Watch a playful capybara twirl a stick around his mouth like he's performing a trick at a talent show. He seems very dedicated to the art of stick twirling. His serious expression says it all.

Another capybara hanging out nearby simply chews on a stick to pass the time. — Read the rest

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If you have ever eaten French fries in the vicinity of seagulls, you have experienced kleptoparasitism, even if you don't know the word. Seagulls snatch fries from humans. Bald eagles harass ospreys into dropping fish. Pea crabs live inside mollusks like clams and oysters and steal their food. — Read the rest

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I watched this video on The Kid Should See This; it's a time-lapse of "jelly bean" isopods eating chunks of sweet potato. I've not heard of jelly bean isopods before, so I looked it up and learned that it's a rare color variety of pill bug that came from a single colony on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia and comes in a variety of colors: orange, gold, red, yellow, black, striped, and speckled. — Read the rest

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A new species of wild cat has been identified in a Bolivian forest: The Tilcayo cat is in the genus Leopardus, a group of small cats native to the Americas, and is smaller than a domestic cat.

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Maybe you learned that thousands of years ago, a now-extinct species of cheetah sped across the plains of North America. New genetic evidence shows that these animals weren't cheetahs, but were more closely related to American pumas. Paleontologists had been fooled by the animal's morphological similarity to African cheetahs, but it turns out that similarity was just an instance of convergent evolution. — Read the rest

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