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China to lift ban on sale of tiger bones | Environment | guardian.co.uk
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Jun 19, 2007 6:11am
1 review
animals
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/conservation/story/0,,2106337,00.html
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China to lift ban on sale of tiger bones
Tiger bones will go back on sale because market forces are too strong to resist, a senior China conservation official was reported as saying in the domestic media today, raising fears of a lifting of the trade ban on one of the world's most endangered species.
China - the biggest market for traditional medicines made from tiger parts - has banned sales for 14 years as part of a global effort to save the animal from extinction.
But it has come under intense pressure from domestic tiger farmers to re-open the lucrative business. Wang Wei, deputy director of the department of wildlife conservation of the state forestry administration, said a change of policy is inevitable.
"The issue is open for review," he told the state-run China Daily newspaper. "The ban won't be there forever, given the strong voices from tiger farmers, experts and society."
China's population of wild tigers has almost been wiped out, with only 50 left in the north-east of the country. But commercial farmers have reared about 5,000 in captivity. Each year, 1,000 new cubs are born.
At present the valuable carcasses, bones and penises cannot be legally sold so they are kept in freezers after the animals die. Several huge farms face ruin because they have speed-bred thousands of tigers, which are worthless until the ban is lifted.
Mr Wang argued this was an unnecessary economic loss. "It will be a waste if the resources of dead tigers are not used in traditional medicine," he said.
Any shift in China's stance would prompt international outrage. Despite promises that captive-bred tigers would be tagged to distinguish them from wild animals, conservationists fears that any re-opening of the market would accelerate poaching. At a meeting in the Hague last week, John Sellar, senior enforcement officer at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, criticised the captive-breeding programmes as having "limited" potential for conservation.
Mr Wang said some of the captive population could be reintroduced to the wild. But there is no successful case of this happening in China. Conservation groups say farm-bred tigers cannot survive in forests and jungles because they are too tame.
They accuse the farmers of racing to increase the captive stock - despite overcrowded cages and the dilution of genetic quality - to blackmail the government into a change of policy.
see also environment.guardian.co.uk/conservation [environment.guardian.co.uk/conservation] couldnt link the specific article but you can get it through this link and the article im refering to is "noahs ark of rare animals found off coast of china"
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Jun 19, 2007 4:49am
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bonjourno n that sorry to all the dudes that have messaged me an got no responce my computer snuffed it around december ive bin savin up for a new one but sods law il break the bugger now that ive finally got it so if i dissapear again youl know why
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Marine census reveals Jurassic shrimp and more - earth - 10 December 2006 - New …
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Dec 19, 2006 12:31pm
4 reviews
marine-biology
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn10756-marine-census-reveals-jur...
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Marine census reveals 'Jurassic shrimp' and more
The 2006 Census of Marine Life is in, and this year's trawl includes scores of weird and wonderful creatures brought back from the deep.
(Cavolinia uncinata is a pelagic "wing-footed" snail, with a shell up to 1 cm long. They feed by secreting large feeding nets or bubbles to which food sticks. They then suck in the net)
The latest census has revealed 500 new species. One is the shrimp-like Phronima. It was found 5000 metres below the surface of the Sargasso Sea, along with hundreds of related species. All were eating each other and the organic matter that falls from the surface waters in drifts of "marine snow".
Another find is the Neoglyphea neocaledonica - nicknamed the "Jurassic shrimp" by its discoverers. It was thought to have disappeared 50 million years ago.
And it was not just individual creatures that caught the eyes of the researchers. Thanks to a new sensor, they also spotted a colossal school of 8 million fish off the coast of New Jersey, US. The shoal was the size of Manhattan Island in New York City.
(This thimble jelly is called Linuche unguiculata and is about 1 cm across. It is packed with commensal algae that provide the colour and probably much of its nutrition)
The researchers also shot deep-sea video, for example this footage of hydrothermal vents coml.org/medres/highlights2006/hl2006videopublic.htm [coml.org/medres/highlights2006/hl2006videopublic.htm] in the North Pacific and North Atlantic. It features the Pompeii worm, seen in shimmering hot waters - it is thought to be the most heat-resistant creature on Earth.
2006 is the census's sixth year of existence and will run until 2008. The results will then be analysed during 2009 and 2010. The researchers intend the end result to be a full description of what lived, lives and will live in the oceans.
"Each expedition reveals new marvels of the ocean - and with the return of each vessel it is increasingly clear that many more discoveries await marine explorers for years to come," says Fred Grassle, chair of the project's scientific steering committee.
In 2006, the 2000 researchers from 80 countries led 19 marine expeditions, with a 20th underway in the Antarctic. They also used satellites to track more than 20 species including sharks, sea lions, albatross and squid.
found this thanks to nutmeg.stumbleupon.com [nutmeg.stumbleupon.com]
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An Amazing First: Two Species Cooperate to Hunt | LiveScience
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Dec 17, 2006 7:48am
1 review
marine-biology
http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/061207_fish_cooperation.html
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An Amazing First: Two Species Cooperate to Hunt
The giant moray eel (below green moray eel) is normally a lone hunter in the dark. Now scientists find these eels may at times hunt in the daytime in the Red Sea, and surprisingly cooperate with another predatory fish, the grouper, which is also normally a solitary predator.
This is the first example of coordinated hunting seen in fish, and the first known instance of cooperative hunting between species seen outside humans, researchers said.
The giant moray eel is as thick as a man's thigh and can grow up to nearly 10 feet long. It normally lurks through crevices in coral reefs at night to corner victims in their holes, meaning the best way to avoid these hunters is to swim into open water. On the other hand, groupers (shown below) normally hunt in the open water during the day, meaning the best way to avoid them is to hide in coral reefs.
Behavioral ecologist Redouan Bshary from the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland was following groupers to collect information on so-called "cleaner fish" that enter the mouth of predators to eat parasites.
"When I first saw a grouper shaking its head in the face of a moray, I thought two top predators were about to fight each other," Bshary said. "So I was very surprised when they swam off together side by side."
Bshary and his colleagues followed fish around by snorkeling. They found groupers often visited giant morays resting in their crevices and rapidly shook their heads an inch or so from the eels to recruit them in a joint hunt. At times this call took place after a grouper failed in its hunt because prey escaped into a crevice the grouper could not get into but a giant moray might.
If the moray emerged, the grouper guided the eel to a crevice where prey was hiding. Groupers sometimes even performed a headstand and shook its head over a prey hiding place to attract moray eels to the site. At times the moray ate the fish it rooted out, while at other times the grouper did. [Video]
Before this, coordinated hunting was only seen in mammals and birds. In addition, until now the only other examples of cooperative hunting between species were seen with humans and dogs or humans and dolphins, Bshary said.
The researchers are uncertain whether this cooperation is an innate or learned behavior, although currently Bshary suspects it is learned because there is considerable variation in levels of it between individuals, especially in morays, "which may reflect personal experience." They plan to study whether this cooperation is local to the area they studied or whether it is widespread in the Red Sea.
"The most important implication is that there are still so many surprises to be discovered in coral reefs," Bshary said.
Bshary and his colleagues reported their findings in the December issue of the journal Public Library of Science Biology.
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LiveScience.com - Tigers Reproduce Like Rabbits But Barely Survive
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Dec 17, 2006 7:45am
3 reviews
animals
http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/061215_tiger_breeding.html
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Tigers Reproduce Like Rabbits But Barely Survive
Tiger populations in a national park in India are stable despite relentless poaching because the wild cats breed like rabbits.
A nine-year study conducted in India's Nagarhole National Park found that an average of 23 percent of the park's tigers either moved away or died each year from natural causes or from poaching by hunters who kill the animals for their body parts. Yet, despite the loss, the park's tiger population remained stable because the wild cats are fast breeders, with females giving birth to three to four cubs per litter every three to four years.
"This study shows that even well-protected wild tiger populations have naturally high rates of annual loss, and yet do fine because of their high reproductive rates," said lead research Ullas Karanth of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
The study, conducted by researchers from WCS and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is detailed in the journal Ecology.
In other parts of the world, however, high breeding rates can't replenish tiger populations fast enough to counteract the negative effects of poaching. Another WCS study, detailed in a recent issue of the journal Animal Conservation, found that tiger numbers in a protected area along the Laos-Vietnam boarder are extremely low due to commercial killing of not only the big cats but also of their prey. By wiping out animals the tigers feed upon, hunters are inadvertently starving the very beasts they wish to profit from.
Humans are also threatening tiger survival by destroying the cats' natural habitats. Studies indicate that tigers now reside in only 7 percent of their historic range--40 percent less than a decade ago.
"The good news is that given the chance, tigers can replenish their numbers; the bad news is that they are not being given the chance in many parts of their range," said Alan Rabinowitz, a WCS big-cat expert.
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Farewell to the Yangtze dolphin | Conservation | Guardian Unlimited Environment
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Dec 16, 2006 12:52pm
1 review
marine-biology
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/conservation/story/0,,1972171,00.html
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Farewell to the Yangtze dolphin
The search for China's rarest dolphin has had an unhappy ending with scientists fearing it is lost forever
It lived in the Yangtze river for millions of years and was revered by the Chinese as the "goddess" of the mighty river. But now scientists believe that the baiji, a white, freshwater dolphin, is extinct.
A painstaking six-week hunt on the Yangtze for any remaining signs of the baiji ended yesterday with the news scientists had been dreading: there don't appear to be any remaining.
"The baiji is functionally extinct. We might have missed one or two animals but it won't survive in the wild," said August Pfluger, a Swiss naturalist involved in the expedition. "We are all incredibly sad."
Also known as the Chinese river dolphin, the baiji is the first large aquatic mammal to be declared extinction since the Caribbean monk seal was killed off by hunting and over-fishing half a century ago.
The marine scientists from the baiji.org foundation launched their hunt with some limited optimism six weeks ago, aware that the dolphin was in desperate peril but hopeful they would sight some of the pale, nearly blind creatures.
But as the Guardian's Jonathan Watts detailed last month even halfway through the expedition the signs were looking gloomy.
The dolphin, which dates back 20 million years, has been pushed to extinction by the severe degradation of its habitat. Increasingly noisy shipping traffic on the Yangtze affected the dolphins' sonar, while severe pollution and over-fishing diminished food supplies.
The completion of the massive Three Gorges dam project upriver also did not help, worsening the decline of the smaller fish on which the baiji fed and shrinking the sand bars around which they once played
Around 400 baiji were believed to be living in the Yangtze in the early 1980s, when China was just launching the free market reforms that have transformed its economy. The last fully-fledged search, in 1997, yielded 13 confirmed sightings, and a fisherman claimed to have seen a baiji in 2004.
The closest most modern Chinese people got to the creature was Qi Qi, a female baiji found in the river in 1980, who lived in an aquarium until her death in 2002.
The chances of a miraculous return from presumed extinction seem extremely remote, given that the team of 30 scientists from five countries searched a 1,000-mile stretch of the Yangtze over the six weeks. At least 20 to 25 baiji would now be needed to give the species a chance to survive, they say.
The disappearance of the "goddess of the Yangtze" is a sobering reminder to the Chinese government about the extent to which the country's economic transformation is affecting the environment.
According to Mr Pfluger, China's Agriculture Ministry had hoped the baiji would end up being another giant panda, an animal brought back from the brink of extinction in a highly marketable effort that bolstered the country's image.
Almost equally under threat is Yangtze finless porpoise (above), whose numbers have fallen to below 400, the expedition found.
"The situation of the finless porpoise is just like that of the baiji 20 years ago," the baiji.org expedition group said in a statement. "Their numbers are declining at an alarming rate. If we do not act soon they will become a second baiji."
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Rudolph is threatened by unsafe sex - Telegraph
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Dec 16, 2006 11:31am
2 reviews
animals
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=A1&xml=/con...
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Rudolph is threatened by unsafe sex
A study of rutting contains more bad news for Europe's wild reindeer, reports Roger Highfield
Rudolph the red nosed reindeer is under threat because of risky sexual practices, ranging from polygyny to inbreeding, according to a new study.
Norway is home to the majority of Europe's wild reindeer population, a subspecies of Rangifer tarandus. However, the 40,000 surviving animals now face a range of threats, from a decline in alpine habitats caused by climate change to the rise of tourism in the mountains of southern Norway. And, because the males are highly prized by hunters, mature Rudolphs are becoming an increasingly rare sight as the herds become dominated by females.
In the journal Biology Letters, a team led by Dr Øystein Holand of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences reports that the remaining populations are also at risk of inbreeding, so that there will be a greater mortality caused by genetic diseases.
The team came to the conclusion after studying an experimental herd during two rutting seasons, which adds to their existing problems: "Their polygynous mating system (where males mate with more than one female in a season) and the man made female biased sex ratio among adults may contribute to reduce effective population size."
"The populations are rather female skewed and rather few old males are around," said Dr Holand. Because, unlike other animals, the reindeer seem to be as willing to breed with close relatives as unrelated animals, this will put further pressure on the remaining populations, especially those with 500 or fewer animals.
Reindeer (called caribou in North America) are adapted to Ice Age conditions and, in the past, would cross the Scandinavian peninsula on their seasonal migration of up to 300 miles. This would reduce the chance of inbreeding but today the fragmentation of their habitat means that more inbreeding occurs, undermining the long-term viability of the remnant populations of wild European tundra reindeer.
The Norwegian Directorate for Natural Conservation and Management has recently devised an action plan to manage and protect key wild reindeer habitats, he said. The study was conducted with colleagues in Norway, Finland and Canada.
The study was conducted at Kutuharju Field Reindeer Research Station, in Kaamanen, Finland, as a part of a bigger study of reindeer sex.
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National Geographic News Photo Gallery: New Glowing Fungi Species Found in Brazi…
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Nov 7, 2006 10:31am
9 reviews
nature
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/10/photogalleries/glowing-fungi/...
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New Glowing Fungi Species Found in Brazil
Like a black light poster come to life, a group of bioluminescent fungi collected from Ribeira Valley Tourist State Park near São Paulo, Brazil, emanates a soft green glow when the lights go out.
The mushrooms are part of the genus Mycena, a group that includes about 500 species worldwide. Of these only 33 are known to be bioluminescent--capable of producing light through a chemical reaction.
Since 2002 Cassius Stevani, professor of chemistry at the University of São Paulo; Dennis Desjardin, professor of mycology at San Francisco State University in California; and Marina Capelari of Brazil's Institute of Botany have discovered ten more bioluminescent fungi species--four of which are new to science--in Brazil's tropical forests.
The work, Stevani says, has increased the number of glowers known since the 1970s by 30 percent.
A species of bioluminescent fungi looks unassuming as it pokes its capped head above the mossy wood from which it grows in the tropical forests of Brazil. But at night a chemical reaction causes the fungus to emit an eerie green glow sometimes called foxfire.
The 33 Mycena species known to glow in the dark are separated into 16 lineages, San Francisco State's Desjardin says.
"Obviously the big question then arises: Did luminescence evolve 16 different times in the genus Mycena, or did it evolve only a few times and was lost hundreds of times during the course of evolution?" he said in an email to National Geographic News.
To help answer this question, Desjardin's research team has been extracting and sequencing DNA from the glowing mushrooms. They will use the data to develop a mushroom "family tree" that includes glowers and related nonglowers, a first step to determining when bioluminescence emerged in fungi.
Researcher Luis F. Mendes gazes up at a tree sporting ghostlike fungi in the forests south of São Paulo, Brazil.
Since 2002 several new species of glowing mushrooms have been found in the region, "some of the last remaining old-growth Atlantic forest habitat south of the city of São Paulo," San Francisco State's Desjardin said.
While searching for known glowing fungi in the forest, the University of São Paulo's Stevani came across an unusual specimen. He sent it to Desjardin, who identified it as Gerronema viridilucens, a species new to science and the first fungi from the genus Gerronema known to glow.
A pair of bioluminescent fungi glows in Brazil's Ribeira Valley Tourist State Park.
In addition to mushrooms, a variety of marine animals as well as select species of bacteria, insects, and annelids (earthworms) are known to be bioluminescent.
Bioluminescence creates "cold" light--emissions with low thermal radiation. An enzyme called luciferase triggers a pigment called luciferin to oxidize, and the reaction emits light.
But why the fungi evolved to glow this way remains a mystery, the University of São Paulo's Stevani says.
In addition to helping researchers decipher how and why mushrooms glow, Stevani is studying the bioluminescent fungi's ability to signal the presence of toxins in the soil. In the lab, his team has developed a procedure that shows that fungi emit less light when exposed to several metals and organic pollutants.
"In a near future we can use it to evaluate the toxicity of environmental samples of soil and sediments," Stevani said in an email to National Geographic News. The researcher also says that the fungi could serve as a tool for bioremediation (cleanup using living organisms) of contaminated soil.
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UnderwaterTimes | Scientists Stumped: Underwater Photographer Captures Picture …
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Nov 7, 2006 10:25am
16 reviews
marine-biology
http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=91073406251
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Underwater Photographer Captures Picture of Mysterious Gelatinous Ball; 'A Bit of Science Fiction'
A mysterious gelatinous ball has puzzled and fascinated researchers after undersea photographer Rudolf Svensen spotted it while diving at the mouth of the Matre fjord in Hordaland, western Norway.
On Oct. 1 Rudolf and his brother Erling were diving when he spotted the unusual object.
"It was 50-70 centimeters (19.5-27.5 inches) in diameter and looked like a huge beach ball. It was transparent but had a kind of thick, red cord in the middle. It was a bit science-fiction," Svensen told newspaper Bergens Tidende's web site.
The Svensens contacted associate professor Torleiv Brattegard at the University of Bergen, and other experts were notified to try and solve the mystery.
Brattegard was convinced the object was organic, and possibly a species unknown to Norway.
"It might be an animal, the remains of algae, something which has been alive, or a mysterious accumulation of microorganisms," were some of Brattegard's initial theories.
On Friday Brattegard told NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting) that the mystery may have been solved.
Colleague Arne Fjellheim, who works with Stavanger Museum, tipped off Brattegard that the organism resembled a photograph from New Zealand that he had seen. A zoology professor and squid expert in New Zealand corroborated by email - the peculiar gelatinous ball was a large squid egg sack.
"The gelatinous lump contains several fertilized eggs. This is not at all a common sight, because squids are some of the most inaccessible animals known," Fjellheim told iBergen.no.
Fjellheim told Aftenposten.no that squid are found in such numbers along the Norwegian coast that they are a commercial catch, and used mostly as bait. Despite this, extremely little is known about their biology.
thanks to the smashing blog of olgui.stumbleupon.com [olgui.stumbleupon.com]
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Parchment worm from Fiji Photo | TrekNature
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Nov 7, 2006 9:43am
1 review
photography
http://www.treknature.com/gallery/Oceania/photo80605.htm
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parchment worm (Polychaeta, Chaetopteridae, Chaetopterus sp)
parchment worms live in irregularly U-shaped tubes through which they pump water, filtering out organic particles with a mucus bag that acts as a sieve. Nodopodial paddles create the water current through the tube, while other segments bear suckers to help anchor the worm in position. When the mucus bag becomes clogged with particles, it is rolled into a ball, passed to the mouth by a ciliary tract and ingested, then a new bag is produced.
Certainly contributing to its success as an invader is the chaetopterids power of regeneration. Any single segment from among the first 14 can regenerate anteriorly and posteriorly to produce a complete worm.
Chaetopterid worms are dioecious (having separate sexes). Gametes arise from proliferation of cells from the peritoneum, these cells are released into the coelom where they mature, before being released. After a short
time in the plankton, the trochophore larvae settle and mature.
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