Many Smaller Animals Clean Themselves to Survive

Going without a shower for a few days might make you feel gross, but for small animals like bees and houseflies, keeping clean is a matter of life or death.A mosquito flying through the fog of the early morning may find its wings so weighed down by water droplets that it can no longer search for food. A honeybee can easily pick up five times its body weight in pollen over the course of a day.  "It's all relative," said Guillermo Amador, a doctoral student at Georgia Institute of Technology. "To us, a particle of dust doesn't mean anything, but if a mosquito accumulates too many of them it gets too heavy to fly."

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Animal That Survives in Space Has Weird DNA

The only animal known to survive the extreme environment of outer space without the help of special equipment turns out to have the most foreign DNA of any species.Water bears, also known as tardigrades, have genomes that are nearly one-sixth foreign, meaning that the DNA comes from creatures other than the animal itself, new research finds.  The discovery, published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, adds to the evidence that tiny water bears are incredibly unique and seemingly indestructible animals. In 2007, some were even rocketed into space on the outside of a satellite.

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Want to Work With Animals?

So you want to work with animals? Having a real passion for the area is an excellent start, says Tom Laws, a careers adviser working with the National Careers Service.  “If you’re just starting out or planning a career change, begin by volunteering at a local kennel or animal charity,” he says. “After getting more of an idea about the day-to-day tasks of the work, and speaking directly with people working there, it could help make your mind up about re-training.”

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Profile: A Human Touch For Animals

Temple Grandin, 68, is one of the world’s top experts on nurturing farm animals. She trains farmers and ranchers to raise livestock without causing them pain or fear. Those methods and insights make their care — called animal husbandry — faster and easier because the animals do not become anxious.  Grandin also has designed slaughterhouses, facilities where animals are killed for food. Animals move through these facilities without stress. Death comes instantly and painlessly. About 30 million cattle are killed for meat every year in the United States. Today more than half of those cattle are processed in systems that Grandin designed.

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The Truth About Animal Charities, Cats and Dogs

As we approach December - the month when almost a third of all charitable giving for the year takes place - many of us might be wondering where we should be sending our charitable donations. Some of us will choose to give to charities such as Against Malaria Foundation, which helps to protect people in the developing world from a disease that kills almost 3,000 children every day. And yet, despite the great needs of humans around the world, many people will choose to donate to charities that help animals. In fact, it has recently been reported by the Mirror that “bequests to animal charities beat donations to human causes”, and that donations bequeathed to animals “dwarfed” those going to vulnerable and abused children.

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Top 10 Most Virile Male Animals

Sperm and male sex organ extremes are revealed in a new study of more than 100 mammal species. The study also answers a question that has baffled scientists for years: Which is favored more during evolution, sperm size or sperm count? Quantity is key for mammals such as this roaring male lion, which can mate up to 60 times per day. The findings are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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Why Some Animals Are More Tolerant to Human Interaction

When most wild animals first encounter humans, they respond as they would to any predator—by running, swimming or flying away.Over time, some species become more tolerant of humans' presence, but the extent to which they do is largely driven by the type of environment in which the animals live and by the animal's body size, according to a comprehensive new analysis.

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Companies Like Kikkoman Are Still Testing on Animals

Kikkoman, the Japanese soy-product manufacturing company known for their ubiquitous bottles of soy sauce, is on blast this month for conducting violent experiments on animals while testing their products. PETA, the animal rights organization, published an investigation of the company's history of animal testing and found multiple examples of experiments where animals are mutilated and killed for the testing of soy products. 

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The Person Who Taught Me To Love Animals

Every evening after dark she'd begin to make the sandwiches.  She'd spread out peanut butter on the bread, then the sliced bananas. She'd use a whole loaf each night. We'd put the sandwiches out on the wooden platform she'd affixed to the sill of the window that looked into the towering trees behind her house in suburbia. We'd turn out the kitchen lights.

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Hairy Animals Teach Us How to Keep Robots Clean

If you own a cat or a dog, you’re familiar with their grooming habits. All of that licking might seem excessive — especially if the dog is doing it under the dinner table or the cat is doing it on the pillow next to your head.  But staying clean is essential to their health and their grooming habits could actually teach hairless creatures such as ourselves how to improve the cleanliness of a range of technologies.

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Remembering The Animals That Served Alongside Our Soldiers

Whether attending a Remembrance Day service or simply paying respects to those who gave their lives in conflicts, how many people actually study the sculpture of the men and horses at the core of the National War Memorial in Ottawa?

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Humans and Animals Lead Social Groups In Similar Ways

In social groups of both humans and animals members look to their leaders for guidance and support. Researchers have long studied the roles of animals within groups as they work together to hunt, forage or fight; but the ability a leader has to encourage members to work collaboratively has remained slightly more ambiguous.

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Photo Perfectly Captures How Animals Actually Rescue Us

Sometimes an image surfaces that perfectly captures a feeling we thought could never be totally conveyed.  This particular image shows a woman tearfully embracing a dog in an emotional moment that appears to be a reunion or a first-meeting. It was posted on October 19 on Facebook by a user who compiles "funny, inspirational animal photo quotes" and shared over 54,000 times.

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Animals Experiencing the Joy of Going Outside for the First Time

From cows to cats, an animal's first time outdoors is magical. Take a look at a few of our favorite videos showcasing animals' first times experiencing the great outdoors below.

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How Animal Poop Makes the World Go Round

Tens of thousands of years ago, giant land animals roamed the Earth. And these animals—woolly mammoths, giant deer, sloths the size of elephants—would often take breaks from their roaming to deposit vast piles of nutrients on the ground.  In other words, they pooped.

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Do Animals Really Cry?

Humans are pretty fond of giving voices to animals. Squeaky voices. Excited voices. Princess voices.  But do we give them our emotions, too? More specifically, do animals actually cry tears of sorrow?  It's a question as old as our relationship with animals themselves.  But first, we need to understand the difference between shedding tears and crying. From a strictly scientific perspective, a tear is simply liquid emanating from an eye.

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Unusual Ocean Animals Spotted Across California

Warmer waters across the California coast have brought unprecedented sightings of marine animals along the shore and in the water. Larger fish and bigger schools of fish are staying around later in the year, and in some cases, species that have never before been documented in California have found their way to California shores. 

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