That time Oregon blew up a whale with dynamite. And why we should never do it again. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When a whale dies in the ocean, an ecosystem grows around its sunken carcass. It's an epic burial at sea, something researchers call a whale fall .

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Of the over 500 known shark species, many of these giant fish are hunters and not scavengers–particularly those found in the open ocean. White sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) ambush their prey from below and even sharks closer to shore like reef sharks are known to chase their prey into smaller crevices before eating them. Yet a small portion of the diets of most sharks still comes from picking apart already dead animals. In a study published May 29 in the journal Frontiers in Fish Science, a team from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa describe an unusual aggregation of sharks coming together to feed on a decaying carcass of an unidentified animal. "To our knowledge, this is the first study to document a feeding aggregation of tiger sharks and oceanic whitetip sharks scavenging concurrently, and peacefully, on a carcass," study co-author Molly Scott said in a statement.

--Automated poultry processing lines still rely on humans to lift slippery, easily bruised carcasses onto a shackle conveyor . Deformability, anatomical variance, and strict hygiene rules make conventional suction and scripted motions unreliable. An independently actuated dual-jaw pneumatic gripper clamps both chicken legs, while a conditional diffusion-policy controller, trained from only 50 multi-view teleoperation demonstrations (RGB + proprioception), plans 5-DoF end-effector motion, which includes jaw commands in one shot. On individually presented raw broiler carcasses, our system achieves a 40.6% grasp-and-lift success rate and completes the pick-to-shackle cycle in 38 s, whereas state-of-the-art implicit behaviour cloning (IBC) and LSTM-GMM baselines fail entirely. All CAD, code, and datasets will be open-source. ChicGrasp shows that imitation learning can bridge the gap between rigid hardware and variable bio-products, offering a reproducible benchmark and a public dataset for researchers in agricultural engineering and robot learning. OBOTS and intelligent agents are increasingly deployed in unstructured, dynamic environments where manual programming struggles to capture the intricacies of real-world tasks [1].

Drone footage captured by rangers shows dozens of tiger sharks feeding on the carcass of a humpback whale off the Australian coast. The feasting involved some 50 tiger sharks scavenging a humpback whale that died of natural causes and was floating adrift in the Great Sandy Marine Park off Hervey Bay, which is about 180 miles north of Brisbane. The carcass of a humpback whale left floating adrift off the coast of Australia. The frenzy, captured on video by marine park rangers Sunday afternoon, prompted a warning from the Queensland Department of Environment and Science, reminding people to keep their distance from stranded or deceased marine animals. "Where there are dead whales, there are likely sharks nearby and this vision clearly shows why this is the case," senior ranger Daniel Clifton told Australia's news.com.au.

Battle rifles, Phantoms, Cortana--for those in the know, the references come thick and fast in the new Halo series. Paramount shelled out $10 million an episode to adapt Bungie's first-person shooter for the screen, and with every knowing wink, the message gets louder: This show is for the fans. The first episode closes with the iconic Gregorian chant of the original soundtrack, which, the internet has noted, was not present in the original trailer. We wait with bated breath for the Master Chief to teabag a dead Elite. Halo finds itself atop an unenviable heap: the carcasses of failed video game adaptations.

It's been a tough year for elegant terns in Southern California. A drone crash in June forced an estimated 3,000 of the sleek seabirds with their pointed orange bills to abandon their eggs on Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Orange County. Experts say it's possible that many of the birds set up camp on two commercial barges in nearby Long Beach Harbor. Now droves of the baby birds are falling into the ocean and drowning. "They basically landed on the barge a day or so, and it may have been two or three days, after the incident involving the drones when they left Bolsa Chica," said Tim Daly, spokesman for California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Early one winter morning in 2020, Kurt VerCauteren discovered a cluster of dead birds in a barren field in northwest Texas. They were small birds, mostly dark-eyed juncos, but also a smattering of white-crowned sparrows. VerCauteren's team had poisoned them, inadvertently. The clues were clear, the death uncomplicated: The birds had flown in before dawn to scavenge deadly morsels of a contaminated peanut paste, left behind after a sounder of wild hogs had torn through the area in a feeding frenzy. The birds likely died within minutes of eating. "I couldn't even see the crumbs," says VerCauteren, a wildlife biologist at the US Department of Agriculture in Fort Collins, Colorado, who has spent years developing and testing pig poisons. The birds were the unintended victims of a field experiment to test a toxicant--one intended for feral pigs, but no other animals--that had been developed in Australia.

A 30ft-long whale that died after it became stranded in a Welsh estuary was a one-year-old male calf that was struggling to find food, an autopsy has revealed. The fin whale, named Henry by rescuers, is thought to have been recently weaned by his mother and started to live independently - as they stop receiving milk at around six to seven months old - before becoming beached. The young male died on the sands of the Dee Estuary, North Wales, on June 14. He had beached at least twice over the previous two days. A post-mortem was carried out by the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP) to identify the cause of death and find out why the whale ended up out of the sea.

Elephants mourn their dead even if they did not have a close bond and continue to take an interest long after their bodies start to decay, a new study finds. Experts from the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research looked at 32 wild elephant carcasses from 12 different sources across Africa. They monitored the way in which the animals interacted with the carcasses and found that, in all cases, they would touch and examine the remains. They were also seen vocalising and attempting to lift or pull fallen elephants that had just died, according to researchers. New research has shown they mourn their dead even if they don't know them well (stock image) The idea that elephants have a'unique relationship' with the dead has been touted for a number of years, but this new study is the first to examine it in detail.

If you've got "Red Dead Redemption 2" we've got tips and advice to help you USA TODAY Out for more than a week now, the video game "Red Dead Redemption 2" has generated blockbuster sales and stellar reviews. Want to know how the West can be won in Rockstar Games' open world adventure? We've gathered some advice and tips from the Rockstar brain trust and video game journalists who reviewed the game to aid your explorations in "Red Dead Redemption 2" ($60, for Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4, rated Mature for ages 17-up). Early in the game, your protagonist, Arthur Morgan, and the rest of the Van der Linde gang set up camp in the mountainous Horseshoe Overlook. As you earn money, you will want to use the ledger to improve the camp, says Matt Bertz, managing editor of Game Informer, who reviewed the game for the site.