One of the explanations being floated for the purple squirrel recently captured in Pennsylvania: An organobromide overdose caused by fracking. Yeah, it sounds a little far-fetched, but doesn't it sound more interesting than "it fell in a port-a-potty"?

Image by AFP

Oh look, it's Rick Santorum's worst nightmare. Changmao the ram and Chunzi the doe are engaging in some sheep-on-deer marriage at China's Yunnan Provincial Wildlife Park today, because true love knows no species, especially when you're both even-toed ungulates who are too dumb to understand taxonomy.

Okay to be fair this is a German one. My image research indicates that U.S. crates usually don't have tops but Creative Commons pictures of them are hard to come by.

McDonald's has announced that it's requiring pork suppliers to phase out gestation stalls -- pig-sized pig cages where pregnant sows are confined, often unable to stand up or move around. Whoa, McDonald's food has actual pigs in it? Who knew.

Photo by Olivier Deveault.

Foolish enviros might think that oil pipelines are bad for wildlife, what with the habitat-destroying and whatnot. But Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert (Texas) is an expert on ungulate romance, and he knows the score: Oil pipelines are the caribou equivalent of a hotel room with a heart-shaped bed, a champagne glass-shaped hot tub, and a Charles Koch-shaped semen stain on the bedspread.

A couple from Jersey Shore, Penn. (not that Jersey Shore), trapped a purple squirrel who was getting into their bird feeders. This is obviously awesome, but we felt you might have some questions.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT A PURPLE SQUIRREL:

Where I live in New York, we’re constantly holding community meetings where neighbors complain that noise from local bars is stressing them out and keeping them awake. Whales don't get to protest when their home jet streams get turned into noisy shipping alleys, but it’s otherwise basically the same. Just like late-night drunken clamor stresses out East Villagers, shipping noise stresses out whales.

Researchers found a clear link between whales' stress levels and shipping noise almost by accident: two whale experiments were going on during the stretch after September 11th when shipping ground to a halt for security reasons.

The Toronto Zoo is having a contest to name its new baby polar bear. Here are my entries, based on my initial responses to seeing the above photo (from the zoo's Facebook page):

Giant African Gamba grass, introduced in the 1930s, has taken over the Australian outback, crowding out native plants and seriously increasing the risk of massive bush fires. David Bowman of the University of Tasmania thinks the most viable way to get rid of it is to introduce things that eat it in Africa, like elephants.

"I'm talking about using elephants as a machine or ecological tool to manage this grass," he said in an interview for the Guardian, acknowledging that his proposal is radical and has major risks associated with it.

In Canada, caribou herds are declining, in part, environmental groups say, because of tar-sands development. The Canadian government's response? Kill the wolves.

The country's plan, which involves poison bait and Sarah Palin's favorite sport -- shooting wolves from planes -- is meant "to balance what civilization has developed," in the words of Peter Kent, Canada's Minister of Environment. If human development is killing off caribou by destroying their habitat, the thinking goes, there need to be fewer wolves to eat the remaining ones.

The poison bait is a particularly gruesome and archaic weapon.

Looks delicious! (Photo by Angela Rutherford.)

Puerto Rico needs to get rid of 4 MILLION invasive iguanas, some of which can grow to be six feet long. Short of passing a law requiring every man, woman, and child on the island to eat one iguana, what do you do about that volume of unwanted critters? Well, Puerto Rico is taking what's probably the most lucrative option: Rounding them up, slaughtering them, and exporting the meat to the U.S.