truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Two scientists from Britain's University of Oxford, on a three-year study costing the equivalent of nearly $500,000, found that ducks may be even more comfortable standing under a sprinkler than paddling around in a pond. Lead researcher Marian Stamp Dawkins concluded that ducks basically just like water.

A University of Florida researcher found, for a recent journal article, that mockingbirds, among all animals, are skilled at identifying particular humans who have displeased them and whom they wish to attack.

Entomologists in San Antonio said in May that the "Raspberry ant" (whose colonies produce billions and cover everything in sight) had migrated north to within 75 miles of the city and would arrive by year's end, posing, said one, a "potential ecological disaster."

Russia's long-running Moscow Cat Circus/Theater, reported in News of the Weird in 1998, is still in service, astonishing all who ever tried to train a cat. In the United States, Samantha Martin runs her own similar show (at such venues as Chicago's Gorilla Tango Theatre in March) featuring the Rock Cats trio on guitar, piano and drums, as well as a tightrope-walker, barrel-roller and skateboarder, among other daring performers. Martin admitted to a Chicago Tribune reporter that the cats' music "sucks," in that "when they're playing, they're not even playing the same thing," and anyway she has two backup drummers because her regular is prone to "walking off in a huff," sort of "like diva actresses." "This is why you don't see trained cat acts. Because ... the managers can't take the humiliation."

A researcher at Kyoto University's Primate Research Center told Agence France-Presse in March that he had observed mother long-tailed macaques in Thailand flossing their teeth (with strands of human hair) more frequently if their young are present and hypothesized that they were teaching dental hygiene.

We Welcome Our New Monkey Overlords: Researchers recently revealed that they had observed monkeys (1) planning future combat and (2) perhaps teaching their young to floss. A researcher from Sweden's Lund University, writing in the journal Current Biology, described a daily ritual of a 30-year-old chimpanzee that loathes his human visitors at a zoo north of Stockholm and thus begins every morning by roaming his enclosure to collect stones and place them strategically in handy piles for subsequently hurling at irksome visitors.