carnivore

Photo of cat eating meat from Wikimedia Commons. Photo by Tom Corser www.tomcorser.com. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales (UK) Licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/uk/deed.en_GB A new study published in PLOS ONE that examined bitter taste receptors in cats may provide evidence as to why felines are such finicky eaters. Unlike my cat that seems to take after Garfield in his dietary choices, most cats are purely carnivorous. Cats are reportedly unable to taste sweets thus plant-based starches are not typically desirable. This is…

A small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.

A ring-tailed mongoose (Galidia elegans), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.

African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo. African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) don't have it easy. Their taste for large mammalian prey puts them in competition with lions and spotted hyenas for both prey and living space, meaning that wild dogs regularly have their kills stolen or are even killed by other predators. In fact, the dogs may even be unintentionally attracting the attention of these other hunters. Like other social carnivores, African wild dogs communicate with each other through body language and olfactory cues, but they also employ a variety of high-…

Rokan the Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae), photographed at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.

A sloth bear (Melursus ursinus), photographed at the National Zoo in Washington DC.

A leopard (Panthera pardus). Image from Wikipedia. When a leopard eats a baboon, what is left behind? This question is not only relevant to primatologists and zoologists. Even though instances of predation on humans is relatively rare, big cats still kill and consume people, and when they do they can virtually obliterate a body. Yet, just like a human criminal, the dining habits of big cats leave tell-tale clues, and in 2004 researchers Travis Pickering and Kristian Carlson fed two captive leopards eight complete baboon carcasses each in order catalog the most useful ways to identify the…

A jaguar (Panthera onca). From Flickr user Prosper 973. One year ago this week Macho B was euthanized. He had been captured in mid-February of 2009, the only known jaguar living inside the United States, but after he was caught and fitted with a radio collar his health quickly deteriorated. When he nearly stopped moving he was recaptured, taken to the Phoenix zoo, and put to sleep when it was discovered that he was suffering from irreparable kidney failure. At first it seemed as if his capture was a lucky accident, but a later investigation by the Fish and Wildlife Service found that the…

Yellowstone National Park is an amazing place. I stayed there for three days longer than I had originally planned and I still was not ready to leave it. Even if I had spent another week there I still would not have seen all the natural wonders of the park, but fortunately the BBC recently sent film crews to Yellowstone to capture its natural history in every season. These vignettes were expertly strung together in the miniseries Yellowstone: Battle for Life, and embedded below is one of the scenes in which a fox tries to catch dinner in the middle of winter: see more Lolcats and funny…

Detail of a Charles R. Knight mural depicting a family a mastodons. Fossils often turn up in unexpected places. As people have dug swimming pools, tilled farms, blasted through mountains, and quarried the land for minerals traces of ancient life sometimes come to the surface, from isolated shark teeth to skeletons of our extinct hominin relatives. Even fossil graveyards are found this way every now and then, like the one found in a southern Pennsylvania quarry a little more than a century ago. In late April 1907 William Jacob Holland, a paleontologist and director of Pittsburgh's Carnegie…

A reconstruction of Smilodon, photographed at the American Museum of Natural History. When it comes to animals, encyclopedias often present us with generalized descriptions. Where a creature lives, what color it is, what it eats, and other tidbits of information are listed to distinguish one species from another, but what is lost is an appreciation of variation. Be they genetic, anatomical, or behavioral, variations are grist for natural selection's mill, and if you study any species in detail it becomes apparent that individuals differ considerably over space and through time. This was…

A grizzly bear (the black dot in the middle of the photo) walking near the treeline in Yellowstone's Hayden Valley. The quiet of my evening wildlife watching was suddenly broken by a thick Boston accent. "Oh my gawd! Look! It's a grizz! That's the last animal I needed to see! It's a grizz!" He was right. Lumbering across the valley was a big dark shape that could only be a bear. It was not very close, being little more than a dot moving along the distant treeline, but through the zoom lens of my camera it was just possible to make out the hump that distinguishes black bears from grizzly…

Wolves are among my favorite carnivores, but they're often shy even in zoo settings, making them difficult to photograph. During my visit to the National Zoo this past spring, however, this Mexican Wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) came down to get a drink from the pool at the edge of the enclosure, allowing me to snap a few photos. Not everyone likes wolves as much as I do, though, and the Mexican Wolf is currently critically endangered with only about 200 individuals left in the wild. As with other wolves, this subspecies (ranging from Mexico across the southwestern U.S. and as far north as…

The whole of natural history fascinates me, but everyone has their own favorite topics, and one of the most intriguing subject areas (to me, at least) is predator/prey interactions. Herbivores are interesting in their own right, surely, but for me it is the predators that are the most thought-provoking and impressive. Given this proclivity to ponder carnivory , I've chosen to write up my term paper for a seminar course I'm currently taking (Topics in African Prehistory) on the entrance of hominins into the "Carnivore Guild," especially in terms of hunting small prey in forests, scavenging…

The American Black Bear (Ursus americanus) is so common in northern New Jersey that many people don't need to go to a zoo in order to see one. Although there have been occasional sightings of the animals in New Brunswick, I've only once seen a Black Bear in the wild, a large individual that quickly ran off through the forest as soon as I saw it. Still, the Black Bear population in New Jersey exponentially increased in a very short period of time, many state conservation and wildlife agencies coming under fire for supporting or not supporting a bear hunt (at least one official left their…

This is Cali and Summer, two California Sea Lions (Zalophus californianus) at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Both rescued from wild populations (Summer was abandoned by her mother and Cali's mother died soon after Cali was botn), the two were raised by human keepers and so require a lot of care. They still play with each other nearly constantly, however, this shot taken during a sort of "King of the Rock" game.

Yesterday my friend Julia commented that one of the best times to visit a museum is in the late afternoon during the winter, and these two photographs will give you some idea why. While the fourth floor of the AMNH is usually bathed in natural lighting during most of the day and artificial lighting from above during the evening, there's a few minutes during the winter months while the sun is getting low in the sky but the overhead illumination hasn't come on yet, a time when shadows sweep across the ancient bones. These two photographs of the "Bear Dog" Amphicyon were taken during that short…

While I love to visit the zoo on warm summer days, I usually don't come home with many good pictures, and the reason why can be summed up in one word: Strollers. Anyone who's visited a museum, zoo, or other such institution with me knows that the never-ending sea of strollers is pretty high on my list of pet peeves, and on at least one occasion the shuffling mob gave me a migraine and sent me off home. There is an easy way to avoid this, however; visit in the wintertime. The above photo is of Zeff, a 14-year-old female Amur Tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), taken right around 10 AM on a cold…

I was planning on putting up one of my patented mega-posts this evening, but unfortunately I just don't have it in me at the moment. It's based on a presentation I made today involving scavenging and early hominids, and while I'm sure some of you will be able to make the right connections (especially if you're familiar with the work of a certain Rutgers alum) here's a video of a certain behavior exhibited by one of my most favorite big cats, the Leopard (Panthera pardus), that'll prominently figure in tomorrow's discussion;

Yesterday's photographic subject, the cougar (Puma concolor), has plenty of common names by which it is known by (some of which are better than others), and the White Nosed Coati (Nasua narica) is another mammal that is known by many other monikers. Pizote, Antoon, and Harrington all sound more like the names of places rather than a long-nosed member of the Family Procyonidae (which also includes raccoons, the Kinkajou, and Olingos), but that is precisely what they are. One should also be mindful that there is at least one other species of coati, distinct from the Pizote, being known as the…