Map of most common domesticated animals

Based on data from the USDA Census of Agriculture, this map by John Johnson shows the predominant domesticated animal in each county in the United States. It nonchalantly includes humans.

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Learning animal languages with AI

Financial Times highlights how researchers are using AI to try to learn what animal sounds mean and to communicate back. Turn on the sound for maximum effect.

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World map of illustrated animals

During a three-year span, Anton Thomas illustrated a world map of 1,642 animals native to each region. It’s called Wild World. The New York Times highlighted the work:

“We don’t see the latitude and longitude lines of maps,” he said. “We see the world, in our heads, through icons.”

For Mr. Thomas, this equates to a kind of “emotional geography,” where features with greater emotional heft — the New York City skyline, say, or the Golden Gate Bridge — may take up more space.

“There are animals the sizes of mountain ranges on my map,” he said. “But you know what? The African lion should tower over Kilimanjaro, if we’re drawing an emotional map.”

Prints for Wild World, among other illustrated maps, are available in Thomas’ shop.

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Scale of flying animals

A straightforward lineup of animals that fly provide a sense of scale, from tiny to very big. I feel like some everyday objects like a car or a helicopter would’ve really driven the point, but it’s neat to see.

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Animal extinction over time

Animals are going extinct at a faster rate. Reuters shows a developing pattern across species:

Losing hundreds of species over 500 or so years may not seem significant when there are millions more still living on the planet. But in fact, the speed at which species are now vanishing is unprecedented in the last 10 million years.

“We are losing species now faster than they can evolve,” O’Brien said.

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Generative sea creatures

Cindermedusae by Marcin Ignac is “a generative encyclopedia of imaginary sea creatures.” I’m into the aesthetic.

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Disappearing animals as a matrix of dots

Reddit user WhiteCheeks used dot density to show population counts of various animals. Each dot represents an animal. So animals with lower counts show less obviously.

This is similar to the use of pixelation to show endangered species, which I think works better since the size of the dots above don’t encode anything.

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Deer crossing across highway corridors

With the climate changing, animals will need to migrate to different areas to live, but that can be a challenge when there is a giant highway blocking the way. The Washington Post looks at how scientists in Wyoming are hoping to clear the path:

“We can’t predict exactly what the impacts of climate change are going to be, or what species are going to be impacted,” said Hall Sawyer, a research biologist at Western Ecosystems Technology. “We do know one fundamental truth: That if we can keep this landscape connected, improve that permeability, they’ll be better off.”

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Scroll, scroll, scroll through the depths of the ocean

The oceans are deep. But how deep and what’s down there? Neal Agarwal provides this piece, The Deep Sea, that scales the depths of the ocean to your browser window. Scroll, scroll, and then scroll some more to see what sea life (and other things) reside at various depths.

Agarwal’s Size of Space piece from last month explores the size of space in a similar vein. It’s equally fun.

This is the internet I signed up for.

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Pixelation to represent endangered species counts

In 2008, the World Wildlife Fund ran a campaign that used pixelation to represent the number of animals left for endangered species. One pixel represents an animal, so an image appears more pixelated when there are fewer animals left. Imgur user JJSmooth44 recently used more recent numbers to show the images for 22 species (sourced from the Animal Planet endangered species list).

The above is the image bengal tiger with 2,500 pixels. In contrast, the black rhino has 5,000 pixels:

Or, here’s the black footed ferret with 300:

See all of them here.

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