Follow-ups

Humboldt squid Subsequent to my post this afternoon, I heard that the two competing reasons for the influx of squid are 1) climate change, and 2) the overfishing of their predators, namely sharks. Here is a dramatic look at the squid underwater.
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Follow-ups In my follow-up to Elusive animals, I mentioned the almiqui of Cuba, which was new to me. It is included in this list of the top 10 ugliest animals. Also be sure to check out #2, the very unfortunate-looking naked mole rat.
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Oscar Mayer dies News broke just today that the wienermobile crashed into a Racine, Wisconsin, home! The driver took a wrong turn, ended up on a dead-end street, and stepped on the gas instead of the brake while turning around. No one was hurt, but the wienermobile was towed. My friend Deb. Weiner (pronounced why-ner) took me to task for misspelling the name of the vehicle, which I immediately corrected. "Having my name routinely mispronounced," she writes in an e-mail that left me in stitches, "I can speak authoritatively on this issue of spelling. Fear not, it is a common mistake."
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Chihuahuas in the weird news These little dogs always seem to grab the headlines. This guy, ironically named "Smoky," got a barbecue fork lodged in his skull when the handle snapped off at a cook-out. He disappeared into the woods for 3 days before the family could get him to the vet. The fork was removed and he has recovered.
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Megafishes I'm of two minds about 11-year-old angler Jessica Wanstall landing this record-breaking catfish in Spain. While it makes for a spectacular story and equally spectacular photograph, I mourn the death of the 193 lb. monster, which must have been ancient and probably wasn't used for food.
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Hedgehogs Speaking of naked mole rats, a spineless hedgehog that surfaced in an English garden has regrown its spines and is no longer "embarrassed," even though the underlying skin condition causing the loss of this defense mechanism remains unresolved.
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Traumatic skull injuries Phineas Gage (1823-1860) is one of the earliest documented cases of traumatic brain injury, surviving (though with some personality changes) an explosion that sent a metal pole through his head. Bright Bytes Studio has just identified a daguerreotype that it has had in its collection for 30 years as the only known photograph of this famous patient. Remarkable!
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Myrtle Corbin & Hannah Kersey Meet Lindsay Hasaj, who has just given birth to a baby from one of her two wombs. Like Corbin and Kersey (and plenty of other women, judging from the comments about the article) she has the condition uterus didelphys.
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Amputation Along with news of the most recent double hand transplant, here is a list of 10 fascinating reattachment surgeries that includes several stories I have blogged about: the young woman who lost her feet at Six Flags, the man whose hand was torn off in a tug-of-war, and the veterinarian whose arm was bitten off by a crocodile.
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Cannibalism Reports of a newly unveiled military robot made a massive splash in the weird news the other day because the machine sustains itself by "eating" biomass and converting the energy from it. Headlines blared that it would be consuming the corpses of the war dead. These reports have been retracted with the news that the robot "is a vegetarian."