This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience while browsing it. By clicking 'Got It' you're accepting these terms.
Most recent
Trending
The best of EcoWatch, right in your inbox. Sign up for our email newsletter!
Viral Video Shows a Tiny Koala Getting Kicked Out of a Tree, Find Out Why
Koalas are typically quiet creatures, according to ScienceAlert. It's hard to make a lot of noise when you sleep for 18 to 22 hours per day. But they can get a little rowdy between the months of August and February. The marsupials breed during these months, and that means males are competing for the attention of females.
This competition for a mate results in the kind of territorial skirmishes displayed in this video, which has more than 2 million views since Jan. 2:
YouTuber Alicia Alexander in Adelaide Hills, South Australia filmed a younger male koala getting kicked out of a tree by an older male koala, and the younger guy was not happy about it.
ScienceAlert explains:
During koala breeding season, the dominant males will patrol their territory, going from tree to tree to check if any females are ready to mate. This tree monopoly often sees young males that have just reached sexual maturity—from 18 months old—pushed out of the mating game until they're old and tough enough to fight back.
While it's not clear exactly how old the pair of fighting koalas are in the video above, the unsuccessful one is definitely younger, which would explain why all it can do is sit at the base of the Eucalyptus [tree] and make its dissatisfaction known.
While it's likely he will be bullied out of access to females until he's about four or five years old, Alicia Alexander mentions in the video description that he did eventually gain access to that tree when the older male wasn't looking. "The little koala won as it had claimed the the tree by nightfall," she said.
And here's another fun tidbit via ScienceAlert:
At around the 0:29 mark, you get to hear another type of koala vocalization from the dominant male—a deep, grunting bellow, the purpose of which is to attract nearby females. Amazingly, researchers have discovered that these bellows have a pitch about 20 times lower than they should be, considering the koala's size. According to Mary Bates at National Geographic, "it's actually more typical of an elephant-sized animal."
Back in 2013, researchers in the UK reported that these bellows—recordings of which were used to create T. rex roars in Jurassic Park—are produced by an organ found in no other animal on Earth. A team from the University of Sussex identified unique vocal cords inside koalas that are completely separate from their larynx (or voice box). "It’s the first evidence in a land-dwelling mammal of an organ other than the larynx that is devoted to producing sound," Bates explained.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Stunning Images of One of Nature’s Most Incredible Phenomena
Jane Goodall: Power of Corporations Is Destroying World’s Rainforests
Yogurt Cups, Food Wrappers and a Shoe Found in Stomach of Dead Orca
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
Tuna auctions are a tourist spectacle in Tokyo. Outside the city's most famous fish market, long queues of visitors hoping for a glimpse of the action begin to form at 5 a.m. The attraction is so popular that last October the Tsukiji fish market, in operation since 1935, moved out from the city center to the district of Toyosu to cope with the crowds.
gmnicholas / E+ / Getty Images
Kristan Porter grew up in a fishing family in the fishing community of Cutler, Maine, where he says all roads lead to one career path: fishing. (Porter's father was the family's lone exception. He suffered from terrible seasickness, and so became a carpenter.) The 49-year-old, who has been working on boats since he was a kid and fishing on his own since 1991, says that the recent warming of Maine's cool coastal waters has yielded unprecedented lobster landings.
The climate crisis is getting costly. Some of the world's largest companies expect to take over one trillion in losses due to climate change. Insurers are increasingly jittery and the world's largest firm has warned that the cost of premiums may soon be unaffordable for most people. Historic flooding has wiped out farmers in the Midwest.
Hawaii's Kilauea volcano could be gearing up for an eruption after a pond of water was discovered inside its summit crater for the first time in recorded history, according to the AP.
Trending
'We Should Be Retreating Already From the Coastline,' Scientist Suggests After Finding Warm Waters Below Greenland
Andrew Yang's assertion that people move away from the coast at the last Democratic debate is the completely rational and correct choice for NASA scientists in Greenland.
By Johnny Wood
The Ganges is a lifeline for the people of India, spiritually and economically. On its journey from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, it supports fishermen, farmers and an abundance of wildlife.
The river and its tributaries touch the lives of roughly 500 million people. But having flowed for millennia, today it is reaching its capacity for human and industrial waste, while simultaneously being drained for agriculture and municipal use.
Here are some of the challenges the river faces.
Trending
Leaked Audio Shows Oil Lobbyist Bragging About Success in Criminalizing Pipeline Protests
By Jake Johnson
As a growing number of states move to pass laws that would criminalize pipeline protests and hit demonstrators with years in prison, an audio recording obtained by The Intercept showed a representative of a powerful oil and gas lobbying group bragging about the industry's success in crafting anti-protest legislation behind closed doors.
Speaking during a conference in Washington, DC in June, Derrick Morgan, senior vice president for federal and regulatory affairs at the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), touted "model legislation" that states across the nation have passed in recent months.
AFPM represents a number of major fossil fuel giants, including Chevron, Koch Industries and ExxonMobil.
"We've seen a lot of success at the state level, particularly starting with Oklahoma in 2017," said Morgan, citing Dakota Access Pipeline protests as the motivation behind the aggressive lobbying effort. "We're up to nine states that have passed laws that are substantially close to the model policy that you have in your packet."
Big Oil is now using its political power to try and criminalize protests of oil & gas infrastructure.
— Friends of the Earth (@foe_us) August 19, 2019
"This legislation has potential to punish public participation and mischaracterize advocacy protected by the First Amendment."https://t.co/bmiHjONEhy
The audio recording comes just months after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law legislation that would punish anti-pipeline demonstrators with up to 10 years in prison, a move environmentalists condemned as a flagrant attack on free expression.
"Big Oil is hijacking our legislative system," Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network said after the Texas Senate passed the bill in May.
As The Intercept's Lee Fang reported Monday, the model legislation Morgan cited in his remarks "has been introduced in various forms in 22 states and passed in ... Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota."
"The AFPM lobbyist also boasted that the template legislation has enjoyed bipartisan support," according to Fang. "In Louisiana, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards signed the version of the bill there, which is being challenged by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Even in Illinois, Morgan noted, 'We almost got that across the finish line in a very Democratic-dominated legislature.' The bill did not pass as it got pushed aside over time constraints at the end of the legislative session."
Many of the state bills restricting the right to protest have been "drafted by companies and passed through groups like ALEC, the secretive group of corporate lobbyists trying to rewrite state laws to benefit corporations over people." @greenpeaceusa https://t.co/ZxpTjWdrwT
— Stand Up To ALEC (@StandUpToALEC) May 6, 2019
Reposted with permission from our media associate Common Dreams.
Wildfires raging on Gran Canaria, the second most populous of Spain's Canary Islands, have forced around 9,000 people to evacuate.