Dear Kitty. Some blog

This video is called Corner Country, NSW Outback, Australia.

From the University of New South Wales in Australia:

‘Extinct’ mouse rediscovered

Tuesday, 14 October 2008

A small mammal classified as “presumed extinct” in NSW - the desert mouse - has been rediscovered living in Sturt National Park in the State’s far west. It had not been seen since 1857.

University of NSW PhD student Ulrike Kloecker rediscovered the Desert Mouse during research in the park last month.

“It was so exciting,” Ulrike said. “After all this time I have worked here, I believed I knew all the species that occurred in the area.

“I never thought I would actually have to get the mammal identification book out again,” she said. …

National Parks and Wildlife Service Tibooburra Area Manager Ingrid Witte said it’s not the first time a mammal presumed extinct has emerged in the treasure trove that is Sturt National Park.

“In 2003, the Dusky Hopping Mouse [see also here] was removed from the presumed extinct list after being rediscovered in Sturt and a species not detected for more than two decades - the “long haired rat” was found in earlier research.”

“These finds show the real value of protected areas as refuges for rare and endangered species in NSW,” Ms Witte said.

From Wildlife Extra:

Critically endangered Brazilian Mergansers tagged for the first time

Critically endangered water bird to be satellite tracked

October 2008. For the first time, Brazilian Mergansers have been caught, colour ringed and satellite tagged during a highly successful expedition, run by WWT and Terra Brasilis, to Serra da Canastra in Brazil.

The crucial 10 day expedition has resulted in 14 Brazilian Mergansers being ringed, and five were also been fitted with radio transmitters. This will enable valuable information to be collected on their habitat use, movements and social interactions on the River Sao Francisco.

These findings will help the project leaders (Terra Brasilis in partnership with Minas Gerais State Forestry Institute - IEF, ICMBio and WWT) to understand what these birds require to survive.

Critically endangered

Brazilian Mergansers are one of just six species of wildfowl to be listed as Critically Endangered on the World Conservation Union Red List. They are extremely sensitive to habitat loss and disturbance caused by factors such as logging, river siltation, mining and tourism.

Consequently there are just 200-250 known to exist in the wild, almost all in Brazil. There are a few known in Argentina, but they have not been seen in Paraguay for more than 20 years. However, areas remain which haven’t been surveyed adequately.

This picture shows a newly discovered Ophiacantha brittlestar in the Huon Commonwealth Marine Reserve off southern Tasmania.

From AFP news agency:

Hundreds of new marine species discovered: Australian scientists

Wed Oct 8, 4:37 AM ET

SYDNEY - Hundreds of new marine species and previously uncharted undersea mountains and canyons have been discovered in the depths of the Southern Ocean, Australian scientists said Wednesday.

A total of 274 species of fish, ancient corals, molluscs, crustaceans and sponges new to science were found in icy waters up to 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) deep among extinct volcanoes, they said.

The scientists mapped undersea mountains up to 500 metres high and canyons larger than the Grand Canyon for the first time, the government’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) said.

The finds were made in marine reserves 100 nautical miles south of the Australian island of Tasmania during two CSIRO voyages in November 2006 and April 2007 using new sonar and video technology as well as seafloor sampling.

Announcing the discoveries in the Tasmanian capital Hobart, CSIRO scientist Kate Wilson said more was known about the surface of Mars than the depths of the world’s oceans.

“In Australian waters, for example, more than 40 percent of the creatures brought to the surface by our scientists on a voyage of discovery have never been seen before,” she said.

See also here.

From Discovery in the USA:

How the turtle got its shell

Fossil discovery could help put an end to mystery vexing scientists

By Michael Reilly

Oct. 8, 2008

Famous for carrying its shelled “home” on its back, the humble, plodding turtle has also been toting around one of the biggest mysteries of the animal kingdom. Paleontologists have now unearthed a bizarre fossil beast in the eastern New Mexican desert that might put that mystery to rest.

A foot long and armored from head to tail, the 215-million-year-old fossil Chinlechelys tenertesta is a missing link in turtle evolution that promises to finally settle a controversy that’s been raging for the past two centuries over how turtles got their shells.

There are two camps in the debate. As turtle embryos develop, their shells grow directly from the animals’ ribs, and adult turtles’ ribs are fused to the shell carapace. Some scientists conclude this must have been how the shells originally developed in antiquity, too — normal rib bones gradually flattened out and spread until they formed a complete shell.

But animals like armadillos have shells that aren’t attached to their ribs. Instead the shell is skin that has thickened and hardened to provide protection. This so-called “dermal armor” is also prevalent among ankylosaurs, a group of stoutly built dinosaurs that lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous eras.

Walter Joyce of Yale University was the first to identify the new fossil as a primordial turtle from just a few bits of the neck and shell. “It’s a pretty ugly fossil, really,” Joyce said of the jumbled pieces he examined, “almost like a shoebox full of crud.”

But the key, Joyce said, was an intact series of three neck spines, a small piece of the belly shell, and a fragment of the back shell with ribs attached.

“That’s what really gave it away,” Joyce said of the final piece. “You can see that the ribs are not fused to the shell.”

Covered in dermal armor, the ancient turtle probably looked a lot like an ankylosaur, though the two species are unrelated. It couldn’t yet retract its neck or feet, and its shell was thinner than a modern turtle’s, but Chinlechelys tenertesta was bristled with sharp spines along its neck and tail.

“This is very clear evidence that the shell is a composite structure,” James Parham of the Field Museum in Chicago said. “It is a missing link. This is one of the most important turtle fossils ever found, I think.”

From the BBC:

‘Glowing’ jellyfish grabs Nobel

A clever trick borrowed from jellyfish has earned two Americans and one Japanese scientist a share of the chemistry Nobel Prize.

Martin Chalfie, Roger Tsien and Osamu Shimomura made it possible to exploit the genetic mechanism responsible for luminosity in the marine creatures.

Today, countless scientists use this knowledge to tag biological systems.

Glowing markers will show, for example, how brain cells develop or how cancer cells spread through tissue.

But their uses really have become legion: they are now even incorporated into bacteria to act as environmental biosensors in the presence of toxic materials.

Colour palette

Jellyfish will glow under blue and ultraviolet light because of a protein in their tissues. Scientists refer to it as green fluorescent protein, or GFP.

Shimomura made the first critical step, isolating GFP from a jellyfish (Aequorea victoria) found off the west coast of North America in 1962. He made the connection also with ultraviolet light.

From Practical Fishkeeping:

Scientists from Singapore and Indonesia have described a new species of hillstream catfish from the Alas River drainage in Aceh province in northern Sumatra.

The description of the new sisorid species, named Glyptothorax plectilis by Heok Hee Ng and Renny Hadiaty, is published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

The Odessa barb has been formally named Puntius padamya by Sven Kullander and Ralf Britz after the first wild-caught specimens were obtained from Myanmar.

Publishing the description in the latest issue of the Electronic Journal of Ichthyology, the authors distinguish the new species from other members of the P. conchonius group (to which it belongs) by the males possessing a broad red band from the head to the base of the caudal fin, abdominal scales with dark margins, and hyaline dorsal, anal and pectoral fins with conspicuous black spots and black distal margins.

This video from the USA is called Navy Sonar & Whales.

From ScienceDaily:

U.S. Navy Sonar Linked To Whale Strandings, Environmental Scientists Argue

ScienceDaily (Oct. 6, 2008) — Earlier this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review a series of lower court rulings that restrict the Navy’s use of sonar in submarine detection training exercises off the coast of Southern California. The court is due to hear the case after its term begins again this month.

For many years, professor Chris Parsons has been tracking the patterns of mass whale strandings around the world. In his most recent paper, “Navy Sonar and Cetaceans: Just how much does the gun need to smoke before we act?” Parsons and his co-authors bring together all of the major whale and dolphin strandings in the past eight years and discuss the different kinds of species that have been affected worldwide. They also strongly argue for stricter environmental policies related to this issue.

“Generally, if there is a large whale stranding, there is a military exercise in the area,” says Parsons. “Sonar is killing more whales than we know about.”

Parsons is a national delegate for the International Whaling Commission’s scientific and conservation committees, and on the board of directors of the marine section of the Society for Conservation Biology. He has been involved in whale and dolphin research for more than a decade and has conducted projects in South Africa, India, China and the Caribbean as well as the United Kingdom.

Though Parsons believes that there is a good chance the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in favor of the Navy, he thinks there is a chance for a win-win situation on both sides.

“If the Navy uses proper mitigation efforts, it can still perform its exercises and affect less of the whale population,” he says. However, he argues they need to avoid sensitive areas completely, and have trained, experienced whale experts as lookouts when performing these exercises—”not just someone who has watched a 45-minute DVD, which is sadly the only training most naval lookouts get with respect to finding and detecting whales.”

Even with all these efforts, however, Parsons worries that sonar is affecting many more whales than we even know about. “Eventually the Navy may have to reconsider the use of certain types of sonar all together. They could be wiping out entire populations of whales, and seriously depleting others.”

Journal reference:

1. Chris Parsons et al. Navy Sonar and Cetaceans: Just how much does the gun need to smoke before we act? Marine Pollution Bulletin, (in press)

Adapted from materials provided by George Mason University.

This video, recorded in Namibia, is called AEWA - Species Conservation Damara Tern.

From The Namibian daily:

Namibia: Swakop Bird Found On Polluted Nigerian Beach

The Namibian (Windhoek)

3 October 2008
Posted to the web 3 October 2008

Adam Hartman

A damara tern that was ringed by Swakopmund environmentalists Rod and Sigi Braby in 2003 and 2007 was spotted by their daughter, Justine Braby, on the beaches of Lagos, Nigeria, in August.

According to Justine, who is studying towards a master ’s degree in zoology at the University of Cape Town, she detected the bird on a polluted beach while doing a survey in Lagos, and immediately recognised it as the one ringed by her parents five years ago.

“I was very lucky - that the first bird I saw was so special,” she told The Namibian.

According to her, this ‘Braby tern’ is the only Damara tern with a silver ring on the left leg and two coloured rings on the right.

“This combination of rings was unique to one bird that was trapped on its nest in the Horse’s Graveyard colony near Swakopmund in 2003 by my parents,” she said.

Rod and Sigi used pink and yellow rings that, according to Justine, indicated the year and the colony the bird was trapped in.

She said her parents again found the bird last year, just a couple of metres from its previous nest at the Horse’s Graveyard.

The pink ring had somehow come off, and so received another yellow ring - making it two yellow rings.

“This is the first record of a ringed individual [from Swakopmund] in Nigeria, and proof that the Swakopmund breeders migrate over 4 000 km to spend the winter along the West African coastline,” she said.

She said the find was a very sentimental one for her, and that it was the third bird from Swakopmund found in another country.

In 2006, two birds were spotted in Benin and Gabon.

“The fact that I saw a ringed bird was not much of a coincidence.

The fact that I found a uniquely ringed bird, ringed by my parents in Swakopmund - this was a ridiculous coincidence,” Justine said.

This video from the USA says about itself:

Rocks of the Proterozoic and Archean eras (The Precambrian) make up the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado Plateau. Proterozoic strata contains stromatolites, Chauria (small cap-like fossils) and Brooksella canyonensis, a fossil considered by some to be a fossil jellyfish and by others as a vendozoan (a group of puzzling late Precambrian firm impressions of what may be an extinct major category of life). The very hard rocks of the inner gorge belong to the Archean Era which in Arizona, may be younger in geologic time than nearer the continental nucleus where Archean rocks can be over three billion years old.

Found: earliest known animal tracks?

Oct. 5, 2008

Courtesy Ohio State University and World Science staff

Faint, fossilized tracks of an ancient aquat­ic crea­ture sug­gests an­i­mals walked us­ing legs at least 30 mil­lion years ear­li­er than had been thought, some sci­en­tists say. But they ad­mit the lack of a fos­sil of the crea­ture it­self will probably fos­ter a healthy skep­ti­cism, and that re­search­ers will need to look for ad­di­tion­al ev­i­dence.

The track­s—two par­al­lel rows of small dots, each about two mil­lime­ters wide—are dat­ed to some 570 mil­lion years ago, to a per­i­od called the Edi­a­ca­ran. That pre­ced­ed the Cam­bri­an per­i­od, when most ma­jor groups of an­i­mals evolved.

Sci­en­tists once thought that mainly mi­crobes and sim­ple mul­ti­cel­lu­lar an­i­mals ex­isted be­fore the Cam­bri­an, but that idea is chang­ing, said Lor­en Bab­cock, pro­fes­sor of earth sci­ences at Ohio State Uni­ver­s­ity.

He pro­nounced him­self “rea­sonably cer­tain” a centipede-like ar­thro­pod or a leg­ged worm made the tracks. An ar­thro­pod is an in­ver­te­brate hav­ing joint­ed limbs and a seg­mented bod­y—a group that in­cludes in­sects.

Soo-Yeun Ahn, a doc­tor­al stu­dent at Ohio State and a co-author of the re­search, pre­sented the find­ings at the Ge­o­log­i­cal So­ci­e­ty of Amer­i­ca meet­ing Sun­day in Hous­ton.

Bab­cock said he found the tracks while sur­vey­ing rocks in the moun­tains near Gold­field, Ne­vada in 2000. “We came on an out­crop that looked like it crossed the Pre­cam­brian-Cam­bri­an bound­ary…. We just sat down and started flip­ping rocks over. We were there less than an hour when I saw it.”

The crea­ture must have stepped lightly on­to the soft seabed, be­cause its legs pressed only shal­low pin­points in it, Bab­cock said. But when he flipped over the rock bear­ing the lit­tle pits, the low-angle sun­light cast them in crisp shad­ow, he re­called. He could­n’t be sure of the crea­ture’s length or num­ber of legs, but he guessed it car­ried a centimeter-wide body on many spindly legs.

In 2002, oth­er re­search­ers re­ported a si­m­i­lar fos­sil trail from Can­a­da that dat­ed back to the mid­dle of the Cam­bri­an per­i­od, about 520 mil­lion years ago. Anoth­er set of tracks found in South Chi­na date back to 540 mil­lion years ago.

This video is called Birdwatching, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory, Australia.

World BirdWatch today, with people in many countries and places counting migratory birds.

In the Netherlands, the top ten of bird species was at 1pm:

1 Chaffinch 59.394
2 Starling 21.539
3 Oystercatcher 8.544
4 Meadow pipit 7.999
5 Dunlin 3.988
6 Lapwing 3.808
7 Wigeon 3.800
8 Great cormorant 3.722
9 Redwing 3.081
10 Black-headed gull 2.731

Where I was (Corversbos), already over 1300 birds of 38 species had been counted, including grey wagtail.

I saw five common crossbills. A group of a hundred great cormorants. Two buzzards. And a buzzard harrassed by a carrion crow.

Just as science begins to solve the mysteries of their seasonal comings and goings, many of the world’s migratory species are in sharp decline: here.