loris - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arabs trying to stuff them into their pants (for whatever reasons) are bound to be viewed with suspicion and outrage (its against all sorts of laws)
BBC News - Men arrested hiding loris in underwear at Delhi airport
NL : Party for the Animals place bee hotel outside PM’s window Bees are becoming rare in Northern Europe due to weather and excessive pesticide use.
In the Netherlands there is proportional representation, so minority political parties get more power. As well as a Green/Left political party (GroenLinks) there is also a party for animals ( Partij van de Dieren) who have set up a bee hotel near a pond by Den Haag (the sort of place where the Dutch would plant flowers everywhere, so its cool for bees). but it is also placed so Mark Rutte (the current PM, who is in a centre right party) cannot avoid looking at these bees whenever he is at work, unless he sits in semi darkness with the shutters pulled down :laugh_at:
» PvdD plaatst bijenhotel bij Hofvijver « Blog Jack Tummers
My cat has started to meow…. nope this isn't a thread about M-cat :laugh_at::laugh_at:
but MY cat
he's been pretty much mute since we had him, used to open his mouth and nothing came out.. :crazy_diz
(which was lush after living with our friends very very very 'chatty' cats!! esp at 5-6am!!)
Then he learnt to sort of 'squeek'
after we got back from shambles he seems to have learnt to meow and its totally cute!!! :love:12
VT : New species – Vietnamese fish with a penis on its head. Phallostethidae - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Phallostethus cuulong is a species of priapum fish. It was discovered in 2009 and described in 2012. This species is found at depths of 0.5 to 3.5 metres (1.6 to 11 ft) in tidal canals on the Mekong Delta. This species attains a length of about 25 millimetres (0.98 in) SL and is colored translucent white. It has its gonads under its chin – along with a serrated saw and rod for grasping females.[1]
sounds like it would be perfectly at home in East Anglia..
New Genitalia-Headed Fish Is Evolutionary Mystery
UK : Scot : Bad, bad fish. thats very peaceful and mellow of him to spare the shark - if that had been my boat and it had bit my foot and tried to hole the boat I'd have had as much of the fucker I could served up to myself and the crew, sold the rest to the nearest Chinese restaurant (not that hard to find in Scotland and the meat is €5 - €7 per kilo), and what humans couldn't eat would be distributed to the "home for wee stray catties", every other bit of it appropriately processed and I'd have kept the teeth for a trophy. I know its code VU (vulnerable) species but there are some things I wouldn't put up with.....
A Scottish fisherman has spoken of the moment a 7ft shark clamped its jaws around his foot on board his boat.
Hamish Currie managed to free himself with the help of one of his crew after a porbeagle they had hooked took hold of his steel toe-capped boot. He said the fish also gnawed a hole in the boat.
The skipper had targeted the shark after hearing reports of it attacking seals off Islay, in the Inner Hebrides. He aimed to tag the fish, which is a member of the Great White family, and release it back into the water, and the crew tracked it down on Wednesday.
'Bad, bad fish': Scottish fisherman describes shark encounter | UK news | guardian.co.uk
UK : East : Lion in Essex! This isn't too far away.... :crazy_diz :crazy:
St Osyth: Major police operation under way after lion spotted in field - News - East Anglian Daily Times
US : AK : Hiker/photographer eaten by bear Should have used a long lens,
Hiker killed by bear in Alaska after photographing grizzly bear up-close | World news | guardian.co.uk
thats what the Japanese do when taking pictures of bears (they have bears as well) and this is a more sensible reaction
the sign says
"Caution - the bear infest. Now!"
the chap is one of 3 lads who converted a Nissan/Toyota hiace into transformers style Japanese house and toured the country with this).
he did not get eaten, and is probably now a senior manager at some electronics company...
UK : East : Bees in a yacht! Just a couple of miles up the road from me - bees can afford to be fussy these days, they are becoming rare..
Waterfront: Swarm of bees removed from luxury yacht - News - Ipswich Star
NP : Man bites snake The various Ghurka regiments (now in the armies of UK, IN , SG and MY) come from this country, you can see why - impressive enough a 55 year old man caught a snake after being bit , let alone was able to bite it...
A Nepalese man who was bitten by a cobra snake bit it back and killed the reptile in a tit-for-tat attack, it has been reported. The Nepali newspaper Annapurna Post said that Mohamed Salmo Miya chased the snake, which bit him while he was in his rice paddy earlier this week, caught it and bit it until it died.
"I could have killed it with a stick but bit it with my teeth instead because I was angry," Miya, 55, who lives in a village 125 miles south-east of the Nepali capital, Kathmandu, was quoted on Thursday as saying. The snake, called "goman" in Nepal, is also known as the common cobra.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/23/nepal-man-bite-snake-death
ID : Non gnawing, worm eating rat discovered.. Similar to others found in Luzon, PH (as good a place for rodents as call centres) but with less teeth (it is not a completely toothless animal as mistakenly described on the mainstream media)
Tail of a rat who won't chew but he's a new species and new genus | Nature | The Earth Times
DE : Wild animals assist kangaroo in zoo escape.. A kangaroo is on the run in Germany after breaking out of a wildlife park, with a fox and a wild boar as his suspected accomplices.
Michael Hoffmann, assistant head of the Hochwildschutzpark Hunsrück west of Frankfurt, said on Monday the male kangaroo was one of three that escaped overnight on Saturday with the inadvertent help of the menagerie that lives in the local woods.
Hoffmann said the kangaroos got out of their enclosure after a young fox snuck into the park and dug a hole next to the cage's fencing. Two of the three were then able to escape the park entirely through another hole dug by a wild boar under the exterior fence.
"We've got two of them back; now we're just looking for the third."
Kangaroo escapes with help of fox and boar | World news | guardian.co.uk
NO : family of bears rob and trash hunters holiday cabin not as considerate as the American bears, they caused bear carnage innit.. though surely if he's studied "natural resource management and bears", you wouldn't leave a great stash of beer, sweets and honey unattended? it seems like the sort of thing that bears would want to get at the world over..
A family of bears has broken into a holiday cabin in Norway and consumed more than 100 cans of beer.
A mother bear and her three cubs broke into the wooden lodge in the north of the country by ripping off a wall, according to Norway's Finnmarken newspaper, and went on to eat and drink nearly all its contents.
The cabin’s owner, Even Borthen Nilsen, told reporters that over 100 cans of Norwegian beer - stored in the hut in preparation for the autumn hunting season - had disappeared.
Bear excrement and footprints – and an awful stench – left him in no doubt that it was the animals that had trashed the place during a night of revelry.
The carnage was discovered by Mr Borthen Nilsen’s mother and grandmother when they returned to the family-owned 26-square foot hut in Jarfjord in Finnmarken.
The bears had also polished off their store of marshmallows, chocolate spread and honey.
Mr Borthen Nilsen, who has studied natural resource management and bears, said: "They had a hell of a party in there.
"The entire cabin was destroyed. The beds and all kitchen appliances, stove, oven and cupboards and shelves were all smashed to pieces.
"They have bitten into the cans and drunk the beer.
"It's almost like taken out of Goldilocks and the three bears."
He added that now that the mother had shown her cubs how to get into the cabin and given them a taste for beer, he feared they might come back for more.
Bears Break Into Cabin And Drink 100 Beers - Yahoo! News UK
another article (in Norweigian but with more pics) here Her hadde bjørnefamilie hyttefest - Troms og Finnmark - NRK Nyheter
it even made the Viet Nam news (I think there are bears out there too)
http://nld.com.vn/20120813052814945p0c1006/gau-nhap-nha-uong-can-100-lon-bia.htm
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