WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Electric eels, those perilous predators of South America, can unleash a potent electrical jolt to wallop their hapless prey. But this zap is not used merely to stun other fish.

A new study shows that the eels use it to exert a form of remote control over their victims, causing fish that may be hiding to twitch, thus exposing their location, or inducing involuntary muscle contraction to incapacitate their prey.

"Apparently, eels invented the Taser long before humans," said biologist Kenneth Catania of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who conducted the research published on Thursday in the journal Science.

The study reveals precisely what an eel's zap does to its victim. In laboratory experiments, Catania showed how the electrical discharges remotely activate the prey's neurons, or nerve cells, that control the muscles.

While hunting, the eels periodically give off two high-voltage pulses separated by a 2 millisecond pause, causing a massive involuntary twitch in nearby hidden prey, the study found. The eels, highly sensitive to water movements, can detect motion caused by the twitch, learning the other fish's location.

The eel then delivers a full blast of a longer, high-voltage shock to immobilize the prey through involuntary muscle contraction - much like a Taser - enabling easy capture.

"I have spent much of my career examining extreme animal adaptations and abilities. I have seen a lot of interesting stuff, but the eel's abilities are astounding, perhaps the most amazing thing I have ever observed," Catania said.

"After all, they can generate hundreds of volts - that by itself is incredible. But to use that ability to essentially reach into another animal's nervous system and activate their muscles is a pretty good trick," Catania added.

Electric eels, with serpentine bodies and flattened heads, can reach lengths of 6 to 8 feet (1.8 to 2.5 meters), prowling the Amazon and Orinoco river basins. They possess electric organs with specialized cells called electrocytes that serve as biological batteries and can generate an electric discharge of up to 600 volts to subdue prey or defend against predators.

"Although they are not known to kill people, they are capable of incapacitating humans, horses and obviously fish during their electric discharge," Catania said.

Catania said the eels also use electricity in a third way, periodically giving off a low-voltage pulse that seems to work as sort of a radar system for navigating dark and murky water.

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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One of the Business Insider’s colleagues caught the moment a massive stingray snuck up on an unsuspecting swimmer in Manly, beach-side suburb of Sydney, this morning.

On his way to catch the Manly Ferry to Circular Quay, Allure Media sales exec Guy Scott-Wilson snapped the “giant” ray in action.

“I walk along Manly Cove every morning on the way to the ferry, and I noticed the water looked pretty funky today,” he said.

“I saw a woman swimming in it and thought ‘I wouldn’t fancy going for a dip in there the morning after a big storm like that’ [and] then I noticed this big dark shape floating right underneath her,” he said. “I couldn’t make out what it was until it got closer.”

“It’s pretty mad to see a giant stingray on the way to work in the morning. It was a good couple of meters long with the tail as well, not something you expect to see in such shallow water.

“She got out pretty sharpish when we told her what it was,” he said.

Here's the stingray:

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Tourists have been leaning out the side of their small boat to capture a better photo of the great white shark which has been swimming around an Australian lake.

Here’s the photo Nine News has obtained of a woman leaning out of an inflatable boat, dangerously close to the shark.

The 2.5 metre juvenile shark was spotted by a fisherman in Lake Macquarie, north of Sydney, last week.

Locals are now calling it “The White” and have been getting very close to the shark.

Here’s the video fisherman took of the shark last week spotted swimming off Murrays Beach.

Over the weekend The Newcastle Herald obtained footage was released of the shark jumping out of the water and circling a boat.

While Australian television ABC News went to speak with the fisherman who first discovered the shark:

Locals believe it is the same shark involved in the past week’s string of sightings.

Lake Macquarie is Australia’s largest coastal salt water lake. Commercial fishing ceased in the area in 2002.

There have also been numerous bull shark and hammerhead shark sightings in the lake over the past few years.

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We've come a long way since scientists cloned the first adult mammal, a sheep named Dolly, in 1996.

Now, you can pay to have your own dog duplicated using the same technique scientists used to make Dolly.

But there's a catch (aside, of course, from the whole ethical dilemma of incubating your recently deceased pet's cells inside a random pup): It costs around $100,000, and there's only one lab in the world that does it. In South Korea.

How It Works

To clone a dog, scientists at the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation laboratory do exactly what researchers did to make Dolly.

First, they take a few cells from your pet and reprogram them to stop growing — effectively putting their DNA to sleep. Then, using a tiny straw-like device, they suck up the dormant cell and inject it inside another dog cell that's been emptied of its nucleus, or command center. Then the scientists zap the new cell with electricity, coaxing the two parts to fuse into one cell. Once they make sure the new cell "works," meaning it can divide and develop on its own, the scientists implant it inside a surrogate mama pup.

In a few months, if all goes well, the surrogate dog will give birth to a puppy that looks just like yours.

The new animal won't be identical, of course.

"When thinking of cloning, try to think of an identical twin," Sooam biologist Insung Hwang told The Guardian. "The dog will not be 100% the same — the spots on a Dalmatian clone will be different, for example — but for breeds without such characteristics it will be very hard to tell them apart."

The lab that oversees the procedure isn't without controversy, however.

Eight years after winning international acclaim for cloning the world's first dog in 2005, Sooam founder and veterinarian by training Woo Suk Hwang was publically disgraced for falsifying research on human embryo cloning. Hwang (no relation to Insung Hwang) was expelled from Seoul National University, where he did the research, and is still facing criminal charges.

Despite the public outcry, Hwang's supporters managed to gather more than $3.5 million to help him start Sooam in 2006. Since then, the lab has cloned more than 400 dogs, mostly pets, reports Nature. In the past few years, Sooam researchers have picked up their pace, producing about 15 puppies a month.

"I'm making a new body for you."

In 2011, Los Angeles businessman Peter Onruang watched his two best friends — mixed breed dogs Wolfie and Bubble — pass away. Before they died, he visited the Sooam headquarters to find out how to keep his memory of them alive. Literally.

At the South Korean laboratory, he was told what he needed to do: When his dogs died, he was not to put their bodies in the freezer. Instead, he was to wrap them in wet towels and place them in the refrigerator. Then he would have five days to take them to the lab and have scientists extract the cells they'd use to make new animals.

After the lab took some cells from his dogs, Onruang brought their bodies home to be buried.

He visited their graves regularly, he told TLC in a TV series on the subject called "I Cloned My Pet.""When I'm there, I say, 'Hi, I'm making a new body for you.'"

Three years later, Onruang brought home two new versions of each of his deceased best friends — Wolfie Bear and Wolfie Girl and Bubble Face and Bubble Rubble.

"I do still miss the original Wolfie and Bubble and nothing could ever replace them,"Onruang writes on a Facebook page he created for them. "But these clones have come very close. I think of these clones mostly as their offspring."

He also said: "Am I Happy? More than I could ever possibly imagine after getting my heart broken from Wolfie and Bubbles death. All those that said I would be disappointed were all wrong."

Beyond Dog Cloning

Some scientists want to use Sooam's cloning technique to replicate far more than people's deceased pups.

Geneticist George Church and Sooam biologist Insung Hwang, for example, are exploring the possibility of bringing long-extinct animals back to life using samples of their DNA.

Church and Hwang are part of a team of researchers who recently autopsied the body of a woolly mammoth who lived about 40,000 years ago and whose blood was surprisingly well preserved, along with her body, in Siberia. The autopsy is featured in detail in a recent Smithsonian documentary called "How To Clone A Woolly Mammoth."

Hwang hopes the mammoth carcass will hold enough DNA to allow them to clone Buttercup. While her blood was well preserved, however, all of the cells inside were destroyed over time. So instead of being able to make a near-perfect replica of Buttercup (like Sooam does with dogs), the researchers would likely end up creating a hybrid version of mammoth and its closest living relative, the Asian elephant.

"It gives you hope that one day you're going to be able to see the mammal again,"says Hwang in the documentary.

NOW READ: Researchers Found Something Amazing When They Autopsied A 40,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth

SEE ALSO: 9 Science-Backed Reasons To Own A Dog

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Last night the TV-watching world held its collective breath as viewers watched the Discovery Channel's 2-hour special, "Eaten Alive," in which naturalist Paul Rosolie approached a 20-foot-long Amazonian green anaconda with — in theory — a plan to be swallowed.

It takes guts to slather yourself in pig's blood and walk up to a snake that literally has enough constricting power to break your bones. But it takes even more guts to call the event off after you've promised the world a show.

So, what made Rosolie call for rescue? Well, the snake was doing what anacondas do best: she was trying to suffocate Rosolie.

"I can tell you that the thing beat the shit out of me and constricted me,"Rosolie told Entertainment Weekly in an interview posted before the show aired but after the stunt had already taken place.

At one point, the team removed the crush-proof armor around one of Rosolie's arms, which gave him more mobility but also exposed the arm to the snake's powerful grip.

While some doubt that it was ever Rosolie's intent to go through with the stunt, the encounter sounds terrifying. Even though Rosolie wore a protective, "snake-proof" suit, the anaconda still overwhelmed the 27-year-old man.

The snake initially latched on to Rosolie's arm, at which point she immediately began coiling herself around his body. He could hear ominous sounds as the snake moved her mouth toward his head.

"I felt her jaw on my helmet and I could hear a gurgling and wheezing," Rosolie told AFP.

At first he struggled to move into a more eatable position and to avoid the deadly coils, but the snake was too strong.

"I'm trying to use my legs to get into a better position. I'm actually trying to get away from this snake right now," he said during the encounter.

Rosolie's goal was to be swallowed whole in a special suit designed to help him breath throughout the entire ordeal. He searched for two months for the right snake.

"She nailed me right in the face," he recalled, "and the last thing I saw was her mouth wide open before everything went black. And then she wrapped me and I felt the suit cracking and my arms ripping out of their sockets. It was absolutely terrifying," he told Entertainment Weekly.

Instead of being immediately engulfed, he was slowly constricted to the point where he felt light-headed. "I'm not getting air that well," he said as the snake continued to squeeze.

"Guys, she's really heavy. She's got me pinned here. I'm trying to move, and I can't move at all. I'm just face down in the mud," Rosolie said. He remained wrapped in her clutches for over an hour. It actually looks pretty scary:

"My whole upper body has 200 pounds of snake on it, so everything I'm doing doesn't work, and I can just hear [her] tightening," he said while straining to breath. "She's lifting and moving my body... each time she breathes, I can feel myself going up and down."

A little later, he said: "I'm starting to get a little light headed. I really can't move right now, so I want to see what she does next." Generally, anacondas will constrict their prey for as long as it takes to suffocate the animal. With each breath, the snake tightens its grip a little more.

The team, already worried about the stunt, became really anxious when Rosolie's heart rate began to slow.

"If I wasn't in this suit right now, I'd be dying," Rosolie gasped, shortly before the stunt was cancelled to prevent any serious injury to himself.

"Her crush force was fully on my exposed arm so I just started to feel the blood drain out of my hand and I felt the bone start to flex and when that got to a point when I felt like it was about to snap, I had to tap out," Rosolie told AFP.

Despite outcries that the stunt was cruel to animals, potentially staged, and was a terrible idea, Rosolie insists that he and the team always had the snake's safety in mind, in addition to his own.

"I'm being careful how much I'm saying here, but the plan was once she got to my waist, they'd pull me back out — that's partly for my safety, partly for the snake's. Because once she got past my waist it would be difficult for me to get pulled out," Rosolie told Entertainment Weekly.

In the end, Rosolie was not eaten alive, but he was certainly constricted. He told Entertainment Weekly that it took him months to recover after the encounter, despite reportedly suffering only minor injuries.

Rosolie says this crazy stunt was all for a good cause. Over the last decade, Rosolie has watched thousands of miles of rainforest burnt to the ground, and he hoped to raise awareness and public support to stop this kind of destruction.

"I wanted to do something that would sort of shock people and force a dialogue about what's going on here," he told Entertainment Weekly. But, actually, the internet has responded pretty negatively to the stunt.

Check out the terrifying stunt below:

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

IN DEPTH: Naturalist Plans To Let A Snake Swallow Him, Then Freaks Out Right Before The Stunt

CHECK OUT: EXPERT: New Discovery Show About Man Eaten Alive By A Snake Is 'Nonsense'

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Pope Francis declared recently in his regular weekly address at St. Peter's Square that animals go to heaven. He made the statement while trying to comfort a boy who was upset about the death of his pet dog.

Quoting several biblical passages as evidence that animals go to heaven, Pope Francis said, "The holy scripture teaches us that the fulfillment of this wonderful design also affects everything around us... what lies ahead... is therefore a new creation... It is not an annihilation of the universe and all that surrounds us. Rather it brings everything to its fullness of being, truth and beauty."

The 77-year-old pontiff then concluded: "One day we will see our animals again in eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all God’s creatures."

Reacting to Francis' statement, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera wrote optimistically that the pontiff had effectively declared an expansive "hope of salvation and eschatological beatitude to animals and the whole of creation."

While the declaration from the controversial pontiff might have brought consolation and relief to animal-loving Catholics who have mourned the loss of a pet, it probably caused Church conservatives more hand-wringing over their fears about their pope’s escalating "liberalism."

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I tried out a device called Whistle which is like a Fitbit for dogs. I put one on a 100-pound Rottweiler and another on myself to compare our level of activity over one weekend. The difference in results were, to say the least, quite drastic. 

Produced by Will Wei

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A great horned owl went for an unexpected swim in Lake Michigan this week, after two peregrine falcons forced it into the water, according to Chicago birders who saw the territorial skirmish firsthand.

Steve Spitzer, a birder and photographer who lives near Chicago, filmed the owl's athletic water strokes shortly after the bird entered the lake, he told Chicago station WGN-TV.

Owls are known for their nearly silent flight, but it's not unheard of to see one go for a dip, said Julia Ponder, the executive director of The Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota. [Daring Duos: Unlikely Animal Friends]

For an owl, "if you go after something in the water, and you accidentally get too wet, then sometimes it's easier to swim to shore than it is to fly with wet feathers," Ponder told Live Science.

Birds are known to use their feathery wings as paddles, but it's more common to see an eagle than an owl swimming in a river or lake. "They are often in areas near water," Ponder said. "You have to have those skills."

But swimming is thought to help great horned owls grab midnight snacks. The owls are known to prey on water birds that roost on the open water at night. "Swimming to shore is a natural and necessary follow-up activity when an owl finds itself having splashed down in the middle of a body of water going after prey," said Marc Devokaitis, a spokesperson at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York.

Once an owl swims to shore, it will typically fluff out its feathers to dry.

"They'll shake it off," Ponder said. "They'll preen a bit. They'll rouse. They'll go up into a tree and let their feathers dry."

The incident that sparked the Chicago owl's aqueous escape is also common, Ponder said. Peregrine falcons often prevent other top predators from trespassing into their territory. The clash was likely a way for the peregrine falcons to indicate that "this is my space, and you need to move on," Ponder said.

The onlookers called a bird rescue team, but the owl flew away before the team arrived, WGN reported.

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

• Whooo's in There? Images of Amazing Owls
• Top 10 Most Incredible Animal Journeys
• In Photos: Birds of Prey

Copyright 2014 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

CHECK OUT: I Used A Fitness Tracker For Dogs And Boy Am I Lazy — Compared To A Rottweiler

SEE ALSO: 'Men Are Idiots,' Says Study In Prestigious Medical Journal

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A rare but fatal Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV) infection transmitted via a bite or scratch can remain hidden for years and will kill unless treated early on.

The infection is related to rabies and occurs in all four Australian flying fox species, according to an article in the Australian Medical Journal.

Although transmitted to humans only rarely — usually via bites or scratches — when it goes untreated before its active phase, the result is inevitably fatal.

ABLV can present weeks and even years after exposure, is difficult to diagnose and, although treatment regimens exist, “none have proven consistently effective”.

Authors, led by Dr Joshua Francis, a paediatric infectious diseases specialist at Royal Darwin Hospital in the Northern Territory, reviewed the guidelines published by the Communicable Diseases Network of Australia and the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Infection can be prevented by administration of human rabies immunoglobulin and rabies vaccine.

This treatment is also recommended to people who have had exposure to the saliva of an infected person across mucous membranes or broken skin.

Public and doctor awareness of the dangers of even the smallest contact with bats remained problematic, the authors write.

Public awareness spikes after a publicised case but this falls after time.

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An 18-year-old man was killed by a shark on Rudder Reef, off Port Douglas, on Monday.

The teenager from the nearby town of Mossman was reportedly spearfishing at about 11 a.m. when he was bitten on his right upper leg into his groin and his right upper arm. Queensland police report the man died shortly after a two-hour trip back to the shore.

The breed of shark is unknown.

The ABC reports friends travelling with the man called authorities and performed CPR and first aid while they waited for emergency services to arrive.

Police will prepare a report for the coroner.

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Humans think of cats as fuzzy and cute. Birds and small mammals have a vastly different perception.

Domestic cats kill between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds and between 6.9 and 20.7 billion mammals (mostly mice, shrews, rabbits, squirrels, and voles) each year, according to a study published last year in Nature Communications.

The study indicated that both stray and owned cats are responsible for a far greater number of bird and mammal deaths in the contiguous United States than previously estimated, outpacing other threats such as collisions with windows, buildings, communication towers, cars, and poisoning, the report notes.

Free-ranging cats are "likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic (man-made) mortality for US birds and mammals," according to the report.

Un-owned cats (farm cats, feral cats, and stray cats that are fed by humans, for example) are the main perpetrators, but owned cats do their fair share of killing, too.

Researchers guess that a single cat may kill between 100 and 200 mammals annually, meaning an estimated population of between 30 and 80 million un-owned cats would result in the death of 3 and 8 billion mammals. And that's a low-end estimate. The researchers calculated that there are around 84 million owned cats, the majority of which are allowed outdoors.

"The magnitude of our mortality estimates suggest that cats are likely causing population declines for some species and in some regions," the study authors write.

Island cats are thought to be particularly deadly. A study published several years ago in the journal Global Change Biology estimated that island-dwelling feral cats have contributed to at least 14% of the world's bird, mammal, and reptile extinction. That study's authors also estimated that feral island cats were the primary threat to 8% of all critically endangered birds, mammals, and reptiles on earth.

Some experts, including the authors of this study, are critical of current tactics to control feral cat populations, including Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR), a project aimed at capturing and sterilizing feral cats before returning them to the wild, where they can continue to prey on wildlife.

A 2010 letter published in the journal Conservation Biology argued that TNR programs afford wild animals "second-class treatment at the expense of cats." The authors argue that it is conservation biologists' responsibility to advocate for laws making it illegal to maintain cat colonies on public lands. They also call for a more open dialogue between conservationists and veterinarians, animal shelters, and other pet advocates.

Others have been even more abrupt in their calls to action. Last January, a prominent New Zealand economist upset the international cat community when he called for the eradication of cats, citing their threat to the country's unique wildlife.

Animal activists rightly criticized the plan. The author of this post does not condone harm to any animals. 

SEE ALSO: New Zealand Economist Calling For The Eradication Of Cats Tells Us Why They Have To Go

NOW WATCH: Why People Spend Thousands Of Dollars On These Cats

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Christmas came early for Derby the dog.

He was born with deformed front legs:

But 3D Systems’ director of CJP product management Tara Anderson found him through adoption agency and rescue group Peace and Paws.

"I had to try and help this dog," she said.

Derby had a cart, which wasn’t great:

“It limits his ability in being able to play with other dogs and it’s not the full motion of running,” Anderson said.

So Anderson and her team hit upon a new design for dog legs:

The circular loop design was proposed as a way to stop Derby’s new legs digging into the dirt.

They printed it off and presented it to Derby and his adopted family:

Look how happy he is now:

Here’s why – Derby now runs with his adopted dad Dom “at least two to three miles” a day:

And now the basic design is on file, it only requires a quick modification and print to give the same freedom to other dogs with similar disabilities.

“This is what 3D printing is all about,” Anderson says.

“To be able to help anybody – dog, person, whoever – to have a better life is just, there’s no better thing to be involved in.”

Here’s the full video:

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The winners of the 2014 National Geographic Photo Contest have been announced, and the final photographs are among the best we've ever seen.

Nineteen images were selected from over 9,200 submissions from both amateur and professional photographers hailing from 150 countries. 

Winners and honorable-mention photographs were selected from three categories: nature, people, and places. They were chosen by an esteemed panel made up of National Geographic photographers and other creative professionals. 

Grand Prize winner Brian Yen will receive $10,000 and a trip to Washington, D.C., for his image “A Node Glows in the Dark."

NatGeo shared the images with us here.

Grand Prize and People Winner: “A Node Glows in the Dark," Brian Yen, Hong Kong

"In the last ten years, mobile data, smartphones, and social networks have forever changed our existence. Although this woman stood at the center of a jam-packed train, the warm glow from her phone told the strangers around her that she wasn't really there. She managed to slip away from "here" for a short moment; she's a node flickering on the social web, roaming the Earth, free as a butterfly. Our existence is no longer stuck to the physical here; we're free to run away, and run we will."

Nature Winner: “The Great Migration," Nicole Cambré, North Serengeti, Tanzania

"Jump of the wildebeest at the Mara River."

Places Winner: “Bathing in Budapest,” Triston Yeo, Budapest, Hungary

"The thermal spas in Budapest [are] one of the favorite activities of Hungarians, especially in winter. We were fortunate to gain special access to shoot in the thermal spa thanks to our tour guide, Gabor. I love the mist, caused by the great difference in temperature between the hot spa water and the atmosphere. It makes the entire spa experience more surreal and mystical."

Los Angeles (AFP) - So how exactly do you save an almost extinct rhinoceros? Turns out, a test tube baby rhino could be the solution, being sought by experts on three continents. But it won't be easy.

Keepers at California's world-renowned San Diego Zoo announced this week that Angalifu, one of its two northern white rhinos, had died at the ripe old age of 44.

That leaves only five other members of the species in the world: one female in California, one in the Czech Republic, and two females and one male -- the sole remaining on the planet -- in Kenya.

The trouble is, four of the five are already on their last legs -- being already into their 40s, for a species with an average age of 43. Only one, a female in Kenya, is still young, having been born in 2000.

"It is seriously going to be an uphill battle. There is absolutely no doubt about that," Randy Rieches, curator of mammals for the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, told AFP.

"We're looking at a bunch of different options," including in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination, he said, while admitting they were "grasping at straws at this point in time."

The real problem, he said, is in Africa, where rhinos have been hunted for decades. The northern white rhino has been nearly wiped out by poaching for their horns, and by wars, according to the World Wildlife Foundation.

Ten years ago there were known to be some 30 animals living wild in the Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Aware that they were threatened, conservationists organized for a handful of them to be transported to Kenya -- but in the end the DRC authorities blocked the move, saying the animals should be kept in the country.

"That proved to be a very poor decision, because they weren't able to protect them because of the remoteness" of the park, said Rieches, who has worked with rhinos for over three decades.

- Poacher problem -

The poachers took swift advantage of the decision. "There were gangs coming through at that point in time from several different countries," he said.

He added: "Now it has become so horrific with rhino poaching because rhino horn prices gone through the roof. They're doing it now with gunships. The rangers on the ground are so severely outmatched. It's just almost impossible.

"They are literally putting their lives on the line to try to stop the rhino poaching," he said.

Coming back to the current conundrum, he said it was important that the three places with surviving rhinos -- San Diego, the Czech Republic's Dvur Kralove Zoo, and Kenya's Ol Pejeta Conservancy -- work together.

A Czech expert visited the California facility a month ago, while a German expert was recently in Kenya to retrieve semen samples.

"We're actually in partnership with everyone that still has animals," said the US expert. "So everyone is trying methods on their own, but working together with samples."

Specifically, they have frozen samples of semen. The idea would be either to try to fertilize eggs in the laboratory -- the test tube rhino scenario -- or alternatively to impregnate a southern white rhino, of which there are far more.

You would then then take female calves from that combination, and combine them with sperm from another northern white. But the best you could hope for would be a 15/16 pure northern white, Rieches said.

In any case, he is not expecting a breakthrough overnight. The gestation period for a northern white rhino is 17 months.

"So this is a long term project. We're in it for the long haul... it will take time before something comes to fruition, it certainly will be a couple of years," he said.

For Rieches, the quest is personal. He has worked for the conservancy group San Diego Zoo Global for 36 years, and is on the board of directors of the International Rhino Foundation.

If the last northern white rhino dies, he will be devastated.

"A large portion of my life has been rhinos... it's going to be a huge, huge thing for me if this happened on my watch, if this happened during my lifetime."

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Two hooded crows in a lab have wowed their human colleagues by passing a test designed to see whether animals can grasp analogies.

The test presents a sample card showing two symbols, such as two triangles or a plus sign paired with a circle, that may be alike or different in shape, color or size, says study coauthor Edward Wasserman of the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

A crow also sees two other cards with completely different symbols and has to pick the one that best exemplifies the relationship — sameness or difference — shown in the sample card.

The crows managed to pick the correct card more than three-quarters of the time, Wasserman and his colleagues report December 18 in Current Biology. (Watch a video of the test.)

The triumph of the crows at this test, he says, adds new evidence to a growing revolution in attitudes toward animal's mental processes. Research has been exploding, he says, suggesting that animals, without language or a fancy human forebrain, have ways of dealing with what humans consider abstract concepts. "We have been grossly wrong: underestimating animal intelligence," Wasserman says.

Some apes plus monkeys such as baboons have also passed a version of the tests as difficult as this one, with just two symbols for determining sameness or difference, Wasserman says. He eventually trained pigeons to do a simple version of the task but had to hype up the samples with clusters of 16 icons to create blatant sameness and difference. "This is quite a chore for pigeons," he says.

Honeybees have made news for learning tasks that required distinguishing sameness or difference, but the crow test "is a step ahead in cognitive complexity," says Martin Giurfa, based at Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse with France's CNRS research agency. He and his colleagues had shown honeybees a single icon and then required that they choose flight paths marked with either the same icon or a different one. The crow version presented sameness or difference with pairs of symbols, which Giurfa suspects would be more difficult.

"It's a tough task," Wasserman says. What especially interested him was that the crows scored well the first time they tried it. The birds, working in the lab of Wasserman's coauthors at Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia, had learned how to take easier versions of the test, picking one of two cards that had symbols of the same size, shape or color as a reference sample. When the Moscow researchers first challenged the crows using a reference sample with symbols not shown on any of the choice cards, the crows did well the first time.

The test can't detect what mental processes the bird uses to get the right answers, Wasserman cautions. Bird minds quite possibly would not use the same approaches that humans might use.

SEE ALSO: This Amazing Video Reveals How Smart Crows Really Are

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BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - An orangutan held in an Argentine zoo can be freed and transferred to a sanctuary after a court recognized the ape as a "non-human person" unlawfully deprived of its freedom, local media reported on Sunday.

Animal rights campaigners filed a habeas corpus petition - a document more typically used to challenge the legality of a person's detention or imprisonment - in November on behalf of Sandra, a 29-year-old Sumatran orangutan at the Buenos Aires zoo.

In a landmark ruling that could pave the way for more lawsuits, the Association of Officials and Lawyers for Animal Rights (AFADA) argued the ape had sufficient cognitive functions and should not be treated as an object.

The court agreed Sandra, born into captivity in Germany before being transferred to Argentina two decades ago, deserved the basic rights of a "non-human person."

"This opens the way not only for other Great Apes, but also for other sentient beings which are unfairly and arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in zoos, circuses, water parks and scientific laboratories," the daily La Nacion newspaper quoted AFADA lawyer Paul Buompadre as saying.

Orangutan is a word from the Malay and Indonesian languages that means "forest man."

Sandra's case is not the first time activists have sought to use the habeas corpus writ to secure the release of wild animals from captivity.

A U.S. court this month tossed out a similar bid for the freedom of 'Tommy' the chimpanzee, privately owned in New York state, ruling the chimp was not a "person" entitled to the rights and protections afforded by habeas corpus.

In 2011, the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit against marine park operator SeaWorld, alleging five wild-captured orca whales were treated like slaves. A San Diego court dismissed the case.

The Buenos Aires zoo has 10 working days to seek an appeal.

A spokesman for the zoo declined to comment to Reuters. The zoo's head of biology, Adrian Sestelo, told La Nacion that orangutans were by nature calm, solitary animals which come together only to mate and care for their young.

"When you don't know the biology of a species, to unjustifiably claim it suffers abuse, is stressed or depressed, is to make one of man's most common mistakes, which is to humanize animal behavior," Sestelo told the daily.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

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While studying wild gorillas in Rwanda last year, a team of vets observed something very exciting: a young female using a stick to forage for ants. While you may have heard of apes performing similar behaviors before, this is the first time that gorillas have ever been spotted using tools to acquire food in the wild.

Observing tool use in animals is exciting because it highlights similarities between humans and other members of the animal kingdom in terms of problem solving skills and dexterity. Although we now know that many different animals use tools, such as crows, dolphins and primates, prior to Jane Goodall’s observations of chimpanzees stripping the leaves off twigs and using them to dig out termites, it was believed that only humans made and used tools. It was this behavior that scientists initially believed separated us from other animals, but we've known this is not the case for some 50 years now. So although this is a well-recognized behavior, it remains relatively rare.

The behavior was spotted by a team of vets studying a group of mountain gorillas residing in the Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda. The group has 23 members, including three silverback males, seven adult females, and several juveniles and infants. As described in the American Journal of Primatology, a male was seen sticking his hand into a hole in the ground in an attempt to catch ants for food. He quickly pulled it back out and ran away, presumably because he was bitten.

A female who had been watching the situation then approached the hole and repeated his actions. However, rather than accepting defeat, she picked up a nearby twig and used it to fish out ants which she then proceeded to munch on without being bitten.

Scientists are particularly interested in tool use in apes because it not only sheds light on the abilities of early humans, but also suggests that tool use may have its origins before the split between early humans and other ape lineages occurred. Chimpanzees have been observed making and using tools for a variety of purposes; such as fishing for termites, scooping out food and drinking. Scientists are also familiar with orang-utans using branches to forage for food, for example using poles to acquire fish from nets after watching humans spear fishing.

It was not until 2005 that the first observations of tool use in wild gorillas were made, when a female was spotted using a branch as a depth gauge before attempting to cross a pool of water. However, unlike other ape species, wild gorillas had never been seen using tools to eat prior to these latest observations.

While gorillas have been spotted using a range of tools in captivity for a variety of purposes, such as drinking, this behavior has scarcely been observed in the wild. But this does not necessarily mean it is rare, as it could be due to a lack of studies. Furthermore, captive gorillas have less to do than wild gorillas and often have novel objects placed in their enclosures, both of which are likely to encourage experimentation.

[Via BBC Earth and the American Journal of Primatology]

NOW READ: 3 Of Jane Goodall's Devastating Predictions For 2050 Are Already Coming True

CHECK OUT: Little Girl Befriends Baby Gorilla In This Adorable Video

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Screwdrivers for breakfast?

If you're one of scientist Christopher Olson's lab birds, you could get used to this.

Unfortunately, boozing jumbles birds' sweet songs the same way it garbles our tongues, according to a new study.

We still don't know why boozing makes us slur our own speech — most assume it's because it slows down overall brain activity, but the precise connection between garbled speech and drunkenness has yet to be nailed down.

The new research on birds may provide a clue.

Finches who drank the alcohol solution became "a bit less organized in their sound production,"Olson told NPR. Their tunes also became a bit more muffled than usual, he wrote in his study.

Similarities Between Birds And Humans

Scientists have studied finches for decades to learn more about how humans communicate; the way birds learn to sing is remarkably similar to how we learn to talk. A study published earlier this month narrowed in on the connection — birdsong and human speech, it turns out, are even controlled by the same genes.

While we rely on speech to communicate, very few other mammals use vocalizations at all. Among us warm-blooded folk, only dolphins, bats, and three species of birds use some form of speech or song. Most of these animals are difficult to study.

When it comes to learning how to vocalize sounds, however, zebra finches and humans have a remarkable amount in common, making them ideal candidates for research.

For starters, both of us spend a fair amount of time outside the womb (or egg) before we begin to form sounds. During this time, our brains develop specialized circuits that allow us to speak (or sing). We learn to make sounds by listening and watching our parents. Zebra finches, similarly, learn to tweet with the help of a tutor. And both of us mimic what we hear, so that with practice, the sounds we make get better over time.

Boozy Tunes

Using this foundation as a jumping off point for their research, Olson and his colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University studied how alcohol would affect both the birds' singing behavior — how often they sang, for example — and the sound of their songs.

On a recent morning, Olson and his team fed a group of zebra finches a mixture of juice and alcohol until their blood alcohol levels reached about .06% (in bird terms, that's sufficiently tipsy). 

While the booze didn't coax them into singing more or less frequently, it did affect the quality of their tunes.

With alcohol, the researchers wrote, the birdsong "amplitude significantly decreased and entropy increased." In other words, the birds' tunes became a bit hushed, and their songs grew less harmonious and more jumbled.

Olson hopes his study will help scientists explore how alcohol affects human speech in the future.

SEE ALSO: How Birds Lost Their Teeth

NOW READ: Why Birds Fly In A V-Formation

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From red pandas to golden-striped salamanders, Earth's wildlife is in trouble.

Many scientists believe our planet is in the early stages of a mass extinction, an event defined by a loss of 75% of species on Earth. It will be the sixth one to occur in the planet's 4.5 billion year history — and the first to be caused by humans.

But just how fast are species disappearing from Earth, and how much should we be worried?

Information recently compiled by the journal Nature, the World Wildlife Fund, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) sheds some light on these questions. It's not a pretty picture.

Drawing from the IUCN's "Red List," a catalogue of species considered in danger of extinction, Nature recently published a detailed analysis of threatened animals on Earth. The report concluded that 26% of all known mammals, 13% of birds, and 41% of amphibians are in jeopardy. Scientists don't have enough data for fish and reptiles to make an assessment for them, and insects got off comparatively easy — an estimated 0.5% of known species are thought to be facing extinction.

But these are just the species that we know of. There are about 1.7 million species of animals, plants, and fungi that humans are aware of, but scientists estimate there are millions more yet to be discovered, and we have no idea what kind of shape their populations will be in if we ever do discover them before they die off.

And there's more bad news where that came from.

Scientists aren't completely sure how fast all these species are disappearing from the planet, but the fastest estimates — which suggest 690 extinctions take place every week— indicate that the mass extinction could be complete in the next 200 years. (Slower estimates give us several more hundred years before 75% of life on Earth is gone, and the most conservative guesses allow us thousands.)

In fact, research from the World Wildlife Fund suggests that the number of vertebrates on Earth (excluding humans) is only half what it was 40 years ago.

The Living Planet Index, an assessment of vertebrate populations, shows that between 1970 and 2010, terrestrial and marine vertebrate populations both declined by 39%, and freshwater vertebrates declined by a whopping 76%. Altogether, the total rate of decline for vertebrates was 52%, meaning their populations have been cut in half since 1970.

So what's causing all the trouble, anyway?

The report says that the biggest current threat to animals, accounting for 37% of all threats, is exploitation — hunting, fishing, and other similar activities. Habitat degradation is a close second at 31%, and habitat loss comes in third at 13%.

Other threats include climate change, invasive species, pollution, and disease, although scientists expect climate change to become a much bigger threat as temperatures continue to rise around the globe.

Extinctions are bad news for more than just the species facing them. Ecosystems are inextricably tangled up in the organisms that compose them, meaning if one species die off, others will feel its loss. That means humans, too. For instance, ecologists are gravely concerned over declining honey bees, because they pollinate many of the plants humans rely on for food.

It's a scary future we're looking at, given the stats — and, if the sixth extinction really does occur, a lonely one, too.

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From the mightiest beasts in the jungle to the tiniest microorganisms swimming in our pond water, Earth is home to some amazing life-forms.

This year, we've observed some incredible wildlife in action all around the world.

In 2014 we saw leopards battling crocodiles, walruses swarming the Alaskan coastline, and ghostly fish lurking in the deepest parts of the ocean.

This nature shot from London's Richmond Park, titled “Stag Deer Bellowing,” by Prashant Meswani, was an honorable mention in National Geographic's 2014 photo contest.

Source: Here Are The Winners Of The 2014 National Geographic Photo Contest

This shot of a Colored Parson's Chameleon at Andasibe-Mantadia National Park in Madagascar was a finalist in the Nature Conservancy's photo contest.

Source: The 20 Best New Pictures Of Nature From Around The World 

This photo, titled "Apex Predators" by Justin Black, was one of the top photos from the BBC photographer of the year competition. Black shot this in the wetlands of the Brazilian Pantanal.

Source: Unbelievable Pictures Of Wildlife From The BBC's Photographer Of The Year Competition