Blogs / Discoblog

If you went to Cheers to pour a few back with Norm and Cliff, could you get a plate of fish and chips? Probably not, if Ted Danson had anything to say about it.

One of the ways that Danson has been keeping busy, now that “Cheers” and “Becker” are long since canceled, is by heading up Oceana, the ocean conservation organization he started two decades ago. Danson is hopping mad that a rare species of shark called the spiny dogfish has been hunted to the brink of extinction, and he faults, for one, the British love affair with fish and chips.

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Last week we covered the paper released by the Japanese Whale Research Program (JARPA) showing that minke whales in the Antarctic were getting thinner, and we also covered their research methods—taking measurements from more than 4,500 slaughtered whales. This week National Geographic has an update, interviewing two American researchers who say that killing the whales wasn’t necessary for the research.

Scott Baker, from Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, said researchers could have made the same finding by genetic testing, biopsy—removing a small piece of tissue for sampling—or simply through photographic evidence. And Stanford University’s Stephen Palumbi disagreed with the Japanese scientists over the importance of the finding, saying that whales getting a little skinnier might not matter that much, and the study’s findings weren’t statistically significant enough to be useful.

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Ten-foot-long reptiles in Indonesia have the taste for human flesh, and it’s the fault of…the Nature Conservancy?

That’s what some of the locals are saying. According to the Wall Street Journal, a Komodo dragon killed a young boy last year near the dragons’ main home, Komodo National Park, and since then dragon attacks on people have become much more frequent. And one reason the Komodos have started feeding on the locals, they say, is that they have stopped feeding the Komodos.

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It’s nice when police catch intercept ivory smugglers trying to import their product into another country. But often their efforts don’t get authorities any closer to stopping hunters from killing elephants in the first place.

Thanks to a new approach crafted by Samuel Wasser at the University of Washington, however, the smugglers’ ivory may tell police all they need to know. Wasser and his team have begun analyzing DNA samples from seized ivory and connecting those samples to elephant populations in the wild. After collecting tissue samples from across the African continent, he figured out that ivory seized in Singapore in 2002 had come from the savannas of Zambia in Southern Africa. In another example, a load of ivory found in Hong Kong in 2006 originated in the West African forests near Gabon.

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Perhaps Lonesome George should now be called Curious George.

The giant Galapagos tortoise earned his moniker by keeping to himself for most of his 36 years of captivity at the Charles Darwin Research Station. Now, all of the sudden, George appears to have broken out of his solitude and mated with one of the two females at the station that come from a similar species of Galapagos tortoise.

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We now have an answer to the question nobody was asking: Which would win in a fight—a leopard or a crocodile?

The leopard came out on top, as you can see in the gripping images here. An American photographer was trying to capture hippos at a watering hole in South Africa when this battle began right in front of him.

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Here’s another case from the “pitting one animal against another” file: Japanese conservationists want to use bees to protect terns from crows.

Seabirds called little terns nest near Tokyo’s airport after migrating north from Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. But National Geographic reports that are area’s crows are bad neighbors, prone to attacking and killing young terns.

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When we wrote about the rash of dolphin deaths in Cornwall, England last month, it seemed like a sad aberration. But now British scientists are saying that dolphins and other cetaceans like porpoises have been dying at a dramatically higher rate this decade, and they are pointing the finger at trawler fishing as the main culprit.

According to the British study, only about 50 cetaceans washed up in Cornwall per year during the 1980s, but in the 2000s that number has risen to between 100 and 250. Brendan Godley from the University of Exeter says that at least 61 percent of the cetaceans found in Cornwall had been caught in fishing trawler nets and died.

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Tuatara are often called living fossils—the ancestors of these New Zealand creatures roamed the Earth 200 million ago and survived the extinction event that took down the dinosaurs. But according to a study released today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the lizard-like animal’s long run might come to a sudden end if the planet warms as rapidly as some fear.

The problem is that tuatara, like a lot of reptiles, show what’s called temperature dependent sex determination, meaning that the sex of a baby animal depends on the temperature during its development. For the tuatara, scientists say, the critical temperature is close to 71 degrees Fahrenheit. If the mercury reads higher than that during a baby tuatara’s development, it is much more likely to be born a male. So, the researchers say, a warmer world could throw off the male-female balance.

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Movie stardom can be a blessing and a curse, even for a fish.

Finding Nemo, the 2003 Disney/Pixar blockbuster about a young clownfish, his father, and a host of goofy aquatic animals, became the bestselling DVD of all time, according to The Times of London. While that was great news for Pixar, it turned out to be bad news for clownfish everywhere. British scientist Billy Sinclair of the University of Cumbria says that clownfish populations in the wild have been in steep decline since the movie’s release five years ago, and he thinks he knows what happened: They became pets.

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