conservation
edyong | March 31, 2008You might not be that impressed to receive a clump of grass or branches on a first date, but a boto dolphin might think differently. A new study suggests that these Amazonian dolphins wave bits of flotsam to attract mates.
The boto is a freshwater river dolphin that swims through the currents of the Amazon and the Orinoco. They are elusive creatures that are difficult to study, so very little is known about their social lives.
Tony Martin from the University of St Andrews spent three years in the Amazonian Mamiraua reserve studying the behaviour of botos. During this time, he spotted over…
voltagegate | March 27, 2008
The black caiman is just one of the endangered species that inhabits the Guiana Shield.
Back in November, the president of Guyana, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, offered the entirety of his country's rainforest to a British-led international body in return for help with development. Jagdeo was searching for alternatives to an obvious, but morally objectionable solution.
"Maybe we should just cut down the trees. Then someone would recognize the problem," said Mr Jagdeo. "But I want to think we can fulfill our people's aspirations without cutting down the trees."
British…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2008tags: The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, marine biology, environment, conservation, Jacques Cousteau, Susan Schiefelbein, book review
. . . I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world . . .
"Ulysses"
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
In the ten years before he died, world-famous…
grrlscientist | March 20, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, dog walking, wild birds, ground-nesting birds, conservation, peer-reviewed research
Dog walking in natural areas harms wild birds, according to recently published research.
Millions of people walk their dogs every day, and many of them enjoy walking their dogs in natural areas where birds and other wild animals live. Unfortunately, a scientific paper was recently published showing that the presence of dogs, even when they are on a leash in these natural areas, seriously interferes with wild birds' reproductive success and even scares many of them away.
This…
grrlscientist | March 18, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, birds, aves, ornithology, Zosterops somadikartai, Togian white-eye, Indonesia, Sulawesi
An undated artist's rendering of Zosterops somadikartai, or Togian white-eye.
This small greenish bird that has been playing hide-and-seek with ornithologists on a remote Indonesian island since 1996, but was declared a newly discovered species on March 14, 2008 and promptly recommended for endangered lists.
Image: Agus Prijono.
Sharp-eyed scientists have discovered a new species of bird on a remote Indonesian archipelago in the Southern Pacific Ocean. A formal description…
grrlscientist | March 12, 2008tags: North Island brown kiwi, Apteryx australis mantelli, endangered species, conservation, birds, National Zoo
The National Zoo welcomed a new North Island brown kiwi chick, Apteryx australis mantelli, on March 7, 2008.
The chick, whose sex has yet to be determined by DNA testing, is the third chick to ever hatch at the National Zoo. The first hatching occurred in 1975 and was the first to occur outside of New Zealand. Kiwis are endangered and are extremely rare to see in captivity -- only four zoos outside of New Zealand have successfully bred kiwis, and only three US zoos exhibit them…
tetrapodzoology | March 11, 2008
I've said it before and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: one of the best ways to invigorate your enthusiasm about a subject is to attend a conference on it, and to spend at least a couple of days talking with other people about that subject. I've (more or less) just returned from the third Big Cats in Britain conference, held at Tropiquaria at Watchet, north Somerset. What an amazing venue: picture, if you can, a 1930s BBC radio station [adjacent image shows the stonework above the main entrance] surrounded by gigantic towering antennae, the heat radiating from one of the antennae being…
grrlscientist | March 9, 2008tags: pygmy hippopotamus, pygmy hippo, Hexaprotodon liberensis, zoology, endangered species, conservation
A rare pygmy hippopotamus, Hexaprotodon liberensis,
was thought to be extinct up until recently, after this image was
captured at night by a photo trap set up by researchers in a Liberian rainforest.
A team of zoologists set up a series of camera traps in a west African rainforest to determine whether the rare pygmy hippopotamus, Hexaprotodon liberensis, still survives, despite wars, habitat degradation and poaching in the area. After a three-day wait, they were pleasantly surprised…
tetrapodzoology | March 2, 2008
I spent much of my Saturday doing an interesting thing. Together with another 30 or so people, I went along to my local nature reserve (Chessel Bay Nature Reserve, Southampton) and took part in an effort to clear the shore of its tons upon tons of human crap. Unsatisfied with our constant use of resources, our epic, manic pollution, and our rampant annihilation of other species, we aim to cover as much of the planet's surface as possible in our waste: we are literally doing our very best to swamp natural environments with the discarded shit that we can't be bothered to deal with properly.…
edyong | February 25, 2008Humans have explored the entire face of the planet, but we haven't done so alone. Animals and plants came along for the ride, some as passengers and other as stowaways. Today, these hitchhikers pose one of the greatest threats to the planet's biodiversity, by ousting and outcompeting local species.
Islands are particularly vulnerable to invaders. Cut off from the mainland, island-dwellers often evolve in the absence of predators and competitors, and are prone to developing traits that make them easy pickings for invaders, like docile natures or flightlessness.
Two years ago, I wrote about…
esiegel | February 25, 2008Let me set the scene for you: I'm fresh off my Ph.D., teaching introductory physics at the University of Wisconsin. I'm trying to demonstrate how to turn potential energy into kinetic energy, and so I ask this simple question:
What is Energy?
And I get a stunned silence back from the room. One of those silences where 25 faces look back at you with eyes that say, "no, you're the one teaching us; you need to answer that one!"
And I confess, this is one of those questions that's looks like the easiest thing in the world, and yet there's no good answer for it. Put simply, energy is possibly…
tetrapodzoology | February 18, 2008
I've said it before and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: as a life-long zoology nerd, one of my greatest frustrations has always been the fact that there are so many animals that get mentioned - only ever mentioned - but never elaborated upon. I've always liked Axolotls Ambystoma mexicanum, and among the world's unusual amphibians this has got to be one of the most familiar, thanks of course to its widespread use in the pet trade and as a laboratory animal [assortment of captive axolotls show above]. As everyone knows, the Axolotl is neotenous: it retains juvenile characters into sexual…
grrlscientist | February 15, 2008tags: endangered species, red knot, Caladris canutus rufus, Delaware Bay, horseshoe crab, streaming video
This a streaming video about the shorebirds, the Red Knot, that migrate through Delaware Bay from South America. Red Knots stay in the bay for 10 days or so and feed on horseshoe crab eggs to fatten up for their long journey to their Arctic nesting grounds. In this streaming video, scientist trap and tag migratory shore birds to gather information about them. [7:04]
awild | February 9, 2008
In 1934, a diminutive book by an unknown author seeded the largest conservation movement in history. The book, Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds, pioneered the modern field guide format with crisp illustrations of diagnostic characters, all in a pocket-sized read. The Guide sold out in a week, but the book's effects are ongoing.
To understand the magnitude of Peterson's impact, consider how naturalists traditionally identified birds. They'd take a shotgun into the field, and if they saw something of interest they'd kill it. Birding was necessarily limited to the landed-…
grrlscientist | February 7, 2008tags: birds, red knot, Calidris canutus rufus, ornithology, endangered species, conservation, streaming video
This Sunday, 10 February, at 8pm EST, the award-winning PBS series "Nature" will feature migratory shorebirds, the Red Knot, and the horseshoe crab. This program, Crash: A Tale of Two Species, examines the amazing relationship between these two threatened species.
The red knot migrates from the tip of South America to its breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic, and stops off briefly at Delaware Bay. Here it relies almost completely on horseshoe crab eggs to refuel for the second…
grrlscientist | February 5, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, birds, Nepal Rufous-vented Prinia, Prinia burnesii nipalensis, ornithology, speciation, new species, Nepal
A new subspecies of the Rufous-vented Prinia, Prinia burnesii,
has been found in Nepal. This new bird is now known as the
Nepal Rufous-vented Prinia, Prinia burnesii nipalensis.
[larger view].
A new subspecies of bird has been discovered on marshy grasslands located on small islands in Nepal's Koshi River. This new subspecies is similar to two other previously described subspecies of the Rufous-vented Prinia that are found along rivers in Pakistan and…
sheril | February 4, 2008
Last Thursday night, my Blue Devils triumphed over N.C. State 92-72. But what turned the Cameron Crazies green?
The answer here...
sheril | January 30, 2008Wander into the Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History and surely every child will be gazing up in wonder at the life size blue whale. Most adults will too for that matter. There's something mystical about a world within our own--different from all we know yet exploding with with biodiversity stranger than anything we might imagine.
And yet despite a collective appreciation of marine mammals, we continue go about harming them in a myriad of ways from destructive fishing practices to industrial pollutants and beyond. In fact, twenty-five marine mammal populations in the…
voltagegate | January 28, 2008Man am I not on top of things. EDGE released its list of evolutionarily distinct and Globally Endangered amphibians last week, and I just read the press release with the top 10 (actually nine, but it says 10) on the list. If you want a brief explanation about how EDGE prioritizes conservation, I blogged the PLoS paper released by EDGE scientists last year.
Without further ado, the list:
Chinese giant salamander (salamander that can grow up to 1.8m in length and evolved independently from all other amphibians over one hundred million years before Tyrannosaurus rex)
Sagalla caecilian (limbless…