This rare beaked whale stranded on 6/20/2008 and was cared for by the volunteers at the Marine Mammal Conservancy in Key Largo, Florida. Sadly the whale died on 6/23/2008.
Scientists to study elusive beaked whales in Biscay – “Diver 2008 project”
June 2008. A group of Europe’s leading marine conservation and research organisations have joined forces to carry out further crucial research into some of the rarest and most elusive marine animals on the planet - beaked whales. The research programme, called “Diver 2008″, will run for a month off the northern coast of Spain, within the Bay of Biscay - an area renowned for sightings of these mysterious marine mammals. The programme follows on from a successful first Diver project in 2006, which established an important research baseline.
Beaked whales are a group of 21 whale species, characterised by their distinctive beaks. They are primarily found in offshore deep water canyons and as such are rarely within easy reach of researchers and whale watching enthusiasts, making them little studied. However, the northern Spanish coast has a number of these deep water canyons within 20km of the coast and past survey work by the Diver 2008 researchers from commercial ferries, has highlighted the importance of these canyons for a number of beaked whale species, including Cuvier’s beaked whale, Sowerby’s beaked whale and Northern Bottlenose whale.
The Yemen Council of Ministers has recently approved the Golden-winged Grosbeak as Yemen’s national bird. This colourful bird, with a huge beak for eating fruits and seeds, occurs in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen.
Yemen has also chosen the Arabian Leopard Panthera pardus nimr as the national mammal, the Dragon Blood Tree Dracaena cinnabari as the national tree, and the Aloe Aloe irafensis as the national plant.
The Exxon Valdez ruling: the Supreme Court once again defends big business
2 July 2008
On June 25, the next-to-last day of the current term, the United States Supreme Court slashed the punitive damages judgment for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which devastated Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The award was reduced from $2.5 billion to only $507.5 million—an amount equivalent to a few days’ profit for the giant oil company.
Exxon Mobil Corporation paid more than $1 billion to settle state and federal claims for environmental damages. The company went to trial in 1994, however, against a class action suit by over 32,000 individuals and small businesses devastated by the accident, predominantly commercial fishermen, native Alaskans and local landowners, who claimed that Exxon’s reckless conduct caused the accident.
Exxon conceded fault, and the compensatory damages for the class were set at $507.5 million. The trial then proceeded on the issue of punitive damages only.
The evidence showed that on March 23, 1989, the tanker left port carrying 53 million barrels of crude oil from the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Its captain, Joseph Hazlewood, had recently completed an alcohol rehabilitation program. His superiors knew about Hazlewood’s problem, learned that he had relapsed recently, and even drank with him.
Witnesses testified that before leaving port Hazlewood consumed five double-vodka drinks, an amount that would have rendered any non-alcoholic unconscious. When tested by the Coast Guard 11 hours after the accident Hazlewood still had a blood-alcohol level of .061, meaning that during the wreck his level was about three times the legal limit for driving a car.
As the ship approached a well-known reef, Hazlewood set the autopilot, increased speed and turned the ship over to a subordinate unlicensed to perform the maneuver necessary to avoid running aground. The Exxon Valdez hit the reef, spilling crude oil into Prince William Sound. Hazlewood then tried to “rock” the ship free, a procedure that spewed more oil and risked killing the crew.
The result was the largest oil spill in US history: 11 million gallons covering 11,000 square miles, including 1,300 miles of pristine shoreline. The spill devastated the local economy as well as the environment. Estimated losses in the sport fishing industry alone were almost $600 million over the two years following the accident. Within days an estimated 250,000 seabirds perished, along with thousands of otters and seals. Despite billions of dollars in cleanup, the environmental effects of the spill still linger. Much of the oil seeped below the surface of affected beaches, decaying at a rate of about three to four percent per year. Animals that dig in the sand for their food continue to be contaminated.
After hearing this evidence, the jury awarded the 32,000 plaintiffs a total of $5 billion in punitive damages. In 2007 the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reduced the amount to $2.5 billion. The Supreme Court decision reduces the award to $507.5 million, effectively fashioning a rule under federal maritime law that limits punitive damages to the amount of compensatory damages awarded, a so-called one-to-one ratio.
The punitive award must be viewed in light of Exxon Mobil’s enormous profits. The jury’s original $5 billion award amounts to less than the company’s profits for 1990 alone.
In ancient Egypt, various animals played a role in people’s lives, including in religion.
Just after leaving for the museum, I see a non mummified, still very much alive animal: a holly blue butterfly.
The museum has not only the animal mummy special exhibition, but also animals depicted in paint, sculpture, amulets, etc. in its permanent collection. I decide to look at these today and to come back for the mummy exhibition on some later day.
The first room in the permanent Egyptian exhibition is about prehistoric and early dynastic times.
One of the objects there is a Neolithic pot, with ostriches painted on it. That is special, according to the museum, as ostriches disappeared from Egypt about 5,000 years ago.
Also from Old Kingdom times, a coiled snake, as a board for the mehen game.
After the Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom, the Asian Hyksos invaders ruled Egypt. From their epoch, fish-shaped and goose-shaped vases.
The Hyksos brought horses to Egypt for the first time. These were depicted in the tomb for General Horemheb. The Egyptian sculptors still were not really used to depicting these new animals then.
From the times of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, animal pictures from the tomb of Paatenemheb.
La Trobe University researcher Joe Benshemesh has been studying them for years.
“They’re whitish and they have an iridescent sort of sheen to their fur,” he said.
“Their body size is probably not much larger than that of a medium-size rat, they have a stubby little tail.
“Their foreclaws, rather than being little hands are like little shovels, and they have no eyes and they don’t have any flappy bits on their ears, they do have ears.
“So they are a pretty bizarre-looking creature.
“What we’re listening to is the sound of an Itjaritjari that is tunnelling underground and you can hear the shh, shh as it cuts the ground with its forelegs, with those little spades that it has for forelegs.”
The moles are not really moles, they are marsupials with backward-facing pouches and Mr Benshemesh says they are so unusual that the two species make up their own order of mammals.
“Well they are marsupials but they’re not moles,” he said.
KABUL - Afghanistan’s snow leopards have barely survived three decades of war. But now the few remaining mountain leopards left in Afghanistan face another threat — foreigners involved in rebuilding the war-torn country.
Despite a complete hunting ban across Afghanistan since 2002, snow leopard furs regularly end up for sale on international military bases and at tourist bazaars in the capital. Foreigners have ready cash to buy the pelts as souvenirs and impoverished Afghans break poaching laws to supply them.
Tucked between souvenir stores on Chicken Street, Kabul’s main tourist trap, several shops sell fur coats and pelts taken from many of Afghanistan’s threatened and endangered animals.
Recently, the Bush administration announced it would build an additional 670 miles of border fence by the end of the year. But the fence would “slice through” the University of Texas, Brownsville, which borders Mexico, cutting off the school’s golf course from the rest of the campus. The AP reports that school officials are saying the fence would undermine the university’s mission of fostering cooperation with Mexico:
“The university — built close to the Rio Grande on land where the United States and Mexico traded cannon blasts during the Mexican-American War 160 years ago — recruits Mexican students, offers government and business classes in English and Spanish and turns out sorely needed bilingual teachers. […]
“To slice off and fence off the `bi’ part of `binational’ violates the essence of this university,” said university President Juliet V. Garcia, whose office is situated in what was once the thick-walled, tan-brick hospital at Fort Brown, built shortly after the Civil War.”
Ecological wasteland to be cleared of rat infestation
Within the next 12 months, an island that has been an ecological wasteland for over 200 years will be put on the road to recovery. In 1780, a Japanese ship ran aground on what is today called Rat Island, and many rats jumped ship to find a rat paradise, thousands of ground nesting seabirds. In 1922, Arctic foxes were stocked on the island by fur ranchers, further adding to the devastation.
Prior to these two introduced predators, the island held thousands of nesting seabirds, including Fork-tailed Storm Petrels, Whiskered Auklets, and both Horned and Tufted Puffins. These birds were easy prey because their nests or nesting burrows remain unguarded while the parents forage at sea. The rats ate the eggs, killed the chicks, and harassed the parents until almost no seabirds returned to nest on the island.
1964 - Foxes eradicated
Island restoration began in 1964, when the foxes were eradicated, and now, a solution to the rat problem seems to be at hand. The Nature Conservancy is collaborating with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Island Conservation to remove all the rats from the island. Rodent eradications have proven incredibly successful at other sites, especially in New Zealand and Scotland.
The endangered Xantus’s Murrelet saw an astounding 80% increase in nesting success when introduced rats were removed from Anacapa Island. However, the process is not easy. It takes years of evaluation and planning to select a target island and plan the removal effort. Removing rats from the island using controlled poison applications is expensive; however in this case, funding will come from public sources and dozens of private donors.
Rat Island
Rat Island is one of the Aleutian Islands, which are collectively designated as a Globally Important Bird Area because of their importance to seabird populations. Three of the Aleutians support more than one million birds each. There are several other islands in the chain with infestations of rats, but the next target has yet to be selected. Each island presents its own potential rewards and challenges. The size, the value to nesting birds, the presence of other invasive creatures, the cost and the risk of reintroduction are just some of the factors to be considered.
SANTIAGO - Latin America’s whale-watching industry is flourishing, with revenues up four-fold in 15 years and the region’s whale tourists are set to exceed 1 million this year, a conservation group said on Tuesday.
Several Latin American countries, including Chile, which is hosting the annual International Whaling Commission meeting this week, are championing whale watching as an alternative to whale culls by the likes of Japan, Norway and Iceland.
The International Fund for Animal Welfare said on the sidelines of the IWC meeting that the whale-watching industry in Latin America had seen ticket sales worth nearly $80 million in 2006 alone, with overall related tourist expenditure of nearly $280 million.
By comparison, the global whale-watching industry brings in around $1 billion a year in revenues across some 90 countries.
“This is a sustainable industry that benefits coastal communities socioeconomically, educationally and environmentally for years to come,” said Beatriz Bugeda, the fund’s director for Latin America.
There are 64 species of whales, dolphins and porpoises in Latin America’s waters, which represent around 75 percent of the world’s 86 known cetacean species.
(Reporting by Rodrigo Martinez, Writing by Simon Gardner, Editing by Sandra Maler)
The South Korean administration of President Lee Myung-bak has announced significant concessions in order to placate mass opposition to the lifting of a ban on beef imports from the United States and broader discontent over falling living standards.
US beef was banned from South Korea in 2003 following the discovery of a case of Mad Cow disease in American cattle. Lee, from the conservative Grand National Party (GNP) and a former chairman of the Hyundai conglomerate, announced an end to the embargo in April in order to advance negotiations toward a US-South Korea free trade agreement, which is desperately wanted by Korean auto companies and other major corporations.
