Ocean Survivor Game

Ocean Legacy has recently released this online game that am sure you would enjoy. Experience what it's like to be one of the ocean's top predators as the ocean fills with hooks and nets. The game is designed to draw attention to the perils of overfishing and provide people with an opportunity to sign a petition to make a difference. It is also a great educational tool for people of all ages, but also a catalyst to action.






Try getting caught to every net that shows up and you could learn the array of fishing gears that exist in this world!

After playing the game, please sign the petition, by clicking on the word "petition" below and then share this link with everyone you think would be interested. PETITION

Please consider adding a post to your blog or forum, a link to your website, or any other creative way to get the word out.

King Cobra

Profile

The King Cobra (Ophiophagus hannah) is the world's longest venomous snake, growing to a length of 5.64 m and a weigh of up to 25 kg. The king cobra’s deadly hollow fangs are almost 8 to 10 mm long. It punches them into its prey, like hydrodermic needles, and injects the powerful venom. Because they are fixed to the upper jaw, they have to be short. If they were longer, the king might bite the floor of its mouth and commit royal suicide. Angled back into the snake’s mouth, the fangs help push the prey on its path to the stomach.

A regal bite delivers venom from glands attached to the fangs. The flexing of a small muscle forces the venom through the hollow fangs into the victim. Within minutes, neurotoxins stun the prey’s nervous system, especially the impulses for breathing. Other toxins start digesting the paralysed victim.

Drop for drop, a king cobra’s venom is actually less lethal than a common cobra’s. The king more than makes up for it by delivering more venom per bite—as much as 7 ml of liquid. That’s enough to kill an elephant, or 20 people.

The King Prowls During The Day

The king has a head as big as a man’s hand and can stand tall enough to look you straight in the eye. Its venom can stun your nervous system and stop your breathing. He's colour blind. Still, its eyesight is better than most snakes’. It’s good enough to see a moving person almost 100 meters away. The snake focuses by moving the lens in and out, and can sleep with eyes open, seemingly alert.

Taste and smell merge for most snakes, thanks to the way their tongue and Jacobson’s organ work together. By flicking its tongue, a snake brings odours in to ‘nostrils’ inside the mouth. These nostrils lead to the Jacobson’s organ, two cavities lined with sensitive nerve endings—the king can even smell water at a distance.

Wish we had one? Well we actually did. So did Ludwig Jacobson, the Danish anatomist for whom it’s named. Jacobson’s organ is found in human embryos, but it degenerates as the nervous system develops.

Threatening Stance

The king’s hood plays a big part in its fearsome “threat posture,” and is made by spreading the ribs in its neck. The king can stand up to one third of its total length, or from one or two meters high, and has the ability to move forward in the intimidating pose. An upright posture without the hood extended is a friendly gesture and the snake often assumes this pose to see over bushes or tall grasses.

The king’s hiss is much lower than most snakes’, more like a dog’s growl. It’s produced by tiny holes in the trachea and is resonated by the lung. Click on the image to hear the king Hiss!

To impress a rival, male king cobras resort to wrestling—male combat is a ritual conflict in which the first one to push the other’s head to the ground wins.

The Royal Meal

The king’s Latin name (Ophiophagus hannah) refers to its favourite meal— ophiophagus means snake-eater. Its culinary preferences probably gave the king cobra its English name.

King cobras prefer non-venomous snakes like the rat snake, but they also dine on venomous Indian cobras, kraits, and even small king cobras, thus earning the ignoble title, ‘cannibal.’

With no limbs or cutting teeth, the king is unable to tear its food. However undignified, the king gulps down every meal whole.

Its digestive tract is like a long straight tube. Blunt teeth puncture the food and the venom’s enzymes start the digestive process. From the long stomach, food travels through the small intestine, the large intestine, and then out the cloaca.

The King's Domain

The king cobra’s natural habitats include the cool undergrowth of rain forests. It often stays near streams, where the temperature and humidity are relatively constant. It spends almost a fourth of its time up in trees or bushes, but also likes plains and mangrove swamps.

As deforestation causes the king’s habitat to shrink, it can find itself in enemy territory—the human realm of tea estates and villages.

The king’s natural realm stretches from India eastward to Vietnam, southern China, and the Philippines, and southeast through Malaysia and Indonesia. Yet throughout its vast range the king cobra is not common anywhere, and in India it has become very rare due to the habitat loss.

Despite its aggressive reputation, the king cobra is actually much more cautious than many smaller snakes. The king only attacks people when it is cornered, in self defense or to protect its eggs.

Throughout its entire range from India to Indonesia, the king causes fewer than five human deaths a year—about one-fifth as many as caused by rattlers in North America.

The Dissent

Every monarch must deal with dissent, specially when they are young. Rebels against the king cobra’s reign come in all shapes and sizes, including our own. The Wild boar and mongoose are notorious thieves of king cobra eggs. Hatchling cobras are susceptible to army ants, giant centipedes, civet cats, and more mongooses. Leeches are pesky opportunists and abuse king and commoner alike. On king cobras, they fasten onto the gaps between scales.

Humans are the king cobra’s most dangerous insurgents. Deforestation, often due to growing populations and agriculture, is shrinking the king’s native habitat throughout its range. In southern India, people kill a dozen or more king cobras each year when the snakes stray into tea estates and villages.

The Successor
King cobras are the only snakes to make nests. These consist of mounds of leaves (preferably bamboo) that the queen whips together with her body coils. It’s a two-story affair: The eggs are laid in a bottom chamber and the queen lies coiled in the upper layer.

About two months after mating, the queen lays a clutch of 20-40 eggs. She will guard these on the nest for about two more months. During this time, she’s prepared to fend off any intruders, though she will generally shy away from humans.

Just before the babies emerge, the mother leaves. After her two-month fast, she has a powerful appetite. Experts think she may leave to avoid the temptation of eating her own young. When they hatch, the brightly-marked hatchlings are good to go.

About 35 centimetres long and as thick as your little finger, they emerge self-sufficient. Their venom is just as potent as an adult king cobra’s. Once the young kings undergo their first moulting at seven to ten days old, they realize that the rigours of birth have left them famished—and another creature discovers the perils of living in the realm of the king cobra.

The Emperor
The photo on the side is that of a King cobra seized from Goa, India by Mr. Krishna Ghule. He is considered as a Master in Snake Handling. The King Cobra on the image weighed 20 Kg, and was 3.73 m long! How I wish I had the courage to even stand near and witness a large snake like that being handled!

The World's Largest Snake

Green Anaconda
Eunectes murinus


Member of the boa family, South America’s green anaconda is, kilogram for kilogram, the largest snake in the world. Its cousin, our own Indian reticulated python, can reach slightly greater lengths, but the enormous girth of the anaconda makes it almost twice as heavy!

Size
Green anacondas can grow to more than the length of a large bus (8.8 meters), weigh more than 227 kilograms, and measure more than 30 centimetre in diameter. Like in most other reptiles, females are significantly larger than males. Other anaconda species, all from South America and all smaller than the green anaconda, are the yellow, dark-spotted, and Bolivian varieties.

Habitat
Anacondas live in swamps, marshes, and slow-moving streams, mainly in the tropical rain forests of the Amazon and Orinoco river basins. They are slow moving on land, because of their weight, but stealthy and sleek in the water. Their eyes and nasal openings are on top of their heads, allowing them to lay in wait for prey while remaining nearly completely submerged.

Food Habit
They reach their monumental size on a diet of wild pigs, deer, birds, turtles, capybara, and even jaguars. Anacondas are non-venomous constrictors, coiling their muscular bodies around captured prey and squeezing until the animal is not able to breathe. Jaws attached by stretchy ligaments allow them to swallow their prey whole, no matter the size, and they can go weeks or months without food after a big meal.

Click on the image on the side to watch a video of an Anaconda catching the world's largest rodent, Capybara which weigh up to 40 kilogram from National Geographic Television's website.

Reproduction
Female anacondas retain their eggs and give birth to two to three dozen live young. Baby snakes are about 0.6 meters long when they are born and are almost immediately able to swim and hunt. Their lifespan in the wild is about ten years.

Did you know?
While mating, several competing males form a breeding ball around one female which can last up to four weeks. (Click on the image above to see male anacondas forming a breeding ball.)


Speed and Force
Watch the video below to see how fast and with what power (90.05 pounds/ square inch almost like the pressure of a school bus on top of your chest) an anaconda can strike their prey!

Christian The Lion

A lion cub was separated from his parents at an early age and put up for sale in a London department store. The Lion’s parents were zoo lions, the father came from the Rotterdam zoo and the mother from Jerusalem, and they lived at the Ilfracombe zoo. When they had cubs, the zoo sold them, and two cubs went to the department store.

Two men, Anthony Bourke and John Rendall, found him there and immediately fell in love with him and determined to buy him. They scraped together the money and brought the little lion home when he was only a few weeks old. They named him Christian.

Tony and John dedicated themselves to giving Christian the best life they could, and the bond that developed between them is a joy to behold. Christian was a remarkable lion, obviously very intelligent and loving, and gentle to everyone, both human and animal.

As he grew, Christian began to need bigger facilities than Tony and John could provide. Thanks to a chance meeting with Bill Travers (who had starred in the famous movie Born Free), they hit upon the idea of sending Christian to Africa to live as a wild lion.

Bill Travers contacted George Adamson to set up the project, and came up with the idea of making a documentary movie of it all, to fund the project. Christian is an absolute joy to watch in this movie. The love he shows, his intelligence, his joie de vie, are beautiful. George Adamson, of course, was himself a bridge between the worlds of humans and animals. The first step when Christian arrived at George's compound, was to introduce him to Boy, a lion who had been in the movie Born Free and who George had already sent "back" to the wild, without losing his relationship with him.

When that year had passed, Tony and John came to Africa to see Christian. After a year of struggle, tragedies, and life with a pride of lions in the wild, the relationship Christian felt with Tony and John was as strong as it had always been. In fact, Christian's wonderful relationship with Tony and John caused the other lions in the pride to accept and be at peace with them as well.

Christian and Boy eventually became best friends, and within a year Christian was living as a wild lion. Notice Christian's reaction at the beginning of this video. Sort of 'ohmigosh, what are you guys doing here!' Watch closely and you can see the look of pure disbelief that dawns on his muzzle- it's awesome! Next thing you know, we have a heart warming reunion. Not long after, members of Christian's pride approach and even they seem to accept Christian's human friends.



Christian's story has been told in both a book and a movie.

A bridge existed, and it withstood the separation and the learning of a new way to live. Christian was another lion of two worlds. Mougli’s dream of co-existence can happen. It has been proven on a small scale. The question that eludes me is how to enlarge the scale. How can a bridge be built that encompasses all life?

The footage above from Christian's documentary was also kleptoed from www.kimbawlion.com a FANTASTIC website about Kimba the White Lion. So send all Kudos where it belongs!

...we are not much different in fact to many other forms of animal life; and it is because of subtle human conditioning—not the actual facts—that that we are raised to believe there is a wide gap between what is human and what is animal."

--Gareth Patterson, Last of the Free (1994)

Lambert the Sheepish Lion

Lambert the Sheepish Lion is a Disney animated short released in 1951. The 8-minute film focuses on Lambert, a lion that is mistakenly left with a flock of sheep by a stork. Lambert lives his life thinking he is a sheep. As he is odd one out amongst the sheep, he is ostracised by the rest of the lambs. But things change when he grows up and a wolf attacks the flock. He is forced to defend the flock from an attack by a wolf.

Of all the Disney films I have seen, 'Lambert the Sheepish Lion' sticks in my head the most, probably next only to a more recent, Cimba, the Lion King. I have fond memories of watching it as a child. I just wish it was still around today. I love that cartoon! Not many of the people I know have seen it before so they don't think that it is a real cartoon. Every time I watch the movie, it reminds me of happy times as a child. It is one of the cutest and definitely one of my favourite Disney shorts!

Oh, well. I still love Lambert!

The Song...

Lambert
You can't even baa, you can't even bleat
Your ears are too big and so are your feet

Lambert
Your tail is too short and so is your wool
There isn't enough for one bag full

Lambert, the Sheepish Lion
Lambert is always tryin'
To be a wild and wooly sheep
Lambert, the Sheepish Lion

Little lambs all love to butt
Their heads are hard as stone
Lambert thought that he could lick
A dozen lambs alone.

While the other lambs all gathered 'round
To watch the funny bout (oh, oh, oh, oh...)
He wanted to be counted in
But he was counted out.

Lambert, the Sheepish Lion
Lambert is always tryin'
To be a wild and wooly sheep
Lambert, the Sheepish Lion.

The little lambs got Lambert's goat
He was a nervous wreck
He had to hide behind his ma
To save his little neck.

He couldn't baa and he couldn't butt
At last poor Lambert knew
He hated to admit that he
Was yellow through and through.

(After the fight with the wolf)

Lambert the Sheepish Lion
Lambert ... there's no denyin'
Now he's a wild a wooly sheep
Instead of a sheepish
Wailing and weepish
Little-Bo-Peepish
Lion.

Enjoy the film here:

Lambert the Sheepish Lion was directed by Jack Hannah, and the voice of the narrator and the stork was provided by actor and Disney legend, Sterling Holloway. In 1952, the film was nominated for an Academy Award in the category "Best Short Subject, Cartoons".

Unity is Strength

Have you ever seen a herd of buffalo, fighting a battle with a pride of lions, 2 crocodiles at a watering hole.... and rescuing a calf, which was caught by the pride...
An excellent footage at the Kruger National Park, showing unity is strength...

National Geographic is showing a behind-the-scenes story on how the group got this amazing footage. on May 11, 2008 (Mother's Day).