1 . Kay Day, an 87-year-old UK woman, adores elephants. But Day, suffering from dementia (痴呆),rarely left her nursing home room and hadn’t seen a real elephant for a really long time.

Day is so crazy about elephants that her room is decorated with elephant photos. Day dreamed of seeing an elephant up close again and never thought it would happen. However, Day’s dream became a reality after her nursing home, the Blakelands Lodge care home inMarston Moretaine, took her on a special journey to the Whipsnade Zoo.

“Kay doesn’t join in many activities and tends to spend quite a lot of time alone,” said Carla Blakelands, the Lodge activity manager. “We sat and discussed wishes and found out she would love to see an elephant. We discussed different options and we found the Elephant Experience at Whipsnade Zoo, so we contacted them about our resident.”

Day was so excited about going to the zoo that she marked off the days on her elephant-themed calendar. Day’s carers and family came along on the trip to assist and watch her experience the exciting day. Day was able to pet the Asian elephants and she said that the elephants’ trunk is her favorite part of the animal. “It’s such a wonderful feeling to have an elephant take some food out of your hand, put it in his trunk, curl it up and put it in his mouth,” she told BBC.

Day expressed her gratitude to the people who organized the trip and said it was one of the best days of her life. “I could sit here forever with an elephant sitting by my side,” she said.

Elephant keeper My Eriksson said that the zoo was honored to have played a role in making Day’s dream come true and that it was amazing to meet someone who is as crazy about elephants as the zookeepers at Whipsnade Zoo.

2 . Animals have developed a circadian clock—an internal body clock that runs in 24-hour cycles. It is regulated by cues (提示) from their environment. But they may suffer from a “jet lag （时差反应）” when the cues animals are exposed to do not match the ones of their natural environment.

Kristine Gandia, a PhD student at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and a team of observers set out to understand how the “jet lag” of living in latitudes (纬度) that animals were not used to can affect them. Giant pandas were chosen as the focus for the study partly because they live highly seasonal lives.”

“Giant pandas are very good animals to focus on,” Gandia said. “They are very popular in zoos and there are a lot that have cameras so we can see how their behavior changes across different latitudes. These cameras enabled us to monitor the giant pandas’ behavior across a 24-hour period.”

Gandia explained that the latitudinal range for giant pandas is between 26 and 42 degrees north. Matching latitudes could also be considered between 26 and 42 degrees south, as these mirror the temperature and lighting conditions.

The team monitored 11 giant pandas in six different zoos. Some zoos were within the animals’ natural latitudes but in other countries and the others were outside that range.

Gandia explained, “We recorded giant panda behavior, trying to account for behaviors that are positive, neutral (中性的) and negative indicators for welfare. So, this would include behaviors like play and grooming as positive behaviors, drinking and defecating as neutral maintenance behaviors, and several abnormal behaviors as negative behaviors, with pacing being the most common.”

Those living in zoos outside of their home latitude were found to be less active and display more negative behaviors.

“Giant pandas living in zoos could be suffering from a ‘jet lag’ if their body clocks don’t match their environments,” Gandia said.

5 . Best Parks to See Wildlife

A recent report from a vacation site listed the total number of species and sizes of several well-known national parks. Here are some of them to see the widest variety of animals.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio

Number of species per square meter: 317

Located 20 miles southwest of Cleveland, Ohio, Cuyahoga Valley National Park is a mixed ecosystem of forest and wetlands sheltering a variety of animals. From the boardwalk at Beaver Marsh, watch for water-loving mammals or snapping turtles (鳄龟) that can weigh as much as 55 pounds each. More than 200 bird species live in the park.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico

Number of species per square meter: 286

The representative for Carlsbad Caverns is the Brazilian free-tailed bat. Every summer, hundreds of thousands of the furry, big-eared creatures live in these caves in southeastern New Mexico, attracting crowds at sunset with their spectacular out flight. The Brazilians are one of the 17 bat species that nest at Carlsbad. You might also encounter wild pigs and cave swallows.

Acadia National Park, Maine

Number of species per square meter: 242

The Atlantic Ocean meets the Maine coast at this popular park on Mount Desert Island, providing habitat for wildlife with feet and flippers (鳍状肢). From the shore, scan the water for the heads of harbor porpoises (鼠海豚) and gray seals.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Colorado

Number of species per square meter: 219

In western Colorado, the 2, 722 feet between this park s canyon edge and the Gunnison River below support numerous wildlife habitats. Experienced climbers and hikers who adventure into the inner canyon find collared lizards and mule deer.

6 . Next time you’re having trouble solving a tricky puzzle, consider asking a nearby bumblebee.

A new study in the journal PLOS Biology finds that these humble insects can actually learn to solve puzzles from one another, suggesting that even some invertebrates (无脊椎动物) like these social insects have a capacity for what we humans call “culture.”

“These creatures are really quite incredible. They’re really good at learning despite having these tiny brains,” says Alice Bridges, a behavioral ecologist at Anglia Ruskin University in England.

“In the past couple of decades, a growing body of evidence has shown that animals like chimps and birds show evidence of culture, by which we really mean just that animals learn from each other.” says Andy Whiten, a cognitive ethologist (认知动物行为学家) who studies wild animal minds at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

“Nobody’s really thought to look at it in invertebrates before,” says Bridges. She set out to prove them wrong. “Basically, I built it out of Petri dishes,” she says. The base of the Petri dish held the reward: a drop of super sweet sugar water. Bridges cut a small hole in the lid “to form a rotating (旋转) top that can be spun by pushing either on this red tab clockwise (顺时针) or the blue tab anti-clockwise.”

She trained some bees to head-butt the red tab to get the sugar water and trained others to push the blue tab. Then, Bridges placed these tutor bees inside different colonies, along with the puzzle boxes.

The experiment showed that in colonies where the tutor bee had originally learned to push the red tab, the other bees in the colony usually pushed the red tab. In colonies where the tutor bee was trained to push the blue tab, their fellow bees tended to do the same.

“We found that the behaviors spread among the colonies,” she says, “They copied the behavior of demonstrators even when occasionally they discovered that they could do the alternative.”

8 . A new study discovers that sharks do sleep, and they often sleep with their eyes open. Since some sharks have to swim constantly to keep oxygen-rich water flowing over their gills (鱼鳃), people have long thought that they don’t sleep at all.

Researchers from Australia have now recorded a species of shark sleeping for the first time, finishing the long-standing debate about whether sharks sleep. To see if sharks were in fact asleep, the team analyzed the metabolism (新陈代谢) and pose of seven draughtsboard sharks (猫鲨) over 24 hours. When the sharks were resting for five minutes or longer, their oxygen consumption dropped, which suggested the animals were sleeping. And the researchers also noticed that the sharks changed their posture by lying flat and closer to the ground.

The sharks sometimes slept with their eyes shut as well, though, mostly during the day. At night, they tended to keep their eyes open more often, leading researchers to suspect that the sharks’ eye closure might have more to do with light than the sleep state itself. “Not only are sleeping sharks less responsive to their surroundings, but they also have lower metabolic rate,” said Michael Kelly, an ecophysiologist at La Trobe University.

“Sharks are an important group as they are the oldest living jawed vertebrates (颌类脊椎动物) — a character they share with us,” Michael Kelly said. “Sharks have been swimming in the sea for over 400 million years and have evolved very little in that time. Understanding how and why these animals sleep will provide important understanding into the function of sleep and how the animal has evolved over time.”

The team points out that more research will be needed to see if other species sleep like the draughtsboard sharks. Next they plan to continue to analyze the sharks’ brain activity while they sleep, to learn more about their waking and resting states.

10 . Many birds have shrunk in size as the temperatures have increased during the past 40 years. And the reduction in body size is so common that scientists have suggested it may be a universal response to warming conditions.

However, a new study, published in Ecology Letters, indicates that not all birds are equally affected when it comes to reductions in body size. Birds with bigger brains relative to body size have not shrunk as much as those with smaller brains.

Study lead author Justin Baldwin said, “As temperatures warm, body sizes are shrinking. But larger-brained species are shrinking less strongly than small-brained species.”

The researchers analyzed information on some 70,000 birds that died when they collided (碰撞) with buildings in Chicago between 1978 and 2016. They found that birds with very big brains relative to body size have shown only about one-third of the reduction in body size.

“Relative brain size is related to increased learning ability, increased memory, longer lifespans and more stable population dynamics,” said Baldwin. “In this case, a bigger-brained species of bird might be able to reduce the influence of climate change by seeking out habitats with cooler temperatures, for example.”

“One of the first things that jump out to me from these findings is that we can already see that climate change is having a much stronger effect on species that have poorer ability to deal with environmental change through their behavior.” said Professor Botero at Washington University.

North America has lost nearly one-third of its birdlife in the last half-century. The findings of this recent study, therefore, are very important to bird management and protection.