The Kid Should See This.
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There's just so much science, nature, music, art, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...
But we don't underestimate kids around here.
Kid-friendly not-made-for-kids videos for all! Collected by Rion Nakaya and her four year old co-collector.
Tip Jar: Finding great content for this blog takes work! If you like the videos on this site, please support the science education projects that we've picked on DonorsChoose.org.
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A baby koala, called a Joey, moves inside (and occasionally peeks from!) its mother’s pouch at the Taipei Zoo. From National Geographic:
…a female koala carries her baby in her pouch for about six months. When the infant emerges, it rides on its mother’s back or clings to her belly, accompanying her everywhere until it is about a year old.
The kid should see this!
via Science Dump.
When the elephant keepers at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo hear the sound of a harmonica, it’s not the radio they’ve left on. Instead, it’s the Zoo’s 36-year-old Asian elephant, Shanthi, who, unsolicited, has a propensity for coming up with her own ditties using whatever instruments the keepers have provided. These include harmonicas, horns and other noisemakers. The Zoo has captured some of Shanthi’s most recent capriccios on this video…
Shanthi is the mother of the Zoo’s 10-year-old calf, Kandula. Asian elephants are endangered in the wild, where 30,000 to 50,000 Asian elephants still live in the forests of south and southeast Asia.
via Viral Viral Videos.
Yabbra is one of just two koalas in the UK. He lives at the Edinburgh Zoo and we’ve watched him trot down this hall many, many times this week! A few koala facts:
Koalas and most other marsupials live in Australia and neighboring islands. The only marsupial native to North America is the Virginia opossum.
The word koala may come from an Aboriginal word meaning no drink. Although koalas do drink when necessary, they obtain most of the moisture they need from leaves.
Koalas have thick woolly fur that protects them from both heat and cold. It also acts like a raincoat. People used to hunt koalas for their fur. Now strict laws protect them from hunters, but their habitat is not protected, and it is disappearing as land is developed. More than four-fifths of original koala habitat has been destroyed. People are trying to save what is left.
Newborn koalas—called joeys—continue to develop in their mothers’ pouches… There it stays, safely tucked away, growing and developing for about seven months.
Koalas spend as many as 18 hours a day napping and resting.
Koalas smell like cough drops because of their diet of eucalyptus leaves.
Though koalas look like teddy bears and are sometimes even referred to as koala bears, they are not bears.
Fossils of 12 different extinct species of koala have been found. These extinct koalas were much larger than the ones today. They were like giant koalas!
via TheDailyWh.at.
In a world first, zookeeper Rohan Cleave captured the amazing hatching process of a critically endangered Lord Howe Island Stick Insect at Melbourne Zoo. The eggs incubate for over 6 months and until now the hatching process has never been witnessed. If you didn’t see it you wouldn’t believe it could fit in that egg!
Krulwich Wonders has a great post with excellent photos of this six-legged black giant and the incredible story of how, with just 24 of them living under one bush on a remote island cliff in 2001, scientists spent two years determining if they could move a few, finally breeding two at the Melbourne Zoo in Australia. This passage gives some detail on the conservation group’s success:
When Jane Goodall visited in 2008, Patrick [Honan, of the zoo’s invertebrate conservation breeding group,] showed her rows and rows of incubating eggs: 11,376 at that time, with about 700 adults in the captive population. Lord Howe Island walking sticks seem to pair off — an unusual insect behavior — and Goodall says Patrick “showed me photos of how they sleep at night, in pairs, the male with three of his legs protectively over the female beside him.”
The co-curator was into the suspense of the video. The details of the story echo that…
via @990000.
Brookfield Zoo is happy to announce the birth of an aardvark on January 12, 2012. Because of the dedicated care provided by the Society’s zookeepers, veterinarians, veterinary technicians, and nutritionist, the now healthy 13-pound calf has a bright future ahead of it…
For several weeks following its birth, the calf spent nights at the zoo’s Animal Hospital being cared for by the veterinary staff and brought back to its mom in the mornings. Aardvarks are nocturnal and [its mother] sleeps during the day, giving the calf uninterrupted time to nurse and get all the nutrients it can from its mother’s milk. This scenario mimics what would take place in the wild: a mother aardvark would leave its burrow to go forage for food during the night and return in the morning to sleep while the calf nurses.
Aardvarks are native to Africa and eat mostly ants and termites. One interesting note about aardvark babies is that zookeepers won’t know if the calf is a boy or a girl until it is about one year old.
via Neatorama.
King penguins explore the snowy outdoors at the St. Louis Zoo!
Keepers decided to use the wintry weather as part of the penguins’ daily enrichment activity by letting a few selected penguins walk outside of the Penguin and Puffin Coast area.
via Neatorama.
