Why adult coyotes have blue eyes sometimes! Maybe it has something to do with domestication or…? What do you think?

This is one of my 4 articles in the spring issue of Bay Nature Magazine!

Imagine someone in your neighborhood buys a salamander for a pet – not a completely unlikely scenario in a country that imports more than 3.5 million amphibians every year. Salamanders are cute, small, and interesting pets, although they require specialized care. They’re appropriate for small living situations and a Covid-reduced world.

Every so often, however, one of those salamanders has a fungal pathogen. An owner might not know that the animal is infected if it’s without symptoms, or pre-symptomatic. But as everyone on Earth knows now, asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic carriers can spread a lot of disease. The salamander owner in your neighborhood could unwittingly release a diseased pet, or even just throw infected pet water in the yard. Something like this, scientists say, is just what has happened recently in California.

There are no roads in the sea, no animal crossing signs, and no speed bumps. And yet, those driving fishing vessels often accidentally run into ocean traffic—and by “traffic,” we mean whales.

There is a new true crime documentary on Netflix about Luka Magnotta, who is believed to have uploaded a video of himself with a living student, then graphically dismembering the student’s body. (Technically, the apparent murder isn’t in the widely-circulated video.) He had allegedly started by killing cats, gaining coveted attention for those videos.

I (making it clear that I’m a journalist) interviewed Magnotta, and have several letters from him, although I sadly didn’t get to use many of his quotes for this article. Still, I think if you are interested in the Magnotta case, or the laws, ethics, and tech policies of watching, and allowing people to watch, videos of violence, give this a read. 

I encourage comments and opinions, but remember to always read an article, or at least relevant parts, before getting upset about what you think it says. 

Edward Mordrake is basically a staple of “weird but true” and “incredible actual medical cases” but the whole thing is actually not true at all. That “photo” you’ve seen floating around the internet for ages is a wax sculpture, the one pictured in this article is papier-mâché. 

As I’ve explained before, there really is nothing stopping you from taking your human skeleton on a plane.

It’s unfortunate that people who love animals the most are also most likely to take and share dangerous images of them. There is a “Wildlife Selfie Code” that explains when it is safe and healthy to take these pictures, but often they are not. Remember: 

-It’s generally unwise to feed wildlife
-Wild animals are supposed to be wary of humans, not depend on them
-The food in your kitchen is not the same as their natural diet
-Many places that charge you to take pics with wildlife are harmful: they have even been caught cutting down trees so they can “rescue” sloths for tourists

But the good news is, people are doing something about this issue! Details in my article for The Daily Beast.