This little guy is Pierre, an African penguin living at San Francisco’s Academy of Sciences.

He’s 25 years old, pretty hoary for a penguin, and is unfortunately starting to go bald around the tushie.

Penguins don’t have blubber and need their feathers to keep  warm, so instead of sitting around watching Pierre shiver after every swim, biologists from the California Academy of Sciences had a custom wetsuit cut just to his size.

The upshot is that wetsuit-clad Pierre has been doing so well, some of his feathers have grown back, and he is currently being weaned away from the wetsuit.

How often do you hear about a hospital being forced to evacuate patients and close its doors?

Now how often do you hear about a hospital evacuating patients and locking up because  it was invaded by an army of lethally poisonous spiders?

The Baralaba Hospital in Australia’s Queensland state was declared too dangerous by officials because of a severe infestation of Australian redback spiders, whose poisonous bite can cause intense pain, spasms and even death.

Okay, so it was a ten-bed hospital in rural Queensland, but still–lethal spider invasion!

The five-month-long infestation was said to have been caused by recent humid and wet weather in the area.

A series of strange, unsolved killings of wild brown donkeys in Cyprus have pushed hundreds of young Cypriots, both Turkish and Greek, to start an online movement to save the rare species.

Using Facebook and email, as well as more traditional methods such as banners erected near the Rizokarpaso donkey sanctuary (yes, they really have one of those),  the donkey defenders are fighting to save an important part of their Mediterranean culture.

At this point, alleged suspects in the killings include hunters, developers and farmers who claim that the wild donkeys harm their crops.

Pictured above is a Swinhoe’s soft-shelled turtle, the largest freshwater turtle in the world. Only three are currently in captivity, and none were thought to exist in the wild until the news broke out that researchers from the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo Asian Turtle Program found and shot video footage of a live specimen in a lake in northern Vietnam.

Cute they are not, but these things can weigh as much as two fully-grown humans, and are revered in Vietnam as a mythological being who once bestowed a magic sword upon the Vietnamese people’s ancestors with which they fought off Chinese invaders in the 16th century.

The legend reminds me of the Lady of the Lake from the King Arthur stories… just a little less sexy, maybe.

Hats off to Laika: intrepid space explorer and science subject, dutiful citizen to the motherland, first mammal in space. That’s a pretty long way for a stray mutt to come.

50 years later, Russia is commemorating the pioneering pooch with a statue in her honor at a military research unit near Moscow.

There’s an “early bird” reference here somewhere.

It seems that the  European cuckoo is the latest victim of global warming, with populations dropping by 25 percent in recent years.

According to scientists, one explanation seems to be that the cuckoo’s host birds, such as reed warblers and dunnocks, have started breeding earlier in the year due to rising temperatures. The cuckoo, however comes back from its migratory trip from Africa at the same old schedule, leaving them with fewer host nests to breed in.