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This is one cat that doesn’t need any help getting down from a tree. The leopard is so comfortable up there that it often stalks prey and even hauls its kills up into the branches. Leopards are powerful big cats closely related to lions, tigers, and jaguars. They live in sub-Saharan Africa, northeast Africa, Central Asia, India, and China. However, many of their populations are endangered, especially outside of Africa. You can identify most leopards by their light color and distinctive dark spots. Those spots are called rosettes, because they resemble the shape of a rose. These patterns camouflage their bodies as they move through the grass and trees. Black leopards, which appear to be almost solid in color because their spots are hard to distinguish, are commonly called black panthers. Unlike lions, leopards are solitary creatures. Males are almost entirely solitary and females only break their solitude when they are raising cubs. But, like lions, leopards roar. Male leopards defend their territory by roaring and scent marking, while females use their roar to attract mates and call their cubs. A leopard roar is a rough rasp, like a handsaw cutting wood. Leopard cubs are born with barely visible spots. The mother hides her cubs and moves them from one safe location to the next until they are old enough to begin playing and learning to hunt. When the cubs are about two years old, they live on their own. But the maternal bonds are strong, and offspring sometimes have reunions with their mothers.
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Flamingos are famous for their bright pink feathers, stilt-like legs, and S-shaped neck. When a flamingo spots potential dinner—favorite foods include shrimp, snails, and plantlike water organisms called algae—it plunges its head into the water, twists it upside down, and scoops the fish using its upper beak like a shovel. They are able to „run“ on water, thanks to their webbed feet, to gain speed before lifting up into the sky. Flamingos build nests that look like mounds of mud along waterways. At the top of the mound, in a shallow hole, the female lays one egg. The parents take turns sitting on the egg to keep it warm. After about 30 days, the egg hatches. Flamingo young are born white, with soft, downy feathers and a straight bill. The bill gradually curves downward as the flamingo matures. Both parents take care of the newborn flamingo, feeding it a fluid produced in their digestive systems. The young leave the nest after about five days to join other young flamingos in small groups, returning to the parents for food. The parents identify their chick by its voice. After about three weeks, the adults herd young flamingos into large groups called crèches where they start to look for food on their own. Most flamingo species are not endangered, although the Andean flamingo is listed as Vulnerable, and the Chilean, Lesser, and Puna flamingos are Near Threatened.
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Hooray for summer! Find out why this sunny season deserves a warm welcome.
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The guitar is one of the most popular instruments around the world, and different cultures have different variations. The Russian version called is the balalaika. In India it’s called the sitar, and in Polynesia it’s known as a ukulele. Even though the designs are somewhat different, all the versions make music the same way: by plucking or strumming strings, which creates sound vibrations. Try it for yourself!
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There are more than 200 species of squirrels living all around the world, including kinds of tree, ground, and flying squirrels. You may have seen the eastern gray squirrel in parks, your backyard, or in a forest in the eastern half of the United States. Eastern gray squirrels forage for nuts, seeds, buds, and flowers of trees. Like other tree squirrels, the eastern gray squirrel plays an important role in what’s known as seed dispersal. As winter approaches, squirrels carry their food and bury it in several locations. They hide more food than they will recover or eat. The buried seeds and nuts sprout and begin to grow in these locations the following spring. Eastern gray squirrels have an excellent sense of smell, which they use to help locate food that they’ve hidden away. They can also pick up information about their fellow squirrels by smelling them. They communicate with each other by making sounds and body movements, such as tail flicking. When predators such as red foxes and red-tailed hawks are nearby, eastern gray squirrels will sound warning calls to alert other squirrels. Female eastern gray squirrels may start having babies at as young as five and a half months old. Females can have litters twice a year, each usually consisting of two to four babies. They gather leaves and twigs and build nests high in the trees to house their young offspring, or use tree cavities as dens. Newborn eastern gray squirrels don’t have fur when they are born and are not able to see. They often weigh as little as half an ounce (14 grams). They leave the nest by around ten to twelve weeks old and they become fully grown by around nine months.
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Learn all about these bamboo eaters.
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Seahorses are tiny fishes that are named for the shape of their head, which looks like the head of a tiny horse. There are at least 50 species of seahorses. You’ll find them in the world’s tropical and temperate coastal waters, swimming upright among seaweed and other plants. Seahorses use their dorsal fins (back fins) to propel slowly forward. To move up and down, seahorses adjust the volume of air in their swim bladders, which is an air pocket inside their bodies. Tiny, spiny plates cover seahorses‘ bodies all the way down to their curled, flexible tails. The tail can grasp objects, helpful when seahorses want to anchor themselves to vegetation. A female seahorse lays dozens, sometimes hundreds, of eggs in a pouch on the male seahorse’s abdomen. Called a brood pouch, it resembles a kangaroo’s pouch for carrying young. Seahorse young hatch after up to 45 days in the brood pouch. The baby seahorses, each about the size of a jelly bean, find other baby seahorses and float together in small groups, clinging to each other using their tails. Unlike kangaroos, baby seahorses do not return to the pouch. They must find food and hide from predators as soon as they’re born.
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Thought to be some of the smartest animals on Earth, bottlenose dolphins send messages to one another in many different ways. They squeak, squawk and use body language—leaping as high as 20 feet in the air, snapping their jaws, slapping their tails on the surface of the water, blowing bubbles and even butting heads. Each dolphin has a special whistle that it creates soon after it is born. This whistle is used for identification, just like a human’s name. Dolphins also produce high frequency clicks, which act as a sonar system called echolocation (ek-oh-low-KAY-shun). When the clicking sounds hit an object in the water, like a fish or rock, they bounce off and come back to the dolphin as echoes. Echolocation tells the dolphins the shape, size, speed, distance, and location of the object. Bottlenose dolphins have a sharp sense of hearing. Scientists believe that the sounds travel through the dolphin’s lower jaw to its inner ear and then are transmitted to the brain for analysis. Dolphins grow to be anywhere from 6 to 12 feet long. They shed their outermost layer of skin every two hours. Very social and playful mammals, bottlenose dolphins form friendships that last decades hunting, mating and protecting each other. They like to surf in the waves and wakes of boats and swim through self-made bubble rings. They can swim up to 22 miles an hour. These sea mammals feed on fish, squid and shrimp. A group of dolphins will cooperate to make a mud ring to trap fish. Then, some of the dolphins in the group will wait outside the ring for the fish that try to escape, gulping them up as a snack. Bottlenose dolphins are found in warm water all over the world. They live both in shallow water close to shore and far out in deep dark water. Dolphins face a lot of problems with getting trapped in the garbage humans leave on the beach.
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Get pictures and facts about eight awesome pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Get pictures and fun facts about eight awesome baby animals.
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