Want to find out what whales eat? There’s no need to cut them open, just wait until they relieve themselves.
One of the reasons given by the Japanese government for its “scientific” whaling programme is to learn more about the animals’ diet. Now Stacy DeRuiter at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and her team have developed a way of investigating diet by identifying mitochondrial DNA from the remains of the prey in a whale’s faeces.
The team has collected samples from several cetacean species and discovered, for example, that faeces from Blainville’s beaked whale contain DNA evidence of bony fish, including gulper eel. It had been thought to dine primarily on squid.
“It’s now certainly the case that we can get as good diet information from DNA analysis of faeces as we can from dead whales - probably better,” says Simon Jarman of the Australian Antarctic Division …
November 2007. A local beetle expert, Dr Ian McClenaghan, has found a specimen of one of the UK’s rarest beetles Hypulus quercinus (Quensel) on a Cornwall Wildlife Trust reserve - Cabilla and Redrice Woods. This is the first ever recorded sighting in Cornwall.
Dr McClenaghan said, ‘The species is associated with red rot in dead wood and I am not aware of anyone having spotted it in the UK for a number of years. Probably about one per year is discovered in Britain. …
Meanwhile, further east in the county the Launceston Parish Wildlife Recording Group have made an interesting discovery whilst recording moths in the parish of Lezant. The group has discovered an unusual looking leaf hopper Ledra aurita (Linnaeus).
The exhibition is about Homotherium latidens. Until recently, scientists thought that species had become extinct 300,000 or 400,000 years ago.
However, on 16 March 2000, a lower mandible was found in the North Sea, near the Bruine bank. It was only 28,000 years old; so, it proved the older theory wrong. Then, during the Ice Age, the southern part of the North Sea was still land.
See also: Late Pleistocene survival of the saber-toothed cat Homotherium in northwestern Europe. J. W. F. Reumer, L. Rook, K. van der Borg, K. Post, D. Mol, and J. de Vos, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2003, 23(1):260-262.
Osteology and ecology of Megantereon cultridens SE311 (Mammalia; Felidae; Machairodontinae), a sabrecat from the Late Pliocene - Early Pleistocene of Senéze, France: here.
Conservationists “thrilled” as Kirtland’s Warbler returns to Canada
30-11-2007
Bird Studies Canada (BirdLife’s Canadian co-Partner) has expressed delight at news that a pair of Kirtland’s Warbler Dendroica kirtlandii have bred in Canada – the first in over 60 years.
The birds were found at a Canadian Forces Base in eastern Ontario and, although eggs in the nest were unviable, the discovery has provided useful data for scientists researching the distribution of this species, listed globally as Near Threatened by BirdLife.
Kirtland’s Warbler does not normally breed outside of Michigan in the US, but this year in addition to the nest in Ontario, others were found in Wisconsin.
Extensive habitat loss across its northern breeding range saw the warbler’s population drop to fewer than 200 males in the 1970s. More recently numbers have been seen to recover: almost 1,500 singing males were recorded in Michigan in 2006.
More Than 25 percent of US Birds Need Urgent Conservation Action: here.
Poaching and deforestation threaten Ugandan chimps: here.
London, March 4 [2009]: Scientists have discovered that chimpanzees can fashion plant stems into tools that resemble fishing rods, in order to scoop termites out of their nests: here.
Congo wildlife officers in prison after government crackdown on illegal destruction of gorilla habitat: here.
A chimpanzees spatial memory is so precise that it can find a single tree among thousands in a forest: here.
Pablo Picasso’s ‘Massacre in Korea‘ (1951; in the Musée Picasso, Paris), … is based on a massacre of Korean civilians by US forces at No Gun Ri from 26-29 July 1950, which has remained controversial to this day. Korean survivors claim that they were bombed by the US airforce on 26 July, and subsequently fired on by US soldiers in a tunnel into which large numbers had fled, leading to over 300 deaths.
Half a century later, after an indefatigable campaign by Korean survivors, in 1999 Associated Press reporters found US veterans who confirmed the massacre story. The US Army was finally forced to confront the allegations and established an official investigation into the episode, whose Report of the No Gun Ri Review was published in January 2001. …
Picasso’s painting was doubly controversial in its time. It not only endorsed claims of massacre that were denied by the US. It was also criticised within the French Communist Party (PCF), of which Picasso was a member, for not conforming to a socialist realist style. The painting has never achieved the iconic status of the earlier Guernica (1937), but it has remained one of Picasso’s most explicitly political works, a point of reference in various situations.
Discussion about Picasso, politics, and art: here.
Stanley George Thorne, politician: born Donaghadee, Co Down 22 July 1918; MP (Labour) for Preston South 1974-83, for Preston 1983-87; married Catherine Rand (two sons, three daughters); died Liverpool 26 November 2007
Published: 30 November 2007
It is hardly conceivable that Stan Thorne, a principled politician of the extreme left, would have been selected as a Labour candidate today. And the House of Commons would have been the poorer for his absence.
Late into the night, when we were waiting for votes to take place in the small hours, Stan Thorne would sidle up to me and say in that gentle voice, “How about a game?” He was one of the best chess players in the House of Commons and it was on this account that, although we had many different political opinions, I got to know him well and so to value him highly. …
Born in Northern Ireland, the son of a postman and a dressmaker, Stanley Thorne went to school in Manchester. Naturally tough, he volunteered for the Royal Marines and went with them to Singapore. He told me that the beginning of his political attitude came when he spoke out to the officers about what he considered to be the inhuman treatment of some of his fellow marines who, in conditions of extreme heat, were made to wear full battle-dress and kit. Thorne suffered solitary confinement.
After the war, Thorne became a coal-miner, then a semi-skilled fitter, a chartered accountant’s clerk, a railway signalman in Bedford, an office manager, an auditor and a commercial manager. Then, at the age of 48, yet again he was sacked, from a construction company, for speaking out on behalf of his fellow workers. His wife, Catherine, told him that he should try to get in to Ruskin College, Oxford and, on reading his 3,000-word essay, they accepted his submission. In the next couple of years, he was taken under the wing of Peter Donaldson, a lecturer in economics at Ruskin, who became Thorne’s lifelong mentor. …
At the age of 53, Thorne was selected for the election of February 1974 for the marginal seat of Preston South held by the Conservative minister Alan Green. He was by no means favourite at the selection conference, though at the time he was a very popular lecturer in politics at the Bolton College of Technology. Given his views on defence, and his vehement opposition later on to adventures such as the Falklands War, it was perhaps surprising that an area so dependent on the defence industries should have selected such a candidate.
However, he proved to be an extraordinarily good constituency MP, with a reputation for inviting down-and-outs into his home at Christmas and on other occasions. …
When Labour seats were tumbling all around in 1979, it was a matter of huge surprise that Stan
Thorne clung on to his seat. Perhaps his most important contribution to parliamentary debate came at the beginning of the Thatcher government when he opposed the British Aerospace Bill. Thorne retired in 1987, not because anyone suggested that he should do so, but because he wanted to leave Parliament while he was still fit and able.
In his retirement, he was a familiar figure in his area of Liverpool, going for four or five walks a day with his inevitable pipe. I shall remember him with respect and affection as he represented a part of society which is almost unrepresented in the House of Commons today.
This video is called Golden plover or Heilo on Stemshest Farstad Norway. Golden plovers are among the birds threatened by Donald Trump’s golf course plans.
· Casting vote throws out sand dune development
· Man who stuck out hopes Trump has got message
* Karen McVeigh and Severin Carrell
* Friday November 30 2007
In one corner, a world-famous property developer with serious dollars to spend and some of the most prestigious real estate in places such as New York, Chicago and Dubai. In the other, a rag tag of staunch Aberdonian conservationists and a salmon fisherman who has become a local celebrity by refusing to sell his unkempt nine hectares (23 acres) to make way for “the world’s greatest golf course”.
Concerns over the proposed resort, which included two championship golf courses, a five-star hotel, a golf academy, nearly 1,000 holiday homes and 500 private houses, centred around the fact that part of it would be built on a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) containing sensitive sand dunes.
The odd couple: Trump’s controversial golf resort drives Salmond into the bunker. Scotland’s First Minister is in trouble after intervening in a row to back the tycoon’s multimillion-pound plans: here.
You’re fired! Councillor loses his job after voting against Donald Trump’s golf course: here.
IT has emerged that it is a question of principle for the Labour government that elderly people who are now living in nursing and other homes, and have spent a lifetime paying taxes of one kind or another, must pay for their personal care.
This was the message from Health Secretary Johnson to the House of Commons Health Committee yesterday. This positions the Labour government well to the right of the Scottish National Party government in Scotland.
Johnson argued that the policy differences on health between the Labour and Scottish governments were not due to financial pressures, but was ideological. He explained that the Labour government disagreed with the approach of the Nationalists, who have established that the elderly must have free personal care, and that the government had much more important things to spend the taxpayers’ money on.
