Apr 20

AFP -
Hong Kong is getting a taste of the Ice Age, in the middle of the swanky IFC shopping mall.

The main attraction is a 42,000-year-old baby woolly mammoth mummy.

On loan from a Russian museum, researchers estimate she died when she was just one month old.

Though pint-sized - only 150 centimetres tall - this rare discovery is getting a giant following.
.
The Siberian specimen was found frozen in the Arctic tundra in 2007, by sons of a reindeer herder.

She was named Lyuba after the herder's wife, which means "love" in Russian.

With her remains at near-perfect-condition and her mother's milk still in her stomach, researchers are calling Lyuba the best-preserved baby woolly mammoth specimen ever found.

Lyuba received plenty of care from Russian authorities to properly preserve her. She was mummifed by being submerged in ethanol and formalin to remove all moisture from her remains, which also made her lighter and easier to transport.

Looking north from the catwalk on the 10th floor I came out of the elevator to see my giant neighbor (guy is about 6.5 270) staring north where upon he pointed and said “ther’s dolphin.” As I had never seen them in the Intracoastal Waterway, I was skeptical. But there they were, at first I thought they maybe Tarpon, no they breached like a mammal, the dorsal looked right and then the tail. I had binoculars close and with them it was confirmed, four separate, brown in color, feeding, small dolphins heading north. Who would have thought?

Bryan Nelson | Mar 6

Mother Nature Network - The new strings play at a brilliant timbre that matches or exceeds the sound that can be produced from established materials such as steel, nylon and gut.

A new kind of violin string woven from spider silk produces such a beautiful and spine-tingling sound that it could revolutionize the sound of music — and forever change the reputation of spiders in the process, according to New Scientist.

The spider strings are the invention of Shigeyoshi Osaki of Nara Medical University in Japan, who has spent the last 35 years carefully studying the properties of spider silk. Weaving violin strings out of the eerie material has been a pet project of his for about a decade.

The results of his labors are nothing short of spectacular. You can listen to the sound of a violin with spider silk strings playing in the following video, provided by New Scientist:

** Spider silk conducts heat as well as metals, study finds

A giant 27-pound lobster has been caught off the Maine coast ~ CSM(AP Photo/Maine State Aquarium)

Feb 7

BBC - SeaWorld sued over 'enslaved' killer whales

The five wild-captured orca "plaintiffs" are based at SeaWorld Orlando and SeaWorld San Diego

Five killer whales have been named as plaintiffs in a court case which argues they deserve the same constitutional protection from slavery as humans.

A US judge is considering People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' (Peta) lawsuit against SeaWorld.

It is reportedly the first time a US court has heard legal arguments over whether animals should enjoy the same constitutional protections as humans.

SeaWorld's legal team said the case was a waste of time and resources.

The marine park's lawyer, Theodore Shaw, told the court in San Diego: "Neither orcas nor any other animal were included in the 'We the people'... when the Constitution was adopted."

He said that if the case were successful, it could have implications not just on how other marine parks or zoos operate, but even on the police use of sniffer dogs to detect bombs and drugs.

Peta says the killer whales are treated like slaves for being forced to live in tanks and perform daily at the SeaWorld parks in California and Florida.

It is not considered likely that the whales will win their freedom, but campaigners said they were pleased the case even made it to a courtroom.

The lawsuit invokes the 13th Amendment to the constitution, which abolished "slavery or involuntary servitude" in the US.

As the years-long drought in Texas subsides, I feel this would be a good time to remind everyone that water is not only precious, but scarce.

Indeed, Africa is seeing some of the worst droughts in recorded history. Drought doesn't only affect humanity, afflicting us with thirst, famine, and war, but wildlife too. And while the famine in Somalia (not directly water-related, but...) has been declared "over", countries like Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone face dismal prospects for the near future.

Meg Jones | Milwaukee | Oct 27

McClatchy - When bats in northeastern America began dying off in alarming numbers a few years ago, wildlife ecologists were perplexed.

They named the disease white-nose syndrome, but until now authorities had no idea what caused the fatal ailment.

Researchers in Wisconsin have discovered the culprit is a fungus that's common in Europe but wasn't seen in the United States until five years ago. Now that the cause has been determined, officials can turn their attention to stopping the spread of the disease.

In research published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison and other institutions determined that the fungus Geomyces destructans causes white-nose syndrome.

"We need to know what we're up against, what we're fighting," said David Redell, a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources bat ecologist and a co-author of the study.

An estimated 2 million bats in North America have already died of the disease since 2006. The threat from white-nose syndrome is so dire that scientists say little brown bats have a 99 percent chance of regional extinction in the Northeast within a decade.

building their nests.

Tim Johnson | Cabo Pulmo | Sept 14

McClatchy - What's happened at the Cabo Pulmo marine reserve off the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula is fishy — in a good way.

Once severely depleted of fish, the reef system off Cabo Pulmo now teems with marine life, thanks to fishing restrictions imposed more than 10 years ago.

But environmentalists are worried that that ecological advance will be lost if the Mexican government allows a $2 billion development plan to go ahead that would place a "new Cancun" less than three miles north of the Cabo Pulmo marine sanctuary.

Mexico's Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources has given Spanish developer Hansa Urbana all but final approval for the project, which would turn desert scrubland into a bustling development of hotels, condos, golf courses and a large marina.

The government says such a resort would have no impact on the marine reserve.

That makes environmentalists seethe. They say the secretariat's speedy approvals are questionable and without scientific merit.

"This development is completely unjustifiable, especially since it's right next to the marine reserve," said Alejandro Olivera of the Mexico office of Greenpeace, the international activist group on conservation issues.

Olivera called the revival of Cabo Pulmo, the northernmost reef system along the Pacific coast of the Americas, "one of the best examples of marine conservation in Mexico."

A bridge for all species in Canada

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?
If You Build It, THEY Will Come…

This is the actual turn-off From Banff, Alberta, Canada to
the #1 highway to Calgary.

Great picture isn’t it? They had to build the animals their own
crossing (especially the elk) because that was where the natural
crossing was and after the highway was built there were far too
many accidents.

It didn’t take the animals long to learn that this was their very own bridge!

And then you have some people saying ‘Animals aren’t intelligent.’ link

Digital debate: Do birds have thumbs?

Agence France-Presse
Paris, September 04, 2011
"It is the kind of question that keeps biologists up at night: from an evolutionary standpoint, is the innermost digit of a bird's three-pronged wing more like a thumb or an index finger?

A study published online on Sunday by Nature says it's a bit of both."

Ker Than | Aug 20

National Geographic -

In an apparent flash of insight, a young Asian elephant in a zoo turned a plastic cube into a stool—and a tool—a new study says.

That eureka moment is the first evidence that pachyderms can run problem-solving scenarios in their heads, then mentally map out an effective solution, and finally, put the plan into action, researchers say.

During the study seven-year-old Kandula was eager to reach a cluster of fruit attached to a branch that was suspended from a wire, just out of reach. After some apparent thought, the young male rolled a large plastic cube under the branch and stepped up to snatch the treat with his trunk—a feat he repeated several times over multiple days with the cube and with a tractor tire.

The youngest elephant at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., Kandula had never before been seen moving an object and standing on it to obtain items, and he didn't arrive at his solution by trial and error, said study co-author Diana Reiss, who studies animal intelligence in elephants and dolphins at Hunter College at City University in New York. (Photograph courtesy Foerder/Reiss, CUNY)

Really cool! Video of the event at link

Wild Horse fans

Another book to order.

Ottawa | Jun 8

Reuters - Two Canadians died instantly in a freak accident when a car hit a 440-pound black bear and sent the animal flying straight through the windshield of an oncoming vehicle, local media said on Wednesday.

The bear's body hit the 25-year-old driver and a 40-year-old man sitting behind her and then shot out of the back window. The bear also died.

photo

Mark Kinver | May 19

BBC - US experts have published an action plan that aims to halt the spread of white-nose syndrome (WNS), which has killed more than a million bats.

The document offers guidance on a range of issues, including how to identify the disease and improving bio-security.

WNS has spread rapidly since it was first found in 2006, and now affects 18 states and four Canadian provinces.

The action plan was unveiled at the fourth annual WNS conference in Arkansas, which runs until Thursday.

Stefan Lovgren | Apr 28

National Geographic - The battle over the war-ravaged Virunga National Park, home to some of the world's last wild mountain gorillas, is heating up.

In early April a ranger in the park, in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was shot to death by militias—the eighth ranger to have been killed in the past three months.

And rebels who have been fueling the illegal charcoal business, which destroys critical gorilla habitat, now appear to have turned to an additional criminal activity: growing marijuana.

"The same people are involved," said Innocent Mburanumwe, the warden in charge of the southern sector of Virunga, where the mountain gorillas live.

A crackdown on the charcoal and marijuana businesses in 2009 was very successful. But the Rwandan militia living in the park, known as FDLR, seems to have reorganized and stepped up its activities, Mburanumwe said.

"The most recent attack is by far the most worrying, as it appears the rebels may be changing their tactics, and are currently getting the better of the wildlife authority," Rob Muir, of the Frankfurt Zoological Society's office in Goma, DRC, said via email.

I guess it's a bit silly to think this hasn't been seen already, but here it is anyway.

Caribdude

Perhaps unfamiliar to many in North America - Syd Kitchen passed away this week. He was an icon of South African folk music. I first heard his work in association with the Human Elephant Foundation and the work of Andries Botha.

. . . for Texas Monthly, in defense of birds and birdwatching. Funny thing about blogging is that it originated as a riposte to this essay in Slate and turned into something much more.

As a side note, here are links to photos of the birds mentioned in the story:

Black-naped Oriole (Oriolus chinensis)

Little Bee-eater (Merops pusillus)

Hoopoe (upupa epops)

Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris)

Enjoy!

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Dec 27

Discover Magazine - This is the conclusion of a new paper published in Biology Letters, a high-powered journal from the UK’s prestigious Royal Society. If its tone seems unusual, that’s because its authors are children from Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. Aged between 8 and 10, the 25 children have just become the youngest scientists to ever be published in a Royal Society journal.

Their paper, based on fieldwork carried out in a local churchyard, describes how bumblebees can learn which flowers to forage from with more flexibility than anyone had thought. It’s the culmination of a project called ‘i, scientist’, designed to get students to actually carry out scientific research themselves. The kids received some support from Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at UCL, and David Strudwick, Blackawton’s head teacher. But the work is all their own.

The class (including Lotto’s son, Misha) came up with their own questions, devised hypotheses, designed experiments, and analysed data. They wrote the paper themselves (except for the abstract), and they drew all the figures with colouring pencils.

It’s a refreshing approach to science education, in that it actually involves doing science. The practical sessions in modern classrooms are a poor substitute; they might allow students to get their hands dirty, but they are a long way from true experiments. Their answers are already known and they do nothing to simulate the process of curiosity and discovery that lie at the heart of science. That’s not the case here. As the children write, “This experiment is important, because no one in history (including adults) has done this experiment before.”

Annette Cary | Hanford, WA | Nov 5

tricityherald.com - A radioactive rabbit caught at Hanford just north of Richland had Washington State Department of Health workers looking for contaminated droppings Thursday.

Contaminated animals occasionally are found at the nuclear reservation, but more often they are in the center of Hanford, far from town.

The rabbit trapped at the 300 Area caught the Department of Health's attention because it was close enough to the site's boundaries to potentially come in contact with the public -- such as if it had been caught by a dog or if its droppings were deposited in an area open to the public.

It's the Department of Health's job to look for contamination off-site and make sure there is no public hazard.

However, an afternoon of surveying turned up no contaminated droppings in areas accessible to the public, said Earl Fordham, the department's regional director of the Office of Radiation Protection.

Washington Closure Hanford, the Department of Energy contractor cleaning up Hanford in the 300 Area, found the contaminated rabbit droppings last week, said company spokesman Todd Nelson.

Several rabbits have been trapped since then and one of them was found to be highly contaminated internally with radioactive cesium, Fordham said.

Because the number of contaminated droppings being discovered on-site has decreased, officials believe it's possible that just one rabbit might have been contaminated and they now are finding old droppings from it.

. . . good news, this story is pretty interesting:

Many animals feared extinct have actually been found alive and well, adapting to different habitats. "I think it might be useful to know that rediscoveries are not random," says Diana Fisher of the University of Queensland, who led the work. "If we know which types of species are most likely to be alive but hard to detect we might be able to better target searches for missing species."

It would not surprise me if a small population of Tasmanian Tigers were found in New Guinea, as PNG and Irian Jaya are some of the most unexplored, untouched regions on the planet, or even in Tasmania. It does happen, and that is good news, of sorts.