What the wild things are

[steer]

Comments

[moral_vacuum]

"My hovercraft is full of bees". No phrase book should be without it.

[steer]

My "vessel, boat, hovercraft aircraft or vehicle of any other description;" is suspected to be full of diseased bees.

[moral_vacuum]

"Please direct me to the nearest appropriate person".

[nisaba]

How do you define an appropriate person? They're covered in bees!

[zotz]

Giant Pandas aren't fast, but they'll happily kill and eat anything that can't escape. Tethered goats, for example.

[steer]

Hmm... I'm not so convinced of this. There are photos of them eating meat from carcasses but I know of no good evidence of them killing an animal as large as a goat tethered or otherwise. Google doesn't seem to find it. They have attacked keepers before now mind you.

Still, if we take literally both the assertion that pandas will kill tethered animals and also "man is born free and everywhere he is in chains" then surely there's a huge risk of pandas killing and eating people. No wonder they are a Dangerous Wild Animal.

Here's a video of one killing a peacock though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGI4ZjwuXj0

(There's a youtube video allegedly of a panda killing a goat but it's so blurry as to be useless and looks like a panda eating a carcass).

[zotz]

It hasn't been filmed, but people involved with the Chinese panda program seem convinced it happens.

[steer]

Interesting, looks like you're probably right... quite odd that for such a well-known large mammal it's behaviour is undocumented to the extent that whether it is capable of killing anything of size is hard to know (I've no reason to disbelieve that claim but it's odd that it's the best sourced evidence you or I could find).

[shermarama]

Well, both the aardwolf and the aardvark seem to mainly eat ants and termites and not really meat at all, so neither of them are going to attack you for food. But the largest aardwolves only reach 15kg, and many are only 7-10 kg, while an aardvark weighs between 60 and 80 kg, and I therefore propose that aardvarks are more dangerous because they're a crush hazard.

[steer]

I can believe an aardvark to be a credible threat as they have claws designed to tear through sun-hardened mud -- they could probably do you a severe mischief.

[ms_siobhan]

Glorious stuff :-) just the thing to put a smile on my face after a challenging day - thank you.

And on a semi-serious note, we had a talk on bees at the WI and the diseases they can suffer from are both horrid and fascinating.

[steer]

Glad you enjoyed it.