A Few Years Before Koko Passed Away, She Shared an Important Message to Humankind that Needs to Be Heard Now More Than Ever

The world was struck with grief once again when the beloved gorilla, Koko, passed away at the age of 46.

Koko's ability to use sign language to communicate with people warmed the hearts of millions worldwide.

She even became best friends with Robin Williams, and felt tremendous grief after learning about his tragic death in 2014.

It wasn't just Koko's ability to learn American Sign Language that stunned the world, it was her empathetic personality and worldview that everyone found to be so fascinating.

As Koko got better at communicating, thanks to the efforts of animal psychologist Francine "Penny" Patterson, many people wondered, "What could ape say to mankind?"

The former San Francisco Zoo resident actually had a lot of important things to say.

Gorillas may not be smarter than humans, but we sure could learn a lot from them.

A few years before Koko passed away, she shared an important message to humankind that needs to be heard now more than ever.

For the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Koko had an important message for world leaders.

"I am gorilla. I am flowers, animals. I am nature," she began signing in front of a dark background.

"Man Koko love. Earth Koko love," she continued. "But man stupid, stupid! Koko sorry. Koko cry. Time hurry."

Then she looked down in deep thought, before finishing off her message. "Fix Earth. Help Earth. Hurry! Protect Earth. Nature see you. Thank you."

As much as many people would like to deny the existence of climate change, it's only doing a disservice to the world by thinking that the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of the environment is not making a negative impact on the world.

As Koko said, she's part of nature, and so are we.

It's humankind that has a powerful impact on this world, and it's up to us to change the world for the better.




You may be interested in reading:

Heartbreaking Tributes Pour in After Famous Gorilla who 'Captivated the World' Dies at 46. 

Koko, The Famous Gorilla Who Learned Sign Language, to Be Laid to Rest at Animal Sanctuary. 

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Koko, The Famous Gorilla Who Learned Sign Language, to Be Laid to Rest at Animal Sanctuary

Koko, the gorilla who mastered sign language and became a pop-culture phenomenon, will be laid to rest Saturday in a ceremony at an animal sanctuary in Northern California where she lived for decades.

The western lowland gorilla died in her sleep Tuesday morning at the age of 46, according to the Gorilla Foundation, which is headed by animal psychologist Francine "Penny" Patterson, who worked with and cared for Koko since the primate was a year old.

Koko was renowned as one of the most intellectual apes in history, beloved by millions of people around the world. Under Patterson's tutelage, she learned more than 1,000 words in sign language and came to understand over 2,000 words spoken to her in English.

"She taught me more than I taught her, for sure," Patterson, 71, told ABC News in a telephone interview Thursday. "She had opportunities to show her brilliance and that’s what we saw. We saw a person, really. She had all the attributes of a person and then some."

To read more on this story, click here: Koko, The Famous Gorilla Who Learned Sign Language, to Be Laid to Rest at Animal Sanctuary



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Heartbreaking Tributes Pour in After Famous Gorilla who 'Captivated the World' Dies at 46

When a celebrity passes away, fans around the world take to social media to share their condolences and their favorite songs, movies, or events that the deceased was a part of. But what happens when a famous animal passes away? On Thursday, June 21, fans around the world are sharing their loyalty and despair over the “gorilla who captivated the world,” Koko.

Koko the ape was one of the most beloved animals in the world who captured the world’s attention years ago over her amazing connection with humans and other animals. The research center that has done a lot of work with the gorilla announced her death.

They said, “The Gorilla Foundation is sad to announce the passing of our beloved Koko.”

Koko was best known around the world for her ability to communicate through American sign language and for her love of kittens. In 1978, she was even featured on “National Geographic.”

To read more on this story, click here: Heartbreaking Tributes Pour in After Famous Gorilla who 'Captivated the World' Dies at 46

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Giant Tortoise, Nigrita, Gives Birth to 9 Hatchlings at the Zurich Zoo in Switzerland

At the Zurich Zoo in Switzerland resides an 80-year-old tortoise named Nigrita who had 9 little hatchlings over 8 months ago. Some would say that’s quite old to have a baby, but for tortoises, it’s just the opposite!

Giant tortoises are said to be one of the longest-living vertebrates on earth, with a life expectancy of over 100 years. The oldest tortoise was recorded to be 152-years-old. Now that’s impressive!

According to National Geographic, tortoises live a long life because they have a slow metabolism and large internal stores of water, allowing them to live up to a year without food or water. Tortoises nap for up to 16 hours a day, sunbathe at their leisure and enjoy a diet of grasses, leaves, and other leafy greens.

Unfortunately, these amazing creatures are on the list of endangered species. They were hunted as food by pirates, whalers, and merchantmen during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries where up to 100,000 tortoises were killed for their meat. Plus, feral animals are a threat to their food supply as well as their eggs.

Nigrita, her 54-year-old mate Jumbo, and the 9 babies are kept safe at the Zurich Zoo, where they are part of a breeding program that is designed to protect the species from extinction. These remarkable creatures even have a chance of living until the year 2216. That’s longer than any of us mortals can say! It’s quite a miraculous feat to live an extensive, slow, and relaxing life.

When born, tortoises weigh between 4 and 5 ounces, and when they are fully grown, both male and female tortoises can weigh up to 400 and 700 pounds.

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Stunning Images from the 2016 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year Contest

The 2016 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year contest is underway.

National Geographic invites photographers from around the world to enter the 2016 Nature Photographer of the Year contest. The grand-prize winner will receive a 10-day trip for two to the Galápagos with National Geographic Expeditions and two 15-minute image portfolio reviews with National Geographic photo editors.

Eligible contestants can visit natgeo.com/photocontest to submit photographs in one or all of four categories: Landscape, Environmental Issues, Action and Animal Portraits. Each entry to the contest will be submitted through National Geographic's photo community, Your Shot, where members can comment on photos and share their favorites. The entry fee is $15 (USD) per photo, and there is no limit to the number of submissions per entrant. Entries must be in digital format and submitted electronically. The contest ends Saturday, Nov. 4, at 12 p.m. EDT (U.S.).

Here's a look at some of the submissions so far.

To read more on this story, click here: Stunning Images from the 2016 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year Contest



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Rare Fish Called the ‘Nutcracker’ Eats Mens Testicles with Human Like Teeth, Caught in New Jersey Lake

A father and son fishing at a New Jersey lake may be lucky their bodies still have all their pieces after catching a fish called 'the Nutcracker' that is more commonly seen in the Amazon.

Ron Rossi, from the Philadelphia suburb of Delran, was out with his son Frank at a man-made body of water when they hooked what they thought was a piranha.

However, the rare species in Swedes Lake was actually a pacu, an omnivorous fish native to Brazil that has human-like teeth and has been reported to eat the testicles of swimmers and fishermen.

The Rossis realized the bizarre find when they went home and researched the animal after being confused at its lack of sharp, piranha chompers, they told WPVI.

Department of Environmental Protection officials said the South American fish are sometimes kept as pets, who may have dumped the pacu into the lake.

The species can grow up to four feet long and uses its molar-like teeth to crush food that falls into the Amazon River.

Many pet owners mistakenly think they are piranhas when they purchase the more famous species's cousin, which can grow up to 55lbs.

Given the fish's worldwide popularity, it turns out that the Rossis did not make the surprise catch of the century, or even of the last couple years.

A 10-inch pacu was caught in northern New Jersey in September 2013, followed by 17-incher in Washington state, a 20-inch specimen in southern Illinois two months later and a 14-inch pacu in Michigan's Lake St Clair last summer.

The fish's worldwide popularity has seen them spread far from their Brazilian homeland, with the fish being found in Paris, Scandinavia and Oceania.

In Papua New Guinea, where the fish is known as the 'Ball Cutter', a member of the species is thought to have contributed to two men's death from blood loss after it castrated them.

Scientists in Denmark said that reports of pacu eating genitalia were 'overblown' after they issued a joking warning to male swimmers to beware following a sighting of the fish, according to National Geographic.

Some wildlife experts worry that the introduction of pacu into lakes such as the one in New Jersey may endanger local fauna.

However, pacu cannot survive in colder water and the DEP urged owners of the fish to 'humanely destroy' it rather than throwing it into nearby waters.

A New Jersey man was surprised when he thought he caught a piranha, but the fish turned out to be a pacu, an Amazonian fish famous for eating men's private parts.

The Swedes Lake catch was the latest in an increasing number of pacu being found outside of their native habitat.

Fisherman Ron Rossi (pictured) researched the animal with his son, and environmental officials said that it most likely came from a pet owner who dumped it in the man-made lake

Pacu have spread around the world from their tropical home and been captured in places in northern Europe such as Scandinavia. Above left, a fish captured in Paris was about a foot long

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100-Year-Old Woman in Miami Said She Woke Up to Find an Exotic Animal on Her Chest

100-year-old woman in Miami said she woke up to find an animal on her chest, according to a veterinarian caring for the unusual creature.

"I was awaken by a phone call at 2 a.m., which is never good news, and it was from my terrified mother-in-law," said Carlos Aguaras.

Aguaras said he rushed over, and found the animal that had terrified his mother-in-law. The only other person in the home at the time was her live-in caregiver.

It was a kinkajou, an animal usually found in the rainforests of Central and South America, said Veterinarian Dr. Don J. Harris, who works for the South Dade Avian & Exotic Animal Medical Center.

Aguaras said the animal was in the attic when he arrived, and they lured it out with food. They got it inside a cage and brought it to Dr. Harris, who said he knew the animal belonged to someone.

"No undomesticated wild animal like this would curl up on a woman's chest to go to sleep," Dr. Harris explained.

The animal, whose name is Banana, was being cared for at South Dade Animal Hospital, where the medical center operates, but will be reunited with its owner Wednesday morning.

There's no word on how the animal got loose, but the woman's family has a message for the owners. "Put it in the hands of the experts, but it's not intended to be a pet in a home," Aguaras said.

Kinkajous typically spend most of their time in trees. They have the ability to turn their feet backwards to run easily in either direction, along branches or up tree trunks. Kinkajous also often hang from their tails. According to National Geographic, they are sometimes called "honey bears" because they raid bees' nests by slurping honey from the hive.

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Why You Should Not Scare Cats with Cucumbers: Startling Cats Can Cause Them to Injure Themselves or Become Chronically Stressed

There is a new viral craze that has hit the internet and apparently there are some people who think this is adorable. It’s nothing more than low-grade animal cruelty.  National Geographic reports that we should not be scaring our cats with cucumbers.

According to Upvoted, the first cat-scared-by-cucumber video appears to have been uploaded in May and went viral by July or so. Countless others followed, to the point where Reddit has an entire Cucumbers Scaring Cats community. The idea behind these videos is that if you put a cucumber behind a cat, it'll freak out when it sees it. But experts say that's bad for the cats, with some calling the videos "cruel" and "despicable," National Geographic reports.

"If you cause stress to an animal, that's probably not a good thing," animal behaviorist Jill Goldman tells National Geographic. "If you do it for laughs, it makes me question your humanity." She says startling cats can cause them to injure themselves or become chronically stressed. But why exactly are cats scared of cucumbers? Goldman says it's simply a natural reaction to seeing an object where they aren't used to seeing it. A number of animal experts tell Upvoted it could also be because cats associate the cucumbers with snakes, and their brains—like the brains of all mammals—are reportedly predisposed to fear snakes. Veterinary behaviorist Dr. Katherine Houpt says that's unlikely, as cats hunt snakes in the wild. Regardless, she agrees: Stop scaring your cats with cucumbers.

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Skunk Lovers Unite: A Look at Pets and Their People

Having photographed for National Geographic for the last 20 years, you learn never to promise someone that they will “make it” into the magazine. After seeing the story about exotic pets in the April issue, some of the folks represented in this post were happy not to be included in our coverage, feeling that the tone of the story would have cast them in an unflattering light.

I spent the better part of 2013 photographing this world for the cover story that appears in the April edition of National Geographic magazine about Wild Pets.

Exotic pet ownership is a very complicated and often controversial relationship that is often portrayed and understood in a narrow and simplistic way. The animals photographed were far from wild. Captive-bred for many generations, these animals can commonly be found in the homes and backyards of places like Indiana, Ohio, Florida, and Texas.

I met committed and caring people who owned monkeys, chimpanzees, lions, tigers, cougar, venomous reptiles, bears, lemurs, kangaroos, bobcats, alligators, hedgehogs, and one with a capybara, a 130-pound rodent found commonly in Brazil.

Surprisingly to me, very few of the people I met were advocates for owning an exotic pet, in fact, most said their best advice would be to tell people not to get an exotic pet. This wasn’t based in regret but issued as a cautionary note for potential owners about the extraordinary responsibility and commitment required to care for these animals. Each of these people came to be with these animals in different ways, and their relationships to these animals are just as different.

Albert Killian, a gentle man fascinated by snakes, lives side by side with king cobras, Egyptian cobras and other extremely venomous snakes. His bedroom, where he keeps them, looks more like an exhibit in a zoo. He adores and respects an animal that doesn’t really give or receive affection. He has been bitten over 100 times.

Conversely, for the last 33 years, Alison Pascoe Freedman was rarely more than an arms-length away from Amelia, her precocious and affectionate capuchin monkey. Amelia was a small animal and a large part of Alison’s life. The two went everywhere together as Alison often carried Amelia around in her pocket.

I was really interested in the differences but also the similarities of these relationships. Were all monkey people like Alison? Was there such a thing as monkey person? I certainly knew that all monkeys were not Amelia.

Enter Skunk Fest, the labor-of-love brainchild of Deborah Cipriani who lives with and cares for more than 50 skunks at her Ohio home. For the past 12 years it’s been a community event that connects skunk owners with each other and a curious public.

To read more on this story, click here: Skunk Lovers Unite: A Look at Pets and Their People




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Does Your Dog Really Remember The Hug You Just Gave Them?

When it comes to short-term memory, animals have very short ones indeed. A new meta-analysis examined more than 90 memory experiments carried out on 25 species encompassing birds, mammals, and bees.

Researchers at Stockholm University and Brooklyn College found that for dogs, events are forgotten after about two minutes—and that's on the long end of the spectrum. The average memory duration for all animals studied is 27 seconds, with chimps' memory as short as 20 seconds; that's a length of time that rats beat, reports National Geographic. Humans subjected to similar studies have had no problem remembering a sample stimulus they had seen as many as two days prior. In fact, based on these findings, "we think humans' ability to remember arbitrary events is unique," one researcher says.

Animals' memories can be broken into two categories—short-term and longer-term "specialized" memories, reports the University of Stockholm. And while animals can have excellent specialized memories (think birds remembering the exact locations of previous nests), memories of specific events tend to disappear in a span "ranging from a few seconds to several minutes," per the researchers' findings, published in December in Behavioural Processes.

That said, one researcher not involved in the study pointed out that some animals have shown the ability to capture episodic memories the way humans can—great apes have been shown to do so for days, if not years—while another cautioned that "it might be too early to argue that humans are the only ones who are able to mentally travel back and forward in time." (Dolphins, meanwhile, can recall whistles 20 years later.)


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Our Interest in Unlikely Animal Friendships Reveals Something Surprising About Humankind

YouTube/National Geographic Applying psychology to the topic of animal cuteness might seem like using a hammer on an egg. Can't we agree that something is adorable just because it is?

But as with beauty, cuteness is in the eye of the beholder, and arguments abound as to why (some) infants and (some) animals manage to be so endearing to the human observer.

"Pleasure is not something that natural selection doles out without a reason," writes evolutionary biologist David Barash for Aeon Magazine, "and we would expect that reason to be intimately connected with maximizing fitness."

To read more on this story, click here: Our Interest in Unlikely Animal Friendships Reveals Something Surprising About Humankind FOLLOW US!

These Frogs Might Be Evolving Right In Front Of Us

Scientists believe that the mimic frog, which is dividing into two increasingly distinct populations in Peru, may be on its way to speciation -- a division into multiple species.

Ranitomeya imitator is a poison dart frog that mimics one of two other poison species. One has yellow and black stripes on its body and blue spotted legs, and the other has an orange head that fades to blue legs, with black spots all over.

In an August Nature Communications study, researchers reported that these frogs might be the first vertebrates ever observed splitting into two species because of distinct mimicry. Only one other animal of any kind (a butterfly) has been observed doing the same, National Geographic reported.

The "striped" mimic frog is adapting to look like the species variabilis. (Evan Twomey)

Experiments confirmed that the frog populations are already wary of interbreeding with one another. This preference could lead to speciation within the next several thousand years, study co-author Kyle Summers, an evolutionary biologist at East Carolina University in Greenville, told National Geographic. The preference "suggests there has been some sort of negative consequence of breeding with the wrong morph," he said.

These distinct colorings serve as giant "keep away" signs for predators, especially when they're used by multiple species of poison frog. It's possible that the mixing of two types leads to offspring that look like neither, making predators more likely to take a bite.

It's not for certain that the color mimicry itself is what's driving the schism. Scientists would have to make sure that other differences -- like calls -- didn't exist to help pull them apart.

The "veradero" mimic frogs are taking a different approach. (Evan Twomey)


"The mate choice trials we conducted were done using actual frogs, so it is possible that the mating preference was based on some other, less obvious cue," said Evan Twomey, lead author of the study and a PhD student in Summers's lab. "It would be very interesting to follow up this study with an experiment to determine if color alone is responsible for the mating preferences we observed."

But if these frogs continue to show such a strong preference for one half of their species over the other, then more and more differences will arise between the populations as generations pass. And eventually, they may not be interested in mingling at all.

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Petition to take 'Dog Whisperer' Cesar Millan Off Air Fuels Heated Debate

A petition was created on Change.org asking that “Dog Whisperer” Cesar Millan be taken off the air – and it has fueled a heated debate from supporters and detractors alike.

The petition states:

Cesar Millan has no formal behavior education. He cites discredited scientific studies as the basis for his methods. His methods create pain and fear, put the subject animal at risk, put people who attempt his methods at risk of physical harm and put other innocent animals at risk from the animals he has traumatized. What he does is abuse - not training.

There are many excellent behaviorists who could teach humane, intelligent methods through a program. National Geographic used to be known as an organization that advocated for humans, animals and the environment but by supporting Mr. Milan they have shown themselves to have sold out to popularity and cash.

Those who have signed the petition include animal lovers, dog trainers, and veterinarians. One signer wrote:

As a professional dog trainer I encounter numerous cases of benign behaviors which have, through the use of ‘what Cesar does on TV,’ become dangerous and pathological...

Another wrote:

I am a veterinarian and his training methods are barbaric, outdated, and arcane.

Yet another wrote:

As…someone who has spent the last seven years learning about the differences between positive and negative-reinforcement training, I implore you to remove this show from the air. We would welcome a program that deals with training from qualified dog trainers and behaviorists utilizing proven methods.

Supporters of Cesar Millan have stated on social media that Cesar is a steadfast animal advocate whose methods save lives. One supporter wrote:

Cesar has helped so many people save dogs that would have been destroyed and he is an advocate for pit bulls.

Another stated:

...anybody, that fights so hard for all dogs everywhere to be given correct care, proper love, support and discipline is to be adored...

A third supporter stated:

He has done more for raising awareness of how wonderful Pit bull type dogs can be than anybody else!

What do you think? Should the “Dog Whisperer” be taken off the air – or is this petition without merit?

See petition here: Petition

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