Save the hooded grebe

This is a hooded grebe video.

From BirdLife:

Hooded Grebe Appeal – Action on breeding grounds already delivering results

Tue, Jun 26, 2012

In January this year we launched an international online appeal to save the Hooded Grebe Podiceps gallardoi as a new BirdLife Preventing Extinctions Programme initiative, building on earlier support provided by the Aage V. Jensen Charity Foundation as part of BirdLife’s High Andean wetlands initiative. We are delighted to report today that conservation actions undertaken earlier this year are already delivering results.

Hooded Grebe is endemic as a breeding species to Santa Cruz province in Southern Argentina and is now so threatened it has been uplisted to Critically Endangered in this year’s IUCN Red List update.

Previous research has identified that the main threats to Hooded Grebe are nest predation by an increasing population of Kelp Gulls Larus dominicanus; predation of adults by introduced American Mink Neovison vison; predation and competition for food resources from alien Rainbow Trout Oncorhynchus mykiss; loss of breeding sites through sedimentation as a result of land erosion caused by overgrazing; and breeding failure, due to increasingly strong winds, that are detaching floating nests from their moorings.

Urgent conservation action is now underway for the Hooded Grebe to address these threats led by BirdLife National Partner and Species Guardian – Aves Argentinas and local Patagonian NGO – Ambiente Sur, who are both working around the clock to prevent its extinction. During the first few months of 2012 (the austral summer in Patagonia) the two organisations led a substantial field team to the grebe’s breeding grounds to attempt a number of pioneering conservation initiatives.

Please click here to visit our appeal page and see a video of breeding Hooded Grebes filmed by the conservation team earlier this year.

We are also seeking BirdLife Species Champions for the Hooded Grebe. If you or your company would like to find out about this opportunity please email species.champions@birdlife.org

The Hooded Grebe Conservation Team visited 180 lakes in the remote plateaus of western Santa Cruz province, an area that covers nearly 20,000 square km. A total of 13 people participated in the fieldwork including naturalists, ornithologists and biologists, from Aves Argentinas, Ambiente Sur, Buenos Aires University, the Austral Centre for Scientific Research, the Santa Cruz Birdwatchers Club, and the Argentinian National Parks Service. Important information was obtained about the reproductive biology of the Hooded Grebe and the factors that affect its reproduction, such as predation by Kelp Gull, American Mink, and increasing wind gusts.

The team’s first action was to assess the species’ abundance at known breeding colonies and investigate its presence at several new locations. Results from this survey confirmed the very precarious conservation status of the species, though several new colonies were discovered. A total of 265 breeding pairs were located of which just 64 were successful.

This year a pioneering new approach dubbed “Colony Guardians” was trialled at El Cervecero Lagoon, one of the most important Hooded Grebe breeding locations on the Buenos Aires Plateau. Last year the significant colony there was wiped out when invasive American Mink slaughtered more than 30 breeding adult Hooded Grebes at this one site, leading to 40-plus eggs also being left abandoned. This year, a team of three scientists acting as Colony Guardians monitored the birds throughout the breeding season with one of the team always present during the important stages of incubation, hatching and the initial parental care of fledglings.

The Colony Guardians approach made a big difference, helping to protect the breeding birds from avian predators including their primary threat – Kelp Gulls – which have been increasing throughout the province since assessment began in the ’80s. This year a breeding colony of Kelp Gulls was located at a site in the middle of the Buenos Aires Plateau for the first time, rather than at their historical breeding areas along rivers and the marine coast of Santa Cruz province.

In addition to combating aerial predation, the team also set a number of traps for mink. While evidence of mink was again clearly present this year, none were caught in traps. Apparently the Colony Guardians’ human presence was sufficient to deter the mink from a repeat attack. As a result of the predator control actions, breeding success at the colony has greatly improved over the norm and some 60% of nests were successful, with most of the young reaching the juvenile stage. This is a higher reproductive success than has been historically recorded for the species anywhere else.

Following their anti-predator activities, the Colony Guardians at El Cervecero Lagoon were also able to catch and apply individually marked wing tags to several of the adult and juvenile Hooded Grebes present. This activity was also conducted at other colonies and a total of nine birds were tagged including three juveniles. The plan was to monitor these birds at the lakes but hopefully also then try to record them on their wintering grounds when they had migrated to the unfrozen fjords of the Santa Cruz south-eastern seaboard.

The wing-tagging activity is not without risk to the conservation team. To catch the grebes, a small inflatable dinghy is used to approach the birds in deeper water where they make their floating nests. The tagging operation is conducted in half-light and usually the naturally windy conditions at the lake make handling a small craft bobbing about on the waves quite a precarious platform. Falling in the icy water is clearly not to be recommended. This year dramas were luckily averted, and using a strong torch to distract and transfix the birds, they were simply caught in a long-handled fishing net and processed as quickly as possible to avoid any unnecessary stress.

The wing-tagging activity proved an instant success, with researchers able to monitor the progress and behaviours of individual birds with considerable accuracy, contributing to a far greater understanding of their ecological requirements. One of the tagged juveniles, along with another juvenile and three adults, was found to still be present on the partially frozen El Cervecero Lagoon as recently as May 8th.

Remarkably, in the last few days, a wing-tagged juvenile Hooded Grebe has been seen at Rio Gallegos on the coast in the far south-eastern part of Santa Cruz province. Volunteers conducting biological research there made the sighting and, having heard about the project to save the species through the considerable national publicity that has recently been generated in a variety of media, passed on the news. This young bird has been identified from its unique number as one of the individuals tagged by the Colony Guardians at El Cervecero Lagoon. This is not only the first time the origin of a wintering Hooded Grebe has been confirmed, it is also the first time a juvenile has ever been recorded on the wintering grounds.

Throughout the summer the Hooded Grebe Conservation Team has also been working closely with landowners, local food producers and their staff, and local authorities, informing them of the uniqueness of the Hooded Grebe and its plight, and of the simple measures that can be undertaken to help secure its future. This has been a gradual process of building trust that will provide a strong foundation for future action, including support for the protected area, and on-the-ground action such as predator control and habitat restoration on private properties. A number of landowners are already actively collaborating with the team.

About two years ago, Ambiente Sur and Aves Argentinas developed and presented a proposal to the Argentinean Government’s National Parks Authority, for the creation of a protected area within the Buenos Aires Plateau. Several colonies of Hooded Grebes breed inside the boundaries of the proposed protected area. Since then, both organisations have been providing additional technical information and lobbying for the creation of a new national park. Recent feedback from the National Parks Authority suggests that approval of a law creating a protected area for the species may now only be a few months away. If successful, the creation of a new national park will afford Hooded Grebe the highest level of legal protection available for its habitat.

The main area where introduced Rainbow Trout are a problem is south of the Buenos Aires Plateau in the Strobel Plateau. The effect of the introduced trout there has been so great it has reduced Hooded Grebe breeding by more than 98% in the last 25 years. In addition to reducing food sources, the presence of trout leads to a change in the turbidity of the water, which prevents the growth of “vinagrilla”, the filamentous plant that provides indispensable nesting material for all the water birds that breed in the lagoons. During the summer, substantial information was gathered by the Hooded Grebe Conservation Team about the impact of introduced trout in the lagoons there, which will be published shortly. This information will be used to inform provincial technicians and officials about the need to legislate appropriately to restrict further introductions.

As part of their outreach work in the area this year, the Hooded Grebe conservation team has also been holding meetings with local authorities (mayors, and other local government representatives) to explain about the threat that the introduced trout pose to the Hooded Grebe. These meetings have received a good reaction with offers of future support made by several stakeholders.

With support from the National Secretariat of Tourism, the Hooded Grebe conservation team has also begun the development of a bilingual video on the species, to promote its conservation at a national and international level. The video will be available in July 2012.

Next actions planned for the project are to repeat the work conducted this year but focus on some specific additional activities. Firstly the conservation team would like to increase the numbers of breeding sites at which Colony Guardians operate. If funding were secured, the plan would be to repeat the successful pilot at El Cervecero Lagoon at three additional colonies in 2013.

Restoration of the lakes in the Strobel Plateau is also a priority. Several measures to reduce numbers of introduced Rainbow Trout and combat land erosion (which leads to silting) at various private lakes there will be attempted.

A third measure that builds on the initial wing-tagging exercise is to establish a satellite-tracking scheme. In this way it is hoped birds tagged with transmitters can be constantly monitored by conservationists throughout their migration, providing important information about the routes they take, clarifying the risks they encounter and establishing where they spend the winter.

The cost of this urgently required action will be a minimum of $20,000 for the tagging alone, so unless more funding can be secured, very few of the planned measures will be possible in future years.

There is clearly much to be done if the fortunes of the remarkable Hooded Grebe are to be turned around. A robust plan is in place and work has already begun thanks to support from the Aage V. Jensen Charity Foundation and funds raised locally and through the international appeal. However, significant new funding is now urgently required to deliver this ambitious project and achieve long-term success.

Every little helps and every one can join in. If you would like to help save the magnificent Hooded Grebe from slipping away, within just four decades of its original discovery, please click here to make a donation online today.

If you or your company would like to become a BirdLife Species Champion for Hooded Grebe, please contact species.champions@birdlife.org

Facebook friends can follow the latest news on the Aves Argentinas and Ambiente Sur team’s work (in Spanish) by visiting their Facebook pages here.

On behalf of all the conservationists, scientists and volunteers working tirelessly on this project we would like to thank all those donors and new Species Champions who have responded so generously so far.

This appeal news is brought to you by The BirdLife Preventing Extinctions Programme.

Famous fruit fly sexual selection study flawed

This video is called Fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) courtship.

From ScienceDaily:

Biologists Reveal Potential ‘Fatal Flaw’ in Iconic Sexual Selection Study

(June 26, 2012) — A classic study from more than 60 years ago suggesting that males are more promiscuous and females more choosy in selecting mates may, in fact, be wrong, say life scientists who are the first to repeat the historic experiment using the same methods as the original.

In 1948, English geneticist Angus John Bateman published a study showing that male fruit flies gain an evolutionary advantage from having multiple mates, while their female counterparts do not. Bateman’s conclusions have informed and influenced an entire sub-field of evolutionary biology for decades.

“Bateman’s 1948 study is the most-cited experimental paper in sexual selection today because of its conclusions about how the number of mates influences fitness in males and females,” said Patricia Adair Gowaty, a distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA. “Yet despite its important status, the experiment has never been repeated with the methods that Bateman himself originally used, until now.

“Our team repeated Bateman’s experiment and found that what some accepted as bedrock may actually be quicksand. It is possible that Bateman’s paper should never have been published.”

Gowaty’s study was published June 11 in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and is scheduled for publication in an upcoming print edition.

The original experiment on Drosophila melanogaster, also known as the common fruit fly, was performed by creating multiple, isolated populations with either five males and five females or three of each gender in a jar. The insects mated freely in the experimental populations, and Bateman examined the children that made it to adulthood. To count the number of adult offspring engendered by each of his original insect subjects, Bateman needed a reliable way to match parents with children.

Nowadays, modern geneticists would use molecular evidence to determine the genetic parentage of each child, but DNA analysis was not available in the 1940s. Instead, Bateman chose his initial specimens carefully, selecting D. melanogaster flies that each had a unique, visible mutation that could be transferred from parent to child, Gowaty said.

The mutations were extreme. Some of the flies had curly wings, others thick bristles, and still others had eyes reduced in size to narrow slits. The outward differences in each breeding subject allowed Bateman to work backward to determine the parentage of some of the fly progeny and to document each mating pair among the original insects. A child with curly wings and thick bristles, for example, could only have come from one possible pairing.

Yet Bateman’s method, which was cutting-edge for its time, had a “fatal flaw,” according to Gowaty.

Imagine the child of a curly-winged mother and an eyeless father. The child has an equal chance of having both mutations, only the father’s mutation, only the mother’s mutation or no mutation at all. In order to know who mated with whom, Bateman used only the children with two mutations, because these were the only ones for which he could specifically identify both the mother and father. But by counting only the children with two mutations, Bateman probably got a skewed sample, Gowaty said. In repeating Bateman’s experiment, she and her colleagues found that the flies with two severe mutations are less likely to survive into adulthood.

Flies use their wings not only to hover but also to sing during courtship, which is why curly wings present a huge disadvantage. Specimens with deformed eyes might have an even tougher time surviving. The 25 percent of children born with both mutations were even more likely to die before being counted by Bateman or Gowaty.

“It’s not surprising that the kids died like flies when they got one dramatic mutation from mom and another dramatic mutation from dad,” she said.

Gowaty found that the fraction of double-mutant offspring was significantly below the expected 25 percent, which means Bateman would have been unable to accurately quantify the number of mates for each adult subject. Further, his methodology resulted in more offspring being assigned to fathers than mothers, something that is impossible when each child must have both a father and a mother, Gowaty said.

Bateman concluded that male fruit flies produce many more viable offspring when they have multiple mates but that females produce the same number of adult children whether they have one mate or many. But Gowaty and her colleagues, by performing the same experiment, found that the data were decidedly inconclusive.

In their repetition — and possibly in Bateman’s original study — the data failed to match a fundamental assumption of genetic parentage assignments. Specifically, the markers used to identify individual subjects were influencing the parameters being measured (the number of mates and the number of offspring). When offspring die from inherited marker mutations, the results become biased, indicating that the method is unable to reliably address the relationship between the number of mates and the number of offspring, said Gowaty. Nonetheless, Bateman’s figures are featured in numerous biology textbooks, and the paper has been cited in nearly 2,000 other scientific studies.

“Here was a classic paper that has been read by legions of graduate students, any one of whom is competent enough to see this error,” Gowaty said. “Bateman’s results were believed so wholeheartedly that the paper characterized what is and isn’t worth investigating in the biology of female behavior.”

Repeating key studies is a tenet of science, which is why Bateman’s methodology should have been retried as soon as it became important in the 1970s, she said. Those who blindly accept that females are choosy while males are promiscuous might be missing a big piece of the puzzle.

“Our worldviews constrain our imaginations,” Gowaty said. “For some people, Bateman’s result was so comforting that it wasn’t worth challenging. I think people just accepted it.”

Shaking the foundation

Biologists studying sexual selection examine mating habits of organisms ranging from fruit flies to gorillas, both in the lab and in the wild, in order to better understand how certain traits or behaviors confer evolutionary advantages.

Sexual selection began as a discipline following Charles Darwin‘s publication of “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,” considered Darwin’s defense against critics of his theory of evolution through natural selection. He argued that while the unwieldy, colorful tails of peacocks hindered flight and made males easy targets for hungry tigers, the flamboyant plumage served a vital role in attracting potential mates. The overdressed birds had an unexpected evolutionary advantage that did not help when it came to escaping predators but did help when it came to producing offspring through sexual selection, said Gowaty.

Darwin, and later Bateman, cleaved to the notion that females of a species tended to be discriminating and passive, while the far more promiscuous males competed for their attentions. In the last few decades, however, evolutionary biologists have shown that the story is far more complicated. Gowaty, who has been interested in female mating habits in insects and birds since the beginning of her career, spent 30 years in the field studying Eastern bluebirds. She published the first molecular genetics study showing that females in a socially monogamous species mated outside their traditional pairs regularly.

Gowaty describes the benefits of multiple mates as an answer to the never-ending evolutionary struggle against what may be the world’s greatest predator: disease.

“Our pathogens have much shorter generation times than we do as the hosts, and they evolve offenses much more rapidly than we can evolve defenses,” she said. “One of the rules of nature is that our pathogens are going to get us.”

In this illness-driven arms race, organisms that produce offspring from multiple mates are more likely to produce some children with the right antibodies to survive the next generation of viruses, bacteria and parasites. Fruit fly males are likely to give females the additional variation in the genome that they need to build strong immune systems in their kids, Gowaty said.

For Gowaty, there are many open questions remaining when it comes to female mating habits, whether in fruit flies or other organisms. Yet shaking the bedrock of the Bateman paradigm may help the field examine new perspectives.

“Paradigms are like glue, they constrain what you can see,” she said. “It’s like being stuck in sludge — it’s hard to lift your foot out and take a step in a new direction.”

This study was federally funded by the National Science Foundation. Other co-authors included Wyatt Anderson, a professor of genetics at the University of Georgia and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and Yong-Kyu Kim, a research scientist at Emory University.

Do Charles Darwin’s ideas really leave us at the mercy of a savage human nature? John Parrington takes a fresh look at evolution: here.

Industrial revolution in Britain

This video says about itself:

The devastating enclosures of the English commons forced peasants into the labor market and the factories of the industrial revolution. This video explains how and why.

From weekly Socialist Worker in Britain:

Tue 26 Jun 2012

Britain’s Industrial Revolution: the birth of a new power

Owen Miller debunks the myth of a unique British genius for invention and innovation

During this summer of royal and sporting spectacles, we seem to be surrounded by the warmed up leftovers of Britain’s patriotic myths.

We’re constantly reminded of our “British values” of fair play, our uniquely majestic-yet-down-to-earth monarch and the pastoral idyll of the English countryside. Then there’s the peculiar inventiveness of the British people that brought the world the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution took off in Britain in the second half of the 18th century. It was one of the most significant events in human history. It transformed the way people live their lives, putting it on a scale with the development of agriculture or of complex urban societies.

But why did it develop in Britain rather than anywhere else? Establishment intellectuals like Melvyn Bragg point to the “scientific culture” of 18th century Britain with its dogged pursuit of technological progress.

They cite inventor-entrepreneurs like Richard Arkwright and James Watt as evidence of a peculiarly British culture. They seek to explain the Industrial Revolution largely through a form of “British exceptionalism”, emphasising “great men” and the “culture” that produces them.

However, socialists look primarily to material rather than cultural causes. This means focusing on our interactions with the natural environment, relations between different societies, and above all, the relations between classes within societies.

From this standpoint, the dramatic shock of the Industrial Revolution is part of much broader historical processes. It is also the child of new capitalist social relations that had burst on the scene with revolutionary movements in 16th and 17th century Europe.

Interaction

The Industrial Revolution emerged from long processes of technological innovation and interaction across the Eurasian land mass.

Remember that a thousand years ago East Asia was responsible for much technological innovation. Gunpowder, paper and the compass were all inventions crucial to early modern Europe—and they all originally came from China.

Still, at the time of the Industrial Revolution itself, Europe—and Britain in particular—continued to practice “innovation by imitation”.

One well-known example is that of printed calico, a type of cotton cloth much prized in Europe that originated in the Indian city of Calicut (Kozhikode).

In order to protect the English wool industry its import was banned in 1700. But an entire industry then grew up in Britain to print imported plain calico cloth in imitation of the original Indian product.

Many experts argue that neither Britain nor Europe had an economic advantage over areas such as the Indian region of Gujarat until the Industrial Revolution. They were just as commercialised and productive and sometimes benefited from better technologies.

None of this explains why the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain rather than in China or France. For this we have to turn to a number of other factors.

One of the most important was environmental—the availability of cheap, accessible coal in Britain. Coal was first used to provide fuel for heat-intensive industries such as potteries or furnaces.

Later it was used to provide steam power for the new factories. Britain was almost unique in having easy access to large reserves of coal, a far more efficient source of power than wood or charcoal.

Island

A second key factor was Britain’s geopolitical position as an island situated off the coast of the European continent. This favoured the development of British naval power and offered a degree of protection from continental warfare.

Naval power was crucial in allowing Britain to seize the trade routes and colonies that would help fund the Industrial Revolution and provide raw materials.

Like other European nations, Britain was able to extract vast quantities of wealth from the New World and particularly from the slave trade and plantations.

But unlike feudal competitors like Spain or Portugal, capitalist merchants ran Britain. This made it more efficient at extracting wealth. It also meant that wealth could be used to fund the development of industrial capitalism.

In the 18th century, British ships transported some 1.6 million Africans to the British Caribbean alone to work and die as slaves. Britain also made extensive use of mercantilist trade policies to protect its new industries against foreign imports with high tariffs or outright bans.

But Marxists argue that there is more to the Industrial Revolution than all this. By the time of the Industrial Revolution social relations based on wage labour were already well established and Britain was essentially a capitalist country.

The emergence of capitalism was by no means a gradual or smooth process that could be attributed to the “entrepreneurial spirit” of the British.

It was a long period of economic and political change, punctuated by violent upheavals such as the English Revolution in the 17th century. In the early 18th century, Britain was the European country where capitalist social relations had become most firmly embedded.

Dominance

Two features of capitalism are key in understanding the Industrial Revolution in Britain. The first was the new capitalist class that had fought over the previous centuries to assert its dominance over British society.

The second was the drive of the capitalist system to accumulate capital through the relentless competition between capitalists.

The combination of this assertive ruling class and the drive to accumulate helped accelerate technological innovation that had been going on for thousands of years.

These factors provided the material basis for the growth of a “scientific culture” and the emergence of “inventive geniuses” like Watt.

Pre-capitalist ruling classes had been driven to raise armies to expand their territories or increase their own private consumption. But there were always limits to this sort of expansion.

The capitalist class on the other hand, driven by competition, seeks to expand endlessly. In so doing it is constantly in search of new, more productive ways to combine human labour and technology.

One of the “heroes” of the Industrial Revolution is Richard Arkwright. He is a classic example of a capitalist who helped to drive innovation by applying new technologies in his cotton mills.

He did this not for the sake of science or innovation itself. He did so in order to out-compete his rivals and expand his business.

In 1769 he patented a spinning machine that could be used to produce cheap cotton cloth. He was able to quickly expand his business to multiple factories and hundreds of workers. This heralded the beginning of the age of factory production.

The new ruling class had already begun pushing unwanted peasants from the land. Now it squeezed them into the new mills and factories, creating the working class—the class that could challenge capitalism’s rapacious growth.

There is nothing particularly inventive about Britain or its people. Like the rest of humankind people who inhabit the British Isles can be lazy, stupid, stubbornly resistant to change and completely lacking in inspiration.

Yet throughout human history, social, political and environmental conditions have created moments when huge transformations like the Industrial Revolution can take place. These transformations were often focused initially in one geographical location that enjoyed particular advantages.

These were moments when slowly accumulated changes were swiftly transformed into fundamental reconfigurations of the way we live.

Unfortunately we are still living in the world of capitalist exploitation that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. If Britain gave a gift to the world it is certainly a double-edged one.

Industrial Revolution timeline

1619 British land first African slaves in colony of Virginia

1649 English revolution beheads King Charles I freeing merchants to develop capitalism

1709 Abraham Darby uses coke to smelt iron ore, replacing use of charcoal

1758 First threshing machine produced

1760-1820 Agricultural enclosures. Common rights lost as big farmers drive millions of poor people off the land

1765 James Hargreaves invents the Spinning Jenny, automating cloth weaving

1772 Bridgewater Canal completed, transports coal to Manchester and Liverpool. Starts mass building of transport canals

1775 James Watt builds first efficient steam engine

1779 First steam powered mills

1801 Robert Trevithick demonstrates a steam locomotive

1811-15 Luddite riots. Workers break machines in a protest at attacks on living standards and working conditions

1821 Michael Faraday demonstrates electro-magnetic rotation, the principle of the electric motor

1830 The Liverpool and Manchester Railway begins first regular commercial rail service

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• Yes, The US Industrial Revolution Was Built On Piracy And Fraud (lxer.com)

British police attacks workers

This video from Britain is called Save Coryton 2012.

By John Millington in England:

Coryton protesters attacked by police

Tuesday 26 June 2012

Essex police attacked a peaceful demonstration outside Coryton oil refinery today in what trade unionists described as an “unprovoked assault.”

Officers pushed, punched and assaulted trade unionists, supporters and even some of the partners of the Coryton workers who had turned up to protest against the 800 job losses expected at the plant after it went into administration in January.

Speaking to the Star in the wake of the attack, Unite rep at the plant Russell Jackson insisted that the protest had been peaceful and “running smoothly” until officers threatened him with arrest.

“During the middle of the international speaker (a Spanish miner) the police decided to try and move us on,” he said.

“They instructed me to move people on or I would be arrested.”

Despite the initial intimidation, Mr Jackson said people stood their ground and grew angrier when wives appeared to be targeted.

“Then they start pushing people away and not in a gentle way,” he said.

“We had wives there with one officer putting an elbow in one of their faces and punching another peaceful demonstrator.”

Mr Jackson added that he was “stunned” by the police behaviour and suggested that bosses were worried by the growing media attention around the campaign.

Shell is reportedly interested in buying Coryton but plans to turn it into an import terminal – stripping the plant of its refinery capacity.

“If this goes ahead Britain will be completely dependent on energy from outside. We could be held to ransom by a corporation and that is not in the national interest,” he said.

Mr Jackson said five people were arrested – three of them members of the National Shop Stewards Network.

Trade unionists from other unions who had turned up to show solidarity to Unite members also spoke to the Star about the day’s events.

RMT assistant general secretary candidate Steve Hedley urged a swift response to the “unprovoked assault” on the workers.

“The trade union response should be to call a mass demonstration outside that oil plant.”

An Essex Police spokeswoman said: “This afternoon’s tensions saw protesters seek to disrupt the business of the refinery and fail to comply with requests to move back to the area which had been agreed.”

Update: here.

Haitian slum-dwellers protest eviction

This video is about the Jalousie neighbourhood in Haiti, 20 November 2010.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Haitian protesters fight slum clearances

Tuesday 26 June 2012

by Our Foreign Desk

More than 1,000 Haitians marched through the capital Port-au-Prince on Monday to protest against a reported plan to destroy their hillside shanties for a flood-control project.

Police fired tear gas in an attempt to control the protesters, some of whom threw rocks.

The demonstrators snaked through Port-au-Prince chanting threats to burn down the relatively affluent district near the shanties if the authorities flatten their homes.

The Environment Ministry said last week that officials want to demolish several hundred homes to build channels and reforest the hillsides in an effort to curb floods that come with the annual rain season.

Many of the threatened homes are in Jalousie, a shanty town that spreads across a mountainside alongside the affluent city of Petionville.

The protesters said that President Michel Martelly had not fulfilled his promise to build homes destroyed in the 2010 earthquake.

The disaster destroyed tens of thousands of houses in the capital and other cities in the south and 314,000 people died.

The government is building hundreds of homes north of the capital, but too few to house the more than 400,000 people still living in the precarious settlements that emerged in the aftermath of the quake.

In an effort to move people out of the camps, the Haitian government, foreign aid groups and governments gave displaced people year-long rental subsidies.

Residents of six highly visible camps moved into hillside shanty areas such as Jalousie. Others have moved there because they were evicted by landowners.

Port-au-Prince, a city of around 3 million people, has seen concrete houses and hovels sprawl across its hills because governments past and present have failed to provide affordable housing.

The march began peacefully but some protesters threw rocks at a towering hotel financed by the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, a charity set up after the earthquake by former US presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

The demonstrators were angry to see the opulent hotel under construction amid fears that they will lose their homes.

Update 13 July 2012: About 100 people marched in Haiti’s capital on Thursday to protest against a government plan that threatens to demolish their homes: here.

Britain: Transport workers called for joint action with the TUC today to support the Haitian people’s struggle two and a half years after a devastating earthquake killed over 300,000: here.

As mining conglomerates target Haiti, Latin America rises against them: here.

“This is How Duvalier Started”: Critics of Haitian President Imprisoned: here.

Vegetarian turtle recipe

This 2017 video is called How To Make Watermelon Turtles – Fruit Carving Garnish – Sushi Garnish – Food Art Decoration.

From The Sticky Tongue Project:

An Edible Turtle

The only kind of turtle that should ever be eaten … what do you think?

Materials Needed For the Watermelon Turtle:

1 Oblong watermelon
Knife
Melon baller or other scoop spoon
Channel knife (you can substitute with the top of a standard vegetable peeler)
Dry erase marker
2 Peppercorns, or other eye pieces
Fruit salad
Leaves, plants, or other accents as desired
Toothpicks or other skewers

Instructions for the Watermelon Turtle:

Choose an oblong seedless watermelon for carving.
Wash watermelon and pat dry.
Cut in half lengthwise.
Hollow out both sides, using a melon baller.
Carve out block design in the bottom side, using a channel knife.
Use a dry erase marker to trace turtle shell, legs, and head on top side of watermelon.
Carve shapes with knife, and add designs with channel knife.
Add peppercorns to the eye holes to fill.
Fill bottom with fruit salad.
Attach legs and head to shell, using strong toothpicks or skewers, and put on top of salad. Add accents around base with leaves and plants.

79 new shark, ray species discovered?

This video is called Scalloped Hammerhead Shark (Sphyrna lewini).

From Nature journal:

Shark species more diverse than thought

Genetic analysis suggests overlooked species, raises concerns about conservation.

Daniel Cressey

22 June 2012

A genetic study of thousands of specimens of sharks and rays has uncovered scores of potential new species and is fuelling biologists’ debates over the organisation of the family tree of these animals. The work also raises the possibility that some species are even more endangered than previously thought.

Sharks and rays are key predators in marine ecosystems, but the life cycles and population numbers of many species remain poorly understood. The family tree of these animals — which are part of the elasmobranch subclass — has proved similarly opaque, with little agreement among researchers over their evolutionary relationships.

Gavin Naylor, a biologist at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, and his colleagues sequenced samples from 4,283 specimens of sharks and rays as part of a major effort to fill the gaps. The team found 574 species, of which 79 are potentially new, they report in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.

Naylor says that he was “flabbergasted” by the result, especially because the sequencing covered only around half of the roughly 1,200 species thought to exist worldwide.

The huge number of new species found raises immediate conservation concerns — the reason that some of these purported new species have gone undetected is probably their close resemblance to already-identified species. The populations of such species may, therefore, be even smaller than estimated, as what was thought to be one population may instead be several smaller populations of separate species.

For example, Naylor’s work suggests that the endangered scalloped hammerhead (Sphyrna lewini) is actually two separate species. “Scalloped hammerheads in general have taken a huge hit, so it may be even worse than has been documented if there’s more than one species out there,” he says.

Naylor is now working on a project with the US National Science Foundation to catalogue the diversity of sharks and rays and is working to assist the International Union for Conservation of Nature to map which species are where in the world.

“This will have an impact on what is considered endangered and the fragility of different organisms,” he says. “These are sentinel species of all sorts of other organisms in the sea which are probably undergoing similar or worse kinds of impacts.”

Bull sharks have the strongest bite of any shark species, scientists have discovered. Relative to their body size, bull sharks bite harder than other, larger predatory sharks: here.

Good Dutch godwit news

This is a black-tailed godwit video.

Translated from Staatsbosbeheer in the Netherlands:

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

It was a great year for black-tailed godwits in nature reserve De Wilck. The volunteers of the birding group Koudekerk counted 103 breeding pairs, a record number for this area in the Green Heart region of the Netherlands. And this while in the Netherlands as a whole the number of godwits decreases steadily.

The quality of flower-rich grasslands will determine the breeding success of black-tailed godwits. The forestry department are mowing late in the year, so there is tall grass for the young godwits to hide and to find insects. The rising numbers of godwits this year indicate that the management in de Wilck is to their the taste.

Over half of European black-tailed godwits nest in the Netherlands.

Welsh bat news

In Wales, there is not just news about birds.

Also about other flying animals.

From the BBC:

Have you seen this bat? Grey long-eared bats have been discovered in Wales for the first time by researchers. Previously the bats were only known to live in limited locations in southern England, but DNA analysis of droppings in Pembrokeshire has confirmed that they have made a new home there. Scientists at the University of Bristol looked for evidence of the bats after research showed that the area was a suitable habitat. “It totally changes what we know about the distribution and potentially [the] population size of this species,” said researcher Orly Razgour. The species is known to be very secretive and the team, which so far has seen only bat droppings rather than the bats themselves, are now carrying out further tests to validate their discovery.

New sighting of rare UK Priority Bee Species Brown-banded carder bee (Bombus humilis) has created a buzz at Carmel National Nature Reserve (NNR), Carmarthenshire. June 2012. A joint project of The Grasslands Trust and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust has resulted in an exciting discovery of the rare Brown-banded carder bee (Bombus humilis), a UK Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) Priority Species, at Carmel National Nature Reserve: here.

Birds’ nests at museum

At Ecomare museum on Texel island in the Netherlands, birds are nesting.

On the roof, herring gulls nest. They already have chicks.

In a basket between museum woodpiles, a common gull sits on one egg.

On top of the door leading to the museum’s aquarium, barn swallows nest. Every time the door opens or closes, it just misses the nest.