Jan. 6, 2015—As the year’s first blanket of snow coated the Washington, D.C. area today, giant panda Bao Bao at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park spent much of the morning playing in it for the very first time. The 16 month-old panda cub tumbled down the hill in her outdoor enclosure, climbed trees and pounced on her mother Mei Xiang.

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Huli Wigmen in line, New Guinea. (Photo: Bruce Beehler)

The majestic feathers of the greater bird of paradise (Paradisaea apoda) have inspired people for thousands of years. Like many birds on the isolated island of New Guinea, these highly decorated creatures have evolved not only their unusual appearance but also unique relationships with indigenous communities.

To celebrate the publication of Birds of New Guinea, an essential field guide to the birds of the world’s second largest island, Smithsonian Science asks author Bruce Beehler what makes the birds of this region so remarkable. Beehler is research associate in the Division of Birds at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Joshua A. Bell ethnology curator in the museum’s Department of Anthropology.

Q: What makes the birds from this region so special?

Beehler: It’s earth history. New Guinea and Australia have been separated from other continents for over 100 million years. While at several points Australia and New Guinea were linked, there has never been a continuous land link between these islands and the rest of the world.

Isolation and time have enabled the few animals that somehow made their way to New Guinea to evolve into many varied and specialized species. This has resulted in some of the most diverse bird lineages and most spectacular looking species, like the greater bird of paradise.

Q: Bird of paradise feathers have been collected for a long time. Has this put these species in danger of extinction?

Beehler: The most beautiful species of birds of paradise have been collected over millennia for traditional headdresses and other uses. In the Victorian era, they were exported in large numbers to adorn the hats of stylish women in the West. Conservationists initially believed these species might be at risk of extinction. When we studied them, however, we found their mating behavior and reproductive biology protected them from overharvest—because only a few of the oldest males exhibit the most sought-after plumage adornments.

Chimbu lady dancer, New Guinea. (Photo: Bruce Beehler)

Male greater birds of paradise, for example, become sexually mature at one year old, but do not complete their plumage development until they are more than seven years old. So even if the fully mature males are collected, the younger birds can mate with the females to produce offspring. Males don’t help raise the chicks; they spend all their energy developing these impressive feathers and competing to mate with females. Males assemble in groups to display to the females. In each mating group, called a lek, the dominant male mates with up to 90 percent of all the females in that area. All the other males are just waiting, biding their time and developing their feathers, so that one of them can take his place when he dies.

Of course human males are vain just like their bird counterparts, usually only taking the most beautiful bird, the dominant male, for his feathers. The large majority of the birds in any population are not fully plumed and thus safe from traditional harvest for headdresses.

Q: How do the traditional people of New Guinea view and interact with their native birds?

Bell: While this varies across the island, generally traditional communities divided birds into those that they ate and/or those that they did not because they were deemed to be ancestors or spirit-beings. Throughout New Guinea, people utilized feathers and other parts of birds for decoration, such as headdresses, and as tools, such as a modified cassowary’s tibiotarsi  (tibia bone connected to a claw) as daggers. Using feathers and other body parts of animals was a way of displaying relationships—displaying kinship to the birds, relating one’s status in the community and making social statements through aesthetic displays.

Yam mask – woven mask used by the Abelam in the Sepik River region of PNG to decorate cultivated yams that are displayed. (Photo: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History)

Again while it varied, hunters traditionally understood the hunting of birds as part of an exchange relationship with the ancestors, and typically made some sacrifices after a successful hunt. This was an ongoing relationship of give-and-take rather than one of pure extraction.

The relationship between the people and birds of New Guinea has, however, become strained as people have increasingly converted to Christianity, and have been pulled into the global capitalist system. For example, where I work in the Purari Delta, people have increasingly come to see birds not as kin, animal manifestations of their ancestors, but as commodities to be eaten or sold. There are exceptions to this regional trend however, where communities have either maintained their traditional beliefs and/or merged them with conservation efforts.

Highlands dancer (Photo: Bruce Beehler)

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While it seems that we can find just about anything on the Internet, it doesn’t mean we know everything yet. Every year, Smithsonian scientists discover many new species around the globe and even in their own backyards.

Let’s take a look at some of this year’s interesting newcomers from the animal kingdom, found by our very own Smithsonian scientists. Scroll through to meet them.

1. Poison dart frog from Panama

If you had the chance to name a poisonous species, would you name it after your wife? That’s what Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute researcher Marcos Ponce did when he and his team discovered a bright orange poison dart frog in Donoso, Panama. His wife, Geminis Vargas, was the inspiration for the new species, Andinobates geminisae, “for her unconditional support of his studies of Panamanian herpetology.” Read more…

Andinobates geminisae (Photo: Brian Gratwicke)

2. Dragon-like mite

This new species has a face only a mother could love. But when you aren’t looking for a mate it doesn’t matter if you are attractive. Osperalycus tenerphagus, less than a millimeter long, has evolved an all-female lineage. No males and no mating. They lay eggs that don’t need to be fertilized, making little clones of themselves. The species was discovered in Ohio by Samuel Bolton, an entomologist and fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and researcher at Ohio State. Read more…

The front end of Osperalycus tenerphagus showing three of its legs and the unusual structure of its skin. (Photo courtesy Samuel Bolton)

3. Bolivia’s golden bat

Whether or not you like bats,, you can’t deny this new species is golden. Myotis midastactus, is just one of more than six species described by Ricardo Moratelli, a scientist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Brazil) and post-doctoral fellow at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Read more…

Adult female of “Myotis midastactus” captured at Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, Department of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Ricardo Moratelli and Don Wilson, mammalogist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History recently named this bat as a new species. (Photo courtesy Marco Tschapka)

4. Armored catfish from Colombia

Farlowella yarigui is a new species of stick catfish from South America, so called because the thin, elongated bodies of these fish mimic sticks. About 5 inches long, it lives on the bottom of clear-running streams among partially submerged vegetation and sticks. This discovery by Gustavo Ballen from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute represents the first and only species of its genus found living in the Magdalena River basin, west of the Andes Mountains in South America. Read more…

“F. yarigui” belongs to a subfamily of armored catfish and is covered in bony plates that protect it from predators, such as birds and predator fishes.

5. Poppy pollinating fly

The new fly, named Sericomyia khamensis, mimics the bumble bee to fool predators into leaving it alone. Found in the highlands of southern China by Christian Thompson, an entomologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, these flies are pollinators of the yellow poppy (Meconopsis integrifolia). Like bees, the female flies visit yellow poppies to drink nectar, but unlike their fellow pollinators they also eat the poppy pollen on the spot. Read more…

“Sericomyia khamensis,” a newly discovered flower fly from China

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Ornate Fruit-Dove (Photo: Bruce Beehler)

The genomes of modern birds tell a story of how they emerged and evolved after the mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the family tree of modern birds has confused biologists for centuries and the molecular details of how they arrived at more than 10,000 species is barely known.

Now that story is coming to light, thanks to an ambitious international collaboration underway for four years that has sequenced, assembled and compared full genomes of 48 bird species. The first findings of the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium are being reported nearly simultaneously in 23 papers — eight papers today, Dec. 12, in a special issue of Science and 15 more in Genome Biology, GigaScience and other journals. The full set of papers in Science and other journals can be accessed by clicking this link www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6215/1308.full

Led by Guojie Zhang of the National Genebank at BGI in China and the University of Copenhagen, Erich D. Jarvis of Duke University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and M. Thomas P. Gilbert of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, the consortium focused on species representing all major branches of modern birds including the crow, duck, falcon, parakeet, crane, ibis, woodpecker and eagle.

Red bellied woodpecker (Photo by Ken Thomas)

The Avian Phylogenomics Consortium has so far involved more than 200 scientists from 80 institutions in 20 countries, including the BGI in China, the University of Copenhagen, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Smithsonian Institution, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Louisiana State University and many others.

This first round of analyses suggests some remarkable new ideas about bird evolution. The first flagship paper published in Science presents a well-resolved new family tree for birds, based on whole-genome data. The second flagship paper describes the big picture of genome evolution in birds.

Six other papers in the special issue of Science describe how vocal learning may have independently evolved in a few bird groups and in the human brain’s speech regions; how the sex chromosomes of birds came to be; how birds lost their teeth; how crocodile genomes evolved; ways in which singing behavior regulates genes in the brain; and a new method for phylogenic analysis with large-scale genomic data.

The new family tree resolves the early branches of Neoaves (new birds) and supports conclusions about some relationships that have been long-debated. For example, the findings support three independent origins of waterbirds. They also indicate that the common ancestor of core landbirds, which include songbirds, parrots, woodpeckers, owls, eagles and falcons, was an apex predator, which also gave rise to the giant terror birds that once roamed the Americas.

The whole-genome analysis dates the evolutionary expansion of Neoaves to the time of the mass extinction event 66 million years ago that killed off all dinosaurs except some birds. This contradicts the idea that Neoaves blossomed 10 to 80 million years earlier, as some recent studies suggested.

Based on this new genomic data, only a few bird lineages survived the mass extinction. They gave rise to the more than 10,000 Neoaves species that comprise 95 percent of all bird species living with us today. The freed-up ecological niches caused by the extinction event likely allowed rapid species radiation of birds in less than 15 million years, which explains much of modern bird biodiversity.

(Visit Science to learn more.)

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Bright orange with a distinctive call the Panamanian poison dart frog Andinobates geminisae lives in only a small area of the Caribbean Coast of Panama. It was discovered and named just a few months ago yet scientists already fear for its future from habitat loss, pet-trade collectors and chytrid fungus—a deadly disease that is decimating frog populations across the globe.

“Andinobates geminisae” (Photo: Brian Gratwicke)

At the Smithsonian’s National Zoo Brian Gratwicke leads the Panamanian Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project, a modern-day Noah’s Ark that is attempting to save endangered frog species from chytrid by raising and breeding captive populations. Gratwicke answers a few questions about the Amphibian Rescue Project and if A. geminisae might become its newest member.

Q: How do you decide to add a new species to the Amphibian Ark?

Gratwicke: We have about 12 different species now in the Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project and our goal is to grow that to about 20. To add a new species like A. geminisae we’d need to collect at least 10 males and 10 females to be represented in its first captive generation. For species that are difficult to breed we might need to collect more animals than that to ensure that we can maintain a genetically healthy captive population.

So that’s one big unknown; A. geminisae is a fairly rare frog and we don’t know if we will be able to find more. Maybe they have already declined from chytrid, which can happen rapidly. We’ve run into a situation before where we found three frogs of a species that is highly sensitive to chytridiomycosis on our first trip, and after going back numerous times, never saw any ever again.

Limosa harlequin frogs are among the 12 frog species currently in the Amphibian Rescue Project. (Photo by Brian Gratwicke)

But before we add a species to the Amphibian Rescue Project and devote the resources and staff necessary to care for it, we also need to be in a position to make a really informed decision about adding it. So, we first try to make as many natural history observations about a potential candidate as we can. With A. geminisae we are not sure what its susceptibility is to chytrid. It seems to be a fairly terrestrial frog [chytrid is a water-borne fungus] and we are not even sure if chytrid will kill them.

We also need to figure out what environmental cues a frog needs to reproduce, where it reproduces and what habitat might be limiting for reproduction. For some species we may also turn to people who keep similar species as pets to learn about successful husbandry practices and what they have done to rear them successfully. There are a fair number of Andinobates in the pet trade because they are really attractive little frogs.

So, right now our real priority is to learn a little more about this species and whether we can breed it in captivity.

Q. Are pet-trade collectors a problem for frogs?

Gratwicke: Because of its color A. geminisae might be attractive animal to collectors. Once people know where it is some will certainly go looking for it. Panama has few collectors but they could have an impact when they harvest frogs from a very small population. For example, Panamanian golden frogs were once found in Cerro Campana National Park in Panama, but they were totally collected out of that locality, even before chytrid became an issue.

Brian Gratwicke swabs a frog in the field to test it for the deadly chytrid fungus. (Photo courtesy Brian Gratwicke)

Q. If chytrid is here to stay, what is the ultimate plan for the frogs in the ark?

Gratwicke: The ultimate plan for our existing collection is to develop some tools that we might use to help these frogs resist chytrid infection, and then reintroduce frogs that are less susceptible to the disease back into the wild. We’ve been actively researching the frog’s skin microbiome, with the hope that we could treat susceptible frogs with beneficial skin bacteria that might protect them from fungal infections, but it has proven much more difficult to manipulate the frog skin microbiome than we anticipated.

We also have been looking at the immune response of frogs to chytrid fungus and we’ve found that some frogs have very strong immune response as measured through their transcriptomes. Basically each cell has a nucleus full of DNA that is converted to RNA before making the proteins that govern cell function. So when we do a transcriptome analysis we are reading the RNA that is actually giving orders to all of the organelles to make various different kinds of proteins and ultimately get a glimpse of the genes being expressed at a single moment in time in any particular tissue.

So let’s say we actually find a frog that manages to resist a chytrid infection. We’d look to see if this group has a different genetic signature than the non-chytrid resistant group. Our ultimate aim would be to understand the frog’s immune response to chytrid infection so that we could help give them a leg up in the battle against chytrid.

“Atelopus certus,” lives Cerro Sapo (or Toad Mountain) in the Darien Region of eastern Panama, and is one of the most strikingly colored or all harlequin frogs. This species is in the Amphibian Rescue Project. (Photo by Brian Gratwicke)

Q. How long do these frogs live and are they breeding well?

Gratwicke: A frog’s lifespan depends on the species. Some species like the La Loma tree frog seems to be really short lived. The oldest frog of this species we’ve had in captivity has lived about 5 years, but on the other hand Panamanian golden frogs can live for more than 15 years!

All the frogs in our Amphibian Rescue Project pods are wild-collected founding members or their first generation offspring. Our goal is to breed all of the founders as quickly as possible. We don’t want to begin breeding a second generation until we have as many of the founders bred as we can. This way we capture as much of the genetic diversity of our founders before those animals die. If they die without being bred, they’re gone forever, so we are really racing against the clock.

Q: Are there things you can do to get captive frogs in the mood to mate?

Gratwicke: Yes, there are a lot of different potential cues to get a frog, male and female, into breeding condition. For certain species we’ve tried making it rain, we tried a simulating misting system, we tried making waterfalls, we played calls back to them at night, we tried giving them a little bit of light, we tried giving them no light, we tried giving them all different kinds of food.

Nutrition is important; you’ve got to have an animal in a really positive nutritional space before they can expend energy on reproduction. For our harlequin frogs, we breed them a special kind of moth larva that has a high fat content and we give them to the females to get them to start producing eggs.

Q: What other measures are being taken to save these frogs?

Gratwicke: We’re also doing some research to see if we can freeze frog sperm and we have pretty good results coming out of that program right now. So hopefully we could actually freeze frog sperm of all of our male founders that are not yet represented in captivity, so that if they do die before they are actually breed we can still have a plan B. Frozen sperm is kind of an insurance policy. Researchers have been trying to do this for many years and have largely failed, because frog sperm is activated in a frog’s urine and once activated it is really hard to cryopreserve, and then thaw.

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Newly hatched Cuban crocodile (Photo by Barbara Watkins, Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

The challenges of conceiving only get greater as we get older. But if you have some of the most prized genes within your entire species, then the pressure is really on.

The Smithsonian’s National Zoo is home to one of the oldest female Cuban crocodiles in captivity. For most of her life she has been a rather reluctant member of the North American breeding program tasked with ensuring the survival of her critically endangered species. However biologist Matthew Evans from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo’s Reptile Discovery Center is not about to give up on her just yet.

“She has not successfully mated or shown an interest in nest building while at the National Zoo. As she approached her mid-50s we almost gave up on her as an animal we would ever get to breed. This would have been really disappointing as she is very important genetically to the species,” explains Evans.

Cuban crocodile (Photo Credit: Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

But in 2012 Evans and the Zoo team saw a remarkable change in her behavior when they altered her diet and increased her activity.

“After we began introducing some basic training and enrichment into her normal routine she became interested in the male in mating season and began fighting with a rival female. Crocodiles are highly intelligent creatures and it seems the increased interaction we had with her got her a little more energized and active. We ended up with two male offspring from her that season and we are hoping to try again this breeding season.”

The value in this reluctant mother’s genes lies within their lack of representation in the species studbook — a giant list of who is breeding with whom among Cuban crocodiles held in captivity at zoos and parks across North America. With only two offspring to represent her genes into the future, the team of geneticists tasked with maintaining genetic diversity in the population are keen to get more babies from the National Zoo’s sexagenarian mother.

At approximately 60 years of age however, Evans concedes that the crocodile’s best reproductive years are probably over.

“Last year we got a clutch of eggs from her but a lot of the eggs she produced were not fertile. It could be an issue with the male, as he is also older, or it could be an issue with her age. Out of a clutch of 30 we would only get three or four eggs that might be fertile. Even then a lot of things can go wrong during incubation. Some embryos just stop developing for unknown reasons,” explains Evans.

With crocodilian species living up to 75 years in captivity, Evans and his team may have a few more years for breeding success. While zoos and crocodile farms are breeding Cuban crocodiles with the aim that someday they might join their wild relatives, that dream is still out of reach.

Habitat for this species is dwindling, with the 3,000 to 6,000 Cuban crocodiles left in the wild restricted to only two swamp habitats in Cuba. Widespread destruction of wetlands for agriculture, heavy hunting pressure, and the introduction of the common caiman (Caiman crocodilus), which compete for food and space, have all contributed to the Cuban crocodile’s decline. So for now, until there is more habitat in their homeland, the captive Cuban crocodiles will continue to find romance with a little human help.

Video provided by Smithsonian National Zoo

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Goliath bird-eating tarantula (Photo by: Meghan Murphy, Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

1. Some male spiders just want to be eaten

Black widows are known for cannibalizing their mates, but this doesn’t actually happen all the time. The exception seems to be the red widow, where the male force feeds himself to the female by placing himself into her mandibles. If she ‘spits him out,’ so to speak, he will keep placing himself there until she eventually eats him.

Female Black Widow Spider, Latrodectus mactans. (Photo by: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Insect Zoo/ Butterfly Pavilion)

2. Spiders can see what we cannot

Certain species of salticids (jumping spiders) can see into spectrums we humans cannot. A few have been shown to be able to see both UVA and UVB light.

Anterior Median and Lateral Eyes of a Female Jumping Spider, Maevia inclemens. (Photo by: Thomas Shahan)

3. Some tarantulas fling hair at predators

New-world tarantulas are capable of flinging off tiny irritating hairs, known as urticating hairs, to deter potential predators, similar to a porcupine using its quills as a defense.

Chilean rose-haired tarantula, Grammostola rosea. (Photo by Matt Reinbold)

4. Spiders can work together

While most spiders are solitary animals, there are some that form communities building large communal cobwebs. Colonies can number in the thousands of individuals and they will work together to incapacitate prey trapped in their webs and share the harvest with each other.

Tetragnathid web at Arkansas Bend Park, Lago Vista, TX. (Photo by: Joe Lapp)

5. Spiders can go fishing

There are some ingenious ways spiders use to capture prey. For instance, the ogre-faced spider weaves a net between its front legs and then dangles above places where prey are likely to pass through. By using its web like a net, it scoops up hapless prey. Bolas spiders use a long line of silk ended with a spot of sticky glue (a bolas), swinging it at nearby moths to catch them, much like a fishing line.

Net-throwing Spider, Ankarafantsika, Madagascar. (Photo by: Frank Vassen)

6. Spiders are the real superheroes

For its weight, spider web silk is actually stronger and tougher than steel.

Photo by: Fabian Viana

7. Ants can be spiders in disguise

There are over 100 species of spiders that mimic ants by having evolved similar appearances and even similar pheromones. Most do it to evade predators, but a few do it to help them prey on ants.

An ant-mimic spider, Synemosyna formica. (Photo by: Patrick Coin)

8. Spiders have inspired their own dance

During the 16th and 17th centuries it was believed that a bite from a species of wolf spider (named “tarantula,” found in the Taranto region of Italy) would be fatal unless the victim engaged in frenzied dancing to a specific piece of music. It inspired a dance locally known as the tarantella.

Wolf spider face (Photo by: e_monk)

Michael Miller is an animal keeper at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo who spends most of his time taking care of the animals who keep most people awake at night.

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Black vultures (Flickr photo by e_monk)

A new study of microorganisms living on the skin and in the intestines of North America vultures (black and turkey vultures) has turned up a remarkable find. The large intestines of these birds are dominated by two groups of flesh-digesting bacteria toxic enough to kill a human and most other birds and animals.

The discovery suggests that millions of years of eating decaying, contaminated flesh have not only given vultures a strong tolerance to bacterial toxins, but that these birds have perhaps harnessed the decaying power of pathogenic bacteria, allowing vultures to absorb more nutrients from the food they eat.

Such a mutualistic, co-evolutionary relationship between vultures and bacteria probably evolved over millions of years, says Gary Graves, a Smithsonian ornithologist who is a co-author of the study published today in the journal Nature Communications.

Turkey vulture (Flickr photo by George Lamson)

“In birds, scavenging is an old profession. From an evolutionary perspective vultures branched off from hawks and eagles millions of years ago,” Graves says.

The benefit the bacteria receive from this arrangement, the scientists theorize, is that it gives them “a uniform, stable environment in which to live,” Graves adds. “Vulture chicks are fed by regurgitation. Whatever the adult has on its face and in its crop is transferred to the baby. This chain has likely been perpetuated for millions of years.”

Conducted by scientists at the University of Copenhagen, the Copenhagen Zoo, the Technical University of Denmark, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Aarhus University, the study’s aim was to document all of the bacteria and other organisms that live on the face and in the guts of both black and turkey vultures in North America. In particular, the scientists wanted to investigate how vultures survive eating carrion. The team took swabs from the faces and throats and extracted samples from the hind guts of 25 turkey vultures and 25 black vultures in Nashville, Tenn.

Turkey vulture, left; Black vulture, right. (Flickr photo by Dave Govoni)

A second discovery made during this study is that the vulture stomach is an extremely harsh chemical environment that acts as a strong bacterial filter, killing a majority of the bacteria the vultures consume. On average, the scientists found 528 different types of microorganisms living on the vultures’ faces, yet only 76 of these made it through to the large intestine. It appears that only bacteria species that have adapted to survive the harsh conditions of the vulture’s stomach acid are able to colonize and thrive in their lower intestines.

Clostridia and Fusobacteria, the anerobic bacteria that dominate the vulture’s guts, most likely originate from physical contact with food sources or from soil clinging to the carcasses, the scientists say. To eat, a vulture will frequently place its head inside a carcass and often eats meat contaminated with feces.

“It looks like some sort of competition is going on between Clostridia and Fusobacteria in the vulture gut,” Graves observes. “Both occur in high abundances so they tolerate one another and dominate all other bacteria in the gut.”

A black vulture. On average, the scientists found 528 different types of microorganisms living on the faces of vultures in the study. (Flickr photo by Phil)

“Vultures are nature’s disposal unit. They are cleaning up the environment. They are an unpaid sanitation service that cleans up almost all of the small and mid-sized carcasses in the United States,” Graves adds.

DNA from a majority of large-bodied mammalian families found in the vicinity of Nashville was found on the vulture’s faces including rabbit, dog, deer, opossum, skunk and raccoon. One vulture had human DNA on its face and hindgut sample, the result of lab contamination or eating sewage, the scientists speculate. DNA detected on the facial samples however was absent from the majority of the vulture gut samples, further indication of the harsh chemical environment inside the vulture stomach.

“This study is a kind of first scratch at the surface of a larger mystery,” Graves says. “The next step is we need to do more work on identifying and documenting exactly what pathogenic strains of bacteria are in these intestines and to find out how virulent these things are. We also need to find out if they are biologically active when the vultures expel them. It’s one thing to have these bacteria in the vulture’s intestine but are they active in the environment after they leave the birds, and how?”

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You too can meet a kiwi! Micaela Jemison from Smithsonian Science takes us to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo where she gets up close and personal with a kiwi. From their amazing sense of smell to the whisker-like feathers on their face, we learn all about New Zealand’s national icon with kiwi keeper, Kathy Brader.

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Bleached coral off the coast of Panama.

A new study by Florida State University and Smithsonian Institution biologists shows that bleaching events brought on by rising sea temperatures are having a detrimental long-term impact on coral.

Bleaching—a process where high water temperatures or UV light stresses the coral to the point where it loses its symbiotic algal partners that provides the coral with color—is also affecting the long-term fertility of the coral the scientists reveal in the latest issue of Marine Ecology Progress Series.

Don Levitan and William Boudreau of Florida State University; Javier Jara from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and Nancy Knowlton from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History are co-authors of the study.

Most corals reproduce by releasing sperm and eggs into the ocean during brief annual spawning events. The chance of sperm finding and fertilizing an egg depends on corals spawning in close proximity and in synchrony with each other.

In a study of the corals that build the major framework of Caribbean coral reefs, the team found that the species living in shallower water experienced near total reproductive failure, while the species living in deeper water were about half as likely to spawn.

“The remarkable finding from this study was that the reduction in spawning persisted for three additional years, long after the corals had regained their symbiotic partners and regained their normal appearance,” says Levitan, chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Florida State. “Even corals that didn’t bleach aren’t reproducing at the levels they should.”

The worldwide decrease in coral abundance in combination with long-term reductions in spawning and reproduction following bleaching events put reef- building corals in a difficult situation. Eggs might be released, but never fertilized. And that could have a major impact on the ecosystem at large.

Levitan and other researchers been studying coral just off the coast of Panama since 1996. Since then, those corals have been exposed to two bleaching events. On average, it takes coral three to four years to recover from bleaching.

“Even if we can fix what’s killing these corals, it’s going to be hard for coral populations to recover, because the surviving corals might not successfully produce enough offspring to repopulate reefs,” Levitan said.

Coral reefs provide protection and shelter for many different species of fish. Without the reefs, certain fish are left homeless and without an area to reproduce. They also protect coastlines from large waves and flooding, a major issue in areas that are prone to tropical storms or hurricanes.

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When two red panda babies are born in critical condition at Smithsonian’s National Zoo, caretakers make the crucial decision to raise them by hand.

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A juvenile Swainson’s hawk flies by Panama City’s Ancon Hill on Sun, Nov. 2 during a record-setting raptor migration. (Photo courtesy Rafael Lau)

More than two million migrating raptors passed over Panama City on Sunday, Nov. 2, doubling the previous record of almost 900,000 tallied in a single day last year. This season at least three million raptors flew over Panama City on their thousand-kilometer journey from North to South America. This figure is also a record-setter in the annual tallies kept by the Audubon Society of Panama since 2004.

“The official count from Sunday’s massive raptor migration is 2,105,060 birds, most of them Turkey vultures and Swainson’s hawks,” said George Angehr, a Smithsonian ornithologist and authority on Panama’s birdlife. “A large percentage of the world population of Swainson’s hawks probably passed through on their way from the Great Plains to Argentina.”

This one-day total may also be the single largest recorded in the Americas. The season totals may also tie Panama with the world’s second-largest destination for raptor migrations in Eilat, Israel, which sees three million yearly. Spotters in Veracruz, Mexico estimate that some five million raptors per year pass through. Few other places in the world count a million raptors in a single migration.

“It’s a record that will leave us asking for a long time: What happened? Why so many birds?” Panama’s Audubon posted on its Facebook page.

Bad weather in Central America may create a bottleneck, limiting migration when it is rainy or cloudy, said Angehr. “When you get good flying conditions after several days of rain, they take advantage,” he said. “There must have been at least 100 miles of raptors. There was a river of birds passing all day.”

Raptors conserve energy during migration by riding columns of warm air that only form over land. Because the Isthmus of Panama is so narrow, birds are forced together and are easily seen. While the majority of the raptors are vultures and Swainson’s hawks, expert birders may spot some 20 species.

“These birds migrate by day and at night they need the forests that we have around the city — the humid forests and also the mangrove forests,” Rosabel Miró, the executive director of the Audubon in Panama, told news station TVN-2. She added this reinforces the need for legislation to protect the mangroves of the Bay of Panama.

The count, sponsored by Fundación Natura, is carried out from Oct. 1 to Nov. 18 on Ancon Hill, the landmark at the Pacific gateway to the Panama Canal.

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Snail infected by Leucochloridium parasite. (Still from video by: Gilles San Martin via Wikimedia)

Have you ever had a pet that seemed just a little bit crazy or odd? Can you be sure that it was in control of its own mind and not something else? The power of parasites often goes unnoticed by most people, but not by invertebrate research zoologist Anna Phillips from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Managing the large collection of earthworms, flatworms and leeches at the museum, Phillips’ research focuses on the relationships between parasites and their sometimes multiple animal hosts. To ensure that they are eaten or picked up by their desired host some crafty parasites use some very disturbing techniques.

Birds beware of the crazy-eyed snail

While snails that have colorful pulsating eye stalks may seem quite appetizing for a bird, they are really something they should avoid, Phillips explains.

Phillips: Snails can get infected with the parasite when they eat bird droppings filled with the parasite’s eggs. This parasite is a type of trematode—a parasitic flatworm that infects mollusks and vertebrates. Inside the snail, the parasite grows and then tunnels into the eye stalks of the animal. Here it pumps embryos into fat, throbbing brood sacs it builds in the snail’s eyestalks, turning the appendages into bright green-banded, pulsating beacons that look like caterpillars.

While these colorful pulsating eye stalks may be attractive to birds, they still need to be able to find the snail to eat it. The parasite has evolved to help move its host out of the darkness, by influencing the snail’s tiny brain to reduce its natural aversion to daylight.

Once a hungry bird finds and eats the infected snail, the parasite finds itself in an optimal host for reproduction. Even if the snail manages to survive, it may be infected with more parasites, meaning that another trematode can emerge in its other eye stalk, beginning the process all over again!

Rats who chase cats

Most rats that smell cat pee would run in the opposite direction. Not those infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii.  They don’t flee from danger as Phillips explains.

Just no fear — cats and rats (Photo: Angelo Su via Flikr)

Phillips: Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled parasite that can infect most warm-blooded animals, including humans, causing a disease called toxoplasmosis. To reproduce sexually, however, this parasite needs to be inside a cat.

One way for the parasite to reach its feline host is to infect rodents. When the parasite infects the rodent’s brain, it removes the rat’s innate fear of cats. So instead of running away when they smell a cat, these rats are undisturbed by the risk of being eaten. This lack of fear increases the chance that the rodent will become dinner for a feline predator, completing the parasite’s life cycle.

Visitors watch in awe as Anna shows a video of the flat worm Leucochloridium paradoxum burrowing into a snail’s eye stalks. (Photo: No Bones, NMNH)

No Bones, a blog from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, featuring the fascinating world of invertebrates, inspired this article.

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Ever wonder why only male peacocks have such extravagant plumage? We ask caretaker Gwendolyn Cooper at Smithsonian’s National Zoo to explain.

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Eastern Cottontail Rabbit, Sylvilagus floridanus. (Photo: Micaela Jemison)

Among the bats, rats and other ferocious animals that lie within the storage drawers of the mammal collection in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., an unusual freak of nature can be found.

The jackalope, also commonly known as a ‘Frankenstein’ rabbit, is the stuff of nightmares, with elongated horns protruding from its furry little head. The mythological jackrabbit with the horns of an antelope is an American legend, one that young biology students are taught to regard with the same disbelief as unicorns and werewolves.

So when one of the museum’s mammal collection managers, Suzanne Peurach, from U.S. Geological Survey Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, discovered an eastern cottontail rabbit with horny facial growths in the collection, she could not believe it was real.

The American Jacklope sold in stores (Photo Max -flikr)

“When I pulled the rabbit out of the box I thought this must be a joke. I went to school in Albuquerque, N. M., and everywhere you go there are jackalopes in biology professors’ offices and even being sold in stores,” Peurach explains.

“Those are fake animals, the result of people sewing taxidermy rabbits and deer antlers together. This rabbit was definitely not one of those.”

Indeed the rabbit was real, and after conferring with Robert Hoffmann, senior Smithsonian mammologist and world authority on rabbits and hares, Peurach learned that the rabbit was infected by Shope papilloma virus. The virus infects rabbits and hares worldwide, causing tumors to grow in various places on a rabbit’s head and body.

Mammal collection manager, Suzanne Peurach, with the specimen collected north of Lawrence , Kansas in 1955. (Photo Micaela Jemison)

The Shope papilloma virus is a cancer-causing strain related to the human papillomavirus, or HPV. Whereas HPV corrupts cells in the human cervix to build cancerous tumors, in rabbits the papillomavirus manifests as hard, keratinized horns. If they develop near the mouth, the tumors can become large enough that they interfere with the host’s ability to eat, eventually causing starvation. Such papillomaviruses are found throughout the animal kingdom, including in other mammals, birds and reptiles.

Although American virologist Richard Shope discovered the virus in the 1930s, its distinctive symptoms in rabbits and hares have mystified and inspired people for centuries. Descriptions of horned hares as real or mythical creatures date back to medieval and early Renaissance times, appearing in Bavarian folklore and early scientific texts. Stories and illustrations of horned rabbits as real animals last appeared in scientific books in the late 1700s, after which the idea of a horned hare as a distinct species was mostly rejected.

Plate XLVII of Animalia Qvadrvpedia et Reptilia (Terra) by Joris Hoefnagel, circa 1575, showing a “horned hare” (Photo: Wikipedia)

Sightings of virus-affected rabbits in North America are thought to have influenced the resurrection of the horned rabbit legend. The term “jackalope” was most likely coined by taxidermists who reproduced the horned hare of legend by grafting pronghorn horns onto the mounted head or complete body of a jackrabbit.

The New York Times attributes the popularization of the jackalope to Douglas Herrick (1920–2003) of Douglas, Wyoming., who in 1932 created and sold the first taxidermy “jackalope.” These taxidermy mounts became hugely popular, with many thousands being made and sold by Herrick’s brother and son.

Today the jackalope legend is still a popular story, with many outlandish and largely tongue-in-cheek claims as to the mythological creature’s habits. Like most campfire stories, a little bit of truth mixed in with large amounts of imagination can result in a strange cottontail.

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