Category Archives: Beautiful World
Nature and Such
Top Ten New Species of 2010
Darwin’s Bark Spider
Photograph courtesy Matjaz Kuntner
Created by the Darwin’s bark spider—called one of the top ten new species of 2010—a river-spanning web dwarfs a park ranger in Madagascar in 2008.
Each May the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University (ASU), along with an international committee of taxonomists, announces their choices for the top ten species that were formally recognized during roughly the previous year. Participants draw up their own criteria, and selections can be made based on anything from unique attributes to odd names.
The announcement is timed to celebrate the May 23 birthday of Carolus Linnaeus, who developed the scientific system of plant and animal names more than 250 years ago.
Darwin’s bark makes the world’s largest webs of any single spider—as wide as 82 feet (25 meters), or about as long as two city buses.
(See related pictures: “World’s Biggest, Strongest Spider Webs Found.”)
The annual list draws attention to how little we know about Earth’s species, said Quentin Wheeler, director of the ASU institute. (See pictures of the top ten new species of 2009.)
So far, scientists have documented about two million species, but another ten million may still be unknown.
“For us to sit back and think we understand evolutionary history—how life arose and why it’s as diverse as it is—is a joke when we’re missing 80 percent of the evidence,” Wheeler said.
“In reality we’ve just scratched the surface of that fascinating story.”
(Related: ”Ten Weirdest New Animals of 2010: Editors’ Picks.”)
—Christine Dell’Amore
Published May 24, 2011
Titanic Bacteria
Photograph by Emory Kristof, National Geographic
A new species of bacteria, Halomonas titanicae, was discovered on—and named for—the Titanic shipwreck (pictured, the ship’s rusted prow). (See Titanic pictures.)
The bacteria is part of a family that had never before been seen so deep underwater, about 2.4 miles (3.8 kilometers) below the surface.
What’s more, iron oxide-eating H. titanicae may be speeding up the decay of the historic wreck, scientists say. (See “New Bacteria Discovered on Titanic; Eats Metal.”)
Published May 24, 2011
Rest of story -> Top Ten new Species of 2010
New Mongoose-Like Carnivorous Mammal Discovered in Madagascar
Durrell””s vontsira (Salanoia durrelli) — the first new carnivorous mammal to be discovered for 24 years. It was discovered on the Island of Madagascar by a team from Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust (DWCT), the Natural History Museum, London, Nature Heritage, and Conservation International (CI). (Credit: © Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust)
A new species of small carnivore, known as Durrell””s vontsira (Salanoia durrelli) has been identified by researchers from the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, the Natural History Museum, London, Nature Heritage, Jersey, and Conservation International (CI). The small, cat-sized, speckled brown carnivore from the marshes of the Lac Alaotra wetlands in central eastern Madagascar weighs just over half a kilogramme and belongs to a family of carnivores only known from Madagascar. It is likely to be one of the most threatened carnivores in the world.
The findings are outlined in the latest issue of the taxonomic journal Systematics and Biodiversity.
The carnivore was first seen swimming in a lake by researchers from the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust on a field trip surveying bamboo lemurs (Hapalemur griseus alaotrensis) in 2004. After briefly examining the animal, the team suspected they had witnessed a new species and so took photographs. By examining brown-tailed vontsira (Salanoia concolor) specimens in the Natural History Museum””s collections, Museum zoologists confirmed the animal was a new species. The brown-tailed vontsira is the closest relative of the new species, which zoologists named in honour of the conservationist and writer Gerald Durrell, who died 15 years ago.
Fidimalala Bruno Ralainasolo, a conservation biologist working for Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust who originally captured the new carnivore, commented: “We have known for some time that a carnivore lives in the Lac Alaotra marshes, but we””ve always assumed it was a brown-tailed vontsira that is also found in the eastern rainforests. However, differences in its skull, teeth, and paws have shown that this animal is clearly a different species with adaptations to life in an aquatic environment. It is a very exciting discovery and we decided to honour our founder, the world renowned conservationist Gerald Durrell, by naming this new species after him. However, the future of the species is very uncertain because the Lac Alaotra marshes are extremely threatened by agricultural expansion, burning and invasive plants and fish. It is a highly significant site for wildlife and the resources it provides people, and Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust is working closely with local communities to ensure its sustainable use and to conserve Durrell””s vontsira and other important species.”
Article Continues -> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101011083904.htm
Tube-Nosed Bat, More Rare Species Found
A Nose for Fruit
Photograph courtesy Piotr Naskrecki, Conservation International
This tube-nosed fruit bat is just one of the roughly 200 species encountered during two scientific expeditions to Papua New Guinea in 2009—including a katydid that “aims for the eyes” and a frog that does a mean cricket impression, Conservation International announced late Tuesday.
Though seen on previous expeditions, the bat has yet to be formally documented as a new species, or even named. Like other fruit bats, though, it disperses seeds from the fruit in its diet, perhaps making the flying mammal crucial to its tropical rain forest ecosystem.
In all, the expeditions to Papua New Guinea”s Nakanai and Muller mountain ranges found 24 new species of frogs, 2 new mammals, and nearly a hundred new insects. The remote island country”s mountain ranges—which have yielded troves of new and unusual species in recent years—are accessible only by plane, boat, foot, or helicopter.
(Also see pictures of new species from Papua New Guinea”s “Lost World.”)
—Rachel Kaufman
Watching, Waiting
Photograph courtesy Stephen Richards, Conservation International
A feather-tailed opossum clings to a tree branch in Papua New Guinea”s Muller Range in September 2009. Though it has yet to be scientifically documented, the elusive species has been reported once before before, on a nearby mountain in 1985.
The possum may have been attempting to catch moths, the researchers said, as it was found near a light trap intended to lure nocturnal insects. Not much is known about the creature, though the structure of its tongue suggests a diet including nectar.
Published October 6, 2010
More pictures -> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/10/photogalleries/101006-papua-new-guinea-species-tube-nosed-bat-science-animal-pictures/
Experts baffled by ''small'' Bangladesh tigers
Roar data: Sunderbans tigers were found to weigh nearly half as much as their cousins in the region
By Ethirajan Anbarasan BBC News, Dhaka
Tigers prowling the famous mangrove forests of Bangladesh are about half the weight of other wild Bengal tigers in South Asia, a study has found.
The average weight of female tigers in the Sundarbans forests was 76.7kg (170lb), according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service research.
But other wild Bengal tigers in the region tipped the scales at 138.2 kg on average.
Researchers said this could be because Sundarbans tigers ate smaller deer.
The team believes the big cats found in the mangrove forest, which stretches from Bangladesh to India, could be among the world”s smallest tigers.
They belong to one of nine sub-species of Bengal tiger in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan.
Smaller dinner
Researchers from the University of Minnesota and the Bangladesh Forest Department – who carried out the study for the US Fish and Wildlife Service – weighed three Sundarbans tigers.
Two of the animals were captured and sedated, but the other one had been killed by villagers.
Adam Barlow, one of the authors of the research, said they do not know why the Sundarbans tigers are so small.
“This could be related to the small size of deer available to tigers in the Sundarbans, compared to the larger deer and other prey available to tigers in other parts,” he said.
It is estimated that between 300 and 500 Bengal tigers live in the Bangladesh side of the Sundarbans alone.
They are isolated from the next tiger population by a distance of up to 300km (190 miles).
Tigers are an endangered species. There are only about 3,500 left in the wild worldwide – less than one third of them breeding females.
Patagonia''s Pristine Wild Rivers Threatened by Dams
The Aysén region of Chilean Patagonia is threatened by a plan to build five dams on the Baker and the Pascua rivers – two of the wildest most pristine rivers on the planet. The Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition (Rave), an initiative of the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP), set up to address the challenges of modern conservation, visited the area in February this year to assess what impact the dams would have on the surrounding area and its way of life.
The expedition team included the Pulitzer prize winner and National Geographic photographer Jack Dykinga and twice World Press winner and Prince”s Rainforest Project award winner Daniel Beltra.
The three dams on the Pascua River (below) would create artificial lakes flooding more than 1,600 hectares (about 4,000 acres). Flooded lands would include some of the world’s rarest forest types, including the critically endangered plants. Other rare species that would be harmed by the Pascua dams include the torrent duck and the white-bellied seedsnipe.
The water supplying 80 per cent of the world”s population is exposed to “high levels of threat,” according to a study that surveys the status of rivers throughout the world, and looks at their effects on both humans and the ecosystem at large.
Writing in this week”s Nature (vol 467, p 555), Charles Vorosmarty of the City College of New York and colleagues presented data on factors affecting water security, from dams that reduce river flow in Patagonia, for example, to the pollution and destruction of wetlands.
They produced two maps showing the levels of threat to humans and to ecosystems that rely on rivers. The maps are virtually identical, with the continental US, Europe and south-east Asia facing the greatest threats, to both humans and the wider ecosystem.
Via The Guardian
Octopus Kills Shark (VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/13/octopus-kills-shark-video_n_575117.html
What happens when you put a huge octopus in the same aquarium tank as a large shark? Let’s just say things don’t turn out well for the shark!
Glowing Sea Beasts: Photos Shed Light on Bioluminescence
Illuminating Bioluminescence
Image courtesy Edith Widder, ORCA
Naturally produced light-emitting chemicals offer undersea advantages to (clockwise from top left)
a pelagic worm, squid, krill, scaleless black dragonfish, and deepwater jellyfish.
Though research on bioluminescence recently garnered a Nobel Prize, the phenomenon is still poorly understood, according to a new paper reviewing recent discoveries about bioluminescence’s benefits, its evolution, and the surprising diversity of ways plants and animals generate glowing substances.
(Also see “Glowing Animals: Pictures of Beasts Shining for Science.”)
Eighty percent of all creatures known to produce their own light live in the ocean, according to the report, published today in the journal Science.
“There are no hiding places in the open ocean, so a lot of animals have evolved this trick of hiding in the dark depths during the day and coming up to eat at the surface water under the cover of darkness,” said Edith Widder, a marine biologist at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association in Fort Pierce, Florida.
“This means they spend most of their lives in near darkness,” she said. “And bioluminescence is very useful in that kind of environment”—be it for finding food and mates, thwarting predators, or simply lighting the way.
—Ker Than
Greenpeace lauds Cisco on climate, chides Google
Despite Google’s lobbying on clean-energy policy and investments in renewable energy, it was Cisco and Ericsson who received Greenpeace’s top marks in its ranking of computing vendors’ activity on climate change.
The environmental watchdog group released its annual Cool IT Leaderboard on Thursday, which judges large IT and consumer electronics companies on a range of criteria related to climate change, including efforts to lower their environmental footprints and commercial efforts in energy and efficiency.
This year, Greenpeace placed Cisco at the top of the list because of its move into building energy management and the smart grid, technologies that can boost renewable energy use and efficiency.
Ericsson and Fujitsu scored well for developing methods for measuring the environmental impact of IT and for setting credible carbon reduction estimates for its customers.
Google, meanwhile, was marked down for not reporting its internal greenhouse gas emissions, which most companies surveyed do. In response, a Google representative on Wednesday said that it doesn’t disclose information on the size of its operations for competitive reasons.
Google’s data centers run efficiency, consuming about half the power as typical data centers by optimizing the chip, power pack design, and building cooling. “We are…dedicated to minimizing our footprint; it makes business and environmental sense for us to do so,” the representative said.
Overall, Greenpeace is pressuring IT and communications companies to get involved in energy policy, which is historically not been an activity of tech companies. As it did in last year’s Cool IT Leaderborad, Greenpeace is also prodding IT companies to take advantage of the commercial possibilities in lowering greenhouse gas emissions, as does IBM’s Smart Planet initiative. Greenpeace estimates that applying IT to transportation, buildings, and power generation can result in 15 percent emissions reduction over the next 10 years.
“The company bottom line coupled with the environmental bottom line, the need to curb a growing greenhouse gas emissions, should send the IT industry to the front lines in the battle for a clean energy economy,” said Greenpeace campaigner Casey Harrell in a statement. “The sector needs to step up its policy advocacy now.”
For Earth Day last week, Greenpeace organized a panel on IT and climate change which was hosted by Cisco and had representatives from Cisco, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20003584-54.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0
New Monitor Lizard Discovered in Indonesia
This is Varanus obor, the Sago monitor, or Torch monitor lizard. (Credit: Valter Weijola)
A newly discovered species of monitor lizard, a close relative of the Komodo dragon, was reported in the journal Zootaxa by a professor at UC Santa Barbara and a researcher from Finland.
Sam Sweet, a professor in the department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at UCSB, and Valter Weijola, a graduate student at Abo Akademi University in Turku, Finland, are the first to describe the distinctive lizard, which lives in the Moluccan islands of east Indonesia. Sweet is an authority on monitor lizard biology.
The scientific name of this lizard is Varanus obor; its popular names are Torch monitor and Sago monitor. It’s called Torch monitor because of its bright orange head with a glossy black body. Obor means torch in Indonesian. It is a close relative of the fruit-eating monitor lizard recently reported from the Philippines. The Torch monitor can grow to nearly four feet in length, and thrives on a diet of small animals and carrion.
The Torch monitor exists only on the small island of Sanana in the western Moluccan islands. A unique aspect of this geographical region is the lack of mammalian predators, which may have given reptiles the space to evolve as the top terrestrial predators and scavengers. Several million years ago, this island was situated near New Guinea, and it is possible that the lizard lives on as a relic from that period. It is the only black monitor in its lineage, and the only monitor species anywhere that has evolved red pigmentation.
Sweet describes an important biological context: “East of Wallace’s Line — the boundary between Asian and Australian domains — there are no native carnivorous mammals, and monitor lizards fill that role. There are more species there, doing more different things ecologically than in Africa or South and Southeast Asia, where competition and predation by mammals tend to keep monitor lizards down. East of Wallace’s Line in Indonesia, New Guinea, and Australia, monitor lizards are on the top of the heap. It emphasizes again how little we know about some tropical regions, to find an animal so strikingly colored and so large only last year.”
Weijola discovered the lizard last spring, and returned with Sweet in late 2009 for five weeks to do studies and take photographs of the animal. The Torch monitor is most common in the coastal sago palm swamps and belongs to the mangrove monitor, V. indicus group.
Story Source:
Adapted from materials provided by University of California – Santa Barbara, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Journal Reference:
- Valter S-Å Weijola, Samuel S. Sweet. A new melanistic species of monitor lizard (Reptilia: Squamata: Varanidae) from Sanana Island, Indonesia. Zootaxa, 2010; 2434: 17-32
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100426182024.htm
Elephants Have Word for ‘Bee-Ware’
Elephants run from bee sounds making ‘bee rumble’. (Credit: OU/Lucy King)
For the first time elephants have been found to produce an alarm call associated with the threat of bees, and have been shown to retreat when a recording of the call is played even when there are no bees around.
A team of scientists from Oxford University, Save the Elephants, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom, made the discovery as part of an ongoing study of elephants in Kenya. They report their results in the journal PLoS One.
‘In our experiments we played the sound of angry bees to elephant families and studied their reaction,’ said Lucy King of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology and charity Save the Elephants, who led the research. ‘Importantly we discovered elephants not only flee from the buzzing sound but make a unique ‘rumbling’ call as well as shaking their heads.’
The team then looked to isolate the specific acoustic qualities associated with this rumbling call and played the sounds back to the elephants to confirm that the recorded call triggered the elephants’ decision to flee even when there was no buzzing and no sign of any bees.
‘We tested this hypothesis using both an original recording of the call, a recording identical to this but with the frequency shifted so it resembled a typical response to white noise, and another elephant rumble as a control,’ said King. ‘The results were dramatic: six out of ten elephant families fled from the loud speaker when we played the ‘bee rumble’ compared to just two when we played a control rumble and one with the frequency-shifted call. Moreover, we also found that the elephants moved away much further when they heard the ‘bee’ alarm call than the other rumbles.’
The researchers believe such calls may be an emotional response to a threat, a way to coordinate group movements and warn nearby elephants — or even a way of teaching inexperienced and vulnerable young elephants to beware. Further work is needed to confirm whether the rumble call is used for other kinds of threats, not just bees.
‘The calls also give tantalising clues that elephants may produce different sounds in the same way that humans produce different vowels, by altering the position of their tongues and lips,’ said Dr Joseph Soltis of Disney’s Animal Kingdom. ‘It’s even possible that, rather like with human language, this enables them to give superficially similar-sounding calls very different meanings.’
Earlier Oxford University research found that elephants avoid bee hives in the wild and will also flee from the recorded sound of angry bees. In 2009 a pilot study led by King showed that a fence made out of beehives wired together significantly reduced crop raids by elephants. The team hopes that the new findings could help develop new ways to defuse potential conflicts between humans and elephants.
Despite their thick hides adult elephants can be stung around their eyes or up their trunks, whilst calves could potentially be killed by a swarm of stinging bees as they have yet to develop this thick protective skin.
Story Source:
Adapted from materials provided by University of Oxford.
Journal Reference:
- Lucy E. King, Joseph Soltis, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Anne Savage, Fritz Vollrath, Karen McComb. Bee Threat Elicits Alarm Call in African Elephants. PLoS ONE, 2010; 5 (4): e10346 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010346
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100427093106.htm
