A decades-long study finds that February-nesting gray jays are suffering a shrinking range as global warming heats up their natural “refrigerator”
IN ONTARIO’S ALGONQUIN Provincial Park, February is a lean time for songbirds. The air is frosty, and lakes are lidded with ice. In a month or so, warm weather will bring out swarms of insects, but for now, food is scarce. Yet February is the start of breeding season for gray jays. Within a few weeks, on well-hidden nests, the females will sit on their clutches—three or four pale green, speckled eggs—while snow piles up all around.
Global warming, General Motors’ vice-chairperson of global product development Robert A. Lutz told reporters in a closed-door meeting in January, is “a total crock of shit”: here.
At a national wildlife refuge on the Big Island, staff and volunteers are restoring a damaged woodland that is home to at least 34 endangered bird species
ON A HAWAIIAN WINTER DAY so clear that Mauna Kea’s rounded, volcanic summit emerges from its usual blanket of clouds above the Big Island, federal biologist Jack Jeffrey stands in a shady grove of koa trees at Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge. He is watching a tiny ‘amakihi, a native honeycreeper, dart through the sun-dappled canopy. Suddenly, an ‘akiapola‘au—the Big Island’s rarest bird, with perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 individuals in the wild—begins to loudly sing.
QUICK: WHAT DO YOU KNOW about the Bering Sea, that patch of blue on the map to the west of Alaska?
Your answer could be that an astounding half of the U.S. seafood catch comes from the region—including 2.5 billion pounds of walleye pollock turned every year into imitation crabmeat, fish sticks and fast-food fish filets. Or maybe you know that Yup’ik, Inupiat and Aleut people have lived off the Bering Sea’s bounty for thousands of years. Or that ever since Russians happened upon the region’s Pribilof Islands in the 1700s, human beings have been altering its rich ecosystem. …
The exploitation began in the Pribilof Islands, which are critical breeding and staging areas 300 miles from the mainland. First Russians “ravaged the place,” says Springer, almost eliminating the islands’ fur seals and killing off entirely the local walrus and sea otter populations. In the mid-1800s, U.S. whalers took a huge toll on bowhead and right whales, and in the mid-1900s, several countries did large-scale, uncontrolled commercial fishing as well as additional whaling. In the Aleutian Islands, both the Steller’s sea cow and Steller’s spectacled cormorant were hunted to extinction.
Though the region’s fisheries are now intensively managed, and the hunting of birds and marine mammals is regulated, many species have decreased in number over the past quarter century. They include the spectacled eider and Alaska’s breeding populations of Steller’s eiders, both federally listed as threatened. Populations of Steller’s sea lions [see also here and here]—now listed as endangered in the western part of their range—harbor and fur seals, sea otters, ocean perch and several species of crab have declined, some dramatically. The reasons, elusive and controversial, could include the impacts of commercial fishing in addition to the long-term effects of whaling and natural shifts in ocean temperatures.
Whaling scene found in 3,000-year-old picture, here.
A new study suggests that the impact of predation on juvenile Steller sea lions in the Gulf of Alaska has been significantly underestimated, creating a “productivity pit” from which their population will have difficulty recovering without a reduction of predators: here.
Female Steller sea lions tend to breed near their birthplace. Familiarity with other females, geography may be crucial for reproduction: here.
By insuring herders against livestock losses to snow leopards, an innovative program in Pakistan is helping to protect the elusive and endangered cats
ON A COLD MARCH MORNING in 2000, Mohammed Abbas led his two dozen goats to the outskirts of his village, Skoyo, in northwestern Pakistan. There, the herd spent the day grazing, nosing through light snow cover to the brown grass below. Returning at dusk to drive the animals back to the corral, Abbas noticed that a three-year-old male was missing. Then he found the goat dead, eviscerated and partially eaten, almost certainly by one of more than a hundred hungry snow leopards that roam the mountainous region.
A few years ago, Abbas might have been enraged enough to get his rifle and go leopard hunting. Like 400 or so of his neighbors in the Skoyo Valley, the father of six barely carves out a living by tilling fields and tending orchards in the lowlands and herding goats on the mountain slopes. Instead, when Abbas found the kill, he notified the local insurance committee—and became the first in his village to claim a loss through Project Snow Leopard, an inventive program to protect the cats through a village-administered livestock insurance system linked to snow leopard ecotourism.
The snow leopard, if you can catch a glimpse of one, is a graceful predator, with a luminous soft gray coat marked with rosettes of black on brown and a long tail that helps it balance, doubling as a muffler in bitter weather. Ranging from Afghanistan to China, the cat rules at the top of the food chain in mountain ecosystems that include famous peaks like K2 and Mount Everest.
No one knows for sure how many snow leopards remain in the wild. The cat is so reclusive and hard to track that it has taken on an aura of myth. Based on indirect evidence such as tracks, interviews with locals, and the remains of kills, accepted population estimates range from 3,000 to 7,000.
About 47 million years ago, what is now the Messel quarry was a volcanic lake, surrounded by sub-tropical forests. As there was no oxygen in the deeper layers of the lake, animals and plants sinking to those levels fossilized well.
The palaeontological research at Messel is the scientific base for much of the first part of the BBC TV series Walking with Beasts, about the evolution of life in the Cenozoic.
That research was also the basis for much of the BBC Internet game, the Evolution game. In that game, you started during the Eocene as a small early primate. Then, depending on choices you as a player made on eating various kinds of food, moving to different environments, evading predators, etc., you (or at least, your offspring) could evolve into a human or another primate species living presently. I tried hard to be good at the game. However, mysteriously, I never managed to evolve beyond the Miocene era. Then, as a Proconsul or something, I typically would be unable to get enough food; and I would die. Probably, something was wrong in the design of the game. At the moment, you cannot play it at the BBC site anymore. That’s a pity, as in itself it was interesting.
At the Messel exhibition, looking at the fossils behind glass, I recognized quite some animal species from the Evolution game. Including the small early relative of the horse, Propalaeotherium. The early rodent Ailuravus. Kopidodon macrognathus, also a tree dwelling mammal. Another forest dweller, Heterohyus nanus.
Marsupials, today only living in Australia and the Americas, then also lived in Europe: Peradectes was found at Messel.
The most often found mammal fossils of Messel are bats; eight species have been found so far.
Nine fish species have been found; most of them ‘primitive’ bony fish, related to the gars and bowfin of today, now confined to the Americas. It is possible for exhibition visitors to touch the (replica) bones and scales of well preserved Messel gar and bowfin specimens.
So far, six species of crocodiles; and other reptile species like snakes, lizards, and tortoises.
Over 50% of the insect fossils of Messel are beetles.
A LONG-SNOUTED DYROSAURID (CROCODYLIFORMES, MESOEUCROCODYLIA) FROM THE PALEOCENE OF MOROCCO: PHYLOGENETIC AND PALAEOBIOGEOGRAPHIC IMPLICATIONS: here.
Apart from that fruit-eating fish, killed by a grey heron, the exhibit shows a more notorious relative of the pacu: a ‘real’ carnivorous rhombeus piranha, Serrasalmus rhombeus from Suriname.
Tony Benn discusses Trident replacement and addresses the rally in Trafalgar Square [in London] during the ‘No Trident’, ‘Troops out of Iraq’ demonstration on 24th February 2007.
US military admits to a dozen civilian deaths in Iraq
6 February 2008
The US military confirmed Tuesday that soldiers shot dead at least three Iraqi civilians in their beds Monday night north of Baghdad. The admission comes just a day after military officials acknowledged that nine civilians were killed in an Army air raid south of the capital on February 2.
The incidents, which were only acknowledged by the military after inquiries from the media, highlight the ongoing brutality of the US occupation and its reliance on indiscriminate firepower.
Mounting social distress among returning US troops: here.
Primary elections and party caucuses in 22 states Tuesday left the Democratic presidential nomination contest unresolved. Senator Hillary Clinton barely retained a narrow lead over Senator Barack Obama, winning the primary vote in California, the largest state.
In the Republican contests in 21 states, Senator John McCain opened up a significant lead over his two rivals, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, with California giving him a potentially decisive victory.
As of this posting, no estimate was possible of the total number of convention delegates won by each of the five major candidates, because many of them are apportioned on the basis of the vote in congressional districts, not statewide. Half of all the convention delegates were at issue in the voting.
Clinton won eight of the 22 Democratic contests, including the two largest, New York and California, while Obama won 13. Results in New Mexico have not yet been reported.
Besides California and New York, Clinton’s most significant victory came in Massachusetts, where Obama had been endorsed by senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry and Governor Deval Patrick.
‘Hands Off Iraqi Oil’, read the banner of protest outside the Middle East Energy Conference in London yesterday.
At the conference was Iraqi puppet Oil Minister, Hussein al Shahristani, plus US/UK government ministers, and Shell and BP oil executives seeking ‘Production Sharing Agreements’ (PSA) for control of Iraqi oil supplies.
Shahristani has declared Iraq ‘open for business’, and invited oil companies to invest and prosper.
The protest, organised by Hands Off Iraqi Oil, called for an ‘immediate end to the military and economic occupation of Iraq’, pointing out that international oil companies, and the British and US governments, have been pushing for a law which will hand control of Iraq’s oil to foreign companies. …
Despite the small number and non obstructive nature of their picket, a senior police officer (number 2073 – he would not give his name), threatened the protesters with arrest under section 14 of the Public Order Act.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 