Warden Oene de Jong this week on the beach of Boschplaat nature reserve in Terschelling found a young gannet. The bird was entangled in rope and could not fly or swim.
Unfortunately, it often happens that birds, seals and porpoises get caught up in waste floating in the sea. Nets, ropes and can casings are the biggest culprits. Usually the animals do not survive, but this gannet was lucky.
Together with ornithologist Harry Horn, Oene has released the bird and ringed it. In this way it is possible to know more about where and when this bird will be flying around. The gannet’s first flight went quickly towards the sea.
Photos are here. The gannet looks about three years old.
It also causes animals to go north. “North” sometimes means disappearing from the Netherlands. Sometimes it means that animal species hardly known, or only known from the far south, in the Netherlands, will become less rare in Dutch nature.
In a nature reserve in Doetinchem a nest of the rare Polistes biglumis wasp has been found. So far, this species in our country used to live only in southern and central Limburg province. The Forestry Commission announced this today on its website.
The wasp species occurs in Europe, North Africa and eastward to Japan. In the Netherlands the wasp was seen for the first time in 1949, but it was most frequently encountered in the nineties.
According to the Forestry Commission, they are social wasps living in relatively small nests. When flying, they are conspicuous because their legs hang downwards. The wasp settled mainly around the South Limburg marl quarries.
The area is home to one of the largest chalk reefs in Europe, extending six kilometres out to sea. On the chalk is a large forest of the marine plant kelp.
The manager of the new centre Anthony Hurd said the kelp supported a diverse ecosystem.
‘New attractions’
“It not only provides a home to animals, just like a forest would on land, but allows juvenile fish to grow up and other fish to come in and feed on them. So it is a really important habitat.”
Australia’s largest fossil fish found on ancient inland sea
Peter Michael
August 18, 2011 12:00AM
AUSTRALIA’S biggest fish fossil has been discovered on the ancient inland sea of northwest Queensland.
The 3m specimen of genus Cooyoo, which means fish in the local indigenous dialect, was found in sediment of the 100 million-year-old sea floor near Richmond.
It is the latest prehistoric skeleton unearthed in the Outback treasure trove after last summer’s floods.
“What is spectacular about this specimen is the extent of preserved material,” paleontologist Paul Stumkat said. “That means we now know how large this fish was and the details of its anatomy.”
Mr Stumkat, curator of Richmond’s Kronosaurus Korner, said the holy grail for all vertebrate paleontologists was to find a complete skeleton.
“Queensland Museum specimens are only known for heads and vertebra. Now we will have enough scientific material to produce a scientific paper on the body arrangement of this giant predatory fish,” he said.
The fossil was discovered by Canadian volunteers and a 10-person, five-day excavation at the end of June unearthed the specimen. Scientists believe it may rival the complete skeleton of a Xiphactinus, the American ancestor of Cooyoo, found in North America’s ancient inland sea from the Cretaceous period.
That 4m-long sea monster was found with the nearly perfectly preserved 1.8m skeleton of an ichthyodectidaeGillicus arcuatus, inside it. The larger fish apparently died soon after eating its prey, most likely due to the smaller fish struggling and rupturing an organ as it was swallowed.
This site also had skeletons of two unidentified fish, one 70cm long, and a 100cm squid.
Much of Queensland was under an inland sea 100 million years ago when there were no polar ice caps.
Richmond is world renowned as the state’s epicentre of fossil finds.
marine reptile like a cross between a dolphin and a shark, was unearthed in the state school’s vegie patch.
The outback town, west of Townsville, also is the site of other significant fossil finds such as the kronosaurus – an armoured dinosaur –
Political and public pressure is driving a slew of “hysterical” sentencing from fast-track courts for offences related to England’s recent riots, a senior barrister warned today: here.
Campaigners labelled David Cameron “crass and insulting” today after he claimed that the recent riots had their roots in an “obsession” with health and safety legislation: here.
Council attempt to evict eight-year-old girl for brother’s alleged rioting: here.
Crown court judges in England handed down long jail sentences to two young men for posting comments on Facebook: here.
The latest rise in unemployment figures is yet more evidence that the “savage” cuts are strangling the economy and stifling recovery, union leaders warned today.
Total unemployment rose for the first time in six months, pushing Britain’s total jobless rate up 38,000 – to 2.49 million or 7.9 per cent, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Women were once again the hardest hit as female unemployment increased by 21,000 to 1.05m – the highest since May 1988.
And youth unemployment among 16 to 24-year-olds moved closer to the one million mark at 949,000. …
Women’s group Fawcett Society acting chief executive Anna Bird warned that as well as record unemployment “women were facing widening inequality as cuts to public services and benefits begin to bite.”
She said that the reason why women were suffering disproportionately from the cuts was largely down to their exclusion from positions of power and influence.
The number of women in the Cabinet has fallen to its lowest level in a decade under the Tory-led government, the Equality and Human Rights Commission revealed today.
Women were similarly absent from the top tables of media business, the judiciary, the arts and even the female-dominated education sector.
The commission said that women were continuing to be passed over for top jobs and it would take another 60 years or 12 general elections to achieve an equal number of women MPs.
The Sex & Power 2011 report is an index of women in positions of power and influence across Britain’s public and private sectors.
Its release yesterday coincided with the latest unemployment figures, showing that more than one million women were now without a job – highest level for more than 20 years.
Fawcett Society acting chief executive Anna Bird said that the commission’s report should act as a “wake-up call.
The government and others can no longer turn a blind eye to this injustice.”
She also demanded that Mr Cameron honours his pledge to ensure that one-third of his Cabinet ministers are women.
“Decisions that affect us all, be it how to balance the nation’s budget or our preferred system of welfare, are being made without women round the table.”
Female representation in the boardroom has shown a heartening increase; but more and more of their sisters are ending up on the dole queue: here.
UK firms fail to meet gender diversity in the boardroom: here.
Investigation into deaths of boys in Catholic institution
Published on 16 August 2011 – 10:15am
The Dutch Public Prosecution Office is investigating the deaths of 34 boys in the early 1950s in an institution for the mentally handicapped in the southern province of Limburg. The deaths were reported by the Deetman Commission, which is investigating the sexual abuse of children in the Roman Catholic church.
Roman Catholic monks were responsible for the care of mentally-handicapped children in the former St. Joseph institution in the town of Heel near Roermond. An investigation of archives by the Deetman Commission has revealed that the number of deaths in the institution in the early 1950s was much higher than average. The death rate at the home increased in 1952, 1953 and 1954. It is not clear why the rate dropped back down after 1954. All the cases were boys under 18-years-old.
This information was made known at the end of the same decade to the diocese of Roermond, the government’s Labour Inspectorate, the former Catholic Alliance for the Protection of Children and possibly to the health inspectorate, reports regional daily Dagblad De Limburger. The home was run by the Catholic church until 1969, when it was taken over by the Daelzicht foundation.
The Public Prosecution Office refuses to comment on the causes of the 34 deaths. Although it has indicated to the Limburger that due to the lapse of time, no prosecutions can take place if any crimes were committed. The PPO wants to investigate what caused the deaths “with a view of the impact and extent of the case.” It is possible that the deaths were connected to sexual abuse.
Both the Public Prosecution Office and the Deetman Commission have declined to comment on how the suspicious deaths came to light back in the 1950s. The Public Prosecution Office was not aware of the possibly suspicious deaths of the 34 children. It is not known whether there was a conscious effort on the part of the church or other organisations to cover up the affair a half century ago.
The diocese of Roermond has issued a statement saying it welcomes the investigation and has opened its archives to encourage research. “We want to get away from the cover-up practices, have opened the archives and encourage this kind of research,” says a church spokesperson.
So, half a century after the children died, finally “away from the cover-up practices”. Now when not just those 34 children are dead, but when many of the perpetrators, and of the other victims have died in in the meantime.
Doctors had serious questions about the high children’s mortality figures there already in the 1950s, daily De Limburger says.
Following revelations concerning the deaths of 34 boys in the 1950s in a Catholic home for the mentally handicapped, it has now been discovered that 40 girls also died in the same period between 1952 and 1954.
A regional TV channel requested information on the number of deaths at the St. Anna institution in the southern town of Heel near Roermond from local authorities and found that the most of the girls who died from 1952-1954 were younger than 12 years old. The deaths also included babies and toddlers.
The animal used as the basis for the new study was an 18cm-long female, collected by one of the researchers during a dive at a 35m-deep cave in the Republic of Palau.
But the scientists also mention other examples of the new eel species in their research paper.
At first there was much discussion among the researchers about the animal’s affinities. But genetic analysis confirmed that the fish was a “true” eel – albeit a primitive one.
“In some features it is more primitive than recent eels, and in others, even more primitive than the oldest known fossil eels, suggesting that it represents a ‘living fossil’ without a known fossil record,” write the scientists.
In order to classify the new animal, the researchers had to create a new family, genus and species, bestowing on the animal the latin name Protoanguilla palau.
The team – including Masaki Miya from Chiba’s Natural History Museum in Japan, Jiro Sakaue from the Southern Marine Laboratory in Palau and G David Johnson from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC – drew up a family tree of different eels, showing the relationships between them.
This allowed them to estimate when the ancestors of P. palau split away from other types of eel.
Their results suggest this new family has been evolving independently for the last 200m years, placing their origins in the early Mesozoic era, when dinosaurs were beginning their domination of the planet.
The researchers say the Protoanguilla lineage must have once been more widely distributed, because the undersea ridge where its cave home is located is between 60 and 70 million years old.
The first close look at the Pacific leaping blenny may offer clues to how ancient fish first made the transition to land, a new study says: here.
February 2012: Twelve per cent of marine species surveyed in the Gulf of California, the coasts of Panama and Costa Rica and the five offshore oceanic islands and archipelagos in the tropical eastern Pacific are threatened with extinction, according to a study by IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature). Main threats to the region’s marine flora and fauna include overfishing, habitat loss and increasing impacts from the El Nino Southern Oscillation: here.
Translated from Dutch conservationists ARK, about the “Zandmotor” [Sand Engine], an articial sandy island to the west of the Westland coast in the Netherlands, built to stop floods because climate change causes sea levels to rise:
Two large sandbanks have already arisen in the mouth of the bay of the Sand Engine. Next year may see the first plants grow there, such as European searocket; these will capture more sand again. On the old beach dunes have been created after the beach widening of early 2010. Not only searocket is flourishing here, but also the first European beachgrass and the very rare frosted orache have been observed. In the lee of the bay also some mud is settling which will in the future attract waders. Sometime this fall, the Zandmotor will be open to the public for the first time.
England: Experts at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank turned their hand to propagating an array of native flowers yesterday to help restore vanishing habitat such as meadows: here.
Spanish mayor desecrates mausoleum of fascist victims
17 August 2011
The right-wing Popular Party (PP) mayor of Poyales del Hoyo, in Alava province, has desecrated a mausoleum containing the remains of 10 victims executed by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Mayor Antonio Cerro ordered the bodies to be thrown back into the mass grave outside Candeleda, a village near Poyales from which they had been exhumed in 2002.
Spain has some 2,000 mass graves containing 100,000 or more victims of the dictatorship. (See the map of graves at the Historical Memory Act web site.)
The exhumation at Poyales was carried out by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), a group composed of archaeologists, anthropologists and forensics scientists. Damiana Gonzaléz (PP), the mayor of Poyales del Hoyo, and the local section of her party fiercely resisted authorising space in the cemetery for the victims. According to El País, “The story of the town tells that a forefather of hers was the executioner. Or at least she bragged about it for years.” Eventually, the mausoleum was built with a plaque remembering all the names of the dead and a dove of peace on top.
The first three victims, Virtudes Punte (53), Pilar Espinosa (43) and Valeriana Granada (26 and pregnant at the time), were placed in the mausoleum in 2002. They were executed by a group of Falangists in December 1936, according to the daughter of one of the victims “because she had the luck to read, she read anything she could get her hands on, and among the newspapers they read as they were sewing was El Socialista [the newspaper of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE)].”
The other seven victims, Francisco Martín Vélez, his son Régulo Martín Plaza, Tomás Retamal Vicente, Emilio Garcia Hornillos, Caferino Gómez Díaz, his wife, Tomasa de la Peña Garcia, and their son, Benjamín Gómez de la Peña, were arrested, executed and buried in a mass grave next to a road going to Candeleda.
The other 70 to 75 victims who were executed in the small town, now with a population of 620, have not been found. One example is the former mayor, a member of Izquierda Republicana (Republican Left—the party of President Azaña of the Second Republic), who was executed in 1936. His lands were expropriated and auctioned to pro-fascist neighbours, who continue to be the owners.
Throughout the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1939-1975), the fascists who were killed during the first days of the Civil War retained their honours with church plaques remembering all those who died “at the hands of the Marxist hordes.”
The 30,000 lost children of the Franco years are set to be saved from oblivion. Pressure is growing to illuminate the fate decreed by the Spanish dictator to the families of his Republican enemies: here.
To this day, after Cambodia, Spain ranks second as the country with the highest number of “disappeared” people: 114,000, according to historians and relatives’ estimates. Many were executed by fascist firing squads. Their bodies were dumped in mass graves and roadside ditches: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 