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One of the downsides of public transportation is that you can’t always expect a free seat, and you can’t save a place for yourself or a friend. But Jaymi showed us a novel solution — fake spilled ice cream cups and coffee to keep potential seat thieves at bay. They’re of dubious morality (and taste), but sometimes, you just need to sit down.

We also have sharks invading a golf course lake, a whale making friends with a motorboat, amazing night sky photography, and more in our roundup of the most popular stories on TreeHugger this month.

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Photo: Martin Pettitt / cc

Authorities in Ohio are warning residents to remain inside their houses after dozens of exotic animals had apparently broken free of an area wildlife farm and taken to the streets and highways. Police haven’t said exactly which type of animals are on the loose, but the farm is home to such species as “lions, wolves, tigers, giraffes, camels and bears” reports the AP — and police say that so…Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: ARLIS via Flickr/CC BY

Yes, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill occurred well over two decades ago, but the fallout can still be felt today. As Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard notes, you can still find oil right on the beaches where the crude first made landfall in 1989. That’s crazy. Fish and wildlife populations have not yet recovered, and some are still threatened. But despite the fact that the oil spill was one of the most widely-publicized environme…Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Photo credit: D Guisinger/Creative Commons

Every year salmon swim up the Snake river, struggling over 900 miles and up 7,000 vertical feet to their spawning grounds—the highest in the world and among the most important in North America. Before the construction of dams down the length of the river, as many as 30 million fish made the annual journey.

This year, two runners will acco…Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Screenshot via OurFarSouth.org

Just over seven days after biologists from New Zealand’s Wellington Zoo released their famous surprise guest, a wayward emperor penguin named Happy Feet, back into the waters of the Southern Ocean to make his way home, experts are fearing the worst. For the better part of a week, the world has been able to track his progr…Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Photo: snowflakegirl / cc

Whether it be the millions of livestock animals sent to the slaughterhouses every year, or the countless species endangered across the world from poaching or habitat loss, it seems too often that non-human life is a merely a commodity — though a recent study suggests that that is not how our brains see things. In fact, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and UCLA say that the region of the human brain which dictates emotions, both positive and negative, is more responsive to the sight …Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Mayo Clinic

As the quest for a cure to Aids continues to offer hope to millions suffering from one of the world’s most devastating health epidemics, it’s also producing some particularly peculiar sights along the way. Scientists studying how genetic engineering could help combat HIV infection have successfully birthed a litter of kittens spliced with virus-resilient DNA from a monkey, along with luminescent genes of a jellyfish — producing cats that literally glow in the dark and that one day may help save countless lives….Read the full story on TreeHugger

Now add a helicopter to the mix. Photo: miatamaniac92 under a Creative Commons license.

Yesterday, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed into law a bill legalizing the hunting of feral wild hogs from helicopters. The arguments for the law are simple: the state’s 2 million hogs are over-populating and cause $400 million in damage to crops annually, and it’s a lot easier to hunt them down from the air. The hogs can weigh up to 400 pounds and run at 35 mph, advantages wiped out by an automatic rifle and a low-flyi…Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Soggydan / cc

In pursuit of convenient animal-based products, like meat and leather, profiteers and consumers have turned a blind eye to some incredibly inhumane treatment of countless other species — but too often, unimaginable cruelty is inflicted for no real gain at all. Throughout parts of China, some 10,000 endangered Asiatic black bears are currently housed in tiny, restrictive metal cages where they are systematically ‘milked’ of bile, a digestive fluid produced in the gallbladder which is believed to have medicinal qualities…Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: creativedc / cc

It’s commonly stated that dolphins are one of the most intelligent species on Earth, but the latest research is proving once again that this lofty assessment of their smarts is well-deserved. Researchers studying bottlenose dolphins in West Australia recently discovered the animals employing a remarkably inventive technique, called ‘conching’, to nab their meals — essentially using a conch shell like a baseball glove to catch fish — and that more and more dolphins are ditching their traditional hunting methods for this ne…Read the full story on TreeHugger