Articles by "Animal"
Twitter Facebook

A new breed of sheep debuting at the New Zealand Agricultural Show in Christchurch is proving very popular with the crowds.

The Swiss Valais Blacknose, which are considered to be the "the cutest sheep in the world," have a black head and black knees, and a fluffy white fleece.

Wairarapa farmer Christine Reed, along with several business partners formed Valais Blacknose NZ and imported the breed as embryos from the UK about a year and a half ago.

Ms Reed said before the venture she had never heard of the breed but having bred dorper sheep for a decade, she googled Valais Blacknose sheep to find the cutest sheep in the world peeking back.
"If you were to imagine a poodle that was in fact a sheep ... they are the cutest thing on four legs," she said.

Only a handful of farmers in New Zealand are breeding the Valais Blacknose and Ms Reed said they were now working on building up their flock.

"We were lucky enough to work with some of the best breeders in the UK to get embryos into New Zealand," she said.
"By the time we lamb this season we will have about 50 animals in the two flocks," she said.Ms Reed said they intended to sell the sheep to lifestyle block owners and other farmers who are looking to have something in their paddocks that has a bit of wow factor to it and was good with kids."What we were really astounded by, when we got them on the ground, was their personalities, they're just like dogs, they're actually not like a sheep at all ... so they are very very inquisitive, very friendly ... the lambs will come up to you in the the paddock and climb all over you," she said.
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/46621
Join Geezgo for free. Use Geezgo's end-to-end encrypted Chat with your Closenets (friends, relatives, colleague etc) in personalized ways.>>
November 14, 2018
Twitter Facebook

Meet Zippy, Britain's second donkey, zebra crossbreed 'zonkey'

What do you get when you cross a zebra and a donkey? A 'zonkey', of course.

The crossbreed is known to be rare, but a UK farm has welcomed one of their own - a male zonkey called Zippy.

The animal was born last month at owner Kristine Turner's 55-acre farm in South Barrow, Somerset, The Independent reports. Zippy joins Britain's only other known zonkey, Zambi, who lives on a donkey sanctuary in Shropshire.

"Last month I opened my bedroom curtains, which look onto the farm, and I just saw this little foal sitting up staring my way," Ms Turner told The Independent, recalling Zippy's surprise birth. She says she wasn't even aware his mother was pregnant.

Zippy is the offspring of six-year-old zebra Ziggy, his mother, who shares a field with nine donkeys, including Zippy's father, Rag. Ziggy was taken to the farm after she was purchased for NZ$19,600 from a farm in Germany, the Mirror reports.

"Ziggy has always been a bit porky so I didn't notice she was getting any bigger," said Ms Turner. "He seemed like a right little character and has had a personality from day one."

The young zonkey is distinctively a crossbreed - he has the torso of a donkey but has zebra stripes running down his legs. He's well-protected by his mother, says Ms Turner: "He's never out of her sight."

She says the birth of Zippy is a "miracle".

The most well-known donkey crossbreed are mules - the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. A hinny is the rarer offspring of a female donkey and a male horse.
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/45532
Join Geezgo for free. Use Geezgo's end-to-end encrypted Chat with your Closenets (friends, relatives, colleague etc) in personalized ways.>>
November 06, 2018
Twitter Facebook

Rolling up the sleeves of her immaculate white habit, Sister Ofelia Morales Francisco plunges her hands into an aquarium, grabs a large, slimy salamander and lifts it dripping into the air.

The nun is part of a team at a Dominican convent in Mexico that is fighting to save the Lake Patzcuaro salamander, a critically endangered species.

Revered as a god by the indigenous Purepecha people and keenly studied by scientists, the salamander -- known for its stunning ability to regenerate its body parts -- is found in the wild in only one place: the lake near the Convent of Our Immaculate Lady of Health, in the western town of Patzcuaro.

But the lake is badly polluted, and that is where Morales and her sisters come in.

They have launched a program to raise the salamanders in captivity, and hope their efforts will one day help the species -- Ambystoma dumerilii -- make a comeback in the wild.

It is a job that has required the nuns to step outside their routine of charity and prayer, and get their hands dirty in a field they knew little about at first.


AFP / ENRIQUE CASTRO
The endangered dark green Lake Patzcuaro salamanders are distinguished by a flowing mane of gills around their heads
That meant, for example, mastering the reproductive habits of the dark green salamanders, which are distinguished by a flowing mane of gills around their heads.

"The best way (to get them to copulate) is by mating a male with three females," says Morales, who has been working on the project for 18 years.

Then comes an even trickier task.

"We have to raise the offspring very carefully, because they try to eat each other," she told AFP.

- Syrups and soups -


AFP / ENRIQUE CASTRO
Sisters Ofelia Morales Francisco (L) and Rosa Cortez are shown next to a bottle of achoque (Ambystoma dumerilii) syrup produced by their convent -- the elixir is reputed to cure anemia and chest infections and sells for about $10 a bottle
The nuns of Our Immaculate Lady of Health did not start out trying to save the salamanders, which are known locally as "achoques."

In fact, they started out by killing them.

More than a century ago, the convent began cooking the salamanders into a syrup that is reputed to cure anemia and chest infections.

They likely borrowed the idea from the Purepecha, who worshipped the salamander as the twin brother of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl and traditionally served it up in a soup.

The nuns' syrup sold so well it became the convent's main source of income.

So when the salamanders started to become scarce because of untreated sewage, invasive carp and over-exploitation of the lake, the nuns realized their convent's survival was at stake as well.


AFP / ENRIQUE CASTRO
Mexico's Lake Patzcuaro is the only place in the wild where the endangered Ambystoma dumerilii salamander is found, and pollution has led the nuns to breed the species in captivity
They invited a priest who also happened to be a trained biologist to teach them all about the achoque.

Today, they have some 300 salamanders in their care -- the maximum their two rooms of aquariums can hold.

It is more than enough to keep making their syrup, which sells for 200 pesos (about $10) a bottle, and give specimens to universities for research.

Occasionally, a salamander still ends up in the nuns' own cooking pot.

"They make delicious soup," said Morales.

- Regenerative powers -

The achoque is a close relation of the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), another endangered salamander found only in the Xochimilco lake system in Mexico City.

Both species are known for their capacity to regenerate their cells. If one loses a tail, it quickly grows another, with no scar tissue.

They have the largest amount of DNA of any known species.


AFP / ENRIQUE CASTRO
A pair of Ambystoma dumerilii salamanders, popularly known as achoques, are shown in their home at the convent
That has made both salamanders a subject of fascination for scientists hoping to learn lessons that could apply to humans.

However, since the 1980s, the achoque's numbers have plunged "dramatically," said Maria Esther Quintero, who works on protecting endangered species for Mexico's National Commission on Biodiversity.

"There are very, very few achoques left in the wild," she told AFP.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature warns the Lake Patzcuaro salamander "is believed to be in very serious decline, and might be close to extinction."

The nuns are hoping their colony can help reverse that trend.

"We are trying to rescue this species to do justice for Mother Nature," said Sister Maria del Carmen Perez, another of the three nuns who staff the aquarium.

"If we did nothing, it was going to vanish."

But for now, Lake Patzcuaro is too polluted to reintroduce them there.

Quintero said the immediate goal of Mexican officials is to clear invasive species from at least the northern part of the lake.

If that happens, perhaps the achoque can be returned to the waters where, according to Purepecha legend, it hid at the dawn of time to avoid being eaten.
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/38995

Join Geezgo for free. Use Geezgo's end-to-end encrypted Chat with your Closenets (friends, relatives, colleague etc) in personalized ways.>>
September 13, 2018
Twitter Facebook

A surprised witness at a farm in Brazil captured video of an animal with an unusual feature -- a cow with three horns.

The video shows the cow wandering amid its two-horned compatriots in a pen at a Brazilian farm.

The cow's third horn is located directly in the middle of its forehead, like a unicorn's spike.



Continue Reading
It was unclear whether the horn was a genetic mutation passed down from one of its parents.
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/38993
Join Geezgo for free. Use Geezgo's end-to-end encrypted Chat with your Closenets (friends, relatives, colleague etc) in personalized ways.>>
September 13, 2018
Twitter Facebook

A US woman has rescued a pack of dogs who were set to be killed and eaten at a dog meat festival in China.


North Carolina woman Valerie Curran raised US$20,000 (NZ$29,600) to travel to China and volunteer at an animal shelter.

While she was there, she rescued 25 dogs - seven of which travelled with her back to the US.

"Animals are so important to us. They are on the front lines with our military, they do search and rescue, and there are therapy dogs."

If not for the animal welfare centre where Ms Curran volunteered, those dogs would have been tortured and eaten in the annual Yulin Dog Meat Festival.

"They just have a very different outlook on animals. The more they cause pain and suffering, they feel like the better the meat tastes.

"When I learned about that I was determined to get involved and figure out a way to help."

Ms Curran now works with the global animal rescue group No Dogs Left Behind in emergency response and rehoming rescued dogs.

"These dogs are an opportunity to make others aware about the situation going on. So when they walk the streets these dogs are ambassadors and it would be wonderful if those families utilise that."

Three of the dogs she rescued already have new homes.

https://www.geezgo.com/sps/28734
June 30, 2018
Twitter Facebook

A North Carolina woman whose kids left some doughnuts in the garage captured video of the snacks being stolen by a not-so-sneaky thief -- a black bear.



The video shows the bear feasting on a box of doughnuts that had been left inside the garage of the Hendersonville home with the door left open.

"When your kids get doughnuts and decide not to put them up," the woman says while narrating the bear's snack.

"My teenagers left a box of Ingles donuts in the garage," the woman wrote online.

She said it did not take long for the bear to sniff out the pastries.


"Approximately four minutes after they arrived home, the bear walked into the garage," she wrote. "He found the donuts in the grocery bag, got them out of the bag and carried the box to the door and proceeded to eat them. Three bear claws and one kurler. Once he finished, he wandered back into the woods by our house."
By Ben Hooper
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/28704
June 30, 2018
Twitter Facebook

"Long-term interactions with humans shaped orangutans in some pretty profound ways," researcher Stephanie Spehar said.

For thousands of years, the evolution of orangutans has been influenced by humans, according to a new study.

"It was often assumed that environmental factors like fruit availability were primarily responsible for most features of modern-day orangutans, such as the fact that they usually live at low densities and have a restricted geographic distribution," Stephanie Spehar, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, said in a news release.

However, fossil evidence of the orangutan lineages of Southeast Asia suggest the apes began adapting to life alongside humans as early as 70,000 years ago.

"Our synthesis of fossil, archeological, genetic and behavioral evidence indicates that long-term interactions with humans shaped orangutans in some pretty profound ways," Spehar said.

Fossils collected in China, Thailand and Vietnam suggest the apes were more widespread and lived in denser populations. These early lineages likely also adapted to a wider range of habitats.

Analysis of the fossil timeline showed shifts in distribution and population dynamics among early orangutan lineages correspond with changes in human behavior. Scientists found a sharp reduction in the ape's numbers followed the emergence of projectile weapons around 20,000 years ago.

"It suggests that Paleolithic humans were probably hunting orangutans regularly -- and as orangutans reproduce very slowly, it doesn't take much to put a dent in their populations," Spehar said.

The fossil and genetic analysis suggests the orangutan nearly suffered the fate of the woolly mammoth and other megafauna, and that a shift in behavior may have enabled ape's survival.

"Surviving orangutans probably modified their behavior to counter this threat, perhaps retreating further into the thickest forests to avoid human hunters," researchers wrote in The Conversation.

The latest findings, published this week in the journal Science Advances, suggest humans have been underestimating the orangutan's adaptability. For example, recent camera trap surveys suggest the apes, thought to be strictly arboreal, spend a surprising amount of time walking around on the ground.

Researchers say more work must be done to understand whether orangutans can thrive in different kinds human-altered habitats. Some studies have shown the apes can maintain healthy populations on oil palm plantations and in selectively-logged forests.

There may be unique conservation opportunities for orangutans that humans are currently ignoring.

"This offers hope," said Marc Ancrenaz, director of French conservation group Hutan. "If we humans manage things correctly, there can be room for the orangutan in the Anthropocene."
June 29, 2018
Twitter Facebook

Alaska biologists spent Friday trying to track a brown bear they say killed a hiker and mauled a second man who went searching for him.


The biologists set traps in the woods this week, but still hadn't located the animal by early Friday.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game officials collected the bear's DNA from a leg wound to Paul Vasquez, who was attacked as he searched for missing hiker Michael Soltis.

Soltis' body was later found on a heavily wooded trail. The avid hiker had been missing since Tuesday night, officials said.

The cause of Soltis' death is not yet known, but authorities believe he was killed by the bear.

Wildlife officials say the bear will be shot when it's found, and are warning people to stay away from trails in the South Fork and Symphony Lake areas, about 15 miles east of downtown Anchorage.

About 95 percent of the entire United States brown bear population is located in Alaska. The animals are nocturnal and are typically most active in the morning and early evening hours.
By Susan McFarland


https://www.geezgo.com/sps/27989
June 23, 2018
Twitter Facebook

The lions appeared healthy but a little distressed by the long journey, Jan Creamer, the president of Animal Defenders International (ADI), an animal rights charity that organised the flight, told reporters.

An African lion in a cage arrives at the OR Tambo International Airport on Apr 30, 2016 in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo: AFP)
JOHANNESBURG: The roaring of 33 lions rescued from circuses in Peru and Colombia echoed through Johannesburg's international airport on Saturday (Apr 30) after they arrived in their ancestral homeland for the first time.
The lions appeared healthy but a little distressed by the long journey, Jan Creamer, the president of Animal Defenders International (ADI), an animal rights charity that organised the flight, told reporters.
"They have lived a life of absolute hell. They've been beaten and they've been starved. They've been deprived of everything that makes life worth living for a lion. I believe we have brought them back to paradise, where they belong," she said.
After flying for more than 15 hours the lions were loaded onto two huge trucks which were due to drive through the night to their new home at the 5,000 hectare Emoya Big Cat Sanctuary in the north of the country.
At around dawn they will be freed into large natural enclosures in the African bush.
"The lion habitats will be steadily expanded over the coming months as the lions become familiar with their new life and are introduced to each other," said ADI.
The lions were bred in captivity and many have broken teeth or other ailments - one is almost blind, another has lost an eye and most had their claws removed - which would make it impossible for them to survive in the wild.
The lions were freed with the assistance of the authorities after the use of wild animals in circuses was outlawed in Peru and Colombia.
Twenty-four lions rescued in Peru were driven from their temporary rescue center to Lima airport to be picked up by a cargo plane that brought another nine over from Colombia before taking off for Africa.
"The lions will be in their natural habitat for the first time in their lives," Creamer said. "They should fit right into that habitat. It's the best environment for them."
At their new home, "the lions will enjoy large natural enclosures situated in pristine African bush, complete with drinking pools, platforms and toys," ADI said.
The sanctuary is already home to six rescued lions and two tigers.

- AFP/ec
April 30, 2016
Twitter Facebook





A hippopotamus prepares to use its powerful jaws to burst a whole watermelon. Screenshot: Nagasaki Bio Park/YouTubeA hippopotamus prepares to use its powerful jaws to burst a whole watermelon. Screenshot: Nagasaki Bio Park/YouTube



NAGASAKI, Japan, April 29 (UPI) -- A Japanese zoo showed off the jaw power of some real-life Hungry Hungry Hippos by demonstrating their ability to devour whole watermelons.
The video, posted to YouTube by the Nagasaki Bio Park, shows a keeper at the zoo tossing whole watermelons into the mouths of the hippopotamuses, which chomp down on the large fruits to explode them in a way that would make Gallagher's hammer envious.

One of the hippos appears able to devour the watermelon in a single bite without having to chew the smaller pieces.
"Learn how hippopotamus eat whole watermelon!" the video's description reads.
April 30, 2016
Twitter Facebook

A planeload of 33 lions rescued from abuse in Peruvian and Colombian circuses will fly to South Africa Friday in what campaigners call the largest ever airlift of big cats.

African lions born in captivity in Peru prior to being airlifted to Johannesburg. (Photo: AFP/Cris Bouroncle)
LIMA: A planeload of 33 lions rescued from abuse in Peruvian and Colombian circuses will fly to South Africa Friday in what campaigners call the largest ever airlift of big cats.
The lions, with names such as Zeus and Shakira, were freed after the use of wild animals in circuses was outlawed in Peru in 2011 and Colombia in 2013.
They have been rounded up with the help of authorities by Animal Defenders International (ADI), an animal rights charity.
"It's truly wonderful that these lions, after a lifetime of suffering and abuse in circuses, are going home to Africa," said the president of ADI, Jan Creamer.
"All of the lions when they arrive from the circuses have health problems, parasites, disease," she added.
"All of their lives they haven't had enough food, so they have long-term malnutrition problems."
In recent months spent in straw-lined cages in a refuge north of Lima, however, they have been well fed and are in generally good health, she said.
Twenty-four lions rescued in Peru will be driven from their temporary rescue center to Lima airport to be picked up by a cargo plane that is bringing another nine over from Colombia.
That contingent includes Shakira, named after the Colombian pop singer.
From one of 10 Peruvian circuses also comes "Ricardo, the one-eyed lion" and from another "Joseph, the almost-blind lion."

BACK TO PARADISE
Together, the 33 will take a 15-hour flight to South Africa in travel cages inside the plane chartered by ADI.
They will arrive on Saturday in Johannesburg where they will be housed before being sent in October to the Emoya Big Cat Sanctuary in the north of the country.
"The lions will be in their natural habitat for the first time in their lives," Creamer said. "They should fit right into that habitat. It's the best environment for them."
ADI says it is the biggest transfer of such large captive animals ever.
In the circuses the lions were ill fed and trucked around in cages, the group said. The Colombian circuses gave up the nine lions voluntarily but police had to launch raids to free the lions in Peru.
"Almost all of the rescued lions have been mutilated to remove their claws, one has lost an eye, another is almost blind, and many have smashed and broken teeth so would not survive in the wild," ADI said in a statement.
At their new home, "the lions will enjoy large natural enclosures situated in pristine African bush, complete with drinking pools, platforms and toys," it added.
"The lion habitats will be steadily expanded over the coming months as the lions become familiar with their new life and are introduced to each other."
The cost of the transfer is $10,000 per cat.
"These lions have endured hell on earth," Creamer said.
"Now they are heading home to paradise."
- AFP/jb
Planeload of 33 rescued lions to fly from Peru to S Africa
Reviewed by Kogonuso on 2:04 AM Rating:
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
April 29, 2016
Twitter Facebook

By Brooks Hays  

Birds are the evolutionary successors of the dinosaurs, but the succession was nearly not to be. New research suggests birds have seeds to thank for their modern success.

Most bird-like dinosaur species -- like their larger relatives -- died off during the extinction event that occurred roughly 66 million years ago. Several early bird species, however, survived. Why did these close relatives of feathered dinosaurs outlast their predecessors?
To answer that question, scientists first needed to understand the decline of maniraptoran dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period.
To determine whether these creatures were already in decline or were killed off abruptly, a team of scientists led by paleontologist Derek Larson analyzed 3,104 fossilized teeth from four different maniraptoran families. The fossil comprised a time span of 18 million years.
Consistent variation among the teeth fossils suggest the species enjoyed rich genetic and physiological diversity right up until the end.
"The maniraptoran dinosaurs maintained a very steady level of variation through the last 18 million years of the Cretaceous," Larson, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, said in a news release. "They abruptly became extinct just at the boundary."
Larson and his colleagues then turned their attention to the fossilized teeth of the maniraptoran lineage that produced modern birds. Working backward along the evolutionary timeline, the researchers hypothesized that the last common ancestor between the lineage of bird-like dinos and modern birds would have been toothless, beaked seed eater.
Scientists believe the asteroid apocalypse that snuffed out the dinosaurs put a serious damper on vegetation. Species that relied on leaves and flowers were out of luck, but those that could subsist on seeds had an advantage.
"There were bird-like dinosaurs with teeth up until the end of the Cretaceous, where they all died off very abruptly," Larson said. "Some groups of beaked birds may have been able to survive the extinction event because they were able to eat seeds."
The latest research was published in the journal Current Biology.
Seeds may have saved birds from extinction
Reviewed by Bizpodia on 23:31 Rating:
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
April 22, 2016
Twitter Facebook

The wallpapers, which we have to admit that are pure masterpieces, are in fact inspired by the codenames of the Ubuntu operating system, most of which are real animals.

With the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu Linux has a total of 23 releases, but at the moment of writing this article Sylvia Ritter managed to release wallpapers for only the first ten releases.
It starts with the first release, Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog), and continues with Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog), Ubuntu 15.10 (Breezy Badger), Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake), Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), and Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).
You'll also find a special wide-screen version for the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron), as well as phone wallpapers for the Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).
We have attached them below for your viewing pleasure, but we strongly recommend that you visit the artist's Deviantart page for the full version, as well as if you want to keep an eye on new releases for the rest of the Ubuntu Linux versions.
More wallpapers to be released soon
We can't wait to get our hands on wallpapers for the rest of the Ubuntu releases, such as Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx), Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), and Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot).
And the list continues with the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail), Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) and, of course, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).
 



Edgy Eft
Dapper Drake
  
April 21, 2016
Twitter Facebook


Bees rely on goldenrod pollen as a food source, but it's less nutritious than it used to be due to rising CO2 levels, a Purdue University study finds. Credit: Purdue University/Tom Campbell
Rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have reduced protein in goldenrod pollen, a key late-season food source for North American bees, a Purdue University study shows.
Researchers found that the overall protein concentration of goldenrod pollen fell about one-third from the onset of the Industrial Revolution to the beginning of the 21st century.
Previous studies have shown that increases in carbon dioxide can lower the nutritional value of plants such as wheat and rice - staple crops for much of the global human population - but this study is the first to examine the effects of rising CO2 on the diet of bees.
"Bee food is less nutritious than it used to be," said Jeffrey Dukes, study co-author and professor of forestry and natural resources and biological sciences. "Our findings also suggest that the quality of pollen will continue to decline into the future. That's not great news for bees."
Native bee species and honeybees rely on flowering plants for energy and nutrition. While nectar is the primary energy source for bee colonies, pollen is the sole source of protein for bees. Pollen is essential for the development of bee larvae and helps maintain bees' immunity to pathogens and parasites.
Goldenrod, a common North American perennial that blooms from late July through October, offers bees some of the last available pollen before winter. Bees that overwinter must store substantial amounts of pollen to rear their winter young. Declines in pollen protein could potentially threaten bee health and survival and weaken bees' ability to overwinter on a continental scale, said Jeffery Pettis, study co-author and research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.
"A poor diet sets bees up for failure," he said. "Previous research shows bees have shorter lifespans when fed lower quality pollen."
The researchers noted, however, that this study only assessed pollen protein levels and did not look at the impact of protein reductions on bee health and populations.
"Our work suggests there is a strong possibility that decreases in pollen protein could contribute to declines in bee health, but we haven't yet made that final link," said Dukes, who is also director of the Purdue Climate Change Research Center housed in Discovery Park.
Dukes collaborated with a team led by USDA-ARS researchers to examine protein levels in historical and experimental samples of goldenrod pollen. They found that pollen protein levels dropped about a third in samples collected from 1842-2014, a period during which the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere rose from about 280 parts per million to 398 ppm. The greatest drop in protein occurred during 1960-2014, a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rose dramatically.
A 2-year controlled field experiment that exposed goldenrod to a gradient of carbon dioxide levels from 280 to 500 ppm showed strikingly similar decreases in pollen protein, Dukes said.
"These data provide an urgent and compelling case for establishing CO2 sensitivity of pollen protein for other floral species," the researchers concluded in their study.
Bees provide a valuable service to U.S. agriculture through pollination, contributing more than $15 billion in added crop value each year.
But a number of new and mounting pressures are crippling colonies and endangering bee populations. These threats include emerging diseases and parasites such as deformed wing virus, Varroa mites and Nosema fungi; a lack of diversity and availability of pollen and nectar sources; and exposure to a wide variety of pesticides. From 2006 to 2011, annual losses of managed honeybee colonies averaged about 33 percent per year, according to the USDA-ARS.
"Bees already face a lot of factors that are making their lives hard," Dukes said. "A decline in the nutritional quality of their food source going into a critical season is another reason to be concerned."
Elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide - a building block for plant sugars -have allowed many plants to grow faster and bigger. But this growth spurt can dilute plants' total protein, rather than concentrating it in the grain, resulting in a less nutritious food source.
Slowing the degrading effects of rising carbon dioxide levels on plant nutrition hinges on reducing carbon emission rates from deforestation and burning fossil fuels, Dukes said.
"The impact of carbon emissions on the nutritional value of our food supply is something people need to be aware of. This issue isn't just relevant to honeybees and people - it will probably affect thousands or even millions of other plant-eating species around the world. We don't yet know how they'll deal with it."
April 18, 2016
Twitter Facebook


TSAVO, Kenya - Dangling from a helicopter with a high powered rifle, a Kenyan vet fires drugged darts at elephants to sedate them so they can be fitted with satellite collars.
Conservationists fear the new train route slicing through the giant Tsavo national park will affect the movement of elephants
Ten minutes after the elephant is darted, the lumbering creature stumbles, and falls asleep. Ground teams are scrambled, rushing to the scene with just a 20 minute window to conduct tests and fit the collar before it regains consciousness.
More than 12,000 elephants live in Tsavo Park, threatened daily by poaching, but also more recently, by the construction of a new high-speed railway linking Kenya's coast to the capital.
The new 483-kilometre (300-mile) train route linking Kenya's Nairobi to the country's main port Mombasa is worrying conservationists, who fear the new infrastructure slicing through the giant Tsavo national park will affect the movement of elephants.
It is hoped that the satellite radio tracking collars fitted last month by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and conservation group Save the Elephants, will help conservationists monitor railway crossing points to allow the animals to live in peace.
"This project is the first of its kind in Kenya and indeed in Africa," said Dr. Benson Okita, head of monitoring at Save the Elephants. "It seeks to understand how elephant movements are influenced by a major infrastructural project."
Once the railway is complete, a six-lane motorway is also planned, so understanding what impact the railway has on the animals will be crucial to limiting the disruption caused by a new road.
Tsavo, spread over a western and eastern park, covers a vast 20,812 square kilometre (8,035 square miles) area of dense bush, about the size of Slovenia or Djibouti.
- 'First of its kind' -
Each collared elephant is tracked on a map overlaid with land use, logging their movements as humans encroach ever closer on wilderness areas, helping experts to monitor the impact on elephant ranging patterns.
The elephant movement data "will allow the country to secure space for wildlife as the Kenyan population grows," KWS deputy director for conservation Patrick Omondi said.
Though only elephants are being tagged, the scheme will help experts monitor the movements of other species as well.
"We are only using elephants, as a keystone species, but that will give an indication on how this effects wildlife distribution in general," said Sospeter Kiambi, who heads the KWS elephant tagging programme.
With ivory commanding thousands of dollars per kilo in Asia, conservationists have warned that African elephants could be extinct in the wild within a generation. More than 30,000 elephants are killed for their tusks every year.
Later this month, Kenya is due to set fire to the vast majority of its ivory and rhino horn stockpile -- some 105 tonnes of ivory, seven times the size of any ivory stockpile destroyed so far, as well as 1.35 tonnes of rhino horn -- in a highly publicised symbolic gesture against poaching led by President Uhuru Kenyatta.
The mass burning is expected to be attended by international celebrities, actors, conservationists and heads of state.
And though Kenya is striving to secure its economic future with infrastructure investment like the Mombasa-Nairobi road and rail link, it is hoped that the elephant tracking project will ensure that development does not come at the cost of wildlife.
- Environment vs Economy-
Kenya launched in 2013 the construction of a Chinese-funded $13.8 billion (10 billion euro) flagship railway project to dramatically increase trade and boost the east African country's position as a regional economic powerhouse.
The key transport link is eventually hoped to extend onwards to landlocked Uganda, and then connect with proposed lines to Rwanda and South Sudan, a key goods route extending far into the continent.
It replaces a colonial-era 19th century railway built under British rule, a line dubbed the "Lunatic Express" due to the logistical challenges -- including in Tsavo, where man-eating lions hunted the struggling railway workers.
Chugging once-a-day trains on that slow moving line occasionally hit animals, but posed nothing like the threat the busy, fast new link may pose.
Elephants crossing are being built underneath the railway -- raised bridges allowing animals to move beneath -- but concerns remains especially as to the impact of the planned road.
Similar raised bridges will be used when the railway line cuts through the 117 square kilometre (45 square mile) Nairobi national park, where buffalo, lion and rhino roam just seven kilometres (four miles) from the bustling high-rise city centre.
Construction of the railway in that park -- disturbing animals and with reported gaps made in fencing amid the building -- is reportedly one reason for a spate of lion escapes into the capital suburbs in recent weeks.
The new railway "is perhaps the most important transport project Kenya has seen since the building of the first railway in the early 20th century," said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants.
"If research such as this can help influence the way development is carried out, then we are truly on the path to securing a future for wildlife into perpetuity."
April 18, 2016
Twitter Facebook

April 16, 2016
Twitter Facebook

Thousands of seals were spotted at a beach on Monomoy Island in southern Massachusetts on Sunday, April 10. Local media said the island is an ideal habitat for seals, hence the large numbers. Credit: Aaron Knight
on.aol.com
April 16, 2016
Twitter Facebook

I can definitely see you. Credit: Graeme Shannon, Author provided
In today's busy online world, our brain's are constantly stimulated by an onslaught of information. When faced with distractions such as ringing phones, noisy colleagues and floods of incoming emails, focusing on a complex task can be difficult. In fact, many studies have claimed that these multiple demands on our attention are impacting on our ability to concentrate and connect with people.
Animals in the wild also face similar challenges. All animals have only a limited amount of attention, and it must be shared between an array of tasks, including locating food, maintaining social bonds and keeping a watchful eye out for both competitors and hungry predators. With increasing levels of man-made noise in the environment, animals are having to contend more and more with external stimuli which can draw their attention away from these key tasks. And the consequences of failing to focus on lurking dangers can be deadly.
Getting distracted
Experts have been aware of the distracting effects of noise on aquatic animals for some time. Research has demonstrated that a number of fish and crab species are significantly slower to react to a simulated predator attack when exposed to ship noise. And a recent study on damselfish in Australia showed for the first time that noise exposure directly impacted upon survival by increasing the fish's susceptibility to predator attacks. However, the "distracted prey hypothesis", had until now, not been explored in wild mammals.
Easily distracted. Credit: www.shutterstock.com
Our experiments involved activating a remote-controlled speaker to broadcast road noise at a colony of prairie dogs. I then played the role of the "predator", and approached a foraging animal at the centre of the group, to measure how close we would have to be before the prairie dog would become alert and flee. The experiment was conducted under artificial noise and repeated during quiet control periods - building upon our previous research.
Although we expected that the prairie dogs would take longer to respond when distracted by noise, we were surprised by our findings. Unlike the fish and the crabs, in the presence of noise, prairie dogs reacted earlier to the approaching predator and took evasive action more quickly, dashing for their burrows. We saw the same response in almost all our experiments, demonstrating that the prairie dogs were more than capable of attending to risk without being distracted.
Over the course of the experiments, it was also clear that these animals were reacting more quickly. It became increasingly difficult for me to pass by individual prairie dogs close to the trail without triggering loud alarm calling, which rapidly spread to neighbouring animals. But strangely, other nearby humans, such as hikers and cyclists, passed by the same animals and barely triggered even a raised head.
On the alert. Credit: www.shutterstock.com
Intelligent animals
These unexpected observations may well be explained by the fact that prairie dogs, despite their small size, have impressive cognitive abilities. Experiments have demonstrated that they can distinguish between different predators (and even human observers) using specific alarm calls, a skill often associated with large-brained animals such as primates.
And it seems that they were doing the same with me, identifying my presence as a greater threat compared to other humans in the area. Instead of being distracted, introduced noise appeared to further increase the prairie dog's perception of risk in the environment, in a phenomenon known as the "risk disturbance hypothesis".
But at what cost? Taking flight burns valuable energy and interrupts foraging, which is crucial for any animal, but particularly for small-bodied species with high energetic demands such as the prairie dog. So the cost of reacting to perceived danger must be balanced against the risk of staying put. Being too reactive could, over time, affect the fitness of an individual prairie dog, and potentially impact upon their survival and reproduction. Clearly, this higher level of awareness comes at a price.
And what if the cognitive challenges of identifying a threat were significantly increased? Predators are rarely as obvious as a human walking through the open prairie. At the end of the day, every species has a finite attention span and, depending upon the source of disturbance and the task at hand, can get distracted. In an increasingly noisy world, this will no doubt have implications for other animals as well as humans.
April 16, 2016
Twitter Facebook

The dog was ready to go.
Let's say you're scrolling through your favorite social media app and you come across a series of pictures of a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a long white dress.
An automated image captioning system might describe that scene as "a picture of a man and a woman," or maybe even "a bride and a groom." But a person might look at the pictures and think, "Wow, my friends got married! They look so happy. What a beautiful wedding."
As image captioning tools get increasingly good at correctly recognizing the objects in an image, a group of researchers is taking the technology one step further. They are working on a system that can automatically describe a series of images in the same kind of way that a human would, by focusing not just on the items in the picture but also what's happening and how it might make a person feel.
"Captioning is about taking concrete objects and putting them together in a literal description," said Margaret Mitchell, a Microsoft researcher who is leading the research project. "What I've been calling visual storytelling is about inferring conceptual and abstract ideas from those concrete objects."
For example, while another image captioning system might describe an image as "a group of people dancing," the visual storytelling system would instead say "We had a ton of fun dancing." And while another captioning system might say, "This is a picture of a float in a parade," this system would instead say "Some of the floats were very colorful."
He had a great time on the hike.
The research project, which relies on a new Microsoft Sequential Image Narrative Dataset, doesn't just stop at one picture. Instead, it takes a series of pictures about the same event and strings together several sentences describing what's going on. The work will be presented in June at the annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
'Ready for the next step'
The researchers say visual storytelling could eventually be helpful for people who are sharing a number of pictures on social media and want a tool that will help them build a narrative about those pictures. It also could potentially be used to provide richer descriptive tools for people who are blind or visually impaired.
And was very happy to be in the field.
"In image captioning, there are a lot of things we can do reasonably well, and that means we are ready for the next step," said Ting-Hao (Kenneth) Huang, a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University who worked on the project as part of a summer internship at Microsoft Research. "I think the computer can generate a reasonably simple story, like what we see in a children's book."
Huang was the first author on a paper about the work, along with another summer intern from Johns Hopkins University, Francis Ferraro.
'Translating' from images to sentences
His mom was so proud of him.
The fields of computer vision and natural language processing have made significant advances in the past few years. That's thanks in part to the more widespread use of a machine learning methodology called deep neural networks. These methods have helped researchers get much more accurate results for pattern recognition tasks like speech recognition and identifying objects in photos.
To build the visual storytelling system, the researchers used the deep neural networks to create a "sequence to sequence" machine learning system that is similar to the kind other computer scientists have used for automated language translation. In this case, however, instead of translating from, say, French to English, the researchers were training the system to translate from images to sentences.
For a machine learning system to work, it needs a training set of data that it can learn from. To build the visual storytelling system's training set, the researchers hired crowdsourced workers to write sentences describing various scenes. To account for variations in how people described the scenes, the tool was trained to prefer language in which there was consensus, and to create sentences based on that common ground.
It was a beautiful day for him.
The team also created a separate test set, so they could compare the machine's descriptions with how a human described the scene.
Then, they fed the system new images and asked it to create sentences based on the knowledge it had from the training set.
The research is still in the early stages, and the researchers admit there's significant progress to be made. Still, the researchers say these most recent advances represent another milestone in the fast-moving effort to use machine learning and other methods from the broader field of artificial intelligence for valuable applications. The new work on visual storytelling brings artificial intelligence a step closer to interpreting the world in the complex, nuanced ways that humans do.
"A picture is worth 1,000 words. It's not just worth three tags," Mitchell said.
Still, the researchers caution that this system – and other cutting-edge research projects like it – are still far from reaching a human level of cognition.
"We're really all scratching the surface," said Nasrin Mostafazadeh, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Rochester who worked on the project as an intern at Microsoft Research. "It's not that we're doing it, really, in the way that humans do it. It's just that we're trying to."
April 16, 2016

Geezwild

Contact Form

Name

Email *

Message *

Powered by Blogger.
Javascript DisablePlease Enable Javascript To See All Widget