How many animals are instinct

After people tried in vain to get the whales into deeper water, the dolphin appeared and the two whales followed it back into the ocean.

Dogs are also known for helping those in need. A lost pit bull mutt broke up an attempted mugging of a woman leaving a playground with her son in Port Charlotte, Florida. And outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina, a dog rescued an abandoned baby by placing him safely among her own newborn puppies. Amazingly, the dog carried the baby about feet to where her puppies lay after discovering the baby covered by a rag in a field.

In his book, Mind of the Raven , biologist and raven expert Bernd Heinrich observed that ravens remember an individual who consistently raids their caches if they catch him in the act. Is this moral? Heinrich seems to think it is. In subsequent experiments, Heinrich confirmed that group interests could drive what an individual raven decides to do. Ravens and many other animals live by social norms that favor fairness and justice.

Marc Bekoff, Ph. Bekoff, thank you for such interesting anecdotes. I seem to remember that mockingbirds also remember human faces and like ravens, will attack specific people who have disturbed their nest in the past. Because by doing so, we seem to imply that other animals are stupid. Squid, for example, evolved perfectly for the ecosystem in which they live.

No human or pet can rival the ecological importance of a squid. Same story with lobsters, newts, bats, etc. But when can we talk about the differences? Do people know how aggressive elephants can be, or that they completely change their ecosystem turn forests into grasslands? I just like to hear stories that challenge us to appreciate not-so-cuddly traits and know animals for what they really are.

Emmy pm, March 10, Link. Your wonderful article makes me think I was right all along. Paul Nicholas am, May 9, Link. Roughly 16 billion animals will be killed for food in the United States alone this year. Most of them are kept in appalling conditions, being seen as nothing more than production units in an economic equation.

There is an alternative to this madness. Yet vegetarianism remains a fringe pursuit. If PETA cannot convert enough people with their horror stories, perhaps they should try the approach of this article. But I doubt it would work. Cat Lover pm, August 19, Link. Crazy Vision am, September 23, Link. Become a subscribing member today. Scroll To Top Scientific research shows that many animals are very intelligent and have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours.

Although not officially recorded as extinct, no one has seen a Yangtze River Dolphin since The Ibex would grow to a height of cm at the shoulder and weigh kg and fed mainly on grasses and herbs. They were thought to have numbered 50, historically, but by the early s its numbers had fallen to fewer than The last Pyrenean Ibex was killed by a falling tree in northern Spain in It is estimated that between 3 and 5 billion Passenger Pigeons inhabited the US when Europeans arrived in North America, but their settlement led to mass deforestation resulting in habitat loss and a reduction in the bird population.

By the 19th century pigeon meat was commercialized as a cheap food for the poor, which resulted in hunting on a massive scale.

The Passenger Pigeon died out in the wild by around , with the last known individual dying in captivity in Not related to tigers, the creature had the appearance of a medium-to-large-size dog it weighed 30kg with a nose to tail length of almost 2 metres but dark stripes gave it a tiger-like appearance. It is believed to have been hunted to extinction — this was encouraged by bounties — but human encroachment into its habitat, the introduction of dogs and disease could also have contributed.

The last wild Tasmanian Tiger was killed between and , with the last captive one dying in Hobart Zoo, Tasmania in Named after George Steller, a naturalist who discovered the creature in , Stellers Sea Cow was a large herbivorous mammal. It is believed that Stellers Sea Cow which grew to at least metres and weighed around tons, inhabited the Near Islands, southwest of Alaska and the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea.

It is believed that the mammal was tame and spent most of its time eating kelp; this, and the fact that it was unable to submerge its enormous body, is possibly what made it vulnerable to human hunters. A large and flightless bird found in the North Atlantic and as far south as Northern Spain.

Unlike the mass extinction events of geological history, the current extinction challenge is one for which a single species - ours - appears to be almost wholly responsible. This is often referred to as the 6th extinction crisis, after the 5 known extinction waves in geological history. Or what the exact numbers are. There can be little debate that there is, in fact, a very serious biodiversity crisis.

The dodo Raphus cucullatus was a flightless bird endemic to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Related to pigeons and doves, it stood about a meter tall, weighing about 20 kilograms 44 lb , living on fruit and nesting on the ground. Some ecologists believe that this is a temporary stay of execution, and that thousands of species are living on borrowed time as their habitat disappears.

If nothing else, that gives time for ecological restoration to stave off the losses, Stork suggests. But we are still swimming in a sea of unknowns. For one thing, there is no agreement on the number of species on the planet. Researchers have described an estimated 1. But, allowing for those so far unrecorded, researchers have put the real figure at anywhere from two million to million. That may be a little pessimistic. Some semblance of order is at least emerging in the area of recorded species.

In March, the World Register of Marine Species , a global research network, pruned the number of known marine species from , to , by eliminating double-counting. Embarrassingly, they discovered that until recently one species of sea snail, the rough periwinkle, had been masquerading under no fewer than different scientific names. Costello says double-counting elsewhere could reduce the real number of known species from the current figure of 1.

That still leaves open the question of how many unknown species are out there waiting to be described. But here too some researchers are starting to draw down the numbers. Back in the s, after analyzing beetle biodiversity in a small patch of forest in Panama, Terry Erwin of the Smithsonian Institution calculated that the world might be home to 30 million insect species alone — a far higher figure than previously estimated. His numbers became the received wisdom. But new analyses of beetle taxonomy have raised questions about them.

He analyzed patterns in how collections from particular places grow, with larger specimens found first, and concluded that the likely total number of beetle species in the world might be 1. From this, he judged that a likely figure for the total number of species of arthropods, including insects, was between 2.