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Staffers at the New England Aquarium last winter were setting up for an after-hours event near the Amazon rain forest exhibit when they made an unexpected discovery. Anna the anaconda — 30 pounds, 8 years old and 10 feet long — had given birth to a litter of baby snakes. Aquarium staff notified the resident biologist, who scrambled into the tank and found three live babies and about a dozen stillborn. On its face, anaconda birth isn’t unusual. Anaconda have no trouble reproducing in aquarium settings, and the snakes living in this Amazon exhibit were no exception. If left to...

The bear that recently killed a caretaker in a Cleveland suburb was the latest example of animal violence in a state that has some of the nation's weakest restrictions on exotic pets and among the highest number of injuries and deaths caused by them. The death in Ohio and attacks elsewhere - including the maiming of a Connecticut woman by her friend's pet chimpanzee and a 2-year-old Florida girl squeezed to death by her family's python - highlight that the patchwork of federal, state and local laws on keeping dangerous wild animals at home has holes. After a friend's 200-pound...

Watch out, animals of South Florida: It's a wild world out there. There are five species of foreign snakes just waiting to eat you. More troublingly, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report released Tuesday, nonnative snakes like the Burmese python could slither their way north from the warm, humid conditions of South Florida. The big snakes threaten native species and ecosystems because they mature and reproduce quickly, travel long distances and can eat almost anything in fur, feathers or scales, experts say. The 302-page report could be a step toward a ban on importing constrictor-like snakes into the U.S.,...

I have been arranging my extensive CD collection which lead me to play some of those long forgotten CD. This afternoon it was Mendelssohn "Reformation" Symphony. This might not be the best symphony of this rather underrated composer. The 5th popularity has suffered from being a "heftier" work, more intellectual, less crafted and vital than the "Italian". As if trying to encompass the reformation movement in music were possible. Still, the last movement opening is one of the most stirring moments of the repertoire, and a powerful musical image of the liberation of the spirit, no matter what religious connotation...