|
filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 01/11/2006 : 07:07:13
|
Jesus caterwallin' Christ on a segway, all they had to do was ask! This is actually a retread; it was first put out on '04. Must be they're running out of material. quote:
Catching a kinkajou
by David Catchpoole
Researcher Roland Kays had a problem. His task: to find out more about the elusive kinkajou (Potos flavus), or ‘honey bear'.1,2 People knew that it slept all day in tree holes in the tropical rainforests of Central and South America, and that it was usually found alone—but who could say what actually goes on up in the canopy at night? So, Dr Kays wanted to fit kinkajous with radio collars for tracking—but to do that, he had to catch them first!
Dr Kays rigged up a system for hoisting traps up into trees, but … how to lure kinkajous into the traps?
Kinkajous are classified as carnivores because of their skull structure and teeth, so Kays thought he'd try using meat (chicken) as bait. But the kinkajous weren't interested. What to do now?
Dr Kays had heard reports of pet kinkajous raiding their owners' liquor stocks, so thought he'd try to lure kinkajous with some schnapps. But that ploy was just as fruitless—still no kinkajous.
Then Dr Kays considered what fruit might entice the kinkajous, so he tried using bananas, which don't grow in that forest. And it turned out that, finally, here was something the kinkajous couldn't resist. Success at last!
Mr. Catchpoole, without giving the least of credits, plundered the bulk of his article from a brief piece in National Geographic.
I have a little first-hand experience with a kink. I was asked a couple of times to varmit-sit one named Audry, while her owners were on vacation. What a charming animal! I only wished she could have been allowed to free-roam in the house (raccoon relatives loose in the house are an engraved invitation to disaster). Kinks tend to be insectivores as well as fruit and nectar eaters, and when loose (supervised!), Audry never passed up a chance at a spider, nor the beetles I used to collect for her under the porch light. If Mr. Catchpoole had done his homework, he would not have written this drivel: quote:
And thanks to Dr Kays and his research team, we now know that the kinkajous they studied in the wild are exclusively vegetarian, feeding on fruit, leaves, flowers and nectar.6
But it is the tail, as prehensile as a New World monkey's, that AiG has studiously avoided: of all aborial, non-primate species, it is, as far as I know, the only mammal aside from opossums that has such (and opossum's tails aren't really all that prehensile). And when you figure in the fact that prehensile tails are unknown in Old World primates, one wonders if, perhaps and just maybe, they *ahem* evolved thataway....?
The dishonesty of AiG is nothing short of appalling!
|
"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
|
|
Topic Locked
