#hunting

#hunting

Wild Elks in Utah Have Figured Out How to Avoid Being HuntedBrigham Young University's (BYU) Ecology Research Lab has found another case of "animals are smarter than you think": elks in Utah have learned to know when hunting season starts and move to avoid being hunted.In particular, these elks are moving from public lands, where they can be hunted, to private lands, where they cannot be hunted. Incredibly, once hunting season ends, these elks return to public lands.

Slow but Deadly: Tortoise Hunts and Eats Baby Bird"It was horrifying and amazing at the same time," said Justin Gerlach of University of Cambridge, as he reported on the first documented evidence of a tortoise hunting, killing and eating a tern chick.The video clip shows an adult female giant tortoise in the woodlands of the Frégate Island in the Seychelles archipelago walking slowly but purposely towards a tern chick stranded on a log. The chick tried to fight, but the tortoise managed to crush the bird's head, instantly killing it. Then, the tortoise proceeded to swallow the chick whole.Gerlach noted that the attack seemed to be deliberate and planned. The tortoise approached the chick with its jaws open and tongue retracted, which is a typical aggressive behavior. As the giant tortoise is thought to be vegetarian, the evidence of a hunting tortoise brought up new questions about what is causing this new type of behavior. "Could we be seeing a population of tortoises that is developing a new type of behavior with evolutionary implications, or is it just an interesting observation at the moment?" Gerlach added.Video: Anna Zora#tortoise #gianttortoise #hunting #tern #FregateIsland #Seychelles #animalbehavior

Octopuses Sometimes Punch Fish For No Reason At AllOctopuses are smart animals, that much we know. They have large and well-developed brain as well as complex nervous system. Scientists have observed octopuses use tools and solve complex problems like opening the lids of containers and unlocking latches to get at food inside. They're high social and can communicate with each other. They can even collaborate with other predatory fish when they hunt.A new observation by Eduardo Sampaio and colleagues has now shown that octopuses can also be a bit of a jerk: they recorded multiple events where different Octopus cyanea off the coast of Egypt were seen punching fishes, sometimes for no reason at all!Sampaio noted that during collaborative hunting, there were times where the octopuses had good reasons to punch their partner fish, for example to gain advantage over them while catching a prey, to forcibly relocate a fish to a less advantageous position in the group, or even to permanently ban a partner fish.But there were also instances where the octopuses seemed to punch a fish out of spite with no immediate benefit. Sampaio wrote that "punching could be a case of spite (no emotional connotation), used to impose a cost on the fish regardless of self-cost, for example, after defection (stealing prey) by a usually collaborative partner."#octopus #animalbehavior #cephalopod #animalintelligence #hunting #cephalopod #marinebiologyVideo: Sampaio E, et al.