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An orangutan saves a tired baby chick with a leaf, then inspects it afterward to makes sure it’s all right. There’s not a ton of info available about this video (for instance, which zoo this is or when it was filmed), but the important takeaway here is that orangutans are both extraordinarily compassionate and also kind of gross, as evidenced by the first 40 seconds of the clip. How many times did you think the orangutan was going to eat the bird? I’m not gonna lie–I held my breath a few times.
via Pharyngula
Four-year-old Andrei Pavlov was feeding ducks near his home in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, when he fell through the ice into the freezing water of a pond. A stray dog named Naida immediately began barking frantically.
“She’s not just a dog,” Tatiyana Balashova told Komsomolskaya Pravda. “She’s not a pure bred, but she’s still very special.”
Balashova who usually feeds stray dogs in Krasnoyarsk was the person who reacted to Naida’s alert.
“I heard Naida barking on the pond bank, like she was calling for help. She saw me, ran up, looked at me and ran back to the pond…”
Balashova quickly realised that a child had fallen into the water and rushed to find help from utility service workers, who were luckily close at hand.
“Because of the fact the boy was taken out of water pretty quickly and due to medics’ professionalism, this story had a happy end for Andrei, without any serious consequences,” Vladimir Fokin, the chief doctor at the hospital Andrei was admitted to, told KP.
Andrei spent a few days in the hospital recovering, and is now in satisfactory health. Naida has been adopted by a family that lives 500 km away. The canine adoption was arranged before the near-drowning incident, and the new owners are particularly proud of Naida’s heroism. Link -via Arbroath
Would you recognize that someone is drowning if you saw them? Real-life drowning looks nothing like the way Hollywood depicts drowning: the yelling, the arm-waving, the violent panic.
The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC).
gCaptain has a list of signs that indicate the instinctive drowning response. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
36 hours after drowning, wolf spiders were able to revive themselves and suffered no ill effects, scientists discovered recently.
A study at the University of Rennes in France found that wolf spiders died after 24 to 36 hours of being immersed in water. But when the scientists came back to weigh the dead spiders, they found them alive again. Apparently wolf spiders can put themselves into comas and shut down the metabolic processes that do not require air. Arachnologist Julien Pétillon says,
“There could be many other species that could this this that we do not know of yet.”
(image credit: Sonia Dourlot )
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