In the Texas grassland, home to white-tailed deer and rattlesnakes, outdoorsman Charly Seale sees a vast sanctuary of open spaces that could be used to protect the wild African rhino from its biggest enemy — poachers in search of the animals' valuable horns.

Seale is part of an ambitious project organized by animal welfare groups in the United States and African countries to bring hundreds of orphaned baby southern white rhinos to the south Texas grasslands, whose climate and geography are similar to their native South African veld.

That is if governments will let them and the Texans can afford a transportation bill that could run tens of millions of dollars, all paid for by private donations.

"This is not for the faint of heart or for the faint of checkbook," said Seale, head of the Texas-based Exotic Wildlife Association's Second Ark Foundation, pointing out no public money will be sought for the effort, which is still in its early stages.

Rhino poaching hit a record in South Africa last year, home to almost all the rhinos in Africa, with 1,215 killed in 2014, according to South Africa's Environment Ministry.

International crime syndicates are after rhino horns, which are used in traditional Asian medicine and sell at prices higher than gold to the newly affluent in places such as Vietnam, where a belief exists, with no scientific basis, that they can cure cancer.

In January, South Africa said it had moved about 100 rhinos to neighboring states to combat poaching. In 2015, another 200 rhinos will be moved to what Environment Minister Edna Molewa said are "strongholds" where the animals will be safer from poaching.

Some have ended up in Botswana, a country that allows the shooting of poachers on sight.

FORMIDABLE CHALLENGES

But what about Texas? If the plan goes forward — and there are many issues yet to be resolved — it would likely be the largest attempt outside of Africa to move rhinos out of harm's way.

The South African Environment Ministry says it has yet to receive a formal request for export but added that strict criteria under international endangered-species agreements would have to be met, including zoo accreditation, standards of care, and record keeping.

South Africa is home to about 20,000 rhinos, but under the Texas plan, called Project 1,000, far fewer rhinos would likely be approved for export to the US state. Africa has two different species of rhinos: white, which number about 20,000, and black, whose population is about 5,000, according to the website savetherhino.org.

The Second Ark Foundation, which has worked to preserve the African addax and the scimitar-horned Oryx, is working with South African wildlife organizations to handle the logistics.

"There is a lot of red tape on both sides and there would be a need to quarantine the animals," Seale said. "Most of the rhinos that would be transferred are orphan, baby rhinos."

The challenges are formidable. Most of the rhinos would be under three years old and younger animals would have to be fed milk by bottle. They are typically darted in South Africa and would then be transported by truck and shipped as air cargo.

Rhinos are not the best of travelers. Their health could be put in jeopardy by a long trip and airplanes can only move a handful at a time. But if it goes according to plan, the rhinos would be housed on ranches in south or southwest Texas that can run in size to 100,000 acres-plus (40,000 ha-plus).

The rhinos would be well guarded, with their DNA sequences stored in a database and microchips placed in their horns while they are kept under surveillance at the ranches, many equipped with helicopters to keep an eye on the animals.

If things go well in Texas and South Africa can put a lid on poaching, the Lone Star-raised rhinos could eventually be returned to Africa. None would be hunted in Texas, said outdoorsman Alan Warren, who is part of the Texas group.

"It's not about hunting, it is about preserving and saving the species from certain annihilation in South Africa," Warren said.

SEE ALSO: Singapore just seized $6 million of illegal ivory

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NOW WATCH: GoPro Video Shows What It's Like To Get Stomped On By An Elephant

In the Texas grassland, home to white-tailed deer and rattlesnakes, outdoorsman Charly Seale sees a vast sanctuary of open spaces that could be used to protect the wild African rhino from its biggest enemy - poachers in search of the animals' valuable horns.

Seale is part of an ambitious project organized by animal welfare groups in the United States and African countries to bring hundreds of orphaned baby southern white rhinos to the south Texas grasslands, whose climate and geography are similar to their native South African veld.

That is if governments will let them and the Texans can afford a transportation bill that could run tens of millions of dollars, all paid for by private donations.

"This is not for the faint of heart or for the faint of checkbook," said Seale, head of the Texas-based Exotic Wildlife Association's Second Ark Foundation, pointing out no public money will be sought for the effort, which is still in its early stages.

Rhino poaching hit a record in South Africa last year, home to almost all the rhinos in Africa, with 1,215 killed in 2014, according to South Africa's Environment Ministry.

International crime syndicates are after rhino horns, which are used in traditional Asian medicine and sell at prices higher than gold to the newly affluent in places such as Vietnam, where a belief, with no scientific basis, exists that they can cure cancer.

In January, South Africa said it had moved about 100 rhinos to neighboring states to combat poaching. In 2015, another 200 rhinos will be moved to what Environment Minister Edna Molewa said are "strongholds" where the animals will be safer from poaching.

Some have ended up in Botswana, a country that allows the shooting of poachers on sight.

Formidable Challenges

But what about Texas? If the plan goes forward - and there are many issues yet to be resolved - it would likely be the largest attempt outside of Africa to move rhinos out of harm's way.

The South African Environment Ministry says it has yet to receive a formal request for export but added that strict criteria under international endangered species agreements would have to be met, including zoo accreditation, standards of care and record keeping.

South Africa is home to about 20,000 rhinos, but under the Texas plan, called Project 1,000, far fewer rhinos would likely be approved for export to the U.S. state. Africa has two different species of rhinos: white, which number about 20,000, and black, whose population is about 5,000, according to the website savetherhino.org.

The Second Ark Foundation, which has worked to preserve the African addax and the scimitar-horned Oryx, is working with South African wildlife organizations to handle the logistics.

"There is a lot of red tape on both sides and there would be a need to quarantine the animals," Seale said. "Most of the rhinos that would be transferred are orphan, baby rhinos."

The challenges are formidable. Most of the rhinos would be under three years old and younger animals would have to be fed milk by bottle. They are typically darted in South Africa, and would then be transported by truck and shipped as air cargo.

Rhinos are not the best of travelers. Their health could be put in jeopardy by a long trip and airplanes can only move a handful at a time. But if it goes according to plan, the rhinos would be housed on ranches in south or southwest Texas that can run in size to 100,000 acres-plus (40,000 ha-plus).

The rhinos would be well guarded, with their DNA sequences stored in a database and micro chips placed in their horns while they are kept under surveillance at the ranches, many equipped with helicopters to keep an eye on the animals.

If things go well in Texas and South Africa can put a lid on poaching, the Lone Star-raised rhinos could eventually be returned to Africa. None would be hunted in Texas, said outdoorsman Alan Warren, who is part of the Texas group.

"It's not about hunting, it is about preserving and saving the species from certain annihilation in South Africa," Warren said.

(Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Steve Olofsky)

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NOW WATCH: NASA scientists are stumped by this dwarf planet

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Some 18,000 species, great and small, were discovered in 2014, adding to the 2 million already known, scientists said on Thursday, as they released a "Top 10" list that highlights the diversity of life.

The 10 are "a reminder of the wonders awaiting us," said Quentin Wheeler, president of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, which issues the list. An estimated 10 million species are still unknown to science.

But researchers have to move fast: development, poaching, and climate change are driving plants and animals to extinction faster than science can discover them.

Two animals made the list because of unusual parenting.

A wasp from China is the first animal found to use chemical weapons to thwart predators that might have designs on its offspring. Mothers fill part of their nest with dead ants, which give off volatile chemicals that mask the scent of larvae, throwing off would-be predators.

A frog from Indonesia breaks the rule of anuran reproduction. Rather than laying eggs, as almost all the world's 6,455 species of frogs do, or giving birth to froglets, it deposits tadpoles into shallow pools.

One of the top 10, dubbed "the chicken from hell," is extinct. The feathered dinosaur whose partial skeletons were unearthed in the Dakotas was a contemporary of T. rex and Triceratops.

Two species caught the list-makers' attention for their performance art.

A spider from the sand dunes of Morocco cartwheels to thwart predators, moving twice as fast as when it runs, while a pufferfish from Japan turns out to be the creator of intricate circles on the sea floor which had mystified scientists for 20 years. Males construct the circles, meant to attract females, by swimming and wriggling in the sand.

Since no top-10 list would be complete without an entry that made it on looks, SUNY included a photogenic blue, red, and gold sea slug from Japan.

More than a pretty face, it could shed light on how algae in a sea slug's gut produce nutrients for the slug out of corals it eats.

The release of the top 10 is timed around the May 23 birthday of Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), the Swedish botanist and zoologist who founded modern taxonomy.

The full list, with photographs, is at http://www.esf.edu/top10/.

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Richard Chang)

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NOW WATCH: The real 'Jurassic World' is in China — 17,000 dinosaur eggs have been found in the same city

Antlions create a conical trap in soil not unlike the notorious sarlacc pit in "Star Wars," trapping ants on an unstable slope and dragging them to their doom. Entomologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied the trap-jaw ants' unlikely defense mechanism with high-speed video, and the results are incredible.

This video originally appeared on Slate Video. Watch More: slate.com/video

Jim Festante is an actor/writer in Los Angeles and regular video contributor to Slate. He's the author of the Image Comics miniseries The End Times of Bram and Ben.

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"LIFE ON EARTH IS ONE BIG EXTENDED FAMILY!" is the greatest lesson from evolution, Leonard Eisenberg shouts at the top of his website EvoGeneao.com, which he says stands for Evolutionary Genealogy.

Eisenberg created the graphic below to counter the creationist themes he's seen spring into science classes recently. A Penn State University poll in 2011 found 59% of teachers are wary of discussing evolution in the classroom and fear sparking controversy by teaching it. Even more worrying, another 13% dismiss it all together and instead teach intelligent design or creationism in class.

"I run into this even when teaching about Earth history, how life and the planet have changed through time," Eisenberg told Business Insider in an email. "By emphasizing the 'family' aspect of evolution, in a fun way with attractive art, EvoGeneao makes evolution less scary, more 'family' friendly, and easier for students to understand and teachers to teach."

So what does the family tree of all living things on Earth look like in one graphic? Check it out (Or for a larger version click here):

The age of the Earth radiates out in both directions from the center of the half-circle. As the world gets older, you can see more and more species populate it. The majority of the species on this graphic are still living — except for a few, like the dinosaurs, which are mentioned specifically to point out the five mass extinctions that have changed Earth's history. The graphic didn't include the millions of organisms that have died out over the Earth's history.

"This Great Tree of Life diagram is based primarily on the evolutionary relationships so wonderfully related in Dr. Richard Dawkins' 'The Ancestor's Tale,'" Eisenburg writes on the site. It is meant "to illustrate a great lesson of evolution; that we are related not only to every living thing, but also to every thing that has ever lived."

The lines show different big events — like major extinctions — that have changed Earth's evolutionary history. You can also see the huge explosion of new species at the Cambrian Explosion, 542 million years ago, as the large swath of pink organisms called protosomes.

And we are just a tiny slice of that evolution. Mammals, like humans, are the darkest brown. Here you can see humans as one tiny sliver of life at the end of the evolutionary rainbow:

And even though humans take up a tiny amount of space on the tree, our presence should be even smaller, Eisenberg says. Bacteria, as you can see, take up a huge swath of life on Earth — as they have from the very beginning, through five mass extinctions:

As Eisenberg writes on the site:

This Tree of Life is drawn from the human, mammalian point of view. That is why humankind, instead of some other organism, occupies a branch tip at the end of the tree, and why our vertebrate cousins (animals with a backbone) occupy a large part of the tree. This falsely suggests that humans are the ultimate goal of evolution. In fact, if that asteroid or comet that hit the earth 65 million years ago and helped wipe out the dinosaurs, had instead missed the Earth, there might not be a dominant, tool-using, space-faring species on earth. Or if one evolved, it might be a dinosaur, not a mammal.

There are a few other simplifications in the poster, as noted on the site.

As a retired oil industry geologist, Eisenberg says this project developed out of volunteering with his children's schools, pursuing multiple evolution and Earth history based projects to educate the children.

"I needed a diagram to explain evolution for an interpretive sign. I couldn't find any I liked, (mainly because they were not tied to a geologic time scale) so created my own, hand drawn in Photoshop, using available texts and websites," which wasn't an easy feat, Eisenberg said. It "took about six months and many hundreds of hours to find ages of common ancestors."

Eisenberg is currently working on an animated, interactive version of the tree of life for the website.

See the entire graphic over at EvoGeneao. You can also buy the graphic as a giant laminated poster.

SEE ALSO: 12 examples of evolution happening right now

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NOW WATCH: Incredible animation shows 550 million years of human evolution in 60 seconds

As global commerce grows, the movement of goods is occurring at ever-faster rates. And with increased global trade comes the spread of non-native species.

This includes invasive insects that are making life difficult for domestic bees.

Non-native species get introduced both intentionally and accidentally. However they migrate, though, their spread can lead to devastating results.

Non-native species can dramatically reshape their invaded habitats and disrupt the interactions between native species.

After direct habitat loss, invasive species are the second greatest threat to biodiversity. Biodiversity is crucial to a healthy ecosystem, providing us services such as food, the natural resources that sustain our current lifestyle, and the building blocks of medicines.

Invasive species come in all forms – plants, animals and microbes – but all share common traits: they are non-native, they are increasing in prevalence, and they negatively affect native species.

Native bees in North America are declining drastically. Habitat loss is the number one reason for bee decline, with pesticide use, invasive species, and climate change also playing a major role. With the growth of cities and farms, habitat suitable for our native bees shrinks. And with competition and habitat degradation from invasive species, suitable habitat becomes even less.

We depend on native bees, like our humble bumble bees (Bombus spp.), to pollinate native flowers and crops. Bumble bees pollinate tomatoes, peppers, blueberries and many more of our favorite food items. Honey bees, which are widely used in agriculture and are suffering from colony collapse disorder, are a non-native species, and can't replace the pollination services provided by native bees such as bumble bees.

But one invasive species in particular is threatening the livelihood of bumble bees.

New bee on the block

The European wool-carder bee was first discovered in North America in 1963 near Ithaca, New York, and since then, its impact has been felt from coast to coast. Wool-carder bees get their name from the nest building behavior of the female bees. Females collect plant hairs, called trichomes, by cutting them with their mandibles. The up-and-down motion they use during trichome collection to cut the hair-like fibers and ball them up is reminiscent of carding wool.

My research has shown that carding behavior induces chemical changes in the plant similar to what occurs when insects eat plants. These chemical changes signal other wool-carder bees, attracting them to the plant, which causes further damage.

In addition to damaging plants, female wool-carder bees compete with our native bees for flowers. Bees depend on nectar and pollen from flowers for food, and increased competition from invasive species raises concerns over the future of our native bees.

But the behavior of male wool-carder bees appears even more sinister. Males aggressively defend flower patches in order to attract mates. Males use evolved weapons on the base of their abdomen to attack any interloper who isn't a potential mate, often causing severe injury or even death to the attacked bee. By decreasing competition for flowers, the male wool-carder bee hopes to entice more female wool-carder bees to visit his patch, thus increasing his chances of mating.

Of all our native bees, bumble bees (Bombus spp.) receive the brunt of attacks from male wool-carder bees. Therefore, my research focuses on the impact of these attacks on bumble bee well-being. My preliminary research shows that bumble bees avoid foraging for nectar and pollen in areas with wool-carder bees - likely to avoid attack. Because they stay away from areas defended by wool-carder bees, the number of flowers available to bumble bees decreases.

As bumble bees are already facing a shortage of flowers due to habitat loss, this additional restriction on flower availability is causing serious concern about the sustainability of local bumble bee populations. Because the population of wool-carder bees is growing, my current research is trying to determine the extent of the negative impact they are having on our precious native pollinators.

Native pollinators, such as bumble bees, cannot easily be replaced by other species. This is because our native bees perform a special form of pollination, buzz pollination, where they use a unique vibration pattern to shake loose pollen from flowers. Many of our native crops, such as tomatoes and blueberries, need buzz pollination for efficient pollen transfer. So for the health and well-being of our native plants, we must care for our native bees.

So what can we do?

There are a number of pollinator-friendly actions each of us can take.

1. Plant native wildflowers– Ornamental non-native plants are often easy choices for the garden, but they promote the spread of invasive species such as the wool-carder bee, and often go unvisited by our native bees. So while you may think you are helping the bees by planting flowers, make sure that you are planting flowers that our native bees will actually visit. Native wildflowers help mitigate the effects of urbanization on our native bees by increasing the availability of food in an otherwise challenging urban environment.

2. Opt for a more natural yard– Treating our yards with herbicides and cutting the grass very short can lead to a perfectly manicured lawn, but at what cost? Lawns with no flowers are food deserts to our bees. Allowing wildflowers such as clover to blossom in your yard provides much-needed resources for our native bees. If you absolutely can't give up the manicured look of your lawn, opt for a wildflower garden at the perimeter of the yard instead. The bees will thank you!

3. Buy organic– Pesticides, particularly neonicotinoids, have devastating effects on bees, and are linked to the decline of both bumble bees and other bee species worldwide. Lessen your pesticide footprint by buying organic produce when you can.

To read more about bees and pollinators, see:

• Flower pharmacies help bees fight parasites
• Bee crisis: global warming will cause onward march of exotic gut parasite

Kelsey K Graham is PhD Candidate in Behavioral Ecology at Tufts University .

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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NOW WATCH: This Rare Baby Pygmy Hippo Is Latest Hope For An Endangered Species

Sydney (AFP) - Australia's Queensland state will list the koala as a "vulnerable species" throughout the northeastern region, saying urban expansion, car accidents and dog attacks were threatening the much-loved furry animal.

"Everybody loves the koala and we must do everything in our power to protect the koala now and into the future," Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said Sunday of the tree-dwelling marsupial.

Koalas are already listed as vulnerable in south-east Queensland, but the extended protection to cover the whole state will see its government step up its efforts to map populations and conserve habitats.

"We also know, from motor vehicle accidents (to) dog attacks, that this is having a huge impact on the koala populations right across the state," the premier added.

"We have been determined to do everything we can."

A 2011 study estimated there were more than 10 million koalas before British settlers arrived in 1788 but numbers had declined to less than 45,000 in the wild, though it noted their existence high in the treetops makes them difficult to count.

The federal government placed the most at-risk koalas in New South Wales, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory on the national list of threatened species, classing it as vulnerable, in 2012.

A 2012 report also found the koala population in south-west Queensland had dropped from 60,000 to 11,000 over the past two decades, with researchers blaming drought, heatwaves and habitat clearing for the sharp decline.

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NOW WATCH: NASA scientists are stumped by this dwarf planet

This remarkable underwater video was captured near the remote island of Palau when a man recorded his "surreal" swim through millions of jellyfish. He was able to do this safely only because the local species does not have a noticeable sting.

Produced by Jason Gaines. Video courtesy of Associated Press and Newsflare.

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To the surprise of scientists, giant endangered fish with sawlike snouts in Florida are experiencing virgin births, reproducing without sex.

This is the first solid evidence of such asexual reproduction in the wild for any animal with a backbone, scientists added.

Asexual reproduction is often seen among invertebrates — that is, animals without backbones. It happens rarely in vertebrates, but instances are increasingly being discovered — only observed to survive in captivity previously. For example, the Komodo dragon, the world's largest living lizard, has given birth via parthenogenesis, in which an unfertilized egg develops to maturity. Such virgin births have also been seen in sharks, in birds such as chickens and turkeys, and in snakes such as pit vipers and boa constrictors. Such virgin-born offspring are known as parthenogens.

Until now, evidence of parthenogenesis in vertebrates came nearly entirely from captive animals, usually surprising their keepers by giving birth despite the fact that they had not had any mates. Scientists had recently found two female snakes in the wild that were each pregnant with progeny that developed via parthenogenesis, but it was not known if these parthenogens would have survived. As such, it remained uncertain whether virgin births happened to any significant extent in nature.

Now scientists find that among smalltooth sawfish, progeny of virgin births do regularly live in the wild. These fish are critically endangered relatives of sharks.

"Vertebrate animals that we always thought were restricted to reproducing via sex in the wild actually have another option that does not involve sex," study co-author Demian Chapman, a marine biologist at Stony Brook University in New York, told Live Science. "Rare species, like those that are endangered or colonizing a new habitat, may be the ones that are doing it most often. Life finds a way."

Smalltooth sawfish are one of five species of sawfish, a group of large rays known for long, tooth-studded snouts that the animals use to subdue small fish. Smalltooth sawfish are mainly found nowadays in a handful of locations in southwest Florida. These fish, which possess skeletons made of cartilage just like sharks do, can reach lengths of up to 25 feet (7.6 meters).

The researchers noted that sawfish could be the first entire family of marine animals to be driven to extinction, which is occurring due to overfishing and loss of the animals' coastal habitats. "Sawfish are on the brink of extinction thanks to humans," Chapman said.

Smalltooth sawfish have already disappeared from most of the places in the Atlantic where they were common a century ago.

"We were conducting routine DNA fingerprinting of the sawfish found in this area in order to see if relatives were often reproducing with relatives due to their small population size," lead study author Andrew Fields, also at Stony Brook University, said in a statement. "What the DNA fingerprints told us was altogether more surprising — female sawfish are sometimes reproducing without even mating."

Between 2004 and 2013, the researchers sampled DNA from 190 smalltooth sawfish. All of the fish were tagged and released back into the wild as part of an ongoing study of sawfish movements.

The scientists found seven parthenogens, representing about 3 percent of the sawfish the researchers investigated. Five of these seven appear to all be siblings of about the same age, probably members of a single brood.

Sawfish and many other creatures carry out meiosis, in which cells divide to form sex cells, each of which only possesses half the material needed to make offspring. In the female sawfish the researchers investigated, pairs of sex cells likely fused to generate offspring. However, these progeny are not clones of the mother or each other; sex cells are not perfectly identical to each other, and neither are the parthenogens resulting from these sex cells.

Since virgin birth is essentially an extreme form of inbreeding, "there was a general feeling that vertebrate parthenogenesis was a curiosity that didn't usually lead to viable offspring," study co-author Gregg Poulakis of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, who led field collections of the sawfish, said in a statement.

However, the seven parthenogens the researchers discovered appeared to be in perfect health and were the normal size for their age.

"This suggests parthenogenesis is not a reproductive dead end, assuming they grow to maturity and reproduce," Poulakis said in the statement.

Parthenogenesis may occur mainly in small or dwindling populations, perhaps when females cannot find males during mating season. The researchers are now encouraging other scientists to analyze their DNA databases of birds, fish, snakes, lizards, sharks and rays for other examples of vertebrate parthenogenesis in the wild.

"This could rewrite the biology textbooks," study co-author Kevin Feldheim of the Pritzker Laboratory at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where the DNA fingerprinting was conducted, said in the statement. "Occasional parthenogenesis may be much more routine in wild animal populations than we ever thought."

The scientists cautioned that parthenogenesis alone was not enough to save the critically endangered smalltooth sawfish from extinction.

"It would be great to use this interesting finding to inspire conservation action for sawfish," Chapman said.

The scientists detailed their findings online today (June 1) in the journal Current Biology.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

• On the Brink: A Gallery of Wild Sharks
• Cyclops of the Sea: Pictures of a One-Eyed Shark
• 7 Iconic Animals Humans Are Driving to Extinction

Copyright 2015 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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NOW WATCH: Amazing video captures how exotic animals drink water

YORK (Reuters) — They're not likely to start barbecuing in the rainforest, but chimpanzees can understand the concept of cooking and are willing to postpone eating raw food, even carrying food some distance to cook it rather than eat immediately, scientists reported on Tuesday.

The findings, based on nine experiments conducted at the Tchimpounga Sanctuary in Republic of Congo and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that chimps have all the brainpower needed to cook, including planning, causal understanding, and ability to postpone gratification.

They do lack the ability to produce fire. But if they were given a source of heat, chimps "might be quite able to manipulate (it) to cook," said developmental psychologist Felix Warneken of Harvard University, who conducted the study with Alexandra Rosati.

While the finding may seem esoteric, it lends support to the idea that cooking accelerated human evolution. Cooked food is easier to digest, spurring the growth of large brains in our australopithecine ancestors, Harvard's Richard Wrangham proposed about a decade ago.

If chimps have the cognitive skills to cook, australopithecines likely did, too, said Wrangham, who was not involved in the study: "It suggests that with a little extra brainpower, australopithecines could indeed have found a way to use fire to cook food."

Archaeological evidence suggests humans began using fire 1 million years ago.

Some of the experiments confirmed studies by other scientists, such as that chimps prefer seared sweet potatoes to raw. But those tests did not test whether chimps have the mental chops to cook.

Other tests did. For instance, the scientists presented chimps with two containers. One yielded cooked food through a false bottom, not actually cooking, and one did not.

The chimps learned that one transforms potatoes from raw to cooked. Given a choice of which device to put food in, they almost always opted for the "cooker," showing they understood and willingly waited for the raw-to-cooked transformation.

Chimps did not put pieces of wood that scientists gave them into the cooker, suggesting they grasped that only food can be cooked.

Surprisingly, since chimps usually eat food immediately, they were often willing to walk across a room to cook. When the first one did this, the scientists wondered if they had a single "chimpanzee genius," Warneken said. But others showed the same ability, understanding the idea of cooking and postponing gratification to do it.

There was no evidence, however, that they understood the concept of tipping.

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by David Gregorio)

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NOW WATCH: Here's what happens when you get bitten by a black widow

Don't sneeze — you might blow away a newly discovered species.

Scientists have uncovered seven new species of teeny-tiny frogs, each smaller than a thumbnail, in the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest. The miniature frogs live on isolated mountaintops in Brazilian cloud forests.

The mountaintop habitats are like isolated islands, making the frogs vulnerable to threats such as climate change. Illegal deforestation and cattle ranching also threaten the frogs' habitat, researchers report today (June 4) in the journal PeerJ.

Rainbow frogs

The brightly colored, little frogs are all part of the genus Brachycephalus, a group known since the 1800s to inhabit the cloud forests of southern Brazil. Suspecting that more of these frogs might be hiding in the southern part of the Atlantic Forest, researchers led by Marcio Pie of the Universidade Federal do Paraná hiked into the remote, misty rainforest in the states of Parana and Santa Catarina. [See Photos of the Tiny, Colorful Frogs from Brazil]

There, they discovered multiple new frog species, including the seven reported in their new paper. All of the frogs are less than 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) long, and they come in a jellybean-like array of bright colors. (The flashy hues are meant to warn predators of the neurotoxins in the frogs' skin, the researchers note.)

The new Brachycephalus mariaeterezae, for example, is bright orange with light-blue splotches along its backbone. Brachycephalus olivaceus, true to its name, is the color of a greenish-brown olive. Brachycephalus auroguttatus sports a bright-yellow head and coloration that fades to brown limbs ("aurogattatus" translate to "gold drop" in Latin).

The warty Brachycephalus verrucosus is orange with brownish-green bumps, and shares its uneven complexion with Brachycephalus fuscolineatus, which has yellow skin and a dark green-and-brown stripe down its back. Brachycephalus leopardus gets its name from its yellow skin covered with dark spots; researchers observed one of these frogs piggybacking on another as part of the mating process called amplexus in which the male climbs onto the female's back so he can fertilize her eggs as she releases them into the water.

Finally, Brachycephalus boticario is orange with darker, bumpy flanks. All of the frogs were found living in leaf litter on the forest floor.

More to find?

"Such high success in uncovering new species might indicate that the total number of Brachycephalus is still underestimated," Pie and his colleagues write in PeerJ.

The frogs' mountainous habitat is key to their diversity. Separated by valleys that the frogs cannot traverse, the pipsqueaks end up living in isolated communities, interbreeding until they evolve into completely separate species from the frogs a mountaintop over.

"This is only the beginning," study researcher Luiz Ribeiro of the Mater Natura Institute for Environmental Studies said in a statement, "especially given the fact that we have already found additional species that we are in the process of formally describing."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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It's a tradition in landscaping, but in pet stores? Dog owners in Japan and Taiwan are taking their canines to have their hair groomed into perfect cubes.

Yes, cubes.

It's adorable and geometrically pleasing, and though not yet wildly popular in America, the style has exploded on the internet, leaving dog lovers across the globe more than a little curious.

It's unclear exactly when the trend came about, but it was a huge hit at the Tokyo Dog Festival in 2012. You can see photos from the show below.

The trend, "came about because people were always looking for more impressive haircuts, and somebody came up with the idea of shaping the dog like a hedge," Tain Yeh — a hairdresser for dogs in Taipei — told the Daily Mail. 

It's not just dogs who are getting the square treatment — for over thirty years, the Japanese have been enjoying cube shaped Watermelon, which will run you about $100.

But dogs are different than fruit (we know; groundbreaking observation) and not all puppies can work the cube-face. According to Buzzfeed News, the haircut is only available for pups who have lots of hair around their face, like poodles or shih tzus. 

Check out these amazing pictures of dogs sporting the trendy hairdo.

If you're wondering where you can get your own dog a cube cut, Suzanna Grande, a pet groomer who specializes in "Asian-style grooming," would be happy to help you out, reports the Huffington Post. But the trend hasn't made it to Florida yet; Grande admits she hasn't received any requests at her Poodle Penthouse store in Tampa.

Olga Zabelinskaya is a New Jersey pet groomer and specialist in international grooming styles. The cube cut is "not practical," she told the Huffington Post, as it requires an inordinate among of product to maintain the rigid right angles.

What's more practical and less angular is the art of shaving a dog's hair into a circle. Zabelinskaya says the circle cut is "more subdued, and easier to maintain."

Check out this video from the Daily Mail where a dog is transformed into a circular masterpiece.

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Close to half of all living species on the Earth could disappear by the end of this century, and humans will be the cause.

This is the Sixth Mass Extinction — a loss of life that could rival the die-out that caused the dinosaurs to disappear 65 millions years ago after an asteroid hit the planet. 

This time, though, we’re the asteroid.

At least that's how Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of "The Sixth Extinction," sees it.

"We are deciding," Kolbert writes, "without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy."

In "The Sixth Extinction," Kolbert traces our understanding of extinction from the first time it was proposed as a theory in the 1740s until now, with scientists mostly agreeing that humans may be causing it.

It took scientists a long time to accept that entire species could disappear

It used to be that when researchers came across old animal bones, their first goal was to identify them with a species that already existed. In 1739, for example, when a group of researchers unearthed the first Mastodon bones, they assumed they were looking at the remains of two different animals — an elephant and a hippopotamus.

It wasn't until French naturalist Georges Cuvier suggested that the bones were from "a world previous to ours" that researchers first started to consider the idea that an entire species could have existed and then disappeared.

This realization should awaken us to the idea that our impact on the planet could have serious implications. 

One of the main culprits in the sixth extinction, Kolbert says, is climate change, but modern agriculture and a rapidly growing human population have contributed as well. By warming the planet, introducing invasive species to different areas, and encouraging the spread of previously contained fungi and viruses, people are killing the life around us.

Here's Kolbert:

No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before, and yet other, comparable events have occurred. Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.

We know what mass extinctions look like. And a growing number of scientists have agreed that we are likely causing a new one.

Yet we are doing surprisingly little to curb the tide.

"It is estimated," Kolbert writes, "that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed towards oblivion."

That adds up to between 30% and 50% of all life on Earth that could be gone by the end of the century— unless we start taking action now.

NOW READ: 12 examples of evolution happening right now

DON'T MISS: This is what caused the biggest extinction in Earth's history

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An oddly captivating video of a green, goopy substance attacking its prey is blowing up around the internet so fast it's become a trending topic on Facebook along with news of a Gilmore Girls reunion and photos of Princess Charlotte.

No, it's not a lost container of Nickelodeon-branded Slime. The green sludge is a ribbon worm (also called "Nemertea").

The Independent reports the video originates from a man "in Taiwan, when the animal was spotted [by uploader Wei Cheng Jian] while he was fishing in a port, and uploaded to Facebook."

That same publication also embedded the video from a YouTube channel called "FunnyVideoHD."

But it's hardly funny. Remember going to the grocery store as a kid and cranking out one of those slimy, sticky toys from the quarter machines? Imagine if that came to life. Yeah, exactly.

That pink tongue you're seeing is called a "proboscis." Most ribbon worms average about seven inches long, though it's rumored that at least one specimen measured up to 177 feet.

A student from NCSU explains in a study how the ribbon worm secures its prey:

When the animal senses a prey organism nearby, a circular muscle layer around the proboscis sheath rapidly and vigorously contracts. This contraction forces the fluid from the proboscis sheath into the proboscis and, in the process, literally turns it inside out, blowing it out of the proboscis sheath. The proboscis will rapidly (within a second or so) wrap itself around the prey, which is then drawn to the mouth and eaten.

How charming!

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It's not unheard of for animals to become quite chummy with members of another species  — even with those they would normally consider eating. 

Abandonment, trauma, or living together on farms or zoos, all serve as factors in bringing animals together in unexpected ways.  

In celebration of National Best Friends Day, we're taking a look at what happens when opposites attract. 

Robert Ferris wrote the original version of this post.

A baby monkey, a lion cub, and tiger cubs play at a Tiger Park in China.

A turtle catches a ride on the back of an alligator in Panama's Summit Zoo.

A monkey bought from an animal trader in Bangladesh spends hours hugging and cuddling this puppy.

Since the first one was spotted nearly four decades ago off the coast of Peru, only two pocket sharks, teensy sharks with a tiny pocket above each fin on the side of their body, have ever been found.

NOAA biologist Mark Grace found the second one, a young male, recently by accident of the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, the two of them have been traveling the globe so researchers from all over can see and study the rare shark.

We paid a visit to New York's American Museum of Natural History, where the shark is being studied, last week to get an up-close-and-personal look. 

In 2010 during a mission to study how sperm whales feed, a team of marine researchers working about 190 miles off the Louisiana coast scooped up buckets-full of marine life to take back to their lab for further study.

There, while rifling through several different species of fish and plankton that the researchers had frozen to study, NOAA biologist Mark Grace found something that didn't quite belong.

Its skin was too rough to be a fish, but it was far too small to be a shark — or at least that's what he thought at first.

A couple years ago, we reported a rumor based on a source who claims to have seen it that billionaire hedge fund manager Steven Cohen had a live and very large pig living in his 35,000 square-foot Connecticut mansion.

Page Six is now reporting that he did in fact have a large domesticated swine living in his home named Romeo. 

The Cohens reportedly took in Romeo as a piglet. The pig even had its own room in the mansion.

Romeo apparently grew too big and they had to find him a new home. According to the New York Post, he's been sent to live on a vegan farm in Florida (phew!). 

Our source claimed that Romeo had a tattoo on his face and that he appeared to be a walking piece of art. That's not entirely clear.

Cohen is a huge art collector, though.  His expansive collection includes pieces by Monet, Picasso, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol, according to a 2010 Vanity Fair profile.  He recently purchased Alberto Giacometti’s 1947 masterpiece "Man Pointing" for $141.3 million at Christie's. 

Cohen is the founder of SAC Capital, which is now called Point72 Asset Management after SAC pleaded guilty to insider trading charges in November 2013 and agreed to pay a $1.8 billion settlement. Point72 Asset Management currently operates as a "family office" hedge fund that manages Cohen's wealth and money of its employees, which comes to about $11 billion in assets.

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One of the largest camera trap studies done in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, reveals the daily lives of its wild inhabitants as they eat, play, nap, and even take inadvertent selfies.

The scientists of Snapshot Serengeti mounted 225 cameras in a 434 square mile area as an expansion of the ongoing Serengeti Lion Project and the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute's surveys of major species. 

The cameras captured 1.2 million sets of photos (three photos per set) from June 2010 to May 2013, according to the study published on June 9 in Scientific Data. They've set up a website can search the whole set of images to find your favorites.  

What they uncovered gives us an idea of what the daily struggle to survive looks like in one of the most varied and unique ecosystems in the world.

1.6 million wildebeest and zebra migrate across the Serengeti savanna every year. Hoping to catch this awesome show of life, the research group Snapshot Serengeti set up camera traps in the park, which were set off by a combination of heat and movement — catching lots of images of animals in motion.

Source: Scientific Data.

... Like this herd of elephants migrating. Many of the 322,653 photos that contained wildlife shows groups of animals. "The images are supposed to be random," Swanson said. "We wanted the cameras to give an unbiased view of how these animals were using the landscape."

Snapshot Serengeti was stunned by the 1.2 million photos captured. "We were simply overwhelmed." So, they partnered with Zooniverse, a citizen science project website, to have volunteers sort through the images. But using non-scientists leaves a lot of room for mistakes when identifying animals. For example the hyenas below are easily recognizable ...

Source: Zooniverse.org

Humans' closest living relatives may have a drinking habit: Scientists spied intoxicated wild chimps soaking up palm wine with leaves and squeezing it into their mouths.

Alcohol consumption is seen across nearly all modern human cultures that have access to fermentable materials. This prevalence led scientists to suggest what is known as the "Drunken Monkey Hypothesis"— that alcohol consumption might have provided a benefit of some kind to the ancestors of humanity, and perhaps also to the ancestors of chimpanzees, humanity's closest living relatives.

Humans and apes share a genetic mutation that emerged about 10 million years ago that helps them break down alcohol and could have helped them eat overripe and fermenting fruit. According to the proponents of the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis, the benefits of such an expanded diet may have even led evolution to favor an attraction to alcohol.

There were a few anecdotes of primates other than humans partaking in alcohol — for instance, green monkeys introduced to the island of St. Kitts like drinking tourist cocktails. However, most of these anecdotes were unconfirmed.

Now, researchers say they have confirmed, for the first time, that wild apes habitually drink alcohol. [Watch Wild Chimps Sucking Down Palm Wine (Video)]

The scientists watched wild chimpanzees living near the village of Bossou in the West African country of Guinea from 1995 to 2012. Villagers in Bossou tap raffia palm trees for the sap, harvesting it with plastic containers placed near the crowns of the tall palms. Villagers leave the containers alone for most of the day, collecting the palm sap in the early morning and late afternoon.

The sweet palm sap ferments quickly into palm wine. Villagers knew chimps occasionally sampled this sap for themselves, the researchers said.

Chimps often fold or crumple leaves inside their mouths to produce a drinking tool. They dip these "leaf sponges" into their preferred drink, and then squeeze the leafy tools in their mouths.

The researchers saw 51 instances in which 13 chimps used leaf sponges to drink fermenting sap. "I was fascinated by this behavior," study lead author Kimberley Hockings, a behavioral ecologist at Oxford Brookes University in England, told Live Science."To harvest the palm wine, chimpanzees at Bossou use a leafy tool as a spongy drinking vessel."

The sap averaged about 3.1 to 6.9 percent alcohol, or 6.2 to 13.8 proof. For comparison, beer averages between 3 and 6 percent alcohol, and wine can contain 7 to 14 percent alcohol, with dessert wine having nearly 19 percent alcohol content, according to the University of Notre Dame. The chimps often drank the booze in large quantities — about a liter (34 ounces, or about three average-size beers) of fermented sap on average. Males accounted for 34 of the 51 instances of drinking — one adult male in particular accounted for 14 of the 51 instances.

"Chimpanzees at Bossou have applied their knowledge of how to make and use leafy tools to exploit a new liquid resource — palm wine," Hockings said. "This new use of elementary technology shows once again how clever and enterprising humankind's nearest living relations are."

A number of chimps appeared intoxicated. One time, Hockings noted the chimps rested immediately after drinking the palm wine; "on another occasion after drinking palm wine, one adult male chimpanzee seemed particularly restless and whilst other chimpanzees were making and settling into their night nests, he spent an additional hour moving from tree to tree in an agitated manner," she said.

Hockings noted these findings do not confirm the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis, since they cannot say for sure whether the chimpanzees were attracted to the alcohol. "However, our data clearly show that alcohol is not an absolute deterrent to chimpanzee feeding in this community," Hockings said.

Hockings suggested that a future experiment could be to give chimps access to both alcoholic and nonalcoholic palm sap, to see whether the apes are attracted to alcohol. She and her colleagues detail their findings online June 10 in the journal Open Science.

Follow Live Science@livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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