A retirement home for baboons and macaque monkeys in Indiana has recently planted 60 fruit trees to help feed the animals, thanks to The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation and generous donors. The foundation plants fruit, nut and medicinal trees worldwide to help alleviate hunger, poverty and disease. The recipient, The Peaceable Primate Sanctuary in Winamac, Indiana is a 78-acre sanctuary, the first of its kind, which houses baboons and macaques that have been retired from research institutions, the pharmaceutical industry or rescued from poor situations.
Video and audio of Chinese covid prevention workers beating a corgi to death in the name of Covid control has sparked outrage all over China and much of the rest of the internet. The dog’s owner was in compulsory quarantine when the two workers entered his home. The corgi was hit over the head with a crowbar. The incident was captured on security camera and shared by the dog’s owner.
De Winton’s golden mole, a South African mole last seen in 1936, may be not be extinct after all. if the work of a team of conservationists bears fruit. The small moles live in an area that has been exploited for gold mining. They have oil on their fur which gives them a golden hue and also allows to slide through sand without leaving a tunnel. The team of researchers and a dog are pioneering a method to find eDNA – environmental DNA from shed skin and other leave behinds such as excrement. The technique has been used in aquatic situations but not on land. The dog locates a likely place for a mole to live and the researchers hunt for the eDNA. So far the results show that the eDNA collected could belong to the De Winton’s mole or to the related Van Zyl’s mole, which is also endangered. The research was sponsored by Re:Wild through it lost species program.
Another lost species, Australia’s assassin spider, (also known as a pelican spider) has also been recently rediscovered. It was feared extinct after the massive fires that burned much of the island continent but two indiviual spiders have been found. Assassin spiders are a super family of related spiders. The spider in question is a pelican spider, named for its resemblance to the bird. The spiders are named assassin spiders because they eat other spiders and have developed specialized characteristics to that end.