Questions tagged [zoology]
Use this tag for questions involving animal biology; evolution, ecology, physiology, behavior, genetics, and marine biology.
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Do rats swim 240 times longer after being saved from drowning?
A post on Facebook with 104k shares reads,
During a study at Harvard in the 1950s, Dr. Curt Richter placed rats in a pool of water to test how long they could tread water.
On average they'd give up ...
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Do chimpanzees perform lab memory tasks well by having a good memory?
A working memory test of chimpanzees, described in this BBC Earth video, shows a chimpanzee outperforming a human.
Another video shows a chimpanzee performing the test:
Young chimpanzees outperform ...
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Do bison conceal their pregnancy?
Today there is an article in The Guardian that states
Three bison were released in Kent in July but, unknown to the rangers, one had a secret passenger on board. Bison conceal their pregnancies to ...
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Is moderated livestock grazing an effective countermeasure for desertification?
In this TED talk from 2013, Allan Savory claims that livestock/cattle grazing (not industrial farming, but rather some frugal grazing of herds) help prevent and reverse desertification processes, ...
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Can whales send each other 3D images?
I recently asked this question on Biology Stack Exchange but didn’t get any answers.
Russell Arnott, apparently an oceanographer, who currently works as a project manager at the Sainsbury Laboratory, ...
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Has a mole stored over a thousand earthworms in its underground larder?
On the wikipedia article for moles, I found some remarkable assertions:
Because their saliva contains a toxin that can paralyze earthworms, moles are able to store their still-living prey for later ...
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Are the British to blame for Israel's stray cat problem? [closed]
Stray cats are extremely common in Israel and there is a common urban legend that they were imported by the British during the mandate period to combat a rat problem.
For example, you can see this ...
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Did a cheetah refuse to race against dogs?
This speed race wanted to know the fastest, the dogs or the cheetah. But the cheetah did not move a finger and sat in place. People asked the race coordinator what happened. He responded after seeing ...
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Have pacu fish castrated people?
Supposedly
In Papua New Guinea, the invasive species has reportedly earned a reputation as the "ball-cutter" after castrating a couple of local fishermen.
It doesn't sound totally ...
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Do cows need their tails when ploughing?
I was watching this documentary about North Korean defectors, and one of the claims struck me as very odd. One of the defectors claimed that the CIA was largely responsible for the famines in North ...
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Is there a breeding population of big cats living wild in the UK?
In an October 2020 Daily Mail article, a 'big cat tracker', Rhoda Watkins claims the UK has a healthy wild population of leopards and pumas.
However, when I search on Wikipedia and other wildlife/...
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Did Louis Pasteur keep a gun in the laboratory while developing the rabies vaccine?
Is it true that while developing the vaccine for rabies Louis Pasteur kept a gun in his laboratory and had instructed all his lab assistants to shoot anyone in the head who accidentally got infected ...
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Were rats in Kowloon addicted to street drugs?
The book Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings by James Crawford has a chapter about the walled city of Kowloon in Hong Kong, and there is also an article based on this ...
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Do praying mantises kill lizards in the wild?
There are some videos of praying mantises eating slow-moving lizards (calotes versicolor?) that don't even put up a fight. The videos are filmed in aquariums with macro lenses and special lighting. ...
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Did a group of monkeys steal SARS-CoV-2 positive blood samples from a health care worker in India?
An article from Reuters claims that a health care worker in India was assaulted by a team of monkeys and robbed of the blood samples that he was carrying:
LUCKNOW, India (Reuters) - A troop of ...
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