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Defining the largely submerged landmass may be trickier than defining Pluto as a planet

Lurking beneath New Zealand is a long-hidden continent called Zealandia, geologists say. But since nobody is in charge of officially designating a new continent, individual scientists will ultimately have to judge for themselves.

A team of geologists pitches the scientific case for the new continent in the March/April issue of GSA Today, arguing that Zealandia is a continuous expanse of continental crust covering around 4.9 million square kilometers. That's about the size of the Indian subcontinent. Unlike the other mostly dry continents, around 94 percent of Zealandia hides beneath the ocean. Only New Zealand, New Caledonia and a few small islands peek above the waves.

"If we could pull the plug on the world's oceans, it would be quite clear that Zealandia stands out about 3,000 meters above the surrounding ocean crust," says study coauthor Nick

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Newly identified continent Zealandia faces a battle for recognition

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Defining the largely submerged landmass may be trickier than defining Pluto as a planet Lurking beneath New Zealand is a long-hidden continent called Zealandia, geologists say. But since nobody is in charge of officially designating a new continent, individual scientists will ultimately have to judge for themselves.

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The average American's carbon footprint shrinks Arctic sea ice. Not by a little. By a lot - about the area covered by 16 queen-size beds. And that happens each year.

A carbon footprint is the number of tons of carbon dioxide a person produces in their daily activities. The average American produces about 16 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. Each metric ton of this CO₂ released into the atmosphere directly results in a 3-square-meter (32-square-foot) loss of sea ice cover at summer's end. That's similar to losing an area of ice just a bit smaller than a two-seat Smart car, scientists say. They reported their findings online November 3 in Science.

"For the first time now, it is possible to grasp how each one of us contributes to tangible consequences," says Dirk Notz. He works as a climate scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany. He was an author of the new study.

How much CO₂ each person produces leads to a lot of melting ice. And there are some 7 billion people contributing. Altogether, humanity is responsible for the release of some 36 billion metric tons of CO₂ each year. With another trillion metric tons, the Arctic Ocean will have a completely iceless summer.

This might be the first time the summer Arctic has been ice-free in 125,000 years. And it could happen before 2050, Notz estimates. He did the work with Julienne Stroeve. She is a climate scientist in England at University College London. The estimate by these two contradicts many previous studies. Those other studies projected that summertime ice in the Arctic would stick around for far longer.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

"Sea ice feels so substantial," says Cecilia Bitz, especially when its strong enough to land an airplane on. But this new work, she notes, "makes [the ice] feel very fragile." As an atmospheric scientist, Bitz studies how aspects of Earth's atmosphere drive weather and climate. She works at the University of Washington in Seattle, and was not involved in the study.

Dwindling ice at the top of the world is important to watch. Its disappearance threatens Arctic species. Its melting also can spread pollution. And, disappearing ice could open the region to polar shipping.

What the new study showed

Each winter, the Arctic sea surface freezes solid. As snow falls on it, more and more accumulates and eventually melts into ice. Some of that ice melts in summer. Still, a great deal of the Arctic retains its ice cover even throughout the summer. But that situation is threatening to change - and in our lifetime.

Satellite data show summertime Arctic ice cover has been falling. In 2012, the area of sea covered by ice hit a record low (since satellite observations began). It was then just a mere 3.39 million square kilometers (1.3 million square miles). That's well below the average of what had been typical from 1981 through 2010: 6.22 million square kilometers (2.4 million square miles).

How quickly the summer ice would continue to diminish remained unclear. So Notz and Stroeve decided to estimate how soon it could be completely gone.

To do that, they analyzed records of Arctic sea surface temperatures and the minimum sea area covered by summer ice. They looked at records going way back to 1953. The average ice cover by the end of September had dropped. And it fell in lockstep with the rising releases of CO ₂ from human activities, the team found.

The researchers think they now understand why there is such a simple relationship between CO ₂ emissions and ice loss. As CO ₂ builds up in the atmosphere, it strengthens the so-called greenhouse effect. This is where certain gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and methane, trap some of the sun's heat. As CO 2 levels climb, less of the sun's heat bounces back into space. Instead, it remains trapped near Earth's surface. This increases the amount of ice-warming infrared radiation hitting the Arctic. That causes the outermost edge of the sea ice to retreat northward, moving away from the shore. And that shift northward begins to reduce the total area covered by ice.

The researchers argue that computer models of how Earth's climate is changing have underestimated this effect. These models use a computer to describe the conditions, functions or appearance of some changing system. The current models don't accurately re-create how sensitive Arctic ice melting is to rising CO ₂ levels, the scientists say. There are other factors linked to sea ice loss, though. For instance, the heat entering the Arctic from the Atlantic Ocean can vary. How reflective the region is also can change (allowing more or less light to bounce off ice and back into the atmosphere). These factors were minor over the period the team studied, Notz says. The big factor was the increased heat being trapped in the air by greenhouse gases.

Still, downplaying the role of ocean heating is a mistake, argues Rong Zhang. She's a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her work takes place at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. As an oceanographer, she studies the physical and biological properties of the ocean.

Sea ice cover in the Arctic reaches its peak during winter, she notes. At that time, little light shines on the area. During these months of dark or near-darkness, the greenhouse effect is less important, she explains. But just as the summer minimum of Arctic sea ice has been falling, so has the maximum sea ice present in winter. After declining for decades, it reached a record low in March 2016. Why the ice is declining in the winter is not yet clear, she says. More study is needed.

Scientists need to figure out whether warming from below or above the ice plays a larger role, says Zhang. Indeed, she adds: "There's not just one explanation."

Power Words
More About Power Words

Arctic A region that falls within the Arctic Circle. The edge of that circle is defined as the northernmost point at which the sun is visible on the northern winter solstice and the southernmost point at which the midnight sun can be seen on the northern summer solstice.

Arctic sea ice Ice that forms from seawater and that covers all or parts of the Arctic Ocean.

Atlantic One of the world's five oceans, it is second in size only to the Pacific. It separates Europe and Africa to the east from North and South America to the west.

atmosphere The envelope of gases surrounding Earth or another planet.

average (in science) A term for the arithmetic mean, which is the sum of a group of numbers that is then divided by the size of the group.

carbon dioxide (or CO ₂) A colorless, odorless gas produced by all animals when the oxygen they inhale reacts with the carbon-rich foods that they've eaten. Carbon dioxide also is released when organic matter (including fossil fuels like oil or gas) is burned. Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in Earth's atmosphere. Plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen during photosynthesis, the process they use to make their own food.

carbon footprint A popular term for measuring the global warming potential of various products or processes. Their carbon footprint translates to the amount of some greenhouse gas - usually carbon dioxide - that something releases per unit of time or per quantity of product.

climate The weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period.

computer model A program that runs on a computer that creates a model, or simulation, of a real-world feature, phenomenon or event.

dynamic An adjective that signifies something is active, changing or moving. (noun) The change or range of variability seen or measured within something.

factor Something that plays a role in a particular condition or event; a contributor.

fluid dynamics The study of liquids and gases in motion.

greenhouse A light-filled structure, often with windows serving as walls and ceiling materials, in which plants are grown. It provides a controlled environment in which set amounts of water, humidity and nutrients can be applied - and pests can be prevented entry.

greenhouse effect A trapping of heat by the presence of certain gases in Earth's atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and methane. The greenhouse effect also can occur in smaller environments. For instance, when cars are left in the sun, the incoming sunlight turns to heat, becomes trapped inside and quickly can make the indoor temperature a health risk.

methane A hydrocarbon with the chemical formula CH ₄ (meaning there are four hydrogen atoms bound to one carbon atom). It's a natural constituent of what's known as natural gas. It's also emitted by decomposing plant material in wetlands and is belched out by cows and other ruminant livestock. From a climate perspective, methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is in trapping heat in Earth's atmosphere, making it a very important greenhouse gas.

model A simulation of a real-world event (usually using a computer) that has been developed to predict one or more likely outcomes.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA) A science agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Initially established in 1807 under another name (The Survey of the Coast), this agency focuses on understanding and preserving ocean resources, including fisheries, protecting marine mammals (from seals to whales), studying the seafloor and probing the upper atmosphere.

physical (adj.) A term for things that exist in the real world, as opposed to in memories or the imagination. It can also refer to properties of materials that are due to their size and non-chemical interactions (such as when one block slams with force into another).

radiation (in physics) One of the three major ways that energy is transferred. (The other two are conduction and convection.) In radiation, electromagnetic waves carry energy from one place to another. Unlike conduction and convection, which need material to help transfer the energy, radiation can transfer energy across empty space.

reflective Having the quality of reflecting light strongly. Reflective objects can produce a strong bright glare when sunlight bounces off of them. Examples of reflective objects include a mirror, a smooth metal can, a car window, a glass bottle, ice, snow or the watery surface of a lake.

satellite A moon orbiting a planet or a vehicle or other manufactured object that orbits some celestial body in space.

sea An ocean (or region that is part of an ocean). Unlike lakes and streams, seawater - or ocean water - is salty.

solid Firm and stable in shape; not liquid or gaseous.

trillion A number representing a million million - or 1,000,000,000,000 - of something.

weather Conditions in the atmosphere at a localized place and a particular time. It is usually described in terms of particular features, such as air pressure, humidity, moisture, any precipitation (rain, snow or ice), temperature and wind speed. Weather constitutes the actual conditions that occur at any time and place. It's different from climate, which is a description of the conditions that tend to occur in some general region during a particular month or season.

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The average American's carbon footprint shrinks Arctic sea ice. Not by a little. By a lot - about the area covered by 16 queen-size beds. And that happens each year. A carbon footprint is the number of tons of carbon dioxide a person produces in their daily activities.

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7 new planets found, could sustain life

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NASA Telescope Reveals Record-Breaking Exoplanet Discovery

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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water.

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Only two animals survived after a Mosul zoo was destroyed in the battle to retake the city from ISIS.

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A team of scientists from the U.K.'s Queen Mary University of London have discovered the secret behind what makes reindeer antlers so tough.

In a report published Monday in the ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, the team said it used X-ray techniques and computer modeling to get a closer look at the antlers. The team also examined the antler structures at a nano level, which measures at roughly one thousandth of the thickness of a hair strand, in order to identify what makes them so strong.
SCIENTISTS MAY HAVE FOUND 'FIFTH FORCE OF NATURE'
Scientists were keen to discover why reindeers' antlers can endure impacts during fights. First author Paolino De Falco from the university's School of Engineering and Materials Science explained their durability on the school's website. "The fibrils that make up the antler are staggered rather than in line with each other," said De Falco. "This allows them to absorb the energy from the impact of a clash during a fight."

This discovery has provided insight and filled a previous gap in scientists' understanding of the structure modeling of bone, according to the university, which added that the information could be used in the future to create damage resistant materials.

Ettore Barbieri, a co-author of the report, said the next steps include creating a 3D printed model with fibers "arranged in staggered condition and linked by an elastic interface."
WEASEL SHUTS DOWN WORLD'S LARGEST ATOM SMASHER IN SWITZERLAND
"The aim is to prove that additive manufacturing - where a prototype can be created a layer at a time - can be used to create damage resistant composite material, said Barbieri.

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Rugged Rudolph: Scientists discover why reindeer antlers are so strong

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A team of scientists from the U.K.'s Queen Mary University of London have discovered the secret behind what makes reindeer antlers so tough. In a report published Monday in the ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, the team said it used X-ray techniques and computer modeling to get a closer look at the antlers.

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Cropan's boa (Corallus cropanii) inhabits a forest range in Brazil, and scientists recently glimpsed the first living specimen seen since 1953.

Credit: Lívia Corrêa/Instituto Butantan

Brazil's elusive tree boa, Corallus cropanii - also known as Cropan's boa - is one of the world's rarest boas, infrequently sighted and known from only a handful of dead specimens collected after the snake was first seen and described in 1953.

However, the species is alive and well, scientists recently discovered. One of the slippery serpents was captured in January - the second living specimen ever seen, and the first glimpsed in 64 years.

The boa was brought to local scientists by rural residents of the Ribeira Valley Region, in response to extensive outreach efforts coordinated by researchers from the Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo and the Butantan Institute (BI), a biological research center, BI representatives explained Feb. 3 in a Facebook post.

Scientists developed the outreach program to raise local awareness about Cropan's boa - to educate community members about the snake's ecological importance and to encourage them to help biologists learn more about its habits. The boa would likely never have been captured alive without this essential collaboration, BI representatives said on Facebook. [ See Photos of Snakes from Around the World]

In fact, the boa was nearly killed by one of the people who first spied it in January, according to a report in the journal Science. But two bystanders recognized the snake from fliers and posters, and intervened before the boa could be harmed. The rescued snake, a female, measured about 5.6 feet (1.7 meters) in length and weighed 3.3 lbs. (1.5 kilograms).

Cropan's boa is found only in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, in a 116-square-mile (300 square kilometers) region in São Paulo; it is the rarest type of boa in the New World and possibly the rarest on Earth, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. The organization classifies the boa as "Endangered" because its habitat is restricted to one location that is declining in quality, and though the population size is unknown, the scarcity of sightings hints that there probably aren't a lot of these snakes to be found.

The species was described in 1953 from a single adult male specimen. Scales along its back were an olive-beige color, with dark-brown spots "that appear from the neck as far as the tail," according to a study published in May 2011 in the journal Salamandra. After that first sighting of a living animal, the only Cropan's boas seen by scientists - five in total, and all thought to come from the same Atlantic Forest region - were already dead, the study authors wrote.

Cropan's boas have never been observed in the wild. But when the recently captured female is released, she'll be carrying an implanted radio transmitter, which could provide scientists with a few more clues about how these snakes survive in their forest home.

"The snake will be studied in order to discover more information about its biology and habits. As it has never been observed in nature, we do not have much information about its behavior," Livia Corrêa, a biologist at the Butantan Institute, told Carta de Notícias. "It will be released in its natural habitat and receive equipment with radiotelemetry that will enable its tracking in nature and the transmission of information to researchers," she said.

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World's Rarest Boa Snake Seen for 1st Time in 64 Years

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Brazil's elusive tree boa, Corallus cropanii - also known as Cropan's boa - is one of the world's rarest boas, infrequently sighted and known from only a handful of dead specimens collected after the snake was first seen and described in 1953. However, the species is alive and well, scientists recently discovered.

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A herd of wild bison has been reintroduced to Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada, marking the first time that bison have roamed this part of Canada since they were hunted to near extinction in the 19th century.

Parks Canada - the Canadian government agency that manages national parks, conservation areas and historical sites - relocated the 16 bison, which primarily include pregnant females, to the remote Panther Valley in Banff National Park, the Calgary Herald reported. Initially, the bison will be in an enclosed pasture and monitored by Parks Canada officials, but by summer 2018, the herd will be free to roam across more than 460 square miles (1,200 square kilometers) in the Red Deer and Cascade river valleys, according to the Calgary Herald.

Banff National Park Superintendent Dave McDonough said the herd's release is part of a celebration of Canada's 150th anniversary of Confederation, when the country was united into one dominion. [ Photos: 9,000-Year-Old Bison Mummy Found in Siberia]

"It's a great event to have a keystone species return to one of our nation's most iconic places," McDonough said when making the official announcement Monday (Feb. 6), according to news reports. "I'm proud to say that history has come full circle and wild bison are once again in Banff National Park."

Bison used to freely roam the land that is now Banff National Park, and their historic population in North America was about 30 million, the Calgary Herald reported. However, overhunting brought the large herd animals to the brink of extinction. To save the species, the Canadian government purchased one of the last surviving herds in the early 1900s, according to Parks Canada. For almost a century, this herd and its descendants were kept in a protected paddock at the base of Cascade Mountain in Alberta, before being released in 1997 to begin their reintroduction to the wild.

If the herd thrives, and a healthy wild population is established, the Banff plains buffalo population will be just one of four in North America that is roaming in the wild and interacting with its historical environment, said Karsten Heuer, bison project manager for Parks Canada.

"That will be a first in over 140 years in Banff National Park, and that's really why we're doing this, is to make them wild again," Heuer told the Calgary Herald. "They've been absent from this landscape for too long, and so I think today is the hooves-on-the-ground beginning of trying to bring that back."

Original article on Live Science.

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Bison Reintroduced to Canadian Wild After a Century of Conservation Efforts

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A herd of wild bison has been reintroduced to Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada, marking the first time that bison have roamed this part of Canada since they were hunted to near extinction in the 19th century.

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http://www.livescience.com/57786-new-gecko-species-disposable-skin.html

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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/12/wildlife-watch-china-legal-ivory-market-african-elephants/

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Animal News - 2018 Science and Zoology Articles

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Get the latest news and articles about animals from around the world. Featuring stories about animal births, new species, and other animal news.

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The U.S.-Mexico border in the state of Arizona.

Credit: Chess Ocampo/Shutterstock

President Donald Trump's wall may not only block humans from easily crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, but also wildlife whose homes straddle both countries, biologists tell Live Science.

Some species that live along the border, including the Arroyo toad ( Anaxyrus californicus) and black-spotted newt ( Notophthalmus meridionalis), are already endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

These animals, as well as others such as jaguars, desert bighorn sheep and roadrunner could see their habitat split in two and their genetic diversity threatened if the wall is built, said Howard Quigley, Jaguar Program Executive Director and Puma Program Director for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation group. [ 10 Species You Can Kiss Goodbye]

"[The wall would] prevent gene flow, which is ultimately bad for the species," Quigley told Live Science. For instance, if a population is cut in half, it could lead to inbreeding if not enough mates are available, he said.

Trump initially proposed that he would "build a great, great wall on our southern border," in June 2015, during the speech announcing his candidacy for president, according to Time magazine.

On Wednesday (Jan. 25), Trump signed an executive order that orders that the Department of Homeland Security use existing funding to start building the wall, according to Politico. However, Congress would need to approve more funding for the wall's completion, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said at a daily briefing, Politico reported.

About 700 miles (1126 kilometers) of border fencing already exists along the nearly 2,000 mile (3,218 km) long U.S.-Mexico boarder, according to ABC News. Most of this border was build after former President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

Moreover, the REAL ID Act of 2005 allowed the Department of Homeland Security to waive all regulatory law, including environmental review, prior to building the boarder barrier, said Jesse Lasky, an assistant professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University.

"It meant that this large project was going to go through without any forethought in terms of all of the environmental aspects," Lasky told Live Science. "That seemed to be a glaring problem to me."

Lasky conducted his own investigation in the wake of the Secure Fence Act. That study, published when he was a graduate student of biology at The University of Texas at Austin, showed that the new fence and proposed fences along the border posed significant threats to wildlife, especially among populations living along the Texas Gulf and California coasts, as well as the Madrean archipelago - mountain ranges surrounded by a sea of deserts and grasslands in Arizona, New Mexico and Chihuahua, Mexico, Lasky said.

Lasky and his colleagues used publically available databases to see where different populations of animals lived along the border. Then, they checked which were listed as vulnerable, threatened or endangered, he said.

The species most at risk included four species listed as threatened globally or by both the United States and Mexico, and 23 other animals with small range sizes, Lasky found, according to a news release. These animals included the California red-legged frog and the jaguarondi, a small wild cat, he said.

Moreover, vegetative cover helps animals hide and protect themselves, but construction for the wall could destroy that, Lasky said in the 2011 study, published in the journal Diversity and Distributions.

If Trump's wall is built, it could push endangered animals and native animals with small habitats over the edge, Lasky said. [ 7 Iconic Animals Humans Are Driving to Extinction]

"If the populations on the border start disappearing, the functioning of these ecosystems could be reduced," he said.

For instance, if jaguars start disappearing (many live in Mexico, but one is in the United States, and more may come as the population grows), then their prey, such as deer and peccaries (small pigs also known as javelinas), will swell in numbers, Quigley said. What's more, studies show that when predators are absent from an ecosystem, prey tends to act less vigilant and can also alter an ecosystem when their numbers go unchecked, he said.

That's not to say that Panthera and other groups oppose human development, Quigley said. Rather that "we oppose development that obstructs that movement of jaguars," he said.

Jaguar in the Brazilian Pantanal, courtesy of Panthera.

Credit: Steve Winter/Panthera

The United States isn't the only country with walls. A new anti-refugee wall between Slovenia and Croatia is hurting the area's gray wolves ( Canis lupus) and Eurasian lynxes ( Lynx lynx) populations, and it may one day threaten the regions' brown bears ( Ursus arctos), a June 2016 study in the journal PLOS Biology found.

In another instance, southeastern Australia erected 3,000 miles (4,800 km) of fencing in the 1950s for the purpose of protecting sheep from wild dogs known as dingos. But the idea backfired: the fence protected the sheep, but it also protected kangaroos, which had a major population boom and began competing with the sheep for grass, the BBC reported.

Original article on Live Science.

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Trump's Wall Could Have Unexpected Victims: Wildlife

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President Donald Trump's wall may not only block humans from easily crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, but also wildlife whose homes straddle both countries, biologists tell Live Science. Some species that live along the border, including the Arroyo toad ( Anaxyrus californicus) and black-spotted newt ( Notophthalmus meridionalis), are already endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

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Scientists from the Universities of Bristol and Groningen, in The Netherlands, have created a computer game style experiment which sheds new light on the reasons why starlings flock in massive swirling groups over wintering grounds.

A mumeration can hold many thousands of starlings but the reasons why they put on these amazing displays are not well understood.

However, scientists have observed that flocks of starlings are larger, and more densely packed in areas with more predators, such as hawks, and that attacks by such predators are less likely to succeed against larger groups of starlings. This has led researchers to suggest that one function of these flocks may be avoiding predation.

There are many ways in which forming groups can reduce predation. One idea is that in larger groups, more birds can be on the look-out for predators at any one time, and there is even evidence that larger groups can allow for faster transfer of information. For example, if one bird sees a predator it might turn to escape, causing other birds to turn, even if they have not seen the predator themselves.

Another suggestion is that predators may simply be confused by the sheer number of potential prey, something called the "confusion effect." The confusion effect is well documented in several species and describes decreased predator attack success with increased prey group size.

Benedict Hogan, a PhD student based at the School of Biological Sciences in Bristol, explained: "Testing these theories is difficult in the wild, so we traded hawks for human participants, and made a computer game style experiment, where the participant attempts to fly in and catch one target starling in a flock of up to 5,000 simulated starlings."

The confusion effect is often discussed when considering the causes of large and complex groups like those of starlings and shoals of fish, but there is little empirical evidence that these groups induce predator confusion, indeed most evidence for confusion comes from experiments with very small groups (less than 10).

Benedict added: "What we aimed to do was to find out whether or not confusion does occur in these massive and complex aggregations, like those of starlings.

"We found that, in line with the predictions of the confusion effect, participants had more difficulty in capturing a target starling in larger flocks, and in denser flocks; and that these effects interacted.

"This means we have evidence that suggests that starlings could indeed be safer from predation in larger and denser flocks, through the confusion of predators.

"However, it is likely that predator confusion is only one of many functions of these impressive groups in starlings.

"Computerized experiments like this may allow us to test other potential functions in starling groups, and similar simulations may help others to understand the mechanisms and functions of complex groups in other species."

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birds; wild animals; behavioral science; animals; computer modeling; computer science; artificial intelligence; educational technology

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Birds of a feather flock together to confuse potential predators

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Scientists from the Universities of Bristol and Groningen, in The Netherlands, have created a computer game style experiment which sheds new light on the reasons why starlings flock in massive swirling groups over wintering grounds. A mumeration can hold many thousands of starlings but the reasons why they put on these amazing displays are not well understood.

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Lethal Laser Mice! What's next?! Laser Sharks?!!!

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One moment, a mouse nonchalantly shares a cage with a cricket; the next, the rodent leaps on the insect and rips its head off-all because a scientist flipped a switch. For the first time, researchers have hacked into the part of the brain that makes animals hunt, using lasers to target specific neurons. What's more, they've found this hunting center in a surprising place: the region of the brain responsible for fear.

"This is really exciting stuff and it's sort of out of the blue," says Kay Tye, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who was not involved with the study. "How does this relate to fear or avoidance? It's almost the opposite of hunting."

Ivan de Araujo wasn't initially interested in turning mice into maniacs. A neurobiologist at Yale University, he usually studies rodent feeding behavior in his lab. But a few years ago he came across a 2005 study that suggested the amygdala-a small, almond-shaped part of the brain linked to fear and anxiety- was active during hunting and feeding in rats. That seemed odd, because most research about the amygdala is focused on defensive or submissive emotions.

To further explore the connection, De Araujo and his team turned to optogentics, which stimulates neurons with laser light. In the past, researchers have used the technique in mice to do everything from altering their memories to making them feel thirsty, and De Araujo and colleagues wondered whether they could use it to make mice mimic specific hunting and eating behaviors. They didn't necessarily expect that the rodent would perform an entire hunting sequence from start to finish: rear its neck, spot its prey, chase it down, grab it, sink its teeth into it, and deliver a lethal bite. But that's exactly what happened.

Two pathways work in tandem to execute a hunt, the team found. One controls prey pursuit (PAG), and the other controls bite accuracy (PCRt). Targeting PAG with the laser made the mouse move faster or slower, and targeting PCRt made its bite weaker or stronger. When the scientists stimulated both at the same time, the mouse stopped in its tracks and hunted down almost anything it could find-crickets, woodchips, even bottle caps-and bit into it, the team reports today in Cell. "The central amygdala seems to be a center for organizing motor behavior ... it has not been conceptualized this way before," De Araujo says.

Still, activating PAG and PCRt doesn't turn mice into unchecked killers. The rodents only went after small objects, not other mice. This suggests that other parts of the brain may be keeping the amygdala in check, De Araujo says.

As for why the fear and hunting center would be located in the same part of the brain, Tye suspects it may be because the two behaviors are related in the wild. When a mouse leaves its burrow to hunt, it also has to be concerned about predators, she says. "Like every good scientific discovery, this one raises a lot of questions. It's raising a lot of questions about the amygdala, but also, how the brain works, really."

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One moment, a mouse nonchalantly shares a cage with a cricket; the next, the rodent leaps on the insect and rips its head off-all because a scientist flipped a switch. For the first time, researchers have hacked into the part of the brain that makes animals hunt, using lasers to target specific neurons.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170118143757.htm

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/17/this-new-species-of-moth-has-yellowish-white-scales-on-its-head-it-is-named-for-donald-trump/?utm_term=.acc194669b90

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http://time.com/4638694/peta-boycott-a-dogs-purpose-animal-cruelty/

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A hairy-legged vampire bat ( Diphylla ecaudata), captured in Mexico.

Credit: Gerry Carter

Unlike mythical vampires, vampire bats do not prey on humans - or do they? Scientists have found the first evidence of vampire bats supping on human blood.

Diphylla ecaudata, also known as the hairy-legged vampire bat, inhabits forests in northeastern Brazil and is one of three species of vampire bats that feed only on blood. It was thought that birds were its sole prey, but dung analysis recently revealed that other types of two-legged animals - humans - were on the bat's bill of fare.

The bats' feeding preferences may have shifted because birds were hard to find, hinting that even highly specialized bats could have more flexibility in their diets than expected, the study authors wrote. [ Flying Mammals: See Photos of Spooky Bats]

Vampire bats, which live only in the Americas, feed by puncturing the skin of their prey with sharp incisors and lapping up the flowing blood, mixing it with saliva that prevents their gory meal from coagulating too quickly. Previous studies have shown that these bats don't store fat in their bodies and can't survive without food for more than a couple of days.

The scientists were curious about how a bat that depends on birds and must eat every two days would modify its feeding behavior if its prey of choice were less available. To find out what else D. ecaudata might be eating, they collected 70 fecal samples from a colony living in a cave in Brazil's Catimbau National Park, and extracted DNA to identify the bats' most recent meals.

Their analysis revealed that the bats were feeding on chickens and, more surprisingly, on humans. D. ecaudata is adapted to consume bird blood, which has higher water and fat content than mammal blood, and lower concentrations of proteins. It is possible that the bats couldn't survive on human blood alone, and had to seek out at least some blood from birds - even if those birds weren't their usual prey, the researchers noted. Domestic animals and people usually live close together in that region, making it easier for the bats to grab a quick bite from whoever is available.

Birds may be growing scarce in the forests where the bats live because of human activity. About half of the 510 species of native birds living in Brazil's Caatinga - the vast forest region that is partly contained in Catimbau National Park - are described as moderately to highly sensitive to disturbance by humans, according to an earlier study.

Unraveling the circumstances that led D. ecaudata to rely on human and chicken blood would be "an interesting ecological exercise," the study authors wrote. But the prospect of vampire bats feeding on humans also raises concerns about public health, as it could bring an increased risk of rabies transmission, the researchers said.

The findings were published online in the December 2016 issue of the journal Acta Chiropterologica.

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Well, That Sucks: Vampire Bats Found Drinking Human Blood

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Unlike mythical vampires, vampire bats do not prey on humans - or do they? Scientists have found the first evidence of vampire bats supping on human blood. Diphylla ecaudata, also known as the hairy-legged vampire bat, inhabits forests in northeastern Brazil and is one of three species of vampire bats that feed only on blood.

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A new study has revealed that just 7,100 cheetahs remain in the world.

Credit: Zoological Society of London

The cheetah, the world's fastest land animal, is headed toward extinction, largely due to unprecedented habitat loss, scientists announced in a new study.

The research revealed that only 7,100 cheetahs remain globally and that the speedy animal has lost 91 percent of its historic habitat range. Due to human development, cheetahs' habitat decreased from a historical range totaling about 13 million square miles (33,056,767 square kilometers) before 1900, to now only covering about 280,000 square miles (724,514 square km), according to the researchers.

In Zimbabwe, where the cheetah distribution is well-documented, the population has plummeted from 1,200 individuals in 2000 to about 170 individuals in 2016, according to the study. Because of these dramatic losses, the study's authors are urging scientists to change the cheetah's conservation status from "vulnerable" (which means the animal is likely to become endangered unless threats improve) to "endangered" (which means the animal is facing a very high risk of extinction in the wild) on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species, which tracks at-risk species.

Cheetahs are particularly sensitive to habitat loss because of their large space requirements, said lead study author Sarah Durant, a senior researcher with the Zoological Society of London and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) who focuses on the conservation of cheetahs and African wild dogs. [ Cat Album: The Life of a Cheetah]

"Given the secretive nature of this elusive cat, it has been difficult to gather hard information on the species, leading to its plight being overlooked," Durant said in a statement from the WCS. "Our findings show that the large space requirements for cheetah[s], coupled with the complex range of threats faced by the species in the wild, mean that it is likely to be much more vulnerable to extinction than was previously thought."

The threats cheetahs face are largely caused by humans. These threats include overhunting by people, as well as habitat loss, the exotic-pet trade and illegal trafficking of cheetah parts, representatives with the WCS said in a statement.

Although there are some conservation measures in place for cheetahs, such as protected areas, these cats are one of the world's most wide-ranging carnivores, and 77 percent of their habitat falls outside protected areas, according to the study. These geographical complications make the cheetah difficult to protect, and so scientists are looking for a more holistic conservation approach.

"The takeaway from this pinnacle study is that securing protected areas alone is not enough," said study co-author Kim Young-Overton, director of the Cheetah Program for Panthera, a conservation organization focused on wild cat species. "We must think bigger, conserving across the mosaic of protected and unprotected landscapes that these far-ranging cats inhabit, if we are to avert the otherwise certain loss of the cheetah forever."

The study's authors are calling for the cheetah's status to be changed to "endangered" because this listing can lead to greater international conservation support, according to the WCS statement. For example, an IUCN listing of "endangered" increases recognition for the animal, as the Red List updates can make news around the world.

The study was detailed in a paper published online Dec. 26 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Original article on Live Science.

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The cheetah, the world's fastest land animal, is headed toward extinction, largely due to unprecedented habitat loss, scientists announced in a new study. The research revealed that only 7,100 cheetahs remain globally and that the speedy animal has lost 91 percent of its historic habitat range.

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Evolution is working hard to rescue some urban fish from a lethal, human-altered environment, according to a study led by the University of California, Davis, and published Dec. 9 in the journal Science.

While environmental change is outpacing the rate of evolution for many other species, Atlantic killifish living in four polluted East Coast estuaries turn out to be remarkably resilient. These fish have adapted to levels of highly toxic industrial pollutants that would normally kill them.

The killifish is up to 8,000 times more resistant to this level of pollution than other fish, the study found. While the fish is not commercially valuable, it is an important food for other species and an environmental indicator.
Genetic diversity speeds evolution
What makes Atlantic killifish so special? Extremely high levels of genetic variation, higher than any other vertebrate -- humans included -- measured so far. The more genetic diversity, the faster evolution can act. That's one reason why insects and weeds can quickly adapt and evolve to resist pesticides, and why pathogens can evolve quickly to resist drugs created to destroy them.

Not all species are so lucky, however.

"Some people will see this as a positive and think, 'Hey, species can evolve in response to what we're doing to the environment!'" said lead author Andrew Whitehead, associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Environmental Toxicology. "Unfortunately, most species we care about preserving probably can't adapt to these rapid changes because they don't have the high levels of genetic variation that allow them to evolve quickly."
Evolution a pollution solution? Not for most of us
The scientists sequenced complete genomes of nearly 400 Atlantic killifish from polluted and nonpolluted sites at New Bedford Harbor in Massachusetts; Newark Bay, New Jersey; Connecticut's Bridgeport area; and Virginia's Elizabeth River. The sites have been polluted since the 1950s and 1960s by a complex mixture of industrial pollutants including dioxins, heavy metals, hydrocarbons and other chemicals.

The team's genetic analysis suggests that the Atlantic killifish's genetic diversity make them unusually well positioned to adapt to survive in radically altered habitats. At the genetic level, the tolerant populations evolved in highly similar ways. This suggests that these fish already carried the genetic variation that allowed them to adapt before the sites were polluted, and that there may be only a few evolutionary solutions to pollution.

The study lays the groundwork for future research that could explore which genes confer tolerance of specific chemicals. Such work could help better explain how genetic differences among humans and other species may contribute to differences in sensitivity to environmental chemicals.

"If we know the kinds of genes that can confer sensitivity in another vertebrate animal like us, perhaps we can understand how different humans, with their own mutations in these important genes, might react to these chemicals," Whitehead said.

"This study shows that different populations of Atlantic killifish exposed to toxic pollution evolve tolerance to that pollution through changes in one molecular pathway," said George Gilchrist, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the study along with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. "This pathway may play a similar role in many animals exposed to pollutants, with slightly different adaptations in response to different toxicants."

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evolutionary biology; nature; wild animals; environmental awareness; pollution; environmental issues; environmental policies; ocean policy; land management

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Against the tide: A fish adapts quickly to lethal levels of pollution: What's its secret? And can humans learn from it?

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Evolution is working hard to rescue some urban fish from a lethal, human-altered environment, according to a study. Atlantic killifish living in four polluted East Coast estuaries have adapted to levels of highly toxic industrial pollutants that would normally kill them.

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http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/34918/20170109/theres-gigantic-iceberg-break-antarctic.htm

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Jan 09, 2017 10:00 AM EST

Scientists keeping an eye on Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf reported an alarming observation: a sizeable portion seems poised to break away in the coming months.

According to a report from Phys Org, the enormous block of ice that's set to break away is a hundred times the size of Manhattan. Adrian Luckman, Swansea University professor and leader of Britain's Project Midas, revealed to BBC that he expects the chunk to split from Larsen C soon.

"If it doesn't go in the next few months, I'll be amazed," he said. "There hasn't been enough cloud-free Landsat images but we've managed to combine a pair of Esa Sentinel-1 radar images to notice this extension, and it's so close to calving that I think it's inevitable."

This estimate comes after a rift in the ice sheet suddenly extended by approximately 18 kilometers (11 miles) by the end of December. Only a small fraction of the block remains connected to the main shelf. The gap also increased from being under 50 meters (160 feet) in 2011 to almost 500 meters at present. Should it separate, Luckman described the break-off as one of the ten biggest break-offs in recorded history.

While the iceberg itself would not cause a significant rise in sea level, the inland glaciers that are held in place by the Larsen C ice shelf contains frozen water that could hike up ocean levels by about 10 centimeters (four inches). This is a large increase that is causing considerable concern worldwide.

University of Colorado scientist Ted Scambos told Phys Org in a separate report that although the Delaware-sized iceberg is set to break away soon, he does not see the other signs that point to a collapse of the entire ice shelf.

"By itself this calving is not cause for alarm," NASA glaciologist Jay Zwally agreed. He added that icebergs breaking off is a natural occurrence in the Antarctica. "But the ice shelf has been thinning as other ice shelves have been thinning in the Antarctic peninsula."

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Uh-Oh! There's a Gigantic Iceberg About to Break Off From the Antarctic

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Jan 09, 2017 10:00 AM EST Scientists keeping an eye on Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf reported an alarming observation: a sizeable portion seems poised to break away in the coming months. According to a report from Phys Org, the enormous block of ice that's set to break away is a hundred times the size of Manhattan.

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The killer whale "Tilikum" performs in a show at SeaWorld on March 30, 2011, in Orlando, Florida. This was the first time Tilikum had performed since killing trainer Dawn Brancheau on Feb. 24, 2010.

Credit: Gerardo Mora/Getty Images

Tilikum, the orca at the center of the 2013 documentary "Blackfish," has died at SeaWorld Orlando, the marine park announced Friday (Jan. 6).

According to SeaWorld, Tilikum died early in the morning. The cause of death is officially unknown, but the killer whale had been under long-term treatment for a persistent bacterial lung infection. In March 2016, SeaWorld announced that Tilikum was lethargic and seemed to be deteriorating, but his condition improved.

Tilikum was the focus of a controversy over the ethics of keeping orcas in captivity. Over his approximately 33 years in captivity, he was involved in three human deaths, including the death of a trainer at SeaWorld in front of a horrified audience of onlookers after a show in 2010. Those interviewed in "Blackfish" argued that the whale had essentially become psychotic after being torn from his close-knit wild pod at a young age and kept in barren, isolated tanks.

"You really felt personally connected to him as an individual animal [in the documentary]," said Brian Ogle, an anthrozoologist at Beacon College in Florida who studies interactions between humans and captive animals. "I think that's why that movie was so successful." [ Image Gallery: Russia's Beautiful Killer Whales]

Tilikum's story launched a public conversation about large marine mammals in captivity, including how to make life in a pool better for these animals. But it also opened up a broader debate about whether to keep large mammals in captivity at all, Ogle said.

"It's a double-edged sword," he said. "You have to look at it from the perspective that if these animals weren't in captivity to begin with, would we have cared so much about them as we do now?"

In March 2016, due to declining SeaWorld ticket sales, political pressure from California lawmakers and public backlash because of "Blackfish," SeaWorld announced that it would end its captive breeding program. The California Coastal Commission had made permits for SeaWorld's expansion in San Diego contingent on the park ending killer-whale breeding in the state.

The park also ended its circus-style, trick-filled orca shows. The orca shows at the parks have been altered to show off more naturalistic behaviors in the whales.

As has been documented by "Blackfish" and Outside magazine, Tilikum was captured from the wild off the coast of Iceland in 1983, when he was approximately 2 years old. Killer whales are intensely social, and males typically stay with their mothers for decades, if not for life. Males don't reach full sexual maturity until age 25, according to the Center for Whale Research. [ Whale Gallery: Giants of the Deep]

Tilikum was kept in a tank at a marine zoo in Reykjavík, Iceland, for a year before being purchased by Sealand of the Pacific, a marine park in British Columbia. There, he was kept in a pen open to a marina along with two females that bullied him to establish dominance. In 1991, the three whales killed a 20-year-old part-time trainer who slipped into their pool. It was the first killing by an orca at a marine park - in fact, it was the first killing of a human by orcas ever reported, as killer whales have never killed a person in the wild.

Tilikum was shipped to SeaWorld shortly after the incident. In 1999, he was involved in the death of another human, a man who snuck into his tank after hours. Whether Tilikum actually killed the man is a mystery, but the man's body was found drowned, mutilated and draped over the whale the next morning.

It was the death of SeaWorld's Dawn Brancheau in 2010, however, that catapulted Tilikum to notoriety. The whale dragged her into the water after a show, drowning her as park employees tried to usher away park guests.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) opened an investigation into SeaWorld after Brancheau's death, but it was "Blackfish," which outlined Tilikum's tragic beginnings, that kicked off public outrage about orcas in captivity. People in the animal care world call it the "Blackfish effect," Ogle told Live Science, and the resulting sentiment has transferred beyond orcas to other large captive mammals.

"I really believe if the whole issue with 'Blackfish' would not have happened, we would have been having a same or similar conversation, but it would have been around elephants," Ogle said. "I really think zoos kind of dodged a bullet."

Zoos have been updating elephant habitat in recent years and resigning themselves to transferring elephants they can't care for, Ogle said. The focus on orcas after "Blackfish" allowed them to make a lot of that progress quietly, without much public attention.

"I think the zoo industry as a whole has learned from SeaWorld," Ogle said. The marine park didn't prepare a rapid public-relations response to Blackfish, he said, and when they did respond, it came across as evasive and defensive, he said.

"They didn't respond in a manner that made it look like they weren't doing anything wrong," Ogle said.

Some animal activists advocate releasing today's captive killer whales, but many zoo professionals say releasing the orcas would be akin to a death sentence. Both sides genuinely want to do the right thing for the whales, Ogle said.

"They're having a hard time finding a middle ground in what's actually best for those animals," Ogle said.

Original article on Live Science.

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How Tilikum the Orca Changed the Conversation About Animals in Captivity

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Tilikum, the orca at the center of the 2013 documentary "Blackfish," has died at SeaWorld Orlando, the marine park announced Friday (Jan. 6). According to SeaWorld, Tilikum died early in the morning. The cause of death is officially unknown, but the killer whale had been under long-term treatment for a persistent bacterial lung infection.

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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/spiders-chile-ghost-robinson-crusoe/

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A giant larvacean, Bathochordaeus charon, surrounded by its inner "house" (the rounded globular object in the middle of the photo) and it's outer "house (the large yellowish mucus net)

Credit: (c) 2013 MBARI

A mysterious sea blob that looks like a psychedelic Slinky has finally been spotted, more than a century after it was first described.

The translucent, sea-dwelling invertebrate, called Bathochordaeus charon, was identified recently off the coast of Monterey, California, by scientists using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Though B. charon was first discovered a century ago, no one had managed to confirm its existence in all those years, Rob Sherlock, a scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who found the creature, told Live Science in an email. [ See Photos of the Translucent Sea Blob]

B. charon belongs to a group of sea creatures known as larvaceans - normally teensy, millimeter-size creatures whose bodies resemble a tadpole's, with a large "head" (actually a trunk) and a tail, Sherlock said.

A giant larvacean, Bathochordaeus charon, that has discarded its mucus feeding filters and is swimming freely in the open ocean.

Credit: (c) 2007 MBARI

Though the sea is teeming with tiny larvaceans, the larger versions, which can have bodies extending up to 3.9 inches (10 centimeters), are much less common. To eat, the sea blob filters food through its shimmering, parachute-like mucus "house" almost 3.3 feet (1 m) in length. By waving its tail, it stirs the water and pulls particles directly into its house. Large particles get trapped and form a fine dusting of marine "snow" on the house, while the smaller particles pass through, concentrating and then funneling into a feeding tube that goes into the mouth, Sherlock said. (The tiny larvaceans also don mucus homes, but they're smaller.)

If a passing squid or fish crashes through the house, or big particles clog the feeding tube, larvaceans simply move on and build another house. Without their houses, they cannot eat, Sherlock said.

The first report of B. charon's existence came in 1899, when professor Carl Chun of Leipzig University came across one in the south Atlantic Ocean while leading the Valdivia Expedition, a German mission aimed at exploring the deep sea. Chun believed the creature welled up from the deepest depths of the ocean, so he named the larvacean after Charon, who in Greek mythology ferries the souls of the dead across the river Styx, the researchers reported Aug. 16 in the journal Marine Biodiversity Records.

In the decades that followed, several other naturalists reported spotting giant larvaceans, though only a few were captured alive and described thoroughly. In 1936, for instance, British marine biologist Walter Garstang collected a set of giant larvaceans that differed from Chun's, and they were classified as a new species, Bathochordaeus stygius. [ Marine Marvels: Spectacular Photos of Sea Creatures]

Because the two sets of specimens were similar and Chun's originals were lost to history, scientists eventually began to wonder whether Chun's originally described B. charon was actually the same species as B. stygius. One famous larvacean expert even suggested combining the two species names, Sherlock said. Part of the difficulty in capturing these creatures is that they don't fare well in the trawling nets typically used to collect specimens, Sherlock said.

Sherlock and his colleagues happened upon the new species when the team's ROV, called Doc Ricketts, was exploring the waters of Monterey Bay. As soon as they saw it, the crew carefully collected it in a sealed, thermally insulated container.

"Since the vehicle was recovered some tens of minutes later, the animal was alive, in fantastic shape, and we preserved it right away in order to send it to the Smithsonian," Sherlock said. "We had no idea, until we looked more closely at the specimen, that we had actually found B. charon, the species first described over a hundred years ago."

Genetics and analysis of physical features confirmed the find, Sherlock said. It was official: There really were two distinct species of giant larvacean - B. stygius and B. charon.

"It felt like Chun had finally been vindicated after years of doubt," Sherlock said.

When the team went back over videos from Monterey Bay from the past 25 years, they realized the creature had been spotted many times in the bay. Whether they dwell in places between Monterey Bay and the South Atlantic, however, remains to be seen.

Still, this mythical sea blob is fairly rare; over the course of the past few decades, biologists have seen hundreds of B. stygius, but captured footage of only a dozen B. charon individuals, Sherlock said.

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'Mythical' Sea Blob Finally Spotted a Century After Its Discovery

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A mysterious sea blob that looks like a psychedelic Slinky has finally been spotted, more than a century after it was first described. The translucent, sea-dwelling invertebrate, called Bathochordaeus charon, was identified recently off the coast of Monterey, California, by scientists using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Though B.

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People have a remarkable ability to remember and recall events from the past, even when those events didn't hold any particular importance at the time they occurred. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on November 23 have evidence that dogs have that kind of "episodic memory" too.

The study found that dogs can recall a person's complex actions even when they don't expect to have their memory tested.

"The results of our study can be considered as a further step to break down artificially erected barriers between non-human animals and humans," says Claudia Fugazza of MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group in Budapest, Hungary. "Dogs are among the few species that people consider 'clever,' and yet we are still surprised whenever a study reveals that dogs and their owners may share some mental abilities despite our distant evolutionary relationship."

Evidence that non-human animals use episodic-like memory has been hard to come by because you can't just ask a dog what it remembers. In the new study, the researchers took advantage of a trick called "Do as I Do." Dogs trained to "Do as I Do" can watch a person perform an action and then do the action themselves. For example, if their owner jumps in the air and then gives the "Do it!" command, the dog would jump in the air too.

The fact that dogs can be trained in this way alone wasn't enough to prove episodic memory. That's because it needed to be shown that dogs remember what they just saw a person do even when they weren't expecting to be asked or rewarded. To get around this problem, the researchers first trained 17 dogs to imitate human actions with the "Do as I Do" training method. Next, they did another round of training in which dogs were trained to lie down after watching the human action, no matter what it was.

After the dogs had learned to lie down reliably, the researchers surprised them by saying "Do It" and the dogs did. In other words, the dogs recalled what they'd seen the person do even though they had no particular reason to think they'd need to remember. They showed episodic-like memory.

Dogs were tested in that way after one minute and after one hour. The results show they were able to recall the demonstrated actions after both short and long time intervals. However, their memory faded somewhat over time.

The researchers say that the same approach can most likely be used and adapted in a wide range of animal species, to better understand how animals' minds process their own actions and that of others around them.

"From a broad evolutionary perspective, this implies that episodic-like memory is not unique and did not evolve only in primates but is a more widespread skill in the animal kingdom," Fugazza says. "We suggest that dogs may provide a good model to study the complexity of episodic-like memory in a natural setting, especially because this species has the evolutionary and developmental advantage to live in human social groups."

For all those dog owners out there: your dogs are paying attention and they'll remember.

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dogs; animal learning and intelligence; veterinary medicine; animals; nature; behavioral science; evolutionary biology; mammals

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People have a remarkable ability to remember and recall events from the past, even when those events didn't hold any particular importance at the time they occurred. Now, researchers have evidence that dogs have that kind of "episodic memory" too.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/science/a-forgotten-step-in-saving-african-wildlife-protecting-the-rangers.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FAnimals&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection

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Scientists recently released time-lapse animation comparing Arctic sea ice since 1984 with now, and it is a little startling. The old sea ice -- the Arctic sea ice that lasts year after year -- is smaller than it has been in three decades.

You see, sea ice is kind of like plants. There are seasonal and perennial sea ice. The perennial sea ice lasts from one year to the next and represents the thickest ice. It can last for four, or even up to nine years or more without melting during the warmer summer months and can be at least 4 meters thick.

But lately, the thinner, younger sea ice -- less than a year -- has become the majority across the Arctic. Young ice struggles to reach 2 meters thick during winter months and then is more likely to melt during the summer.

In September, Arctic sea ice shrank to the second-lowest level since records began in 1979. The lowest sea ice extent was recorded on September 17, 2012, when it fell to just 1.31 million square miles (3.39 million square kilometers).

The polar sea ice has a direct influence on ocean circulation, weather and regional climate across the globe. Vanishing sea ice is an easy indicatorthat climate change is taking place.

According to NASA, many global climate models predict that the Arctic will be ice-free for at least part of the year before the end of the 21st century. Some models predict an ice-free Arctic by midcentury.

If this holds true, it would have a direct impact on weather patterns seen in the United States and around the world.

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Scientists recently released time-lapse animation comparing Arctic sea ice since 1984 with now, and it is a little startling. The old sea ice -- the Arctic sea ice that lasts year after year -- is smaller than it has been in three decades. You see, sea ice is kind of like plants.

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Biggest exposed fault on Earth discovered

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Biggest exposed fault on Earth discovered

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Geologists have for the first time seen and documented the Banda Detachment fault in eastern Indonesia and have worked out how it formed.

Faith Cox

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Geologists have for the first time seen and documented the Banda Detachment fault in eastern Indonesia and worked out how it formed.

Lead researcher Dr Jonathan Pownall from The Australian National University (ANU) said the find will help researchers assess dangers of future tsunamis in the area, which is part of the Ring of Fire -- an area around the Pacific Ocean basin known for earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

"The abyss has been known for 90 years but until now no one has been able to explain how it got so deep," Dr Pownall said.

"Our research found that a 7 km-deep abyss beneath the Banda Sea off eastern Indonesia was formed by extension along what might be Earth's largest-identified exposed fault plane."

By analysing high-resolution maps of the Banda Sea floor, geologists from ANU and Royal Holloway University of London found the rocks flooring the seas are cut by hundreds of straight parallel scars.

These wounds show that a piece of crust bigger than Belgium or Tasmania must have been ripped apart by 120 km of extension along a low-angle crack, or detachment fault, to form the present-day ocean-floor depression.

Dr Pownall said this fault, the Banda Detachment, represents a rip in the ocean floor exposed over 60,000 square kilometres.

"The discovery will help explain how one of Earth's deepest sea areas became so deep," he said.

Professor Gordon Lister also from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences said this was the first time the fault has been seen and documented by researchers.

"We had made a good argument for the existence of this fault we named the Banda Detachment based on the bathymetry data and on knowledge of the regional geology," said Professor Lister.

Dr Pownall said he was on a boat journey in eastern Indonesia in July when he noticed the prominent landforms consistent with surface extensions of the fault line.

"I was stunned to see the hypothesised fault plane, this time not on a computer screen, but poking above the waves," said Dr Pownall.

He said rocks immediately below the fault include those brought up from the mantle.

"This demonstrates the extreme amount of extension that must have taken place as the oceanic crust was thinned, in some places to zero," he said.

Dr Pownall also said the discovery of the Banda Detachment fault would help assesses dangers of future tsunamis and earthquakes.

"In a region of extreme tsunami risk, knowledge of major faults such as the Banda Detachment, which could make big earthquakes when they slip, is fundamental to being able to properly assess tectonic hazards," he said.

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geology; natural disasters; earthquakes; earth science; oceanography; geography; tsunamis; environmental awareness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Biggest exposed fault on Earth discovered

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Geologists have for the first time seen and documented the Banda Detachment fault in eastern Indonesia and worked out how it formed. Lead researcher Dr Jonathan Pownall from The Australian National University (ANU) said the find will help researchers assess dangers of future tsunamis in the area, which is part of the Ring of Fire -- an area around the Pacific Ocean basin known for earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

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Ten years after it was declared functionally extinct, amateur conservationists believe they have spotted a Yangtze river dolphin, or baiji, in a stretch of the Yangtze in eastern China.

In recent interviews with the Guardian and the Chinese government-sponsored publication Sixth Tone, amateur investigator Song Qi claimed to have spotted the baiji on October 4, during a seven-day expedition in pursuit of the animal.

"No other creature could jump out of the Yangtze like that," Song said to Sixth Tone. "All the eyewitnesses-which include fishermen-felt certain that it was a baiji dolphin."

If the unconfirmed sighting is authentic, it would come as a shock to biologists: The small and nearly blind white dolphin, nicknamed the "goddess of the Yangtze," in all likelihood ended its 20-million-year run in the early 2000s. In 2006, researchers declared the species functionally extinct, after a six-week survey failed to turn up a single sighting.

The river dolphin's population cratered in the late 20th century, plummeting from around 400 individuals in 1979-1981 to just 13 individuals in the late 1990s. The drop was due largely to unsustainable by-catch in local fisheries, though boat collisions, dams, and pollution from thousands of riverside chemical plants also played a role.

The last confirmed baiji sighting was in 2002; an exciting 2007 sighting eventually turned out to be a finless porpoise. The dolphin is the most recent large aquatic mammal to have gone extinct since the 1950s, when hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal.

By his own admission, Song is not a baiji expert and cannot be sure that he saw a baiji. What's more, his group did not conclusively photograph the animal. And in an email to the Guardian, conservation biologist Samuel Turvey of the Zoological Society London threw additional cold water on the prospect of finding the baiji alive and well.

"Extreme claims for the possible survival of probably extinct species require robust proof, and while I would deeply love there to be strong evidence that the baiji is not extinct, this isn't it," wrote Turvey, who participated in the 2006 survey that declared the species functionally extinct.

Turvey went on to say that popular attention should instead focus on the Yangtze finless porpoise, now the only known freshwater cetacean surviving in China.

That critically endangered species is down to its final 500 to 1,800 individuals, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. And a recent study in Biological Conservation finds that without swift action, the porpoise could go extinct in the Yangtze as soon as 2041, if not sooner.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly listed Samuel Turvey's first name as Steven.

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Reported Sighting of Extinct River Dolphin is Unlikely

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Ten years after it was declared functionally extinct, amateur conservationists believe they have spotted a Yangtze river dolphin, or baiji, in a stretch of the Yangtze in eastern China. In recent interviews with the Guardian and the Chinese government-sponsored publication Sixth Tone , amateur investigator Song Qi claimed to have spotted the baiji on October 4, during a seven-day expedition in pursuit of the animal.

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A Burmese python shown with the DNA sequence associated with snake limb loss.

Credit: Eric Zamora and Martin J. Cohn | Florida Museum of Natural History and University of Florida

The ancestors of today's slithery snakes once sported full-fledged arms and legs, but genetic mutations caused the reptiles to lose all four of their limbs about 150 million years ago, according to two new studies.

The findings are welcome news to herpetologists, who have long wondered what genetic changes caused snakes to lose their arms and legs, the researchers said.

Both studies showed that mutations in a stretch of snake DNA called ZRS (the Zone of Polarizing Activity Regulatory Sequence) were responsible for the limb-altering change. But the two research teams used different techniques to arrive at their findings. [ Image Gallery: Snakes of the World]

According to one study, published online today (Oct. 20) in the journal Cell, the snake's ZRS anomalies became apparent to researchers after they took several mouse embryos, removed the mice's ZRS DNA and replaced it with the ZRS section from snakes.

The swap had severe consequences for the mice. Instead of developing regular limbs, the mice barely grew any limbs at all, indicating that ZRS is crucial for the development of limbs, the researchers said.

"This is one of many components of the DNA instructions needed for making limbs in humans and, essentially, all other legged vertebrates. In snakes, it's broken," the study's senior author Axel Visel, a geneticist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in a statement.

Visel and his colleagues began looking at the genomes of "early" snakes that were closer to the base of the snake family tree - such as the boa and python - that have vestigial legs, or tiny bones buried within their muscles. The scientists also studied "advanced" snakes, including the viper and cobra, which do not have any limb structures.

During their investigation, the researchers focused on a gene called sonic hedgehog, which is key in embryonic development, including limb formation. Sonic hedgehog's regulators, located in the ZRS sequence of DNA, had mutated, they found.

However, the researchers needed proof that the ZRS mutations were responsible for limb loss. To find out, they used a DNA-editing technique called CRISPR (short for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats") to cut out the ZRS stretch in mice embryos and replace it with the ZRS section from other animals, including snakes.

When the mice had ZRS DNA from other animals, including humans and fish, they developed limbs just like any regular mouse would. But when the researchers inserted the python and cobra ZRS into the mice, the mice's limbs barely developed, the researchers found.

During normal development, mice form full arms and legs (top). But when mice embryos are given a stretch of DNA from a cobra (middle) and a python (bottom) that controls limb development, their arm and leg growth are severely limited.

Credit: Kvon et al. Cell 2016

Next, the researchers took an in-depth look at the snakes' ZRS, and found that a deletion of 17 base pairs (that is, paired DNA "letters") within the snakes' DNA appeared to be the cause of the limb loss, they said. When they painstakingly "fixed" the mutations in the snake ZRS and inserted it into mice embryos, the mice grew normal legs, they found. [ Photos: Weird 4-Legged Snake Was Transitional Creature]

However, creatures usually have redundant DNA that protects against mutations such as these, so it's likely that multiple evolutionary events led to limb loss in snakes, Visel said.

"There's likely some redundancy built in the mouse ZRS," he said. "A few of the other mutations in the snake ZRS probably also played a role in its loss of function during evolution."

Adult snakes don't have limbs, but extremely young snake embryos do, according to the other study, published online today in the journal Current Biology.

Like the researchers of the Cell study, the scientists found that snake ZRS had disabling mutations that prevented limb development. However, they also found that during the first 24 hours of their existence, python embryos have a "pulse of sonic hedgehog transcription [the first step of gene expression] in just a few limb bud cells," said the study's senior author Martin Cohn, a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at the University of Florida College of Medicine.

But that transcription switches off within a day of the egg being laid, meaning that the snake cannot fully develop legs, Cohn and his co-author Francisca Leal, a doctoral student in Cohn's lab, found.

"Python ZRS proved to be very inefficient, turning on transcription for a short time in a few cells," Cohn said.

However, even during that short time, python embryos managed to begin development for leg bones such as a femur, tibia and fibula, the researchers found. "[But] those distal structures degenerate before they fully differentiate into cartilage, and python hatchlings are left with just a rudimentary femur and a claw," Cohn said. He added, "the results tell us that pythons have retained a lot more of the leg than we appreciated, but the structures are transitory and are found only at embryonic stages."

Cohn called the Cell study, "a tour de force" and "absolutely thrilling."

"The two groups took very different approaches to the question of limb loss in snakes," Cohn said. "Axel [Visel]'s group started with genomics, and we started with developmental biology, and the two groups converged on exactly the same discovery."

Original article on Live Science.

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Snakes Used to Have Legs and Arms ... Until These Mutations Happened

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The ancestors of today's slithery snakes once sported full-fledged arms and legs, but genetic mutations caused the reptiles to lose all four of their limbs about 150 million years ago, according to two new studies. The findings are welcome news to herpetologists, who have long wondered what genetic changes caused snakes to lose their arms and legs, the researchers said.

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http://returntofreedom.org/2016/11/05/owyhee-roundup-continues-36-wild-horses-captured-nov-5-2016/

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161107112417.htm

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Undergraduate students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas examine the four-legged animal's trackway on a large slab of loose rock. From left to right, Stephanie Vosburgh, Summer Matz and Cameron Rickerson.

Credit: Stephen Rowland

SALT LAKE CITY - About 290 million years ago, a four-legged reptile with three toes on each of its back feet strolled across the mucky land, the waves of a tidal flat likely lapping near its feet, a new study finds.

The ancient environment preserved this creature's footprints in a fossilized trackway that researchers are calling Chelichnus gigas. (Scientists name trackways like they do new species.) However, although researchers have a clear view of the animal's back feet, the shape of its front feet remains a mystery.

That's because like many four-legged (or tetrapodal) animals, this ancient critter's back feet would have stepped directly on top of the freshly made footprints of its front feet, meaning that the front footprints are obscured by the back ones, said study lead researcher Stephen Rowland, a professor of geology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. [ 5 Fossil Hotspots: National Parks to Visit]

"The hind footprints are superimposed on the front footprints, so we don't have well-preserved front footprints," Rowland told Live Science. But there are "three digits on the most distinctive [rear] ones," he added.

The 290-million-year-old trackway discovered in Nevada's Mojave Desert.

Credit: Stephen Rowland

Amateur paleontologist Tom Cluff found the ancient footsteps by accident a few years ago while he was hiking in southern Nevada's Clark County with two friends. Cluff planned to show them a fossilized invertebrate track he had found earlier. When they sat down for a picnic lunch that day, they noticed the reptile's tracks fossilized on a rock slab below, Cluff told Live Science.

Cluff told Rowland of the discovery, and the professor soon set out with his students to study the trackway. In all, the trackway includes six strides, with an average stride length of 6 inches (15 centimeters), Rowland said.

Each footprint is about 3.5 inches wide by about 4 inches long (8.8 by 10.1 cm), and the entire trackway measures about 7.4 inches (19 cm) long, he added.

However, it's hard to say what species of animal left the prints. It was likely an early reptile, about 2 feet (60 cm) long, similar to Dimetrodon, which lived before the dinosaurs during the Permian period, Rowland said. But Dimetrodon's tracks are different from the ones Rowland and the team are studying, he noted.

Moreover, "the early Permian was a time when the reptiles were really diversifying," Rowland said, so it's possible the footprints belong to a creature that has yet to be identified.

The trackway provides clues about the species, however. For instance, there's no evidence of a tail dragging behind the creature, suggesting it either didn't have one or that it was held aloft, Rowland said. Also, the fossil retains some ripple marks, indicating that the animal was walking along a tidal flat, rather than in a dry desert, Rowland said.

Notice that the ancient animal's back feet had three toes.

Credit: Stephen Rowland

The tidal flat probably played a role in the trackway's preservation, Rowland said. The animal may have walked on top of a thin film of bacteria near the water called a microbial mat, he said.

"When you have that mat, it's like a thin layer of cellophane," he said. "When an animal walks on it, it makes an impression in the cellophane. Even though new sediment comes on top of it, the old print is preserved underneath the new sediment because of that thin biofilm."

Over hundreds of millions of years, the layers built up and then eroded from the footprints, "but because of that biofilm, we have a beautiful exposure of a track from 290 million years ago," Rowland said. [ Photos: Giant Sauropods Plodded Along in Scottish Lagoon]

Though small, the C. gigas trackway is larger than fossilized trackways found in the famous Coconino Sandstone in the Grand Canyon region, he added. What's more, it's several million years older than many of the trackways in the surrounding Colorado plateau region, Rowland said.

However, it's not the oldest reptile trackway; that honor goes to tiny footprints left by a reptile that lived about 318 million years ago in what is now New Brunswick, Canada.

The study, which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, was presented Thursday (Oct. 27) here at the 2016 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting.

Original article on Live Science.

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Jackpot! Hiker Discovers Ancient Reptile Footprints Near Las Vegas

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SALT LAKE CITY - About 290 million years ago, a four-legged reptile with three toes on each of its back feet strolled across the mucky land, the waves of a tidal flat likely lapping near its feet, a new study finds. The ancient environment preserved this creature's footprints in a fossilized trackway that researchers are calling Chelichnus gigas.

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Researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology show catastrophic declines in wilderness areas around the world over the last 20 years. They demonstrate alarming losses comprising a tenth of global wilderness since the 1990s -- an area twice the size of Alaska and half the size of the Amazon. The Amazon and Central Africa have been hardest hit.

The findings underscore an immediate need for international policies to recognize the value of wilderness areas and to address the unprecedented threats they face, the researchers say.

"Globally important wilderness areas -- despite being strongholds for endangered biodiversity, for buffering and regulating local climates, and for supporting many of the world's most politically and economically marginalized communities -- are completely ignored in environmental policy," says Dr James Watson of the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. "Without any policies to protect these areas, they are falling victim to widespread development. We probably have one to two decades to turn this around. International policy mechanisms must recognize the actions needed to maintain wilderness areas before it is too late. We probably have one to two decades to turn this around."

Watson says much policy attention has been paid to the loss of species, but comparatively little was known about larger-scale losses of entire ecosystems, especially wilderness areas which tend to be relatively understudied. To fill that gap, the researchers mapped wilderness areas around the globe, with "wilderness" being defined as biologically and ecologically intact landscapes free of any significant human disturbance. The researchers then compared their current map of wilderness to one produced by the same methods in the early 1990s.

This comparison showed that a total of 30.1 million km ² (around 20 percent of the world's land area) now remains as wilderness, with the majority being located in North America, North Asia, North Africa, and the Australian continent. However, comparisons between the two maps show that an estimated 3.3 million km ² (almost 10 percent) of wilderness area has been lost in the intervening years. Those losses have occurred primarily in South America, which has experienced a 30 percent decline in wilderness, and Africa, which has experienced a 14 percent loss.

"The amount of wilderness loss in just two decades is staggering" Dr Oscar Venter of the University of Northern British Colombia. "We need to recognize that wilderness areas, which we've foolishly considered to be de-facto protected due to their remoteness, is actually being dramatically lost around the world. Without proactive global interventions we could lose the last jewels in nature's crown. You cannot restore wilderness, once it is gone, and the ecological process that underpin these ecosystems are gone, and it never comes back to the state it was. The only option is to proactively protect what is left."

Watson says that the United Nations and others have ignored globally significant wilderness areas in key multilateral environmental agreements and this must change.

"If we don't act soon, there will only be tiny remnants of wilderness around the planet, and this is a disaster for conservation, for climate change, and for some of the most vulnerable human communities on the planet," Watson says. "We have a duty to act for our children and their children."

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nature; ecology research; endangered animals; extinction; environmental policy; geography; ecology; environmental awareness

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A tenth of the world's wilderness lost since the 1990s

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Researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology show catastrophic declines in wilderness areas around the world over the last 20 years. They demonstrate alarming losses comprising a tenth of global wilderness since the 1990s -- an area twice the size of Alaska and half the size of the Amazon.

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For the yellow-shafted northern flicker, "you are what you eat" has proven freakishly true.

These eastern North American woodpeckers get their name from a thin vein of yellow that runs through the center of their dark feathers.

In the past few decades, ornithologists have noticed some the birds' yellow feathers have mysteriously turned red. (See National Geographic's backyard bird identifier.)

At first researchers thought the birds were somehow interbreeding with the red-shafted northern flicker, which is lives in the West. Yet some of the oddly red birds were thousands of miles away from their western cousins.

The answer, it turned out, had to do with their diets: The birds were eating red berries that turn their feathers crimson, according to new research published in The Auk. Vibrant yellow, orange, and red hues common in bird plumage actually come from pigments in the food they eat.

"This answers a really important question," says study leader Jocelyn Hudon, an ornithologist at the Royal Alberta Museum in Canada. "Colors are an important signal in birds, so a change in color can have huge impacts," such as finding a mate, she adds.

Bird of a Different Feather

Hudon's first clue came in previous studies of the cedar waxwing.

In the 1960s, biologists noticed the yellow tips of some birds' feathers were turning orange.

The cedar waxwing didn't have any close relatives with red feathers, so the scientists soon turned to the bird's food.

Waxwings love berries-so much so that birds have died of intoxication after eating too many overripe, fermented berries. But they've also co-evolved with many of these plants, so it didn't make sense that their feathers would abruptly change color.

Further studies revealed the birds were eating invasive honeysuckle berries, which were making their feathers red.

In the late 1800s, horticulturalists imported honeysuckle bushes from Europe and Asia both as landscaping and to provide bird habitat and food.

The shrubs, however, rapidly spread over the continent, becoming an i nvasive species.

Red-Feathered Mystery Solved

Despite the waxwing findings, bird experts puzzling over the red northern flickers still suspected interbreeding was the cause.

So, using museum samples, Hudon and colleagues compared pigments of various flicker feathers with those of honeysuckle berries.

Although the red pigments from the normally red-shafted flickers and the honeysuckle berries looked similar, they absorbed different wavelengths of light. ( Take National Geographic's bird quiz.)

This, and chemical analysis of both pigments, showed that the red hue in the flickers' color-changing feathers came from honeysuckle berries.

"It's a good piece of detective work that explains a known phenomenon and says something about how birds acquire the pigments in their feathers," says William Moore, an ornithologist at Wayne State University who wasn't involved in the study.

No one knows if this could affect the northern flicker's ability to select a good mate, or how many other bird species may be experiencing similar phenomena.

It's another example, he adds, of the ripple effects of invasive species.
Follow Carrie Arnold on Twitter.

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For the yellow-shafted northern flicker, "you are what you eat" has proven freakishly true. These eastern North American woodpeckers get their name from a thin vein of yellow that runs through the center of their dark feathers. In the past few decades, ornithologists have noticed some the birds' yellow feathers have mysteriously turned red.

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You're not seeing double. A young cow calf with two faces became the longest living example of the rare genetic mutation in late October, passing the previous calf record of 40 days, Caters News reports.

The calf, known as Lucky, lives on a farm in Campbellsville, Kentucky. Owners Brandy and Stan McCubbin told Caters they have come to love the calf and "treat it like their baby," although they were surprised by its unusual appearance when they first saw it a few weeks ago.

"It's something I've never seen before and I think it's amazing," Stan McCubbin told local news station WDRB. ( Learn about Venus the two-faced cat.)

"I'm just thinking, 'How many days do we have?' and I mean, it's a blessing that we get to go through this with our children and our family and it's just something unique and rare," Brandy McCubbin told WDRB.

The calf was named Lucky by the McCubbins' five-year-old daughter, Henley, after her parents told her the rare animal was lucky to be alive. Most such genetic or developmental defects are aborted in the womb, although a few make it to birth. Most of those die within a few days.

For a two-faced or two-headed animal to make it to adulthood is extremely rare. It's considered ultrarare in the wild, although two-faced cat "Frank and Louie" lived to at least 12 years old, thanks to the care of its owners.

So far, Lucky has been doing well, the McCubbins said, although the middle two of her eyes don't work. She can only walk in circles and falls down a lot.

Lucky needs some help eating, and both mouths move at the same time.

When Stan first saw the calf, he thought he was seeing two animals lying close together. But then he was "blown away" by what he saw.

Developmental biologist Arkhat Abzhanov at Imperial College, London told the BBC that rare two-faced and two-headed animals develop in a few different ways. Sometimes, a single fertilized egg does not separate completely. ( Learn about the two-headed dolphin found in Turkey in 2014.)

Other times, a gene that controls for head width gets overexpressed, and a head grows so large in the womb that it actually splits into two faces or heads.

"Those kind of mutants are rare, but they're reported in domestic animals and in the wild," Abzhanov told BBC.

The condition of having two faces is called diprosopus or craniofacial duplication.

The opposite affect can also occur, when a head gets so narrow that it collapses in on itself, producing a " cyclops."

Another possibility is that certain cells-called an organizer group-that trigger development of a head or face somehow get transported to another part of the body.

Whatever the exact cause, the McCubbins say they are committed to taking care of Lucky and making sure the calf is as comfortable as possible, for as long as possible.

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Rare Two-Faced Calf First to Survive Past 40 Days

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You're not seeing double. A young cow calf with two faces became the longest living example of the rare genetic mutation in late October, passing the previous calf record of 40 days, Caters News reports. The calf, known as Lucky, lives on a farm in Campbellsville, Kentucky.

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Every July, young common swifts leave their European roosts and migrate to western and central Africa. They'll only be back in the following June, and they'll spend the intervening 10 months almost continuously in the air. They might travel to Africa, but their feet never meet African soil.

"They feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air," says Susanne Åkesson from Lund University in Sweden. "They can land on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can't really land on the ground." That's because their wings are too long and their legs are too short to take off from a flat surface.

As a result, common swifts are among nature's greatest aeronauts, superbly adapted for a life spent largely in the skies.

People have long suspected that swifts stay airborne for long stretches of time, but no one could confirm it. Åkesson and her husband, Anders Hedenström, both from Lund University, did so by fitting 19 of the birds with lightweight data loggers in 2013, and recapturing them one or two years later. The loggers had regularly recorded local light levels, which the duo could use to pinpoint the birds' global position. And they had recorded the swifts' acceleration, activity, and body positions, which revealed if they were flying or resting.

The data revealed that some swifts were almost never inactive during their long migrations. For example, between September 2013 and April 2014, one of the birds rested for just four nights in February. The following year, it never rested for a full night; over the same period, it stopped for just two hours.

A few other swifts didrest more often. Åkesson and Hedenström suspect that this was because they hadn't finished replacing their wing and tail feathers during their annual molt. The old feathers might have compromised their ability to stay permanently aloft, or their inability to molt fully might reflect some underlying health problem that affected their flight. Either way, it's not like they were actually grounded. If they rested, it was just for a few hours. At most, they spent just 0.64 percent of their migration on terra firma.

Other scientists have found similar results. In 2013, Felix Liechti from the Swiss Ornithological Institute used similar data loggers to show that three alpine swifts probably flew nonstop for 200 days, on their long migration from Switzerland to Africa and back again. That was especially surprising because alpine swifts are twice the size of common swifts, with wingspans of up to 22 inches.

Such long nonstop flights imply that swifts must be able to sleep while flying. This August, Niels Rattenborg of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany proved that frigate birds-large seabirds with piratical tendencies-do the same. He fitted brainwave sensors to 15 frigatebirds and showed that they sleep mid-flight, for about 40 minutes a day and just a few seconds at a time.

There's no brain sensor small enough to record their mental activity of a flying swift, but they surely must be taking midair naps too. Maybe they do what dolphins do, sending one half of their brains to sleep at a time so they can stay continuously alert.

Why bother? Why should a bird evolve to be continuously airborne, rather than to land occasionally? "When you're airborne, you're extremely mobile, and you can explore a dynamic food environment," says Åkesson. Swifts eat insects, which might concentrate in dense swarms and move from one place to the next. By patrolling large swathes of sky, and never wasting time on the ground, swifts might be able to snap up more insect prey.

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These Birds Fly Almost a Year Without Landing

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Every July, young common swifts leave their European roosts and migrate to western and central Africa. They'll only be back in the following June, and they'll spend the intervening 10 months almost continuously in the air. They might travel to Africa, but their feet never meet African soil.

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Are two heads always better than one?

Scientists from Spain are asking that question after they published findings this month documenting the first ever case of a two-headed shark among egg-laying shark species. The research, published in the Journal of Fish Biology, describes an Atlantic sawtail catshark embryo.

This catshark ( Galeus atlanticus) lives only in the western Mediterranean, at depths of 330 to 710 meters (1,082 to 2,329 feet), and is considered near threatened. While studying the fish's cardiovascular system, the scientists found an embryo with two heads, each with its own mouth, set of eyes, brain, and gill openings. The embryo had a single intestine but two sets of stomachs and livers.

When an animal has two heads it is said to exhibit dicephaly. The condition is relatively rare in the animal kingdom but has been seen in many different groups, from snakes to dolphins to people. (See the two-headed bull shark found by fishermen off the Florida Keys.)

Dicephaly has been recorded in other sharks that either bear live young (viviparous) or lay eggs that develop, and then hatch, inside the mother (ovoviviparous)-but never in true egg-laying sharks (oviparous).

Seven other two-headed sharks of various species had been found with two complete heads. Another shark had been found with a duplicated face. ( See photos of a rare cyclops shark.)

The Spanish team had collected 797 embryos for study of their cardiovascular systems, and only one displayed the abnormal feature, leading them to conclude that the incidence of dicephaly in egg-laying sharks is likely quite low.

The causes of dicephaly aren't known, but the researchers-led by Valentín Sans-Coma of the University of Malaga-suspect that genetics are the most likely culprit (rather than some environmental factor, à la Blinky, the three-eyed fish, from The Simpsons).

"We see two-headed sharks occasionally," says George Burgess, director of the Florida program for shark research at the Florida Museum of Natural History. "It's an anomaly, caused by a genetic misfire. There are lots of different kinds of genetic misfires, and most don't make it out of the womb."

When discussing another find of a two-headed shark, biologist C. Michael Wagner of Michigan State University previously told National Geographic that it is important not to jump to conclusions about such rare finds.

"In and of itself, this single natural history observation does not tell us anything earth-shattering about the health of the world's oceans," he said.

If they make it to birth, two-headed sharks probably don't survive long in the wild, Wagner added, since they likely have a hard time swimming and finding food.

"There's a reason you don't see a lot of sharks with two heads swimming around: they stand out like a sore thumb, so they get eaten," adds Burgess. "They would have trouble swimming and probably digesting food."

This story was updated at 2:45 pm ET with comments from George Burgess.

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Are two heads always better than one? Scientists from Spain are asking that question after they published findings this month documenting the first ever case of a two-headed shark among egg-laying shark species. The research, published in the Journal of Fish Biology , describes an Atlantic sawtail catshark embryo.

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http://www.livescience.com/56665-fossilized-dinosaur-brain-tissue.html

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Sixty-eight-year-old Snooty is the oldest manatee living in captivity.

Credit: Guinness World Records

Sixty-eight may not seem that old, but for Snooty the manatee, it's a world record.

Snooty is now the world's oldest manatee living in captivity, the Guinness World Records recently announced. The sea cow was brought to South Florida Museum as an 11-month-old calf in 1949. Now 68 years old, Snooty has earned the world record title.

"We felt it was important to apply on Snooty's behalf, because we wanted people to understand that manatees can live for a long time," Marilyn Margold, director of living collections at South Florida Museum, said in a video for the Guinness World Records. "Taken proper care of, paying attention to their habitats, those things can help with their longevity. They are hearty animals overall." [ Marine Marvels: Spectacular Photos of Sea Creatures]

Though they may look hearty, most manatees living in the wild die before they reach the age of 10. Algae blooms, fishing debris and boat strikes threaten these gentle giants, which are listed as "vulnerable" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which monitors manatee populations, the oldest wild manatee in Florida was 59 years old - with the next oldest having reached 48 years of age.

Snooty's longevity is credited to the fact that he lives in a controlled environment, a 60,000-gallon (230,000 liters) pool he shares with two other manatees at South Florida Museum. Jessica Schubick, communications manager at the museum, said that while Snooty doesn't seem to mind his pool-mates and other manatees, he's more interested in people. When Snooty turned 67 in July 2015, the marine mammal received birthday cards from fans around the world congratulating him on his incredible age.

The manatee breeding program at the museum offers visitors an educational opportunity to see that manatees do have personalities and a level of intelligence, Margold said.

"I would say that he's intelligent, he's very personable, he has the staff well trained, Margold said of Snooty. "He's just entertaining and calming at the same time."

Original article on Live Science.

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Meet Snooty: The World's Oldest Manatee Living in Captivity

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Sixty-eight may not seem that old, but for Snooty the manatee, it's a world record. Snooty is now the world's oldest manatee living in captivity, the Guinness World Records recently announced. The sea cow was brought to South Florida Museum as an 11-month-old calf in 1949.

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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160406-brown-snake-eagle-vs-spitting-cobra-video-kruger-south-africa/

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Humans inherited a propensity for violence from our primate ancestors, a new study says, making it easy to think, "Ah, see-we really are just animals." But that doesn't give animals enough credit.

The first humans were about as violent as could be expected based on their family tree, researchers report September 28 in the journal Nature. The scientists pored through examples of lethal violence-not animals killing other species, such as predators and prey, but killings within a species, whether by cannibalism, infanticide, or aggression.

They looked for evidence of this ghastly activity among four million recorded deaths in more than a thousand different mammals, from shrews to primates. On top of that, they compiled a history of human slayings.

One pattern stood out pretty clearly: Lethal violence increased over the course of mammal evolution. While only about 0.3 percent of all mammals die in conflict with members of their own species, that rate is sixfold higher, or about 2 percent, for primates. Early humans likewise should have about a 2 percent rate-and that lines up with evidence of violence in Paleolithic human remains.

The medieval period was a particular killer, with human-on-human violence responsible for 12 percent of recorded deaths. But for the last century, we've been relatively peaceable, killing one another off at a rate of just 1.33 percent worldwide. And in the least violent parts of the world today, we enjoy homicide rates as low as 0.01 percent.

"Evolutionary history is not a total straitjacket on the human condition; humans have changed and will continue to change in surprising ways," says study author José María Gómez of Spain's Arid Zones Experimental Station. "No matter how violent or pacific we were in the origin, we can modulate the level of interpersonal violence by changing our social environment. We can build a more pacific society if we wish."

Lethal Lemurs

What may be most surprising to some of us, though, isn't how violent we are, but rather how we compare to our mammalian cousins.

It's not easy to estimate how often animals kill each other in the wild, but Gómez and his team got a good overview of the species most and least likely to kill their own kind. The number of hyenas killed by other hyenas is around 8 percent. The yellow mongoose? Ten percent. And lemurs-cute, bug-eyed lemurs? As many as 17 percent of deaths in some lemur species result from lethal violence. (See "Prairie Dogs Are Serial Killers That Murder Their Competition.")

Yet consider this: The study shows that 60 percent of mammal species are not known to kill one another at all, as far as anyone has seen. Very few bats (of more than 1,200 species) kill each other. And apparently pangolins and porcupines get along fine without offing members of their own species.

Whales are also generally thought not to kill their own kind. But dolphin biologist Richard Connor of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth notes that a dolphin infanticide attempt was documented recently, and he cautions that whales, as their close relations, might also be more violent than we've thought.

"We could witness a lethal fight in dolphins but not know it, because the victim swims away apparently unimpaired, but is bleeding to death internally," he says.

More often, though, people think animals are more violent than they really are, says animal behavior expert Marc Bekoff, an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.

"Violence might be deep in the human lineage, but I think people should be very cautious in saying that when humans are violent, they're behaving like nonhuman animals," Bekoff says.

Bekoff has long contended that nonhumans are predominantly peaceful, and he points out that just as some roots of violence can be found in our animal past, so can roots of altruism and cooperation. He cites the work of the late anthropologist Robert Sussman, who found that even primates, some of the most aggressive mammals, spend less than one percent of their day fighting or otherwise competing.

After all, challenging another animal to a duel is risky, and for many animals the benefits don't outweigh the risk of death. Highly social and territorial animals are the most likely to kill one another, the new study found. Many primates fit that killer profile, though as experts point out, not all of them. Bonobos have mostly peaceable, female-dominated social structures, while chimps are much more violent.

These differences among primates matter, says Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard known for his study of the evolution of human warfare. In chimpanzees and other primates that kill each other, infanticide is the most common form of killing. But humans are different-they frequently kill each other as adults.

"That 'adult-killing club' is very small," he says. "It includes a few social and territorial carnivores such as wolves, lions, and spotted hyenas."

While humans may be expected to have some level of lethal violence based on their family tree, it would be wrong to conclude that there's nothing surprising about human violence, Wrangham says.

When it comes to murderous tendencies, he says, "humans really are exceptional."

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How Human Violence Stacks Up Against Other Killer Animals

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Humans inherited a propensity for violence from our primate ancestors, a new study says, making it easy to think, "Ah, see-we really are just animals." But that doesn't give animals enough credit. The first humans were about as violent as could be expected based on their family tree, researchers report September 28 in the journal Nature.

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Efforts to reopen the ivory trade failed Monday at a global wildlife conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. Zimbabwe and Namibia had put forward proposals at the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a 183-government treaty that regulates the international wildlife trade, but both failed to generate enough votes.

The committee also failed to pass a proposal that would have given all elephants the highest level of international protection, which would effectively permanently ban the ivory trade.

African elephants are facing a poaching crisis. Some 30,000 are killed each year to supply the ivory trade, and the population of savanna elephants has dropped by 30 percent in just seven years, according to the recently released Great Elephant Census. Poaching has become increasingly organized and militarized, with criminal syndicates moving huge shipments of illegal ivory across the ocean to Asia and elsewhere.

International trade in ivory was banned back in 1989, but the way elephant protections were set up gave Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa-countries with robust elephant populations-the opportunity to request and hold ivory sales because their elephants have been assigned a lower level of protection than the rest of Africa's.

Will Ivory Trade Help or Hurt Elephants?

The showdown over the ivory trade was one of the most highly anticipated debates of the two-week conference.

Some argued that a legal ivory trade would hurt elephants by erasing the stigma around ivory and encouraging more people to buy it. They say that the illegal trade would increase as a result and that legal sales would provide cover for illegal ivory.

"Legal international trade in ivory would unleash powerful economic forces that need to be taken into consideration," said Alejandro Nadal, an economist from Mexico who has studied the possible effects of a legalized ivory trade. It's not as simple as a basic supply-and-demand model, he says.

Others argued that a legal trade would help elephants by giving them economic value, which would encourage conservation and habitat protection. Rural communities often see elephants as a nuisance and a threat because the animals trample crops and sometimes kill people. If villagers instead benefited from elephants by way of ivory sales, they'd have more incentive to protect the animals, the argument goes.

"The most effective strategy is to integrate elephants into rural communities as assets and to demonstrate that elephants contribute to welfare and development," the Namibian representative said.

A recent study found that a one-time, legal ivory sale in 2008 actually increased the poaching of elephants, and another study released two weeks ago found that reopening trade would speed up elephants' march to extinction.

A handful of African countries spoke in favor of the proposals allowing Namibia and Zimbabwe to sell ivory, but in a surprise move, Botswana threw its support behind the African Elephant Coalition, a group of 29 countries that opposes the ivory trade, arguing that a total, permanent ban on the ivory trade is necessary.

Up until today, Botswana had been pro-trade, a big deal because Botswana has more elephants than any other African country. But Botswana's statement wasn't enough to persuade nations to pass the proposal to permanently ban the ivory trade by listing all of Africa's elephants on CITES's Appendix I, which prohibits commercial trade.

U.S. Fails to Back New Elephant Protections

Some blame the European Union, which voted as bloc of 28 countries, for the proposal's failure. The EU argued that certain elephant populations are too strong to justify their inclusion on that list.

The EU's opposition was expected, but the U.S. also voted against the proposal-a big surprise. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service long suggested it supported the African Elephant Coalition, but when it came time to vote, the country decided not to back additional protections for elephants.

"We applaud the leadership and dedication of ... the proposing and supporting range states," a statement from the Fish and Wildlife Service says. "However, the United States voted no on this proposal because it opened up the potential that member nations would take a reservation and use a victory on Appendix I uplisting as a back door to resume trade."

Namibia and Zimbabwe had threatened to resume ivory trade outside the CITES legal regime if all elephants were given these additional protections. They argued that they only agreed to a moratorium on ivory sales in 2007 in their countries as a compromise that discussions about establishing a mechanism to set up legal trade would continue. Last week, CITES voted to end those discussions, and now the two southern African nations are saying the compromise is null and void.

"It's a form of blackmail is what it is," said Beverly Joubert, a conservationist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence. "We can understand why the U.S Fish and Wildlife voted the way they did, to be able to have some control, but I think it's a sad day that we have got to this, where it's all about trade and not the protection of the animals."

The other surprise was China. Last year China announced its intention to close down its huge domestic ivory market. And just a few days ago, it backed a resolution at the conference urging all countries to shut down their domestic ivory markets. Nonetheless, today the Chinese delegate spoke in favor of allowing a limited, legal international trade in ivory.

CITES also voted earlier in the week for a resolution urging all countries to phase out their domestic ivory markets.

The votes were finalized at the plenary session Tuesday.

(Read more stories out of the CITES meeting in Johannesburg here.)

This story was produced by National Geographic's Special Investigations Unit, which focuses on wildlife crime and is made possible by grants from the BAND Foundation and the Woodtiger Fund. Read more stories from the SIU on Wildlife Watch. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas tongwildlife@natgeo.com.

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Efforts to reopen the ivory trade failed Monday at a global wildlife conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. Zimbabwe and Namibia had put forward proposals at the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a 183-government treaty that regulates the international wildlife trade, but both failed to generate enough votes.

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Liz Wenkel

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FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports

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LAWRENCE, Kan. -- "There's been tremendous uptick in oak mite bites this year."

That's the opinion of Dr. Daniel Aires, the head of dermatology at the University of Kansas Hospital.

Have some itchy red bites? It might be more than mosquitoes. You may be part of a trend you didn't ask for.

Chances are if you spend time outdoors, you may have noticed it. Doctors say there has been an increase in the number of oak mite bites this year.

They're pesky bites that can cause an itch much worse than your normal mosquito bite. Some KU students learned about oak mites the hard way.

"Originally, we thought it was bed bugs and we asked around, and we noticed that everyone also was complaining of some sort of bites and I talked to my R.A. and she told us it was oak mites," said Alejandra Juarez, who has recently been feeling the itchy bites.

Students in the Oliver residence hall at KU were alarmed when so many of them in the dorm ended up with the same signs of bites.

"I had some on my arm and my neck, but they have gone away," Juarez said. "My roommate says she got three a couple days ago."

Even people coming by to visit friends in the dorm this week got bitten by oak mites too.

"I've just been hanging out in her room, and I would just feel something itchy, and next thing you know, I have a big bite on my ankle," said Angelo Sanchez. "It's real itchy. As soon as you itch it, it just won't stop itching. It's worse than a mosquito bite."

Many of them had never heard of oak mites.

"I wasn't sure, I assumed they were bed bugs," Juarez added.

Dr. Daniel Aires, the head of dermatology at the University of Kansas Hospital, said this season, in this area the mites are very common, and they've seen it this year more than ever before.

"Oak mites are insects that can live in trees, including oak trees, and their larvae will often drop during their development process, looking to land on a worm or a bee, or some other kind of insect host, to further their development. We are an accidental target. They really don't do well with humans. Despite that, they'll bite us, and when they bite us, it can cause very severe itching," Dr. Aires explained.

Dr. Aires said they bite and then drop off. But they're microscopic, so you can't see them. And it could take a few hours to realize you've been bitten.

He said, fortunately, they don't infest your home.

"It's more like that when a bunch of students are getting oak mite bites that they were all spending some time outdoors on the quad, under trees, or within wind blowing distance of some trees," Dr. Aires said.

Dr. Aires said to shower and wash your clothes after you've been outside, and wear long sleeves and long pants to prevent oak mites from getting in contact with your skin.

He said the bite itself isn't dangerous, but scratching can cause a risk of infection. He recommended a topical steroid or other anti-itch medication to help the itching.

When the weather gets colder, we can expect them to go away.

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Oak mite invasion brings itchy bites to folks across the metro

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LAWRENCE, Kan. -- "There's been tremendous uptick in oak mite bites this year." That's the opinion of Dr. Daniel Aires, the head of dermatology at the University of Kansas Hospital. Have some itchy red bites? It might be more than mosquitoes. You may be part of a trend you didn't ask for.

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And then there were none.

Toughie, the world's last Rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog and a symbol of the extinction crisis, has died at his home in the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

The famed frog's age is unknown, but he's at least 12 years old, and likely older, because he was an adult when collected in 2005.

Mark Mandica, who worked with Toughie for seven years, says the frog's story isn't entirely unique. "A lot of attention had been paid to him in captivity, so he even has his own Wikipedia page," Mandica, head of the Amphibian Foundation, notes. "But there are plenty of other species out there that are disappearing, sometimes before we even knew that they were there."

In fact, Toughie's own species ( Ecnomiohyla rabborum) wasn't described until 2008, a few years after Toughie was found during a 2005 frog rescue mission by the Atlanta Botanical Garden and Zoo Atlanta. He was one of many frogs scientists raced to collect as the deadly chytrid fungus closed in on central Panama.

"It was likened to just rescuing things from a burning house," Mandica says.

The species occurred in a very small range, at an elevation where the fungus proved especially deadly. Field studies suggest up to 85 percent of all the amphibians on Toughie's home turf were wiped out. It's unlikely that any of his kind survived in the wild, where they were incredible climbers and also graceful gliders-toe webbing allowed them to soar from one tree to the next. ( Learn about the increasing pace of extinctions.)

Mandica's son, then a two-year-old, dubbed the last survivor Toughie. Naming animals isn't the norm among scientists, but the frog's popularity as the last of his kind meant that people (and the press) kept demanding a name-and Toughie stuck.

Although he gave voice to the plight of endangered species, Toughie was silent for all the years he lived at the botanical garden, until one fateful morning in 2014 when Mandica captured the only existing example of the Rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog's call.

"I heard this weird call coming out of the frog [area], and I knew it had to be him, because I knew what all the other species sounded like. I was able to sneak in and record him on my phone." ( Hear Toughie's call.)
Photographing the Last of a Kind
Photographer Joel Sartore recalls a curious, baseball-size creature with amazing eyes that actually hopped up onto his camera while being photographed for the Photo Ark project. Photo Ark aims to showcase our planet's incredible biodiversity and inspire people to help fight the extinction crisis while there is still time. So far, Sartore has photographed more than 6,000 species. Unfortunately, many others also represent the end of the line for their kind.

"About once a year I photograph something that's the last of its kind or close to it," he says. "I get sad and angry because I can't imagine that this won't wake the world up and get people to care about extinction. I keep thinking, OK, this is the one. This animal's story is going to do it and get people to care more about extinction than about what's on TV.

"They can't care if they don't know these animals," he adds. "They have to meet them and fall in love with them the way that I have and so many others have."

Toughie, indeed, had lots of admirers. Last year his image was even projected onto St. Peter's Basilica, and his call played, so that the world could see and hear him.

The frog met race car drivers and movie directors, Sartore recalls. "A lot of people were moved to tears when they saw him. When you have the very last of something it's a special deal."

Now he's gone, and with him an entire species. And as large numbers of animals and plants continue to vanish, their loss increasingly compromises the healthy ecosystems necessary for everyone's survival-including our own. ( Can extinct species ever be brought back?)

"We're on track to lose half of all species by the end of the century," Sartore says. "And it's folly to think that we can lose half of everything else but that people will be just fine. It's not going to work that way. As these species go, so do we."

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Famous Frog Toughie Dies, Sending Species to Extinction

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And then there were none. Toughie, the world's last Rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog and a symbol of the extinction crisis, has died at his home in the Atlanta Botanical Garden. The famed frog's age is unknown, but he's at least 12 years old, and likely older, because he was an adult when collected in 2005.

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Several 80-million-year-old fossils found in Alabama are from a species of sea turtle that is the oldest known member of the lineage that gave rise to all modern species of sea turtle, according to new research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Researchers from the College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Biology worked with two relatively complete turtle skeletons, along with several smaller pieces, that are housed at Birmingham's McWane Science Center, to unearth the evolutionary clues tying the ancient turtles to modern sea turtles, and confirm the existence of that ancient species, previously known only from a few isolated fragments.

The McWane fossils help solve a long-standing debate as to whether this animal was a unique species. They also provide insights into the evolutionary history of living species of sea turtles, including the Kemp's Ridley, Loggerhead and the endangered Green sea turtle.

According to research published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, the fossils belong to Ctenochelys (tee-no-key-lees) acris, a marine-adapted turtle that lived in the shallow, subtropical sea that once covered most of Alabama. By dating the rock formation from which these fossils were recovered, C. acris is presumed to have lived more than 80 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous, a period of time when sea turtle diversity was at an all-time high.

"Climatic warming during the mid-Cretaceous resulted in elevated sea levels and temperatures that, in turn, provided an abundance of new niches for marine turtles to invade," said Drew Gentry, a UAB biology doctoral student and the lead researcher on the project. "Represented today by only seven living species, sea turtles were once one of the most diverse lineages of marine reptiles. Before the cataclysm that claimed the dinosaurs, there may have been dozens of specialized species of sea turtle living in different oceanic habitats around the world."

Before this research, so little fossil evidence for had been documented that most paleontologists doubted the species was real. Not only do the newly discovered fossils prove C. acris existed, they may also be a critical piece in a much larger puzzle of sea turtle evolution.

"There is strong evidence which indicates freshwater turtles may have evolved to occupy marine environments at several points in the past," Gentry said. "But most of those lineages went extinct, making the exact origins of living or 'true' sea turtles somewhat of a mystery."

Evidence gathered from the fossils of C. acris suggests the earliest ancestors of modern sea turtles may have come from the Deep South. By comparing the skeleton of C. acris with those of both extinct and living species of turtles, Gentry discovered that C. acris possessed traits of both sea turtles and their closest living turtle relatives, snapping turtles.

"This animal was a bottom-dwelling sea turtle that fed primarily on mollusks and small invertebrates," he said. "Unlike the 'rudder-like' hind-limbs of today's sea turtles, C. acris had large, powerful hind-limbs to help push it through the water, a lot like a modern-day snapping turtle.

"Data from C. acris tell us not only that marine turtles are capable of occupying specialized oceanic niches, but also that many of the sea turtles we know today may have gotten their evolutionary start as something similar to an oversized snapping turtle in what eventually became the southeastern United States."

Studying the diversity and evolutionary history of sea turtles during previous periods of climate change can provide meaningful insights into what effects climate and environmental changes might have on modern marine turtle populations.

"An important, yet often overlooked, aspect of sea turtle research is their evolutionary history," Gentry said. "By analyzing the remains of fossil species, we can begin to understand the origins of these animals and how they've adapted to different environments over time."

The fossils that led to this research were discovered in 1986 and contributed to what was then the Red Mountain Museum. The McWane Science Center was founded in 1998 by the merger of the Red Mountain Museum and a nearby children's museum, Discovery Place.

The paleontological and archaeological collection at McWane is one of the largest in the southeastern U.S. and houses a number of significant finds from across Alabama, including the recently announced Eotrachodon, a type of duck-billed dinosaur.

"We are always making discoveries from the specimens housed at McWane that give us new respect for the individuals who contributed to this collection," Gentry said.

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frogs and reptiles; marine biology; sea life; endangered animals; fossils; evolution; ancient dna; paleontology

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Fossil from oldest ancestor of modern sea turtles

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The earliest ancestors of modern sea turtles may have come from the Deep South in the United States, new evidence suggests. Working with two relatively complete turtle skeletons, the fossils help solve a long-standing debate as to whether this animal was a unique species.

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Blake Rife

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A big new species of ancient shark has been identified and named.

Likely related to the largest shark that ever lived-the infamous megalodon-the new species, Megalolamna paradoxodon, grew to be the size of a car. Scientists described the new species in the journal Historical Biology on Monday.

The big fish lived in the Miocene, about 20 million years ago, and likely swam in shallow waters at mid-latitudes, in both the Atlantic and Pacific, the scientists wrote. They determined this by studying five tooth samples, which were found in California, North Carolina, Japan, and Peru. Those teeth were nearly two inches long. ( See how the world's sharks stack up in size.)

The teeth also have a unique shape and mosaic-like structure that hasn't been seen before, prompting the scientists to name the new species. Both front teeth, probably handy for grasping, and rear teeth, probably for slicing, were found.

Therefore, the sharks most likely ate medium-size fishes, the scientists concluded. ( Fossils suggest modern sharks are more evolved than previously thought.)

Those teeth also enabled the scientists to estimate the body size of the fish, based on other known sharks. The result: about 12 feet long. That would make it a relatively big shark today, although a bit smaller than a great white, which can reach up to 20 feet long.

Still, people should take that estimate with a grain of salt, John-Paul Hodnett, a shark specialist at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, told Live Science.

"For teeth, you should always be cautious of the fact that it is possible to have very large or small teeth in a shark's jaw, which do not represent the true aspect of the shark's body size," said Hodnett, who was not involved with the study.

The study also suggests the new species may have been a close relative of Carcharocles megalodon, which could grow up to 60 feet long. Both sharks should be placed in the extinct family Otodontidae, the scientists noted. ( What killed the world's biggest shark?)

The authors noted that fossil shark teeth are among the most commonly discovered types of vertebrate fossils, but they said few are as large as those belonging to Megalolamna paradoxodon. The species name alludes to the unusual nature of those teeth, which didn't seem to fit any other known species.

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A big new species of ancient shark has been identified and named. Likely related to the largest shark that ever lived-the infamous megalodon-the new species, Megalolamna paradoxodon, grew to be the size of a car. Scientists described the new species in the journal Historical Biology on Monday.

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As the legend goes, when star-crossed lovers Naupaka and Kaui knew they'd be forever separated, Naupaka took the flower from behind her ear and tore it in two pieces, keeping one and giving Kaui the other.

As she went to the mountains, and he to the sea, the plants around them felt their sorrow, and from then on bloomed only in half-flowers.

Such is the Hawaiian myth behind the naupaka, a beach shrub native to the islands whose flowers look like they're missing half of their petals.

Now the plants are linked to another sad event: Their primary pollinators, a group of more than 60 yellow-faced bee species in the genus Hylaeus, are disappearing fast. So fast that on September 30, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service deemed seven Hylaeus species as endangered-the first bees ever on the list. ( See seven intimate pictures that reveal the beauty of bees.)

In the early 1900s, yellow-faced bees were the most abundant Hawaiian insects, ranging from the coastlines to the mountains and even the subalpine slopes of Mauna Kea.

Yet habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change have hit Hawaii's only native bees so hard that they're now one of the state's least observed pollinators. Only two known populations of H. anthracinus, one of the most studied species, remain on the island of Oahu, and a few small populations are scattered across several other islands, according to recent surveys.

"What we saw was really alarming-the bees were doing a lot worse than we thought," says Cynthia King, an entomologist with Hawaii's Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

In 2010, the state government stepped up efforts to learn more about the bees. Around the same time, the invertebrate nonprofit Xerces Society submitted a petition to federally protect seven yellow-faced bees. Saving these species is a "necessary part" of the White House's strategy to protect pollinators, says Xerces executive director Scott Black.

"We should protect the rarest of the rare."

Ignored Insects

The six-millimeter-long, solitary bees-so named for the golden mark between the males' eyes-are the only bees from Hawaii.

Even so, they flew largely under the radar until around 1995, when Karl Magnacca, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawai'i, noticed bees buzzing in his house on the Big Island. When he looked up the insects up in recent scientific literature, he came up virtually empty.

"That was surprising, since bees in general are an important group. [Yellow-faced bees] have been ignored since the 1920s."

Magnacca decided to do his Ph.D. on the bees, and in the process discovered ten new species, as well as mapped out where the various species live in Hawaii-"sparking a renaissance of interest in them," he says. ( Read "Quest for a Superbee" in National Geographic magazine.)

The bees have possibly gone overlooked in part because they look like wasps.

For one, they're fast-if a bee passes you, all you'll likely see is a little black squiggle, Pigpen-style, according to King, the state entomologist. The insects also have black, shiny bodies, without that classic bee fuzz.

Deadly Invaders

To figure out the life cycle of this little-seen insect, University of Hawai'i entomologist Jason Graham has studied-for the first time-where H. anthracinus lives and nests on Honolulu's Ka Iwi coast and in the James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge on the North Shore.

He found that the bees like to nest in holes in coral rocks that have washed ashore or in the hollow stems of a few coastal plants. After laying eggs, females seal the holes with a type of waterproof cellophane.

Graham has also observed an invasive bee from India-ironically from the same genus-competing with the native bees, nesting in the same plant cavities and foraging on the same flowers.

Invasive species in general are devastating-in addition to these rival Hylaeus bees, yellow-faced bees must contend with alien ants. (Hawaii has no native ant species.)

Highly efficient foragers and predators, ants see a yellow-faced bee nest, with its beefy larvae, "as an amazing little buffet," says King.

Giving Bees a Boost

By dissecting nests and measuring their sizes, as well as raising bees in the lab, Graham has developed an artificial nest box that allows bees in and keeps ants out.

"The artificial nests are wooden blocks with pre-drilled holes that match the hole size female bees look for when home-shopping for a nest spot," he says. The cord that attaches the nest blocks to a branch is then covered with a sticky substance that prevents crawling predators, like ants, from getting inside.

Eventually, Graham envisions placing such boxes in areas where yellow-faced bees no longer live, so that when adults emerge for the first time they'll return to the same spot to reproduce-and therefore reestablish populations.

The boxes "may bring these bees back from the verge of extinction," he says.

More difficult to combat are rising seas and more intense storm surges. In 2015, 40-foot waves wiped out an entire population of bees living on a rock jetty, Graham adds.

"We Can Do More"

Black acknowledges that "Hawaii is one of the toughest places to do conservation. That said, we can do more."

For instance, the state could focus on setting aside the bees' remaining strongholds as conservation areas, ensuring they're free of development and agriculture and trying as much as possible to keep invasive species at bay. ( See more gorgeous photos of bees.)

King is optimistic that the bees' new endangered status will strengthen plans to help the insects.

"A lot of people think of Hawaii as a lost cause because we have so many invasive species," she says, but "we're really well positioned right now to make headway for the bee."

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For the First Time, Bees Declared Endangered in the U.S.

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As the legend goes, when star-crossed lovers Naupaka and Kaui knew they'd be forever separated, Naupaka took the flower from behind her ear and tore it in two pieces, keeping one and giving Kaui the other. As she went to the mountains, and he to the sea, the plants around them felt their sorrow, and from then on bloomed only in half-flowers.

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The elusive Santa Marta Toro was thought extinct for 113 years, until one was spotted in the mountainous rainforests of Colombia. Now researchers are using lollipops to lure them out again.

Credit: Lizzie Noble

A fuzzy, orange tree rat that was once thought to be extinct may be lurking in the mountainous forests of Colombia, and now researchers are pulling out all the stops to find the species again, including lacing their camera traps with candy.

When the rodent, called the Santa Marta Toro, was spotted in 2011, it was the first time the species had been seen in over 100 years. However, the Toro appears to have gone back into hiding, as it has not been seen since then.

"The Toro is an amazing example of conservation hope - it was a species that was [thought to be] gone, but still exists," said Nicolette Roach, a doctoral candidate in wildlife and fisheries science at Texas A&M University and an associate conservation scientist with Global Wildlife Conservation. Roach spent her summer searching for the secretive rodent. "This shows that there are still species that are holding on, even in the face of all these changes that are going on in the world," she said. [ Photos: Hidden Cameras Find Diverse Animals in Tropical Forests]

The Santa Marta Toro, which is also known as the Santa Marta Tree Rat ( Santamartamys rufodorsalis), is about the size of a guinea pig. It sports thick, bright, orange-red fur and has a very long, red, black and white tail, similar to that of other tree-rat species. It lives in the dense forests of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range in Colombia.

In hopes of learning more about the species, Roach and other scientists are trekking though Colombia's El Dorado Nature Reserve, attempting to lure the Santa Marta Toro with sweet treats.

Prior to its rediscovery in 2011, the strange rodent was thought to be extinct for 113 years, as there were no documented sightings during that time, Roach said.

Between early June and August of this year, Roach and her colleagues set up camera traps in trees surrounding the El Dorado Nature Reserve Ecotourism lodge, where the Santa Marta Toro was spotted in 2011. But these were not ordinary camera traps - they were adorned with cherry-flavored, heart-shaped lollipops.

Roach has been studying the Santa Marta Toro for about three months, but during her stay in Colombia, the elusive species did not make an appearance on camera.

To lure the elusive Santa Marta Toro out of hiding, researchers have laced their camera traps with lollipops, shown here.

Credit: Nicolette Roach

The Santa Marta Toro is a small, solitary, arboreal, nocturnal species, which is one reason why these creatures are so difficult to study and even locate in the wild. In addition to the camera traps, Roach and her team conducted night surveys to increase their odds of spotting the elusive Toro. However, the problem is scientists don't have a clear idea where to search for the Toro.

"Not much is known about the Toro's life-history strategy," Roach said. The species "is really understudied and very difficult to find because we don't actually know the type of habitat they're using; we can only guess based on similar species."

Roach added that people have seen the Santa Marta Toro run across the forest floor and climb upward of 40 feet (12 meters) in trees, so there are a lot of habitation variables that need to be taken into consideration when trying to find this little critter.

Roach plans to return to the El Dorado Nature Reserve next summer to search for the Santa Marta Toro and other small mammal species.

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Original article on Live Science.

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Lollipops Could Lure Elusive Tree Rat Out of Hiding

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A fuzzy, orange tree rat that was once thought to be extinct may be lurking in the mountainous forests of Colombia, and now researchers are pulling out all the stops to find the species again, including lacing their camera traps with candy.

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One day while Justin Schmidt was riding his bicycle, something went terribly wrong.

"I was huffing and puffing, so my mouth was open, and this damn honeybee flew right in and stung me on the tongue," he says. He tumbled to the ground, flailing in agony. Later he described the sting as "immediate, noisome, visceral, debilitating. For 10 minutes, life is not worth living."

It wasn't the worst sting possible (we'll get to that), but its intensity surprised him-which is surprising in itself, because Schmidt, a University of Arizona entomologist, has been stung over a thousand times and is famous for developing the Schmidt Pain Scale for Stinging Insects, a four-point scale with descriptions of agony that read like hoity-toity tasting notes for Scotch.

The red paper wasp, for instance, rates a 3 with pain that's "caustic and burning, with a distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut." (See: " The Worst Places to Be Stung? Ask This Guy ")

Normally a honeybee sting is nothing to Schmidt. "Boring," he says. But on the tongue, it was a whole different matter. Clearly, where you're stung can matter as much as what stings you.

So when a Cornell graduate student named Michael Smith contacted him a few years ago with a plan to sting himself all over his body to map the pain, Schmidt had some advice: Don't sting yourself in the eye, kid. But otherwise, go for it.

Smith, who studies bee biology, had been comparing notes with beekeepers and realized that everyone knew stings hurt worse in some places than others, but no one had ever systematically measured the pain. Would pain vary reliably on different body parts? Why do some places hurt worse? "Someone's got to do it," he says, "so as a scientist you go out there and make it happen. It's curiosity; that's what motivates you."

He proceeded to sting himself with honeybees multiple times in each of 24 places on his body, from the top of his head to the tip of his middle toe, and he didn't dodge the scary bits-the nipple, scrotum, and penis. What resulted was the most scientific look ever at the worst places to be stung.

Combine that with Schmidt's pain index by insect, and you've got a good roundup of worst-case scenarios for stings. And that begs a question: What's the ultimate sting? The apotheosis of insect-induced agony?

When I asked both scientists for the worst possible combination, they agreed that a bullet ant to the nostril would probably top the chart for intensity. Schmidt gave the bullet ant a 4 out of 4 on his index and describes the sting as "like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel."

Smith found that the two most painful places to be stung are the nostril and the upper lip, followed by the penis shaft. The penis got more attention in press coverage, but Smith says "the nostril is really where it's at." And it makes sense that bees often target the nose, along with the mouth and eyes-they're crucial to breathing and vision. "Pain isn't for nothing," Smith says; it motivates us to protect our vital functions.

But there's one thing that Schmidt says might be even more horrific. "A warrior wasp to the nose or lip would be up there," he says, and in some ways worse because you'd have intense swelling that could last for days. "You'd get inflated and red, and you get the misery down the line."

The bullet ant, in contrast, doesn't cause much swelling, and in fact doesn't even leave much of a mark.

"It's almost disappointing to go through that and be rendered a babbling idiot, crying, and not even have a big red spot to show people," Schmidt says. "They take away even that satisfaction."

Despite the pain they've endured, both scientists say it's worth it to learn about some of the world's most fascinating animals. "I'm living the dream," Smith says. "I'm working with bees." Since his pain research, he has finished one of the most exhaustive studies ever of the inner workings of a beehive, measuring every detail of a colony from birth to death. And now he's figuring out what triggers bee puberty-yes, bees and almost all other animals have some kind of puberty.

I asked Schmidt what he thinks is the coolest thing he's learned about stinging insects. "I've learned a strange thing," he says. "The relationship between stinging insects and humans is really about us. It's psychological warfare-and they're winning. They've got us terrified of them."

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This Is the Worst Insect Sting in the World

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One day while Justin Schmidt was riding his bicycle, something went terribly wrong. "I was huffing and puffing, so my mouth was open, and this damn honeybee flew right in and stung me on the tongue," he says. He tumbled to the ground, flailing in agony.

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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/09/wildlife-watch-cape-fur-seal-trade-Namibia/

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Namibian Sunshine isn't what you might think. It's oil derived from the blubber of the Cape fur seal, advertised online as rich in Omega-3 fatty acids and allegedly more readily absorbed by the human body-given its mammalian source-than fish oil. Since 2005 Namibia has exported almost 33,000 gallons of sunshine, nearly a third to China.

But export of seal pelts dwarfs Namibia's seal oil business-400,000 of them during the past decade-representing one of the largest trades of any mammal out of Africa. Most go to Turkey, where fashion mogul Hatem Yavuz has them made into "wild fur" coats. According to Seven Network, one of Australia's main free-to-air commercial television networks, Yavuz controls 60 percent of the global market in seal products.

"I come from a family of furriers," Yavuz said in a Whatsapp phone call from his home in Istanbul. "Lamb's wool is the Toyota of the market, mink is the Mercedes, and the sables, chinchillas, and seals are the Bentleys." He says it takes seven pelts to make a man's seal coat, which can sell for between $3,000 and $30,000. "China and Russia enjoy this 'bling bling'-they're my main customers. You won't see Turks wearing the Bentleys: We're good at producing but not at wearing."

Greece, like Turkey, was recently an importer of seal skins from Namibia. But in 2010 the EU banned imports of seal-derived products in response to public outrage over the way seal pups are clubbed to death, or "harvested" in scientific speak. (The EU ban exempts indigenous Inuit in Greenland and the Canadian territory of Nunavut.)

"Global markets for seal products are closing fast," says the Humane Society International. More than 35 countries have now banned products of commercial seal hunts, including the United States, the EU, and Taiwan. (In 1972 the United States Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibited the hunting, killing, capture, and harassment of seals and other marine mammals.)

Namibia, Canada, and Greenland are the last places where seals are harvested commercially. Canada's is the world's largest marine mammal hunt, with some 350,000 harp seals taken each year. Namibia, where seals are listed among the most important commercial marine species, has set an annual hunt quota of 80,000 Cape fur seal pups and 6,000 bulls.

Export of seal pelts represents one of the largest trades of any mammal species out of Africa.

The story of sealing in Namibia focuses sharply divergent interests: an overseas mogul who wants to expand his trading empire; animal welfare advocates who want to end seal hunts; biologists who worry about the long-term survival of the species; fishermen who blame the seals for stealing their catch; and a government agency, the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources, that controls the seal trade and seems intent on keeping it going in the face of a global trend to close it down.

Cape fur seals are found in the waters off southwestern southern Africa and are estimated to number approximately 1.7 million. More than half are in Namibia, and the rest in South Africa-which banned commercial seal harvests in 1990-and Angola. The seals aren't threatened with extinction, but under the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the 183-nation body that regulates international wildlife trade, they're listed as a species that may become threatened if their trade isn't closely monitored and controlled.

Moreover, "If CITES is serious about improving animal welfare standards in trade, then it really should raise the issue of the Namibian seal hunt," says Pat Dickens, the force behind Seals of Nam, a Namibian nonprofit founded in 2010 with the goal of ending the country's sealing industry. Ahead of the CITES wildlife trade conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, next week, Dickens initiated an online petition calling for the Cape fur seal trade to be blacklisted because of the inhumane ways seals are killed, the harm harvests do to seal populations, and lack of transparency in the sealing business.

Yavuz is Namibia's main sealing concessionaire, meaning that he pays royalties to the government for his allotted portion of the annual hunt quota. His connections with Namibia run deep. He helped finance a seal processing plant in Henties Bay, and in 2010 was named Honorary Consul for Namibia in Turkey. A popular target of animal rights groups, he recently thumbed his nose at those who flood him with hate mail with a new label, Fok You ( fok means seal in Turkish).

While the seal pups' soft skins are used for coats-his Bentleys-the bulls are killed for their penises, or hai gou shen, believed in traditional Chinese medicine to improve virility. Seal penises are the animal's most valuable part, selling for approximately $2,000 a pound on average, according to Yavuz.

'Three-Step' Killing Process

The customary way to kill pups is to knock them unconscious with a heavy wooden club, then pierce their main heart vessels with a pick or knife to kill them. But the Cape fur seal is a difficult target. "Its agility on land means that when you're taking a swing at it, it takes evasive actions," Pat Dickens says. "Clubbing nursing pups in large social colonies is unlikely to be swift and accurate and is extremely stressful."

Adult seals are shot in the head. "I have 126 rifles on site," Yavuz says. "Their accuracy is over 86 percent. They're Boers and Angola war veterans, so great shooters."

In 2010, on the basis of footage of Namibian seal hunts made by filmmaker Bart Smithers, David Lavigne, then of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and Stephen Kirkman, who's associated with the University of Cape Town and works for South Africa's Department of Environmental Affairs, asserted that the hunts fail to follow the " three-step" killing process.

Those steps-recommended by the Panel on Animal Health and Welfare of the European Food Safety Authority and by a group of independent veterinarians-are: stun, monitor, and bleed. Stunning involves destroying the seal's brain sensory function through a club blow or rifle shot. Monitoring means ascertaining if the seal is still conscious by checking its blink reflex and, if it is, immediately administering another stunning blow. Only then are the seal's heart blood vessels pierced to guarantee "humane slaughter."

According to Dickens, some sealers are migrant workers who are paid a meager wage and live in makeshift shacks. It's unlikely, he says, that they'll have had adequate training in humane killing methods, such as verifying that a seal has been successfully stunned before swiftly piercing its heart vessels.

CITES stipulates that wildlife exports be prohibited if they violate a country's laws. According to Namibia's 1962 Animal Protection Act, beating or terrifying an animal or causing it suffering is an offense. But the wording of the act has been the subject of controversy between anti-hunt campaigners and Namibian officials.

Among those officials is John Walters, Namibia's "ombudsman," charged with defending human rights, including in the context of environmental protection. In 2012 Walters looked into complaints against the seal hunts by civil society organizations, NGOs, and individuals. He acknowledged that Cape fur seals are moving targets that flee hunters at speeds that make accurate hits difficult.

But, Walters rationalized, the Animal Protection Act applies only to domesticated animals and wild animals that are either captive or "under the control of any person." By Walters's logic, because seals being chased by sealers are moving away from them, the animals aren't under the sealers' control and therefore aren't protected by the act.

An outcry from organizations like Sea Shepherd, an NGO devoted to marine wildlife conservation, ensued, but Walters stuck to his position, concluding that clubbing remains the most practical way to kill the pups while a rifle shot to the head is the ideal way of killing adult bulls.

When asked if his interpretation of the law has changed since 2012, Walters responded, "I cannot add anything further than what I have considered and found in my report."

Yavuz invoked Walters' reasoning almost verbatim as to why the act doesn't apply to seals. On the question of how seals are killed, he says he's tried unsuccessfully to use sound bombs-nonlethal explosives that deafen and stun-to make it easier to target individual pups. But, he says, "clubbing and shooting remain the best methods of killing."

Seals by the Numbers

As early as the 1600s Dutch settlers killed Cape fur seals for their skins and oil. By the 20th century, seals had been extirpated from most of their breeding colonies and were limited to small, relatively inaccessible islands. That's when harvests became legally controlled, and designated sealing seasons were set. As a result the seals recovered-although they've been displaced almost entirely to the mainland by human activities on islands, such as guano collecting.

It isn't clear how stable Namibia's seal populations are today. The hunting season runs 139 days, from July through November, giving the animals little respite. Sealers target larger pups and allow the smaller, thinner ones-those with poorer chances of survival-to get away. This can weaken the long-term genetic vigor of the populations.

A South African biologist who has studied Cape fur seals for several decades-and asked not to be named because of the controversies surrounding Namibia's sealing-believes that the hunt quota of nearly 90,000 "is way too high for a sustainable industry. The quota is set on the basis of the size of the entire population, but only two colonies are harvested. The high quotas for pups mean that very few, if any, can survive in typical years at these two colonies."

The hunts are essentially invisible. "No trespassing" signs are posted at the colonies-Cape Cross and Wolf/Atlas Bay-and violators have been arrested. The latter colony also happens to be on a mining concession leased by De Beers, the world's leading diamond company, which is strictly off-limits. When asked about De Beers's position on Namibia's covert seal hunt, Patti Wickens, the company's environmental principal, said, "There has been no seal culling in any of our mining license areas in the last two years, and we remain hopeful that this will continue into the future."

But it's only a matter of time before sealing resumes there. Both Yavuz and Dickens confirmed that there are still two recognized sealing concession areas. While the previous concessionaire at Wolf/Atlas Bay had shut down his operation, new concessionaires are busy building a seal-processing plant at Lüderitz and may resume sealing before the end of this harvest season.

Do Seals Undermine Namibia's Fishery?

Namibia's fishermen perceive seals as competing for such commercially valuable species as mackerel, sardines, anchovies, hake, and herring. Seals are known to snatch fish right off fishing lines, and fishermen say that seals sometimes damage their gear, doing things such as tearing trawl nets in order to remove fish from them. But Kirkman says seals typically just take the "stickers-fish sticking through the net."

The Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources encourages sealers to take the full allowable yearly catch of nearly 90,000. The ministry itself sets that allowable catch-a seeming conflict of interest, exacerbated by the fact that hunts are also supervised by inspectors from the ministry without external oversight. Representatives with the head office of the ministry did not respond to questions about this and other matters relating to sealing and fisheries.

Does the killing of tens of thousands of seals each year ameliorate fishermen's perceptions that seals undermine their livelihoods? Hatem Yavuz doesn't think so. "If [the quota] were higher, such as an annual of 500,000 seals," he says, "then our business might improve how fishers view seals."

Two decades ago, before Patti Wickens became De Beers's environmental spokesperson, she conducted studies that led her to conclude that seals had negligible effects on the fishing industry. Wickens declined to comment on the effects seals have on fisheries today.

"If you took all of Namibia's seal colonies and created a super colony, it would stretch a mere 11 miles of coastline," says Seals of Nam's Dickens. "How can seals destroy your fishing industry when your coastline is over 900 miles long?"

According to Stephen Kirkman, the fishing industry may hurt seals more than the other way round. He is one of the authors of a forthcoming update of the conservation status of the Cape fur seal that describes threats to seals: drowning in fishing nets, illegal killing by fishermen, deadly entanglements in marine debris.

'Golden Retriever Puppies in Wetsuits'

Despite the worldwide trend against sealing, Namibia's industry is far from shrinking. The new Lüderitz seal-processing plant is described as an "empowerment project" to generate jobs, support young entrepreneurs, and contribute to the local economy. The plant is expected to have the capacity to process 40,000 seals a year, including their skins, oil, and meat. Meanwhile an environmental impact assessment of the plant reported that little information has yet been provided about the chemicals that will be used in the plant, especially in the tannery, exposing potential risks to people and the environment.

Seal king Hatem Yavuz is forging ahead with sales of seal products to Russia and China. Meanwhile, Canadian seal traders say that encouraging Chinese demand is key, as is diversifying the trade. For example, Bernie Halloran, the CEO of PhocaLux International, is advertising seal bones for grinding up into a "health-giving" powder, and banking on Korea and Japan to purchase seal meat.

But Rebecca Aldworth, executive director of Humane Society International/Canada, says that China "has never materialized as a significant market for any seal product." Nevertheless, Chinese companies recently tried to intercept the Nambian Sunshine business by attempting to seize sole rights to the country's seal oil. And according to a September 13 article in the Namib Times, the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources is now contemplating granting a Chinese businessman's request to import live seals-and possibly cetaceans too -for the Asian aquarium trade.

If Namibia were to shut down its sealing industry, say Economists at Large, a team of environmental economists concerned with sustainability, an economically viable alternative exists: seal-watching tourism, which could generate 300 percent more revenue-and jobs-than seal hunting.

"Seals may not be as popular as whales, dolphins, or sharks, but seeing a colony is guaranteed," Stephen Kirkman says. "You can be sure that a whale or dolphin-watching operator will include a spin to the seal colony in their tour, as they then never have a situation where their customers come away with having seen nothing. Most people are quite satisfied after seeing a seal colony."

Monica Taylor runs a company called Offshore Adventures, out of Plettenberg Bay, South Africa, that offers swimming with seals. Since January 2011, when the company got started, some 10,000 people have swum with seals. For three consecutive years Offshore Adventures has won the prestigious Wessa blue flag, an international award for environmental excellence.

"There's no better way of conducting environmental education and awareness than through experiences like these," Taylor says. "Swimming with seals is the best combination of adventure, animal encounters, and sustainable tourism. Due to their inquisitive nature, we don't have to chase after them or feed them to interact. They're golden retriever puppies in wetsuits."

While seal-based tourism could be a win for Namibia and the seals, a leading question remains: Which of the vested interests will prevail?

Read more stories about wildlife crime and exploitation on Wildlife Watch. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas to ngwildlife@natgeo.com.

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Cape Fur Seal Trade Remains Shrouded in Secrecy

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Namibian Sunshine isn't what you might think. It's oil derived from the blubber of the Cape fur seal, advertised online as rich in Omega-3 fatty acids and allegedly more readily absorbed by the human body-given its mammalian source-than fish oil. Since 2005 Namibia has exported almost 33,000 gallons of sunshine, nearly a third to China.

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Most people would run if they happened across a pair of yard-long vipers twisting and thrashing in the weeds. But Dawn Kelly of Searcy County, Arkansas, reached for her phone.

"I've grown up on a farm and am fascinated by all animals, and in 50-some years of being outdoors I had never seen two snakes interacting like that," says Kelly, a confectioner and hobby farmer.

But Kelly had no idea just how unusual this behavior actually was until she sent her video to David Steen, a wildlife ecologist at Auburn University who spends his spare time identifying snakes on Twitter and Facebook. "I knew immediately that I was looking at something that was going to blow everybody's minds," says Steen.

"It's unusual to see snakes fighting," Steen says, "but what makes this observation particularly exciting is that they are two different species-a cottonmouth and a copperhead."

And that raises another question: Could this be evidence of cottonmouths and copperheads actually mating in the wild? Hybrids of the two closely related species-cottonheads, if you will-have occurred in captivity, but are rarely found in nature.

Cottonmouths and copperheads are both venomous snakes native to the American Southeast. Males of each species are known to perform these types of "ritualized wrestling matches" around this time each year as they compete for females. But males of two different species intertwined in a mating duel? That was something new.

"This observation will change the way we think about how snakes interact with each other," says Steen.

When Vipers Dance

Gordon Schuett is a herpetologist at Georgia State University who studies these serpentine reproductive bouts.

"Male-male combat in snakes is a behavior that is highly visual and tactile," says Schuett.

The males writhe against each other rhythmically, twisting in and out of each other's embrace in an attempt to force the other to the ground. During the mating season, they become so primed and ready to fight that anything that even resembles another male looks like a challenge. In fact, says Schuett, he has even seen a snake tango with a broomstick.

What's particularly fascinating about these species of viper is that they perform their battles "in a vertical plane." So while king snakes, pine snakes, and rat snakes do their wrestling on the ground, the cottonmouth and copperhead in the video can be seen rearing up into the air. The result looks as much like a dance as it does a fight.

Once vipers join the fray, they will not disengage until a winner is declared, which happens when a losing snake gives up and is chased away. Kelly can attest to this, as she says she filmed the snakes for around six minutes, with dogs barking nearby, but neither snake seemed to notice her. (Note: Don't try this at home. It's best to let fighting snakes lie.)

Schuett's research shows that the bigger snake usually wins the battle. While the victor goes on to court the female the pair was fighting over, the loser might slither off to lick his wounds for anywhere between 24 hours to up to a week or more before trying again.

In other words, it may look like the snakes are just playing, but we are actually witnessing a serious trial with long-lasting consequences.

If it's so important, one might wonder why neither snake tries to bite the other while they skirmish.

"Biting is almost entirely absent in male-male combat in pit vipers and vipers," says Schuett. Biting is common in nonvenomous snakes, he says, as well as some venomous species such as cobras and mambas.

It's likely that cottonmouths and copperheads have evolved mating duels where biting is off-limits because they have much longer fangs than cobras or mambas-fangs that could potentially penetrate the victim's brain, heart, or other critical organs.

Fortunately, whether you're talking about vipers or bighorn rams, fatalities are rare in animal mating rituals. (Related: Watch "Big Ram Rumble")

Kissing Cousins

Cottonmouths ( Agkistrodon piscivorus) and copperheads ( Agkistrodon contortrix) are members of the same genus, which means they are closely related species, and have even been known to mate and produce hybrid babies in captivity.

"When asked what I would call the hybrids," says Schuett, "I respond tongue-in-cheek, coppermouths or cottonheads."

But is this video evidence that the venomous snakes are hybridizing in the wild?

It's difficult to say, since there's no sign of a female in the video. But it does raise a whole bunch of interesting questions, says Steen.

What species of female were they fighting over? Is it possible there was one of each nearby? What happened when the combat ceased?

"Snakes are very secretive, so they are difficult to observe and study," says Steen. "It's always exciting to catch them in action while they are exhibiting unique behaviors."

As for Kelly, she says, "It sounds hokey but I'm just thrilled I got to share this with others."

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Cottonmouth vs. Copperhead: Watch First Mating Duel Seen in the Wild

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Most people would run if they happened across a pair of yard-long vipers twisting and thrashing in the weeds. But Dawn Kelly of Searcy County, Arkansas, reached for her phone. "I've grown up on a farm and am fascinated by all animals, and in 50-some years of being outdoors I had never seen two snakes interacting like that," says Kelly, a confectioner and hobby farmer.

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The pigeons were trained to distinguish real words from gibberish.

Credit: Damian Scarf/YouTube

Pigeons may be sometimes likened to "flying rats," but these birds are no dummies, according to a new study. Scientists recently taught pigeons to read - kind of.

In a new study, researchers trained pigeons to distinguish real words from gibberish, using 308 four-letter words that baboons had learned in a previous study. Some of the birds learned to identify dozens of words, with the most successful pigeon being able to recognize 58 words, the researchers said.

The pigeons were presented with word and nonword stimuli along with a star symbol on a screen. When a word was shown, the pigeons were supposed to peck the word, and when a nonword was shown, the pigeons were supposed to peck the star. When the birds responded correctly, they were rewarded with treats from a hopper bird feeder. [ The 5 Smartest Nonprimates on the Planet]

Four of the pigeons excelled at the word recognition test, and the scientists continued more intensive training with these birds. These advanced pigeons were even able to distinguish correctly spelled words from those with rearranged characters, like "very" and "vrey," or words that were completely misspelled, the researchers said.

"The pigeons' performance is actually more comparable to that of literate humans than baboons' performance," for the misspelling tests, the scientists wrote in the study.

To determine whether the birds were learning to distinguish words from nonwords rather than merely memorizing the correct answers, the pigeons were introduced to new words throughout the study. According to the researchers, the pigeons correctly identified the new words as words at a rate that was significantly above mere chance.

"This transfer suggests that during training, the pigeons derived some general statistical knowledge about the letter combinations that distinguish words from nonwords," the authors wrote.

The researchers suggest that the pigeons tracked the statistical likelihood that certain pairs of letters, such as "EN" and "AL," were more likely to be associated with words or nonwords.

One of the study's authors, neuroscientist Onur Güntürkün of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, said that it's remarkable that the pigeons have the ability to visually recognize words (known as orthographic knowledge).

"That pigeons - separated by 300 million years of evolution from humans and having vastly different brain architectures - show such a skill as orthographic processing is astonishing," Güntürkün said in a statement.

The new study is the first to identify a nonprimate species as having these orthographic abilities. And the researchers said that by studying the pigeons' ability to learn words, they could provide insights into the origins and function of language.

The study also highlights the intelligence of pigeons, which study co-author Michael Colombo, a professor of psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, said may spark the need "to seriously rethink the use of the term 'birdbrain' as a put-down."

The findings were published online Sept. 16 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Original article on Live Science.

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Pigeons may be sometimes likened to "flying rats," but these birds are no dummies, according to a new study. Scientists recently taught pigeons to read - kind of. In a new study, researchers trained pigeons to distinguish real words from gibberish, using 308 four-letter words that baboons had learned in a previous study.

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Sep 17, 2016 06:26 AM EDT

Are foxes man's new best friend? In Russia, there's now a choice after geneticist Dmitry Belyaev began a breeding program 50 years ago.

There are plenty of people who would want to take the adorable looking fox home. However, a regular fox from the wild isn't domesticated and will often wreak havoc in the home.

A report from BBC revealed that the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals even officially cautions people from attempting to get a fox as a pet saying, "Because foxes are wild animals and do not fare well as domestic pets, they should not be kept as such. Even the most experienced fox experts have had difficulty in keeping adult foxes successfully in captivity as they have very specific needs."

In the late 1950s, Belyaev didn't just attempt to bring home a fox and tame it - the scientist actually began to create a tame fox population. The ambitious project of guided evolution through selected breeding proved to be successful, and is still an ongoing project even past the geneticist's death in 1985.

Belyaev's goal was to track the evolutionary pathway of domesticated animals through his subjects, the silver-black foxes. He did it with a breeding program at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics at Novosibirsk in Russia, but operated under the guise of breeding to improve fur coats because of the ban in genetic study in Russia under Joseph Stalin's rule.

He traveled with his intern Lyudmila Trut throughout Russia to select foxes to bring to their Novosibirsk farm. Their selections were based on the animals' initial response to humans; from the original pool, they chose 100 vixens and 30 males as the first generation.

The cubs were hand-fed and exposed to significant human contact, then "discarded" after still displaying aggressive or evasive behavior. Less than 10% of each selection were chosen as parents of the next generation.

"As a result of such rigorous selection, the offspring exhibiting the aggressive and fear avoidance responses were eliminated from the experimental population in just two to three generations of selection," Trut, who took over operations after Belyaev's death, wrote in a report in BioEssays in 2009.

By the fourth generation, the foxes were beginning to act more like dogs. Actions included wagging their tails, seeking contact from humans, whining and licking researchers. Their bodies changed as well with floppier ears, curlier tails, shortened limbs and wider skulls, among others.

The fox farm still exists and now has 270 tame vixens and 70 tame males. Due to financial problems, the foxes are now being sold as house pets.

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First Domesticated Foxes Bred in Russia With Dog Traits Like Licking, Tail Wagging

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Sep 17, 2016 06:26 AM EDT Are foxes man's new best friend? In Russia, there's now a choice after geneticist Dmitry Belyaev began a breeding program 50 years ago. There are plenty of people who would want to take the adorable looking fox home.

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Stroll down the lanes and alleys of Kolkata's Galiff Street on any Sunday morning, and you'll see hundreds of wild-caught native and exotic birds for sale, crammed into wire cages of all shapes and sizes. You'll hear a cacophony of bird calls and flapping wings. From their makeshift stalls, traders shout all kinds of bird names, vying for customers' attention.

When I went there in July, I saw jet-black hill mynahs with their neon orange beaks, finch-size green avadavats with their yellow bellies and zebra-striped flanks, lovebirds, cockatoos, and various parakeets.

There were even chicks in improbable shades of flamboyant orange and green. A local vendor peddling a cage full of them said they were the babies of rare birds, in great demand as pets.

Pet birds have long been a part of Indian culture. Folktales and royal texts are replete with mynahs, parrots, and pigeons that adorned imperial courts and entertained wealthy families. Today the birds are still popular as pets, and they increasingly feature as good-luck charms at weddings and other celebrations, where they're released into the air.

A blanket ban on the sale and export of native Indian birds has been in place for the past 25 years, yet the wildlife trade-monitoring group TRAFFIC has recorded more than 450 of India's 1,300 native bird species for sale in domestic and international markets.

Furthermore, no prohibition exists on the domestic sale of captive-bred exotic birds in India, so trappers and traders often skirt the ban on the trade of native birds by disguising them as exotics, touching them up with dye, or even paint, to make them look like rarer native birds and increasing their value.

That's what happened to those bright orange and green chicks. They were dyed.

Bird Disguises

Dyed birds of all species can be found at India's markets. Take the rose-ringed parakeet, a green bird with gray rings around its neck that is native to India and is a favorite in the pet trade. Some traders will add a dab of catechu, a brown dye from the acacia tree, on its shoulder feathers to make it resemble the less common, more expensive Alexandrine parakeet. Or traders may paint the parakeet's head orange and sell it as an imported exotic bird. Another disguise: Black dye is applied to the parakeet's entire body so the trader can sell it as a pricey "rare mutation." Other dyes used include shoe polish, lamp soot, spray paint, oil, coal dust, textile dyes, and food coloring, says a trader at the Galiff Street market.

Red avadavats, or munias, are dyed to be sold for 10 times more as rare green avadavats. Spotted owlets are stained with tea water and have feathers glued to their heads to be passed off as hard-to-find brown fish owls, which are sacrificed during the Indian festival of Diwali to usher in prosperity, according to Abrar Ahmed, former principal investigator for TRAFFIC India's live bird trade project. (Related: Photos reveal massive annual falcon hunt in India.)

Many of the dyes contain chemicals that are absorbed by the birds' skin, which can sicken them, says Nikunj Sharma, a spokesman and government affairs liaison with the India branch of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

And the dyeing process can be traumatic. One person holds the bird by its wings and legs, and the other paints it using dye-soaked cotton. Because traders work fast to color as many birds as they can, they're often careless, according to Sharma. Dye may drip into the birds' eyes, causing inflammation or even partial blindness. Chicks may be dipped in a bowl of liquid dye to give them more uniform color. Or they may have liquid poured over them and then be tossed from hand to hand like hot potatoes to even out the color. Because chicks are so delicate, Sharma says, this can kill them.

The deception itself can also put birds at risk. "When the color fades, revealing the original identity of the bird, or when chicks outgrow their painted feathers, many of these species die due to ill treatment of the duped buyers, who do not know what to do with them," says Asad Rahmani, an ornithologist at the Bombay Natural History Society, one of India's largest wildlife research organizations.

From Forest to Market

Trappers often use cruel and indiscriminate methods to capture birds, such as spreading glue onto branches and using insects or bird decoys as bait. Birds land on the branch and get stuck. In their efforts to free themselves, they may injure their legs or wings, and they often lose feathers. They're helpless until a trapper shows up to detach them. Later, the birds are cleaned with a mixture of kerosene and cow dung ash. (Related: Across the Mediterranean, millions of birds are killed for food, profit, and cruel amusement.)

Trappers also use very fine, nearly invisible nets to catch birds. Ornithologists use these mist nets to trap birds they want to study, and when used correctly and checked often, they rarely cause harm. But that's not always the case with trappers looking for birds to sell. Many birds struggling to free themselves from the nets suffer injuries.

Tilotama Varma, with India's Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, the government organization tasked with combating organized wildlife crime, says there's a lot of room to improve how India protects its native birds. She wants to see more surveillance along the country's borders and more law enforcement at markets, and she says certain species should be given India's highest level of wildlife protection.

Another approach, says Deepak Apte, director of the Bombay Natural History Society, is to pay illegal bird trappers to instead protect birds. The traditional trappers are experts, he says, with knowledge and skills that can be put to good use. "With this, more than 10,000 trappers in India can be converted into protectors."

Moushumi Basu is a freelance journalist from India with a passion for writing about wildlife and the environment.

Read more stories about wildlife crime and exploitation on Wildlife Watch. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas to ngwildlife@natgeo.com.

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Dyed But Alive, Disguised Birds Skirt Laws and Fetch High Prices

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Stroll down the lanes and alleys of Kolkata's Galiff Street on any Sunday morning, and you'll see hundreds of wild-caught native and exotic birds for sale, crammed into wire cages of all shapes and sizes. You'll hear a cacophony of bird calls and flapping wings.

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They're gonna need a bigger bowl.

The recent birth of two Irish wolfhound puppies has scientists excited, because-for the first time ever-the puppies have been confirmed through genetic analysis to be identical twins.

People have suspected for years that identical (monozygotic) twins are possible in domestic dogs, and there have been anecdotal reports, but there has never been a confirmed case in the scientific literature until now. And it turns out that although human twins are relatively common, identical twins are exceedingly rare in other species.

The identical twin puppies, named Cullen and Romulus, were delivered by vet Kurt de Cramer in South Africa's Rant en Dal Animal Hospital in Mogale City. He was performing a cesarean section on the mother, who was in distress. He found the two pups attached via umbilical cords to the same placenta, something he had never seen before in decades of practice.

Five other littermates were also delivered, each surrounded by its own placenta, as is usually the case in dogs.

He was struck by how similar Cullen and Romulus looked, although they still had some subtle differences in white markings. But blood samples confirmed that the twins were indeed identical, and had arisen from the splitting of a single fertilized egg. ( Learn more about twins.)

The slight differences in coat patterns can be explained by the fact that although the pups have the same set of genes, how each gene gets expressed is still influenced by subtle environmental cues. That's one reason why human identical twins don't look exactly alike.

So de Cramer enlisted several scientists to help with analysis of the pups, including Carolynne Joone of James Cook University in Australia and Johan Nöthling of the University of Pretoria in South Africa. The team published their findings in the journal Reproduction in Domestic Animals last week.

The researchers point out that confirmed cases of identical twins are extremely rare in nature. It's certainly possible that cases simply go undocumented, they warn, because scientists have only done genetic testing on a small sample of wild (and even domestic) animals. And at least one species, the nine-banded armadillo, regularly gives birth to identical quadruplets. ( See photos of twins.)

But the scientists suggest that twins may be rarer in nature than among human beings because two organisms living in a single placenta can lead to less nourishment for each individual. In the tough world of nature, that can result in young that are less hardy and prepared to face the wild. In people, that is less of an issue now, thanks to the benefits of society and intensive parental care.

In people, the natural rate of twins is roughly one in 80 births, with identical twins making up roughly a third of that. The rate of identical twins has tended to be relatively consistent across nations and cultures, although it may tend to run in some families. The rate of fraternal (or dizygotic) twins tends to rise with the use of certain fertility assistance drugs.

Identical twins develop after a single zygote, or fertilized egg, divides, creating two (or more) embryos. Fraternal twins develop from two (or more) fertilized eggs.

In people, identical twins do tend to form closer relationships than fraternal twins or other siblings, psychologist and twin expert Nancy L. Segal previously told National Geographic. Identical twins often do seem to share some similar habits and quirks, but there are many differences that develop as well, thanks to different environmental impacts and possibly other unknown factors.

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First Ever Confirmed Case of Puppy Identical Twins

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They're gonna need a bigger bowl. The recent birth of two Irish wolfhound puppies has scientists excited, because-for the first time ever-the puppies have been confirmed through genetic analysis to be identical twins. People have suspected for years that identical (monozygotic) twins are possible in domestic dogs, and there have been anecdotal reports, but there has never been a confirmed case in the scientific literature until now.

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There are dog people. There are cat people. And then there are guinea pig people ... or parrot people ... or red-eyed tree frog people.

Private ownership of exotic pets is allowed in many states throughout the United States, and thanks to the Internet, it's easier than ever for people to purchase whatever feathered, furred or finned pet they desire. But just because you can own an exotic pet, doesn't mean you should.

Purchasing or adopting any type of pet requires careful thought and consideration - and exponentially so for exotic animals. Here are five things you should carefully consider before you bring an exotic pet into your home.

The rules: Did you know that it's illegal to possess a chimpanzee in the state of California? In Illinois, it's against the law to own or care for any animal that might be considered "dangerous," and that includes any kind of venomous reptile. The same goes for Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York and several other states. Many states have strict laws regulating the type of pets you are allowed to own and the type of permits you're required to have if you wish to own them. Start here for information about your state's requirements for exotic pets.

The costs: This is a big one. When you adopt a dog or cat, you can assume that you'll be able to pick up all of the food and supplies you need to care for that animal at your local big box store. But that's not necessarily the case for exotic animals. And though the frog or parrot or snake itself may not cost that much, the cost of caring for it might be, and these are costs that you need to know ahead of time.

"Exotic pets typically need special caging, specialized diets and forms of enrichment that can all become quite expensive especially in larger exotics pets," said Sharman Hoppes, associate clinical professor at Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences.

A guinea pig munches on some basil leaves - but do you know what kind of food he should be eating? (Photo: TJ Images/Shutterstock)

The research: Before you bring home an exotic animal, you need to know everything there is to know about what it takes to properly care for this animal. "Before buying an exotic pet, research everything about them," Hoppes said. "Questions such as where they come from, their diet, if they climb, their social ability, how big will they get as adults, diseases they are susceptible to, and how long they live are essential before purchasing an exotic pet," Hoppes added.

Other questions to ask include what size cage or enclosure will it need? What does it need to eat? What is its temperament? And how much interaction will it want or need? Many small animals require stimulation outside of the cage - from floor time to cuddle sessions.

The care: Check to find out if there is a veterinarian in your area who will care for your pet in case of an emergency. If not, you many find yourself driving for hours every time your pet needs a vaccination. And you may want to find out how much those annual visits are going to cost. While a regular checkup for a dog or cat may cost around $100, an examination for an exotic animal can cost anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars, depending upon whether or not anesthesia is necessary for the doctor to complete the checkup.

You also need to find out what your pet can and cannot eat and where you can find it. What are your pet's daily requirements in terms of vitamins, minerals, calories, protein, and what foods or supplements will they need to consume to meet those needs?

The fit: Another major consideration about adopting any pet - but especially an exotic pet - is how well this animal will fit into your life. "Many exotic pets are not good with children, and your new girlfriend or boyfriend may not like your large macaw who wants to bite them or may be afraid of your pet kangaroo that can kick and box with the power of Muhammad Ali," noted Hoppes.

If you already have other pets, it's important to consider how these animals will interact with your new pet. In some instances, you may be able to bring your pets to the exotic animal shelter to see how they will all get along.

Ready to adopt? Once you've done all of your homework, it's time to start looking for your new pet. Be sure to check your local rescue centers first. Of course, this is something that you would want to do for any pet, but the stakes are even higher for exotic animals that are purchased or adopted on a whim and then abandoned at the first complication.

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5 things to ask before you adopt an exotic pet

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There are dog people. There are cat people. And then there are guinea pig people ... or parrot people ... or red-eyed tree frog people. Private ownership of exotic pets is allowed in many states throughout the United States, and thanks to the Internet, it's easier than ever for people to purchase whatever feathered, furred or finned pet they desire.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160902142207.htm

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Hour 3

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A blue fire tornado sounds like it could be an alarming natural disaster, but this phenomenon could actually offer a way to burn fuel with reduced carbon emissions, a new study finds.

A fire tornado, or fire whirl, can occur during urban and wildland fires, threatening life, property and the surrounding environment. However, researchers have discovered a type of fire tornado they call a "blue whirl," and they said these flames have the ability to burn nearly soot-free.

Traditional, yellow fire whirls gain their color from radiating soot particles, according to study co-author Elaine Oran, a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland. Oran said the particles in yellow whirls form because there is not enough oxygen to burn the fuel completely. [ Video: Watch a Blue Fire Tornado Spin]

"Blue in the whirl indicates there is enough oxygen for complete combustion, which means less or no soot, and is therefore a cleaner burn," Oran said in a statement.

The researchers were initially studying the combustion and burning dynamics of fire whirls on water. When they discovered the swirling blue flame, the researchers said they thought there could be a practical application for the fire tornado.

Reduced-emission combustion through the blue whirl could offer a solution to "the worldwide need to reduce emissions from both wanted and unwanted combustion," the scientists wrote in their study.

One potential application is to help clean up oil spills, the researchers said. Currently, one remediation technique is to corral the oil, creating a thick layer on the water's surface to be burned. But burning the oil this way is smoky, inefficient and incomplete, the researchers said. If blue whirls could be harnessed and controlled, oil-spill remediation-by-combustion could be greatly improved, they added.

"Fire whirls are more efficient than other forms of combustion, because they produce drastically increased heating to the surface of fuels, allowing them to burn faster and more completely," said study co-author Michael Gollner, an assistant professor of fire-protection engineering at the University of Maryland.

In the researchers' experiments over water, Gollner said, the blue whirls not only burn cleaner, but also help pull in the fuel due to the flames' circulation.

"If we can achieve a state akin to the blue whirl at larger scale, we can further reduce airborne emissions for a much cleaner means of spill cleanup," Gollner said.

The findings were published Aug. 4 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Original article on Live Science.

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Is a Blue Fire Tornado the Future of Oil Spill Cleanup?

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A blue fire tornado sounds like it could be an alarming natural disaster, but this phenomenon could actually offer a way to burn fuel with reduced carbon emissions, a new study finds. A fire tornado, or fire whirl, can occur during urban and wildland fires, threatening life, property and the surrounding environment.

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This new species of palm pitviper ( Bothriechis nubestris) lives only in a mountain range called Cordillera de Talamanca, on the border of Costa Rica and Panama.

Credit: University of Central Florida

A previously unknown, green-speckled species of venomous snake has been found lurking in the high, misty forests of Costa Rica.

The Talamancan palm-pitviper ( Bothriechis nubestris) was discovered through genetics. The snake, which lives in a remote, forested region of Central America, was long mistaken for a closely related species, the black-speckled palm-pitviper ( Bothriechis nigroviridis). But when University of Central Florida biologist Christopher Parkinson performed a genetic analysis of the black-specked palm-pitviper, he and his team found differences between specimens, suggesting that these might be two separate species.

When two species look and behave nearly identically but are genetically distinct, it's called cryptic speciation. To uncover this particular case of cryptic speciation, Parkinson and his colleagues studied museum collections in the United States and Costa Rica, and also compared DNA from the palm-pitvipers to DNA of other Central American snakes. [ The World's 6 Deadliest Snakes]

The team found that what was believed to be one species was actually two lineages. The black-speckled palm-pitviper can be found across Costa Rica's Central, Tilarán and Talamanca Cordilleras (mountain ranges). The new Talamancan palm-pitviper, in contrast, is found only in the northern and central Cordillera de Talamanca, the mountain range that sits on the border of Costa Rica and Panama.

The snake usually grows to less than 24 inches (61 centimeters) long and is patterned with black and bright green speckles. The species lives at high elevations in the cloud forests of the Cordillera de Talamanca, the researchers reported July 15 in the journal Zootaxa.

The palm-pitvipers make up an interesting group because of their neurotoxic venom. The black-speckled palm-pitviper kills with a toxin called nigroviriditoxin, Spanish and Costa Rican researchers reported in January 2015 in the journal Toxicon. This toxin had previously been found only in rattlesnakes, raising questions about whether it evolved independently in rattlers and palm-pitvipers or was present in a common ancestor of the two.

"It's certainly an interesting question, because it gets at some of the fundamental concepts in evolution," Andrew Mason, a doctoral student in biology at the University of Central Florida and one of the authors of the paper, said in a statement, describing the Talamancan palm-pitviper. "We are really interested in seeing how the venom of this new species compares to other palm-pitvipers."

Original article on Live Science.

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New Speckled Venomous Snake Discovered in Cloud Forest

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A previously unknown, green-speckled species of venomous snake has been found lurking in the high, misty forests of Costa Rica. The Talamancan palm-pitviper ( Bothriechis nubestris) was discovered through genetics. The snake, which lives in a remote, forested region of Central America, was long mistaken for a closely related species, the black-speckled palm-pitviper ( Bothriechis nigroviridis).

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Just over 100 years after he published his general theory of relativity, scientists have found what Albert Einstein predicted as part of the theory: gravitational waves.

"We have detected gravitational waves. We did it," said David Reitze, executive director of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which was created to do just what Reitze announced.

Reitze made the announcement Thursday at the National Press Club in Washington surrounded by other LIGO researchers and National Science Foundation head France Cordova.

The gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time -- were created by the merging of two black holes, Reitze said. One black hole had the mass of 29 suns; the other was the equivalent of 36 suns. Each was perhaps 50 kilometers (30 miles) in diameter.

More than a billion years ago -- LIGO estimates about 1.3 billion -- the two collided at half the speed of light. Gravitational waves pass through everything, so the result traveled through the universe for that time before reaching Earth.

The 'chirp' of black holes colliding

The gravitational waves stretched and compressed space around Earth "like Jell-O," said Reitze.

However, the waves are so small that it takes a detector like LIGO, capable of measuring distortions one-thousandth the size of a proton, to observe them. They were observed on September 14, 2015.

Scientists heard the sound of the black holes colliding as a "chirp" lasting one-fifth of a second. Though gravitational waves aren't sound waves, the increase in frequency the collision exhibited in its last milliseconds -- when the black holes were mere kilometers apart and growing closer -- is a frequency we can hear, said Deirdre Shoemaker, a Georgia Tech physicist who works on LIGO.

LIGO is described as "a system of two identical detectors" -- one located in Livingston, Louisiana, the other in Hanford, Washington -- "carefully constructed to detect incredibly tiny vibrations from passing gravitational waves." The project was created by scientists from Caltech and MIT and funded by the National Science Foundation.

Szabolcs Marka, a physicist at Columbia University who is leader of the LIGO member Columbia Experimental Gravity Group, said you could think of it as "a cosmic microphone."

Einstein's concepts

Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein in his general theory of relativity in 1915, the theory that proposed space-time as a concept. The waves are a distortion of space-time.

However, in order for us to detect them, they needed to be created by a mammoth event -- for example, the collision of two black holes.

Black holes are a holy grail of the gravitational wave concept. To date, we'd been able only to see their aftereffects. Black holes themselves were a conjecture.

"There's been a lot of indirect evidence for their existence," says Shoemaker, an expert in black holes. "But this is the first time we actually detect two black holes merging and we know the only thing that predicts that (is) gravitational radiation, (which) comes from a binary black hole merging. There's no other way we could have seen that but gravitationally."

'Now we can listen to the universe'

But is LIGO correct? Have we really detected gravitational waves?

Scientists have what they call a "five-sigma" standard of proof, and LIGO's researchers say the gravitational wave discovery exceeds that.

"It took six months of convincing ourselves that it was correct," says Shoemaker. "It goes beyond that five-sigma to proving that nothing was happening with the equipment that couldn't be understood."

She's thrilled with the possibilities.

"Imagine having never been able to hear before and all you can do is see," she says. "Now we can listen to the universe where we were deaf before. It's a different spectrum (from the electromagnetic spectrum). It's unlike anything we've ever detected before."

"What's really exciting is what comes next," said Reitze at the announcement. "I think we're opening a window on the universe -- a window of gravitational wave astronomy."

Einstein would be surprised

Columbia University physicist Marka, who's been working on the project for more than a decade, said the discovery will open up new horizons, including direct tests of Einstein's general theory. Those could further support it -- or force physicists to come up with new ideas.

"A physicist is always looking for a flaw in a theory. And the only way to find a flaw is to test it," Marka told CNN. "Einstein's theory did not present any flaws to us yet, and that is really scary. Physicists are very (skeptical) of flawless theories because then we have nothing to do."

Ironically, Einstein didn't think gravitational waves would be discovered.

"He thought gravitational waves are a beautiful construct, but they are so small nobody would ever be able to actually measure it," said Marka.

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Gravitational waves detected, proving Einstein right again - CNN

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Just over 100 years after he published his general theory of relativity, scientists have found what Albert Einstein predicted as part of the theory: gravitational waves. "We have detected gravitational waves. We did it," said David Reitze, executive director of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which was created to do just what Reitze announced.

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144-year-old arctic shipwreck discovered; climate change to thank? - cnn

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144-year-old Arctic shipwreck discovered; climate change to thank? - CNN

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Archaeologists have discovered parts of two 19th-century whaling ships in the Arctic, thanks to sonar technology, intrepid divers and ... climate change?

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A newfound prehistoric flower called Strychnos electri shows its recurved petal lobes and small, tightly attached anthers with pollen in the mouth of the flower.

Credit: George Poinar

Delicate, though possibly deadly, flowers trapped in amber for some 30 million years have been discovered, scientists report.

The fossilized plants are asterids, which make up about one-third of the world's flowering plants. About 80,000 species fall under this taxonomic clade, including coffee trees, tomato plants, mint, basil and tobacco. Despite the ubiquity of asterids today, no fossilized examples of the plants have been found until now, the researchers say.

The two flower specimens, which have been named Strychnos electri, belong to the same genus as poisonous plants that have been used to make lethal, paralyzing substances like strychnine and curare. [ Images: Amazing Ancient Life Trapped in Dominican Amber]

"Species of the genus Strychnos are almost all toxic in some way," George Poinar Jr., an amber expert at Oregon State University, said in a statement. "Each plant has its own alkaloids with varying effects. Some are more toxic than others, and it may be that they were successful because their poisons offered some defense against herbivores."

The prehistoric fossil flower Strychnos electri trapped in Dominican amber is tiny - less than 20 millimeters long.

Credit: George Poinar

Scientists have identified about 200 species of Strychnosplants. One of the most famous representatives of this genus might be Strychnos nux-vomica, from which strychnine is derived. Strychnine has been used in rat poison, but it has also cropped up as a weapon in Agatha Christie novels, and Norman Bates used the poison to kill his mother in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho." Strychnine poisoning was even proposed as a possible cause of Alexander the Great's death.

Curare -which contains the toxin tubocurarine, extracted from the plant Strychnos toxifera - has a storied history as well. Hunters in South America used the poison to make paralyzing blow darts (witnessed as early as the 16th century by the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh). More recently, safe doses of the poison have been used in medicine as a muscle relaxer.

It's not clear how toxic (if at all) the newly discovered Strychnos electri was. These two new flowers became entombed in sticky tree resin in a steamy tropical forest in what is today the Cordillera Septentrional mountain range in the Dominican Republic some 20 million to 30 million years ago.

Amber, which is hardened tree resin, is an important source of knowledge about tiny prehistoric life on Earth. In Dominican amber in particular, scientists have discovered species of wasps, locusts, ticks, blood-sucking flies and beetles suspended in time.

The new flower findings were reported yesterday (Feb. 15) in the journal Nature Plants.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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These 30-Million-Year-Old Fossilized Flowers May Be Toxic

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Delicate, though possibly deadly, flowers trapped in amber for some 30 million years have been discovered, scientists report. The fossilized plants are asterids, which make up about one-third of the world's flowering plants. About 80,000 species fall under this taxonomic clade, including coffee trees, tomato plants, mint, basil and tobacco.

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(NaturalNews) PacifiCorp Energy, a subsidiary of Portland, Oregon-based PacifiCorp, pleaded guilty to charges of violating the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) at two of its wind turbine farms in Wyoming. The sum of fines and restitution to various federal wild life agencies came to $2.5 million.

The charges were based on carcasses of 38 golden eagles and 336 other protected birds, including hawks, blackbirds, larks, wrens and sparrows, discovered since 2009 on two sites operated by PacifiCorp Energy at their Wyoming "Seven Mile Hill" and "Glenrock/Rolling Hills" wind projects in Carbon and Converse Counties between 2009 and the present.

The two wind projects are comprised of 237 large wind turbines sited on private and company-owned land. They also have two other Wyoming sites that were not charged with violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

The treaty that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) used against PacifiCorp Energy

The MBTA was enacted in 1918. Its wording was to specifically restrict hunting, capturing or killing of migratory birds or removal of nests without permits. Permits allow specific amounts for specific purposes. Migratory birds was expanded to include non-migratory endangered species, of which there are over 1,000 listed.

As American society developed and built tall buildings with glass windows into which birds crash and die, along with high-power electric lines, different interpretations of the original hunt, capture and kill restrictions developed. What could be allowed was those big buildings with glass, because they are part of everyday normal life that can't be disallowed -- too normal to fail.

This includes airports that kill more birds and egg-containing nests near runway areas in days than this wind farm killed in five or six years. Too normal to shut down or even restrict avian slaughter.

Accidental nest destruction from logging and tree clearing is also absolved from liability. So only what are extra- or ultra-hazardous projects come under MBTA scrutiny.

Wind farms went through a period of some Federal District Courts allowing incidental slaughter while others did not. Then in 2003, the FWS installed wording that would require wind farms to cooperate during construction planning to agree on site installation and other protective infrastructure measures to minimize inevitable avian population damage.

Wind farms would thus be culpable by non-cooperation or lacking permits to kill limited numbers.

Case commentary

Intentional wildlife bagging without permits is considered a felony. But the somewhat less intentionally rendered corporate wildlife deaths without permits or beyond permit allowances are considered misdemeanors with fines and a five-year probationary period.

By not getting together with FWS to determine the best way to minimize avian dangers, PacifiCorp stands guilty.

Sam Hirsch, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, claimed, "PacifiCorp Energy built two of its Wyoming wind projects in a manner it knew would likely result in the deaths of eagles and other protected birds."

Then Hirsch announced, "PacifiCorp has taken steps to minimize the hazard, and with this plea agreement has committed to a comprehensive plan to continue such efforts in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to seek eagle take permits for each project, and to work to prevent future eagle deaths."

That's interesting. You can bag a few eagles, just not too many, if you get a permit that's paid to a government agency. And part of this five-year probation includes not only taking safety measures according to FWS guidelines but purchasing permits that would allow a certain amount of unintentional avian deaths.

The fines go to state and federal agencies, and so do the permit fees.

It seems that this pursuit of wildlife justice should be applied more to coal and other dirty energy air and waterway pollution from faulty equipment and negligent operation that kills more fish and wildlife over time from one catastrophic spill than what these wind-powered turbines have done over a few years.
Sources: http://www.breitbart.com http://www.justice.gov
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Wind farm pays $2.5 milllion fine for massacring hundreds of protected birds including eagles

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(NaturalNews) PacifiCorp Energy, a subsidiary of Portland, Oregon-based PacifiCorp, pleaded guilty to charges of violating the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) at two of its wind turbine farms in Wyoming. The sum of fines and restitution to various federal wild life agencies came to $2.5 million.

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After building the product for Huffington Post, and owning the product and engineering groups at AOL after we were acquired, it was clear to me there was a huge gap between what the current CMS offering gave the world and what the world needed. Five years later we are at scale, moving the needle and...

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A photograph of dead common murres washed ashore in Alaska.

Credit: Tamara Zeller, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Thousands of dead seabirds have washed up on Alaskan shores over the past nine months. And while a dead bird washing ashore is a fairly common occurrence, these large numbers are leaving scientists concerned and confused.

Nearly 8,000 common murres ( Uria aalge) were found along the shores of Whittier, Alaska, in early January. Over the New Year's holiday, Alaska experienced four days of gale-force winds from the southeast that resulted in dead birds washing ashore, said Robb Kaler, a wildlife biologist for the Alaska branch of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Scientists have known for some time that the key to surviving strong storm winds is having an energy reserve, according to an expert at Tufts University, and Kaler and his colleagues think that the common murres were not finding enough food this season, which may be why so many didn't make it through the storm.

In cases like these, experts typically measure the number of dead birds per kilometer, said Julia Parrish, a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle and executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), which is one of the organizations studying areas where these birds are washing ashore, alongside the USFWS and the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center (NWHC). For the Whittier survey, the final measurements came to approximately 4,600 birds per kilometer, Parrish told Live Science. [ 5 Mysterious Animal Die-Offs]

The common murre is "one of the most abundant and widespread seabirds in Alaska," Kaler told Live Science in an email. While other dead seabirds are being reported on Pacific shorelines, current reports indicate that about 99 percent of the animals are common murres, Kaler said.

Seeing a dead seabird on the beach is not altogether unusual, especially during September and October, when the birds are leaving their breeding colonies, Parrish said. However, dead common murres started showing up in Alaska in March.

"This is really weird, because that is the beginning of the breeding season," Parrish said. "That's when [seabirds] are [usually] fat and sassy."

What's going on?

So far, the NWHC has examined 100 bird carcasses, and most of the birds seem to have died due to starvation, Kaler told Live Science.

"While we know murres are starving," Kaler said, "we do not understand the mechanism."

There is a chance that saxitoxin, a toxin related to paralytic shellfish poisoning, or domoic acid, a toxin that causes amnesic shellfish poisoning, could be responsible for some of these deaths, he said. But both of these toxins are difficult to detect in birds that have nothing in their stomachs or gastrointestinal tracts, which was the case with most of these animals, Kaler said.

In the past, seabird die-off events - in which thousands of birds die in a short period of time - have been associated with strong El Niño events, Kaler said. In 1993, there was another die-off of common murres recorded in the northern Gulf of Alaska, where scientists found about 3,500 dead or dying common murres along the shoreline over a period of six months. Scientists calculated that over that period, about 10,900 bird carcasses actually made it to shore, according to a 1997 study published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin.

Because researchers were able to monitor only a small fraction of the beaches in Alaska, that study's scientists projected that the actual final death count in 1993 was at least 120,000 birds.

With this most recent event, "[w]e assume the die-off is connected to one of the largest oceanographic-atmospheric events, known as 'The Blob,'" Kaler said. This event is the presence of a large area of water that falls well above the average temperature usually observed in the North Pacific, he said. "We do not know how [that] this relates to El Niño or climate warming, but we believe they are factors," Kaler said.

The USFWS also noted in a recent bulletin that common murres have turned up at locations as far inland as Fairbanks, Alaska, where the birds have been seen swimming in rivers and lakes. Wildlife biologists consider this to be unusual behavior, since common murres are seabirds and so don't usually show up so far inland, Parrish told Live Science.

Additionally, while the die-off has been most visible in Alaska, similar events affected seabird populations in Washington, Oregon and California during the months of September and October, Parrish said.

What does this mean?

The behaviors of seabirds are often indicators of what is happening in the marine system, said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Current estimates of the common murre death toll in the recent die-off have suggested that more than 100,000 birds have probably died over the past nine months, and dead birds are likely to continue showing up through the spring, Kaler said.

It is important to note that this high death count doesn't mean that common murres are in danger as a species. There are an estimated 2.8 million common murres in Alaska, Parrish said. This means that current estimates of the die-off account for only approximately 3 percent of the total common murre population in the state.

That's not to say that the appearance of large numbers of dead birds on beaches isn't of concern, Parrish said. Scientists are speculating that this event indicates a species struggling to deal with altered circumstances, he said.

"When there are heat waves during the summertime, you always hear about mortalities in the inner city [from people who don't have air conditioning] and [so] they just have to deal with" the heat, Parrish said. "None of these birds have air conditioning."

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Massive Bird Die-Off Puzzles Alaskan Scientists

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Thousands of dead seabirds have washed up on Alaskan shores over the past nine months. And while a dead bird washing ashore is a fairly common occurrence, these large numbers are leaving scientists concerned and confused. Nearly 8,000 common murres ( Uria aalge) were found along the shores of Whittier, Alaska, in early January.

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In an interview with the National Journal, the Republican governor said critics calling the crisis his "Katrina," referring to then-President George W. Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina, is not unfair.

"It's a disaster," he reportedly said.

"It's clearly a negative on what we've accomplished since I've been governor. And I don't even describe it as an opportunity. I just want to make sure we're doing whatever we can to deal with the damage and address the people of Flint in a constructive way."

In April 2014, the state decided to temporarily switch Flint's water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure until a new supply line to Lake Huron was ready. The river had a reputation for nastiness, and after the April 2014 switch, residents complained their water looked, smelled and tasted funny.

Virginia Tech researchers found the water was highly corrosive. A class-action lawsuit alleges the state Department of Environmental Quality didn't treat the water for corrosion, in accordance with federal law, and because so many service lines to Flint are made of lead, the noxious element leached into the water of the city's homes.

The city switched back to the Lake Huron water supply in October, but the damage was already done to the lead pipes. The state is now handing out filters and bottled water with the hlep of the National Guard.

"The checks and balances that theoretically could have been there didn't work. This is a mess. I mean, I feel terrible about all this happening. And that's why I'm working hard to do everything I can to repair the damage and then actually work to strengthen Flint and the citizens," Snyder told the National Journal.

On Monday, around 100 protesters rallied outside of the governor's home in downtown Ann Arbor, according to CNN affiliate WXYZ.

They are upset that he didn't switch the water supply back earlier, or do more to stem the crisis. Snyder declared a state of emergency this month.

"It feels personal and it makes us all, people who are in Flint and people who are tied to Flint, very, very angry," Flint native Jeff Brown told WXYZ.

Snyder has resisted calls for him to resign.

"As soon as it came to my attention we started to take serious action. What I'd say is I feel terrible about it, though, and it's clear that changes needed to be made in my administration and I think long-term, there are things that need to be improved," he reportedly said.

"I want to solve this problem," said Snyder. "I don't want to walk away from it."

CNN's Eliott C. McLaughlin contributed to this report.

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michigan governor on flint water crisis: 'it's a disaster' - cnn

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Michigan governor on Flint water crisis: 'It's a disaster' - CNN

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In an interview with the National Journal, the Republican governor said critics calling the crisis his "Katrina," referring to then-President George W. Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina, is not unfair. "It's a disaster," he reportedly said. "It's clearly a negative on what we've accomplished since I've been governor.

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Tiny prairie voles can sense when their partner is stressed and will 'console' them: Rodents are the latest animals to show signs of empathy towards loved ones

Prairie voles were shown to groom stressed peers to console and soothe

First time researchers have shown consolation behaviour in rodents

Study adds to growing body of evidence that shows detecting the distress of others and acting to relieve that stress is not a uniquely human trait

Dogs, elephants and monkeys are all thought to show signs of empathy.

Now researchers have found the diminutive prairie vole is equally capable of consoling loved ones who are feeling anxious or stressed.

The study adds to a growing body of evidence that shows detecting the distress of others and acting to relieve that stress is not a uniquely human trait.

Scientists at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre, Emory University recorded the prairie vole's empathetic behaviour.

Until now, consoling behaviour has only been documented in a small number of non-human species with high levels of sociality and cognition, namely elephants, dolphins and dogs.

But researchers Larry Young and James Burkett wanted to explore whether the rodents were capable of it too.

Prairie voles are known for forming lifelong, monogamous bonds with both partners caring for their young.

The experts set up an experiment where certain prairie voles and their relatives were isolated from each other, with one exposed to mild shocks.

THE EMPATHY OF PIGS

Upon reunion, the non-stressed prairie voles proceeded to lick the stressed voles sooner and for longer periods when compared to those that were separated, but not shocked.

The researchers also measured the voles' oxytocin levels to reveal that the family members and friends were distressed when they could not comfort their loved one.

Oxytocin is known as the 'love hormone' and is associated with empathy in humans, as well as maternal nurturing and social bonding.

The researchers said the fact that consoling behaviour occurred only between those who were familiar with each other, but not strangers, demonstrates the behaviour is not simply a reaction to an unpleasant experience.

To test the findings further, the scientists blocked the prairie voles' oxytocin receptors and ran the experiment again.

They found this stopped non-stressed prairie voles consoling their stressed friends and relatives, but had no effect on their self-grooming behaviour.

The researchers explained that the study may have important implications for understanding and treating psychiatric disorders in which detecting and responding to the emotions of others can be disrupted, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia.

For example, research suggests oxytocin may improve social engagement in ASD.

Dr Young said: 'Many complex human traits have their roots in fundamental brain processes that are shared among many other species.

'We now have the opportunity to explore in detail the neural mechanisms underlying empathetic responses in a laboratory rodent with clear implications for humans.'

The authors suggest that consoling behavior evolved in the context of prairie voles' monogamous social structure by tweaking brain systems involved in maternal nurturing, which are present in all mammals.

Study co-author, Frans de Waal, was the first to discover animal consolation behaviour in 1979 by observing how chimpanzees gently touch victims of aggression.

He said: 'Scientists have been reluctant to attribute empathy to animals, often assuming selfish motives.

'These explanations have never worked well for consolation behaviour, however, which is why this study is so important'.

The research is published in the journal Science.

EMPATHETIC ANIMALS: FROM ELEPHANTS TO MAN'S BEST FRIEND

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Tiny prairie voles console stressed loved ones

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Prairie voles were shown to groom stressed peers to console and soothe First time researchers have shown consolation behaviour in rodents Study adds to growing body of evidence that shows detecting the distress of others and acting to relieve that stress is not a uniquely human trait Dogs, elephants and monkeys are all thought to show signs of empathy.

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http://www.livescience.com/53412-australian-bushfires-satellite-photo.html

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from research organizations
Credit: Duke University, Kyle Van Houtan
Radiocarbon dating of atomic bomb fallout found in sea turtle shells can be used to reliably estimate the ages, growth rates and reproductive maturity of sea turtle populations in the wild, a new study led by Duke University and NOAA researchers finds.

The technique provides more accurate estimates than other methods scientists currently use and may help shed new light on factors influencing the decline and lack of recovery of some endangered sea turtles populations.

"The most basic questions of sea turtle life history are also the most elusive," said Kyle Van Houtan, fisheries research ecologist at NOAA's Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center and adjunct associate professor at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment.

Van Houtan and his colleagues analyzed hard tissue from the shells of 36 deceased hawksbill sea turtles collected since the 1950s. The turtles either died naturally or were harvested for their decorative shells as part of the global tortoiseshell trade. The researchers worked with federal agencies, law enforcement and museum archives to obtain the specimens.

The scientists were able to estimate each turtle's approximate age by comparing the bomb-testing radiocarbon accumulated in its shell to background rates of bomb-testing radiocarbon deposited in Hawaii's corals. Levels of carbon-14 increased rapidly in the biosphere from the mid-1950s to about 1970 as a result of Cold War-era nuclear tests but have dropped at predictable rates since then, allowing scientists to determine the age of an organism based on its carbon-14 content.

Van Houtan and his team were able to estimate median growth rates and ages of sexual maturity in the collected specimens by comparing their radiocarbon measurements to those of other wild and captive hawksbill populations whose growth rates were known.

This is the first time carbon-14 dating of shell tissue has been used to estimate age, growth and maturity in sea turtles. Previously, scientists employed other, less precise methods such as using turtle length as a proxy for age, or analyzing the incomplete growth layers in hollow bone tissue.

The researchers published their peer-reviewed research Jan. 6, 2016, in the Proceedings of Royal Society B.

Aside from giving scientists a more reliable tool for estimating turtle growth and maturity, Van Houtan believes the new technique sheds light on why some populations -- including Hawaiian hawksbills, the smallest sea turtle population on Earth -- aren't rebounding as quickly as expected despite years of concerted conservation.

"Our analysis finds that hawksbills in the Hawaii population deposit eight growth lines annually, which suggests that females begin breeding at 29 years -- significantly later than any other hawksbill population in the world. This may explain why they haven't yet rebounded," Van Houtan said.

The bomb radiocarbon tests also indicate another red flag, he said.

"They appear to have been omnivores as recently as the 1980s. Now, they appear to be primarily herbivores. Such a dramatic decline in their food supply could delay growth and maturity, and may reflect ecosystem changes that are quite ominous in the long term for hawksbill populations in Hawaii," he said.

Although the new research focused primarily on Hawaiian hawksbills, bomb radiocarbon dating could be used to study other hawksbill populations, or populations from other sea turtle species, worldwide.

Journal Reference:

Kyle Van Houtan, Allen Andrews, T. Todd Jones, Shawn Murakawa, Molly Hagemann. Time in Tortoiseshell: A Bomb Radiocarbon-validated Chronology in Sea Turtle Scutes. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, January 2016 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.2220

Cite This Page:

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frogs and reptiles; marine biology; fisheries; endangered animals; fish; sea life; nature; wild animals

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Biological 'clock' discovered in sea turtle shells: Atomic bomb fallout keeps time on ages, growth rates and onset of breeding

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Radiocarbon dating of atomic bomb fallout found in sea turtle shells can be used to reliably estimate the ages, growth rates and reproductive maturity of sea turtle populations in the wild, according researchers. The newly tested technique provides scientists with a more accurate means of estimating turtle growth and maturity and may help shed new light on the status of endangered sea turtles populations worldwide.

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The daily rising and setting of the sun propels what is thought to be the world's largest migration: Tiny zooplankton move from the near-surface waters - where they spend the night feeding - down into deeper, darker waters during the day to avoid predators that rely on sight for finding a meal.

It was thought that in the perpetually dark waters of the Arctic winter that such a migration wouldn't happen. After all, there's no sunlight for weeks or months. And until last year, researchers believed that the Arctic pretty much shut down for the winter; it turns out that the region can be surprisingly active in the dark of the polar night.

Now a new study that combines 50 years of observations from locations across the Arctic shows that zooplankton are still migrating in the depths of winter. But with the sun gone, they have tied their timing to the next biggest source of light - the moon.

Zooplankton may be tiny - some are less than 2 micrometers long - but they are so numerous that acoustic instrumentation can detect their presence. Sound bounces off the itty bitty critters, creating what can look like a false ocean bottom (or at least it did to World War II sonar operators). And for more than five decades, scientists have monitored zooplankton with moored acoustic instruments at several locations in the Arctic.

Kim Last of the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban and colleagues gathered data from those instruments to look at daily zooplankton movements at locations across the Arctic. The moon plays an important role in zooplankton migration, the team reports January 7 in Current Biology.

In spring and fall, when the sun sets and rises daily in the Arctic, zooplankton follow their normal pattern of vertical migration, moving down deep in the day and rising toward the surface at night. But after the sun sets for winter, the zooplankton adjust their schedule, swimming up and down the water column not every 24 hours but every 24.8 hours, following the rising and setting of the moon. And every 29.5 days, when there is a full moon, the mass of zooplankton fall to a depth of about 50 meters, where they can keep out of the brightest moonlight. The movement may help hide the zooplankton from predators that need light to find their prey, the researchers say.

In 2013, researchers found a marine worm with a biological clock tied to the phases of the moon, but it is not yet clear if there is a similar molecular mechanism at work in zooplankton. The invertebrates could be responding to subtle changes in illumination, diving deeper to avoid getting eaten by what Last and his team call the "werewolves" of the Arctic night.

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The moon drives the migration of Arctic zooplankton

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The daily rising and setting of the sun propels what is thought to be the world's largest migration: Tiny zooplankton move from the near-surface waters - where they spend the night feeding - down into deeper, darker waters during the day to avoid predators that rely on sight for finding a meal.

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The biggest sea-dwelling crocodile ever found has turned up in the Tunisian desert. The whopper of a prehistoric predator grew to over 30 feet long (nearly ten meters) and weighed three tons.Paleontologists have dubbed the new species Machimosaurus rex and describeit Monday in the journal Cretaceous Research.

Although the recovered remains are fragmentary, enough remained in the 120-million-year-old rock to identify the reptile as the largest known member of a peculiar lineage of crocodiles that spent their lives almost entirely at sea.

"This is a neat new discovery from a part of the world that hasn't been well-explored for fossils," says University of Edinburgh paleontologist Stephen Brusatte, who was not involved with the new study.

The fossils, including a skull and a smattering of other bones, were discovered by Federico Fanti of the University of Bologna in Italy and colleagues with support from the National Geographic Society.

Big Bite

Scientists are awaiting the discovery of a more complete skeleton to figure out exactly how large Machimosaurus rex was. But assuming that the new species had similar proportions as its close relatives, Fanti estimates that Machimosaurus rex stretched about 31 feet (9.6 meters) in length.

While not as large as some of its later, distant relatives that lived in freshwater, that makes Machimosaurus rex the biggest ocean-dwelling member of the crocodile family tree.

The biggest freshwater croc ever, Sarcosuchus imperator, lived 110 million years ago, grew as long as 40 feet (12 meters), and weighed up to eight metric tons (17,500 pounds). Since the time of this and other giants such as the alligator Deinosuchus, many crocodile lineages have died out, leaving today's saltwater crocs closely related.

The carnivore's teeth may hint at what it fed on in the ancient ocean. " Machimosaurus rex had stocky, relatively short and rounded teeth," Fanti says, "and a massive skull capable of a remarkable bite force." This cluster of features leads Fanti to suggest that the croc was a generalist hunter that took a variety of prey, including large marine turtles.

"It would likely have been something of an ambush predator, hanging around in shallow water hunting turtles and fishes and maybe waiting for some land animals to come a little too close to the shore," Brusatte adds.

Tough Survivor

For scientists, the most important aspect of Machimosaurus rex isn't so much its size as when it lived.

Paleontologists have long debated whether or not there was a mass extinction at the end of the Jurassic period, 145 million years ago. The group that includes Machimosaurus, called the teleosaurids, is among those thought to have died out.

The discovery of Machimosaurus rex in later rocks from the Cretaceous hints that if there was a mass extinction, it didn't kill off life planetwide. "The new find adds to growing evidence that a lot of marine reptiles made it across the boundary and through the supposed extinction," Brusatte says.

Rather than being a rapid extermination, the extinction may have been a more drawn-out transition. "In our interpretation," Fanti says, "the end-Jurassic event was global in its effects but was mostly likely a complex sequence of local biological crises that are still poorly documented."

One of the outstanding mysteries is why the marine crocodiles didn't reclaim their former glory. Even though the family of Machimosaurus rex survived for longer than thought, they didn't appear to thrive as they had in the Jurassic.

While Machimosaurus rex was certainly impressive in size, Brusatte says, "it may have just been a dead croc walking."
Machimosaurus and other ancient crocodiles will be featured in "Crocs - Ancient Predators in a Modern World," at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C., from Jan. 27 to May 8, 2016.

Read Brian Switek's blog Laelaps on NationalGeographic.com. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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The biggest sea-dwelling crocodile ever found has turned up in the Tunisian desert. The whopper of a prehistoric predator grew to over 30 feet long (nearly ten meters) and weighed three tons.Paleontologists have dubbed the new species Machimosaurus rex and describeit Monday in the journal Cretaceous Research .

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how beer can motivate you to exercise - cnn

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How to stick to fitness resolution: beer

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Beer, or any alcohol for that matter, when consumed in moderation, may be a brilliant motivator to keep people exercising.

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http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/06/health/beer-as-an-exercise-motivator/index.html

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Increases in global CO2 levels aren't increasing plant growth as predicted, dashing hopes that worldwide carbon storage increases could help slow climate change, researchers say.

Because plants depend on carbon dioxide for growth, it has been predicted that increases in the greenhouse gas would significantly boost plant growth, creating more global greenery to absorb yet more CO2 and at least partially offsetting human-produced emissions.

That hope may have been over-optimistic, researchers are saying in a study appearing in the journal Nature Climate Change.

While plant growth globally has in fact increased in the last three decades, the increase is nowhere near what would have been expected with the rise in levels of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, they say.

"Current Earth system models assume that global plant growth will provide the tremendous benefit of offsetting a significant portion of humanity's CO2 emissions, thus buying us much needed time to curb emissions," says study leader William Kolby Smith from the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.

Unfortunately, he says, estimates of worldwide vegetation growth based on observations indicate actual plant growth may not provide humanity as much time as expected.

That makes action aimed at curbing emissions "all the more urgent," he says.

Because current climate models that assume increased plant growth mirroring CO2 increases haven't accurately predicted such future growth, allowable emissions targets based on the models may need to be revisited, the researchers say.

Looking to explain the lower-than-expected rate of plant growth, the researchers point to the availability of water and nutrients as possible factors in the difference between what is predicted by models and what has actually been observed.

Warmer climates resulting from increasing CO2 in the atmosphere may be putting increased water stress on plants, offsetting any positive effects from rising levels of the greenhouse gas, they explain.

In addition, they suggest, limited availability of environmental nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen may also be limiting plants' ability to take in additional CO2.

Figuring out the ways plants may or may not respond to rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will require scientists from many different specialties working together to understand how ecosystems respond to global changes, says study co-author Sasha Reed of the U.S. Geological Survey.

"We have many scientific tools in our toolbox, and bringing them together is a powerful approach to asking questions and to solving problems," she says.

See Now: 27 Most Inspirational And Motivational Quotes By Influential Leaders In Tech

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Plant Growth Not Keeping Up With CO2 Rise, Dimming Hopes Of Climate Change Mitigation

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Increases in global CO2 levels aren't increasing plant growth as predicted, dashing hopes that worldwide carbon storage increases could help slow climate change, researchers say. Because plants depend on carbon dioxide for growth, it has been predicted that increases in the greenhouse gas would significantly boost plant growth, creating more global greenery to absorb yet more CO2 and at least partially offsetting human-produced emissions.

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Puppies from the first litter born through in vitro fertilization. A new study by Cornell University scientists opens the door for conserving endangered species and for eradicating heritable diseases in dogs.

Credit: Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine

The first-ever litter of puppies conceived through in vitro fertilization was born recently, unlocking a reproductive secret in domestic dogs that has helped researchers solve a decades-old canine biology puzzle.

The findings, published online today (Dec. 9) in the journal PLOS ONE, outline the eggs-ceptional process that produced seven healthy puppies - five with two beagle parents and two with a cocker spaniel father and a beagle mother - born by scheduled caesarian section to a host female dog.

In vitro ("outside the body") fertilization, also known as IVF, combines the egg and sperm in an artificial environment, creating an embryo that is then implanted in a host that carries it to full term. [ See Photos: Fertility Egg-speriments Yield Litter of Playful Pups]

IVF has been successfully practiced for decades, with the first IVF rabbits born in the 1950s and the first human "test tube baby," Louise Brown, born in 1978 in the United Kingdom. By the 1980s, IVF in domestic cattle produced "tens of thousands of pregnancies and offspring," according to a study published in the Journal of In Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer in 1987.

But decade after decade, IVF success in dogs remained elusive, primarily because when it comes to reproduction, dogs are weirder than you might expect.

Reproduction, doggy style

"In reproduction, dogs are very different from all other mammals," Alex Travis, co-author of the study and an associate professor at the Baker Institute for Animal Health at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, told Live Science.

Dogs only come into heat once or twice a year, which creates unique scheduling challenges for scientists studying fertilization and pregnancy. But, Travis added, there's another peculiar detail that's exclusive to canine reproduction - when a female dog ovulates, the resulting egg isn't exactly ready to be fertilized right away.

In most mammals, an egg enters the fallopian tubes primed for fertilizing. Female dogs, however, produce immature eggs that must hang around in their oviducts for one or two days before they're viable, Travis said. Giving the immature eggs - or ovocytes - the extra time they needed to mature was one of the keys to the team's eventual IVF success, he added. [ First Puppy Litter Born by In Vitro Fertilization | Video]

But successful fertilization eluded the researchers even when they allowed for extra maturation time. Travis suspected that the sperm in their IVF equation was the culprit. He told Live Science that they went "back to the drawing board" to look at the first papers on IVF in dogs, and to take a closer look at their findings about sperm.

Magnesium turned out to be a crucial missing ingredient. An early study, Travis said, reported that magnesium prevented sperm's heads and tails from developing in the way that they needed in order to penetrate an egg. Researchers from that study recommended omitting magnesium from IVF's chemical marinade.

But the Cornell scientists found that conclusion to be only partly correct. While magnesium halted the sperm's progress when development happened "spontaneously," outside the oviducts, the researchers found that adding magnesium actually stimulated the sperm once their development was already underway, which typically happens when sperm interacts with the scrum of cells surrounding an egg, Travis said.

And that combination did the trick, raising the fertilization rate to "80 to 90 percent," Travis said in a statement. Once the researchers had the embryos, the final step was to freeze them, in preparation for implanting them in the host dog during the proper stage of her cycle.

Two of the seven healthy puppies - three females and four males - born by planned Caesarian section to the host dog.

Credit: Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine

Going to the dogs

While the successful birth is cause enough for excitement, additional prospects promise other applications for IVF in domestic dogs. Combined with gene editing, IVF could mean a brighter future for breeds that suffer from inherited diseases, allowing scientists to nip genetic defects in the bud, prepping generations of embryos to develop disease free, the study authors suggest.

The study could even inform future studies of genetic diseases in humans. Dogs share more than 350 hereditary traits and diseases with humans, "almost twice as many as any other species," Travis told Live Science. "Doing these things in dogs is a way to improve dog health, but also a way to test things out before you try it in a person. That's one of the real values of the dog as the model," he added.

The success of IVF in domestic dogs also kindles hope for preserving the genetic diversity of endangered canids. Travis described a collaborative effort by Cornell, the Smithsonian and the San Diego Zoo to amass frozen-tissue samples, including eggs and sperm, for a number of threatened species. IVF could someday offer those genes a "second chance," helping researchers to develop embryos to implant in living animals.

"We certainly hope that this work in a domestic dog will provide a good starting point for studies in other species of dog," Travis said.

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IVF Puppies: First Litter Born by In Vitro Fertilization

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The first-ever litter of puppies conceived through in vitro fertilization was born recently, unlocking a reproductive secret in domestic dogs that has helped researchers solve a decades-old canine biology puzzle. The findings, published online today (Dec.

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NBC News - Breaking News & Top Stories - Latest World, US & Local News

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Go to NBCNews.com for breaking news, videos, and the latest top stories in world news, business, politics, health and pop culture.

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In a study published in the journal Nature, the researchers say their discovery in Ethiopia of teeth and jawbones dating back between 3.3 million and 3.5 million years supports the idea that several hominin species coexisted during this period.

The remains show clear similarities to "Lucy," the famous 3.2 million-year-old remains of the species Australopithecus afarensis, found in 1974.

But, the researchers say, there are sufficient differences in the jaw architecture and size and shape of the teeth to mean that this is a new species, indicating that our ancestry is more complicated than previously thought.

The remains were found in the Woranso-Mille area in the deserts of Ethiopia's central Afar region, only 22 miles from the site where Lucy was discovered.

The name, Australopithecus deyiremeda, derives from the local Afar language and means "close relative" -- referring, the researchers say, to "the species being a close relative of all later hominins."

Researchers use the term "hominin" to refer to a group that includes humans and human ancestors.

The leading scientist on the project is Yohannes Haile-Selassie, head of physical anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who has been carrying out field research in the Woranso-Mille area for more than a decade.

"The new species is yet another confirmation that Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, was not the only potential human ancestor species that roamed in what is now the Afar region of Ethiopia during the middle Pliocene," he said, in a news release on the museum's website.

"Current fossil evidence from the Woranso-Mille study area clearly shows that there were at least two, if not three, early human species living at the same time and in close geographic proximity."

Haile-Selassie said the discovery of a new species would take "the ongoing debate on early hominin diversity to another level" and was likely to be met by skepticism in some quarters.

"However, I think it is time that we look into the earlier phases of our evolution with an open mind and carefully examine the currently available fossil evidence rather than immediately dismissing the fossils that do not fit our long-held hypotheses," he said.

What remains to be investigated further is how these different species were related to each other and to later hominins, the study adds, and what environmental and ecological factors led to such diversity.

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ethiopia remains put new species on human family tree - cnn

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Ethiopia remains put new species on human family tree - CNN

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In a study published in the journal Nature, the researchers say their discovery in Ethiopia of teeth and jawbones dating back between 3.3 million and 3.5 million years supports the idea that several hominin species coexisted during this period. The remains show clear similarities to "Lucy," the famous 3.2 million-year-old remains of the species Australopithecus afarensis, found in 1974.

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Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to researchers from the University of Leicester.

A study led by Sergei Petrovskii, Professor in Applied Mathematics from the University of Leicester's Department of Mathematics, has shown that an increase in the water temperature of the world's oceans of around six degrees Celsius -- which some scientists predict could occur as soon as 2100 -- could stop oxygen production by phytoplankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.

Professor Petrovskii explained: "Global warming has been a focus of attention of science and politics for about two decades now. A lot has been said about its expected disastrous consequences; perhaps the most notorious is the global flooding that may result from melting of Antarctic ice if the warming exceeds a few degrees compared to the pre-industrial level. However, it now appears that this is probably not the biggest danger that the warming can cause to the humanity.

"About two-thirds of the planet's total atmospheric oxygen is produced by ocean phytoplankton -- and therefore cessation would result in the depletion of atmospheric oxygen on a global scale. This would likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans."

The team developed a new model of oxygen production in the ocean that takes into account basic interactions in the plankton community, such as oxygen production in photosynthesis, oxygen consumption because of plankton breathing and zooplankton feeding on phytoplankton.

While mainstream research often focuses on the CO ₂ cycle, as carbon dioxide is the agent mainly responsible for global warming, few researchers have explored the effects of global warming on oxygen production.

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference will be held in Le Bourget, Paris, from November 30 to December 11. It will be the 21st yearly session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 11th session of the Meeting of the Parties to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The conference objective is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, from all the nations of the world.

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nature; marine biology; extreme survival; botany; global warming; environmental issues; climate; environmental awareness

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Failing phytoplankton, failing oxygen: Global warming disaster could suffocate life on planet Earth

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Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to researchers from the University of Leicester.

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The Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel, one of the animals on the original endangered species list, is now no longer at risk of extinction, says the U.S. Department of the Interior.

"The fox squirrel's return to this area, rich with farmland and forest, marks not only a major win for conservationists and landowners, but also represents the latest in a string of success stories that demonstrate the Endangered Species Act's effectiveness," Interior official Michael Bean said from Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Milton, Delaware, according to a Department of the Interior statement.

The squirrel -- native to Delaware and coastal Maryland and Virginia (DelMarVa, get it?) -- will be officially removed from the list in December.

The Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel was one of 78 species listed under the Endangered Species Preservation Act in 1967, the first year the list appeared. It continued on the successor list of Threatened and Endangered Wildlife under the Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973.

It's one of 30 species to have been delisted, according to the Interior Department. Others include the peregrine falcon, the American alligator and the national bird of the United States, the bald eagle.

Not all species make it, despite being listed. The Santa Barbara song sparrow was noted as extinct in 1983 despite 10 years on the list. Also considered extinct are the longjaw cisco, a fish once found in the Great Lakes; the Mariana mallard, a duck native to the Mariana Islands; and the Caribbean monk seal, a once-common Gulf of Mexico seal -- Columbus recorded their existence in 1494 -- that was delisted in 2008 after an exhaustive search.

The Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel also had a difficult climb back to its current population. Larger than your average suburban nut-hoarder, it was widely found in the rural areas of the Delmarva Peninsula, a landmass between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

But decades of development and overhunting, starting in the 1950s, limited the fox squirrel's habitat and threatened its existence.

However, "since listing, the squirrel's range has increased from four to 10 counties, and a population of up to 20,000 squirrels now covers 28 percent of the Delmarva Peninsula, primarily in Maryland," the Interior Department's statement observed. (No word on whether Atlanta's Inman Park Squirrel Census contributed to the counting.)

Still, just because the squirrel is no longer endangered, don't expect to head out immediately and start grabbing a few for dinner. According to a fact sheet, "Deliberate killing of any animal is permissible only during an open hunting season defined under state law in Maryland, Delaware and Virginia." Those states haven't decided on any details.

Not bad, Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel. You're out of the woods -- that is, if you wanted to leave.

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squirrel gets off endangered species list - cnn

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Squirrel gets off endangered species list - CNN

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The Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel, one of the animals on the original endangered species list, is now no longer at risk of extinction, says the U.S. Department of the Interior.

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Berger, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, had unearthed some major finds before. But he knew he had something big on his hands.

What he didn't know at the time is that it would shake up our understanding of the progress of human evolution and even pose new questions about our identity.

Two years after they were tipped off by cavers plumbing the depths of the limestone tunnels in the Rising Star Cave outside Johannesburg, Berger and his team have discovered what they say is a new addition to our family tree.

The team is calling this new species of human relative "Homo naledi," and they say it appears to have buried its dead -- a behavior scientists previously thought was limited to humans.

Berger's team came up with the startling theory just days after reaching the place where the fossils -- consisting of infants, children, adults and elderly individuals -- were found, in a previously isolated chamber within the cave.

The team believes that the chamber, located 30 meters underground in the Cradle of Humanity world heritage site, was a burial ground -- and that Homo naledi could have used fire to light the way.

"There is no damage from predators, there is no sign of a catastrophe. We had to come to the inevitable conclusion that Homo naledi, a non-human species of hominid, was deliberately disposing of its dead in that dark chamber. Why, we don't know," Berger told CNN.

"Until the moment of discovery of 'naledi,' I would have probably said to you that it was our defining character. The idea of burial of the dead or ritualized body disposal is something utterly uniquely human."

Standing at the entrance to the cave this week, Berger said: "We have just encountered another species that perhaps thought about its own mortality, and went to great risk and effort to dispose of its dead in a deep, remote, chamber right behind us."

"It absolutely questions what makes us human. And I don't think we know anymore what does."

The first undisputed human burial dates to some 100,000 years ago, but because Berger's team hasn't yet been able to date naledi's fossils, they aren't clear how significant their theory is.

Berger tried to put the new find into perspective.

"This is like opening up Tutankhamen's tomb," he said. "It is that extreme and perhaps that influential in this stage of our history."

Almost human but not quite

Homo naledi is a strange mosaic of the ancient and the thoroughly modern.

Naledi's brain was no bigger than an orange, scientists say. Its hands are superficially human-like, but the finger bones are locked into a curve -- a trait that suggests climbing and tool-using capabilities.

Homo naledi was relatively big: it stood about 5 feet tall, had long legs, and its feet are almost identical to ours, suggesting it had the ability to walk long distances.

"Overall, Homo naledi looks like one of the most primitive members of our genus, but it also has some surprisingly human-like features, enough to warrant placing it in the genus Homo," says John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a senior author on the papers describing the new species that were published Thursday.

The scientists can make these claims, in part, because of the sheer scale of the find.

In the vault at the University of Witwatersrand, hundreds of priceless specimens lie in padded cases across the room.

So far they've unearthed more than 1,500 fossil remains in total -- the largest single hominin find yet revealed on the continent of Africa, the cradle of human evolution.

Underground astronauts

Gathering the fossils was dangerous work.

Berger, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, was already well-known for his discovery of "Australopithecus sediba," another species of human ancestor, in 2008. But this expedition would face unique challenges.

The fossils were found at the end of a series of chambers and tight squeezes deep underground, some 90 meters (100 yards) from the cave entrance. To get there, scientists would have to squeeze through a 7-inch wide cave opening.

S
o Berger put out a call on social media for skinny scientists and cavers who could fit through the tiny chute and bring up the bones.

Within days Berger had dozens of responses, and he eventually selected a team of six "underground astronauts" -- all women -- to do the job.

Berger himself could not reach the chamber where the remains lay, but he followed all of the exploration on real-time monitors above ground and communicated with his team.

"It is the heart of exploration. What we are privileged enough to do is going into the next new unexplored spaces," says Berger.

A field of bones

In the first few days of the expedition, the biggest problem was knowing where to step.

"The first thing that you would see, especially in the early stages of the investigation, was just bones. Bone debris everywhere," says K. Lindsay Hunter, an American scientist and one of the "astronauts" on the Rising Star expeditions, which were conducted in November 2013 and March 2014.

Marina Elliott, another of Berger's astronauts, described the scene underground as "some of the most difficult and dangerous conditions ever encountered in the search for human origins."

Some scientists in this field spend an entire career finding one fragment to identify a possible new species. But early on, the team knew they had stumbled onto something extraordinary.

Initially, Berger thought that they might find no more than a single skeleton. But he says that almost all the bones they found -- besides a few rodent and bird remains that came into the cave much later -- were from Homo naledi.

"We found everything from infants to babies to toddlers to teens, young adults, old individuals. It is like nothing that we could have ever imagined," says Berger. "Homo naledi is already practically the best-known fossil member of our lineage."

The team claims to have uncovered remains of at some 15 distinct individuals, but say this is only the beginning.

"The chamber has not given up all its secrets," Berger says. "There are potentially hundreds if not thousands of remains of Homo naledi still down there."

Berger says their discovery raises haunting questions about our deep past, and about our very identity. Many mysteries remain, and other scientists may well challenge some of the team's controversial conclusions. But few will dispute that Homo naledi is truly significant.

Years of careful exploration lie ahead. "This was right under our nose," says Berger. "And we didn't see it. What else is out there?"

CNN's Nick Thompson contributed to this report.

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homo naledi: new species of human ancestor discovered - cnn

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Homo naledi: New species of human ancestor discovered - CNN

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Berger, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, had unearthed some major finds before. But he knew he had something big on his hands. What he didn't know at the time is that it would shake up our understanding of the progress of human evolution and even pose new questions about our identity.

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Whether you call it hacking, or "fiddling with the knobs in the climate system," or the less-imaginative "geoengineering," it revolves around this question: Can humans game the system by using science to reverse global warming?

One way to keep global average temperatures from warming beyond a catastrophic 2-degree-celsius tipping point, according to some experts, is to suck massive amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere.

How would you do that?

Responding to a recent climate change story by CNN's John Sutter, Trevor Algatt of Los Angeles asked about a possible solution he heard about. "There's a new technology that can extract carbon from the air and condense into 'fibers' for use in buildings, electronics, cars, clothing and other manufactured goods," Algatt wrote. "I'm sure you guys have seen/read/heard about it - the inventors say that, if implemented on a large enough scale ... it could return our atmospheric carbon to pre-industrial levels within a decade. How legitimate is this? Is this cause for celebration? Or a cool technology that's more pipe dream than solution?"

But wait, it's not quite time to put on our party hats and celebrate. There are a couple of problems that have to be solved first.

1. The process would be very expensive

2. Sucking all this CO2 out of the air creates a logistical problem: Where will we put it?

"What people don't grasp is the sheer size," said Dr. Klaus Lackner, director of Arizona State University's Center for Negative Carbon Emissions. "If you drive a car, you put out about a pound of CO2 per mile. Per person, we put out 15 tons of CO2 per year." There are limits, Lackner said, to how much CO2 we can capture and store.

Assuming that problem will be figured out eventually, Lackner and other ASU scientists are developing a machine that can pull CO2 out of thin air.

A concept drawing for the machine looks like a huge box, with a big sail attached to it. Inspired by trees, these sails act as the "leaves" of ASU's machine. The sails are made of plastic resin. As air flows over the plastic resin sails, they grab CO2 and hold on to it.

CO2 binds to the plastic when the material is dry. To release the CO2 from the plastic, you have to get it wet. That's how the CO2 will be harvested from these machines -- either for immediate use, or to be put into storage. CO2 also should be captured at fossil-fuel burning power plants, Lackner said.

In Massachusetts, urban design group SHIFTBoston is waiting for Lackner to fully develop his carbon-scrubbing resin so it can be used to create "Boston Treepods" -- synthetic, solar-powered devices that would scrub CO2 and provide light at night.

For now, ASU's device is being developed for use in greenhouses, to feed plants. Plants need CO2 to grow. "I don't think that's solving the climate problem, but it demonstrates that the technology works," said Lackner. If it proves itself, maybe someday machines like these could be used for massive carbon dioxide farms that harvest CO2 from the air.

Some of of the CO2 could be used to make liquid fuel or building materials. Massive amounts of CO2 would have to be stored in a safe, stable environment. That's never been done before on that kind of scale.

"The simplest place to put it is at the bottom of the ocean," said Yale University geologist Donald Penman, who studies carbon fluctuations underground, in the ocean and the air. "You have to be worried about unforseen side effects. Addressing one problem by manipulating global-scale geochemical fluxes; it just sounds like you're asking for other sorts of trouble. It's fiddling with the knobs in the climate system. You might be opening Pandora's box."

Other skeptics of climate hacking worry it will needlessly lengthen human reliance on fossil fuels. Let's keep our eye on the ball, they say. Getting rid of fossil fuels and carbon emissions should be the most immediate goal. "We're at that moment when we could make change, and geoengineering gets in the way of that change," said Bill McKibben.

The widely respected National Academy of Sciences recommends more research into large-scale CO2 removal while focusing on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

In November and December, experts will gather at an important United Nations meeting in Paris. They'll try to work out a new agreement on climate change and how to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. New data will be released about changes in the average global temperature.

Some experts fear if the average global temperature rises above two degreees celsius, reversing global warming will be even more challenging. Research indicates that to keep below 2 degrees celsius, the world may have to take more CO2 out of the air than we put into it. That might mean using CO2-sucking technology to hack the climate.

"It becomes one tool in a larger tool set," said Lackner. Bottom line, he said, as long as we consume fossil fuels, the carbon problem will get worse. "Either you abandon fossil fuels, or you find a way to get that carbon back."

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will hacking nature protect us from climate change?  - cnn

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Thom Patterson, video produced by Rachel Crane, CNN

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Will hacking nature protect us from climate change? - CNN

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Whether you call it hacking, or "fiddling with the knobs in the climate system," or the less-imaginative "geoengineering," it revolves around this question: Can humans game the system by using science to reverse global warming? One way to keep global average temperatures from warming beyond a catastrophic 2-degree-celsius tipping point, according to some experts, is to suck massive amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere.

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After building the product for Huffington Post, and owning the product and engineering groups at AOL after we were acquired, it was clear to me there was a huge gap between what the current CMS offering gave the world and what the world needed. Five years later we are at scale, moving the needle and doing to WordPress what Airbnb did to Craigslist.

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WordPress, Drupal, and the custom CMS solutions of the world are all independent, non-connected instances that each need to be updated individually. There are over 87 million instances of WordPress alone in the world, and each security upgrade, feature update, and every other single thing has to be updated for each site individually.

By contrast, RebelMouse is a social, centralized platform built to keep up with the speed of the tech giants. Our updates are pushed out to all of our sites at once (and sometimes even multiple times a day) with content creation tools integrated directly into social APIs. We can get clients off of clunky CMSs and into the future in a matter of days. Many of our clients have seen page views and unique visitors grow anywhere from 50-300% literally within the first days of launch.

We iterate with the times and tell you what's changing in the world, how we've reacted to it, and how it's built into the updates you get from the platform. Our creative agency team trains your teams or takes on special projects.

Easy Migrations - the Re-Platform Remastered

We create growth with every re-platform. And it doesn't take months, it takes hours or days. We can suck up a WordPress site, optimize its page speed, the user experience, the balance of ads, and how you monetize. We do it in our sleep now.

We are simply the best in the world at this and have taken it to another level.

You'll grow in SEO, you'll grow in social, you'll grow in return users, you'll grow in the amount your users share, and that will, in turn, grow your total audience.

We can set up test environments you send traffic to and show the dramatic comparison. We create growth.

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Everybody is building media sites wrong. We make it look simple. All the hard technology is at work behind the scenes. For readers, your content shines, is shareable, and your website becomes a rabbit hole that pulls users into more content that creates more sharing.

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Grabbing social content, building listicles and slideshows - RebelMouse makes everything simple, clean, and easy for writers.

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But it's also important for you to manage your writers, see their performance, enable them to learn from each other, and help them become data driven. RebelMouse analytics provide you with a clear view of who is performing, what posts are working, and where that content is gaining traction.

We also have deep Google Analytics integration, so you can easily add in components, promos, third-party units, and ad units. But most importantly, as they're being added, they are set up in staged environments automatically, and the traffic performance from these tests can be traced back to impact on bounce rate, pages/session, session duration, number of shares, percent of shares per visit, and unique custom goals for your business.

You might have the feeling we could go on a bit longer. We could! This is a passion for us. Come talk to us and let's get growing together.

Related Articles Around the Web

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After building the product for Huffington Post, and owning the product and engineering groups at AOL after we were acquired, it was clear to me there was a huge gap between what the current CMS offering gave the world and what the world needed. Five years later we are at scale, moving the needle and...

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According to the latest from NASA, however, the projections the panel made for a rise in global sea levels of 1 to 3 feet may already be outdated.

According to Steven Nerem of the University of Colorado, we are "locked into at least 3 feet of sea level rise, and probably more."

Nerem said experts now think a rise in sea levels toward "the higher end of that range is more likely, and the question remains how that range might have to shift upwards."

This is startling news if you are one of the 150 million people on Earth who live near the ocean. Even if you don't live close to the sea, you probably use goods that are manufactured in plants near the water or vacation at the beach.

Even NASA is finding some of its critical infrastructure threatened by the rising seas.

There are three main causes for rising sea levels: The expansion of warmer ocean water, melting mountain glaciers, and ice loss from the massive Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

The latter of those causes has scientists at NASA the most concerned and is a key area of focus in the "intensive research effort" the agency announced on Wednesday.

One of those projects, called Oceans Melting Greenland, which goes by the intentional acronym of OMG (coincidental, right?) will spend the next six years trying to determine how the Greenland Ice Sheet is contributing to sea level rise.

The Jakobshavn Glacier, the fastest-moving glacier in Greenland, recently broke off a piece of ice large enough to cover the island of Manhattan in ice roughly 1,000 feet thick, according to the European Space Agency.

The glacier drains more ice-melt from Greenland into the ocean and contributes more to sea level rise than any other feature in the Northern Hemisphere.

If the entire ice sheet in Greenland melted completely, global sea levels would rise about 20 feet, and although this total loss would probably take many centuries to occur, sea levels would rise "as much as 10 feet in a century or two," according to NASA scientist and ice expert Tom Wagner.

Many climate experts say that temperatures are rising faster than at any point in our known history and that it is largely because of human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels.

NASA's increased focus on climate change and rising sea levels is not just about future projections. The agency also is demonstrating the past change in a first-of-its-kind visualization of the entire 23-year satellite record of global sea levels.

The agency is using satellite instruments so accurate, NASA Earth Science Division Director Mike Freilich said that if they were "mounted on a jetliner flying at 40,000 feet, they could detect the bump caused by a dime lying flat on the ground."

The data gathered reveal that sea levels have risen nearly 3 inches since 1992. If that doesn't sound like much, remember that a good rule of thumb is, for every inch of sea level rise, you see 100 inches of run-up inland on the coast.

But the rise is not uniform. Some places have seen sea levels rise more than 9 inches, while others, like the U.S. West Coast, have actually seen slight decreases in sea level.

But before you sell your summer home on Long Island and move to Southern California, you should know that this decrease in sea level was probably temporary. Experts say it was the result of cooler phase in a natural cycle with an unwieldy name: Pacific decadal oscillation.

That cycle recently switched to a warmer one (giving rise to something called the blob). According to NASA, the West Coast may now start seeing a faster rise in sea level and more than make up for the deficit it has seen over the past 20 years.

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expert: we're 'locked in' to 3-foot sea level rise - cnn

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Expert: We're 'locked in' to 3-foot sea level rise - CNN

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According to the latest from NASA, however, the projections the panel made for a rise in global sea levels of 1 to 3 feet may already be outdated. According to Steven Nerem of the University of Colorado, we are "locked into at least 3 feet of sea level rise, and probably more."

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Human stem cells have been turned into clumps of kidney tissue in a crucial first step towards building new organs for patients in the lab.

Scientists in Australia made the breakthrough after turning stem cells derived from human skin into two of the main structures found in kidneys, namely collecting ducts and blood-filtering units called nephrons.

Their "organoids" are comparable to an unborn baby's kidneys in the first trimester, and are not yet good enough to transplant into sick patients. But in the near term they will be valuable for screening drugs for toxic effects, and recreating genetic kidney diseases in a dish.

The balls of kidney tissue, which measure less than a centimetre across, also hold promise as sources of fresh kidney cells for medical treatments.

Writing in the journal Nature, Minoru Takasato and colleagues at the Royal Children's hospital in Melbourne describe how they got cells to clump together into primitive kidneys over nearly three weeks in culture. "They spontaneously formed complex kidney organoids," the scientists write.

After growing the organoids in the lab, the researchers found they contained not only collecting ducts and nephrons to filter blood, but cells that form the connective tissue and blood vessels normally seen around nephrons in foetuses.

The human kidney contains up to 2m nephrons which clean the blood by removing urea, salts and excess water. The fluid forms urine which is gathered by collecting ducts and passed through ureters to the bladder.

Until now, scientists have struggled to get stem cells to form different cell types found in the kidney. But the Australian group solved the problem in a series of experiments that perfected the chemical signals stem cells need to receive to form early stage collecting ducts and nephrons.

To test whether the organoids reacted to toxic drugs in the same way as healthy human kidneys, the scientists exposed them to the cancer drug, cisplatin, and found that they suffered similar damage.

In an accompanying article in the same journal, Jamie Davies at the Centre for Integrative Physiology at Edinburgh University, explains that with kidney disease on the rise, and a shortage a transplantable organs, one solution is to build human kidneys from stem cells.

In the year to April 2013, the NHS performed about 3,000 kidney transplants in the UK, though more than 6,000 patients were left on the waiting list.

But Davies stresses that the organoids are not fully-functioning kidneys. "There is a long way to go until clinically useful transplantable kidneys can be engineered," he writes, adding that Takasato's work is "a valuable step in the right direction".

The organoids are still likely to be valued for other uses in medicine though. As Davies adds: "These kidney organoids might fulfil a different medical need - the ability to test drug safety on human kidney tissue, rather than in poorly predictive animals."

"The result could be a major step towards animal replacement and improved safety screening for drugs, as well as towards transplantable kidneys," he adds.

In August, scientists at Ohio State University claimed to have grown an immature brain in the lab for the first time. The ball of brain cells, no larger than a pencil eraser, could be used to test drugs for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

The work followed reports from others stem cell scientists who created pea-sized miniature stomachs for studying gastric diseases, and rudimentary eyes, aimed at helping researchers to study and ultimately treat blindness.
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Stem cells from human skin turned into kidney tissue

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Human stem cells have been turned into clumps of kidney tissue in a crucial first step towards building new organs for patients in the lab. Scientists in Australia made the breakthrough after turning stem cells derived from human skin into two of the main structures found in kidneys, namely collecting ducts and blood-filtering units called nephrons.

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NASA wants the world to know that putting boots on Mars is not just a sci-fi dream.

The space agency has been helping promote the new film " The Martian," which hits theaters across the United States today (Oct. 2), as a way to publicize its own plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet in the 2030s.

Setting up a crewed outpost on Mars is NASA's chief long-term goal in the realm of human spaceflight. Indeed, the space agency's operational robotic Mars craft - the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, and the orbiters Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) - can be seen as scouts for the human pioneers to come, NASA officials say. [ 5 Manned Mission to Mars Ideas]

"The evolution of a Martian starts with our science - starts with our ground-truth that we get from our rovers - and it builds up to human exploration," Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science division, said Thursday (Oct. 1) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, during an event focusing on "The Martian" and the space agency's Red Planet plans.

NASA is working on a number of different fronts to make a crewed Mars mission happen, Green said.

For example, the agency and its partners are currently conducting an unprecedented yearlong mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS). (Crewmembers generally stay aboard the orbiting lab for 5 to 6 months.)

Researchers are monitoring how NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko respond physiologically and psychologically to their extended time off Earth, in an effort to help prepare future pioneers for the long journey to Mars and back.

Furthermore, astronauts recently grew lettuce aboard the ISS - and ate it as well - as part of an experiment called "Veggie." The long-term goal of such projects is to make voyaging astronauts less dependent on Earth.

NASA is also developing a crew capsule called Orion and the Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket to help get astronauts to, and from, distant destinations such as Mars. Orion aced its first uncrewed test flight last December, and the SLS is scheduled to make its maiden voyage in 2018.

Technological development is ongoing in other key areas as well. For instance, reseachers are working to improve solar-electric propulsion systems, which use energy from the sun to strip electrons off gas molecules, then send these ions streaming out the back of a spacecraft to generate thrust.

"These are going to be huge ion engines that will allow us to haul tens of tons of material back and forth to Mars," Green said.

Much of this heavy gear - which will consist of human habitat modules and other infrastructure - must make it down to the Martian surface. That's a tall order, since the 1-ton Curiosity rover maxed out NASA's "sky crane" landing system. [ How to Land on Mars: Martian Tech Explained (Infographic)]

So NASA is developing new tech, such as inflatable "decelerators" and an enormous supersonic parachute, to help get hefty payloads down safely and softly on the Red Planet. NASA has tested a prototype of this system twice during balloon-aided flights off Hawaii; the decelerator worked perfectly, but the parachute tore both times.

The science work being done by Red Planet robots feeds into the crewed effort as well. For example, data and images gathered by MRO have allowed researchers to determine that the dark streaks that appear on steep Martian slopes during warm weather are caused by liquid water - a resource that future pioneers might be able to exploit.

"We're developing the science tools now - the continually orbiting and roving on Mars - to be able to get us the information to know what Mars is really like," Green said.

NASA's next Mars rover, which is scheduled to launch in 2020, will continue to build up the knowledge base, while also making concerted strides toward human exploration.

One of the Mars 2020 rover's instruments is a technology demonstration designed to generate oxygen from carbon dioxide in the Red Planet's atmosphere. Another instrument, a ground-penetrating radar, is capable of discovering subsurface aquifers of liquid water, if any exist in the landing zone, Green said.

NASA is not planning to make the big leap directly from low Earth orbit, where the ISS circles, all the way to Mars. Rather, the agency first aims to test technologies and gain deep-space experience in the "proving ground" of Earth-moon space.

One proving-ground project is the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which involves plucking a boulder off a near-Earth asteroid with a robotic probe and towing the chunk of space rock to lunar orbit for future visitation by astronauts.

NASA plans to accomplish this - the robotic and crewed aspects (which will employ Orion and the SLS) - by 2025.

And the first crewed Mars mission may land not on the Red Planet but on one of its two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos. Such a strategy would prove out the technologies required to get to Mars orbit, and also dilute the risks and costs of a crewed Red Planet campaign, advocates say.

So some of the steps along the path to Mars still need to be worked out. But the ultimate destination - the Martian surface - is not in doubt, NASA officials say.

"[Putting] boots on Mars is possibly the most exciting thing humans will ever do," NASA chief Charles Bolden said last month during an event at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. that detailed NASA's crewed Mars plans.

"We have been engaged in getting to Mars - getting humans to Mars - for at least 40 years, beginning with the first precursors," he added. "I have no doubt that we can accomplish what we have set our minds to do."

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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'The Martian' and Reality: How NASA Will Get Astronauts to Mars

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NASA wants the world to know that putting boots on Mars is not just a sci-fi dream. The space agency has been helping promote the new film " The Martian," which hits theaters across the United States today (Oct. 2), as a way to publicize its own plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet in the 2030s.

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Liquid water runs down canyons and crater walls over the summer months on Mars, according to researchers who say the discovery raises the chances of being home to some form of life.

The trickles leave long, dark stains on the Martian terrain that can reach hundreds of metres downhill in the warmer months, before they dry up in the autumn as surface temperatures drop.

Images taken from the Mars orbit show cliffs, and the steep walls of valleys and craters, streaked with summertime flows that in the most active spots combine to form intricate fan-like patterns.

Scientists are unsure where the water comes from, but it may rise up from underground ice or salty aquifers, or condense out of the thin Martian atmosphere.

"There is liquid water today on the surface of Mars," Michael Meyer, the lead scientist on Nasa's Mars exploration programme, told the Guardian. "Because of this, we suspect that it is at least possible to have a habitable environment today."

The water flows could point Nasa and other space agencies towards the most promising sites to find life on Mars, and to landing spots for future human missions where water can be collected from a natural supply.

"Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past," said Nasa's Jim Green. "Liquid water has been found on Mars."

Some of the earliest missions to Mars revealed a planet with a watery past. Pictures beamed back to Earth in the 1970s showed a surface crossed by dried-up rivers and plains once submerged beneath vast ancient lakes. Earlier this year, Nasa unveiled evidence of an ocean that might have covered half of the planet's northern hemisphere in the distant past.

But occasionally, Mars probes have found hints that the planet might still be wet. Nearly a decade ago, Nasa's Mars Global Surveyor took pictures of what appeared to be water bursting through a gully wall and flowing around boulders and other rocky debris. In 2011, the high-resolution camera on Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured what looked like little streams flowing down crater walls from late spring to early autumn. Not wanting to assume too much, mission scientists named the flows "recurring slope lineae" or RSL.

Researchers have now turned to another instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to analyse the chemistry of the mysterious RSL flows. Lujendra Ojha, of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and his colleagues used a spectrometer on the MRO to look at infrared light reflected off steep rocky walls when the dark streaks had just begun to appear, and when they had grown to full length at the end of the Martian summer.

Writing in the journal Nature Geosciences, the team describes how it found infra-red signatures for hydrated salts when the dark flows were present, but none before they had grown. The hydrated salts - a mix of chlorates and perchlorates - are a smoking gun for the presence of water at all four sites inspected: the Hale, Palikir and Horowitz craters, and a large canyon called Coprates Chasma.

"These may be the best places to search for extant life near the surface of Mars," said Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona and senior author on the study. "While it would be very important to find evidence of ancient life, it would be difficult to understand the biology. Current life would be much more informative."

The flows only appear when the surface of Mars rises above -23C. The water can run in such frigid conditions because the salts lower the freezing point of water, keeping it liquid far below 0C.

"The mystery has been, what is permitting this flow? Presumably water, but until now, there has been no spectral signature," Meyer said. "From this, we conclude that the RSL are generated by water interacting with perchlorates, forming a brine that flows downhill."

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These channels, which are between 1 metre and 10 metres wide, are on a scarp in the Hellas impact basin. Photograph: Nasa/Reuters

John Bridges, a professor of planetary science at the University of Leicester, said the study was fascinating, but might throw up some fresh concerns for space agencies. The flows could be used to find water sources on Mars, making them prime spots to hunt for life, and to land future human missions. But agencies were required to do their utmost to avoid contaminating other planets with microbes from Earth, making wet areas the most difficult to visit. "This will give them lots to think about," he said.

For now, researchers are focused on learning where the water comes from. Porous rocks under the Martian surface might hold frozen water that melts in the summer months and seeps up to the surface.

Another possibility is that highly concentrated saline aquifers are dotted around beneath the surface, not as pools of water, but as saturated volumes of gritty rock. These could cause flows in some areas, but cannot easily explain water seeping down from the top of crater walls.

A third possibility, and one favoured by McEwen, is that salts on the Martian surface absorb water from the atmosphere until they have enough to run downhill. The process, known as deliquescence, is seen in the Atacama desert, where the resulting damp patches are the only known place for microbes to live.

"It's a fascinating piece of work," Bridges said. "Our view of Mars is changing, and we'll be discussing this for a long time to come."
Topics

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Nasa scientists find evidence of flowing water on Mars

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Liquid water runs down canyons and crater walls over the summer months on Mars, according to researchers who say the discovery raises the chances of being home to some form of life. The trickles leave long, dark stains on the Martian terrain that can reach hundreds of metres downhill in the warmer months, before they dry up in the autumn as surface temperatures drop.

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Lockheed Martin's new Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) is just as comfortable on land as in water.

Credit: Lockheed Martin

A new amphibious vehicle that moves just as well on land as it does in the water looks kind of like a salamander. That is, if a salamander had eight wheels, a six-cylinder turbodiesel engine and weighed about 20 tons (18,100 kilograms).

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin designed and built the new Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) to replace the U.S. Marine Corps' aging fleet of swimming tanks, which have been in use for more than four decades. The versatile new ACV was officially unveiled last week (Sept. 22) at the Modern Day Marine trade show in Quantico, Virginia.

Amphibious vehicles are very useful to Marines, who use the hybrid boat-tanks to travel safely between giant ships at sea and dry land. However, because they have to work in such varied environments, designing these machines can be a complicated (and expensive) process, according to David Hunn, technical director of Lockheed's ACV program. [ 7 Technologies That Transformed Warfare]

"For military amphibians, you don't have the benefit of swimming in calm lakes or canal ways and then driving on smooth roads," Hunn said in a statement. "You're swimming through, oftentimes, big waves, ocean currents, nighttime and storms - and then operating in rough, off-road land conditions."

To build a vehicle that can handle all of these conditions, engineers first have to figure out one very important thing: how to get a 20-ton tank to float. To do this, Lockheed engineers have to ensure that the volume of water the ACV displaces weighs the same or more than the ACV itself. If the vehicle is less dense than the water, then it will float.

Once the vehicle can stay above water, engineers can tackle another issue - making the machine impermeable to both water and enemy attacks. To keep water out, the new ACV has limited openings where water can seep in, according to Hunn, who said that the vehicle features hatches up top and a large back door where troops can enter and exit the vehicle. There's also only one window up front for the driver, he said.

To help it withstand blasts from cannons and other artillery, Lockheed shaped the vehicle's hull (the body of the vehicle) to be "blast-resistant," but also "hydrodynamic," so it stays afloat.

But perhaps the coolest thing about this modernized amphibious vehicle is the stuff you can't see - such as the computer system that converts the vehicle from a boat to a tank. Earlier amphibious vehicles had to be manually operated to switch modes when going from water to land, but the new ACV is automatic.

"We're trying to make this where the driver doesn't have to make a lot of decisions under high pressure. When you hit the dashboard button that says 'swim,' everything changes automatically. The wheel works like a regular steering wheel, but it's now attached to the swim system," Hunn said.

In addition to a swimming propulsion system that thrusts the machine through the water at speeds reaching 5 knots, the ACV also has an extremely powerful engine that can keep it moving at upward of 60 miles per hour (96 km/h) on land. The vehicle's eight wheels facilitate its speediness, and allow it to move faster than if it used tracks (such as the ones on a bulldozer or tank) to get around.

While the primary purpose of Lockheed's ACV system is to build a new generation of vehicles for the military, the company also said it believes the salamanderlike machines would be great at search-and- rescue missions, as well.

"I think what we're going to see initially is commercial amphibian variants that are made for rescue operations - flooding situations that occur and you need to be able to get in to rescue people at a moment's notice," Hunn said.

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It's Part Tank, Part Salamander, and Ready for Combat

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A new amphibious vehicle that moves just as well on land as it does in the water looks kind of like a salamander. That is, if a salamander had eight wheels, a six-cylinder turbodiesel engine and weighed about 20 tons (18,100 kilograms).

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This post was initially published on June 6, 2012, and is being resurrected as part of National Geographic's special on de-extinction. When it comes to bringing back the mammoth, it turns out that the biggest hurdle is not getting mammoth DNA, but in navigating the complicated reproductive system of living elephants...
Tens of thousands of years ago, woolly mammoths roamed the northern hemisphere. These giant beasts may now be extinct, but some of their bodies still remain in the frozen Arctic wilderness. Several dozen such carcasses have now been found, and some are in extremely good condition. Scientists have used these remains to discover much about how the mammoth lived and died, and even to sequence most of its genome. But can they also bring the animal back from the dead? Will the woolly mammoth walk again?

Akira Iritani certainly seems to think so. The 84-year-old reproductive biologist has been trying to clone a mammoth for at least a decade, with a team of Japanese and Russian scientists. They have tried to use tissues from several frozen Siberian specimens including, most recently, a well-preserved thighbone. Last year, Iritani told reporters, "I think we have a reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or five years."

A few months ago, a second team led by Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk also expressed interest in cloning a mammoth. While Iritani comes with impressive credentials, Hwang's resume is less reassuring. He is perhaps best known for faking experiments in which he claimed to have cloned the first human embryo and produced stem cells from it. The fact that he has confessed to buying mammoth samples from the Russian mafia does not help to instil confidence.

Regardless of their pedigree, both teams have their work cut out. Any attempt to resurrect the mammoth faces an elephantine gauntlet of challenges, including the DNA-shattering effects of frost and time, and the rather unhelpful reproductive tract of the eventual surrogate parent-the elephant.
Gene challenge
Siberian ice might preserve the bodies of mammoths, but it is not kind to them. Ice crystals puncture cells, spilling out their contents. Even if the DNA inside the cell is not exposed, it tends to break down over time. Stephan Schuster from Penn State University, who led the mammoth sequencing project, says, "Even the genomes from much younger organisms rapidly decay. It's like smashing a mirror on the floor." Schuster's team compared the heavily fragmented DNA of a mammoth against the genome of an elephant. That approach allowed them to read the genome, but it cannot be used to reconstruct it.

Synthesising an animal genome from scratch is a massive challenge by today's technological standards. It would require: a far more accurate draft than the one we have; knowledge of the number of chromosomes a mammoth had; the ability to stitch together such large stretches of DNA; ways of packaging that DNA into a nucleus; and hoping that all the DNA will still be in good working order.

There is another option. Rather than producing mammoth DNA from scratch, you could tweak DNA from an African elephant. The genomes of the two species differ by just 0.6 percent, half the difference between us and chimpanzees. By identifying and swapping the different sequences, you could potentially rewrite an elephant genome so that it reads like a mammoth one.

Palaeontologist Jack Horner is trying something similar by rolling back a chicken's genes into a state more like its extinct dinosaur ancestors, and scientists like Harvard University's George Church are developing techniques that can rewrite vast swathes of DNA at once. But even if the technology catches up with the ambition, Schuster says: "That's not making a mammoth. It's 'mammothifying' an elephant." The resulting creature may be a more mammoth-like version of today's pachyderms, but it won't be the real deal.

These problems might be avoided if we could find intact nuclei from frozen mammoths, at least if experiments in other animals are anything to go by. In 2008, Sayaka Wakayama and colleagues from RIKEN, Japan cloned healthy mice from individuals that had been frozen for 16 years. They found intact nuclei in the chilled bodies, and fused them with empty eggs. By all accounts, Iritani is trying to do the same thing with frozen mammoth remains (he did not respond to a request for an interview). But Schuster does not mince words about the odds of finding intact mammoth nuclei. "It's entirely impossible," he says. Sixteen years in the freezer is one thing; 16,000 years is quite another.
Pregnant pause
Assuming that Iritani's team gets an intact nucleus, they would still have to insert it inside an elephant egg. Collecting such an egg means navigating a reproductive tract that spans three metres from the uterus to the outside world. "It's extremely challenging," says Thomas Hildebrandt from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, who knows the reproductive tract of elephants like the length of his arm.

A female elephant only ovulates once every five years, releasing one or two eggs at any time to ensure that she never becomes pregnant with several gargantuan foetuses. Each egg is a 2-centimetre-wide ball rattling around an enormous cavern. Once it is released, the female almost immediately has sex. "There are almost no wild elephants that are fertile without already being pregnant," says Hildebrandt. So, collecting an oocyte from an elephant is like groping in a haystack for a needle that probably does not exist. If getting oneeggsounds hard enough, would-be mammoth-makers need hundreds or thousands of eggs to ensure one successful clone.

There is a possible cheat. They could take ovarian tissue from a culled elephant, transplant it into a rat or a mouse, and tweak the rodent's hormonal cycles to ensure that the eggs mature properly. This has been tried, but no one knows if the resulting eggs were actually viable. It's a long shot, and "you still have the problem of transplanting the embryo," says Hildebrandt.

Notwithstanding the distance into the uterus, the path is blocked by the hymen. This is essential to the elephant; it grows back after every birth and it cannot be broken without compromising the pregnancy. It has an opening just 2 to 4 millimetres wide that allows passage to sperm - that's what an embryo-carrying tube would have to navigate through. "It's not impossible but it would need quite a lot of technological development," says Hildebrandt. "Most people don't expect that. They think they biggest challenge is creating the embryo."

Even if a baby mammoth comes to term, it may not last for long. In 2009, European scientists used preserved skin cells to clone the Pyrenean ibex, a type of goat that had been extinct since 2000. The glorious resurrection lasted all of seven minutes, before the newborn kid died of lung failure. Many (but far from all) cloned animals have suffered from similar health problems. If the woolly mammoth does the same, its resurrectors could end up with the world's most expensive carcass.
Conservation boost
Despite these many hurdles, Schuster does not dismiss the possibility of cloning a mammoth, especially with improvements in genetic techniques. "Every time a journalist asks me about this, one of those hurdles has been taken out," he says. "I think it's a little irresponsible to stand there and say it'll never happen, but that doesn't mean we should spend money on it. Maybe it would be better spent on preserving endangered species today."

Can we really justify trying to bring the mammoth back from extinction when all three species of living elephant are in danger of joining it? "If you'd interviewed me two or three years, ago, I would have been much more aggressive against it," says Hildebrandt. He has changed his mind after struggling with efforts to conserve other large animals like the Sumatran rhino. Only a few hundred remain, and many are so old that no amount of assisted reproduction will help them to breed. "Our only option is to clone them," he says.

Mammoth-cloning projects might act as an attractive funding magnet in a way that conservation projects of little-known rhinos cannot. "The mammoth may be able indirectly help future conservation projects, by developing cloning technologies that could help modern species," says Hildebrandt. It's a sobering thought: as impossible as cloning an extinct animal might sound, the one good reason to try is that it might prevent a number of species from suffering the same fate.

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Will we ever bring back the woolly mammoth?

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This post was initially published on June 6, 2012, and is being resurrected as part of National Geographic's special on de-extinction. When it comes to bringing back the mammoth, it turns out that the biggest hurdle is not getting mammoth DNA, but in navigating the complicated reproductive system of living elephants...

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For centuries, a highly venomous snake has managed to slither under the scientific radar in the Australian bush.

Now, scientists have finally identified the new species of death adder, Acanthophis cryptamydros, which lives in the northwestern corner of the continent.

"It was a huge surprise. We weren't even looking for a new species. I redid my work to make sure I hadn't made a mistake," says study leader Simon Maddock, a Ph.D. student in a joint program at University College London and the Natural History Museum, London.

The newfound species is 20 inches (51 centimeters) long and, like many other death adders, has a light reddish-brown color.

See More Weird & Wild Stories

Maddock made his discovery not by trekking through the Australian outback but by studying the DNA of various death adders, a group of snakes native to Australia, New Guinea, and Indonesia that are among the world's most venomous. (Read " What's the Most Toxic Snake?")

Many of the approximately eight species of death adder-there's some controversy about exactly how many species exist-are hard to tell apart, since individuals of the same species can sport remarkably different colors and patterns.

The newfound death adder "looks a lot like the northern death adder, A. rugosus, and that's probably why no one discovered it until now," Maddock notes.

Using various death adder DNA from museums and some gathered specifically for his work, Maddock and colleagues sequenced certain genes into figure out how and when the reptiles evolved.

"When we looked at our DNA data, we found there was one group of snakes that were really, really different," said Maddock, whose study was published recently in the journal Zootaxa. (See National Geographic's snake pictures.)

To show definitively that he had discovered a new species, Maddock requested additional specimens from museums around the world, and his colleagues went into the field to capture more snakes. In total, he analyzed 112 specimens, including 32 of the new death adder species.

"It's a very thorough and important study," says Dan Rabosky, an evolutionary biologist and curator of herpetology at the University of Michigan.

"Most of us think of Australia as a First World country that's been thoroughly explored, and this shows how little we know."

The western half of Australia, especially the Kimberley region and the Northern Territory, hosts a tremendous range of species, including several death adders.

"It's a very ancient, stable environment, and there are a lot of species that are just hanging on out there," says study leader Maddock.

Unlike some snakes, which hunt by chasing down their prey, a death adder waits for a victim to cross its path, wiggling its small, worm-like tail as a lure.

When the muscular predator spots a small rodent, lizard, or snake (their favorite food), it strikes, darting out and sinking its fangs and deadly venom into its next meal. (Read about National Geographic venom expert Zoltan Takacs.)

Despite their ominous name, death adders don't seek out people, and will only bite if they feel a threat is very close. Some believe that the term "death adder" is likely a confusion of "deaf adder," since these snakes cannot hear sounds.

You could say it puts a new spin on silent but deadly.

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New Venomous Snake Found: Death Adder Hiding in Plain Sight

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For centuries, a highly venomous snake has managed to slither under the scientific radar in the Australian bush. Now, scientists have finally identified the new species of death adder, Acanthophis cryptamydros, which lives in the northwestern corner of the continent. "It was a huge surprise. We weren't even looking for a new species.

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Will it one day be possible to bring a woolly mammoth or a Neanderthal back to life? If so, should we? How is climate change affecting the evolution and extinction of species?

Traveling the world from Kenya (in search of the white rhino) to a lab in California (where a geneticist is trying to resurrect the extinct passenger pigeon), O'Connor reports on the people and places on the front lines of what has become known as resurrection science.

Talking from her home in Brooklyn, she explains why the White Sands pupfish of New Mexico would have amazed Charles Darwin; how it may become increasingly necessary to genetically engineer species in order to save them; and why she has no plans to volunteer as a surrogate mother for a baby Neanderthal.
You write, "When I was a kid in the 1990s, the world felt like it was on the edge of catastrophe." Wind back the clock for us and explain how those childhood experiences got you interested in the question of extinctions.
I grew up in California, where kids are taught to conserve water from an early age. The early '90s was also a time when the idea that we need to save species at risk because of habitat destruction, pollution, and deforestation, was making news. When I was 14, I read Douglas Adams's amazing book, Last Chance to See, which made a huge impression on me.
Resurrection is a word normally associated with Jesus. That's not what you mean, is it?
[Laughs] It's only recently become a term used to describe the de-extinction effort. The reason I wanted it as the title for the book is that in the next decades we could be bringing back species from the dead, so to speak.

In the next decades we could be bringing back species from the dead.

This recalls Biblical mythology, and yet it is all about science. How can we use our scientific and technological mastery to do something we'd have thought miraculous not that long ago? By trying to de-extinct species, we're bringing together two very different things: mythology and science.
You write, "Humans are in the midst of an unplanned experiment of influencing the evolution of the planet's biodiversity." Explain the role of climate change and the concept of "rapid evolution."
Most of us are aware that climate change is altering habitats and environments. What we don't necessarily think about is that by changing habitats and environments, we're influencing the forces that act upon evolution.

Changes are now happening so quickly that they appear to be driving some species towards extinction because they can't adapt fast enough. Climate change is also driving adaptations that speed up evolution.

You can see species changing in response to their environment in a couple of decades.

The example I write about is a species called the White Sands pup fish, in New Mexico. Four populations of this fish are located in a small area in the Tulurosa Basin. What biologists have learned studying them is that evolution occurs much faster than Darwin believed, and faster even than biologists believed 30 years ago. You can see species like the White Sands pupfish changing in response to their environment in a couple of decades. That's pretty spectacular and scientists are becoming aware that this kind of rapid evolution is occurring in other species, like Chinook salmon or soapberry bugs.
One of the problems conservationists face is that there's no clear definition of what a species is. Explain "the species problem" and how this can alter an animal's status.
The species problem is essentially, how do we define a species? Before the 19th century, people believed a species was divinely created and had fixed identities. Thanks to Darwin, we know that species change.

But how do we define where a species begins and ends? Genetic sequencing compounds the problem because we can now look into the genetic makeup of an animal and see how closely-or not-it's related to a distant relative.

How you define a species can also alter its legal status under the Endangered Species Act. A species may be protected, but its subspecies may not be. That's why it matters for conservationists to have an accepted definition of what a species is and is not.
Sometimes conservationists have to work with strange bedfellows. Tell us about Roy McBride and the attempts to restore the Florida panther.
I wanted to understand how there came to be a small population of panthers living in Florida, north of Miami and south of Disney World. When I started speaking to folks involved in the conservation effort, it became clear that McBride had played a central role.

He was the person who went out in the early '70s with the World Wildlife Fund and rediscovered this population that no one was sure even existed. In the early '90s, he then brought mountain lions from Texas to Florida in order to do a "genetic rescue" of the Florida panther population, which had become very inbred and was suffering as a result. That effort was very successful. They went from around 30 panthers to 160-180 today.

The reason McBride strikes some as an odd person to be involved with this rescue operation is that he was formerly hired by the U.S. government as a predator hunter.
We can't discuss extinctions without mentioning the Passenger Pigeon. Introduce us to Ben Novak and his attempts to bring them back to life.
Before the Endangered Species Act extended protection, the government was actively involved in hunting down predators that were deemed to pose a risk to businesses landowners.

Roy McBride was a very successful tracker and hunter of both mountain lions and the Mexican grey wolf. Some claim he single-handedly led to the extinction of mountain lions in Texas. I think that's an exaggeration. And after the 1970s, he became critical to the Florida panther recovery plan.

I approached the topic of extinction with some cynicism. I wasn't convinced that it was a necessary or appropriate response to some extinction crises. So meeting Ben Novak was a very important moment for me. He's a very passionate young man in his 20s who's completely in love with passenger pigeons and has dedicated his young life to try and bring them back to the forests of the northeast United States.

Passenger pigeons went extinct in about one-thousandth of a percent of the time they were on Earth.
Kes Hillman Smith is a name most of our readers won't be familiar with. Tell us a bit about her and your journey to Kenya in search of the white rhino.
Novak's work mapping the genome of this bird has shown they're at least 22 million years old. The first colonial settlers described seeing an incomprehensible abundance of them in American skies and forests. The last one died in 1914. And the fact that they went extinct in about one-thousandth of a percent of the time they were on Earth is truly incredible.
Recently the extinct Azuay stubfoot toad A recent British newspaper headline read: "Wanted: Adventurous woman to give birth to Neanderthal man-Harvard professor seeks mother for cloned cave baby." Could we one day actually bring back Neanderthals, and are you going to volunteer? leaped back to life in Ecuador At the end of the book, you say, "I have heard few cases for de-extinction that present a clear and compelling argument that justify the risks." How did writing this book change your perspective? And are you still convinced that the world is on the edge of catastrophe? . What does this tell us about extinctions? Are other species about to reappear?
What Novak and his team at the University of California, Santa Cruz, hope to do is use the genetic material of its nearest living relative, the band-tailed pigeon. There's no frozen tissue so you can't clone a passenger pigeon. By using genetic editing tools they'll alter the DNA of a band-tailed pigeon to passenger pigeon DNA.

Once they've been able to genetically modify a band-tailed pigeon, they hope to incubate that genetic material in other band-tailed pigeons to produce passenger pigeons.

If everything progresses as Novak hopes, we might have a passenger pigeon again in ten years. But there's a whole other process of trying to figure out how you teach this animal to be a passenger pigeon. It's not just DNA. There's also animal culture and the relationship between ecology and species. And it's far from clear that scientists understand how they could bring back those types of relationships.
Simon Worrall curates Book Talk. Follow him on Twitter or at simonworrallauthor.com.
When I started writing the chapter on northern white rhinos, there were seven left in the world. Two have subsequently died of natural causes. When I started speaking to people about the history of the northern white rhino, Kes Hillman Smith's name kept coming up.

I realized I'd read about her as a child, in Last Chance to See. Kes and her husband, Frasier, have spent more than two decades trying to protect the last population in Garamba National Park. Unfortunately, that population may well become extinct in the next few years.

Absolutely. There are dozens of species thought to have gone extinct, which were then sighted sometimes many decades after the last sighting. It's a testament to how hard it is to track and find animals in the wild. It also speaks to the resilience of some species to survive against the odds.

[Laughs] Absolutely not! The press loves this story because it's almost like the idea of time travel, and that's endlessly fascinating for us to think about. It was discussed because of a book by George Church, of Harvard Medical School, who's involved with some of these de-extinction initiatives.

His thought was that if we wanted to create greater genetic diversity within the human population, one way to do that might be to bring back Neanderthals through genetic engineering and then incubation in a surrogate. It's doubtful whether this is a good idea, or morally acceptable, though. Our mastery of technology is further along than our moral and ethical frameworks.

I think the world is changing faster than many of us can comprehend. That is something for us all to think about, particularly in regard to our relationship with nature and what kind of world we want to be living in. Do we want to live in a world with wild things free from human influence? And is that even possible with climate change?

My feeling about de-extinction has changed because the people I met and talked to are brilliant and passionate and had wonderful motives for wanting to bring back species that became extinct because of our ignorance and behavior.

But in many of the de-extinctions being proposed, they don't address the problems that caused the extinctions in the first place. We may be able to create woolly mammoths, which would be Asian elephants genetically engineered to survive in the Arctic. But that doesn't solve the problem of why Asian elephants are endangered. And it certainly doesn't solve the problem of why we're experiencing an era of rapid climate change. I hope that will be debated and discussed more in the near future.

We should make every effort to preserve wild places and wild things. But resurrection science is probably here to stay. We just have to decide the degree of intervention and influence we're comfortable with.

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Can Genetic Engineering Bring Back Extinct Animals?

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Will it one day be possible to bring a woolly mammoth or a Neanderthal back to life? If so, should we? How is climate change affecting the evolution and extinction of species?

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After building the product for Huffington Post, and owning the product and engineering groups at AOL after we were acquired, it was clear to me there was a huge gap between what the current CMS offering gave the world and what the world needed. Five years later we are at scale, moving the needle and...