Strange Love: 10 Animals with Truly Weird Courtship Rituals

On Valentine’s Day, lovers who are eager to woo their partners show their affection with traditional gifts of red roses, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, or with romantic dinners at fancy restaurants. There’s usually some effort involved, but pulling off a memorable Valentine’s Day is easier — and generally safer — than some of the courtship rituals performed by other animal species.

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Adorable Animals Pick Super Bowl Winners

Who is going to win Super Bowl 51? That’s the question on everyone’s mind as the big game approaches.  You could weigh each team’s strengths and weaknesses, but why do that when you can rely on animal instinct. Literally.

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Which Animals Use Tools?

Flash back to 1960. At that point in time the best definition of a human was a being with the ability to make tools. Man the tool-maker was considered to be different from animals in this regard. Dr. Jane Goodall was observing chimpanzees at Gombe National Park in Tanzania and saw two chimps strip the leaves off of small twigs and use them as tools to “fish” termites out of the ground to eat. This was the first time a non-human had ever been seen to create a tool and use it to accomplish a task.

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US Elections 2016: Animals Choose Trump Over Clinton

From various polls and different models and predictive simulations, the 2016 U.S. election has been one of the most important highlights awaited for not just by the Americans but the whole world. We’ve seen enough of the surveys telling who might win,but now can psychic animals tip the lead?

http://tinyurl.com/zhodnaz

TripAdvisor Stops Selling Tickets To Animal-Abusive Attractions

TripAdvisor, a leading travel website, says it will no longer sell tickets to attractions where tourists come into contact with wild animals or endangered species. The policy change includes, but is not limited to, elephant rides, “swim with” activities involving the touching or riding of dolphins, and the petting of captured wild animals such as tigers. The company also announces that is developing an educational portal, with the aid of several wildlife protection groups, to inform tourists about animal welfare practices.

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Animals Rescued From the ‘World’s Worst Zoo’

When a rescue team arrived to evacuate a closing zoo near the Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis in late August, just 15 animals remained. They included Laziz, a nine-year-old Bengal tiger that is—according to Four Paws, the Vienna-based animal-welfare nonprofit that led the rescue—the last tiger in Gaza. There were also five monkeys, an emu, a pelican, two buzzards, two porcupines, two tortoises, and a doe. The doe had lost her fawn to wounds shortly before the rescuers arrived.

http://tinyurl.com/jprvbdd

Americans Love Animals More Than They Used To

There are 48 days until the presidential election, and it often feels as if we Americans are at each other’s throats. Sometimes it seems as though all we can agree on — or agree to click “like” on — are dog and cat videos, right? Actually, that’s not so far from the truth. Americans do broadly have positive feelings about dogs and cats — and they also feel warmer and fuzzier about wild animals, such as sharks and wolves, than they did four decades ago.

http://tinyurl.com/guc486v

Watch Shelter Animals Get New Beds

Stop what you’re doing because we’ve found it — the most “aw” inducing animal video ever. The RSPCA animal shelter in Victoria, Australia, recently put out a call to animal lovers to donate their old pet’s beds to the charity. The hand-me-down beds were then gifted to 100 cats and dogs still awaiting their “forever homes.” The resulting video is bitter sweet — at once cute and heartbreaking. Somebody adopt these precious little guys!

http://tinyurl.com/znybsk6

Biggest Animals in Ocean More Likely to Go Extinct

What happens when you remove all the biggest animals from the ocean? Stick around for the next few thousand years and you might find out. A new study finds that in our modern era, large marine animals are significantly more likely to go extinct than small ones. It’s a disturbing pattern that has the potential to wipe out many of the top predators in our oceans, and the researchers say it has never been seen before in the history of our planet. After analyzing marine fossil records that go as far back as 445 million years, the authors report that in the past extinction rates have been fairly egalitarian, affecting ocean animals of all sizes equally.

http://tinyurl.com/zvy4unx

Smart Animals: Ground Squirrel Use the Sun for Navigation

A new study revealed that ground squirrels temporarily rely of the position of the sun to roughly serve as a navigational aide to find the storage place of their foods. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, showed that ground squirrels either moves towards or away from the sun, with its horizontal angle of their direction deviated slightly from the direction of the sun, when searching for a suitable hiding place for its spoils.

http://tinyurl.com/hq8r3bf