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Bears Are Exploiting A Hunting Rule To Better Care For Their Cubs
Aside from trying to keep your stockpile of pic-a-nic baskets safe, there really isn't a good reason left to hunt bears. Nonetheless, shooting the big salmon suckers remains a popular pastime in Sweden, which apparently hasn't gotten Netflix yet. But there are a set of limits to the practice which change the ways bears are hunted, and which hunters should probably memorize. Because the bears certainly have.
One of the most important rules in bear hunting is never killing a mama bear still raising her cubs. Anytime a hunter sees a group of tiny bear brats following their target, they have to back off. And the bears, using their instinctual ability to sense legal loopholes, have adapted to this by caring for their cubs longer. Like, a whole year longer, which in bear years is the equivalent of guilting your 18-year-old into going to the nearby community college so they don't have to move out.
Van de Walle, Et. Al./Nature"Son, you wanting to move out is killing your mother. Literally."
While this strategy does lessen breeding opportunities, that population dip is more than evened out by a stellar increase in the survival rates for both adult females and cubs. And the males? As absentee parents, they don't reap any benefits from walking around with a few adorable bullet shields. So unless they want to keep winding up as rugs on the floor, they should stop wandering off to get drunk on rotten berries and stay at home like a proper papa.
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Lizards Are Developing Bigger Feet To Navigate Cities
Anole lizards are very good at adapting to new environments, and that includes man-made concrete jungles, where they are literally evolving stickier feet. A study of the Puerto Rican anole showed that compared to their hillbilly cousins, city-dwelling lizards had a predisposition for bigger feet (to cover more surface area) and longer lamellae, which are those sticky hairs lizards and Spider-Man use to hang from ceilings.
Postdlf/Wiki CommonsThey even have the same nemesis as Peter Parker: science budget cuts.