Lil’ Drac, the orphaned short-tailed fruit bat, is growing up quickly! He now eats solid foods and knows how to fly. You can follow Lil’ Drac’s progress here, or you can adopt a bat from the Bat World Sanctuary.
Here’s an adorable video of an orphaned short-tailed fruit bat, affectionately named Lil’ Drac, that’s being hand-raised at the Bat World Sanctuary:
Why was Lil’ Drac abandoned by his mother?
Lil’ Drac is an orphaned short tailed fruit bat (Carollia perspicillata). His mother was yet another casualty from zoo closures which are occurring across the US. Sheis a young mother who was stressed from the conditions in which she was kept, combined with the additional trauma of being captured and transferred to a new and unfamiliar environment. Consequently, she abandoned Lil’ Drac after he was born. He was found on the padded floor of the indoor flight enclosure at Bat World Sanctuary, curled up in a little ball.
You can keep up with Lil’ Drac’s progress here, and you can sponsor a bat in need here.
Hat tip to Kevin.
Image: A fairy wasp next to two unicellular organisms or two protozoans. According to Alexey Polilov, this is the “size of the smallest insect and two protozoans in comparison. (A) Megaphragma mymaripenne. (B) Paramecium caudatum. (C) Amoeba proteus. Scale bar for A–C is 200 μm.”
The fairy wasp is so small that is can lay its eggs inside the eggs of small insects. Indeed, they’re some of the smallest multicellular animals on the planet. In fact, at least one species is no bigger than some single-celled lifeforms such as amebas and parameciums, so this family of wasps “include the world’s smallest known insect, with a body length of only 0.139 mm (0.0055 in).” Apparently, they’re able to achieve their diminutive size because “95% of neurons in adult fairy wasps don’t have a nucleus.” More via Sir David Attenborough:
Via io9, Reddit.com, and Sciencedirect.com
Here are some interesting videos of nature, science, and other things that you might’ve missed over the past few weeks:
An earthquake whose magnitude is initially set at 5.6 by the United States Geological Survey… occurred in central Oklahoma near Prague at 10:53 PM CDT, on Saturday evening, November 5th. This animation shows how some evidence of the earthquake was even seen by radar, as birds and bugs were detected taking flight to escape the shaking on the ground. Thanks to NWS Lubbock for first bringing this to our attention.
A hawk moth (Manduca sexta) feeds by hovering in front of flowers and slurping nectar through a proboscis, basically a body-length straw. To understand how these moths keep such a precise position in the air, Tyson Hedrick, a biomechanist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tried destabilizing moths in a variety of different ways and tracked their responses using high speed cameras.
Image: A fisherman pulls out a glob of slime, which is being produced by his catch of hagfish as a defense mechanism. Since they’re considered a delicacy by some cultures, there is a fishery for hagfish. Image via dirtsailor2003 on Flickr
Hagfish might be disgusting creatures, but they’re still fascinating. Hagfish, which are sometimes called slime eels, are eel-like primitive jawless fish, which use their exceptional ability to produce copious amounts of slime as a defense mechanism. The video below illustrates how “hagfishes are able to choke their would-be predators with gill-clogging slime.”
Via Gawker
