‘Poachers have shot the last two white rhinos in Zambia, killing one and wounding the other, in a night operation at the Mosi-Oa-Tunya national park in Livingstone, an official said today.
The shooting of the two endangered animals in a heavily-guarded zoological park near Victoria Falls in Zambia’s tourist resort town of Livingstone took place last week.
“I can confirm that one of the white rhinos was shot dead by suspected poachers. The other one was wounded and is undergoing treatment,” said Maureen Mwape, spokesperson of the Zambia Wildlife Authority, which would be investigating the shooting.
The dead female rhino’s horn was apparently removed.’
‘Telling apart relatives from strangers is crucial in many animal species, helping them to share precious resources or avoid inbreeding. Now it seems that plants can perform the same trick.
Plants have already been shown to compete with others — of their own kind or of another species — when sharing space. For example, they sometimes choose to invest more energy in sprouting roots when they have nearby competition for water and nutrients.
Now, Susan Dudley and Amanda File of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, have shown that plants grown alongside unrelated neighbours are more competitive than those growing with their siblings — ploughing more energy into growing roots when their neighbours don’t share their genetic stock.’
‘A 45-tonne bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt – more than a century ago.
Embedded deep under its blubber was a 13-centimetre arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.
“No other finding has been this precise,” said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts.
Calculating a whale’s age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It is rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.’
‘More than a million animals, including elephants, buffaloes, ostriches, lions, giraffes and a rare type of stork, have been unexpectedly seen living and migrating across Southern Sudan, where no surveys of wildlife had been conducted for the past 25 years due to civil war in the region.
Decades of war wrought significant damage to the region, along with excessive hunting, desertification of the land and periodic droughts, so wildlife numbers were declining in the stricken country. Based on observations in other war-torn nations, conservationists thought the wildlife in Southern Sudan would be wiped out, but it wasn’t.
Officials told scientists they had seen herds of animals in the region.
“Although we were telling people that wildlife was still present in southern Sudan, nobody believed us,” said Maj. Gen. Alfred Akwoch, undersecretary of the Ministry of the Environment, Wildlife Conservation and Tourism for the government of Southern Sudan.’
‘Contrary to the conventional wisdom, scientists have found that logging big dead trees after a wildfire and planting young ones makes future fires worse, at least for the first 10 or 20 years while the young trees create a volatile new source of fuel.
The findings by scientists from the U.S. Forest Service and Oregon State University raise questions about the long-standing practice of salvage logging on national forests at a time when global warming is expected to increase the size and numbers of wildfires and the annual cost of fighting them is running around $1 billion. [..]
They suggested that the large stands of closely packed young trees created by replanting are a much more volatile source of fuel for decades to come than the large dead trees that are cut down and hauled away in salvage logging operations.’
‘It was once a gently flowing river, where fishermen cast their nets, sea birds came to feed and natural beauty left visitors spellbound.
Villagers collected water for their simple homes and rice paddies thrived on its irrigation channels.
Today, the Citarum is a river in crisis, choked by the domestic waste of nine million people and thick with the cast-off from hundreds of factories.
So dense is the carpet of refuse that the tiny wooden fishing craft which float through it are the only clue to the presence of water.’
‘Nuclear power stations will be banned in Western Australia by legislation aimed at thwarting the prime minister’s nuclear push, Premier Alan Carpenter says.
Mr Carpenter announced the new legislation at the WA Labor Party state conference.
The legislation will prohibit the construction or operation of a nuclear facility, the transportation of certain material to a nuclear facility site and the connection of nuclear generation works to electricity transmission or distribution systems.
Mr Carpenter said new technology was the answer to climate change challenges not nuclear power.’
‘China unveiled its first national program aimed at combating global warming on Monday, but it’s modest in scope and offers few firm targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The 62-page report said China is taking steps toward improving energy efficiency over 2005 levels by as much as 20 per cent by the year 2010. It said a top priority was to tackle China’s own environmental problems.
China’s top economic planner said the country will not submit to any outside targets and won’t let its industrial development be hampered by any fight in the West against global warming.
“The consequences of restricting the development of developing nations will be much more serious than the consequences of global warming,” said Ma Kai, the minister heading the National Development and Reform Commission.’
‘A grim-faced George AuClair Jr. wandered his 25-acre patch of desert looking every inch the broken man.
“I’m ashamed of what happened here, but you can’t lie about it,” said the Torres Martinez tribal member. “You have to own up when you do wrong.”
Not far away, bulldozers piled up mountains of junk from AuClair’s illegal dump, a dump so toxic it has been declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency. He now faces millions of dollars in fines. [..]
AuClair’s biggest mistake was burning thousands of toxic wooden grape stakes.
“How could we have known grape stakes were treated with arsenic and chromium?” he asked. “There was no sign saying, ‘This is hazardous to your health.’ ”
And he insists his own health wasn’t damaged.
“I lost my hair, but I think that was a thyroid problem,” he said, “and I get headaches, but that could be anything.”‘
‘It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.
How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human–and planetary–health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.’
‘One year on, the torrent of mud gushing out of a drilling site on Java island shows no signs of abating.
Toll roads, railway tracks and factories have been submerged and 15,000 people have fled from their homes since May last year when mud began flowing from a “mud volcano” following an oil-drilling accident in Sidoarjo, an industrial suburb near provincial capital Surabaya.
The mud volcano has put an area four times the size of Monaco under hot mud.
An embankment has been built in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the mudflow.’
Followup to Indonesia plans new tactic to curb massive mud flow.
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‘Works to reopen the main road between Langholm and Lockerbie have been delayed by badgers.
The B7068 was closed before Christmas after a landslide at Scroggs Bridge and lengthy diversions put in place.
A council spokesman confirmed that work had ground to halt after a badger sett was found under the route of the works. [..]
“I appreciate that work was delayed because of the discovery of a badgers’ sett and land ownership issues,” he said.
“But from an initial indication that the road would be closed for weeks it has now been months and currently there is no end date in sight. [..]”‘
‘A 5-year-old panda who last year became the first to be released into the wild after being bred in captivity has died, China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency said Thursday.
The body of Xiang Xiang was found Feb. 19 in the forests of Sichuan province in China’s southwest, Xinhua said. He survived less than a year in the wild after nearly three years of training in survival techniques and defense tactics.
Xiang Xiang, who may have fallen from a high place while fighting with wild pandas, died of serious internal injuries, the report said, citing the Wolong Giant Panda Research Center in Sichuan.’
‘The Bush administration. You know ’em, you… well, love isn’t exactly the right emotion.
Showing that there is no place safe from idiocy, here’s an absolutely astronomically stupid comment from NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. A statement so stupid, it makes the invasion of Iraq and the management of Katrina look like genius.
Michael Griffin NASA Administrator has told America’s National Public Radio that while he has no doubt a trend of global warming exists “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.”‘
‘They live hundreds of feet below the sea. A formidable predator that can rip its prey to pieces.
The giant Humboldt squid have returned to the waters of Southern California, and they’re bigger and more plentiful than ever.
Fishermen are thankful, but biologists are worried.
“I have nearly a thousand dives with these animals and I have been either tested or full out attacked about 80 percent of the time,” Scott Cassell said. [..]
“I have felt my life was in danger several times with the squid, but knowing that the cable and the armor I was pretty much impervious to the damage,” Cassell said.
But Cassell, like other marine experts, says something is not right.’
‘In 1934, top Nazi party official Hermann Goering received a seemingly mundane request from the Reich Forestry Service. A fur farm was seeking permission to release a batch of exotic bushy-tailed critters into the wild to “enrich the local fauna” and give bored hunters something new to shoot at.
Goering approved the request and unwittingly uncorked an ecological disaster that is still spreading across Europe. The imported North American species, Procyon lotor, or the common raccoon, quickly took a liking to the forests of central Germany. Encountering no natural predators — and with hunters increasingly called away by World War II — the woodland creatures multiplied and have stymied all attempts to prevent them from overtaking the continent.
Today, as many as 1 million raccoons are estimated to live in Germany, and their numbers are steadily increasing. In 2005, hunters and speeding cars killed 10 times as many raccoons as a decade earlier, according to official statistics.’
‘Tony Blair has reiterated his backing for nuclear power as the government prepares to unveil its energy strategy.
Plans to build more nuclear power stations are expected to be among the proposals in the Energy White Paper.
An expansion of energy efficiency and renewable sources such as tide and wind power will also be detailed.
The PM says nuclear power can “underpin the security of our energy supply” but opponents say it is dangerous and will reduce investment in renewable sources.’
‘An artificial lake in El Salvador brimming with sewage and industrial waste is mystifying scientists by attracting thousands of migratory and sea birds.
Built in 1974 to drive El Salvador’s biggest hydroelectric project, the 33,360-acre (13,500- hectare) Cerron Grande reservoir collects some 3,800 metric tons of excrement each year from the sewage pipes, as well as factory run-off and traces of heavy metals like chromium and lead, the government estimates.
So scientists are puzzling over the fact that some 150,000 seabirds from more than 130 species have chosen to make the reservoir their home. At least 90 of the species are migratory birds arriving from as far away as Alaska.’
‘The world is now on track to experience more catastrophic damages from climate change than in the worst-case scenario forecast by international experts, scientists have warned.
The research, published in a prestigious US science journal, shows that between 2000 and 2004 the rate of increase in global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels was three times greater than in the 1990s. [..]
The climbing emissions mean that average global temperatures are now on track to rise by more than four degrees this century – enough to thaw vast areas of arctic permafrost and leave about 3 billion people suffering from water shortages, including in Australia.’
‘Wildlife officials in Florida are expected to announce Monday that they want to make it illegal for developers to entomb tortoises.
Recently, Local 6 reported how it is legal to bury tortoises alive as long as construction crews have the proper permit. [..]
“For a price tag of a quarter million dollars, the Expressway Authority legally began to pave over the only openings to the tortoises’ burrows — essentially burying them alive,” Diaz said.
“They are immobilized and can’t get out of their burrow,” a wildlife official said. “It can take up to a year to die one biologist has told us. It can take that long before they die of suffocation, dehydration or starvation.” [..]
“Just because you can bury alive gopher tortoises, doesn’t necessarily mean you should,” a commissioner told Local 6 News.’
‘He has flippers instead of feet — and certainly no sneakers or hiking boots. But that didn’t stop a sea lion from joining schoolchildren on a walk-a-thon.
The marine mammal apparently noticed children doing laps Friday morning around a course they had set up at the Marin Country Day School next to the shores of the San Francisco Bay. The 185-pound Steller sea lion waddled ashore, shocking students and teachers.
“He did a whole lap,” said Kelly Watson, director of constituent relations and web communications at the private school.’
‘A “disoriented” Magellanic penguin swam ashore on Peru’s coast, some 3,100 miles north of his home in the frigid waters of southern Chile.
The penguin got lost while looking for food, Peru’s National Resource Institute was quoted as saying in El Comercio newspaper Saturday.
“It seems he was disoriented and got lost in the sea due to the different ocean currents,” said Wilder Canales, who heads the National Paracas Reserve in southern Peru. “In his endless search for food, he casually climbed up on our shores, something that has never happened before.”‘
‘Since the fluid is a continuous medium, a traveling disturbance will result. In the earth’s atmosphere, gravity waves are important for transferring momentum from the troposphere to the mesosphere. Gravity waves are generated in the troposphere by frontal systems or by airflow over mountains. At first waves propagate through the atmosphere without affecting its mean velocity. But as the waves reach more rarefied air at higher altitudes, their amplitude increases, and nonlinear effects cause the waves to break, transferring their momentum to the mean flow.’
(1.0meg Flash video)
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‘Untreated sewage from factory discharges and urban centres now accounts for 10 per cent of the Yellow River’s flow, a prominent Chinese group says.
The volume of waste water flowing into the river, China’s second longest, doubled from 2 billion tonnes to 4.3 billion between 1980 and 2005, Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing-based NGO, told the China Daily.
“It now accounts for about one-tenth of its total volume,” Ma said.
The 5,464-km river supplies water to more than 150 million people and irrigates 15 per cent of the country’s farmland, but has lost a third of its fish species and is 70 per cent unfit for drinking or swimming, state media have reported.’
‘Singer Sheryl Crow has said a ban on using too much toilet paper should be introduced to help the environment.
Crow has suggested using “only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required”.
The 45-year-old, who made the comments on her website, has just toured the US on a biodiesel-powered bus to raise awareness about climate change.’
‘Birds in Chernobyl choose to nest in sites with lower levels of background radioactivity, researchers discover, but how they can tell remains a mystery.
Anders Møller at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, and Tim Mousseau at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, US, erected more than 200 nest boxes in the Red Forest, about 3 kilometres away from the nuclear reactor that exploded in 1986.
Using these artificial nests, they studied at the nesting habits of two species of birds – the great tit Parus major and the pied flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca – between 2002 and 2003.’
‘Auckland has come up with a novel plan for getting rid of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of human waste – use it to fill one of its many extinct volcanos, then turn it into a regional park.
Local authority-owned Watercare Services announced this week that it had signed a $25 million, 30-year deal with Puketutu Island’s owners to dump the 61 tonnes of biosolids – cleaned, treated and dried human waste – produced by its Mangere treatment plant each week.
The waste would be dumped on a side of the volcanic island that had been extensively quarried in the past 50 years. The island’s original volcanic cone formation could also be rebuilt using the biosolids, subject to public opinion, spokesman Clive Nelson said. [..]
Auckland University vulcanologist Ian Smith said Aucklanders need not be concerned that they would be showered in “biosolids” in the event of an eruption.’
‘The stars of a major Live 8-style concert to raise awareness of climate change have been condemned as hypocrites for failing to lead environmentally friendly lives themselves. [..]
“Madonna’s Confessions tour produced 440 tonnes of CO2 in four months of last year. And that was just the flights between the countries, not taking into account the truckloads of equipment needed, the power to stage such a show and the transport of all the thousands of fans getting to the gigs.
“The Red Hot Chili Peppers produced 220 tonnes of CO2 with their private jet alone over six months on their last world tour which was 42 dates.
“The average a British person produces is 10 tonnes a year,” said John Buckley, managing director-of CarbonFootprint.com.’
This is a large picture of a whale.
‘A massive, mysterious whirlpool of cold water has developed off the coast of Sydney, forcing the sea surface to fall almost 1m and ocean currents to change course.
Dubbed a sea “monster” by CSIRO oceanographers, the huge body of water stretches almost 200km across and plunges 1000m towards the ocean floor. Its centre sits just 100km off the coast of Sydney and could stay there for months.
Scientists are baffled by the powerful cold-water eddy, which is invisible to the human eye but can be tracked through satellite images.
At its centre the sea level has dropped by 70cm, while the water 400m below the surface is 6C colder than normal at that depth.’
