The answer: An escape artist California two-spotted octopus. Workers at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium were a bit dismayed to find that the octopus in question had flooded the outside of the aquarium, so to speak. They walked in and found a flood.
For one dexterous octopus, an attempt at a great escape turned into a great flood Thursday at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium in California.
The female California two-spotted octopus swam to the top of her tank, disassembled a valve with her powerful arm, and released at least 200 gallons (757 liters) of seawater into nearby exhibits and offices.
Obviously, the escape plan involved waiting for a sufficient amount of water to build up, then to surf back to the sea when the door was opened.
Isn’t this exactly what Algore would predict? Snowy owls swoop southward
Biologists say an increase in snowy owl sightings in the South suggests that the arctic species did so well in its northern breeding grounds last year that competition is driving the young ones to warmer climates.
The showy white owls of “Harry Potter” fame are spotted in small numbers in upstate New York and other northern states, including Ohio, every winter. This year, they’ve also been spotted farther south, in states where they’re rarely seen.
In Tennessee, birders armed with spotting scopes and telephoto lenses scrambled from as far away as Georgia and Alabama to see the first snowy owl reported in that state in 22 years….
Rarely seen south of northern Ohio, snowy owls have also been reported this year in Kansas and Missouri, according to the eBird.org national bird reporting website.
Snowy owls nest on the ground in the Arctic tundra and many of them stay there year-round, while some winter in Canada and the northern United States.
Hmm…an arctic species now being found further and further south. Yeah, that fits with AGW just fine.
After all we have had all those reports of polar bears on the Rio Grande, or am I misremembering that?
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when horses did not get venereal diseases!
The California Department of Food and Agriculture says veterinarians have 14 horses in quarantine as they work with federal officials to control a highly contagious venereal disease.
California now is among 39 states testing horses that might have been exposed to contagious equine metritis.
While the contagious equine metritis (CEM) is contagious, it does not appear to affect humans. But it can ruin a horse’s day. Here’s a fact sheet.
Horses got STDs? Who Knew?
While the abbreviation CEM may be descriptive, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard propose a more catchy name for this scourge: CCC.
That would be Clip Clop Clap.
That’s a Bullwinkle Breaking & Entering. We’ve reported previously on the sad ruin of Bullwinkle’s life after the show ended. The drinking, the assaults on French tourists and so much more. But now, Bullwinkle has well and truly turned to a live of crime. He’s now burglarizing houses.
The saddest thing is that a 1,000 pound moose is simply not credible as a sneak thief.
Three years ago today, the Crabitat opened for business. Mostly. it’s been fun, occasionally not. To my loyal readers, thanks for reading this humble blog. Here’s a picture I took in Florida last week when my family and I were down there on a short vacation. Florida, it seems, has winged squirrels. Or squirrels with wings, as the case may be.
(Yes, that is a hot chicken wing and yes, the squirrel ate it - bone and all - after it had scrounged the wing out of a trash can. I did not give the squirrel a beer to wash it down with, even though he was eying mine.)
As massive of crazed flocks of pigeons assault one town in Britain, the governing elite has sprung into action! Eradicate the winged rats? Oh, no. That won’t do at all, old man. Instead the council for Brighouse, West Yorkshire will use taxpayer money - rather a lot of it - to fund “Pigeon Awareness Days” to discourage residents from feeding the pigeons.
There are several drastic ways to deal with a plague of pigeons – falcons, air rifles and poison to name but three.
The wise folk at Calderdale Council have a better idea. They intend to hold pigeon awareness days.
The events will form a key part of a £10,000 action plan to tackle the nuisance caused by the ever-increasing bird population in Brighouse, West Yorkshire.
More than £1,600 of taxpayers’ money has been earmarked for printing leaflets and hiring a caravan to urge the public not to feed pigeons.
But councillor Paul Rogan said he was not in favour of spending money on exterminating them.
He said: ‘There is only one way of eradicating pigeons and that is for people to stop feeding them. You can spend £50,000 on exterminating them and if their food source is still there they will come back.
The councillor has a point, other than the one on his head, of course. People who feed pigeons are causing part of the problem. However, those folks are not going to be educated by a few leaflets or a caravan. Stopping feeding of the pests will eliminate some of the problem, but will not help with the current overpopulation. Especially since the pigeons have now taken to literally grabbing food out of the hands of people in the town. Food that was not intended for the pigeons.
Look, urban pigeons are feral. They are vermin that need to be controlled. I know that statement will upset a lot of “animal lovers” but it is a fact. West Nile virus can be amplified by these creatures. The CDC is worried about their possible vectoring of Bird Flu. Plus a lot of less exotic things. The “wise” councillors need to look to the protection and welfare of their taxpaying citizens and not worry too awfully much about the pigeons.
Everyone’s a critic. Even among the equine set.
An escaped horse burst into a cinema and walked around the foyer.
The horse was one of three which escaped from a farm and ran through the automatic doors at the Cineworld complex in Boldon, South Tyneside.
The incident was caught on CCTV and was put on the YouTube website, but it has since been removed.
The horse was, of course, hoping for a revival of National Velvet and was disappointed. That’s why he left so soon. Well, that and that the popcorn wasn’t fresh. That’s what our sources tell us.
Then again, maybe the horse was looking for a showing of A Dangerous Mind.
Those wacky folks at The Scottish Beaver Trial (not a made up name) have lost a beaver. The solitary male beaver is rampaging around the countryside chewing up trees and trying to find a mate. This is a bit on the tough side for the wayward rodent, however, since there are no female beavers running around in Britain.
The hunt was on today to catch an escaped beaver which escaped a sanctuary and is now gnawing its way through great swathes of the Devon countryside.
Leaving the tell-tale signs of felled trees in his wake, the animal with an appetite for destruction has proved he is nothing if not eager after travelling more than 20 miles down river.
The six-stone male fled his enclosure on a farm in Lifton, Devon, along with two females which were soon recaptured and is reported to have established his own territory near the village of Gunnislake in Cornwall.
Obviously, it’s past time to call in the experts: Canadians! Or New York’s Finest!
(Side note: The Daily Mail’s “Beaver Fact File” at the end of the article has some hilarious information in it. Also the little tidbit that a family of beavers can fell 300 trees in one winter. Something for landowners to rejoice about when the beaver is officially reintroduced into Britain. Beavers appear to be contributors to global warming then!)
Gavle, Sweden got their goat, as they have for over four decades. Then, on Saturday, someone got the goat, so to speak. Yes, once again, Gavle’s giant straw goat was flambéed.
A giant straw goat erected each Christmas in eastern Sweden was set on fire on Saturday in a violent tradition of vandalism during the festive season that has spanned four decades.
Each year the people of Gavle build a 43-foot-tall straw goat, a traditional Scandinavian symbol of Christmas. But since the yuletide tradition began in the central Swedish city of Gavle in 1966, it has also drawn vandals, who have torched the animal 23 times since it was first set up to mark the holiday season. While the 2007 goat made it through the Christmas period intact, in other years it has been smashed, run over by a car and had its legs cut off.
The vandals have not yet managed to top the 2005 goat torching, though. That’s when Santa Claus and the Gingerbread man set the goat on fire with flaming arrows. No, really. I don’t know why the city fathers didn’t use the massive doses of fire retardant this year as they did in 2006 when I first posted about the goat toasties.
The Animal UprisingTM claims another new first: the krazed kamikaze kestral.
A kestrel falcon was blamed on Monday for the crash in May of a US-owned Boeing 747 cargo plane as it took off from Brussels airport.
As the aeroplane was taking off, the bird was sucked into one of its four engines, said Etienne Schouppe, a senior transport official, citing an accident report.
The 747 Kalitta Air jet broke into three pieces not far from houses in the north-east Brussels suburb of Zaventem.
As the old adage says, it is great to soar like an eagle, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet intakes. Although we are not too sure if that is true these days. Actually, reading a story like this just a few days before flying isn’t recommended. We’re sorry we did. We apologize.
Even though the Animal UprisingTM tries to unify all animals in their war against man, the old rivalries die hard. So it is that mice in Canada have wreaked wrathful rodent revenge on their historic tormentors, cats. Call it a game of cat and mouse - with arson.
A fire that killed nearly 100 cats at an animal shelter near Toronto may have been started by mice, say officials.
Three dogs and several rats also died in the blaze at the Humane Society shelter in Oshawa.
Preliminary reports by a fire marshall indicate that the fire started in the ceiling and was probably caused by mice chewing through electrical wires.
Of course, the propensity of rodent arsonists to use electricity creatively is nothing new.
More than 3,100 Entergy customers in the vicinity of East Harding Avenue lost power Friday morning after a squirrel caused damage to an electricity substation at Idaho Street and Sixth Avenue.
But that activity is usually aimed at humans. This is the first time we can remember that mice have staged a cat cook off.
There appears to be one organization in the United States that is more than willing to invest in the American auto industry: The Animal UprisingTM.
When the turn signal and windshield wipers went out on Hope Wideup’s car, she didn’t think much of it.
It was a 2004 with about 60,000 miles, just about the right age and mileage for some minor problems to crop up.
What the DeMotte resident didn’t expect was what she discovered under the hood of her vehicle.
Nuts, black walnuts, and lots of them.
“There were thousands in there. They were everywhere,” Wideup said.
In exchange for all the nuts, of course, the Animal UprisingTM expects total control of Detroit. Rumor has it that they are ready to appoint a Chipmunk Car Czar who will preside over the takeover.
Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo. The Disneyfication of Britain is complete. They are now trying to rescue plastic owls. No, really, they are.
Perhaps it was the startled look on its face. Or maybe the fact it was frozen with fear.
But when an RSPCA officer was called out to investigate an owl that had been perched on a telegraph pole for days, she was so concerned she called the fire brigade.
It was only as a crew were about to deploy their aerial platform ladder to pluck the poor bird to safety that residents realised what was happening and rushed over to tell them it was a plastic decoy.
The residents of the neighborhood are having a pretty good laugh at the expense of the RSPCA and the local fire brigade. The really stupid part of this story? This gem:
Spokeswoman Klare Kennett said: ‘It is not the first time we have been called to rescue an animal that isn’t real but we’d rather be safe than sorry.’
A number of years ago, I was called to take some pictures of a snowy owl that had taken up residence for a time at a plant I was working at. Obviously, I had to take the pictures during the day. So I went out with my longest telephoto lens on my Nikon 35mm camera and tried to get a good shot of this bird who had perched on a light pole. I tried from a number of different places around the site, But just could not get one that I thought would be good enough. I finally went outside the fenced area and up a hill and got a good vantage point. Those shots came out. (The others were, as I had suspected they would be, not very good.) This whole process probably took the better part of an hour and a half, maybe a bit more.
And that owl never once moved. Nary a twitch. Remember, I was shooting in daylight.
I’m pretty sure that owl was asleep.
Or rather two recipes. Camel burgers and kangaroo kabobs. No, really. The Australian government - or at least their “chief climate change adviser” is advocating the eating of kangaroos. Not to be outdone, another group is now planning camel barbecues.
Australians were urged Tuesday to eat camels to stop them wreaking environmental havoc, just months after being told to save the world from climate change by consuming kangaroos.
A three-year study has found that Australia’s population of more than a million feral camels — the largest wild herd on earth — is out of control and damaging fragile desert ecosystems and water sources.
The Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre, which produced the report, plans to serve camel meat at a barbecue for senior public servants in Canberra on Wednesday to press its point.
Report co-author Professor Murray McGregor said a good way to bring down the number of camels was to eat them.
“Eat a camel today, I’ve done it,” he told the national AAP news agency.
Apparently, Professor McGregor is a very large man to have eaten a camel today. One wonders at his native carbon footprint, so to speak.
One wonders why nobody is experimenting with cane toad appetizers amongst these advocates. We’d encourage them, but someone would take it the wrong way.
Someone is going to need to be sewn up.
With his Remington .270 rifle in hand, he shot a nice buck broadside. The buck’s front legs collapsed as it ran toward a fence and flipped over to the other side.
A second shot at about 30 yards away to the back of the neck put the buck down for good, or so Goodman thought.
A few minutes later Goodman went to check out his trophy. As he grabbed one horn he said, “Wow. What a big deer.”
As the nine-point, 240-pound buck lay lifeless the unexpected happened.
The buck stood up and knocked Goodman on his butt, attacking him with his antlers.
“It was 15 seconds of hell,” Goodman said.
Mr. Goodman required a fair amount of patching before getting back into the game, so to speak. It took seven staples to close up the attempted scalping the zombie deer gave him.
Personally, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard highly recommend a much larger rifle when hunting zombie deer. And pure silver bullets, just in case the beast is actually a werebuck.
Animals | Gaius February 27, 2009 | 
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