CORTE MADERA, Calif. – He has flippers instead of feet, and certainly no sneakers or hiking boots. But that didn’t stop a sea lion from joining schoolchildren on a walk-a-thon.
The marine mammal apparently noticed children doing laps Friday morning around a course they had set up at the Marin Country Day School next to the shores of the San Francisco Bay. The 185-pound Steller sea lion waddled ashore, shocking students and teachers.
“He did a whole lap,” said Kelly Watson, director of constituent relations and Web communications at the private school.
It was the latest brush with humans for the 1-year-old sea lion, called Astro by staffers at the Marin Headlands-based Marine Mammal Center.
Astro’s mother abandoned him at Ano Nuevo Island off the San Mateo coast in June 2006. The biologists who rescued Astro released him April 25 with a radio tag.
But Astro keeps returning to civilization. About a week ago, he swam under the Golden Gate Bridge to the shores of Corte Madera. The Marine Mammal Center again picked him up and released him in the Farallons, 27 miles from San Francisco.
But Astro returned again Friday, just in time for the walk-a-thon.
The center will try to find him a permanent home, possibly the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, which keeps threatened Steller sea lions.
Zoo visitors can’t believe albino alligator is for real
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – “Is she real?” is the most common question from visitors when they get a look at the rare albino alligator at the Knoxville Zoo.
“Nobody believes she’s real. They stare until she takes a breath or moves her eyes or jumps in the pool,” says Phil Colclough, assistant curator of herpetology at the zoo.
The alligator’s name was decided through a contest and will be announced today. The animal is on loan from the Alligator Farm Zoological Park in St. Augustine, Fla., which has about 30 animals that have been acquired over the last 15 years from a commercial farmer in Cut Off, La.
The albinos are found in the same nest every year and are believed to be produced from the same male and female pair, said David Kledzik, curator of reptiles in St. Augustine.
The Florida park made a deal with the farmer to get the albinos. He hatches and raises them until he is ready to give them up, Kledzik said.
But does a two-nosed cow sneeze in stereo?
MERRILL, Wis. – Mark Krombholz had to look twice at his new calf, Lucy – one time for each nose.
“I didn’t notice anything too different about her until I got her in the barn,” Krombholz said, “and all of a sudden I went to feed her a bottle of milk, and I thought maybe she’d been kicked in the nose and there were two noses there.”
The second, smaller nose sits on top of the first.
“It’s a functioning nose because the middle of her second nose, the flap would go in and out when she drank out of the bottle like that,” Krombholz said. “It was kind of funny.”
Breeder Scott Grund said Lucy’s noses seem to be working fine.
Krombholz said Lucy, who was born May 4, will be a pet and bred if she’s able.
Associated Press
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