Blogs / 80beats

Poor Lonesome George: Although he may have found a mate, researchers say he is still being denied the joys of fatherhood. George is thought to be the last representative of a tortoise subspecies from the Galapagos Island of Pinta, and researchers rejoiced this summer when he appeared to father a batch of eggs. But earlier this week a spokesperson for the Galapagos National Park announced that 80 percent of the eggs do not appear to be viable.

The excitement began this summer when two female tortoises exhibited surprising behavior. The females, who have shared George’s enclosure at the Charles Darwin Research Station on the central island of Santa Cruz for almost 20 years, are of a different but closely related species. After decades of reproductive reticence, they stunned scientists during the summer by building nests and filling them with eggs for the first time [Nature News]. Researchers quickly removed the 16 eggs from the nests and installed them in an artificial incubator, although three of those eggs were thought to have already deteriorated.

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How do you get a snot sample from a shy behemoth of the deep? That question stumped researchers studying whale health, who wanted to give the animals check-ups without corralling and traumatizing them. Now, researchers have come up with an ingenious answer, flying a remote-control helicopter through the jets ejected by the whales’ blowholes. The helicopter has petri dishes strapped to it, which collect any bacteria, fungi, and viruses that were in the whales’ lungs.

The collected samples could make a big contribution to scientists’ understanding of infectious diseases in whale populations. Researcher Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse explains: “We don’t know much about them because they are so big and they are in the water all the time, and that makes it really difficult to obtain biological samples that are relevant to determining health in these populations; unless they’ve already stranded or unless they are in captivity, which are hardly representative of a normal population” [BBC News].

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American voters may have enthusiastically chosen to send Barack Obama to the White House as the next president of the United States, but the Bush Administration still has 76 days in office and seems to be making the most of that time by passing a host of so-called “midnight regulations.” Many of these last-minute rule changes relax environmental regulations, and watchdog groups say these controversial changes may be difficult for the incoming president to undo.

Some of the rule changes would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms. Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining [Washington Post]. If the rules take effect before inauguration day, the incoming Obama Administration would have to begin a long and complicated regulatory process to reverse them.

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In a big step forward for cloning research, scientists have produced healthy clones of mice that were dead and frozen for 16 years. Researchers say the new technique could allow conservationists to freeze tissue from endangered species, which could then be used to produce clones if those species become extinct. The finding also raises hopes of one day being able to resurrect extinct animals frozen in permafrost, such as the woolly mammoth, says [lead researcher] Teruhiko Wakayama…. “It would be very difficult, but our work suggests that it is no longer science fiction,” he says [New Scientist].

Researchers have previously produced clones from frozen animal tissue, but only from specimens that were preserved with special chemicals to protect cells from damage during the deep freeze. In this study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [subscription required], no such special precautions were taken when the mice were stowed in a freezer 16 years ago. Many zoos are not in a position to collect cells and freeze them in such a way as to preserve their viability, says [cloning expert] Robert Lanza … but they can put a dead animal “in a plastic bag and throw it in the freezer”, he adds. “With a kitchen freezer you could store the genetic diversity of every panda in existence” [New Scientist].

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Researchers have gathered some clues to solve the mystery of what’s killing off hibernating bats throughout New England, but say they’re still far from knowing how to halt the strange die-off. In a new study, researchers identified the characteristic white fungus that has been found on the noses of dead and dying bats, and say it’s a new species of mold that thrives at low temperatures like those found in caves in the winter. But debate still continues over whether the fungus is the cause of death, or simply a secondary infection that takes advantage of bats with already weakened immune systems.

Bats covered with the fungus, a sickness now called white-nose syndrome, were first spotted in Howes Cave near Albany, N.Y., during the winter of 2006. At that time, field biologists reported caves that were typically covered with hibernating bats had loads of vacancies…. In one case, a cave floor was littered with dead bats [LiveScience]. Since then, the epidemic has spread throughout Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and Vermont, with 80 to 100 percent of bats dying in some caves.

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Pity the poor frogs: they’re one of the most endangered group of vertebrates on the planet, and new research shows that two of the factors in their plight are common, everyday farm chemicals. The study shows that atrazine, a weedkiller that’s widely used in agricultural areas, not only boosts the levels of parasitic flatworms in frog ponds, it also decreases tadpoles’ ability to fight off infections. If that wasn’t bad enough, previous research has found that runoff from phosphate fertilizers also boosts parasite levels. Taken together, researchers say, the weedkiller and the fertilizers are hitting frogs with a double whammy.

Amphibian populations around the world have been declining in recent decades, with many species on the brink of extinction. Infection with any of several species of tiny flatworms, known as trematodes, can trigger debilitating limb deformities in frogs. Severe infections can kill the amphibians. The question was why high rates of those deformities — and, presumably, trematode infections — began showing up across the nation in the mid-1990s [Science News]. The new findings suggest that the growing prevalence of the weedkiller atrazine in corn-growing regions since that time may be partly to blame for the woeful state of American amphibians.

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Yesterday, 7.2 metric tons of elephant tusks were auctioned off to ivory buyers from China and Japan, bringing in a total of $1.1 million for the seller, the Namibian government. The controversial sale was the first of four auctions that will be carried out over the next few weeks in a program approved by CITES, the international watchdog group that monitors trade in endangered species. The sales are intended to let southern African countries dispose of their ivory stockpiles, and CITES hopes that releasing legal ivory onto the market will decrease the demand for poached ivory.

However, some conservation groups worry that the sale will have the opposite effect, and may allow black market ivory dealers to label their goods as products from the legal auction. Says a spokesman for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Michael Wamithi: “By permitting legal trade in ivory, we are only encouraging the laundering of stocks by poachers, thereby increasing illegal hunting activities…. The situation is very clear: More ivory in the market place equals many more dead elephants’’ [The New York Times blog].

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In a new study that’s already generating controversy, researchers tracked more than 1,000 young Pacific salmon on their first journey to the sea, and found that those battling dams on the Columbia River fared no worse than the young fish with an easier path to the sea on Canada’s free-flowing Fraser River. The findings seem to contradict many previous studies about dams: Conservationists have blamed these obstacles for a large share of the shrinking salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest, and engineers have spent billions trying to make the dams less damaging to salmon [Science News].

The study used implanted transmitters to follow the juvenile salmon, called smolts, on their trips downriver, and found that only about 25 percent of smolts in both the Columbia and the Fraser survived the voyage and made it to the ocean. But environmentalists and several salmon biologists pounced on the study, suggesting that industry funding might have biased the results. These critics question the value of comparing the two rivers and say that the study doesn’t even address what many think is the dams’ biggest effect: stressed smolts dying after they reach the ocean [Nature News].

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A legal battle is raging on over whether gray wolves should be removed from the endangered species list in both the Northern Rockies and the Great Lakes region, with the federal government and environmentalists fighting over whether the wolf populations have recovered. But the situation has been made more complicated by a biological battle over whether the present-day wolves are the same animals, genetically speaking, as the wolves who lived in North American forests hundreds of years ago.

The court cases began when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lifted protections from wolves in the Great Lakes states in 2007, and from wolves in the Rockies earlier this year. Environmental groups contested both decisions. The Great Lakes decision was overturned in September when a judge said the wildlife agency hadn’t followed the law; the Northern Rockies ruling covering the states of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana was also overturned. After wolves were allowed to be shot on sight across most of Wyoming — and all three states began planning public hunts — U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy in July issued an injunction to block the killings. On Tuesday, Molloy went a step further, restoring the animal’s endangered status [AP]. However, wildlife officials say they’ll try to delist the wolves again in 2009.

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Global warming isn’t just a threat to polar bears in the rapidly warming Arctic, a new study says: Species in the tropics are beginning to feel the effects as well, and it will only get worse. Researchers surveyed more than 1,900 species of plants, insects, and fungi in a Costa Rica rainforest and came to the troubling conclusion that if world temperatures continue to rise as predicted over the next 50 years, half of those species will have to move to completely new territory to find an appropriate habitat.

The situation is complicated for tropical species, says lead researcher Robert Colwell; shifting north or south doesn’t bring significantly lower temperatures, so species will have to take up residence at higher altitudes to survive. In the absence of mountainsides to serve as a cool refuge, those plants and insects that cannot face higher temperatures may disappear as it would require migrations of hundreds or even thousands of miles to find a suitable cooler climate—crossing habitats utterly changed by human impacts. “For lowland tropical species whose geographical range lies far from mountains, for example in the middle of the Amazon,” Colwell says, “the prospect for extinction cannot be dismissed” [Scientific American].

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An international group of researchers has issued a dire warning about the state of the world’s wild animals. A new report from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists one in four land mammals as endangered, as well as one in three marine mammals. Life on Earth is disappearing fast with man inflicting most of the damage…. On land more species face oblivion because of loss of habitat, hunting and climate change while in the oceans pollution and the side effects of fishing are taking a huge toll [Telegraph].

The new assessment — which took 1,700 experts in 130 countries a total of five years to complete — paints “a bleak picture,” leaders of the project wrote in a paper being published in the journal Science. The overview … covers all 5,487 wild species identified since 1500. It is the most thorough tally of land and marine mammals since 1996 [Washington Post].

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The debate over bushmeat, meat from wild animals like gorillas, elephants, and antelope in Central Africa, just got more complicated. While some environmentalists have argued that a strict hunting ban is the only way to save endangered animals, a new report from the non-profit Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) argues that a blanket hunting ban would help neither the animals nor the people who depend on them for food.

However, bushmeat hunting also can’t continue at its current rate, the report states. “If current levels of hunting persist in Central Africa, bush meat protein supplies will fall dramatically, and a significant number of forest mammals will become extinct in less than 50 years” [Telegraph], says report author Robert Nasi. The best solution is to legalize some hunting while enacting tough regulations and enforcement, says CIFOR director Frances Seymour: “Criminalising the whole issue of bushmeat simply drives it underground. We need to decriminalise parts of this hunting and trade and give local communities the rights and incentives to manage these resources sustainably for their own benefit” [BBC News].

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The Environmental Protection Agency has vetoed a massive flood control project that was in the works for seven decades. The move – which puts the kibosh on the proposed Yazoo Pumps Project to reduce flooding between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers – is only the 12th time the Environmental Protection Agency has used its authority to scrap a project under the Clean Water Act [Scientific American].

The EPA’s decision is being hailed as an environmental victory, as the plan called for massive pumps that would have drained water out of at least 67,000 acres of wetlands, irrevocably altering the ecosystem. The landscape of swamps, bayous, and cypress trees is vital to an extensive range of wildlife, including fish, migrating birds, and the endangered Louisiana black bear; the wetlands are valued not only by conservationists, but also by hunters and commercial fishermen.

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Climatologists predict that the African continent will grow drier and drier as global warming brings more droughts. But whether elephants herds can survive might depend on their oldest members.

In a study published in Biology Letters, Charles Foley of the Wildlife Conservation Society studied how three family groups of elephants responded to a severe African drought in 1993. In a nine-month period 16 out of 81 elephant calves in three study groups died, a mortality rate of 20 per cent. The normal mortality rate of calves during non-drought years is only two per cent [Telegraph].

Two groups left the area during the drought, migrating to places with more water, and lost only five calves between them, compared to 11 for the group that stayed. Foley found that the groups that left contained older females than the remaining group, which was perhaps the key to their success: [T]he older females may have been able to draw on memories of an earlier severe drought from 1958 to 1961, and how the elephants survived it [The Press Association]. The third group, meanwhile, lost many of its females during plagues of poaching in the 1970s and 1980s. As such, its leader was only 33, too young to remember the the late 1950s drought.

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An ambitious study of all the primates on planet Earth has found that almost half of all species are threatened by extinction because of habitat loss and poaching. The latest Red List of Threatened Species, drawn up by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), says that almost 50 per cent of the world’s 634 types of primate may disappear forever [Telegraph].

The findings highlight the multiplying threats facing primates throughout Africa, Asia, and South America, says IUCN official Russell Mittermeier: “Tropical forest destruction has always been the main cause, but now it appears that hunting is just as serious a threat in some areas, even where the habitat is still quite intact. In many places, primates are quite literally being eaten to extinction” [Bloomberg]. The study results were announced at the current International Primatological Society meeting.

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