Serval Kills 4,000 Rodents A Year

The servals of the Serengeti kill 4,000 rodents, 260 snakes and 130 birds each year on average. Servals on average make 0.8 kills per hour in the daytime and 0.5 kills per hour during nighttime (or 1 kill every 2 hours).

They do this hunting/killing while covering the territory at 2.5 kills for every kilometer travelled during the day and at 1.9 kills for every kilometer travelled at night. Young servals (juveniles) kill more frequently at 4.2 kills per kilometer.

Obviously servals don't kill in a routine manner so there will be extended periods when kills do not take place.

The study of kill rates is part of "hunting energetics". Energetics is the study of the transformation of energy. In this instance the amount of energy needed in the form of consumed prey to sustain the serval in his activities including hunting.

By comparison the lynx in the north of Sweden make 1.2 kills every 24 hours. That is much less than the serval.  It is less in the south at 0.6 kills/24 hours and even lower in the east at 0.3 kills/24 hours.

I wonder how many rodents a year the feral cat kills? If there are 80 million feral cats in the USA and each one kills 500 rodents per year that makes 40 billion rodents killed by feral cats yearly. That's a bit of a thought.

Source: page 90 of The Natural History of the Wild Cats by Andrew Kitchener. ISBN 0-8014-8498-7

New Species of Leopard?

March 28th 2012: Apparently a leopard with a distinctly different appearance has been spotted in the well known Sunderbans National Park that is situated in West Bengal, India. The Sunderbans (also spelled, "Sundarbans") is well known as one of the better Bengal tiger reserves.

The key question is whether the cat that was seen was in fact a mutated version of an existing species rather than a new species. It would be surprising if a new species of leopard was discovered at this stage. Classic examples of wild cats that are mutations of existing species and not therefore a new species are white tigers and black leopards. Other black wildcats such as the serval are simply melanistic cats with almost black coats and ghost patterns.

The number of wild cat species is settled (we think) at 36. This is a slimmed down number from 100 years ago when, based on appearance, there was a tendency to assess wild cats as different species when they were not, at least by modern scientific standards.

We will await further news with interest. Let's hope that the cat is safe as there are a lot of people in the Sunderbans and you do get human/wildcat conflicts that almost invariable result in the cat ultimately being killed.

Update: it is melanistic - unsurprisingly. And apparently smaller than a leopard. There is talk of it being a melanistic leopard cat. Leopard cats (Asian leopard cats) are small cats the size of a domestic cat so this story is scrambled. Probably just press hype. I think the story originated in the Times of India.

See: leopard subspecies.

Google Fails To Find the Best Content

Despite Google having dozens if not hundreds of Ph.D. educated boffins working on their mysterious and precious algorithm they continue to make the most fundamental of mistakes in finding the best content on the internet which must be the basic requirement of a search engine.

I'll just give one simple example. The search term is:

"how many cats die a day"

God Bless Good 'Ole Google. It finds Wiki Answers:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_cats_die_a_year_from_abuse

The above is the top search result. The answer is complete mumbo jumbo. The idiotic author says that "584 million a year" die from abuse alone.  That is more than the entire world population of domestic and feral cats so the figure is obviously ridiculous. If it were true there would be no domestic, stray and feral cats in the world after a few years.

My answer is not the finest but it is at least is based on a modicum of common sense and science:

http://pictures-of-catsorgblog.pictures-of-cats.org/2011/11/how-many-cats-die-day.html

It comes about halfway down the first page of search results. That is good but Google should not be putting it below Wiki Silly Answers. Wiki Answers is a joke of a website and Google promotes it.

Facebook friendship can be our enemy

Facebook does a great job of connecting people. We know that. It has changed the idea of what socialization means to us.  There are two broad categories of people who use Facebook:

1. People who simply want to socialise and
2. People who want to use Facebook for some purpose. One prominent purpose is to promote a website to enhance the visitor rate.

The upsides of Facebook are obvious. The downsides are not so obvious but include:

1. An addictive necessity to be in the loop so as not to miss something. There is a lot of "needy" activity on the internet. Text messaging is another example. You see young people furiously texting, endlessly seeking reassurance. It is painful to see it. This sort of needy behavior can become burdensome to the participant. Eventually some decide to get out as the downside of the process outweighs the upside.
2. Privacy. There is a lot of talk about the big brother nature of Google and Facebook. They collect data on us and sell it. People are waking up to this and don't like it.
3. A manic, mindless motivation for website owners to connect up with Facebook and drag Facebook visitors to their site. I guess Facebook accept this as it gets more visitors to their site. It is a tug of war. Website owners have got to have a mile long series of buttons on every page of their site through which visitors can express their liking of the page or share it with "friends" that they have never met and don't even know. It is totally artificial and it has got out of hand.

It is time for website owners to stop being so dependent on Facebook and Twitter. It is a kind of parasitic activity. We should stand on our own feet. And it is time people met more in person, in the real world. It is more healthy that way. Facebook is feeding on our insecurity.

Trolling a window on our mind and society

Trolling is the thing that trolls do. Trolls are people who disrupt online comments and dialogue with foul language and comments that are hate filled. They are written assaults on people. It is internet bullying.

It is common and widespread and website managers don't deal with it properly because there is so much of it that they can't keep track of it especially on the large social media sites.

I know that trolling hurts people. The old adage "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" is incorrect. The written word directed at a particular person, who is decent yet vulnerable, will be upset and indeed may become fearful for his or her safety.

Trolling is more than just casual written violence it is a window on an increasingly impolite and angry world. It is not simply impoliteness. Trolls are a kind of sociopath. They fail to understand that combative and rude comments are hurtful.

People in public normally contain their feelings and anger. For polite people it is polite to do this. For impolite people it is necessary to contain their anger as they could get into trouble with the law if they expressed it in public, in person.

But in the ether of the internet trolls feel protected and free to express their anger. They are set free to show us their lack of politeness and sociopathic tendencies. It is similar to the protection, distance and anonymity that people feel when in a car. Road rage is similar to trolling.

There is a lot of anger and fear out there and the internet is a window on it. It is being exposed by the internet. Trolling happens on my website http://www.pictures-of-cats.org/. Not that often, thankfully. I like to give people freedom to express themselves. I don't like censoring as it stunts freedom of expression. However, true trolls are banned and their comments deleted.

Fortunately the police are finally catching up with the idea that it is a crime to harass people on the internet. Trolls are realising that they aren't as protected or as anonymous as they thought. IP addresses are one element that helps to catch trolls. An IP address is a unique number assigned to a device. Big brother is watching.