Panda maims Chinese student

Panda attacks man in Chinese zoo

The 20-year-old student had ignored warning signs and scaled a two-metre (6.5ft) barrier to get into the pen.
State media say the panda bit him on his arms and legs, and he had to be rescued by the animal's keepers.
Speaking from his hospital bed, the injured man said the panda had looked so cute he had just wanted to hug it.

People, how many times do we have to tell you? Animals are not cute or cuddly once they're big enough to maul you. Hippos will crush your bones, koalas will take your face off with their claws and pandas (being bears, after all) are just as inclined to kill you as you are to hug them. On the other hand, two meters is a pretty high fence, so this guy must have really wanted it. High five for following your dreams, Liu.

The article's winning sentence: "Keepers said [the panda] had recovered from the incident and was eating and playing as normal."

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Nudibranchs

Nudibranchs: Beautiful Animals You Never Knew About

I wouldn't suggest you actually read the text - the writing is so bad it might make you vomit your entrails like a sea cucumber (which, weirdly, aren't even in the same phylum as nudibranchs. so that joke doesn't work very well.). Just look at the photos.

Besides looking pretty, nudibranchs can do a lot of interesting things. Some of them eat hydrozoa (like jellyfish) and assimilate their stinging cells, and others eat plants and use the chloroplasts to photosynthesize food for themselves.

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Pigeon vs. Child

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Marine Census Discovers New Species

PHOTOS: New Deep-Sea Species Revealed by Marine Census

Remember the yeti crab? The ocean has so many horrible, terrifying things left to discover, it's amazing none of them have decided to kill us all.

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Adorable baby pygmy hippopotamus; don't be fooled

It IS true that the Taronga Zoo in Sydney's new baby pygmy hippopotamus is adorable. It is ALSO true that pygmy hippopotamuses are generally docile creatures that do well in captivity.



DO NOT BELIEVE YOU ARE SAFE. If you are unlucky enough to encounter a real hippopotamus and mistake it for a pygmy, you are as good as dead. Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter, once said that a sequence he filmed with hippos was the most dangerous he'd ever done. Steve Irwin! If that's not enough to convince you to stay away, you should consider that "[t]o mark territory, hippos spin their tails while defecating to distribute their excrement over the greatest possible area."

Finally, in the grand tradition of Renaissance Europeans completely making shit up about "the Orient", here is a bizarre painting of humans and dogs fighting a hippo fighting a crocodile, or something, I don't even know. By Peter Paul Rubens (click to make it bigger):


The Dutch always do it weirder.

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Pissed off Octopus Destroys Aquarium

Otto the octopus wreaks havoc

A octopus has caused havoc in his aquarium by performing juggling tricks using his fellow occupants, smashing rocks against the glass and turning off the power by shortcircuiting a lamp.
[...]
Staff believe that the octopus called Otto had been annoyed by the bright light shining into his aquarium and had discovered he could extinguish it by climbing onto the rim of his tank and squirting a jet of water in its direction.
[...]
"Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better - much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants."

Octopi are disturbingly intelligent. They can open screw caps on jars, be trained like dogs and allegedly learn by simple observation. Some are able to change colors and movement patterns to mimic several different species, and apparently a few have even broken into the holds of fishing boats to eat their catch. Cephalopod intelligence isn't limited to octopi, either - some kinds of squid exhibit complex communication through color changes.

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Nate Hill, Rogue Taxidermist

"This is Nate. He loves dead stuff. Best of all, he loves making things from dead stuff."

Follow Nate as he builds an anatomically correct man out of dead animal parts, then goes to Chinatown to dig through the garbage for more. Nate, for some reason, seems to only wear naval clothing. This may be the strangest thing I've ever posted here.

From Diagonal View's Youtube channel, a treasury of bizarre documentaries for people with short attention spans.

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