Last week, director James Cameron found the one spot where people wouldn’t ask him about the Avatar sequel – 8km beneath the ocean, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, in a specially designed submarine. He’ll be repeating the trick later this month at the ocean’s deepest point to shoot footage for a couple of documentaries.
The debate around re-opening the international rhino horn trade is still raging. While government has not given any indication yet of whether it will support the proposal to lift the ban, the demand for rhino horn from Chinese medicine practitioners is not going away.
A rather large Great White Shark, measuring 4,3 metres in length, was caught 400 metres behind the breakers of Fish Hoek beach yesterday. Local fishermen from Kalk Bay accidentally caught the large female in fishing nets they had set late on Saturday night.
Humans and animals don’t always get along. But on occasion one species helps the other out in a remarkable way. When it comes to dolphins, it’s often the animal coming to the rescue of the human, but in this dramatic video, it is beachgoers in Brazil who lend a hand to the dolphins. Heartwarming stuff.
Our local wildlife can be very… independent minded. A giraffe and a baboon have made separate headlines today for their remarkably free-thinking behaviour.
You may have heard about the massive storm that hit KZN over the weekend, disrupting pretty much everything. Over 250mm of rain fell on the KZN coast this weekend – causing the Palmiet River to overflow its banks. Residents of Quarry Heights also faced evacuations. Guess what? She’s coming back.
It would appear that authorities are finally starting to make serious inroads into the rhino horn trafficking underworld. A suspected kingpin, and former Mpumalanga police officer, was arrested on Friday in Hazyview. He was found with four rhino horns, and over R60 000 in his possession.
At least six people have reportedly died as a result of tropical storm Irina, which struck the KwaZulu-Natal coast over the weekend. Rescue teams, emergency workers, and the police worked continuously yesterday to help KwaZulu-Natal residents through the worst of the storm. Durban surfers, however, enjoyed themselves.
Port Elizabeth’s windswept landscape already features one wind farm, and the building of a second farm on the other side of the city is currently under debate. Hearings are underway today in PE, to test opinion on the development of a new wind farm at Blue Horizon Bay. Many residents are opposed to this – basically, because wind farms are ugly.
The Hout Bay Residents’ Association will apply for a court interdict to stop construction on the Chapman’s Peak toll plaza in Cape Town, it has been confirmed. Construction has begun at the site, and lawyers representing the movement have been drawing up the interdict to halt the R54 million project.
Environmental planning authorities in sleepy Fish Hoek on the False Bay coast are reconsidering the installation of an exclusion net across the bay adjacent to the town, to try stave off the regular loitering of Great White sharks near the popular beach front.
These pictures were taken in February at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya. An elephant was giving birth when a group of lions and hyenas mistook her newborn for a potential breakfast. But watch as the rest of the herd comes to the female’s aid by huddling around her until she delivers her calf.
Right on the back of the news that four SANParks employees have been arrested in relation to rhino posting, comes the news that three veterinarians have appeared in court for the wrongful possession of drugs used in rhino poaching. Does this mean that something is finally being done about the poaching crisis in the country?
It’s difficult to act surprised at the announcement from SANParks this morning, stating that four Kruger National Park wildlife officials were arrested yesterday in connection with rhino poaching activities. There are such large amounts of money involved with the rhino poaching syndicates, and just too many closely related coincidences, for there not to have been someone involved on the inside.
Capetonian Dave Meinert was recently asked to look after a mate’s dog for the weekend. Apparently that included strapping a camera to the pet’s back and making a music video for local electro-hero Johnny Neon. And boy, are we glad he did that! See the video that has had everyone talking for the last week – after the jump.
Capetonians: on Janssens Road, in Tableview, near the bike shop, this traffic light is sporting a new “green” signal. Apparently, this isn’t the first traffic light that’s been sporting this kind of “green” signal either.
[Thanks, Jake R]
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA as they are better known, is a crazy bunch. They’re a bunch of militant vegetarians, and at one point even went so far as to rename tuna to “sea kittens”, in an attempt to make the canned fish seem more cuddly and cute. This is a little embarrassing.
Contract archaeologist, Katie Smuts, said on Friday that she estimated the foundations were constructed between 1830 and 1850, and that archaeologists were trying to determine their significance. Smuts jokingly compared that the styles revealed on the porcelain artefacts they found helped determine their age because it was similar to comparing the styles that hipsters wore on their clothes in the year 2012.
Google Street View is pretty great! It lets me see rural villages, the National Gallery in London, post-crisis Fukushima, and your house. And soon, in collaboration with the Catlin Seaview Survey, it’ll be letting people explore Great Barrier Reef as part of the expanding ‘Seaview’ project.
Do you remember when Jeb Corliss was jumping off Table Mountain in his wingsuit in January, and one of his jumps didn’t go as well as he’d planned? Well, he’s just released the footage showing the accident from his point of view, filmed from his GoPro cameras, as well as various angles from the other cameramen that were filming at the time.
The human race is going to have to start believing in science – and quickly – if we want a hope in hell of surviving the environmental crisis we’re facing. This was the sentiment at a recent gathering of the world’s pre-eminent scientific minds in Vancouver. At the meeting, thousands of scientists discussed the problem that their industry is “under seige”, and that the world needs help to believe in science again.
BBC weather forecaster, Alex Deakin, managed to predict what no other weather forecaster has previously forecast on Saturday evening’s BBC World weather report. He meant to say “sunshine”, but he definitely didn’t, and instead conjured up a very strange weather prediction indeed. N5FW.
Capetonian dog owners have been reminded to make sure their pets are registered with their local municipality by July this year, or risk having them impounded. The by-law received further attention from the City following an incident where a three-year-old boy was mauled to death by a pack of strays in Philippi last year.
For around two weeks each February, the sunset turns the Horsetail Falls in Yosemite Park, California into an incredible bright orange “firefall” that looks like flowing lava. And it’s happening right now – take a look at the video after the jump.
It would seem that South Africa is not the only country facing a poaching crisis. Demand for ivory has led to a massive spree of poaching in Cameroon, which has left almost 300 elephants dead since mid-January. This is according to the country’s minister of forestry and wildlife.
I think we may have found wolverine. A Swedish man went for a drive a little while ago, December the 19th to be exact. Whilst on his drive, he was caught in a snowstorm which left him trapped in his car. On February the 17th, just two days shy of two months in a car, he was found. Alive.
PETA recently took up a lawsuit against SeaWorld on behalf of five killer whales. The animal rights campaigners even went so far as to compare the condition of these orcas to human slavery. The Daily Show responded by sending a black guy to interview someone at PETA. After watching this, pack up and go home, because this is the best thing you’ll see all day.
Seth Casteel is an award-winning photographer famed for his pictures of peoples’ pets. Check out this awesome gallery of underwater dog photos he produced after the jump!
A bunch of emails have been leaked from the Heartland Institute, the think tank vaguely infamous for being at once massively skeptical of climate change and funded by billionaire global warming deniers, the Koch Brothers. The emails suggest that the Institute has been paying scientists and bloggers to discredit climate change research.
65-year-old Allan Lorton, of Knight Road, Sherwood in Durban, died of his wounds on Tuesday after being viciously mauled in an attack by his neighbours’ pit bull. Neighbours and bystanders could only watch in horror as the pensioner bled profusely during the attack.