Category Archives: Nature

Man against beast

 Ladies and gentlemen, you can’t make this stuff up. From the Associated Press:

A man clad only in underwear and a T-shirt wrestled a wild leopard to the floor and pinned it for 20 minutes after the cat leapt through a window of his home and hopped into bed with his sleeping family.

“This kind of thing doesn’t happen every day,” said 49-year-old Arthur Du Mosch, a nature guide. “I don’t know why I did it. I wasn’t thinking, I just acted.”

Raviv Shapira, who heads the southern district of the Israel Nature and Parks Protection Authoritym said a half-dozen leopards have been spotted recently near Du Mosch’s small community of Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev desert in southern Israel, although they rarely threaten humans.

Shapira said it was probably food that lured the big cat. Leopards living near humans are usually too old to hunt in the wild and resort to chasing down domestic dogs and cats for food, he added.

Du Mosch’s pet cat was in the bed with him at the time, along with his young daughter who had been frightened by a mosquito in her own room.

Shapira said the leopard was very weak when park rangers arrived at Du Mosch’s home after the surprise late-night visit. He said nature officials would likely release it back into the wild.

Du Mosch said he probably would not have been able to control the big cat were it in better health. As a nature guide, he said, he was familiar with animals and did his best to hold down the leopard without harming it. He said he took it all in stride, “but the kids were excited.”

Different mindset

I’ve just re-read my last post and find myself amazed at how differently I feel today.

Another time I would be raving about what a cool, quirky story it was and then promptly write about something tangentally related. But it seems several factors conspired to colour my viewpoint; the fatigue I mentioned several days ago has not totally lifted, although the accompanying melancholy has. And perhaps the latter was what made me piss and moan about the discovery dolphins have dialects (and other studies have show the same is true of whales). There are certainly worse wastes of scientific time.

Or perhaps elements were at play that I am aware of only on a subconscious level.

Dolphins and dialects

From Reuters:

Dolphins living off the coast of Wales whistle, bark and groan in a different dialect from dolphins off the western coast of Ireland, scientists have discovered.

Different physical environments might have contributed to the mammals developing distinctive sets of vocalizations or “dialects,” said Simon Berrow from the Shannon Dolphin and Wildlife Foundation.

Berrow supervised a master’s thesis by student Ronan Hickey at University of Wales, Bangor, who analyzed 1,882 whistles from the dolphins in the Shannon estuary and bottlenose dolphins in Cardigan Bay in Wales. The study found 32 different sound categories, of which eight were only produced by the Shannon animals.

“The idea that the sounds are different is not a bad notion — you’d expect the information had to be different given the diversity of the areas where they reside,” Berrow told Reuters, adding he would use the data to create a dictionary of sounds and pursue the research further, should time and money allow.

There are times when I just sigh. As much as I love nature and animals of all persuasions — and God knows I hope we can maintain our climate so as to save as many from extinction as possible — there are times when I can’t help but wonder if our scientific focus is fecked beyond belief. Now, I will confess I’m fascinated by this little story, as it’s quirky and unusual. But was it worth the time and money? Could our scientific expertise be used toward better ends? Or am I ignoring the simple joy of research for research’s sake?