naturalacts

"Get the flock out of here" Cloud of birds Invade Town La Grange,Kentucky

2012-01-27T18:07:00.000-08:00

How to catch, store, and use rainwater

2011-12-19T13:41:00.000-08:00

Plant a rain garden

When rain falls in Seattle, homeowner Lyn Dillman smiles: Water that used to run down the street now pools in a thickly planted infiltration basin at the garden’s edge, where it percolates into the groundwater below.

“It’s a win-win situation,” says landscape designer Malissa Gatton. “The garden helps reduce this household’s environmental footprint. Anybody could do it.”

If you have soil that drains well, a rain garden is a great option. Channel rainwater from the roof into a shallowly buried pipe that empties into an infiltration basin or swale at least 10 feet away from your house.

Grow water-tolerant plants such as shrub willows in the basin.

Design: Malissa Gatton (inharmony.com or 888/ 472-7748)

Who owns the rain?

All Western states except Colorado and Utah give you the freedom to catch and use rainfall; some jurisdictions even require it. Here’s how different states see it.

Arizona The state offers an individual income-tax credit to cover 25 percent (up to $1,000) of the cost of rainwater-capture systems.

Colorado Your roof is considered a tributary to a stream somewhere, so unless you have water rights in that drainage, you can’t legally harvest rainwater. However, state legislators this year will consider a bill to permit the collection of water for irrigation.

New Mexico Santa Fe County requires cisterns for commercial buildings and for all new houses larger than 2,500 square feet; smaller dwellings must have rain barrels, berms, or swales to make use of rainfall.

Utah Rainwater is state property; homeowners can’t legally keep it. State Senator Scott Jenkins plans to introduce legislation this month that would allow homeowners to harvest rainwater.

Washington Existing law is ambiguous, so the state’s Department of Ecology doesn’t enforce laws that might regulate rainfall harvest.

David Attenborough - Wonderful World

2011-12-08T15:26:00.000-08:00

Hungry mosquitoes fly farther than you think

2011-11-14T09:25:00.000-08:00

Hungry mosquitoes fly farther than you think

Harry Boerema pointing to an antique map of the area surrounding his farm Thursday Oct. 6, 2011, lives on the edge of a drainage project, where Dutch authorities are dredging a huge meter-deep (3-foot) bowl in the northern rural landscape to head off flood waters and protect towns and villages from disaster.The project, begun in 2003, threatens to inflict hordes of mosquitoes on people bordering the 1,700 hectare (4,200-acre) water retention area, where heavy rainwater will collect and slowly be channeled to the North Sea. The frequent wet-dry cycles will be perfect breeding grounds.

How far does a mosquito fly? Harry Boerema wants to know.

Boerema lives near a drainage project, where Dutch authorities are dredging a huge meter-deep (3-foot) basin in the northern rural landscape to head off flood waters and protect towns and villages from disaster.

The project threatens to inflict hordes of mosquitoes on people living around the water retention area, so scientists set out to calculate how to keep the boundaries of the ditch far enough from human habitation to protect residents from pest infestation.

The question they needed to find out: How far does a common European human-biting mosquito fly?

What they found surprised them: A hungry female looking for a "host" will fly at least 150 meters (yards), three times farther than previously thought, said Piet Verdonschot, who conducted the research.

The 1,700 hectare (4,200-acre) basin, begun in 2003, is designed to collect heavy rainwater that will slowly be channeled to the North Sea. But frequent wet-dry cycles will be perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

Buzzing pests are nothing new for Boerema, a retired professor of architectural history who has lived for 36 years in his quiet cottage set amid dairy farms.

"I don't mind them to a certain extent. But not in surplus," he says. "I'm a nature lover, and mosquitoes are part of nature _ although not the most likable ones."

Not everyone took the prospect of living on water's edge with such equanimity, and local complaints led authorities to commission the mosquito research, said project manager John Tukker.

At the outset, Verdonschot believed mosquitoes stay within about 50 meters (yards) of their breeding ground. The biggest nuisance for humans often originates in flower pots, buckets of collected rainwater or any kind of water left stagnant in the back garden or barnyard.

"The assumption in the literature is that people who suffer bites have bred their own specimens in their own gardens," he said.

Hundreds of mosquito species exist around the world _ 36 in the Netherlands alone _ but Verdonschot concentrated on the two species most common in the Dutch climate: the culex pipiens, which prefers birds to people but will still keep you awake at night during the summer, and the Culiseta annulata, larger, more aggressive insects active year-round. Neither normally carries dangerous diseases.

Verdonschot, an aquatic ecologist working for the private environmental research institute Alterra, hatched 40,000 mosquitoes in large tents in a grassy field. The tents were surrounded by concentric circles of traps set at 50 meters, 100 meters and 150 meters. Around the edges of the field were ditches with tall reeds and wild grasses on the banks.

The traps drew mosquitoes into smoke from dry ice then instantly froze them. At the end of each day researchers collected the corpses and counted them one-by-one, using tweezers under a microscope.

Verdonschot expected most mosquitoes to be caught in the closest traps. Instead, about 80 percent were found in the farthest, meaning most flew at least 150 meters from the tent where they were hatched.

Verdonschot then refined his experiment, placing evergreen shrubs within the inner circle of traps. The numbers caught in the closest ring of traps shot up by one-third. The bushes offered both shelter from predators and moisture evaporating from the leaves.

That discovery led Tukker, working in the north, to create small raised islands of vegetation in the middle of the retention area, which becomes a swamp after a heavy rain. Those islands deflect mosquitoes from nearby farms.

The experiments produced a few other surprises, too.

Mosquitoes are mostly quiet during the day, preferring to concentrate on the edge of a body of water. When females hunt for blood _ necessary for reproduction _ they move for about an hour at dusk or at dawn, staying close to the ground.

"They move differently than we thought, they move farther than we thought," Verdonschot said.

Verdonschot believes his team's research adds to scientific knowledge about mosquitoes. Tomes have been written about mosquito bites and the effects on human health, but little research has been done on their habits, he said.

Verdonschot's simple experiments this summer have value for others building catchment areas around Europe and for housing developers.

"The whole northwestern European climate is becoming more dynamic because of climate change, because of wetter summers. And all this urban infrastructure has to be protected from water excess," he said.

Boerema also has a mosquito trap in the hedge around his cottage, helping to keep track of the mosquito population during wet and dry periods. He is anxious to see the water storage project completed, recalling that he was ordered to evacuate his home during a 1998 flood.

"I think it will ease the danger," he said, even though he's likely to have more mosquitoes.

"We've always been bitten. I don't react very much, but my wife hates them _ but not to the extent that we find it unbearable to live here."

Showdown In Elk Town

2011-11-08T15:14:00.000-08:00

Japanese Giant Hornets Massacre Honey Bees Nest

2011-11-07T16:02:00.001-08:00

Ice Age Yukon and Alaskan Camels

2011-03-29T04:27:00.000-07:00

t is a poorly known fact that camels (Family Camelidae) originated and underwent most of their evolution in North America. The earliest known Late Eocene (about 40 million years ago) camelids like Protylopus were rabbit-sized with four-toed feet and low-crowned teeth. The sheep-sized Poebrotherium of Oligocene time (37 to 24 million years ago) was common in open woodlands of what now is South Dakota, and had already "lost" the lateral toes. During the Miocene (24 to 5 million years ago), camels increased in size with lengthening necks and limbs, also developing and efficient pacing gait for traversing the expanding steppe and grassland habitat of the time. In the Early Pliocene some 5 million years ago, camels spread, eventually reaching South America and the Old World(via a Bering Isthmus). Some of these camels were gigantic, like Titanotylopus from Nebraska. The South American lineage gave rise to such species as llamas and their relatives all adapted to grazing on high-altitude steppes.

Camel Ironically, camels became extinct in their place of origin toward the close of the last glaciation. Although we know a good deal about camels and their origins, few people realize that they once lived in the Yukon and Alaska.

Camelid bones recovered in the Old Crow River Basin in northern Yukon are chiefly from large camels, much larger than either the modern twin-humped camel (Camelus bactrianus, which occurs naturally in small numbers in the Gobi Desert of central Asia) or the single-humped dromedary (Camelus dromedarius, used domestically from North Africa to India and now running wild in the Australian outback after introduction there). The fossils are closest in shape and size to a very large member of the true camel group (Camelini) like Titanotylopus mentioned earlier. That camel had long, massive limbs, a relatively small braincase, a convex region between between the eye sockets and well-developed third premolar teeth in both jaws. It was about 3.5 m tall, with long spines on the thoracic vertebrae indicting a large hump. Its snout was shorter than that of Camelops, the other smaller camel reported from Yukon and Alaskan Ice Age deposits. Evidently males were larger and had more robust skulls and canine teeth than females. Titanotylopus occupied western North America from about 5 to 1 million years ago. Could these Yukon Titanotylopus-like camels be relics of an earlier migration to Eurasia, having given rise to Giganotylopus (considered by some experts as identical to Titanotylopus) of the southern Ukraine(Odessa and Cherkassy) about 5 million years ago?

A number of bones of another smaller camel (Camelops hesternus, the western camel, distantly related to the modern llamas of South America) have been recovered on the banks of the Sixtymile River near the Yukon-Alaska border. Oddly, all Camelops bones are from the same locality, a placer-mining site of Chuck and Lynn McDougall. In the process of washing away masses of frozen silt("muck") covering the gold-bearing gravels, the miners sometimes encounter bones of Ice Age animals. This particular site has produced hundreds of fossils belonging to woolly mammoth, steppe bison, large and small horses, American mastodon, caribou, mountain sheep, helmeted and tundra muskoxen, caribou, moose, wapiti, wolf, wolverine, scimitar cat, American lion, ground squirrel (with ancient nests and droppings), bird and a virtually perfect carcass of a black-footed feret, fur and all! One of the Camelops bones from Sixtymile was radiocarbon dated to about 23,000 years ago, near the cold peak of the last glaciation. Climate was drier then, and cool steppe-like conditions with broad grassy tracts prevailed compared to the spruce forest that covers the area now, with tundra on the uplands.

Thirty-six western camel remains have been reported from mining sites near Fairbanks, Alaska (about two-thirds are from Cripple Creek and Gold Hill; others are from Engineer, Fairbanks and Ester creeks). Dates on a number of the bones range between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago when climate began cooling toward the peak of the last glaciation. So, perhaps western camels did not enter Yukon and Alaska from the south until the relatively warm mid-Wisconsinan interstadial(about 50,000 to 25,000 years ago), dying out there toward the peak of the last glaciation.

Western camels were confined to North America, having been most abundant in the western United States, southwestern Canada(Alberta and Saskatchewan) and central Mexico during the last part of the Ice Age(about 600,000 to 10,000 years ago). They probably reached unglaciated Yukon and Alaska by migrating northward via dry terrain on the eastern flanks of the Rocky Mountains during a relativley warm period. How did they survive the northern winters? Modern camels are able to grow thick pelts under cold conditions. I have seen Bactrian camels at ease, wandering over snow-covered land in mid-winter at a game farm in Alberta, and travellers have encountered them "plodding stolidly through north-Asiatic blizzards".

In life, the western camel probably looked like a large dromedary, however its limbs were about a fifth longer, its head was longer and narrower and the face was flexed downward to a greater extent. The shape of the snout(premaxilla) indicates that Camelops probably ate as much leaves, forbs(herbs other than grass) and fruits, as grass. The long neck and limbs allow it to reach high browse as well. Camelops seems to have been adapted to arid scrublands and grasslands, and Yukon and Alaskan finds suggest that it could tolerate cool, at times snow-covered steppe-like grasslands.

Western camel remains have been reported from at least 18 Paleo-Indian sites dating between about 12,600 and 10,000 years ago(when the species seems to have become extinct). A camel bone chopping tool was found at the Colby site, and there is evidence of butchering at the Casper and Carter/Kerr-McGee sites, also in Wyoming.

C.R. Harington, Canadian Museum of Nature
June, 1997

Sources

Devaney, C.C. (ed) 1988. Macmillan Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals. Macmillan, London.

Domppierrs, H. and C.S. Churcher. 1996. Premaxillary shape as an indicator of the diet of seven extinct late Cenozoic New World camels. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 16(1):141-148.

Frison, G.C., D.N. Walker, S.D. Webb and G.M. Zeimans. 1978. Paleo-Indian procurement of Camelops on the Northwestern Plains. Quarternary Research 10(3): 385-400

Harington, C.R. 1978. Quarternary vertebrate faunas of Canada and Alaska and their suggested chronological sequence. Syllogeus 15: 1-105.

Harington, C.R. 1989. Pleistocene vertebrate localities in the Yukon. In: L.D.Carter, T.D. Hamilton and J.P Galoway, eds. Late Cenozoic History of the Interior Basins of Alaska and the Yukon. United States Geological Survey Circular 1026:93-98.

Harrison, J.A. 1985. Giant camels from the Cenzoic of North America. Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology, Number 57: 1-29

Kurtén, B. and E. Anderson. 1980. Pleistocene Mammals of North America. Columbia University Press, New York.

Webb, S.D. 1965. The osteology of Camelops. Bulletin of the Los Angeles County Museum, Science, Number 1: 1-54.

Japanese Penguin Goes Shopping

2011-01-13T05:50:00.001-08:00

Baby Elephant rescue

2010-12-28T20:02:00.000-08:00

Cross-breeding restores sight to blind cavefish

2010-10-12T14:33:00.000-07:00

In the caves of Mexico lives a fish which proves that a million years of evolution can be undone with a bit of clever breeding.

The blind cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) is a sightless version of a popular aquarium species, the Mexican tetra. They live in 29 deep caves scattered throughout Mexico, which their sighted ancestors colonised in the middle of the Pleistocene era. In this environment of perpetual darkness, the eyes of these forerunners were of little use and as generations passed, they disappeared entirely. They now navigate through the pitch-blackness by using their lateral lines to sense changes in water pressure.

But there is a deceptively simple way of restoring both the eyes and sight that evolution has taken, and Richard Borowsky from New York University’s Cave Biology Research Group has found it. You merely cross-bred fish from different caves.

Unlike their completely eyeless parents, the hybrids develop eyes, albeit ones that are smaller than those of their relatives on the surface. More amazingly still, many of them could actually see, as shown by their ability to reflexively follow a series of moving stripes.

In the most successful inter-cave cross, over a third of the offspring had working eyes. And if the blind fish were bred with surface ones, every single one of their offspring could see. Not bad for a lineage that hasn’t seen light for over a million years!

The hybrids’ restored eyes are a reflection of the genetic changes of their parents. Eyes are very complicated structures and their development is governed by a whole suite of genes. In a previous study, Borowsky found eye genes in twelve different places around the genome of one cavefish population. Mutating any of these could interfere with the production of a working eye, which means that there are many ways of evolving blindness.

Fish populations from different caves have each taken their own individual route, involving changes to different combinations of genes. Based on his new data, Borowsky thinks that this happened on at least three independent occasions, with each group losing their eyes through changes in three or four of the twelve key sites. But in the hybrids, every faulty gene from one parent was compensated for by the working version from the other.

Borowsky also found that two fish had a greater chance of producing a hybrids if they hailed from closer caves. That suggests that fish from neighbouring caves are more closely related than those from distant ones and have more similar genes underlying their blindness.

Bullfrog Hunts… Anything!

2010-10-10T05:55:00.000-07:00

Perfect Timing

2010-09-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

Woodpeckers

2010-08-07T06:25:00.000-07:00

Woodpeckers are surely one of the most distinctive families of birds, hitching their way up trees, chiseling out their food with specially designed bills and reinforced skulls. Woodpeckers tend to be attractively clad in bold patterns of black, white, and red.

The Extreme Ice Survey in Action

2010-06-16T06:20:00.000-07:00

05/26/2010 Massive Colorado Hail Storm.

2010-06-12T11:10:00.000-07:00

BNVN Weather Paparazzi Tony Laubach was out with the Twistex.org research team today for the storms in Colorado. A massive hail storm hit east of Denver, CO today in Hudson and Wiggins Counties. Hail fell for over a half an hour in some area and piled up to almost a foot deep. ...

Rescued Baby Hummingbird Fed in Hand by Mother

2010-06-07T20:37:00.000-07:00

This is actually a pretty amazing story about a baby hummingbird that a man found on a sidewalk. It couldn't fly, so he took it under his wing.

At night, it would come home to his house for safety. During the day, it was in the backyard of the house near where he found him.
About 4 days after he found it, he was holding it in his cupped hands when its mama came by to feed it. She had seen the man around, I guess, because she just flew over, perched on his hand and then fed the fledgling. This happened a number of times, so he called a friend who is good with a video camera, and he came over to film some of the amazing goings on that he told him about.

Bears at play

2010-05-28T05:26:00.000-07:00

Incredible Video: Hail Destroys Oklahoma City Day After Tornado Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/05/18/incredible-video-hail-destroys-oklahom

2010-05-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

At one time, photographs told the story of freak storms and deadly weather. Now, it’s insant YouTube footage of what some Oklahoma City residents are calling “the most insane hail storm, or storm in general, I have ever seen!”

Sunday afternoon, as violent storms rolled across middle America – only a day after a tornado left a path of devastation in the same region – Oklahomans turned on the video cameras and filmed what is sure to be known as the great hailstorm of 2010.

Just check out this footage. The first video is posted by a family that can be heard screaming about the softball-sized hail, and the dents in the jeep that can be seen almost immediately (right around 4:00):

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/05/18/incredible-video-hail-destroys-oklahoma-city-day-after-tornado/#ixzz0oWkEKWWl

I think this second video, though, better captures the extreme force and lethal velocity of the hail in question. Framing a family’s swimming pool, the speed and size of the ice is immediately apparent. But fast-forward to the sixty-second mark, as the storm reaches its apex, and the water is all but turned into a wave pool. It almost looks like a Jacuzzi, with the jets on full blast.

In the background, an utterly baffled homeowner sums it all up best: “That’s insane, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Scientists stunned as grey whale sighted off Israel

2010-05-19T08:56:00.000-07:00

JERUSALEM (AFP) - – The appearance of a grey whale off the coast of Israel has stunned scientists, in what was thought to be the first time the giant mammal has been seen outside the Pacific in several hundred years.

The whale, which was first sighted off Herzliya in central Israel on Saturday, is believed to have travelled thousands of miles from the north Pacific after losing its way in search of food.

"It's an unbelievable event which has been described as one of the most important whale sightings ever," said Dr Aviad Scheinin, chairman of the Israel Marine Mammal Research and Assistance Center which identified the creature.

A population of grey whales once inhabited the north Atlantic but became extinct in the 17th or 18th centuries and has not been seen there since.

The remaining colonies live in the western and eastern sectors of the north Pacific.

"What has amazed the entire marine mammal research community is there haven't been any grey whales in the Atlantic since the 18th century," he said. Scheinin said the creature, a mature whale measuring some 12 metres (39 feet) and weighing around 20 tonnes, probably reached the Atlantic through the Northwest Passage, an Arctic sea route that connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and is normally covered with ice.

"Here you have an animal that is supposed to live in the Pacific and because the ice in the Arctic is melting, it managed to get through this corridor near the Bering Strait," Scheinin told AFP.

The population which lives in the northeastern Pacific normally migrates southwards in around October, heading for warmer waters around the Gulf of California in a huge round trip of at least 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometres).

So when autumn came, this particular grey whale began travelling south, keeping the land mass on the left and heading for the Californian Gulf with the aim of "turning left" into the bay.

But instead, it reached Gibraltar and turned left into the Mediterranean and ended up off the shores of Israel, Scheinin said.

"The question now is: are we going to see the re-colonisation of the Atlantic?" he said. "This is very important ecologically because of the change of habitat. It emphasises the climate change that we are going through."

So far, the whale seems to be happy enough in the waters off the shores of Israel, he said.

"It is pretty thin, which indicates the trip was quite harsh, but we think it can survive here," he said. "Grey whales are very generalist in what they feed on."

Now experts are mulling the possibility of tracking the whale by satellite -- a costly operation that would need outside funding and expertise, Scheinin said.

"It's quite a big operation to do this. If it stays around here for the next month, it's worth having someone come in and do this professionally," he said.

"It will be interesting to see where it goes and to follow it."

How spitting cobras shoot for the eyes

2010-05-15T18:07:00.000-07:00

Bruce Young from the University of Massachusetts is antagonising a spitting cobra. He approaches, keeping outside of the snake’s strike radius, while moving his head from side to side. The cobra doesn’t like it and erects its hood in warning. Young persists, and the snake retaliates by launching twin streams of venom at him from forward-facing holes in its fangs. The aim is spot-on: right at Young’s eyes. Fortunately, he is wearing a Perspex visor that catches the spray; without it, the venom would start destroying his corneas, giving him minutes to seek medical aid before permanent blindness set in.

It may seem a bit daft to provoke a snake that can poison you from afar, but Young’s antics were all part of an attempt to show just how spitting cobras make their shots. Their venom is a potent defensive weapon, but it’s also completely useless if it lands on the skin or even in the mouth. To work, the cobra must aim for the eyes. Just think about how hard that is. The cobra must hit a moving target that’s up to 1.5 metres away, using a squirt gun attached to their mouth. The fang is fixed with no movable nozzle for fine-tuned aiming. And the venom spray lasts just 50 milliseconds – not long enough to correct the stream after watching its arc.

By taunting cobras from behind his visor, Young discovered their secret. The snake waits for a particularly jerky movement to trigger its attack and synchronise the movements of its heads in the same way. It shakes its head rapidly from side to side to achieve a wide spray of venom. And it even predicts the position of its target 200 milliseconds later and shoots its venom at where its eyes are going to be.

There are several species of Asian and African spitting cobras, and Young had individuals of three – the red, black-necked, and black-and-white spitting cobras. Getting the snakes was straightforward enough; getting them to spit is another matter. It’s very difficult to provoke a cobra to spit at a stationary object – you need a moving target for the best results. That sounds like the sort of job that graduate students normally do, but Young stepped up to it himself. As he wryly writes, “To maximize consistency, the last author served as a target for all trials.”

His visor was fitted with accelerometers that recorded his own head movements, while his colleagues Guido Westhoff and Melissa Boetig filmed the snakes with a high-speed camera. Both films were synchronised with a laser pulse and together, the team recorded data from over 100 spits.

They found that a particular type of head wiggle provoked the snakes into spitting – not necessarily large or long-lasting, but always involving a jerky change of direction. This makes sense for the snake. At the moment when the target’s head changes direction, its movements are probably going to keep in the same direction for a short while. Also, to change direction, the head must briefly slow down before speeding up again, giving the snake more time to predict its future position.

On average, the cobra starts spitting 200 milliseconds after such movements, which is roughly the same as a human’s reaction time between sight and movement. But if it takes that long for the snake to contract its venom-shooting muscles, it’s at a 200 ms disadvantage. How can it possibly gun down a moving target and avoid spitting into empty space?

The answer is simple – even before the first droplets of venom emerge, the cobra is already taking aim. Around 65 ms before, it starts to waggle its head up and down, and from side to side, perfectly tracking the zig-zagging of its target’s face. When it actually starts to spit, it stops this synchronous bobbing and rapidly accelerates its head in the same direction as its target’s. The snake is compensating for its moving bull’s-eye, predicting where it’s going to be 200 ms in the future and ‘catching up’ to it well ahead of time.

Young thinks that the cobra’s calculations would be accurate enough to hit the eyes if it focused its venom jets on a specific point. As it is, the snake increases the odds of hitting its target even further by wiggling its head from side to side while releasing its poisonous payload. The result: a massive chance of a direct hit, and a reeling animal that will think twice about approaching a spitting cobra again.

The Animal Odd Couple

2010-05-08T19:06:00.000-07:00

Short lives, short size – why are pygmies small?

2010-05-08T06:50:00.000-07:00

For decades, anthropologists have debated over why pygmies have evolved to be short. Amid theories about their jungle homes and lack of food, new research suggests that we have been looking at the problem from the wrong angle. The diminutive stature of pygmies is not a direct adaptation to their environment, but the side-effect of an evolutionary push to start having children earlier.

Andrea Migliano at the University of Cambridge suggests that pygmies have opted for a ‘live fast, die short’ strategy. Their short lives gives them very limited time as potential parents, and they have adapted by becoming sexually mature at a young age. That puts a brake on their pubescent growth spurts, leaving them with shorter adult heights.

Pygmies are technically defined as groups of people whose men are, on average, shorter than 155cm (or 5 feet and an inch for the Imperial-minded). Strictly speaking, the word is restricted to several ethnic groups of African hunter-gatherers, like the Aka, Efe and Mbuti. But the world is surprisingly replete with shorter-than-average groups who also bear the colloquial moniker of pygmies, including some from Brazil, Bolivia, South-East Asia and Papua New Guinea.

The earlier explanations for a short stature worked for some of these groups, but they could never account for all of them. Some scientists suggested that smaller people move more easily through dense jungles, but some pygmies live outside forests. Other theorised that they could maintain their body temperature more easily, but many live in cool and dry climes.

One of the more popular theories put forward by Jared Diamond suggested that small people are more resilient to starvation and malnourishment when food becomes scarce. But this can’t be the whole story for Africa groups like the Turkana and Massai manage to be some of the tallest people on Earth despite facing similarly unstable food supplies!

Migliano found more evidence against this theory by comparing the growth patterns of three groups of genuine pygmies – the Filipino Aeta and Agta, and the central African Biaka – with the shortest Americans, whose malnourished childhoods landed them in the bottom 0.01% of the population in terms of adult height.

Together with Lucio Vinicius and Marta Lahr, she found that the true pygmies grew slightly more slowly than the undernourished Americans, their growth spurts ended much earlier, at age 12 rather than 15. Typically, groups who lack free-flowing calories grow slowly over a long time – the pygmies’ pattern matched the first part but not the second. The pygmies’ growth curves disproved the malnutrition idea, but their lifespan pointed Migliano towards a better explanation.

Pygmies around the world are short in life expectancy as well as height, with the average adult dying at 16-24 years of age. Only 30-50% of children survive to the age of 15 and less than a third of women live to see menopause at 37. Taller African groups like the Ache or Turkana have lower adult mortality and twice the average lifespan, and compared to them, the pygmies’ pattern is closer to that of chimps.

Migliano argues that their early deaths are the driving force behind both their small size and their shorter growth spurts. It pays pygmies to divert resources away from growth and towards having children as early as possible, to compensate for their limited years. Indeed, Migliano found that they reach a peak of fertility earlier than taller groups.

In general, people who grow taller and larger tend to be more fertile and have larger and more capable offspring. That’s obviously advantageous but not if adult mortality is so low that you may not get a chance to have children at all. In this perilous situation, natural selection favours those who mature and reproduce early, to the cost of their growth.

Migliano’s theory has one important missing piece that needs to be filled in – why do many pygmies die early? It is here that the other earlier explanations for their short size may come in, including tropical diseases, thick jungle environments, hot climates and poor nutrition. None of these factors alone can account for pygmy evolution around the world, but Migliano speculates that one or more of them could lower the life expectancies of different populations.

If she’s right, it means that small body size could be an example of convergent evolution, where different groups of people in disparate parts of the globe independently evolved similar solutions to the shared problem of short and hazardous lives.

highway 7 in Columbia, TN after flood

2010-05-07T20:01:00.000-07:00

Evolution of Monogamy in Poison Frogs

2010-04-02T14:07:00.000-07:00

Genetic tests have revealed the secret sex life of a tiny poison dart frog species that lives in the Peruvian rain forests: remarkably, it turns out that these frogs are monogamous. But the reason this species is monogamous is surprising: it's all about the size of the pools that their tadpoles mature in. This is the best evidence yet that just a single cause can affect evolution of a major life history trait, such as a species' mating system.

The forces that underlie the evolution of biparental care have been the subject of lively debate within the scientific community, and in turn, how different forms of parental care affect the evolution of each species' mating system is also not well understood.

According to one long-standing hypothesis proposed by mammologist Devra Kleiman, monogamy may arise as a life history strategy when biparental care becomes critical to offspring survival. In this situation, both parents may experience higher reproductive success by investing in their mutual offspring instead of seeking extrapair reproductive opportunities [DOI: 10.1086/409721]. Life history studies of a variety of avian and mammalian taxa support this hypothesis.

But which ecological factors drive the evolution of biparental care and monogamy? Is just one ecological factor enough, or is more than one necessary? One way of answering these questions is to compare the life histories and ecologies of closely related species where one species is monogamous and provides biparental care while the other is promiscuous and does not provide biparental care. But which species fulfill these criteria?

Jason L. Brown, now a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University, spent six years studying Peruvian poison frogs while a graduate student at East Carolina University. In those studies, he evaluated key ecological and behavioral differences between Peruvian poison frogs and framed those key differences in the context of differing parental care strategies. Building upon his dissertation work, Dr Brown and his colleagues, Victor Morales, at the Ricardo Palma University's Natural History Museum in Lima, Peru, and his dissertation advisor, Kyle Summers, Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at East Carolina University, took a closer look at two closely-related poison frog species: the mimic poison frog, R. imitator, which exhibits biparental care (where both parents care for their tadpoles for a period of months) and the variable poison frog, R. variabilis, which exhibits male parental care (where only the males transport tadpoles to a pool of water and leaves them to fend for themselves).

Like all amphibians, poison frogs are intimately bound to water because that is where they lay their eggs and where their tadpoles mature. But bodies of water are filled with numerous hungry mouths, so the pressures of predation pushed the tiny poison frogs out of the larger ponds and into the considerably smaller (but safer) pools contained in the cup-shaped leaf axils of a variety of plant species that grow in trees. These tree-top plants are not often visited by hungry predators, but their small pools of rainwater, known as phytotelms, lack sufficient nutrients to successfully grow a tadpole (unlike larger ponds of water).

To ensure that their tiny offspring grew up into mature frogs, the mimic poison frogs adopted a new tactic. Merely transporting their tadpoles to individual phytotelms and abandoning them to grow up on their own was no longer enough: the males needed help. Female mimic poison frogs evolved a behavioral strategy known as trophic egg feeding, where they lay unfertilized nutrient-rich eggs into each tadpole's phytotelm for it to eat.

But this strategy requires teamwork: while the female spends her days eating voraciously so her body can manufacture these special trophic eggs, the male visits each tadpole every day or two, for only he knows where they are hidden. Whenever a tadpole nibbles on its father, the male calls to his mate. The female responds to the male's calls by following him to their offspring's phytotelm, jumps into the tiny pool and produces a trophic egg, which the tadpole consumes. The female produces at least one trophic egg for each tadpole every week for a period of months

Crayfish females lure males with urine

2010-03-30T06:31:00.000-07:00

Releasing a steady stream of urine to attract a mate and then fighting off anyone who still dares to approach you doesn’t seem like a great idea for getting sex. But this bizarre strategy is all part of the mating ritual of the signal crayfish. A female’s urine, strange as it sounds, is a powerful aphrodisiac to a male.

Fiona Berry and Thomas Breithaupt studied these courtship chemicals by organising blind speed-dates between male and female crayfish, whose eyes had been covered with tape. They also injected a fluorescent dye into the animals’ bodies, which accumulated in their bladders. Every time they urinated, a plume of green dispersed through the water.

If the duo blocked the female’s nephropores (her urine-producing glands), the males never showed her any interest. If they met, they did so aggressively. But when the duo injected female urine into the water, things took a more lustful turn, and the males quickly seized the females in an amorous grip. Female urine is clearly a turn-on for males.

But the female doesn’t want just any male – she’s after the best, and she makes her suitors prove their mettle by besting her in a test of strength. As he draws near, she responds aggressively, even though it was her who attracted him in the first place. No quarter is given in these fights. The female only stops resisting if the male can flip her over so that he can deposit his sperm on her underside.

Female crayfish shoulder all the burden of raising the next generation, spending six long months rearing their offspring alone. Males, however, only contribute their sperm. Because the females make such a big investment in the next generation, it’s in their interest to choose the best partners.

Being nocturnal, they can’t see how strong a male is and chemical cues aren’t always reliable indicators of quality. The simplest way of discerning the strongest males is to test their strength for herself. By playing hard to get, she makes sure that she gets fertilised by the best mates, who will at least help to produce the fittest possible young even if they never help to raise them.

Urine typically has an aggressive meaning for crayfish. Males release it when they battle each other, and so do females. During courtship, the difference is that males are drawn to female urine and they stop releasing their own. Doing so might be their way of appeasing the violent female, his way of raising a chemical white flag in the hopes of getting a chance to mate.

In some ways, this is a surprising set-up. In species like crayfish, where females do all the work in raising the next generation, males usually have to be the persuasive ones during courtship while females are the choosy sex. But female crayfish have taken on both roles – seductress and selector. By sending out mixed messages with her urine, she can draw a pool of eager mates that she can then test.

What Lies Beneath

2010-03-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

What Lies Beneath
By NATHANIEL PHILBRICK

THE WHALE

In Search of the Giants of the Sea

By Philip Hoare

Illustrated. 453 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99

“Moby-Dick” is often viewed as a singularly American creation. Part of the beguiling genius of “The Whale,” a rhapsodic meditation on all things cetacean, is that Philip Hoare so suggestively explores the English origins of Herman Melville’s masterpiece while providing his own quirky, often revelatory take on the more familiar aspects of the novel. But “The Whale” is about much more than the literary sources of “Moby-Dick.” Always in the foreground of Hoare’s narrative is the whale itself, a creature that haunts and fascinates him as he travels to old whaling ports in both Britain and America, where he speaks with cetologists, naturalists, museum curators and former whalers on a quest to understand the whale, the cosmos and himself.

At least to the human eye, a sperm whale is a profoundly weird-looking animal, and Hoare makes the weirdness seem somehow familiar. The pale interior of the whale’s mouth “glows like a half-open fridge.” When the whale closes its mouth, the teeth of its lower jaw “fit,” Hoare informs us, “into its toothless upper mandible like pins in an electrical socket.” Hoare is always on the lookout for the revealing detail. When he visits the whaling museum in New Bedford, Mass., he notices that the recently installed skeleton of a whale “incontinently . . . drips oil, like sap from a newly cut conifer.” He also has a finely tuned sense of perspective and pacing. As we read about how the six-man crew of a 19th-century whaleboat pursued its prey, we suddenly find ourselves underwater. “A mile below, the whale might be scooping up squid in the silent depths,” Hoare writes, “unaware of the danger that lurked above, the shapes that sculled over the ceiling of its world.”

Hoare is particularly insightful about Melville’s relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author whose influence turned what might have been, in Hoare’s words, “an exercise in propaganda for the American whaling industry” into “a warning to all mankind of its own evil.” It is a fascinating process to contemplate, how a 31-year-old former teacher and whaleman came to write a book “that saw into the future even as it looked into the past.” For a few brief months, Melville was in that unsustainable zone of miraculous creation, channeling a text that is as close to scripture as an American novelist is likely to write. “Each time I read it,” Hoare insists, “it is as if I am reading it for the first time.”

In one of the more entertaining episodes of “The Whale,” Hoare ventures to Cape Cod to trace Henry David Thoreau’s engagement with that region’s wave-battered coast. In Provincetown, he finds himself in a boat with the redoubtable and magnificently named Stormy Mayo, a Cape Codder who has devoted his life to studying and protecting the 350 to 400 remaining Atlantic right whales. Hoare describes how Mayo — wearing a hockey mask and a helmet equipped with a video camera — tries to untangle right whales from fishing nets. When Hoare finally sees a right whale for the first time, he is overwhelmed not by wonder but by the smell, which he describes as “somewhere between a cow’s fart and a fishy wharf.”

It is near the British whaling port of Hull in East Yorkshire, on the banks of the Humber River, that Hoare’s pilgrimage leads him to the “English Anchor” of “Moby-Dick.” In the great hall of the expansive manor house Burton Constable, Hoare comes face to face with “the only physical relics of Melville’s book”: pieces of the skeleton described by Thomas Beale in “The Natural History of the Sperm Whale.” Melville quoted relentlessly from Beale’s treatise, providing his own book with the factual ballast that kept it from being overwhelmed by its many literary influences, which in addition to Hawthorne included Shakespeare, Thomas Browne and a host of others.

Hoare provides a graphic account of whaling’s “historical crescendo” during the second half of the 20th century, when more than 72,000 whales were killed in a single year. Elsewhere he evokes a possible future in which the rising sea levels associated with global warming will allow the whale to become the planet’s dominant species “with only distant memories of the time when they were persecuted by beings whose greed proved to be their downfall.” As it turns out, whales have already ventured beyond this paltry planet. Unlike any other known substance, sperm whale oil works as a lubricant in the extraordinarily cold temperatures of outer space. “The Hubble space telescope is wheeling around the earth on spermaceti,” Hoare writes, “seeing six billion years into the past.” But that’s not all. The scientists who fitted out the Voyager probe decided that the song of the humpback was the best way to greet any possible aliens. This means that long after all of us are gone, the call of the whale will be traveling out into the distant reaches of the universe.

Hoare is to “The Whale” what Ishmael is to “Moby-Dick”: the genial, deceptively complex narrator who reveals only those personal details that are essential to his narrative. Since this is a book about deep divers, Hoare starts with an account of his near birth within a submarine. His parents had just begun a tour of a naval sub tied up to the docks in Portsmouth, England, when his very pregnant mother felt her first contraction. “For a moment,” Hoare writes, “it seemed as though I was about to appear below the waterline.” As it turned out, Hoare was born not beneath the waves but at his parents’ home in nearby Southampton, the famous port to which he returns near the conclusion of the book to discover that his mother is approaching the end. After a night on a cot beside her hospital bed, he awakens in the early morning just as she ceases to breathe, “leaving me,” he writes in an evocation of Ishmael’s fate in the epilogue of “Moby-Dick,” “another orphan.”

In the end Hoare plunges into the amniotic waters surrounding the Azores, where he sees his first living sperm whale. As he snorkels beside the huge creature he can feel its sonarlike clicks resonating through his body. “My rib cage had become a sound box,” he writes. “The whale was creating its own picture of me in its head; . . . an outline of an alien in its world.” Coupled with the recognition of his own inherent strangeness is the realization that this is a female sperm whale and that there is “an invisible umbilical between us.” And so “The Whale” finishes where it began, in the midst of a birth at the surface of a deep and mysterious sea.

Koalas catch Chlamydia

2010-03-27T09:19:00.000-07:00

by Captain Skellett

Sitting up in their gumtrees, watching the world with little eyes set above the kind of nose you’d expect to find in a craft store. The koala’s fuzzy gray head is adorned with furry white ears, and the end result is a huge bundle of cute that makes you want to squeal.

Of course, being an Australian I know our cute koala isn’t as cuddly as it looks. Okay, it is when you actually get to cuddle one at the zoo. Otherwise they’re just plain vicious. Behind those fuzzy paws are some serious claws. They’re surprisingly fast on the ground, and they grunt in the night like a bush pig in a trap. Freaking terrifying to a twelve year old in a tent, let me tell you.

All the same I like koalas. They be fearsome.

Over a mug o’ rum this week, a friend told me an alarming tale about koalas. She said they catch Chlamydia because they are so promiscuous. It gives them a runny bottom, and makes them infertile.

I haven’t found much evidence that koalas sleep around. But they do have weird special sexual organs. Instead of having one head, a koala penis has two. The female has two internal vagina (vaginas?). The sciencey term for the double dippers is “bifurcated” and lots of marsupials are that way endowed. In fact the echidna penis has four heads!

As for Chlamydia, yes, koalas catch it. There are two strains which infect koalas. C. pneumoniae which humans can also catch, and is one of the leading causes of pneumonia in the world, and C. pecorum which some other animals get and causes urinary tract and respiratory infections. Although 40-70% of koalas test positive for Chlamydia, less than a quarter of them have symptoms at any one time. (Just to be complicated, the C in those names stands for Chlamydophila, a separate but very similar genus to Chlamydia. Same thing, different word says I.)

Chlamydia is a bacteria which acts like a virus. It has the usual cell wall, DNA, RNA, protein concoction that bacteria are so fond of, but unlike most bacteria it can’t grow by itself. To reproduce it has to hijack the machinery of another cell (like a human or koala cell). That’s how viruses roll.

It’s bad news for the koalas, as the cure for Chlamydia is a course of antibiotics taken daily – hard to do in the wild.

One Strange Fish Tale

2010-03-03T13:26:00.001-08:00

By Peter Schmidt

Behold the regal rainbow trout, dappled denizen of deep lake and rushing river, fierce hunter of fish and fly—and prize of pork-barrel politics, invigorator of men, eradicator of native species, payload of numerous bombing missions.

An angler can catch a lot of rainbow trout and yet have no clue what a remarkable force of nature—and mankind—the creatures truly are. Anders Halverson, a research associate at the University of Colorado's Center of the American West, hoists them up for close inspection in a book just released by Yale University Press: An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World.

Few one-that-got-away stories sound nearly as improbable as his account of how our species, Homo sapiens, spread the fish species, Oncorhynchus mykiss, beyond its native range.

Consider that as of the 1870s, the rainbow trout and its sea-run variant, the steelhead, lived only along the Pacific Rim, from California to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. Since then, Halverson says, the fish "have been introduced to every state in the United States and to at least 80 different countries on every continent except Antarctica," an expansion of range that took humans, corn, sheep, and dogs thousands of years to achieve.

Halverson offers statistics that illustrate how much humans are still involved in the spread of rainbow trout: For each of the roughly four million people born in the United States each year, he says, state and federal hatcheries stock about 20 of the fish in public waters. Most of them being mature, they weigh a total of about 25 million pounds.
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Why make such an investment in spreading this one species of fish? It grows rapidly in hatcheries and withstands warmer waters and more-difficult conditions than other trout. Perhaps more important, Halverson says, the stocking of rainbow trout—which fight hard and leap acrobatically when hooked—has "satisfied a powerful human need": the primal urge to seek out and battle prey.

Halverson's book is a microhistory, an examination of America's involvement with a favored fish that sheds light on broader truths regarding our recent relationship with the natural world.

He says he fished for stocked rainbow trout while growing up in Colorado but eventually got bored with the pursuit and thought little of the fish until he became a graduate student in aquatic ecology at Yale University, where he earned his doctorate in 2005. At Yale "I came to realize there is a real paradox to the way so many fisheries are managed these days," he says. "Like most fishermen, I see fishing as a way to escape civilization and industrialization, and a way to sort of make peace with the natural world." Yet most rainbow trout, being either the products of hatcheries or the descendants of hatchery fish, "are in many ways a product of that industrialization."

He decided to write a book examining the artificial spread of the rainbow trout and obtained a National Science Foundation grant to help finance the undertaking. He initially expected the project to be mainly an exercise in muckraking (he had worked as a newspaper reporter before going to graduate school). But "the more people I met and the more people I interviewed," he says, "the more I realized what a complex topic this is." Although he came across case after case in which efforts to spread the trout led to environmental disasters, his book generally does not paint those involved as fools or villains.

When it comes to government policy regarding trout, he says, "there are a lot of issues for which there are no clear answers." He points to the dilemma posed by rainbow trout's ability to mate with the increasingly rare—and unhealthily inbred—cutthroat trout of the American West. Such interbreeding is causing cutthroats to become even rarer as a distinct species, but the purebred cutthroat population is having so much trouble surviving on its own that hybridization might represent the single best hope of passing the fish's genes along to future generations. It is unclear whether the long-term survival of cutthroats requires keeping rainbows at a distance or bringing the two species together.

The oddest specimens in An Entirely Synthetic Fish are the people. They include Livingston Stone, a New Hampshire pastor who abandoned the pulpit to raise brook trout on a fish farm, then ventured to California in the 1870s, initially to set up a federal salmon hatchery in the Sacramento River Valley. He encountered the rainbow trout and ended up propagating that species in a hatchery on the McCloud River, where he lived under threat of attack by outlaws and members of the Wintu tribe. In one report on his activities, he remarked, "With tarantulas, scorpions, rattlesnakes, Indians, panthers and threats of murder our course here is not wholly over a path of roses."

Among others described in Halverson's book is Al Reese, a crop duster and barnstormer who in the late 1940s helped persuade California's Department of Fish and Game to drop rainbow trout into mountain lakes from the air. (He tested the fishes' ability to survive the trip partly by holding live specimens out a car window at 70 miles per hour.) The state agency recruited World War II pilots and purchased surplus military airplanes to dump the fish, generally from about 200 feet. Many of the trout died on impact with the water or ended up stuck in trees, but enough survived to inspire the agency to similarly drop turkeys, partridges, and even beaver (in burlap sacks attached to parachutes). About 50 years later, the agency learned that it had gone overboard with its fish-bombing runs, inadvertently ridding lakes of rare frogs, which the fish had devoured, and filling some lakes with so many trout that their growth was stunted from too much competition for food.

California fish-and-game officials are hardly the only ones who eventually altered trout-stocking policies in response to evidence of money wasted or doing more harm than good.

The book devotes a chapter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's decision in 1962 to deliberately poison the Green River in Utah and Wyoming to wipe out the native fish and make room for rainbows. At the time, few in the agency questioned the idea of pouring huge amounts of the piscicide rotenone into a body of water. Since 1952 federal and state fisheries managers had used the chemical, which kills anything with gills, to clear the way for rainbow trout and other game fish in a long list of rivers and lakes around the nation, even within national parks.

A few scholars at Colorado State University and the University of Utah spoke out against the Green River plan and subsequently complained of efforts by state and federal agencies to shut them up by threatening to cut off grants to their institutions. Many of those involved in the river poisoning lived to regret it, for it ended up being a disaster for both the environment and public relations.

The project's planners assumed they would be able to keep the keep the river from carrying the rotenone into Dinosaur National Monument park by having workers neutralize the poison upstream from the park with potassium permanganate, but they were wrong. When dead fish turned up in the park, the Fish and Wildlife Service found itself in the cross hairs of the National Park Service. Perhaps even more important, about three weeks after the incident, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, helping spawn an environmental movement that barraged officials in Washington with angry letters about the Green River kill.

The secretary of interior at the time, Stewart Udall, responded by curbing the use of rotenone by federal agencies and calling for the welfare of unique species to be a "dominant consideration" in such projects from then on. All four of the chief so-called trash fish that the Green River poisoning sought to kill—the humpback chub, the bonytail, the razorback sucker, and the Colorado pikeminnow—now have a place on the federal endangered-species list. The federal government has spent more than $100-million trying to save them.

An Entirely Synthetic Fish recounts many other governmental attempts at improving nature that went awry. In the 1960s, for example, researchers discovered that stocking a river with hatchery trout can decimate the wild trout population and actually leave it with fewer trout over all; the hatchery fish aggressively compete with the locals for food, and many end up being eaten themselves because they seem to associate the shadows of predators with those of hatchery workers tossing kibble. Beginning in the late 1980s, the Colorado Division of Wildlife inadvertently unleashed trout epidemics by stocking rivers with rainbows infected with parasite-born whirling disease, which leaves its victims disfigured and prone to swimming in tight circles.

The book also compellingly traces how the nation's attitudes toward fishing have varied over time. In the 17th century, the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony regarded fishing with a hook and line as an exercise in idleness deserving punishment. During and just after the American Revolution, fishing suffered a similar image problem, thanks to its association with the English aristocracy. Beginning in the mid-1800s, however, interest in sport fishing boomed as it gained status as a diversion for the wealthy and came to be viewed as a pursuit that helped keep men virile and in touch with nature. Politicians eager to take credit for bringing hatchery jobs and better fishing to their states happily supported federal efforts to stock waters with game species.

Throughout much of America, one can still encounter the absurd sight of fishermen gathered on riverbanks next to hatchery trucks, hoping to catch naïve rainbow trout minutes after they are stocked. While not exactly shooting fish in a barrel, perhaps no other experience comes as close.

For his part, Halverson is attempting to restore the populations of rarer species of trout by, counterintuitively, encouraging people to fish for them. Taking a cue from the culture of birdwatchers, many of whom will travel long distances to add to their "life list" of species they have seen, he has set up a Web site that encourages anglers to catch and release as many species as they can. His logic is that if enough people roll into small towns and say they are out to hook rare fish species X or Y, the local chambers of commerce will get word, and new constituencies will be created to lobby for the fish's restoration.

Writing An Entirely Synthetic Fish has renewed his own interest in angling, both for rainbows and for other trout, Halverson says. "I actually love fishing again. You pick one of these rainbows up, and it is just a book that says so much about us."

Elephants, guests find sanctuary in Ozarks

2010-01-13T07:06:00.000-08:00

By Dena Potter
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sunday, Jan. 10 2010
GREENBRIER, Ark. — As you walk through the field beside the elephants, it's
difficult to tell if that rumble is the sound of their mighty footsteps or your
heart thumping in your chest.

Then just before you sink into the forest, one of the elephants throws her
trunk into the air and trumpets, and you're certain what you're witnessing is
nothing short of magical.

You're not on an African safari. You're in Arkansas, in the foothills of the
Ozark Mountains, at a sanctuary for unwanted elephants. And this may be the
closest you'll ever get to these mammoth creatures.

Riddle's Elephant and Wildlife Sanctuary will celebrate its 20th anniversary
this year. For years, owners Scott and Heidi Riddle have opened its gates for
the Elephant Experience Weekend, where visitors get close to the sanctuary's
eight African and Asian elephants over three days.

The weekends, held about six times a year, help the small nonprofit cover the
cost of caring for and feeding the elephants. But the Riddles say it's more
about the education and conservation of the animals they've spent their whole
lives working with.

"There might be somebody sitting in that room who might have some fantastic,
positive impact on the future of all elephants in the world," said Scott, who
has trained and managed elephants for 44 years.

But on this weekend, it's the elephants that have the impact.

On the first evening, as guests sit around assorted lawn chairs under a big
white tent swapping stories about who they are and where they're from, a loud
gasp brings a sudden halt to the conversation. It's Miss Bets, the sanctuary's
rambunctious 2-year-old African elephant, and her mother, Amy, and they're
headed to their barn for the night. The handlers stop briefly to allow each of
the 11 guests to feed the baby a marshmallow, her favorite treat.

That night, as guests dine in the chow hall, Asian elephants Peggy and Betty
Boop — affectionately known as Booper — munch on hay and twigs under the stars
a couple dozen feet away.

Over the next two days, guests get plenty of hands-on experience with the
elephants, learning along the way what it takes to care for the massive beasts.
Peggy and Booper lie on their sides and let the group bathe them, using brushes
to remove the mud that gets trapped in their bristly hairs.

One of the most important parts of caring for captive elephants is foot care,
so guests pitch in one afternoon to give Peggy a pedicure. One by one, the
Midwestern doctor, the eBay powerseller from Chicago and even the journalist
from Richmond, Va., take turns using a metal rasp to file each toenail to a
perfectly rounded edge.

"For us to stand there and this 8,000-pound animal standing on top of you, just
to be in that presence was just overwhelming," said Chris Martucci of Chicago,
who was there in May with his wife, Deanna.

The sanctuary sits on 330 acres about an hour north of Little Rock, down the
sort of winding country road where it's safe for a turtle to cross during rush
hour. Red metal barns and buildings, including the dormitory and chow hall, dot
the rolling landscape. Horses graze in the distance, and a rooster serves as an
alarm clock.

"It was like a camp, a farm and a sanctuary all in one," said Deanna Martucci.

Most of the buildings were built with grants or donated funds, often with
donated metal or wood. They're not pretty, the Riddles say, but they're
functional.

Scott and Heidi Riddle met while working at the Los Angeles Zoo. They married
in 1986 and opened the sanctuary four years later. Elephants were easy to get
then, and zoos didn't always look at them as a long-term responsibility.

The Riddles wanted to open a sanctuary for all elephants, no matter the sex or
species, and especially for those problem elephants that zoos, circuses or
individuals were looking to unload. But they also understood that to ensure the
survival of the endangered species, they must study the animals and educate
others about them.

The sanctuary has long taken monthly blood samples from each of its elephants.
The data are used in research, including a study on herpes, which is the No. 1
killer of African and Asian elephants. The Riddles also have been active in a
study trying to develop a repellent that will keep elephants away from crops in
India and other areas of the world where the human-elephant conflict is killing
off the elephants.

"We've always felt it was important to, when you have these elephants that are
captive, to not only learn as much as you can about them, but then to educate
about them," Heidi said.

The Riddles started with three elephants, and at one point had more than a
dozen elephants. Miss Bets is the third African elephant born at the sanctuary,
all to first-time mothers. Asian elephant Hank is the nation's No. 1 semen
donor.

Scott still tears up when he talks about the death of Mary, a pachyderm with a
penchant for painting.

Mary died while giving birth. She is one of three elephants buried on a
picturesque portion of the sanctuary. During the weekend, guests take a hay
ride around the sprawling property, stopping by a stream to gather rocks to
place on the memorials.

Gabrielle Durrell of San Diego said her weekend at the sanctuary was "the
actualization of a dream."

"People really should educate themselves on the plight of the elephant and come
out here and spend a few days doing something that they never would have
thought about doing," she said.
Besides the weekends, the sanctuary opens to the public for a few hours the
first Saturday of every month. There's enough interest that it could be open
all the time, but Heidi said they are more concerned with caring for the
elephants.

"It's an opportunity for people to kind of understand better what it takes to
manage elephants," Heidi said. "It's not as black and white as it's often
portrayed to be. Elephants are many shades of gray."

Old McDonald Had a Parrot

2010-01-07T16:27:00.000-08:00

Resurrecting The Extinct

2010-01-07T16:17:00.000-08:00

Could extinct species make a comeback and endangered ones be saved through DNA research? Lesley Stahl reports, this Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010.

Temple of the tigers

2010-01-03T11:26:00.001-08:00

Shagged by a rare parrot

2010-01-02T12:49:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Kristin Samet

Bambi and Thumper "DO EXIST"

2009-12-18T04:14:00.001-08:00

This was taken in Alberta, Canada in a back yard... Very cool!
Bambi & Thumper ....really do exist!

Mt. Rainier Puts on a Show

2009-12-15T15:55:00.000-08:00

14,500 ft.

Those of us NOT living in Tacoma or surrounding areas will appreciate these pictures
This was so amazing, people were pulling over on the freeway to take pictures.

Mt. Rainier puts on a show!

The little dry streak is about to come to an end. But if you looked at Mt Rainier today, you would have known that already.

Take a look at some of these incredible clouds captured over Mt. Rainier today.

Those are called "lenticular clouds" They're caused when the air flow is just right so when it flows over Mt. Rainier , the air gets pushe d upward where it cools and condenses into clouds. Depending on how smooth the flow is, you can get some amazing clouds formations as we've seen so far today Here is more information on what causes them from an earlier blog entry.

It's usually a sign of rain within 24 hours because typically the moist flow that precedes a storm around here is the perfect set up for these clouds.

Beautiful ice formations

2009-12-10T05:55:00.000-08:00

Shark eats siblings in womb!

2009-11-27T11:26:00.000-08:00

Next time you run out of food in the fridge ask yourself this, would you eat a human? If you were in a plane crash in the middle of a desert, would you eat the person who sat next to you, or would you brave the supply of frozen muffins and green omelettes they serve as sky “food”? For your own survival, would you kill and eat your brother or sister?

Some species of shark do indeed feast on their siblings, not just out in the deep blue sea, but while still inside the uterus. Now that’s taking sibling rivalry to a whole new level.

Sharks reproduce in three ways – they either species lay eggs and leave them to hatch, or they lay eggs and let them hatch in the uterus and then give birth to them, or they have a live births. Feeding a growing embryo while it develops in the womb is quite a challenge for sharks, but they have some crazy methods to do it.

Some species, such as the lemon shark, turn their yolk sac into a placenta by attaching it to the wall of the uterus. Salmon shark embryos eat a stream of unfertilized eggs while their in the womb, providing them with plenty of nummy nutrients. Nurse sharks and sand tiger sharks, at the tender age of not even born yet, swim about and eat their siblings. From the 20 or so pups that start life, only two remain – natural selection starting early *they grow up so fast*

This video from the documentary Animals in the Womb has incredible footage of sand tiger shark embryonic cannibalism.

Sophisticated Ears on Found on Butterfly Wings

2009-11-25T20:05:00.000-08:00

Say What? Sophisticated Ears on Found on Butterfly Wings

Butterflies might be experts at using auditory clues to figure out when they’re about to become lunch, according to a new discovery. Butterfly auditory organs are still being figured out; we’ve only known for about a century that they can hear at all. So it was quite a surprise when Kathleen Lucas of the University of Bristol in England found that blue morpho butterflies not only sport tiny ears on the bases of their wings, but can distinguish between high and low-frequency sounds.
Such an advanced ear ( is very rare among similar insects; moths and other butterfly species can hear in a very limited frequency range and take any sound in that range as a threat. Researchers suspect that the blue morpho uses different types of sounds to determine when to stay still (its very visible blue wings are hidden when it’s sitting still) and when to fly. High-frequency sounds, like a bird’s song, are an indication to stay put. Low-frequency sounds, like a bird’s flapping wings, are the blue morpho’s cue to get out of there before it becomes bird food.

Bumblebees!

2009-11-25T15:46:00.000-08:00

The Bumblebees, Bombus species, are among the most popular of all insects. Their black-and-yellow fuzz, large round bodies, and bumbling, buzzing flight make them appear almost cuddly, almost like the "teddy bears" of insects. I have many childhood memories of watching these appealing gentle giants move from one bright flower to another, carefully gathering pollen grains and sipping nectar along the way, gently rebuffing occasional pokes from inquisitive fingers.

Bumblebees are easily identified on the basis of several physical characteristics; their distinctive color patterns and their rotund, fuzzy bodies. Nearly all species have at least some black on their bodies, and most have alternating black and yellow bands or splotches, but some species have white, orange or red in addition to, or instead of yellow, while others may be entirely black. Their large round bodies are completely covered with soft fuzzy plumose hairs, a characteristic that they share with several other hymenopterans according to Brian L. Griffin's delightful little book, Humblebee Bumblebee: The Life Story of the Friendly Bumblebees & Their Use by the Backyard Gardener. However, Bombus are distinguished from other bees by the shape of the female's hind legs. Each hind leg is specially modified in females to carry pollen; it has a bare concave surface surrounded by hairs, known as a corbicula or more commonly, as a pollen basket. In contrast, other similar bees have completely hairy hind legs.

Bumblebees occur throughout the Americas and Europe. Bombus is comprised of more than 250 known species that are primarily found in northern temperate, subarctic and subalpine regions, ranging into cold areas where other bees are not found, although a few species are endemic to tropical regions of South America as well. The reason for this wide distribution is because Bumblebees regulate their body temperatures through solar radiation, shivering, and radiative cooling from their abdomens, as you will learn when you read the excellent book, Bumblebee Economics, written by one of my favorite scientist-writers, Bernd Heinrich.

Similar to many other bees and wasps (the Hymenoptera), Bumblebees are social insects. However, unlike the domesticated honeybee, Apis mellifera, whose nests are comprised of hundreds of thousands of individuals, Bumblebee nests typically number between 50 and 100 individual and rarely exceed 500 individuals, although some colonies may surpass 1000 individuals in tropical climes. Additionally, while a generally large percentage of the entire honeybee hive successfully overwinters, only newly fertilized Bumblebee queens survive the winter. Early each spring, young Bumblebee queens forage and build their colonies after they awaken from hibernation. The young queens raise their first offspring alone while also foraging, until this first generation can take over babysitting duties and then can begin collecting nectar and pollen themselves.

A view inside a Bumblebee nest reveals the queen surrounded by workers
all atop the wax structure of the nest. Open wax pots contain nectar and pollen.
Wax covered clumps contain immature bumble bees. The structure is much
less organized than the perfect symmetry of honeycomb created by honeybees.

Despite my fondness for and attentiveness to Bumblebees, I consider myself lucky when I discover one of their nests. Bumblebee nests are typically located in abandoned mouse holes, but I have found them in all types of objects, including attic insulation, compost piles, abandoned teapots and even in styrofoam refrigerator boxes. Early one spring several years ago, I discovered an active bumblebee nest after I bumped into a precariously dangling chickadee nest box. Within seconds, approximately one dozen small black Bumblebees with yellow and orange stripes greeted me with a soft hum. Fortunately for me, most Bumblebee species rarely sting, even when provoked, unlike the more aggressive domesticated honeybees. The young bees buzzed inquisitively around my face for a minute or so before wandering off to pursue their pollen- and nectar-gathering duties for the day.

As you will learn from Stephen Buchmann and Gary Nabhan's important book, The Forgotten Pollinators, Bumblebees are important pollinators for a variety of food plants that are native to the northern latitudes such as potatoes, blueberries, cranberries, eggplants, kiwi fruits (Chinese gooseberries) and raspberries, and for important crop plants such as red clover, alfalfa, and cotton. Further, Bumblebees are the only insect capable of pollinating the Solanaceae, a family of plants that includes economically important crops such as tomatoes, peppers and tobacco. Approximately 8% of the world's known 250,000 species of flowering plants, the angiosperms, rely exclusively on Bumblebees for pollination.

Bumblebees have several special attributes that uniquely adapt them for pollinating "their" flowers. First, Bumblebees have longer tongues than domesticated honeybees. Their tongues allow Bumblebees to pollinate flowers with long, narrow corolla tubes -- which are found in many flower species that are endemic to North America such as foxglove and fuchsia. Additionally, the large size of Bumblebees enables them to push their way into flowers that protect their nectar reservoirs with "trap doors" or other barriers, such as snapdragons. Further, because Bumblebees are cold tolerant, they visit flowers much earlier in the year than can domesticated honeybees, which are native to Africa. In fact, Bumblebees can be found flying when the cloud cover is more than 70% or when ambient temperatures are cooler than 15 degrees Celsius -- either condition is sufficient to keep honeybees snuggled together in their hives. Amazingly, bumblebees have been reported to actively forage during the winter!

The most remarkable Bumblebee characteristic is their special ability to release tightly held pollen from many important crop plants using sonic vibrations. This ability -- unique to Bumblebees -- is commonly known as "buzz pollination" or "sonication." Using sonication, a buzzing Bumblebee's body shakes rapidly, thereby releasing pollen from tomato blossoms hundreds of times faster than can a honeybee. Their energetic high-pitched buzzes are produced by rapid contractions of their flight muscles while they are decoupled from their wings. These muscular contractions produce physical vibrations of approximately 400 Hz that are transmitted throughout the hollow pollen-containing anthers of the flower, releasing clouds of golden pollen. The Bumblebee's fuzz captures this airborne pollen, some of which is distributed to nearby flowers by the bee, thereby guaranteeing a new crop of tomatoes for humans to enjoy. But most of this pollen is gathered into so-called "pollen baskets" on the Bumblebee's hind legs and they deliver this collected pollen to the hive where the bees later consume it. Because Bumblebees consume pollen in addition to nectar, they visit these so-called "buzz blossoms" that are typically ignored by honeybees, who actively seek out flowers that provide a nectar reward for their pollinators.

The Bumblebee's intense buzzes also makes a strange noise, somewhat reminiscent of the sound produced when one person gives another a "raspberry" or a "Bronx cheer" (which also suggested the peculiar title for this essay).

Considering their environmental and economic importance as pollinators, one might expect that many Bumblebee species have been domesticated, as were their cousins, the honeybees. Unfortunately, this is not the case: with the exception of several tropical species, Bumblebee hives do not over winter so their colonies are much smaller than honeybee hives. As a result, they do not amass large stores of honey necessary to support their large populations through the winter -- these are the same honey stockpiles that are seasonally raided by beekeepers with a sweet tooth. Despite the fact that Bumblebee honey is delicious, they produce such small amounts that they are not attractive to commercial beekeepers. However, several species of Bumblebees have been domesticated for use as pollinators, including Bombus impatiens, which is the main species currently used in North American greenhouses especially those producing "hothouse tomatoes", and the large Earth Bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, which is native to Europe.

Unfortunately, most Bumblebee species are declining or are endangered in the wild due to indiscriminate use of broad-spectrum pesticides, as well as habitat destruction and the introduction of foreign pests and diseases. This has resulted in a concomitant reduction in native plant species that depend upon the unique pollination abilities of Bumblebees. But gardeners and property owners can help conserve Bumblebees by providing them with a safe home: by not using any pesticides on your property, by leaving rock and wood piles and compost piles intact and undisturbed, and by growing plenty of wildflowers. Further, if you do discover a Bumblebee nest on your property, please leave it alone, except to move it to a more private location, if necessary. If you absolutely must move a Bumblebee colony out of their chosen nesting container, then you should provide them with a small wooden or styrofoam box that has a small entrance hole, preferably a chickadee or wren nestbox.

It is my hope that this little essay will help people to become aware of the importance and the plight of Bumblebees so they will act to preserve these amazing insects and the many native plants that depend upon them.

Elephants at Play

2009-11-25T07:20:00.000-08:00

On a visit to a Botswana watering hole, Wild Chronicle's Boyd Matson videotaped pachyderms frolicking like few have ever observed before.

Giant Rat, Bear-Like Marsupial Found in Lost World Crater

2009-11-23T16:46:00.000-08:00

Since the last eruption of Mount Bosavi 200,000 years ago, the Papua New Guinea volcano has become a rich environment full of animals and insects that can’t be seen anywhere else on Earth. And when an expedition of researchers from the US, UK and Papua New Guinea ventured into the crater of Mount Bosavi earlier this year, they found a wealth of previously undiscovered species.
The expedition, filmed by the BBC for a three-part series, took the team into one of the remotest areas of the planet. The rain forest in the dormant volcano’s 100-meter-wide crater is nearly inaccessible. The nearest village is 15 miles away, and the local language is spoken by fewer than 1000 people. The team had to explain to the villagers the concept of paying them for their help and the temporary use of their land to set up base camp.The world inside the crater was completely untouched by human influence. The giant rodents they discovered had no knowledge of humans and therefore showed no fear of the researchers.With the rain forests of Papua New Guinea disappearing at a rate of 3.5% each year, these newly-discovered species are at risk of losing their habitat.Because of their extreme isolation, the species in the Mount Bosavi crater evolved completely separately from other wildlife. A new species of fanged frog was found, along with the above spider which disguises itself as lichen to trick predators. Since there are no cats or primates in the crater, the main predators are large monitor lizards.

Nature can be violent

2009-10-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

Beautiful Icebergs

2009-10-28T10:07:00.000-07:00

Dolphin Bubbles: An Amazing Behavior

2009-09-29T20:24:00.000-07:00

Sharing a Little Water

2009-09-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

AT 120 DEGREES IN AUSTRALIA , IT WAS SO HOT FOR A WEEK THAT KOALAS WERE ASKING PEOPLE FOR WATER. IT'S NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE.
ONE WENT TO A HOUSE TO TRY TO HIDE FROM THE HEAT AND TO
GET A BIT OF SHADE AND HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED WHEN
THE OWNER GAVE HIM SOMETHING TO DRINK. IT'S REALLY CUTE.

Interacting with giraffes

2009-08-29T07:32:00.000-07:00

Giraffe Manor is a small hotel in the Lang'ata suburb of Nairobi, Kenya which, together with its associated Giraffe Centre, serves as a home to a number of endangered Rothschild giraffes, and operates a breeding programme to reintroduce breeding pairs back into the wild to secure the future of the subspecies.
History

The Manor was modelled on a Scottish hunting lodge, and was constructed in 1932 by Sir David Duncan, a member of the Mackintosh family of Mackintosh's Toffee fame on 150 acres (61 ha) of land running down to the Mbagathi River, the southern boundary of the city of Nairobi. In the 1960s the Manor was purchased by a local investor who leased it to a succession of people, including the late Dennis Lakin, before it fell into disrepair, unoccupied.

In 1974 the Manor was purchased by Betty Leslie-Melville and her husband Jock, along with 15 acres (6.1 ha) of the original 150 acres. Since then a further 60 acres (24 ha) of those have also been purchased, which along with an additional 40 acres gifted by Peter Beard which used to form part of his "Hog Ranch" has brought the total acreage of the Manor up to 115 acres (47 ha).

[edit] Life as a giraffe sanctuary

Shortly after purchasing the Manor, the Leslie-Melvilles learned that the only remaining Rothschild giraffes in Kenya were in danger due to a compulsory purchase by the Kenyan government of an 18,000-acre privately owned ranch at Soi, part of Lewa Downs, which was their sole habitat. Inevitably the purchase would result in the land being sub-divided into smallholdings, and the giraffes being slaughtered.[1]

Since the Manor was already home to three wild bull giraffes (nicknamed Tom, Dick and Harry), the Leslie-Melvilles agreed to rehome one of the giraffes, an eight-foot tall, 450-pound baby they named Daisy, about whom Betty subsequently wrote the book "Raising Daisy Rothschild", later turned into the film The Last Giraffe.[2]

Daisy was soon joined by another baby giraffe, Marlon (named after Marlon Brando), and since then the Manor, in conjunction with locations such as Woburn Safari Park in Bedfordshire, England, has run a breeding programme to reintroduce the Rothschild giraffe into the wild to expand the gene pool. At any one time the Manor has around a dozen giraffes in residence, although at present there are only eight,[3] and part of the land of the Manor is given over to the Giraffe Centre, run by the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife, a charitable organisation set up by Jock Leslie-Melville in 1972.[4] By tradition the giraffes themselves are named after individuals who have contributed significantly (whether financially or otherwise) to the work of AFEW, such as Lynn, named for author and journalist Lynn Sherr, a giraffe devotee who wrote an entire book devoted to the creature.[5]

In 1983 Rick Anderson, Betty's son from her first marriage, and his wife Bryony, moved into the Manor, and a year later opened the Manor as a small, privately hosted hotel where guests could feed the giraffes from their breakfast table, through the front door, and out of their bedroom window. The Manor has six bedrooms, one of which is furnished with the belongings of Karen Blixen,[6] and all profits from the hotel go to furthering the charitable objectives of AFEW.

Over the years the Manor has welcomed guests such as Mick Jagger, Walter Cronkite (after whom one of the Manor's resident warthogs was named),[4] Johnny Carson, Brooke Shields and Richard Chamberlain, as well as hosting Richard Branson, Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman on the launch of Virgin Atlantic's London–Nairobi service in 2007.[7]

In March 2009 the Manor was purchased by Mikey and Tanya Carr-Hartley[8] and now forms part of the Tamimi group of lodges and hotels.[9]

The Natural History of Palm Trees

2009-08-24T06:45:00.000-07:00

"The author of over 150 botanical titles, including the great flora of Brazil, Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius also wrote the still-definitive three-volume treatise on the palm family, one of the first plant monographs. He developed his life-long fascination with palms during an expedition through Brazil [map] from 1817 to 1820, and he worked nearly 30 years to prepare this grand summation, including palms found only as fossils." [source]

All three volumes of 'Historia Naturalis Palmarum' are available at the Botanicus website from the Missouri Botanical Gardens. This lavishly illustrated series included systematic descriptions of all known species in the palm family (Arecaceae). The illustrations were produced by Martius himself and Ferdinand Bauer (among others).

The Living Bridges of Cherrapunji

2009-08-20T20:22:00.000-07:00

It might sound like an exaggeration, but the root bridges of Cherrapunji are indeed alive. Unlike most parts of the world, these bridges are grown, not built.
Known as the wettest place on Earth, Cherrapunji is home to some of the most amazing plants. One of these is the Ficus elastica tree, a sort of rubber tree that grows a ind of secondary roots from higher up in the trunk. The War-Khasis, a local tribe, noticed this plant and realized its potential.

Using hollowed-out betel nut trunks, the tribesmen are able to direct the roots in whatever way they like. When the roots grow all the way across a river, they are allowed to return to the soil, and over time, a strong bridge is formed. It takes up to 10-15 years for a root bridge to develop, but it becomes stronger with each passing year and are known to last for centuries.

Boulders and stones are placed among the rubber tree roots for an easier crossing. The living root bridges of Cherrapunji are incredibly sturdy, able to sustain more than fifty people at a time.

The Incredible Doctor Fish Spa

2009-08-20T20:04:00.000-07:00

Doctor Fish spas and skin treatment facilities are becoming more and more popular in countries like Japan, China, Turkey and across Europe. They use an amazing species of fish known as Garra rufa as a cosmetic beautifying treatment and as a cure for a variety of skin diseases. Garra rufa can be found in river basins around the Northern and Central Middle East, in countries like Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, but it is now artificially bred in outdoor pools specifically for the spas.

The so-called Doctor Fish spas first appeared in Turkey, where people suffering from a terrible skin disease called psoriasis, from all around the world started coming for treatment. Psoriasis sufferers develop raised red patches on their body covered by grey, scaly skin, which is sore or very itchy. Fortunately the Garra rufa love to nibble on dead and diseased skin and as soon as the patients insert their limbs in the water, an army of these little guys start eating away the skin that’s been softened by the warm water. Doctor Fish can survive in waters as hot as 43 degrees Celsius, but nutrients can’t and their not fed either, so when somebody dips their feet in their pool, it’s a real treat.

Rainbow River

2009-08-20T18:35:00.000-07:00

The Caño Cristales is a river of Colombia about 100 km long that is located in the Sierra de la Macarena. It was called the “River of five colors” or the most beautiful river in the world. Normally, the Caño Cristales is indistinguishable from another river. However, for a short period each year, thanks to its red, yellow, green and blue algae, the river "flourishes" in a rainbow of colors. It can be said that the river is the biological heritage of humanity.

Australia's coral reefs

2009-08-12T04:46:00.000-07:00

Preemie deer

2009-08-06T21:25:00.000-07:00

Meet a deer little handful called Rupert who was delivered by Caesarean section after his mother was killed by a car

He is growing up without a mother's love. But this tiny muntjac fawn appears to have a lucky streak nonetheless.

He was born three weeks early after his mother was hit by a car.

Vets battled to save her but she died soon afterwards.
Enlarge Rupert

Orphan: Muntjac fawn Rupert was delivered by Caesarean section after his mother was killed by a car. He was just six inches tall and weighed 500 grams

Enlarge Deer

Sleepy head: The male has short antlers, usually four inches or less, and uses them to push enemies off balance so he can wound them with his two-inch upper canine teeth. The small deer is also called the barking deer

The little orphan, delivered by Caesarean section, was just six inches tall and, at 500 grams, weighed little more than a bag of sugar.

It looked like he, too, would face a tough fight for survival.

But staff at Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital in Buckinghamshire believe Rupert, as he has been named, will make a full recovery after his dramatic arrival.

At five days old, he is being kept in an incubator and has just opened his eyes.
Enlarge deer

Wee thing: Rupert is growing into quite a handful. The muntjac grows to 37 inches in length, and weighs between 22 and 40lbs when fully grown

Les Stocker, founder of Tiggywinkles, said: 'Rupert's mother had very severe injuries. We brought him out and got him breathing and then he went into an incubator on oxygen. He is now being fed by a tube.'

'Deer are very, very tricky but this one has spirit. He's an extremely feisty little guy and quite pushy,' he added.

Muntjac are the oldest known deer, appearing 15-35 million years ago, with remains found in Miocene deposits in France and Germany.
Enlarge deer

First steps: An unspecified species of muntjac was introduced to the grounds of Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire in the 19th century by the then Duke of Bedford
Enlarge Deer

Alien species: Larger numbers of muntjac escaped from Whipsnade Zoo, and they are the more likely ancestors, in addition to other releases

The present-day species are native to south-east Asia and can be found from India and Sri Lanka to southern China, Taiwan, Japan and Indonesian islands.

Reeves's Muntjac has been introduced to England and is now common in some areas there.

Inhabiting tropical regions, the deer have no seasonal rut and mating can take place at any time of year.

However, this behaviour is retained by populations introduced to temperate countries.

Males have short antlers, which can regrow but they tend to fight for territory with their tusks.
Enlarge Deer

Widespread: Muntjac colonies exist throughout England below Derbyshire, and the population continues to grow. Small groupings of muntjacs have been seen in large urban parks in the Islington, Highgate, East Ham, Finchley and Greenwich areas of London

Kuroshio Sea

2009-08-02T07:38:00.000-07:00

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world - (song is Please don't go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

Exquisite butterflies

2009-07-11T16:09:00.000-07:00

E.O. Wilson’s Ants & Harvard’s Museum of Natural History

2009-07-01T05:20:00.000-07:00

Dylan Thuras and Michelle Enemark - July 1st, 2009

He is a curious case. Blinded in one eye in a childhood fishing accident, the budding young naturalist E. O. Wilson found it difficult to observe wildlife, like mammals and birds, from a distance. His impaired visibility had changed things. Instead of giving up on his passion for the natural world, the young boy instead focused his sights on a more immediate subject … something he could view up close and personal, something not requiring depth perception: insects.

Throwing himself into his studies, by the time he was 18 Wilson had a growing collection of flies. Soon, however, Wilson came to another roadblock. World War II had created a shortage of insect pins, the metal to make them being in short supply, and he could no longer collect, pin and preserve his beloved flies. Always adaptable, Wilson good-naturedly switched to ants, which were kept in vials of alcohol and involved no pins. It was thus that E.O. began his life’s work.

The Harvard Museum of Natural History is both natural and national treasure. Harvard itself was founded a mere 16 years after the first colony of pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Originally it was a place where a young natural philosopher could learn astronomy, later physics, then medicine, and in 1848, when the great naturalist Louis Agassiz joined the faculty, it became a place to study nature itself. What had been a disorganized and chaotic cabinet of curiosities in Harvard’s past became a revolutionary museum of comparative anatomy under Agassiz’s direction. Today the great museum still holds countless treasures from more than 150 years of collecting. From a dodo skeleton, to the novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly genitalia collection (the writer of Lolita fame had a passion for butterflies, and worked as a research fellow at the Harvard Museum in the 40’s), to the largest collection of ants in the world, the collection is both unique and invaluable.

By the time E. O. Wilson began attending Harvard University around 1948, the museum already housed an impressive collection of ants. Founded in 1908 by entomologist William Morton Wheeler, known as the leading authority on the social behavior of insects, the ant collection grew one million specimens with Wilson’s steady contributions, representing over 5,000 species of those fascinating little workers.

Wilson followed in Wheeler’s footsteps, studying the social behavior of ants, and has found a great deal to say about the tiny creatures, publishing a number of books on ants and ant behavior. He discovered the then unheard of idea that ants used chemical signals in communication, known today as pheromones, and suggested that genes play a role not only in ants and other animals, but in humans as well. The controversial idea came to a “head” when in 1978, an enraged demonstrator at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science poured a pitcher of ice water over Wilson’s head. Despite the occasional controversy, many of Wilson’s findings have stood the test of time, and have played a significant role in our understanding of human biology and nature.

There is at least one ant in Harvard’s collection that is treasured not for its scientific significance, but its historical significance. The “Stalin Ant” was collected in 1945 by a Harvard professor during a dinner hosted by Josef Stalin for visiting American scientists. The professor saw an ant running across his table, and magically produced a vial from his pocket. Industriously filling it with vodka from his martini glass, he saved the specimen for later inspection. This caused great amusement among Stalin and other nearby scientists, and the (scientifically unremarkable) ant has held a special place in the Harvard Museum storerooms ever since. There is no better place to grasp the scientific, historical, or simply curious riches of the Harvard collection than The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History by Nancy Pick, with a foreword by none other than our favorite ant collector, E. O. Wilson.

We have not found another book that so beautifully captures the strange stories behind historical specimens. It is a good thing that Natural History Museums never throw anything away, otherwise we might not know about the bird wing butterflies, scientifically trivial as a specimen; saved because they are the only specimens left of those collected Carl von Hagen on a trip to Papua New Guinea in 1900. The butterflies survived, von Hagen didn’t. It would seem he was eaten by cannibals.

Thankfully, ants aren’t quite as ferocious, and E. O. Wilson is still among us, currently working on a book about ants belonging to the genus Pheidole. There are about 600 species of Pheidole, more than any other any genus, making it the largest in the world, and more than half of these ants were discovered and named by Wilson himself.

Amazing Mountains and Lakes

2009-06-29T06:14:00.000-07:00

Ice Circle

2009-06-22T14:28:00.000-07:00

A rare phenomenon usually only seen in extremely cold countries, scientists generally accept that Ice Circles are formed when surface ice gathers in the center of a body of water rather than the edges.

Animals Getting Drunk

2009-06-13T21:02:00.000-07:00

A small clip from Animals are beautiful people. Directed and written by Jamie Uys.

Cicada

2009-06-09T14:03:00.001-07:00

Animal Tracks 6-2-09

2009-06-06T17:04:00.000-07:00

A relationship for the birds

2009-05-17T06:11:00.000-07:00

An artist and a nature recording expert take different approaches to recording bird songs.

Migration of Animals

2009-05-14T19:57:00.000-07:00

A spectacular event that for some reason reminds me of my subway station in the morning! :) Migration of animals is defined as movements of animals in large numbers from one place to another. In modern usage the term is usually restricted to regular, periodic movements of populations away from and back to their place of origin. A single round trip may take the entire lifetime of an individual, as with the Pacific salmon ; or an individual may make the same trip repeatedly, as with many of the migratory birds and mammals.

Iguazu Falls Spectacular

2009-05-14T06:05:00.000-07:00

Frogs flown from Montserrat to flee deadly fungus

2009-05-09T16:40:00.001-07:00

Frogs flown from Montserrat to flee deadly fungus
By DANICA COTO, Associated Press Writer Danica Coto, Associated Press Writer 2 hrs 44 mins ago

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Scientists are airlifting dozens of one of the world's largest frogs off of Montserrat island to save them from a deadly fungus devastating their dwindling habitat.

The dense forest of this tiny British Caribbean territory is the last remaining stronghold of the critically endangered mountain chicken frog, a 2-pound (0.9 kg), frying pan-size amphibian that got its name because locals say its meat tastes like — you guessed it — chicken.

Once eaten as a delicacy, the frog was hunted and much of its habitat on Montserrat was destroyed by the temperamental Soufriere Hills volcano. Now experts fear a virulent fungus could decimate the few thousand frogs they estimate survive.

"Its impact has been catastrophic," Andrew Cunningham, senior scientist with the Zoological Society of London, said of the chytrid fungus. "The mountain chicken frog has been virtually wiped out."

Experts have found 300 dead frogs and believe hundreds more have perished since the fungus surfaced in late February, said Gerardo Garcia, director of the herpetology department at the British-based Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.

To save the frogs, scientists are giving some of them anti-fungal baths and scooping up dozens of others and flying them at a total cost of $14,000 to zoos in Britain and Sweden, where they live in temperature-controlled rooms with automatic spray systems. About 50 have been flown off the island.

Biologists clad in full paper suits will care for them until they are released.

"We're in a situation where the species could become extinct forever," Garcia said.

Frogs should ideally be kept in their natural habitat, but flying them out was the only short-term solution, said Andrew Terry, Durrell's conservation manager.

They would not have enough to eat if restricted to fungus-free areas, he said.

"Mountain chickens are hardy animals with a wide range of dietary needs," Terry said.

The fungus already has devastated the mountain chicken on Dominica, a nearby island that once served as the frog's other home and whose coat of arms bears the amphibian's image.

Natives on both islands used to favor the frog's meaty legs, although it is mostly tourists now who request them, said Gerard Gray, director of Montserrat's Department of Environment.

Experts are still trying to figure out how to eradicate the fungus, which has killed a range of frog species from Asia to South America.

Chytridiomycosis causes lethargy and convulsions, and thickens the skin that frogs breathe through.

Mountain chickens are nocturnal animals that live in rough terrain, making them hard to find to get an accurate tally of their numbers, Gray said. Scientists estimate a few thousand live on Montserrat.

The large frogs sound like a small howling dog when they croak.

Gray remembers the night he heard a mountain chicken croak and it was so loud he thought it had crawled under his bed.

"My wife laughed at me," he said. "It was in the forest where it was supposed to be."

Hunting aside, the number of frogs already were dwindling in Montserrat because of the active volcano. It has erupted continuously since 1995 and forced more than half of the island's 12,000 people to leave.

But the volcano might prove to be the frog's ultimate savior. Local officials hope to relocate the frog to a region cut off by lava and ash that is inaccessible by foot, and — they hope — free of fungus.

Coral

2009-04-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

Zoologist, lepidopterist and naturalist, Eugenius JC Esper (1742-1810), inherited his father's love of natural history which he pursued as a sideline to his lectureship duties in science at the University of Erlangen in Germany.

He would rise to head the Department of Natural History in Erlangen while expanding their zoological collections substantially (his butterfly collection still exists). He also published a number of copiously illustrated monograph collections relating to seaweeds, butterflies, coral, birds, insects as well as mineralology and general natural history.

The present work is entitled 'Die Pflanzenthiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur mit Farben erleuchtet nebst Beschreibungen' (something like: Natural animal-plants in colour with enlightened commentary) that was first published in ~1791. I get the feeling there were a number of editions or it appeared in excerpts and was subsequently republished as a collection with a variable number of illustrations.

The majority of the images above were sourced from the new natural history collection at the University of Heidelberg.

The Most Terrifying Bird on Earth

2009-04-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

Queensland, Australia. Philip Mclean, a 16 year-old boy, and his brother, three years his junior, encounter a cassowary. Despite the size of the brightly coloured flightless bird before them, the Mclean brothers attempt to bludgeon it to death with clubs. It is a fatal mistake. Armed with its long- and sharp-clawed foot, the bird kicks the younger boy, who flees. His elder brother lands a blow on the beast but is knocked to the ground. Lying prone, Philip is kicked in the neck by the cassowary, opening a deadly wound. The boy manages to get up and run but dies shortly afterward as a result of a haemorrhaging blood vessel in his neck.

Jekyll and Hyde? The cassowary has a fearsome reputation

Philip Mclean’s death took place in 1926, but attacks on humans by the cassowary – viewed by many as the most dangerous bird alive – are not uncommon. Such incidents happen every year in northern Queensland, most often involving a bird that has been fed by people, and usually with it chasing or charging the victim. Humans aren’t the only targets either. In 1995, a cassowary struck a dog in the belly, and while it did not pierce the skin, there was severe bruising and the dog later died from internal injuries. If disturbed or made to feel threatened, this otherwise shy bird can be extremely aggressive.
The southern cassowary is one of the largest birds on the planet – only its relatives the emu and the ostrich are bigger – the female reaching almost 2 metres tall and weighing 130 pounds. It is the only bird in the world with any sort of protective armour, a helmet-like crest that protects its head as it darts through the dense rainforest scrub – which definitely makes it look descended from dinosaur stock. Yet it is the cassowary’s feet that really solidify its reputation as the most lethal of our avian cousins. The dagger-like middle claw of its stout, three-toed foot is 12 cm long, and some experts have claimed it can disembowel a man.
Cassowary comin’ atcha: It is a fast runner, able to reach 50 km/h
Reports of the cassowary having the ability to eviscerate or dismember humans and dogs with a single kick may sound like myth, but you certainly wouldn’t want to find out by being on the receiving end of a lunge when it lashes out. Another point to bear in mind: while this brawler of a bird is unable to fly, it is a good swimmer and on land it sure can shift, attaining speeds of up to 50 km/h and jumping to heights 5 feet. Quickly climbing a tree could be your only option if confronted by a cassowary – just make sure the tree isn’t dropping fruit, as this fiercely territorial bird will defend such food stores for days.
But let’s not demonise the creature with all this talk of its vicious nature; it’s not as if it’s some kind of diabolical fish. The cassowary is a caring parent – or at least the male is: after the female has laid her 3-8 eggs, this new man of the natural world incubates them for 2 months, then protects the chicks for a further 9. The reclusive cassowary can live for over 60 years, yet this wise old bird is in fact endangered. The main reason for its population decline is the clearance of its rainforest habitat, but it is also at risk from motor vehicles, dog attacks, hunters and rival omnivores, feral pigs. So consider the plight of the cassowary, which isn’t as tough as it seems.

Pond Scum Gets Its Moment in the Limelight

2009-04-13T15:48:00.000-07:00

An Algae Collection in Texas Is a Big Hit With the Biofuel Crowd

By RUSSELL GOLD

AUSTIN, Texas -- University of Texas plant physiologist Jerry Brand has spent the past decade lovingly tending the world's largest collection of pond scum.

Now the quest for renewable energy has made Mr. Brand and his algae hot commodities.

As director of the university's Culture Collection of Algae, Mr. Brand is charged with overseeing samples of 3,000 organisms.

"We have more genetic diversity than in all the zoos and botanic gardens of the world put together," says the 67-year-old Mr. Brand.

The Culture Collection of Algae at the University of Texas has seen a spike in interest in its specimens, as inventors try to engineer oil-producing algae. Russell Gold reports from Texas.

Conducting a recent tour of the collection in the university's three-story biology building, Mr. Brand strolled past six-foot-tall shelves filled with flasks containing algae. He paused to point out jugs bubbling with green-hued liquid as a mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide was injected into living samples to aerate them.

The collection's unrivaled diversity has drawn the attention of entrepreneurs who believe that buried within Mr. Brand's assortment of single-cell organisms could be one answer to the world's energy problems.

The basic idea is simple: Algae are little machines that convert solar energy into oily material that can be processed into biofuel. Technically, it's possible to harvest a batch of algae, process the oils into fuel and run a combustion engine like the ones in cars and trucks. To get more oil, just grow more algae.

Mr. Brand is at the center of the quest for the perfect algae for the job.

Mr. Brand's work, during most of his career, was mainly of interest to a narrow band of algae connoisseurs known as phycologists. Now a typical day finds him busy taking calls from venture capitalists and visiting Japanese businessmen to whom he freely offers advice on growing algae. Most commercial applications for algae so far have involved dietary supplements -- algae derived omega-3 fatty acids, for instance.

Samples from the algae collection can be had for $75 apiece; the algae are packed in a screw-top glass vial and sent via overnight mail. Time was when almost all orders came from scientists exploring algae as a food supplement or from high-school kids working on science projects. More than half of orders coming in now are from people working on biofuels. Nobody knows how many different algaes there are.

One afternoon recently at the culture center, Mr. Brand stooped down to examine a batch of algae samples awaiting the mailman. One was headed to the Indian Institute of Petroleum in the foothills of the Himalayas. Another was destined for China; a third to South Dakota.

"There's an enormous universe of algae out there and they have painstakingly collected and cataloged a pretty good chunk of that universe," says Harrison Dillon, co-founder of Solazyme Inc. a California company developing an algae-based diesel and jet fuel. His company has ordered many strains over the years.

Mr. Brand is thrilled that algae are finally getting the attention they deserve.
Dismissing Algae

"Algae have been on the back burner of most people's minds. It's pond scum. It's seaweed," he says. "Those of us who have studied algae for decades realize there is a tremendous genetic potential."

But even Mr. Brand didn't recognize that potential right away. He came to algae as a Ph.D. student studying photosynthesis in the 1970s. Algae proved to be convenient test subjects.

Meanwhile, the university acquired the algae collection in 1976. The samples' roots are traced to 1939, when scientist Ernst G. Pringsheim fled Prague ahead of the Nazis, leaving behind most of his belongings but taking his algae collection. The samples went first to Cambridge, then left England for Indiana University and ended up here in Austin.

Thanks to his longstanding work with algae, Mr. Brand was tapped as director of the collection in 1998.

The collection continues to expand; scholars bring Mr. Brand individual samples from around the world, and occasionally a scientist retires and looks for a new home for his own collection. In 2003, E. Imre Friedmann, a microbiologist interested in how life adapts to extreme environments, turned over much of the algae he acquired on trips to Antarctica and to the Gobi desert in Mongolia.

But biofuels entrepreneurs are picky. They're searching for algae that produce oil -- not all of them do -- and ones that grow quickly. The ideal is algae that do both.

Mr. Brand, whose love of algae's genetic diversity contrasts with his daily uniform of choice -- gray sweater vests -- believes that such focus is naive. "It is like saying I want a wheat [plant] with a high yield that grows fast," he said on a recent afternoon, sitting in his small office where a half-eaten plum lay next to coffee mugs with algae illustrations on them. "But you also have to pay attention to the wheat's disease resistance and whether it falls over when the wind blows."
Oil Producer

One of the more popular algae strains among biofuel scientists is Neochloris oleoabundans, physically undistinguished green dots remarkable for their ability to produce large quantities of oil when deprived of nutrients. The collection's samples of these algae, stored in flasks on shelves and frozen in thermoses filled with liquid nitrogen, are the descendants of samples found in the 1950s in a sand dune in Rub al Khali, Saudi Arabia's legendary sea of sand known as the Empty Quarter.

The discovery is credited to Srisumon Chantanachat, a Bangkok-born botanist whose University of Texas Ph.D. dissertation on algae from arid soils can now be found on the shelves at King Saud University library in Riyadh.

But Mr. Brand has his own favorites. Most notably, there's dasycladales. Opening an industrial refrigerator, the plant scientist pulled out a glass dish filled with distilled water spiked with nutrients.
Sample From Germany

Mr. Brand secured the sample from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, where 50 years ago groundbreaking work was done on these algae's forefathers, deciphering how genetic information is spread within a cell. Mr. Brand traveled to Germany himself to collect the sample, cradling it in his lap on the long return flight to Austin.

Mr. Brand picked up the Pyrex dish to show off his pets to a visitor. Floating in the water was a nickel-size, fern-like green asterisk. "You can see how beautiful these little guys are," he said.

Despite his newfound popularity with the business world, Mr. Brand remains a scientist impatient that there still are not enough "basic biology experiments" being done on algae to understand them better. Doing his part to add to the world's store of algae arcana, he's considering assigning an undergraduate to study the algae that grows in the turtle pond behind his building.

A bird that does the most amazing things ever. A must watch!

2009-04-06T20:01:00.000-07:00

David Gallo: The deep oceans: a ribbon of life

2009-04-01T20:54:00.000-07:00

With vibrant video clips captured by submarines, David Gallo takes us to some of Earth's darkest, most violent, toxic and beautiful habitats, the valleys and volcanic ridges of the oceans' depths, where life is bizarre, resilient and shockingly abundant.

To Feed A Hummingbird…

2009-03-19T06:12:00.000-07:00

You will need a little bit of patience, and not to forget, rock-steady hands.

According to Wikipedia, the Ruby-throated Hummingbirds measure only 7-9 cm in length, and weigh 2-6 g. These delicate creatures are the only species of hummingbirds that regularly nest east of the Mississippi River in North America.

Russ Thompson, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, was able to entice the male of a family of migrating hummingbirds to eat out of the palm of his hand.

This was one of the amazing videos he took during feeding sessions.

Ruby-throated Hummingbird Eating From My Hand (Part One) from Russ Thompson on Vimeo.

Rabbit chasing a big snake must see....

2009-03-13T09:38:00.001-07:00

Don't mess with a mule!

2009-03-05T18:14:00.000-08:00

This is almost unbelievable!

This may be a first...

A couple from Montana were out riding on the range, he with his rifle and she (fortunately) with her camera. Their dogs always followed them, but on this occasion a Mountain Lion decided that he wanted to stalk the dogs (you'll see the dogs in the background watching). Very, very bad decision.

The hunter got off the mule with his rifle and decided to shoot in the air to scare away the lion, but before he could get off a shot the lion charged in and decided he wanted a piece of those dogs. With that, the mule took off and decided HE wanted a piece of that lion. That's when all hell broke loose for the lion.

As the lion approached the dogs, the mule snatched him up by the tail and started whirling him around. Banging its head on the ground on every pass. Then he dropped it, stomped on it and held it to the ground by the throat. The mule then got down on his knees and bit the thing all over a couple of dozen times to make sure it was dead, then whipped it into the air again, walked back over to the couple (that were stunned in silence) and stood there ready to continue his ride as if nothing had just happened.

Fortunately, even though the hunter didn't get off a shot, his wife got off these four pictures.

Great White Hunters

2009-03-04T17:01:00.000-08:00

What do you need to hunt the world's greatest hunter? How about some fishing line and a six-pack.

Answer to bee crisis: amateur beekeepers?

2009-03-04T11:01:00.000-08:00

Sunday, Feb. 22 2009
FENTON,MO. — Beekeeping has been dubbed "farming for intellectuals." The layered
hives, the sociology of the insects and their intriguing life patterns have
long provided an obsession for anyone disposed to backyard science.

But these days, beekeeping hobbyists may be more than just enthusiasts with
funny netted hats. They could provide a vital link in replenishing the world's
disappearing bees and the estimated $15 billion in crops that depend on them.

On Saturday, the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association hosted its second
workshop for beekeepers. It drew nearly 300 people, up from about 200 last year.

"I think the word is getting out about the joy of beekeeping," said Robert
Sears, the association's president, "and the importance of bees in nature."

Dozens of budding beekeepers sat in the Raymond E. Maritz Theater, learning
about where to place their hives, how to handle the frames inside, how to
analyze "honest industry" or determine when their colony has become
demoralized. In another room, more experienced beekeepers — those who attended
last year's workshop — got into the deeper intricacies of beekeeping.

Last year these backyard beekeepers added 150 hives to the area, with an
estimated 7.5 million bees. This year, with the new beekeepers and the
expanding colonies from last year's efforts, the numbers should go up
significantly.

It's these backyard hives, some experts believe, that could provide reservoirs
of healthy bees to bolster commercial populations, the disappearance of which
has become a worsening crisis.

More than two years ago, beekeepers started noticing that bees were abandoning
their hives, mysteriously going off to die somewhere. Since then, the numbers
of bee deaths have climbed.

Last year the population of managed bees — those kept in hives — dropped 36
percent, following a 33 percent drop the previous year, threatening the 90 or
so crops that depend on bees for pollination. Researchers have yet to agree on
the cause of this "colony collapse disorder," but they're getting closer. In
the meantime, many believe, it's up to hobbyists and regional groups to right
the imbalance. "We're pretty confident that hobbyist beekeepers with hives that
raise local queens will continue to create the genetic diversity necessary for
honeybees to survive," Sears said.

Commercial bees are often moved around the country on flatbed trucks, going
from pollination site to pollination site. One hypothesis is that the stress
often sickens the bees, and that chemical and antibiotic treatments further
weaken them.

Some researchers believe they have identified another plausible cause behind
colony collapse disorder.

"We are recognizing that bees are suffering from multiple infirmities," said
Dewey Caron, a speaker at Saturday's workshop and one of the country's
preeminent bee researchers. "We're closer to understanding why they can't fight
back, and that seems to be because of pesticides and herbicides."

But most gardeners don't use either substance — meaning backyards could provide
safe pockets for bees to thrive.

The workshop attendees came from all around the region, and had different
levels of experience or commitment. But, they said, they wanted to be part of
helping nature find a solution.

"We're asking too much of these bees," said Margie Sawicki, an assistant
professor at St. Louis University, who attended the workshop. "This is a way to
build up the population."

And, of course, there's a little bonus in the process, if you get it right.

"I'd like to help with pollination," said Penney Boyce, of University City.
"And I like the honey."

The World’s Largest Mirror

2009-03-03T17:42:00.000-08:00

The world’s largest salt flat, the Salar de Uyuni in Southwestern Bolivia, is one of the most exotic place sceneries on earth. Due to its large size, smooth surface, high surface reflectivity when covered with shallow water, and minimal elevation deviation, Salar de Uyuni makes an ideal target for the testing and calibration of remote sensing instruments on orbiting satellites used to study the Earth. In addition to providing an excellent target surface the skies above Salar de Uyuni are so clear, and the air so dry, that the surface works up to five times better for satellite calibration than using the surface of the ocean.

There is an estimated 10 billion tons of salt in the flats, 25 times the amount in the Bonneville Salt flats in Utah in the United States. The Salar de Uyuni, a sea of salt, a salt desert, was once an inland sea, or giantsalt water lake, but the water vanished into the thin dry air of Andean altitude. All that remains is the salt, tens of meters thick, lying stark beneath bright sky: a sun-bleached skeleton of a dead sea.

Cat Adopts Rabbit

2009-02-12T18:11:00.000-08:00

Cat Adopts Rabbit @ Yahoo! Video

Foxes Jumping on a Trampoline

2009-02-12T04:43:00.000-08:00

Ten new amphibian species discovered in Colombia

2009-02-04T14:56:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Ten new species of amphibians -- including three kinds of poisonous frogs and three transparent-skinned glass frogs -- have been discovered in the mountains of Colombia, conservationists said Monday.

With amphibians under threat around the globe, the discovery was an encouraging sign and reason to protect the area where they were found, said Robin Moore, an amphibian expert at the environmental group Conservation International.

The nine frog species and one salamander species were found in the mountainous Tacarcuna area of the Darien region near Colombia's border with Panama.

Because amphibians have permeable skin, they are exposed directly to the elements and can offer early warnings about the impact of environmental degradation and climate change, Moore said. As much as one-third of all amphibians in the world are threatened with extinction, he said.

"Amphibians are very sensitive to changes ... in the environment," Moore said in a telephone interview. "Amphibians are kind of a barometer in terms of responding to those changes and are likely to be the first to respond, so climate change ... impacts on amphibians heavily."

Amphibians also help control the spread of diseases like malaria and dengue fever, because they eat the insects that transmit these ailments to people.

The new species discovered in Colombia include three poison frogs, three glass frogs, one harlequin frog, two kinds of rain frogs and one salamander.

'NOAH'S ARK' IN COLOMBIA

The expedition that turned up the new amphibians also recorded the presence of large mammals like Baird's tapir, which is considered endangered in Colombia, four species of monkeys and a population of white-lipped peccary, a pig-like creature.

"Without a doubt this region is a true Noah's Ark," said Jose Vicente Rodriguez-Mahecha, the conservation group's scientific director in Colombia.

"The high number of new amphibian species found is a sign of hope, even with the serious threat of extinction that this animal group faces in many other regions of the country and the world," Rodriguez said in a statement.

The area where the new species were found has traditionally served as a place where plants and animals move between North and South America. While the terrain is relatively undisturbed now, its landscape faces threats from selective logging, cattle ranching, hunting, mining and habitat fragmentation.

Between 25 and 30 percent of the natural vegetation there is being deforested.

Moore said protecting the Tacarcuna area where these amphibians were found could also benefit local people by preserving an important watershed.

"We don't go in there and try and tell them to protect the forest for frogs," Moore said. "It's more a case of working with them to find more sustainable long-term solutions that will protect these resources that are ultimately benefiting them."

INVISIBLE OCTOPUS

2009-02-03T16:25:00.000-08:00

A MUST SEE VIDEO

2009-02-01T10:04:00.000-08:00

This is just too sweet.
Not what I expected.

Mass Migration of Stingrays

2009-01-28T10:36:00.000-08:00

Mass Migration of Stingrays

Looking like giant leaves floating in the sea, thousands of Golden Rays are seen here gathering off the coast of Mexico. The spectacular scene was captured as the magnificent creatures made one of their biannual mass migrations to more agreeable waters.

Gliding silently beneath the waves, they turned vast areas of blue water to gold off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. Sandra Critelli, an amateur photographer, stumbled across the phenomenon while looking for whale sharks.

She said: 'It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind.

'It's hard to say exactly how many there were, but in the range of a few thousand'

'We were surrounded by them without seeing the edge of the school and we could see many under the water surface too. I feel very fortunate I was there in the right place at the right time to experience nature at its best'

Measuring up to 7ft (2.1 meters) from wing-tip to wing-tip, Golden rays are also more prosaically known as cow nose rays.

They have long, pointed pectoral fins that separate into two lobes in front of their high-domed heads and give them a cow-like appearance. Despite having poisonous stingers, they are known to be shy and non-threatening when in large schools.

The population in the Gulf of Mexico migrates, in schools of as many as 10,000, clockwise from western Florida to the Yucatan.

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Don't forget to share this with others! Let your friends enjoy the beauty of nature, too!

Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world

2009-01-28T05:29:00.000-08:00

Mycologist Paul Stamets lists 6 ways the mycelium fungus can help save the universe: cleaning polluted soil, making insecticides, treating smallpox and even flu ...

The Animal Odd Couple

2009-01-18T16:36:00.000-08:00

Milky Way _ the galaxy _ not snack-sized anymore

2009-01-05T17:49:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Take that, Andromeda! For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth's cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda. Not anymore. The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought, Andromeda's equal.

Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it's 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it's denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society's convention in Long Beach, Calif.

That difference means a lot, said study author Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. The slight 5-foot-5, 140-pound astrophysicist said it's the cosmic equivalent of him suddenly bulking up to the size of a 6-foot-3, 210-pound NFL linebacker.

"Previously we thought Andromeda was dominant, and that we were the little sister of Andromeda," Reid said. "But now it's more like we're fraternal twins."

That's not necessarily good news. A bigger Milky Way means that it could be crashing violently into the neighboring Andromeda galaxy sooner than predicted - though still billions of years from now.

Reid and his colleagues used a large system of 10 radio telescope antennas to measure the brightest newborn stars in the galaxy at different times in Earth's orbit around the sun. They made a map of those stars, not just in the locations where they were first seen, but in the third dimension of time - something Reid said hasn't been done before.

With that, Reid was able to determine the speed at which the spiral-shaped Milky Way is spinning around its center. That speed - about 568,000 miles per hour - is faster than the 492,000 mph that scientists had been using for decades. That's about a 15 percent jump in spiral speed. The old number was based on less accurate measurements and this is based on actual observations, Reid said.

Once the speed of the galaxy's spin was determined, complex formulas that end up cubing the speed determined the mass of all the dark matter in the Milky Way. And the dark matter - the stuff we can't see - is by far the heaviest stuff in the universe. So that means the Milky Way is about one-and-a-half times the mass had astronomers previously calculated.

The paper makes sense, but isn't the final word on the size of the Milky Way, said Mark Morris, an astrophysicist at the University of California Los Angeles, who wasn't part of the study.

Being bigger means the gravity between the Milky Way and Andromeda is stronger.

So the long-forecast collision between the neighboring galaxies is likely to happen sooner and less likely to be a glancing blow, Reid said.

But don't worry. That's at least 2 to 3 billion years away, he said.

Google Earth Leads Scientists to New Species in Mozambique

2008-12-23T20:34:00.000-08:00

A British expedition of scientists to a mountainous forest called Mount Mabu in northern Mozambique has found that the area is home to hundreds of plant species, birds, butterflies and monkeys.

The 27-square-mile forest is being called a “Lost World” and a “hidden paradise,” filled to the brim with exotic plants, insects, and animals including three new species of Lepidoptera butterly and a new member of the poisonous Gaboon viper family of snakes.

A team of scientists led by the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew also found in just a few weeks’ time that the lush forest was home to the blue duiker antelope, samango monkeys, elephant shrews, almost 200 different types of butterflies, and thousands of tropical plants, and say that at least a few additional new plant species and insects will probably be identified once all of the samples are analyzed.

“The phenomenal diversity is just mind-boggling: seeing how things are adapted to little niches, to me this is the incredible thing,” said Kew expedition leader Jonathan Timberlake, according to Mongabay. “Even today we cannot say we know all the world’s key areas for biodiversity—there are still new ones to discover.”

Kew scientist Julian Bayliss says that he found Mount Mabu, which had been previously unexplored due to unfriendly terrain and civil war, while researching possible conservation projects in the area using satellite imaging tool Google Earth, and unexpectedly noticed green, wooded areas in unexplored locales.

“Nobody knew about it,” Timberlake said to the Daily Mail. “The literature I’m aware of doesn’t mention the word Mabu anywhere. We have looked through the plant collections of Kew and elsewhere and we don’t see the name come up.”

Google Earth is not the only new technology that has recently become of use to scientists. Wired magazine reports that high-definition video is helping scientists study the forces that create volcanic eruptions.
A University of North Carolina seismologist Jonathan Lees and his colleagues found that examining high-definition video frame by frame and using seismic data let them view rapid movements of Guatemala’s Mt. Santiaguito’s dome that normally cannot be seen by the naked eye. “The dome is uplifting prior to the plume coming out,” said Lees. “We never knew this until we did this experiment.”

Scientists say that the new technique will aid them in their understanding of volcanic eruptions, which have been difficult to studying using only indirect measurements such as seismic recordings.

This is what a koala sounds like while mating

2008-12-23T20:27:00.000-08:00

Against the wind

2008-12-20T15:42:00.001-08:00

Music to go with this video
Bob Seger - Against the Wind
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcDCvQbOdig

Dolphin stampede

2008-12-18T06:07:00.000-08:00

Punch Hole Clouds And Other Rarely Seen Cloud Formations

2008-12-17T20:11:00.000-08:00

Punch Hole Clouds may appear as a circular or oval holes in a layer of supercooled clouds; sometimes they assume a form of a perfect circle and persist for quite a long time, drifting together with the cloud layer. One explanation seems to blame the air traffic (the jet contrail intersections) combined with a thermal inversion (a circular motion of a rising warm air).
It seems both rising and sinking air currents can create the same effect. Sometimes a very stable, uniform layer of high-altitude clouds can get "punched though" by a pocket of cold air, which sinks toward the ground - creating the circular hole formation.
NASA Terra satellite equipped with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) has captured these images over Acadiana area in southern Louisiana - a splattering of round holes actually stretched over several states: Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. Some were elongated, some appeared to have smaller clouds inside them.

"This strange phenomenon resulted from a combination of cold temperatures, air traffic, and perhaps unusual atmospheric stability. The cloud blanket on January 29 consisted of supercooled clouds. Supercooled clouds contain water droplets that remain liquid even though the temperature is well below freezing, and such clouds are not unusual. As aircraft from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport passed through these clouds, tiny particles in the exhaust came into contact with the supercooled water droplets, which froze instantly. The larger ice crystals fell out of the cloud deck, leaving behind the “holes,” while the tiniest ice particles in the center remained aloft." (source)

Animals fight for survival

2008-12-14T19:37:00.000-08:00

When the lightning flashes, this is NOT what you want to see.

2008-12-05T06:00:00.000-08:00

When the lightning flashes, this is NOT what you want to see.
THIS IS A PICTURE THAT SOMEONE TOOK WHO WORKS ON AN OIL RIG. HE WAS GOING TO TAKE A PICTURE OF THE LIGHTENING AND WAS UNAWARE OF THE TORNADO UNTIL THE LIGHTENING ILLUMINATED IT.
This is a one-in-a-million photo..............

Taken Thursday night, April 3, 2008.
Lariat # 2
Sandridge Energy
South of Ft Stockton , TX

A very lucky penguin

2008-11-27T09:45:00.000-08:00

THIS IS SO COOL !!

The penguin was going to be killer whale munchie had he not found the boat. The pod was hot on his trail. He must have been terrified, and chose what he hoped was the lesser of two evils.

When an old friend worked at Palmer Station years ago he said he watched killer whales bump small ice bergs to knock the penguins into the water so they could eat them It is a wonder they didn't do this to the Zodiac. Maybe they just knew there were bigger benevolent "penguins" in there, too.

Japanese Landslide

2008-11-22T10:02:00.000-08:00

Termites helped destroy New Orleans dikes?

2008-10-18T05:56:00.000-07:00

Termites helped destroy New Orleans dikes?
NEW ORLEANS (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they've discovered evidence termites might have been to blame for the failure of some New Orleans dikes during Hurricane Katrina.

Louisiana State University Professor Gregg Henderson says he discovered Formosan subterranean termites (Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki) in the floodwall seams of some New Orleans dikes five years before Katrina struck.

After the dikes were breached in 2005, Henderson and colleague Alan Morgan inspected 100 seams for evidence of termites where major floodwall breaks had occurred. They said they discovered 70 percent of the seams in the city's London Avenue Canal, which experienced two major breaks during Katrina, showed evidence of insect attack, as did 27 percent of seams inspected in the walls of the 17th Street Canal.

Henderson said the termites might have contributed to the destruction of the levees in New Orleans by digging networks of tunnels, which can weaken the levee system.

"I believe the termites pose a continuing danger that requires immediate attention," Henderson wrote, suggesting New Orleans' 350 miles of levees and floodwalls should be surveyed for termite damage.

The researchers detail their findings in the fall issue of the journal American Entomologist.

Killer Bee Invasion

2008-09-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

TAMPA, Fla. -- Florida residents are being warned to keep a watchful eye out for Africanized "killer" bees.

A growing number of hives have been reported in the Tampa Bay Area.

The Pinellas County Extension Service says its getting many calls from people plagued by bees, and most of them are the Africanized variety.

Publicity about recent attacks has prompted public awareness, but the county's horticulture expert says the colonies are growing.

"They abscond, which means that once it gets to a certain size, part of them will move to another place to establish another colony of bees, so it becomes kind of a mushrooming problem," explained agent Pam Brown.

Brown says the bees are agitated by vibrations and the african variety will travel quite far to defend their hive.

If you do get attacked by a swarm of bees, the Extension Service has some pretty basic rules that you need to follow.

"If you are being pursued by bees, cover, pull your shirt up, cover your face as much as possible, your mouth, your head, neck and run to the closest place that you can get inside," Brown said.

Experts say people should use an approved exterminator who will not only kill the bees but get rid of the hives as well.

Bees out foraging will return to the hive, or others will move in if its left in place.

'Lizard Man' Nurtured Reptiles And Made Discoveries Along the Way

2008-09-20T10:46:00.000-07:00

BERT LANGERWERF 1944-2008
'Lizard Man' Nurtured Reptiles
And Made Discoveries Along the Way
By STEPHEN MILLER

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In hundreds of enclosures on his Alabama farm, Bert Langerwerf nurtured the beasts that earned him the moniker of "Lizard Man."

Mr. Langerwerf claimed that his Agama International Herpetocultural Institute Inc., named after a brilliantly colored sub-Saharan lizard, was the biggest lizard-breeding facility in the world.

"It's by far the biggest lizard-raising operation in the country," says Russ Gurley, director of the Turtle and Tortoise Preservation Group.
[Bert Langerwerf] Agama International Herpetological Institute Inc.

A onetime physics teacher who was self-educated as a herpetologist, Mr. Langerwerf found that in many species, the sex of offspring is determined by the temperature at which the eggs are incubated -- a discovery often cited in scientific journals.

He also discovered that most lizards need to be exposed to direct sunlight to metabolize calcium for their eggs. The institute sells about 2,000 lizards annually to pet owners, says Mr. Langerwerf's son, Timo.

Mr. Langerwerf, who died Aug. 11 at age 64, boasted that he bred well over 100 lizard species. Most of his business came from three: Australian water dragons, jeweled lacertas and Argentinian tegus, forbidding red-striped monsters that grow to four feet.

Feeding thousands of lizards took lots of food. Mr. Langerwerf and his wife, Hester, collected stale bread and past-ripe vegetables from grocery stores. A local chicken farmer donated dead fowl, and Mr. Langerwerf collected other waste food by dumpster diving. "Thanksgiving time in the dumpsters was amazing," says Mr. Gurley.

He raised unconventional animal feed, including rats, giant African cockroaches and super mealworms, giant squirmy beetle larvae he claimed to have introduced to the U.S. in the late 1980s. Triple the size of a conventional mealworm, they are now commonly used for feeding exotic pet species and were also featured as hors d'oeuvres on the television program "Fear Factor."
Obituaries

* Notable deaths from the business world and entertainment industry from Tributes.com

Born in Holland, Mr. Langerwerf wrote of being ill-suited to schoolyard sports, preferring all his life to scout for bugs and lizards. He moved in 1988 to Alabama, saying the Southern climate was perfect for lizards. Nearly deaf in recent years, he was typically found caring for his lizards to the sounds of North African or other tribal music, blasting at top volume.

He urged owners to let the lizards be lizards.

"It's silly to give them names and play with them. You don't take aquarium fish out of the water to play, do you?" he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2002. His affection shone through: "They're like a live painting, beautiful as flowers."

He is survived by his wife and two sons, and by a Moroccan land turtle Mr. Langerwerf adopted when he was a teenager.

After the Flood: In Louisiana, Diehards Cling to a Vanishing Isle

2008-09-17T06:39:00.000-07:00

ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, La. -- A few days after Hurricane Gustav, Pierre Naquin returned to this fragile vein of marshy land to find part of his roof torn off, his family's furniture, appliances and clothes soaked by beating rains, and black mud oozing under the house. Days later, Hurricane Ike hit the island on its way to Texas.

But as Mr. Naquin, a 67-year-old former tugboat captain, prepared for another slow cleanup, one thing was certain: He won't move. No matter how many times this happens. "This is where I was born. I'm gonna die here," he said.
Gustav Floods Louisiana Wetlands

Jacob Walker, showing his self-made tattoo of Louisiana, carries Braden Naquin in Isle de Jean Charles after Gustav hit the island.

Emergency officials face a number of questions in helping communities like Isle de Jean Charles. Among them: What should be done in wetlands that are disintegrating, or in locations where man-made protections are unlikely ever to spare people from storm damage, yet where many residents refuse to consider moving elsewhere?

With every hurricane, prospects of viable life on this exposed sliver of land -- and others like it nearby -- fade. Built over thousands of years by sediment spread by the Mississippi River during yearly floods, Louisiana's wetlands have been sinking into the Gulf of Mexico ever since the great river was imprisoned in high levees starting in the late 1920s and oil and gas companies began cutting channels through the wetlands.

Without the Mississippi's nourishing sediment and fresh water that once poured onto the edges of the coast, saltwater from the Gulf is eating into the sunken soil, killing off miles of tough marsh grasses and trees that once dissipated the massive surges of water pushed ahead of hurricanes. The once-thick ridge that built up along a bayou and created the island is "all eat up," Mr. Naquin said. "We don't get protected here no more."

Evacuations and flooding are a way of life in Isle de Jean Charles, a poor community of wooden houses and dilapidated shacks in Terrebonne Parish accessed by a narrow causeway that waves lap at on both sides. Once a rural paradise where cattle and pigs roamed, vegetables grew, and inhabitants lived off the land, today it is a finger of land just three feet above sea level where many residents live in poverty or on some form of government assistance.
[Isle de Jean Charles residents survey the damage in a flooded house three days after the storm.] Andy Levin for The Wall Street Journal

Isle de Jean Charles residents survey the damage in a flooded house three days after the storm.

The 9 feet of water, more or less, delivered by Ike was the third major flood here in three years. Increasingly, it seems likely that any major ocean storm moving west in the Gulf of Mexico will flood or wreck Isle de Jean Charles.
Brother Against Brother

Mr. Naquin's determination to stay pits him against his own brother. His ancestors -- Indians intermarried with French settlers -- were among the first people living on this ridge, in the 1800s. His father was a fisherman who trolled the waters around the island for shrimp, oysters and crabs. He and many of the island's 175 or so inhabitants are members of Indian tribes.

Many here fear that giving up the island would mean forfeiting their identity -- and the chance of winning federal recognition and financial aid as an Indian tribe. The groups are recognized as tribes by the state of Louisiana. But the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs has so far declined to award federal recognition.

Six years ago, a cost-benefit analysis by the Army Corps of Engineers found that including the tiny island inside a new levee system would cost about $100 million. Resettling the whole community on higher ground would cost about $8 million.

Relocated residents were to have been allowed to maintain ownership of their land on the island, along with modest monthly royalties they currently get from nearby oil drilling, according to state officials.

Island residents rejected the relocation out of hand. The Rev. Roch Naquin, Pierre's 75-year-old first cousin, left the island as a child because Indians were excluded from local schools in the upper grades. He returned to retire in 1997. He maintains local officials were planning to turn the land over to oil companies or high-paying developers.

"This is a good fishing area," Father Roch says. "Developers are just waiting to come and build waterfront lots and make a fortune."

Local officials deny any such plan. Isle de Jean Charles, about 80 miles southwest of New Orleans, shows no signs of attracting real-estate investors.
[Tribal leader Albert Naquin checks on the damage to a home.] Andy Levin for The Wall Street Journal

Tribal leader Albert Naquin checks on the damage to a home.

Albert Naquin, Pierre's brother and chief of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha Indians, says the real corps plan was to "to let us drown." In 2002, he wrote a letter to the corps likening the island's exclusion from the levee system to the 1838 "Trail of Tears," the forced march of the Cherokee Indians more than 1,000 miles from the Southeastern U.S. to present-day Oklahoma. He pleaded for the federal government to build its levees around the island. Officials ultimately refused on the grounds that it would cost too much money.
Par for the Course?

"History is being relived all over again for the Indian community of the Island," wrote Chief Naquin, who had moved off the island in 1975 to escape having to drive on the flooded causeway on his way to and from work at a natural-gas company. "Indians were always being relocated to reservations by the white man."

Hurricanes Gustav and Ike have been enough to make Chief Naquin reconsider his opposition to moving. With the battle for hurricane protection levees lost, he says he's "wore out." "People's got mud in their homes," he says. "Why make them suffer if they want to go?"

He wants to persuade state and federal officials to make a relocation offer of new homes, a church and community center. Those who are unemployed should be given a year's pay and help finding a job, he says.

Brenda Dardar Robichaux, principal chief of the tribe United Houma Nation, says, "We're not ready to concede that we can't rebuild our community. It's our heritage." But she adds that for those "who are tired of fighting" and want to move, "we're going to support them in that effort as well."

Carl Anderson, senior project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers' $968 million hurricane protection project from which the isle was excluded, says a relocation offer could be renewed.

But Chief Naquin knows that any offer of relocation will face fierce resistance. His brother Pierre, Father Roch and others remained determined to stay, even as the island was flooded again last week. People face dangers -- flooding, tornados, earthquakes -- no matter where they live, Father Roch says. Gustav bent back about a 3-foot piece of his tin roof, dousing treasured photos of his nieces and nephews. "I'm going to stay and keep fighting," he said.

Lighthouses in very stormy weather off the french coast

2008-09-06T06:27:00.000-07:00

Lyre Bird - Imitating Sounds - David Attenborough

2008-08-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

In April 2006, to celebrate naturalist David Attenborough's 80th birthday, the public were asked to vote on their favourite of his television moments.

This clip of the lyrebird was voted number one.

A Lyrebird is either of two species of ground-dwelling Australian birds, most notable for their extraordinary ability to mimic natural and artificial sounds from their environment.

Human Shaped Fruit Grows from Nareepol Tree

2008-08-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

Nareepol Tree
This is amazing tree named "Nareepol" in Thai.

NAREE means Woman or Girl & POL means Bush/Plant/Tree or "buah" in Malay.

It means women tree.

You can see the real tree at Petchaboon province about almost 500 kms away from Bangkok.