Chimpanzees overthrow, kill and then eat their tyrannical leader

The experienced anthropologist that led the study said she was left 'disturbed' by the behaviour

 

Chimps have been spotted killing and then eating their former tyrannical leader.

Jill Pruetz, an professor of anthropology, said that she found it "very difficult and quite gruesome to watch" the group of chimpanzees kill a member of their own community and then abuse the animal's dead body.

Professor Pruetz has described how she saw a group of the animals discover the body of a chimp called Foudouko, a former leader of the Fongoli community who had since been exiled for five years and who was probably killed by members of the group. After they came across the dead body, they abused and ate it for nearly four hours, the Iowa State University anthropologist described.

Scientists still aren't sure why the chimps exhibited such strange and disturbing behaviour, and finding out may help show why few animals apart from humans show such deadly aggression and help answer questions about why chimps are going extinct. It's likely that man-made environmental changes have disrupted the chimp's environment and led them to be upset, and competition for a mate and a power struggle with younger chimps might also be responsible for his death.

Even the fact that Foudouko was able to survive in isolation for so long is rare, according to the scientists. No chimp has been recorded living on their own for so long, and scientists watched as he trailed the group from a distance and sometimes privately interacted with his allies.

But the chimp's downfall may have come from an attempt to make his way "back into the social group", according to Professor Pruetz. If he was more submissive he may have stood a chance, but he was probaly killed because of his aggression, they said.

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Corn turning French hamsters into deranged cannibals: research

January 27, 2017 by Marlowe Hood

 

 The major consumption of corn leads to infanticide among the Great hamster, a rodent threatened in Alsace, according to a recent study highlighting "problems related to monoculture"

A diet of corn is turning wild hamsters in northeastern France into deranged cannibals that devour their offspring, alarmed researchers have reported.


"There's clearly an imbalance," Gerard Baumgart, President of the Research Centre for Environmental Protection in Alsace, and an expert on the European hamster, told AFP on Friday.

"Our hamster habitat is collapsing."

More common farther to the east, Cricetus cricetus in critically endangered in western Europe.

The findings, reported last week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, finger industrial-scale monoculture as the culprit.

Once nourished by a variety of grains, roots and insects, the burrowing rodents live today in a semi-sterile and unbroken ocean of industrially grown maize, or corn.

The monotonous diet is leaving the animals starving, scientists discovered almost by accident.

The problem is a lack of vitamins. In fact, one in particular: B3, or niacin.

Researchers led by Mathilde Tissier at the University of Strasbourg had set out to determine whether hamster diet affects their ability to reproduce in the wild.

Baby hamsters eaten alive

Earlier work had looked at the impact of pesticides and mechanised ploughing, which can destroy their underground homes, especially during hibernation in winter.

But the possible link with what they eat remained unexplored.

A first set of lab experiments with wild specimens compared wheat and corn-based diets, with side dishes of clover or worms.

There was virtually no difference in the number of pups born, or the basic nutritional value of the different menus.

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Maine Lobsters Are Cannibals: They Eat Their Youngsters

If you have ever had the pleasure of cracking into a freshly broiled Maine lobster, then you probably know just how succulent these marine crustaceans can be. But its not just us that find these creatures delectable; it seems the lobster itself cannot resist snacking on its fellow arthropods from time to time.

Lobsters have long been known to attack and eat each other within the confines of a trap or tank, but scientists from the University of Maine have captured new video evidence of adult lobsters eating their younger counterparts in the wild.

The Maine researchers speculated that the exploding lobster population off the coast of the Pine Tree State is the primary driver of this never-before-seen behavior.

“We’ve got the lobsters feeding back on themselves just because they’re so abundant,” research team member Richard Wahle, a marine sciences professor at the university, told Reuters. “It’s never been observed just out in the open like this.”

He noted that a group of Canadian researchers had recently observed evidence of cannibalism in the stomachs of wild-caught lobsters from the same region.

“There are these cases where encounters with each other are becoming so frequent, they result in more than just a bit of competition but in a predator-prey interaction,” Wahle added.

In their experiment, the researchers set out to observe the predation of small lobsters, which they tethered with a rope to the sea floor. Using a special infrared camera, they expected to see larger fish prey on their bait.

“We were hoping just to see that maybe they were being untouched or that perhaps there were still fish and maybe there was just a different predator assemblage,” co-researcher Noah Oppenheim, a graduate student at the school, told the Portland Press Herald.

Continued:  http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112741632/maine-lobsters-eat-youngsters-120412/

Spider cannibalism

Male Spiders Let Mates Eat Them for Kids' Sake

The unkind act of butchering and eating your mate after sex, typified by the female black-widow spider and praying mantis, may make for healthier babies, new research suggests.

The researchers found that a male orb-web spider makes the ultimate evolutionary sacrifice: giving his life for the health of his offspring.

Sexual cannibalism is the act of one partner eating the other after sex. In the orb-web spider Argiope bruennichi, the female tries to grab and wrap up the male at the onset of mating so she can snack on him during sex. In the lab, only about 30 percent of the males survive their first mating, but by letting the female gnaw on them, the males prolong the sex act, making it more likely they will inseminate their partner.

Of these survivors, half go on to find a second mate, while the others try again for the same female. Due to the male's anatomy, two copulations is the limit. (When you are facing a life without sex, is it really worth it to go on?)

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Polar bear 'cannibalism' pictured

By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco

It is an image that is sure to shock many people.

An adult polar bear is seen dragging the body of a cub that it has just killed across the Arctic sea ice.

Polar bears normally hunt seals but if these are not available, the big predators will seek out other sources of food - even their own kind.

The picture was taken by environmental photojournalist Jenny Ross in Olgastretet, a stretch of water in the Svalbard archipelago.

"This type of intraspecific predation has always occurred to some extent," she told BBC News.

"However, there are increasing numbers of observations of it occurring, particularly on land where polar bears are trapped ashore, completely food-deprived for extended periods of time due to the loss of sea ice as a result of climate change."

The journalist was relating the story behind her pictures here at the 2011 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest annual gathering of Earth scientists.

A paper describing the kill event in July 2010 has just been published in the journal Arctic. It is co-authored with Dr Ian Stirling, a polar bear biologist from Environment Canada.

Ross had approached the adult in a boat. She could see through her telephoto lens that the animal had a meal, but it was only when she got up close that she realised it was a juvenile bear.

The kill method used by the adult was exactly the same as polar bears use on seals - sharp bites to the head.

Read more here ...