Good Guatemalan amphibians and birds news

This video is called Carlos Vasquez Almazan – amphibian conservation in Guatemala.

After bad conservation news from Guatemala, today better news:

New reserve declared in Guatemala to protect indigenous frogs and Endangered birds

Sierra Caral Amphibian Reserve in Guatemala

May 2012. Conservationists are celebrating the establishment of the new 6,000-acre Sierra Caral Amphibian Reserve in Guatemala, which will protect some of the country’s most endangered wildlife. The reserve is home to a dozen globally threatened frogs and salamanders, five found nowhere else in the world, three species of threatened birds, and the recently discovered Merendon Palm-pitviper (Bothriechis thalassinus), an arboreal, blue-toned viper.

Isolated mountain range

Tucked away in the eastern corner of Guatemala near the Caribbean Sea, and running along the Honduran border, the Sierra Caral is an isolated mountain range that is home to numerous rare and endangered animals and plants.

New species

Exploration of these mountains has yielded several new discoveries of beetles, salamanders, frogs, and snakes over the past two decades.

Threatened birds

The site will offer protections for many birds including threatened species such as: the Highland Guan, Great Curassow and Keel-billed Motmot. Furthermore, the site is known as a haven for an abundance of migratory birds including the Canada Warbler, Kentucky Warbler, Wood Thrush, Painted Bunting, Worm-eating Warbler, and Louisiana Waterthrush.

Major stop for migratory birds

“The new Sierra Caral Reserve safeguards key stopover habitat for perhaps millions of migrating U.S. birds, making it an invaluable addition to Central America’s roster of protected areas and a real benefit to U.S. bird conservation efforts,” said Dr. George Fenwick, President of American Bird Conservancy (ABC).

The Sierra Caral forests are especially diverse due to the convergence of floras and faunas from North and South America, as well as many species unique to the region. Only a few Merendon Palm Pit Vipers have been found, most often in a palm native to the Sierra Caral. Guatemalan biologist Carlos Vasquez Almazan, one of the few individuals to find a Merendon Palm-pitviper in the wild, drew international scientific attention to the conservation importance of the Sierra Caral in recent years. He was recently awarded the prestigious Whitley Award for Conservation that recognizes outstanding nature conservationists around the world.

See also here.

New whale research

This video from Britain is called Inside Nature’s Giants 2/18 The Fin Whale (Channel 4).

From Wildlife Extra:

New organ discovered in rorqual whales is clue to lunge feeding

A whale of a discovery: New sensory organ found in rorqual whales

May 2012. Scientists at the University of British Columbia and the Smithsonian Institution have discovered a sensory organ in rorqual whales that coordinates its signature lunge-feeding behaviour – and may help explain their enormous size.

Rorqual whales

Rorquals are a subgroup of baleen whales – including Blue, Fin, Minke and Humpback whales. They are characterized by a special, accordion-like blubber layer that goes from the snout to the navel. The blubber expands up to several times its resting length to allow the whales to engulf large quantities of prey-laden water, which is then expelled through the baleen to filter krill and fish.

The study, to be featured on the cover of the journal Nature, details the discovery of an organ at the tip of the whale’s chin, lodged in the ligamentous tissue that connects their two jaws.

Samples collected from Icelandic whaling

Samples were collected from recently deceased Fin and Minke whale carcasses captured as part of Icelandic commercial whaling operations. Commercial whaling in Iceland resumed in 2006 and quotas are determined annually by its government.

Scanning of the whale’s chin revealed a grape fruit-sized sensory organ, located between the tips of the jaws, and supplied by neurovascular tissue.

The research team was assisted by technicians at FPInnovations, the owner of Canada’s only X-ray computed tomography (XRCT) machine large enough to accommodate the massive specimens. Used to scan giant logs, the XRCT machine provides a three dimensional map of the internal structure of whale tissues.

Coordinates lunge feeding

“We think this sensory organ sends information to the brain in order to coordinate the complex mechanism of lunge-feeding, which involves rotating the jaws, inverting the tongue and expanding the throat pleats and blubber layer,” says lead author Nick Pyenson, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution, who conducted the study while a postdoctoral fellow at UBC. “It probably helps rorquals feel prey density when initiating a lunge.”

Catches 10 kilograms of Krill in each gulp

A Fin whale, the second longest whale on the planet, can engulf as much as 80 cubic metres of water and prey – equal or greater than the size of the whale itself – in each gulp in less than six seconds. A previous study by co-author Jeremy Goldbogen showed that a Fin whale captures 10 kilograms of krill in each gulp in order to sustain its average 50-ton body mass. Goldbogen, who conducted both studies while a PhD student at UBC, is now a scientist with the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington.

“In terms of evolution, the innovation of this sensory organ has a fundamental role in one of the most extreme feeding methods of aquatic creatures,” says co-author and UBC Zoology Prof. Bob Shadwick.

“Because the physical features required to carry out lunge-feeding evolved before the extremely large body sizes observed in today’s rorquals, it’s likely that this sensory organ – and its role in coordinating successful lunging – is responsible for rorquals claiming the largest-animals-on-earth status,” Shadwick adds.

“This also demonstrates how poorly we understand the basic functions of these top predators of the ocean and underlines the importance for biodiversity conservation.”

BP oil disaster, new film

This video from the USA is called The Big Fix Official Trailer.

By Jan Lundberg, Culture Change in the USA:

The Big Fix: Documentary Exposes BP, US Government on Gulf Disaster

Sunday, 20 May 2012 14:41

One of the world’s biggest environmental crimes has been more or less forgotten. This is part of our collective guilt as the world’s ecosystem continues its accelerated collapse. But the new documentary film The Big Fix takes a detailed, daring look at what happened in the Gulf of Mexico with BP‘s Macondo offshore oil drilling rig. The story and facts that emerge are more than disturbing.

The movie is soon getting its major national release in theaters and on Netflix. Viewers will be made to recall the unsettling images of oil slicks, fouled fowl, suddenly unemployed fisher folk, and empty assurances by BP and the Feds.

The partially U.S.-owned British oil company has its origins in geopolitical skullduggery in Iran, explained in the film’s narration and images. The history makes more convincing the subsequent telling of of the corporation’s and the U.S. government’s going to great pains to lie that all was being done that could be done to minimize the blowout’s damage and to clean up the mess.

But there was even more going on, undisclosed to the public, such as the extent and effects of massive application of toxic Corexit. This amounted to a double assault on the Gulf, done deliberately. Those who believe that the whole episode from start to finish was an accident, and that industry and government did their best with a bad situation, are sadly ignorant. Or, they wish to simply keep driving and consuming petroleum in other ways, because deep change is inconvenient or frightening.

Corexit, a dispersant banned in the UK, was immediately employed by BP soon after the blowout, and was ordered stopped by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But BP kept on openly using it, and then secretly so, as The Big Fix tells us.

Even more outrageous was that when the undersea oil well was capped, and scrutiny by the average news-consumer slacked off, people were soon misled by corrupt spokespersons that the oil was benignly disappearing. There were contradictory reports of remaining oil pollution that flew in the face of U.S. and industry claims that the oil was 75% gone. It certainly was not gone, and the bulk of it remains today — perhaps in part from additional ocean floor oil leaks. The oil has slowly been moving into the Atlantic, and may damage the Eastern U.S. seaboard.

What to do? The activist response

Some environmental activists during the crisis’ height did more than hand-wringing and crying out for a clean energy economy some day. We instead called for an immediate step-down in U.S. oil consumption to compensate for what the BP blowout was spewing. Our coalition, World Oil Reduction for the Gulf, was gathering steam when the blowout was capped, but everything naturally went back to business as usual.

But some activists, such as Josh and Rebecca Tickell, were just getting heated up. They could not keep their muckraking lens away from the Gulf, and be like almost everyone else who just moved on in their minds and ignored the plight of the Gulf. The BP blowout and subsequent reports of persistent damage to wildlife and human health were enough to draw the filmmakers to the New Orleans region, Josh Tickell’s boyhood home, to check out the whole situation in 2011. Along for the ride with the Tickells on their rolling headquarters-bus was Peter Fonda, friend to the sea and bait for star-struck Cajuns. The Big Fix’s first dramatic device was to show footage of Fonda in Easy Rider, synced with Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild hard-rock tune.

Oil Spill Residue Still Present – In Minnesota: here.

Two years on, the national spotlight seems to have turned away from the Gulf oil spill, but a massive assessment of the environmental impacts is quietly under way. As Cyrus Martin reports, several recent observations, and a study of deepwater coral communities, suggest we may not be out of the woods yet: here.

Department Of Justice Investigates BP For Faulty Oil Spill Estimates: here.

Greg Palast: BP Covered Up 2008 Caspian Sea Deepwater Blowout and Already Knew Cap Wouldn’t Work: here.

USA: It’s a Fact: Domestic Drilling Doesn’t Affect Gas Prices: here.

Britain: The bosses of the world’s biggest multinational defence and oil companies, including BAE Systems and BP, will be asked to account for why hundreds of millions of pounds of government money was used to help military dictators build up their arsenals, and facilitated environmental and human rights abuses across the world: here.

English llama, football clairvoyant

This music video is called Paul The Octopus – song by Parry Gripp.

From AFP news agency:

Many animals emulate Paul the Octopus

Saturday 19 May 2012

PARIS: Ahead of yesterday’s Champions League final and with Euro 2012 just around the corner, animals of all shapes and sizes queued up to succeed Paul the Octopus, the famous clairvoyant Cephalopoda

Cephalopod; Cephalopoda is plural

from the 2010 World Cup.

Paul, an octopus who lived at an aquarium in the German city of Oberhausen, rose to fame during the last World Cup for correctly “predicting” the outcome of eight consecutive matches at the tournament.

The tentacled soothsayer, who picked winners by selecting food from boxes decorated with teams’ national flags, passed away after the tournament, but there are now plenty of animals bidding to step into his (eight) shoes.

Ahead of yesterday’s Champions League showdown in Munich between Bayern Munich and Chelsea, a local sausage dog named Sissi and an octopus called Rosi from nearby Rosenheim have both predicted that Bayern will prevail.

Dachshund Sissi opted for a dish of food underneath a goal bearing the Bayern logo, while Rosi chose food from a box in Bayern red, apparently backing the Bavarians to beat Chelsea at Munich’s Allianz Arena.

But reports from England say Nicholas, the llama from Sussex, believes the Blues will prevail, after he chose a blue ball in his pen over a red one.

English tabloid the Daily Mirror reports that Nicholas’s prediction carries some weight as he correctly predicted Chelsea would beat Liverpool 2-1 in the FA Cup final earlier this month.

The English llama was ‘more clairvoyant’ than the German animals; as Chelsea won.

Birds, insects in the botanical garden

This video from Britain says about itself:

Make your own Bug Hotel with the Horniman Museum

In the summer of 2009, the Horniman Museum and Gardens started work on a new Wildlife Garden which is now flourishing. It has been created as an outdoor classroom and an inspirational space containing lots of simple and fun ideas for attracting wildlife into green spaces. The minibeast hotel has proved the most popular feature and we have had lots of enquiries from people wanting to know how it was built.

We hope this video helps! The minibeast hotel is a one metre square structure made from old pallets and compost which we then packed with both living and non-living material to encourage bugs to visit for nectar, make their nests and spin their webs.

For more information about visiting the Wildlife Garden or taking part in any of our activities and events, visit our website http://www.horniman.ac.uk

On our way to the botanical garden today: in the canal, two young coots, fed by their parents. Close to where a coot nest was last year, in an old car tire.

Further in the canal, closer to the botanical garden. A beam floats in the water. On top of it, a big red-eared slider turtle. On the same beam, a smaller, younger turtle. Was it born here? Or is the climate too unlike the southern USA for that here?

Also on the beam, an adult coot drying its feathers. A young coot climbs on the beam as well. If the young coot approaches, sometimes the young turtle withdraws its head inside its shield. Soon, its head gets out again.

In the botanical garden since last year, a lot has changed. Now that the surroundings of the astronomical observatory, which had separated in the nineteenth century, are again part of the garden, several small biotopes for threatened Red List plants are around the observatory.

One of them is for plants, adapted to zinc in the earth. Zinc is poison for many plants, but not for plants adapted to it. One of them is the zinc violet; which flowers here.

There are also many new nest boxes in the garden. A big one for tawny owls. Others for great spotted woodpeckers (which I saw today). And for great tits, blue tits, nuthatches, short-toed treecreepers, spotted flycatchers, robins, wrens.

There are also boxes for bats, and one for hedgehogs.

Finally, there are many small boxes for solitary bees. A bigger one, called “insect hotel”. And a box for butterflies.

In the garden pond today: carp, which are supposed to be there. And roach; not supposed to be there, but which keep coming back, because roach eggs get attached to ducks’ feet etc.

Dinosaur-era insect pollination discovery

By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor:

Dino-Era Insects Frozen in Time During Oldest Pollination

As dinosaurs loomed overhead, tiny female insects had just dusted themselves with pollen grains when they perished.

Tue May 15, 2012 10:11 AM ET

THE GIST

Amber preserved the earliest evidence of insect pollination.

The insects, called thrips, lived during the dinosaur age and had dusted themselves with pollen.

With massive dinosaurs towering above, tiny female insects called thrips had just dusted themselves with hundreds of pollen grains from a gingko tree more than 100 million years ago when they perished, only to be preserved in tree resin called amber.

The discovery, detailed this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the oldest known record of insect pollination.

(Pollination occurs when either the wind or an animal, mostly insects, deliver pollen from a plant’s male reproductive organ to the female parts either on the same plant or another one.)

During the lower Cretaceous Period when the newly discovered thrips lived, flowering plants would have just started to diversify, eventually replacing conifers as the dominant species, the researchers said.

“This is the oldest direct evidence for pollination, and the only one from the age of the dinosaurs,” study researcher Carmen Soriano said in a statement. “The co-evolution of flowering plants and insects, thanks to pollination, is a great evolutionary success story.”

Soriano and an international team of scientists studying the two pieces of amber, which were discovered in what is now northern Spain, say the specimens date back between 110 million and 105 million years ago. [Photos of the Ancient Pollinators]

They found six female thrips, also called thysanopterans, enclosed in the amber, with hundreds of pollen grains attached to their tiny bodies — the insects are just 2 millimeters long. The thrips, the researchers found, belong to a new genus now named Gymnopollisthrips, with two new species, G. minor and G. major.

After the amber pieces’ initial discovery, they were then kept in a collection of the Museo de Ciencias Naturales de Álava in Spain.

To get a closer look at the pollination event frozen in time, the team used synchrotron X-ray tomography at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), focusing on the most representative of the amber-encapsulated thrips. In synchrotron X-ray tomography, charged particles are sent speeding through magnetic fields; these particles release high-energy light that can then pierce opaque materials to reveal three-dimensional, high-resolution images.

The images revealed various features of the pollen grains, together suggesting the grains came from a kind of cycad, or gingko, tree, the researchers said. Gingkos have separate male and female trees, with males producing small pollen cones and females bearing ovules at the ends of stalks that develop into seeds after pollination.

The researchers wondered what these pollen transporters would’ve gotten in return for their services so long ago. The benefit must have been the opportunity to pick up pollen food for the thrips’ larvae, said the researchers, adding that this benefit would have nudged the emergence of the ringed hairs specialized for pollen transport.

“Thrips might indeed turn out to be one of the first pollinator groups in geological history, long before evolution turned some of them into flower pollinators,” Soriano said.

See also here. And here.

Migratory birds and lice, new research

This video is called WWT: The Spoon-billed Sandpiper expedition so far.

From the University of Gothenburg in Sweden:

Hitch-hiking with birds for life

Although chewing lice spend their entire lives as parasites on birds, it is difficult to predict patterns of lice distribution, new research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, reveals.

Researcher Daniel Gustafsson has studied chewing lice on sandpipers around the world and investigated how host birds’ migration patterns affect louse distribution and reationships.

With no wings and very small eyes, chewing lice are, by and large, helpless away from their host.

Daniel Gustafsson has studied species of chewing lice that live on the birds’ wings and compared them with species that live on their body feathers.

“Given that chewing lice are almost totally dependent on direct contact between two birds to spread, lice that sit on birds’ wings should find it easier to use occasional contact between two hosts to spread than those that sit closer to birds’ bodies,” Daniel Gustafsson says.

Unexpected results

But contrary to expectation, it would appear that body lice can spread more easily than wing lice, even though they live on parts of their host that less frequently come into contact with other birds.

“This is surprising as body lice should be more limited to one particular species of bird,” Daniel Gustafsson says. “The real opportunities for spreading should be between parents and their offspring in the nest, or between adult birds during mating.”

Genetic and morphological data from two different genera show complicated patterns.

“Wing lice from small bird host species are found on more host species than those that parasitize larger bird host species,” Daniel Gustafsson says.

Genetically almost identical

Another unexpected result is that the body lice on almost all sandpipers worldwide, with the exception of those on dunlins and ruffs, are genetically almost identical.

“Sandpipers are incredibly mobile,” Daniel Gustafsson says. “They breed around the Polar Circle but fly to the tropics during the Arctic winter, following specific migration routes known as flyways.”

He has studied sandpipers in Sweden, Japan, Australia, and Canada.

When sandpipers migrate, they do so in enormous flocks, often tens of thousands strong and containing several different species. These winter flocks should offer excellent opportunities for the lice to spread as the birds often stand in tight groups at high tide and at night.

“But it would appear that several factors other than geography play a role, including the size of the host bird,” Daniel Gustafsson explains. “Specific rest and wintering environments probably play a role, too, as some of the host birds that generally winter in fresh water localities carry species of wing lice that differ from those that live on bird species that are mainly found on the seashore.”

Common on mammals

Some chewing lice have also been found hitch-hiking on louse flies, which are related to deer flies. In such cases they attach themselves to the louse flies’ legs and abdomen.

Other chewing lice have been seen to switch between host ducks by walking on the water surface.

Chewing lice are common in birds and most groups of mammals. There are two species that live on humans: pubic lice and head lice.The thesis has been successfully defended.

Bumblebees most visible Dutch bees

This video is called Giant honey bees – Life in the Undergrowth – BBC Attenborough.

Translated from Dutch Vroege Vogels radio:

Earth Bumblebee wins bee count weekend

May 14, 2012 11:46

The earth bumble bee is the most counted species during the first nationwide bee count weekend. That was announced this Monday by the VARA radio / TV program Vroege Vogels. In total, more than 1300 bees were counted. The earth bumblebee was seen in more than 200 gardens.

Bumblebee

The bees’ top-5 is surprisingly dominated by bumblebees. Second is the tree bumblebee, followed by the garden bumblebee and the common carder-bee. In fifth place only, we find the honeybee. Beforehand, it was expected that the tawny mining bee and the red mason bee would end up higher than now, place 6 and 7. The organizers KNNV, EIS-Netherlands and the Bees Foundation are pleased with the results.

First time

The first national bee count weekend was on 12 and 13 May. Hundreds of participants sent their reports of their own garden, balcony or park to the website www.jaarvandebij.nl.

Dutch honey buzzard research

This video is about a honey buzzard excavating a wasps’ nest.

A new report on honey buzzards in the Netherlands has been published on the Internet.

It is about honey buzzard ecology in the Veluwe region, and in the area around Lochem, 2008-2010.

The report says about their research on food for young honey buzzards:

A total of 503 prey animals were collected, by far most of them in or below the nests. Approximately 4% of the prey were birds (nestlings or recent fledglings only), frogs and slow worms were something more than 1% and (nests of) bumblebees almost 2%.

The rest, 92% of the prey, consisted of wasp honeycombs (Table 7). The annual variation was particularly small: the proportion of wasps ranged from 90.8% in 2008 to 92.7 in 2009.

Big butterfly migration in the USA

This video from the USA says about itself:

Each year the North American Butterfly Association gathers to count the majestic creatures all across America. Here is a portion of what was found in Southeast Texas.

By Ryan Hutchins/The Star-Ledger in the USA:

The great butterfly migration: Unnoticed by most, Red Admiral silently invades N.J.

Published: Friday, May 11, 2012, 8:02 AM Updated: Friday, May 11, 2012, 10:18 AM

They’re invading by the millions — swarms and swarms of them, their black and orange masts fluttering against the spring air from Cape May to Sussex in one of the greatest butterfly migration in decades.

The Red Admiral, ubiquitous but rarely noticed by the layman, is everywhere this year.

“This is a giant invasion. It’s really pretty spectacular,” says Jeffrey Glassberg, president of the North American Butterfly Association, headquartered near Morristown. “We’re to the point where non-butterflying people take notice.”

Spend any time outside this month and you’ll probably see a Red Admiral, known for its orange splotches on each wing. Even in New York’s Central Park, in the middle of a metropolis, the butterflies are dotting every plant. Down the shore, especially close to the water, there have been reports of hundreds — and even thousands — flying north together. There are, of course, many of these butterflies in other northern states.

“There are huge numbers of them in western New York and Michigan and Minnesota,” says Glassberg, author of many books on the subject.

What’s happening?

Red Admirals can’t survive in the cold. Each fall they flee south, spending the winter in the Carolinas, Georgia and other deep-south states. Like other butterfly species, they lay eggs, die and more are born. When spring comes, new generations begin migrating, repopulating northern states and even reaching Canada. Usually, it’s a migration that goes unnoticed by most people.

Every 10 years or so, however, the Red Admiral population booms and spring brings a great happening, says Pat Sutton, a naturalist and writer from Cape May. The last major migration was 2001, so we were due, she says.

But this migration is tremendous, she says. It’s likely spurred by the mild winter, which would have allowed Red Admirals to survive farther north and multiply in great number.

“This year is probably more so than the other big flights we’ve had in 1981, 1990 and 2001,” says Sutton, who used to work for the New Jersey Audubon’s Cape May Bird Observatory and now works as a freelance educator.

In 1990, for example, there were so many Red Admirals that the ones who died over the ocean — perhaps pushed out by winds — actually washed ashore in noticeable numbers, Sutton says. This year’s migration could be even larger than that.

“This seems to be one of the biggest I’ve ever witnessed,” she says. “It’s a fascinating happening.”

Jane Scott, a Florham Park resident and member of the North American Butterfly Association, spotted a great number of the Red Admirals and, perhaps, some similar butterflies in Red Bank last week.

“Unbelievable numbers of butterflies. Just constant. It wasn’t just like one cloud of them, but rather just continuously coming by in twos and threes,” Scott says. “It was incredible.”

What’s so great about this migration, butterfly watchers say, is that everyone gets to see the little creatures — not just those who are on the lookout. It’s a science lesson for the willing and unwilling.

“The natural world, I think, is something that gives us all hope,” says Sutton, who hopes the migration will inspire some to grow gardens to attract wildlife. “Here is a wonderful natural history happening that is exciting — life giving.”