“don’t talk to me or my son”
The orange shrub-cat requires many pets to grow big and strong. Contrary to other shrubs, this shrub is deeply adverse to being watered.
female lions are the predominant caregivers to their young, and will nurse not only their own cubs but those of relatives in the pride if the litters are born close together. weaned between seven and ten months, cubs depend on the moms until they are at least sixteen months old.but lions are vanishing from the wild. africa’s lion population has declined by 90 percent in the last 75 years, with their numbers plummeting from 450,000 only fifty years ago to less than 20,000 today.
photos by (clicK pic) mitsuaki iwago in tanzania’s ngorongoro national park, and manoj shah, mark dumbleton and margo traggett in kenya’s masai mara.
reindeer are the only mammals whose eyes are known to change colour, going from a gold in the summer, when the sun is a constant presence in the arctic, to a less reflective blue in the near perpetually dark winter months.
in dark conditions, muscles in your irises contract to dilate your pupils and allow more light into your eyes. when it’s bright again, the irises widen and the pupils shrink. the same thing happens in reindeer, but the arctic winter forces their pupils to dilate for months at a time.
this constant effort to stay dilated ends up blocking the small vessels that drain fluid out of the eyes, which causes pressure to build up. this in turn compresses the collagen fibers that make up the tapetum - a mirrored layer that sits behind the retina (second photo).
when compressed, these fibers in the eye reflect blue wavelengths of lights instead of the yellow which accompanies a typical spacing of the fibers, as in summer. (photos x, x)
swan lake. in winter. photos by (click pic) paul and paveena mckenzie, marina pokupcic, jan tore tangvik, chris seufert, andrei kasprishin, marcel van oosten stefano unterthiner
tsingy de bemaraha national park, a unesco world heritage site in western madagascar, is home to lemurs who, with thick pads on their hands and feet, navigate this six hundred square kilometer labyrinth of three hundred foot tall razor sharp limestone pillars.
photographer stephen alvarez remarked, “it’s an unbelievable experience to watch them [as] they jump like acrobats from the sharp pinnacles” — a feat made more remarkable given the vast chasm bellow.
in the malagasy language, tsingy means “where one cannot walk barefoot,” and alvarez noted that given the difficulty of the terrain, it takes an entire day to walk half a mile.
lemurs, like ninety percent of the species in madagascar, are endemic to the island, and, thanks to the isolation of this near impenetrable refuge, have evolved into tsingy’s eleven distinct species, including the decken’s sifaka seen here.
