Gordon Grice's Blog, page 49

A Heron Fishing

Photography by Dee Puett

Hyenas Kill Two, Injure Six

Tram2/Creative Commons

Two children killed in hyena attack: 


"A pack of hyenas has attacked a family in Kenya, killing two children and injuring six others.


A 10-year-old boy mauled in the attack last week has been airlifted to a hospital in Nairobi for specialised treatment"


Kenya is home to three different species of hyena. The brown hyena has been implicated in only one attack on a human that I know of. The striped hyena is an occasional predator of human children. This case, however, looks like the work of the far more dangerous spotted hyena, a significant predator of humans. There have been other, similar cases of spotted hyenas attacking entire families and even refugee encampments to take several victims at once. Sometimes this species stages a prolonged attack, even in the face of armed opposition. The injured boy sustained serious facial damage. That, too, is a trademark of the spotted hyena, which sometimes uses its powerful jaws to remove face, limbs, or genitals and eat them, not necessarily as part of further predation. 


Related Posts: 
Cannibal Attack in Perspective (including choice quotes about facial injuries caused by spotted hyenas)
Hyenas Maul 17
What Eats People, Part 15: Spotted Hyenas
Spotted Hyena Attack

Thanks to Dee for the tip.

Coyote vs. Cougar

Interesting footage from a wilderness area in Southern California. Thanks to D'Arcy for the tip. 

Chimpanzees Escape at the Hanover Zoo

A rather breathless article from the Telegraph:

Chimpanzees pictured rampaging through Hanover Zoo - Telegraph: 


"Five chimpanzees caused havoc at Hanover Zoo when they escaped their enclosure, injured a five-year-old girl and caused the zoo to be evacuated.


The animals climbed out of their enclosures by using branches as makeshift ladders and escaping over the fences.One chimp knocked the five-year-old girl to the ground, causing a cut to her head and bruises to her face."


These recent chimp escapes remind me of another that occurred in Kansas City a couple of years ago, receiving surprisingly little coverage. Most chimp escapes don't end in tragedy, and it's only since the attack on Charla Nash a few years back that the average citizen has begun to take them seriously. 


Thanks to Croconut for the news tip. 

Aquatic Attacks (Beaver and Otter)

Possibly your only chance this year to see a dead beaver in an ice chest. This one was killed with a BB gun after injuring two children.
2 girls injured after beaver attack in Spotsylvania County lake - DC Breaking Local News Weather Sports FOX 5 WTTG: "A beaver attack on Sunday morning at Lake Anna in Spotsylvania County has left two sisters seriously injured.
The girls were rushed to Spotsylvania Regional Medical Center after the 65-pound animal bit both of them, leaving each with serious wounds to their leg.


Meanwhile, in Minnesota:



A woman suffered some 25 bites when her swim was interrupted by an otter. This would be a river otter, not to be confused with the giant otters discussed here recently. 


Minn. Swimmer Recovering After Attacked by Otter Near Duluth | KSTP TV - Minneapolis and St. Paul: "The attack lasted for about seven minutes. When Prudhomme's father heard her screams, he jumped into his boat to help.


The Department of Natural Resources says there have only been 40 otter attacks in the U.S. in the last 20 years. Animal experts believe the otter in Prudhomme's case may have been a mother attempting to protect her young."

Invasive Giant African Land Snails

Tomas Vokaty/Creative Commons
Of all the exotic animals that have invaded Florida—and there have been a lot, from Gambian pouched rats to wild boars to Burmese pythons—my favorite is a nematode called the rat lungworm. It’s thin as a sewing thread and less than an inch long. Other invaders are crassly direct in their trouble-making. Recently, for example, a study published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) blamed the invading giant snakes for the disappearance of mammals in the Everglades. It cited a 99% drop in sightings of opossums and raccoons, a 94% drop in sightings of whitetailed deer, and so on. The pythons eat the natives, says the report; it’s as simple as that. 


But the rat lungworm only hurts other animals by getting eaten. That happens because, like thousands of other nematode worms, it’s a parasite. You’ve probably heard of its cousin Trichinella spiralis, the reason we overcook pork. It’s famous, of course, for taking up residence in the human intestine. The rat lungworm is different. It takes up residence in the brain, causing headache, stiff neck, vomiting, visual disturbances, and malfunctions in the sense of touch. But let’s not rush to that. First, a little background, a little biography. 


The obvious sign of rat lungworm is the dramatic appearance of giant land snails. A giant land snail looks like other snails, moist wrinkles of yellow hide pulsing as its two antennae probe ahead of the muscular foot that constitutes its body. These creatures are native to Africa, but lately they have been crawling the lanais of North America. Like the giant snakes, they probably arrived as pets, though imported produce is another possibility. The giant land snail can grow a shell a foot long. Even one half that size is a rippling, muscular handful. They are not picky eaters; leafy greens will do, but so will 500 other kinds of plants. The snail laps at any handy food. Since its tongue fairly bristles with tooth-like spikes, the result is to gouge holes in the food, whether it’s a fruit, a leaf, or even a stucco wall. And they can reproduce like mad, each snail laying twelve hundred eggs per year. (They’re hermaphrodites, by the way, so any two can fertilize each other.)  Farmers in Florida are feeling apprehensive. So are home owners; that plaster-licking habit can render buildings unsafe for use.


But what does this have to do with worms? It is, as they say in Hollywood, complicated.


The rat lungworm begins life as an egg in the arteries that supply the lungs of a rat. From there, it follows the blood stream into the lungs proper, then crawls to the throat. The rat swallows it. Now it travels through the gut, finally making its exit in the rat’s droppings. 


Getting swallowed is, in fact, a big part of the lungworm’s life plan. Ideally, some animal with low standards—a giant land snail, say—will come along and swallow it with the rat’s droppings. It’s not built for crawling, but in a pinch, it can swim in search of a snail by thrashing about like a fire hose. 


Inside a snail, the lungworm matures further. It bides its time, waiting for its snail host to meet a gruesome fate. (Remember, its life depends on getting swallowed over and over.) Ah, but what would eat a softball-sized gobbet of snail? 


A rat would. They’re not picky. The worm survives the eating. Once inside the rat, it travels to the brain. There, it finally reaches adulthood. The rat doesn’t mind. Parasite and host have spent countless generations adapting to each other. They get along. The worm swims the bloodstream to the lungs, and there, having engaged in romance, lays its eggs. We’ve come full circle. 


What keeps the well-informed Floridian from treating the giant land snail as an economy-sized escargot is the lungworm. A single giant land snail may contain thousands of lungworm larvae. If we eat the snails, the worms, unschooled in our pretensions, treat us as rats. They proceed to the brain. However, they find us inhospitable hosts, and they die. It’s at this point that we fall sick, as our bodies react to the disintegration of the parasite. The result is a kind of meningitis. Grave as the symptoms sound, they generally pass in a week or two. Still, nobody seems to enjoy them. 


Of course we could choose not to eat giant land snails. The problem is that they may have left their lungworms lying around in produce. We may also eat something—a crab or a shrimp, say—which has itself eaten an infected snail.


The pythons look more dangerous, of course. I often hear people fretting that they’ll slither into houses and eat babies. But for direct impact on human lives, look to the snails and their cargo of tiny parasites. 

Vultures

Photography by Dee Puett

Great White Shark Bites Man in Half

A spectacular fatality in Perth. Predictably, a politician is speculating that there are too many great whites. In fact, the great white remains endangered and can't possibly bounce back within a short span of years because it's a slow-growing species. The only population that's growing here is the human one. 


Beaches Closed After Surfer Is Bitten In Two - Yahoo! News UK: 


"He was surfing near Wedge Island, north of Perth, with a friend when he was mauled by the huge shark, said to be up to 16ft (five metres) long.


A man jet-skiing near him said it was a gruesome scene, with "half a torso" being all that remained of Mr Linden."


On a different note, here's interesting footage of a whale shark sucking the contents out of a fishing net. The whale shark, largest of all fish, is a harmless filter-feeder.





More about shark attacks--and shark conservation--in my National Geographic eBook short:

Zoo Tigers Kill Intruder

Tigers kill man who scaled zoo enclosure - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): 


"A man was killed by tigers at a Danish zoo on Wednesday after he scaled a fence and crossed a moat to get into their enclosure.


The man, in his early 20s, was savaged by three tigers after he broke into Copenhagen Zoo in the early hours of the morning. He was dead when staff arrived for work."

Chimpanzees Escape in Las Vegas

1 chimp dead, 1 tranquilized after Vegas escape - Wire Weird News - The Sacramento Bee:


"Two chimpanzees escaped a Las Vegas backyard and rampaged through a neighborhood Thursday, pounding on cars and jumping into at least one vehicle before police killed one primate and tranquilized the other, authorities said."