Tag Archives: Europe

European prehistoric hippos

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This video is called Hippos assert control – BBC wildlife.

From Wildlife Extra:

Did the changing climate shrink Europe’s ancient hippos?

Giant hippos weighing 3.5 tons roamed Germany 1.8 million years ago

October 2012. Giant German hippopotamuses wallowing on the banks of the Elbe are not a common sight. Yet 1.8 million years ago hippos were a prominent part of European wildlife, when mega-fauna such as woolly mammoths and giant cave bears bestrode the continent. Now palaeontologists writing in Boreas believe that the changing climate during the Pleistocene Era may have forced Europe’s hippos to shrink to pygmy sizes before driving them to warmer climes.

Giant hippos

“Species of hippo ranged across pre-historic Europe, including the giant Hippopotamus antiquus a huge animal which often weighed up to a tonne more than today’s African hippos,” said lead author Dr Paul Mazza from the University of Florence. “While these giants ranged across Spain, Italy and Germany, ancestors of the modern Hippo, Hippopotamus amphibius, reached as far north as the British Isles.”

Hippos were a constant feature of European wildlife for 1.4 million years, during the climatically turbulent time of the Pleistocene era, which witnessed 17 glacial events. The experience of such environmental changes would not have been without cost, and Dr Mazza and co-author Dr Adele Bertini, also from Florence, investigated the impact this changing climate may have incurred.

The research focused on fossils from across Europe, ranging from the German town of Untermaßfeld in Thuringia, to Castel di Guido, North of Rome, and Collecurti and Colle Lepre in Italy’s Central Eastern Marche province. The fossils were compared to a database of measurements taken from modern African and fossil European hippos.

3.5 tonnes

“The German fossil from Untermaßfeld is the largest hippo ever found in Europe, estimated to weigh up to 3.5 tonnes,” said Mazza. “The Collecurti specimen was also large, but interestingly even though it was close in both time and distance to the Colle Lepre specimen the latter specimen was 25% smaller. A final specimen, an old female from Ortona in central Italy, was smaller again. It was 17% smaller than the Collecurti fossil and approximately 50% lighter.”

The team found that a clear size threshold separated hippo specimens which heralded from different parts of the Pleistocene age. The hippos from the early Pleistocene were the largest ever known while smaller specimens emerged during the middle Pleistocene. Larger specimens briefly reappeared during the late Pleistocene.

“We believe the size difference was connected to the changing environmental conditions throughout the Pleistocene,” said Mazza. “The Ortona hippo, the smallest of the specimens, lived in a climate where glacial cycles turned colder, while cold steppes replaced warm ones across the Mediterranean.”

Shrinking hippos

The drop in temperature and rainfall during the Pleistocene caused significant changes to plant life across Europe resulting in an expansion of grassy steppes. Being grazers hippos may have been expected to thrive in this new environment. Unexpectedly they appeared to shrink, only re-attaining their past size during the warm periods of the late Pleistocene, when forests and woodland re-colonised the steppes.

During their time in Europe hippos were forced to live in habitats influenced by a general environmental trend towards cooler and drier conditions. In response hippos achieved giant sizes during warmer and relatively more humid stages, but became smaller, and even very small, under non-ideal environmental conditions.

“While hippos are normally considered indicators of warm, temperate habitats this research shows that temperature was not only the controlling factor for their ancient ancestors,” concluded Mazza. “Our research suggests other factors, such as food availability, were equally important. Appreciating the importance of factors beyond temperature is of great significance as we consider how species may adapt to future ecological and environmental changes.”

November 2012: The South African National Parks (SANParks) have revealed that the anthrax outbreak that started in late August in the north of the Kruger National Park (KNP) has claimed the lives of 30 hippopotamus in the Letaba and Olifants River. Post mortems results from some of the carcases, suggest they were infected by the bacteria: here.

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Europe’s ‘alien’ species online

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This video from Japan is called Chased by Suzumebachi – Asian Giant Hornet.

From ScienceDaily:

Major Update to Europe’s ‘Alien’ Species Catalogue

(Sep. 12, 2012) — The key catalogue of information on ‘alien’ (non-native) species in Europe has undergone a major update. The DAISIE (Delivering Alien Invasive Species Inventory for Europe) database allows the public and policymakers to get a comprehensive overview of which alien species are present in Europe, their impacts and consequences for the environment and society.

The DAISIE on-line database www.europe-aliens.org, which is relaunched today at the NEOBIOTA conference in Pontevedra, Spain, contains details of over 12,000 alien species. Information collated by DAISIE plays an increasingly important role in tackling the threat of alien species within Europe which has been highlighted as a priority action in policies at all levels from national to global including the Convention on Biological Diversity Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 (Aichi Target 9). …

DAISIE information helps in monitoring and assessing emerging threats from new arrivals, such as the northwards expansion across Europe of the Asian Hornet, and current changes in locations of the grey squirrel in Southern Europe.

The Cook Islands Prime Minister Hon. Henry Puna and his Pacific Islands Forum colleagues have backed an initiative to recognise the widespread economic, social and environmental impacts of invasive species: here.

European butterfly atlas published

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This video is called British Butterflies.

From the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society:

Distribution Atlas of Butterflies in Europe

MALCOLM J. SCOBLE

Article first published online: 26 JUNE 2012

Distribution Atlas of Butterflies in Europe by O. Kudrna, A. Harpke, K. Lux, J. Pennerstorfer, O. Schweiger, J. Settele and M. Wimers . Halle : Gesellschaft für Schmetterlingsschutz , 2011 . 576 pp. ISBN 978-3-938249-70-3 .

This book is the product of an ongoing mission. Its driving force is the lepidopterist Otakar Kudrna, who in 1996 planned a project known as Mapping European Butterflies (MEB). The outcome was the publication, in 2002, of MEB-1, a printed atlas of butterfly distribution maps. MEB-1 was conceived as a source of taxonomic and zoogeographic information, but the decline of European butterflies caused Dr Kudrna to change the underlying purpose of the project to that of conservation which, he noted, needed comprehensive distribution maps.

The present volume, MEB-2, is a fully revised and rewritten version of MEB-1. Most of the book is composed of annotated distribution maps of each of the 441 species of European butterflies, one page per species. The maps are preceded by some introductory text describing the background to MEB and the methodology used. There is a concluding discussion in the final pages. Encouraged by the success of MEB-1, Kudrna worked with some close collaborators for MEB-2 to co-author this book, all with particular and appropriate skills. Added to this core team was a remarkable network of data contributors, who provided the 65,000 records that populate the database from which the computer-generated maps were generated.

Britain’s butterflies in trouble due to wet weather: here.

Map butterfly photo: here.

November 2012. A new study has found that the sensitivity and recovery of UK butterfly populations to extreme drought is affected by the overall area and degree of fragmentation of key habitat types in the landscape: here.

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