Animal World

Bugs were a lot bigger more than 250 million years ago -- millipedes longer than a human leg, dragonflies with wing spans like hawks -- and now a question that has long puzzled scientists has been explained. The reason there are no humongous insects now is because of a bottleneck that occurs in insects' air pipes as they grow larger. They were able to surmount the problem in the Paleozoic Era thanks to a high-oxygen atmosphere.Insects aren't like animals with backbones and deliver oxygen to their tissues directly and bloodlessly through a network of dead-end tracheal tubes. In bigger insects, this mode of oxygen transport becomes less efficient, butno one has been exactly sure why.Alex Kaiser of Midwestern University and his colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory and Arizona State University delved deeper by shining X-rays on four living beetle species, ranging in body mass by a factor of 1,000.

This allowed the team to measure the exact dimensions of the beetles' tracheal tubes.Kaiser and collegues discovered the air passageways that lead from the body core to the legs turn out to be bottlenecks that limit how much oxygen can be delivered to the extremities, Kaiser said. The team also examined the passageways that lead from the body core to the head. "We were surprised to find that the effect is most pronounced in the orifices leading to the legs, where more and more of the space is taken up bytracheal tubes in larger species," he said. Kaiser and Argonne biologist Jake Socha also used the results to predict the largest size of currently living beetles. If data on the air passageways to the head were used as a limiting factor, they predicted a crazy-large, foot-long beetle, while the leg data predicted a beetle that matches the size of today's largest living beetle, Titaneus giganteus. The research is detailed in the Aug. 7 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

View: Full Article | Source: Xinhuanet

A bear cub has been rescued by a local wildlife commission after having its head stuck in a plastic jar for 10 days.It is believed the cub got the jar stuck on its head after foraging through rubbish in the Florida neighbourhood, residents assisted wildlife officials in tracking down the cub and separating itfrom its mother while the jar was removed.

The clear plastic container was removed from the cub"s head, where it had become lodged after the animal was digging through rubbish in a neighbourhood in central Florida.

View: Full article | Source: Telegraph

A three-month-old kitten living in Vladivostok, Russia was born with a peculiar set of additional ears.While having four ears might seem very useful to have unfortunately the two additional ones aren"t capable of hearing. Cats with four ears are very rare but not unheard of, another example is a cat called Yoda in Chicago with a set of secondary ears evenlarger than those sported by newcomer Luntik.

The brief Seventies craze for quadraphonic sound might have lasted a little longer if there were more cats like Luntik around. The three-month-old kitten who lives in a garage in Vladivostok, Russia, has a "spare" pair of vestigial ears just in front of his real ones.

View: Full article | Source: DailyMail

A massive crocodile measuring over 22ft in length was killed after terrorising a remote Aboriginal community.Up until now rumours had circulated about the creature but nothing concrete had surfaced, it is now believed the 1997 until it was finally killed by local farmers. It has been warned creature reigned in the area back in however that two even larger crocodiles arethought to still be living in the region.

For picture see full article link. Even Crocodile Dundee would think twice before tackling this monster. At 22ft from its snout to the tip of its tail, it’s as long as a truck and terrorised locals in a remote Aboriginal community in Australia’s Northern Territory.

View: Full article | Source: DailyMail