Mercury and seafood, video

Oceana in the USA says about this video:

Video: Mercury from Source to Seafood

Posted Mon, Jul 2, 2012 by Michelle Cassidy

The health benefits of seafood are well-documented, but some people avoid eating it after hearing reports of high mercury levels. This video might help make things a little clearer.

Produced by the Dartmouth Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program, the video explains how mercury gets into water and then into the fish that we eat. Burning coal releases mercury into the air and increases its concentrations in our waterways. Depending on where in the food chain a fish is, it could have low levels of mercury or high levels that could be unhealthy.

Eating seafood has many health benefits—it has important Omega 3 fatty acids and is low in the saturated fats you find in other animal proteins, especially red meat. Many fish are safe and healthy to eat. While shark, swordfish, king mackerel, tilefish, and tuna have higher mercury levels, there are plenty of other options that are safe to eat. You can find responsible and healthy seafood choices in our Sustainable Seafood Guide.

Check out the video, which also features Oceana senior scientist Kim Warner, to learn more about how mercury builds up in the environment and how to stay healthy while including seafood in your diet.

New feathered dinosaur discovery

From the American Museum of Natural History:

Newly discovered dinosaur implies greater prevalence of feathers

Megalosaur fossil represents 1st feathered dinosaur not closely related to birds

A new species of feathered dinosaur discovered in southern Germany is further changing the perception of how predatory dinosaurs looked. The fossil of Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, which lived about 150 million years ago, provides the first evidence of feathered theropod dinosaurs that are not closely related to birds. The fossil is described in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today.

“This is a surprising find from the cradle of feathered dinosaur work, the very formation where the first feathered dinosaur Archaeopteryx was collected over 150 years ago,” said Mark Norell, chair of the Division of Palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History and an author on the new paper along with researchers from Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie and the Ludwig Maximilians University.

Theropods are bipedal, mostly carnivorous dinosaurs. In recent years, scientists have discovered that many extinct theropods had feathers. But this feathering has only been found in theropods that are classified as coelurosaurs, a diverse group including animals like T. rex and birds. Sciurumimus—identified as a megalosaur, not a coelurosaur— is the first exception to this rule. The new species also sits deep within the evolutionary tree of theropods, much more so than coelurosaurs, meaning that the species that stem from Sciurumimus are likely to have similar characteristics.

“All of the feathered predatory dinosaurs known so far represent close relatives of birds,” said palaeontologist Oliver Rauhut, of the Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie. “Sciurumimus is much more basal within the dinosaur family tree and thus indicates that all predatory dinosaurs had feathers.”

The fossil, which is of a baby Sciurumimus, was found in the limestones of northern Bavaria and preserves remains of a filamentous plumage, indicating that the whole body was covered with feathers. The genus name of Sciurumimus albersdoerferi refers to the scientific name of the tree squirrels, Sciurus, and means “squirrel-mimic”—referring to the especially bushy tail of the animal. The species name honors the private collector who made the specimen available for scientific study.

“Under ultraviolet light, remains of the skin and feathers show up as luminous patches around the skeleton,” said co-author Helmut Tischlinger, from the Jura Museum Eichstatt.

Sciurumimus is not only remarkable for its feathers. The skeleton, which represents the most complete predatory dinosaur ever found in Europe, allows a rare glimpse at a young dinosaur. Apart from other known juvenile features, such as large eyes, the new find also confirmed other hypotheses.

“It has been suggested for some time that the lifestyle of predatory dinosaurs changed considerably during their growth,” Rauhut said. “Sciurumimus shows a remarkable difference to adult megalosaurs in the dentition, which clearly indicates that it had a different diet.”

Adult megalosaurs reached about 20 feet in length and often weighed more than a ton. They were active predators, which probably also hunted other large dinosaurs. The juvenile specimen of Sciurumimus, which was only about 28 inches in length, probably hunted insects and other small prey, as evidenced by the slender, pointed teeth in the tip of the jaws.

“Everything we find these days shows just how deep in the family tree many characteristics of modern birds go, and just how bird-like these animals were,” Norell said. “At this point it will surprise no one if feather like structures were present in the ancestors of all dinosaurs.”

See also here.

Saving India’s wild gaur

This video, recorded in India, is called Biggest Wild Gaur – World’s Biggest Cattle.

From Wildlife Extra:

South African wildlife experts help save India’s wild Gaur

Written by Debbie Cooper – Courtesy of Wild Magazine

June 2012. Bigger than a buffalo, the gaur or Indian bison is an impressive species. Unfortunately, it’s also under threat and some years ago died out in the Madhya Pradesh province of India. But thanks to a translocation project, spearheaded by South African game capture specialists from Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, the animal’s local extinction has been reversed.

In a groundbreaking exercise, leading South African conservationists, working with a team of Indian counterparts, have successfully reversed a local extinction of the gaur (Indian bison) in the Madhya Pradesh province in northern India. Fifty animals have been moved from Kanha National Park into the secure Bandhavgarh National Park, providing a viable breeding herd to sustainably repopulate some of their original habitat.

Animal translocation

The idea for the project first took root some five years ago when Les Carlisle, Conservation Manager for &Beyond, looked around the park, where &Beyond has tourist concessions, and realised that gaurs could be translocated to repopulate the area. At the time animal translocation – common in South Africa – was not a familiar concept in India, which has seen much regional extinction in recent decades. Seeking to change this, Carlisle enlisted the aid of Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife game capture specialists Dr Dave Cooper and Jeff Cooke, and an Indian delegation was invited to South Africa to witness firsthand the achievements that the provincial conservation body had made in wildlife relocation.

Bureaucratic hurdles overcome

So began a lengthy process of bureaucratic hurdles and perseverance, driven by determined parties on both sides, including Dr HS Pabla, Director Madhya Pradesh Forestry Department, who found himself up against numerous sceptics amongst his countrymen. After several false starts, January 2011 heralded the first India-South Africa joint operation to effect change in the gaur population. In a milestone capture exercise over a course of two weeks, 19 animals were successfully translocated from Kanha to Bandhavgarh. Cooper and Cooke provided expert training for Indian capture staff with outstanding results. In turn, the South Africans learned to understand the unique conditions of India’s highlands. Instead of vehicles or helicopters, the transport of choice in this habitat is the Asian elephant. Superbly trained and responsive, these working animals instantly won the hearts of the South African team.

The arrival of the world’s first-ever mass translocation of gaurs in the middle of a cold winter’s night in 2011 brought tears to dozens of spectators and role-players.

Ezemvelo’s Game Capture Unit Manager Jeff Cooke travels with the team and a sedated gaur. Among the relocated gaurs was a pregnant female, who has since given birth to a healthy calf. This confirms the success of the entire relocation and proves that the animals are now relaxed and adapting to their new environment without any stress.

Second translocation

But the numbers were not yet sufficient to turn the course of nature and in February 2012, the three men returned to India to complete the project. Beyond their highest expectations, the team of Indian specialists trained in the previous round performed an almost perfect repeat procedure and learnt additional mass capture techniques applicable to deer species like chital (spotted deer) and the highly endangered barasingha (swamp deer).

An excerpt from Carlisle’s’ diary reads: “I’m very impressed with how slick the teams have become. Doing a full darting capture in 20 minutes is world class.”

Within days, they reached the final magical tally of 50 required in terms of a successful reversal.

“It was a real high point in our lives,” says Cooper. “Not only have we achieved a notable conservation success, but we forged incredible bonds with international colleagues. It has been an honour to have been part of this incredible journey, to share information and build capacity, in the true spirit of our vocation.”

Carlisle echoed this: “It has been an extraordinary privilege to participate in a pioneering Indian wildlife translocation, planning and execution process. The people involved were totally professional and their determination to make a difference to the future of conservation means that the future of the tiger, the overall indicator of the health of the Madhya Pradesh forests, will surely be improved.”

July 2012. A dramatic photo of a male leopard dragging a massive gaur (or Indian bison) calf in Karnataka’s Bandipur Tiger Reserve turned out to be the same animal photographed by a Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) camera trap nearly eight years ago: here.

Prehistoric pottery, older than agriculture?

This video is called Meet Alexandre Livingstone Smith, archaeologist at the Royal Museum for Central Africa; a pottery specialist.

From New Scientist:

Oldest pottery hints at cooking’s ice-age origins

19:00 28 June 2012 by Michael Marshall

Did a deep freeze spur our ancestors to get cooking? The discovery that the oldest pots in the world were made in China around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum suggests that might be the case.

Hundreds of fragments of pottery have been found since the 1960s in Xianrendong cave in south-east China.

Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University and colleagues excavated the cave again in 2009 and, for the first time, used radiocarbon dating to work out the age of the layers where the pottery shards were found. The oldest ones turned out to be between 19,000 and 20,000 years old.

That is thousands of years before people began farming some 12,000 years ago – suggesting that the pots were made by hunter-gatherers, which is contrary to previous thinking. “The making of pottery is not necessarily related to agriculture,” says Bar-Yosef.

A pottery-agriculture link is, eg, that pottery is more necessary if one wants to store grain than if one wants to conserve hunting quarry, which is more difficult to conserve.

Also, Ice Age hunter-gatherers were often pedestrian nomads. Pottery fits better in a sedentary lifestyle of an agricultural village than with nomads, probably preferring light bags.

Prehistoric African pottery: here.

World’s first stew

Bar-Yosef thinks the shards are the remains of crude pots and bowls, probably about 20 centimetres across. “They were poorly fired and easily breakable,” he says. Their outer surfaces carry scorch marks and small amounts of soot, so Bar-Yosef thinks they were used for cooking.

His dating data helps to locate the oldest potters, but humans had been manipulating clay into figurines for many years by then. The Venus of Dolní Věstonice, a small statuette of a naked woman found in what is now the Czech Republic is estimated to be about 30,000 years old.

What prompted Chinese hunter-gatherers to start cooking food 20,000 years ago? Bar-Yosef points out that, at the time, Earth was in the clutches of the Last Glacial Maximum, the height of the last ice age.

The extreme cold would have caused food shortages. Cooked food yields more energy than raw food, so throwing their meals on the fire could have helped people to survive. It takes some form of stress for species to undergo major changes, says Bar-Yosef.

A later cold period, the Younger Dryas starting about 12,800 years ago, could have forced people to start farming (Current Anthropology, DOI: 10.1086/659784). Because much of Eurasia was colonised by then, people couldn’t escape food shortages by moving to a new area. The only option was to start growing crops.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1218643

This article says that to start farming was not the European hunter-gatherers’ own idea, but that farming was brought to Europe by immigrants from the Middle East.

Bahraini and Saudi European turtle doves

Fortunately, there is more than just bad news about dictatorship from Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

This video is called Birds in Saudi Arabia by Saleh Alnemari.

From Focusing on Wildlife:

Breeding European Turtle Doves in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain

July 1 2012

The only birds around at the moment on my local ‘patch’ are a few resident species and a couple of migrant breeders, with the European Turtle Dove Streptopelia turtur being a migrant breeding species with a few pairs breeding in Dhahran Camp. The birds we get in Saudi Arabia on passage are the more eastern sub-speces arenicola rather than turtur which occurs in the United Kingdom. The main differences are that arenicola has a pale brown mantle rather than the olive-grey of turtur, and the central rectrices are not blackish as in turtur with arenicola also having very broad and rather pale fringes to scapulars and coverts.

European Turtle Dove is a species which is in considerable decline over much of its breeding range, and is declining in the Riyadh area of Saudi Arabia. This decline was first documented at the beginning of the second part of the 20th century (1970’s), especially in Western Europe where the decline has been strongly linked to intensification of agriculture. The main treats to the species are destruction and modification of the breeding habitats, droughts and climate change in their wintering areas and hunting. The species has a low productivity rate and suffers from low adult and juvenile survivorship and in the United Kingdom the species population declined by 90% between 1997 and 2010. In the European Union the following countries are legally allowed to hunt the species, Austria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal & Spain w[h]ere between 2 – 4 million birds are killed each year. Hopefully, the breeding birds in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia as well as Bahrain remain in a healthy state and breeding birds in this region can help balance the serious losses from elsewhere in the species range.

Save Portugal’s Algarve birds

This is a video about flamingos and black-winged stilts at Salgados lagoon in Portugal.

From Wildlife Extra:

Vast, unnecessary hotel complex to destroy Portugal’s wetland paradise

Portugal gives go-ahead to destroy internationally recognized unique coastal lagoon and bird sanctuary on Algarve coast.

July 2012. With current hotel occupancy standing at just 55% the Portuguese Government has disgracefully given permission for yet more – and, what’s worse, the development threatens the last coastal lagoon along the south coast.

The RSPB and SPEA, (the Portuguese equivalent), have been fighting a ten year battle to save the area, Salgados, (or “Pera Marsh” as it’s known to many birdwatchers), and for it to be given named as an SPA, (a site of special protection status); inexplicably this has never been granted.

Vast luxury development panned

Instead the Government has given Finalgarve, (part of Grupo Gallilei, a company currently before a Parliamentary Commission for corruption), permission to develop an area of 359 hectares, (887 acres), right next door to this unique habitat.

Insufficient funds & corruption

Included in the plan are three new hotels and a golf course, along with myriad villas and shops etc. However, with not enough funds to pay the fines being levelled on it for its past corruption, Finalgarve have let it be known that they do not have the money necessary for construction and are appealing for investors worldwide.

Last surviving lagoon

Before tourism came to the Algarve in the 1970′s there were several lagoons similar to Salgados along this coastline and they were used as migratory fuelling stops, over-wintering sites and breeding habitat for many bird species, but all the other lagoons have now been “gentrified” out of existence and Salgados is the last one left.

Standing half-way between two of the Algarve‘s most urbanised areas, Albufeira and Armação de Pera, Salgados has always been under extreme threat and severe pressure for many years but the proposed development of the area surrounding it may well prove to be the last nail in the coffin.

Water misuse

With a low-lying golf course bordering its eastern edge, the dune protecting the lagoon from the sea has been illegally breached whenever the course was in danger of becoming flooded. Conversely, right now, after one of the driest winters on record, water is in short supply, so the water feeding the lagoon is being diverted to keep this course green; the lagoon is now 1 metre lower than usual and is dropping 4 cm every week. Breeding success this year has been severely affected again and many of the resident species have disappeared from the lagoon already.

With the proposed development bringing even more pressure upon this unique area, the lagoon will simply disappear and be lost for ever, and there is widespread international indignation that the Government, currently promoting Nature-based tourism, should let this happen.

Sign the petition

There has been an on-line petition set up to persuade the Government to change its mind, rescind the permission and grant SPA status in order to preserve this habitat for future generations. You are urged to sign it here and to share it on Facebook and Twitter.

Irish children help birds

This video is called A year of Irish birds 2011.

From the RSPB:

Serving up a gigantic feast for birds

Last modified: 02 July 2012

Co Antrim may have the Giant’s Causeway, but in Co Down two schools have set up a Giant Bird Table on their grounds. This is not a massive platform smothered in lard and birdseed, but seed plots that are sown in late April or early May with cereals such as oats, barley or linseed and a cornfield annual mix containing corn marigolds, corn poppy and cornflower. These are then left over winter to go to seed and provide a valuable feeding area for birds during the cold harsh months.

Jen Banks, RSPB’s Youth and Education Assistant, has been working with schools to promote Giant Bird Tables in schools. Following sessions supported by NIEA about the decline of house sparrows, the pupils of Spa and Fairhill Primary were keen to help house sparrows and other seed-eating birds such as chaffinch, greenfinch and goldfinch, as well as less well known species.

Michael McLaughlin, Agri-Environment Officer, RSPB, said, “Seed-eating birds are in the decline across Northern Ireland and Giant Bird Tables are a great way to create the seed-rich habitats that will assist birds like the yellowhammer, tree sparrow, linnet and reed bunting.”

Spa Primary’s Giant Bird Table was created on a slope that was too steep for the pupils to play on.

“We’ve wanted to do something with that bit of ground for some time. As we were having renovations done on our school building, it was thought it would be good to do something for nature as well,” said Hilary Banks, teacher. “The Giant Bird Table was perfect. The pupils really enjoyed sprinkling the seeds and it has just started to grow. We are looking forward to seeing the birds feed on the seeds in the autumn when the pupils return to school.”

Fairhill Primary planted a Giant Bird Table last year and resowed the plot this year. For those who worry that a Giant Bird Table might look out of place in school grounds, there is good news. The school was recently judged in the Best Kept School Competition and were Highly Commended. The Giant Bird Table received a special mention and there was also the suggestion it could be extended.

Both of these schools have done a wonderful job stepping up for nature. The Giant Bird Tables will look beautiful over the summer as they attract many insects to the flowering plants, providing food for chicks. Come the winter the children can watch the birds enjoy the seeds.

For more information on the work the RSPB does in Northern Ireland or to inquire about the Giant Bird Tables, go to www.rspb.org.uk/northernireland.

Bankers demand more poverty in Greece

From daily The Morning Star in Greece:

Bank: Greece must stay on track

Monday 02 July 2012

by Our Foreign Desk

The European Central Bank (ECB) came down with the iron hand today despite its velvet-glove noises about some wiggle room for Greece prior to the recent election.

ECB executive board member Joerg Asmussen bluntly told Greece it must fulfil its austerity targets and reform programme “100 per cent” to stay in the euro.

The warning offers little hope of flexibility for Athens and whether it can be given more time to comply.

“If one has identified that something needs to be done, do this quickly,” Mr Asmussen told a financial conference in Athens.

“Don’t wait. Don’t stretch the pain because this is better to restore confidence in an economy.”

Greece’s new government wants to lower some taxes, freeze public-sector lay-offs and extend by two years the mid-2014 deadline for austerity measures demanded by its creditors, conditions that are hugely unpopular in the country.

But Mr Asmussen said: “If the government intends to lower one tax, it will have to increase another tax by the same amount” and when asked whether Greece would get more time to comply, he simply replied: “I don’t think so.”

Mr Asmussen noted that any extension would lead to a need for more external financial help, meaning: “The other 16 eurozone states and the IMF would then have to provide more financing.”

The ECB is part of the so-called “troika” of debt inspectors overseeing the Greek programme, along with the European Commission and the IMF.

Official figures showed today that unemployment in the eurozone hit another record in May: here. And here. And here.

France’s socialist President Francois Hollande faced his first major challenge from the country’s financial establishment today: here.

How bar-headed geese fly across the Himalayas

This BBC video says about itself:

Steve Leonard goes flying with bar headed geese – the only bird species known to survive the suffocating heights of Mount Everest in its yearly migration. Check out this amazing and funny animal take to the sky, Top Gun style.

From the BBC:

1 July 2012 Last updated at 10:49

Bar-headed geese in high-flying wind tunnel test

By Victoria Gill, Science Reporter, BBC Nature, Salzburg, Austria

Video footage of bar-headed geese in high-altitude wind tunnel experiments has been released by researchers.

The flights were captured in super slow-motion by the University of British Columbia.

During “test flights”, birds wear masks they are trained to wear as goslings, which provide them with oxygen levels that simulate high altitude.

The masks also collect gas that the birds breathe out, measuring how much precious oxygen they use in flight.

BBC Nature spoke to lead researcher Dr Jessica Meir at the Society for Experimental Biology’s annual meeting in Salzburg.

Dr Meir explained that a great deal of research into the “remarkable geese” revealed how the birds are specially adapted to fly at extremely high altitude.

Their blood, for example, can carry far more oxygen to their muscles than other birds.

But while most studies have focused on the birds while they are at rest, Dr Meir wanted to create a “picture of oxygen delivery while the bird is flying“.

Fortunately for her, the university’s engineering department has a wind tunnel wide enough for a goose – with a wingspan of more than 1.5m – to fly in.

Tracking studies have recorded the birds at heights of 6,000m (just under 20,000 feet) – something they need to achieve in order to complete their migration through the Himalayas.

But, in order to find out just how high the birds could fly, Dr Meir and her colleagues recreated the oxygen and nitrogen levels that the birds would receive at 6,000m and at 9,000m above sea level. This is approximately 10% oxygen and 7% oxygen respectively.

At 7% oxygen, the birds are experiencing the conditions required to fly over the summit of Mount Everest.

Dr Meir told BBC Nature that she was interested in the physiology that allowed animals to cope in extreme environments and “do amazing things”.

“I want to uncover the mechanism that allows these incredible physical feats to be accomplished,” she said.

“We already know they fly at up to 6,000m, where the oxygen levels are half what they are at sea level.

“And they’re not only able to function, they’re able to fly, which is an incredibly expensive way of moving around; it takes 10-20 times more oxygen than when they’re resting.”

Dr Meir also hopes that understanding how bar-headed geese cope and perform at such low oxygen levels will help inform research into human respiratory problems.

Other high altitude wildlife

Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys – see the bizarre-looking primate that lives at the highest altitudes of any primate other than humans.
Jumping spider – watch the Himalayan jumping spider hunting at 6,700m above sea level.
Ancient bristlecones – see the world’s oldest trees that have survived 5,000 years of harsh, high altitude conditions.

Rare moss species back in the Netherlands

Translated from the blog of Staatsbosbeheer Texel in the Netherlands:

Scorpidium revolvens moss back in the Netherlands

July 2, 2012

In the nature reserve De Geul, part of National Park Dunes of Texel, former Staatsbosbeheer forester Kees Bruin discovered in valleys of the Moksloot area, restored in 1993, a special moss. It’s Scorpidium revolvens, a species which had been extinct in the Netherlands for more than half a century (since 1951).

See also here. And here.

Texel flower news: here.