All tag results for 'colony'

HUMANS?!?!?! What are THEY doing here!?!?!?!

A colony of 9000 penguins…count it…9000 PENGUINS…made its first contact with humans when a group of explorers found them in Antarctica.

Expedition leader Alain Hubert and two others rode snowmobiles across the icy continent to where they believed the penguins were living. Satellite images caught the colony in 2009 but there was no proof until the expedition.

The penguins were discovered in December and the team recorded video of the Emperor penguins!

Check out this mega colony (above) RIGHT NOW!!!

Tags: alain hubert, antarctica, colony, discovery, emperor penguin, expedition, penguins, science

Sleep. Yawn. Sleep.

That's pretty the much the life these walruses want!

But wait, you can't forget about scratching either! LOLz!

Watch as these lazy walruses lounge about on the beach, enjoying a day under the sun.

To be honest, we're kinda jelly…

Tags: colony, lazy, silly, sleep, video, walrus

Life as a termite queen is a piece of cake, workers clean you, constantly fix your nest and wait on you hand and foot… as long as you don't mind having a normal upper body and 4-inch long pulsating (yuck) egg factory of a lower body.

Throughout the course of her life a termite queen will lay literally millions and millions of eggs.

Gross.

Check out the above video to get a close up look inside of a termite nest.

Tags: bugs, colony, eggs, gross, insects, queen, termite, yuck

Vegans in space!

A rocket producer called SpaceX recently announced they're planing on flying people to Mars to make a human colony. We know what your thinking — What will they eat??

Okay, it's not the first thing that came to our mind either. But the people at PETA were all over it! They're petitioning that Mars should be an all-vegan planet!

The animal rights group sent out a press release saying:

“the Martian colony is an opportunity to make a kind civilization in which humans don’t exploit other beings. And since the animal agriculture industry is toxic to human health and to the environment, an all-vegan civilization would ensure that the new Martian citizens would have long and healthy futures.”

Hmm… that's IS something to think about.

Even if their dream of a vegan-friendly planet doesn't come true, we think it's awesome the PETA's goals don't end at home. Looks like they won't stop till the whole universe is rid of animal cruelty!

What do you think of an all-vegan planet? Tweet us UR thoughts HERE!

[image via NASA]

Tags: animal cruelty, awesome, colony, environment, humans, marine, mars, peta, space

We have some good news and some bad news…

Climate change has created a paradise for some pack ice penguin colonies and a purgatory for others, but the long-term fate of all Adélie and emperor penguins seems sealed, as relentless warming eventually pulls their rug of sea ice out from under them.

Adelie penguins colonies - located at the northern fringe of Antarctica, in the Antarctic Peninsula - have collapsed as an intrusion of warmer seawater shortens the annual winter sea ice season.

In the past three decades, the Adélie population on the peninsula, has fallen by almost 90 percent. The peninsula’s only emperor colony is now extinct.

But in the Ross Sea a reverse trend is occurring: Winter sea ice cover is growing, and Adélie populations are actually thriving. The Cape Royds colony grew more than 10 percent every year.

Across Ross Island, the Adélie colony at Cape Crozier (one of the largest known, with an estimated 230,000 breeding pairs) has increased by about 20 percent.

[Image via WENN.]

Tags: breeding, colony, extinct, penguin, population, weather

Totally impressive or totally creepy?

When a city floods, humans stack sandbags and raise levees. When a fire ant colony floods, the ants link up to form a literal life raft.

According to new research,

"They'll gather up all the eggs in the colony and will make their way up through the underground network of tunnels, and when the flood waters rise above the ground, they'll link up together in these massive rafts."

In less than two minutes the ants can link "hands" to form a floating structure that kept all the insects safe.

You would think the ant on the bottom would be SOL but even the ants down below survive, thanks to tiny hairs on the ants' bodies that trap a thin layer of air.

Tags: ants, colony, creepy, impressive, insects, research

Awww! What an amazing story!

At an Australian wildlife park, a chicken and a rabbit are co-parenting a colony of newborn rabbits!

Park staff have never seen anything like it, but suspect since the chicken, Silky, has never hatched an egg herself, her maternal instincts are kicking in.

The mother rabbit seems to appreciate the helping hen and stops by to feed her offspring once a day.

Check out the news story (above) for all the adorable details!

Tags: adorable, australia, colony, mother, offspring, wildlife