East Coast is packed with sea fans!
from wonderful creation
Terumbu Raya - Nemos are everywhere
from Singapore Nature and wild shores of singapore
Whimbrels and Redshanks arrive
from Mendis' World
My First Nightjar
from Life's Indulgences
A nesting tailorbird encounters sunbirds and a cat
from Bird Ecology Study Group
Blue-throated Bee-eater: 9. Release
from Bird Ecology Study Group
Widely used antifouling biocide lingers in freshwater ecosystems
from Water Quality in Singapore
Straits Times Forum 24 Jul 09;
MR GRANT W. Pereira's Forum Online letter, 'Let's walk the talk on green buildings' (July 14), urged the Government to walk the talk by suggesting that 'all new government buildings should be at least 10 per cent powered by solar energy'.
It is important to design buildings which will inherently consume less energy. This can be achieved through better building orientation, designs that minimise heat absorption through the building envelope and facilitate natural ventilation, and use of energy-efficient equipment and fittings.
The Building and Construction Authority's (BCA) Green Mark scheme, which rates green buildings, emphasises such energy-efficient designs.
The incorporation of clean energy sources like solar panels is another solution to complement energy efficiency in buildings. BCA is currently test-bedding solar energy infrastructure at its new Zero Energy Building to ascertain its effectiveness and potential.
More HDB precincts will also have solar panels on their rooftops, as part of a $31 million largescale solar test-bedding scheme. The Government hopes this will encourage wider adoption of solar panels which will help lower the cost.
This two-pronged strategy of exploring clean energy supply and lowering energy demand is a balanced approach to overall energy conservation. Already, new buildings and existing buildings undergoing major retrofitting must achieve the minimum Green Mark certified standard.
The Government is taking the lead in the green building movement by committing its buildings to attain even higher Green Mark standards. Current buildings must attain at least Green Mark GoldPlus by 2020, and new air-conditioned government buildings must obtain the highest Green Mark Platinum rating, which will achieve at least 30 per cent in energy savings.
To date, the BCA Green Mark scheme has received strong support from developers and the industry.
From only 17 green buildings when the scheme started in 2005, we now have close to 300 buildings that have been certified to various Green Mark ratings.
There are also incentives available to encourage the private sector to achieve higher Green Mark ratings and energy savings in both new and existing buildings.
We will continue to review our policies and initiatives to ensure that Singapore's future built environment remains green and sustainable.
We thank Mr Pereira for his suggestion.
Tan Tian Chong
Director, Technology Development Division
Building and Construction Authority
Hasnita Majid, Channel NewsAsia 23 Jul 09;
SINGAPORE: Environment and Water Resources Minister Yaacob Ibrahim will be in Indonesia on Friday to handover three air and weather monitoring stations to the provincial government of Jambi in Sumatra.
There is an ongoing collaboration between Singapore and Jambi province - which started in 2007 under a national plan of action developed by Indonesia - to fight forest fires and tackle the haze problem.
The two sides have started to work on reducing fires in the peatlands. Singapore is providing training to ensure the water level in the peatlands are kept high, as dry peatlands are most prone to catch fire.
Peat soil can store 10 times more carbon per hectare hence they give off the most smoke when they burn.
Singapore is currently working with Jambi province to improve peatland management. This includes ensuring that the natural water in the peatland are kept high when they are converted into land for agricultural purposes, such as for planting palm trees or for eco-culture such as fish rearing.
This is done, for example, by damming up the canals next to the peatland to maintain the water level. The Singapore-Delft Water Alliance from the National University of Singapore will be providing expertise in this area
The governor of Jambi, Zulkifli Nurdin, said the province itself has put in much effort in the last two years. For example, besides warning farmers not to carry out slash and burn practices, it has also arrested those responsible for starting the fires.
And the measures have paid off. In the past few years, fewer hotspots were detected in the region. From more than 200,100 hotspots detected in 2006, they have dropped to 1,600 last year. And up to July 19 this year, only 685 hotspots were detected in the province.
Singapore is also helping Jambi province develop an alternative source of livelihood - fish farming. This will reduce further the risk of peatlands becoming a fire hazard as most of the land is converted into fish ponds. - CNA/vm
More Singapore aid for farmers to curb burning
$800k more to be invested in haze fight; Jambi farmers urged to go into fishery
Amresh Gunasingham, Straits Times 24 Jul 09;
SINGAPORE is encouraging farmers in Jambi, Sumatra to turn to aqua-culture, so as to steer them clear of slash-and-burn activities that cause haze.
The project will involve training farmers to grow their technical expertise and skills.
It is hoped that a thriving fish export industry can be developed to provide the province's 2.7 million population with an alternative means of subsistence, said Mr Joseph Hui, head of the National Environment Agency's (NEA) environmental protection division.
'The hope is that by convincing farmers and commercial operators to go into fishery, they are less likely to burn forests.'
It is one of two new action programmes identified under Singapore's two-year-old collaboration with the province, focusing on the Muaro Jambi Regency, an identified fire-prone zone in Sumatra.
At 524,600 hectares, it is about eight times the land area of Singapore.
The $1 million Jambi plan dovetails with Indonesia's own national action plan to tackle land and forest fires, under which it aims to achieve a 75 per cent reduction in hot spots by 2012.
The second programme involves the development of more advanced training to help farmers manage peatland areas, which are fertile ground for growing crops. The project aims to train the villagers how to maintain a peatland.
Hydrologists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) will be roped in to map the training programmes as well as work out the best way to construct dams to keep the water level in the peatland areas high.
During an El Nino year, such as this, when dry periods are prolonged, water levels go down in peatlands, making them very susceptible to fires, said Mr Foong Chee Leong, head of NEA's meteorological services division.
'Any small fire will spread to the peatland. Once the fire starts, there will not be enough water available to fight the fires except having to wait till the arrival of the monsoon rain.'
An additional $800,000 will be invested by Singapore in the new projects.
Jambi Governor Zulkifli Nurdin, revealing that peatlands make up to 40 per cent of the forested area in Jambi province, said fires there were especially difficult to contain. 'If peatlands burn, they are difficult to stop as many areas can be up to 8m deep. Once the fires start, we can do nothing about it.'
But forest fires in Jambi are less and less of an occurrence over the last two years, the governor said, without revealing any figures.
'We know that in Riau, for example, there are serious fires currently, but in Jambi, we can see clean air.'
Yesterday, 57 hot spots were detected in Sumatra, according to the NEA. Of these, there were just four hot spots in the Jambi province.
The governor added that the provincial government had initiated many programmes aimed at improving the economic well-being of its people.
One started five years ago, for example, has seen 600,000 hectares of land now used to cultivate rubber trees and palm oil plantations.
Nurfika Osman& Budi Othmansyah, Jakarta Globe 23 Jul 09;
The thick haze from raging forest and peatland fires in the north of the country has taken its toll on the health of West Kalimantan residents.
Upper respiratory tract infections in the province have increased by 25 percent in the past two weeks, according to Muhammad Subuh, head of the provincial health agency. He said that on average, air quality in the province was categorized as “unhealthy,” based on the standard air pollution index, or ISUP.
Data for the air pollution index is taken from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.
“Most of the sufferers are children as their immune systems are vulnerable,” Subuh said. “We have distributed 16,000 face masks to residents through community health centers, nongovernmental organizations and educational institutions.”
However, he said the health agency did not have sufficient supplies of masks for all residents.
Subuh advised those residents with masks to wet them before use, which is more effective in blocking the more dangerous larger particles.
“They should wet the masks to prevent bigger particles from passing, which are more harmful for the lungs,” Subuh said.
He said air quality had reached dangerous levels in some areas of the province.
“Some locations in Pontianak and Kubu Raya [near Pontianak] have been categorized as ‘dangerous’ and ‘very dangerous’ for the last week,” he said, adding that the classification was valid from 11 a.m. to 3 a.m.
An air pollution index of 101 to 200 parts per million is considered “unhealthy,” 201 to 300 “dangerous” and above 300 “very dangerous.”
“The index shows 369 to some 1,000 parts per million for the past week,” Subuh said.
He said that forest and peatland fires had been identified by health authorities as the main cause of the air pollution in the province.
“Fires have been the cause of the poor air quality for the past two weeks,” he said.
“At the same time, there’s also extensive deforestation happening in the province. Thus, we do not have sufficient water reservoirs to prevent fires.”
He said the province was particularly vulnerable to fires because it contained extensive tracts of dry peatland, which was extremely combustible.
However, Subuh said, the activities of residents also contributed greatly to poor air quality in the province.
“Lots of farmers are burning their land, which just makes the air quality even worse,” he said.
State-run news agency Antara reported that visibility at the province’s main airport, Supadio, was down to 1,500 meters in the morning and 900 meters in the afternoon.
Meanwhile, in Riau on Thursday, two fire-fighting helicopters on loan from the National Police in Jakarta through the Forestry Ministry were deployed to battle raging peatland and forest fires in Pelalawan district.
The helicopters can carry 500 liters of water each. However, early reports from the field indicated that their efforts did little to extinguish the blazes in the district.
Adianto P. Simamora, The Jakarta Post 24 Jul 09;
Months before another El Ni*o, expected to deepen drought around the country, hundreds of rice paddies have already produced failed harvests.
Data from the Agriculture Ministry showed that 26,388 hectares of rice paddies suffered from drought in the April to June period due to water shortages.
"However, the figure is still far lower than it was in the 2003 to 2007 period when an average of 82,472 hectares of rice paddies suffered from drought each year," Ati Wasiati, director for the protection of food crops at the Agriculture Ministry told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.
She remained optimistic about the target to plant rice in 5 million hectares up until September despite the expected impacts of the El Ni*o phenomenon.
El Ni*o, a climate phenomenon with significant influence on global weather and ocean conditions, is predicted to hit the Asian region, including Indonesia, later this year or in early 2010.
The phenomenon, associated with warmer tropical waters in the Pacific, occurs once every two to five years and continues for about 12 months.
El Ni*o last occurred in 1997, 2002 and 2006, causing huge forest fires in Indonesia and resulted in decreased food production due to water shortages.
The country currently has about 12.4 million hectares of rice paddies, 4 million of which are irrigated.
In 1997, Indonesia exported about 5 million tons of rice due to prolonged drought caused by the effects of El Ni*o.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has warned of food shortages as a result of the return of El Ni*o and has asked the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) to continue to closely monitor the development of climatic phenomenon.
Gatot Irianto, an climate change expert from the Agriculture Ministry dismissed the severe impacts of the El Ni*o on food shortage.
"Rains will occur when El Ni*o hits, which will create warmer temperatures at sea and cause evaporation," he said.
He added the country was likely to experience the peak of the drought until the end of August.
Kompas reported that droughts had hit several areas including 1,600 hectares of rice paddy fields in West Java,Yogyakarta and Aceh, with soil cracking from a lack of water.
Paskah Suzetta, a state minister and the head of the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas), previously said that El Ni*o would increase the state budget deficit.
"The government's precautionary efforts to counter the effects of El Ni*o may expand the state budget deficit from about 1.5 percent to 1.7 percent," he said.
Environmental activists have also warned that El Ni*o will cause severe forest fires across the country.
As of July 17, WWF Indonesia had detected about 9,841 hot spots in the country, mostly in Riau, with 4,581 hot spots and West Kalimantan with 1,010 hot spots.
The 1997 forest fires resulted in Indonesia being the world's third-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. The smoke from those fires was blown as far away as Malaysia and Singapore.
Tan Cheng Li, The Star 22 Jul 09;
PETALING JAYA: The hunting of sambar and barking deer will be stopped for two years, in a move to safeguard their numbers and ultimately, that of the Malayan tiger.
Wildlife and National Parks Department enforcement director Saharudin Anan said the two-year moratorium on hunting will start this November, when the annual one-month open season for both game species usually kicks off.
He said no hunting licences will be issued for deer this year and next, to allow the declining deer population to rebound and provide a food source for wild tigers.
Wildlife scientists have said that tiger densities depended very much on the abundance of large preys such as the sambar and barking deer, but they have been overhunted in recent years.
Sambar deer numbers have plunged drastically, prompting the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to list the species as endangered last year.
The Perhilitan 2007 annual report revealed that 221 sambar deer and 315 barking deer were captured by licensed sports hunters that year, the bulk of them in Pahang.
The department issued 574 hunting licences for both species that year, which brought in a revenue of RM81,500.
The licence costs RM200 for the sambar deer and RM100 for the barking deer, and permits the capture of one animal.
In Kuala Lumpur, Natural Resources and Environment Minister Datuk Douglas Uggah Embas said the ministry has sought military assistance to help curb illegal wildlife trade in the country.
“The border is so long and the areas are so wide. And many people realise that our jungles are rich in resources and all kinds of flora and fauna.
“But all hope is not lost. We are working with the military to come out with more effective enforcement,” he said when launching the forum, Mainstreaming Biodiversity with a Focus on the National Tiger Action Plan yesterday.
“We have a masterplan and our commitment is to achieve that plan,” Uggah said.
He added that a task force, consisting of enforcement agencies, would also be formed to look into matters pertaining to wildlife poaching and smuggling.
Mycat hails ban on hunting of tiger prey
The Star 23 Jul 09;
THE Malaysian Conservation Alliance for Tigers (Mycat) – comprising the Malaysian Nature Society, Traffic South-East Asia, Wildlife Conservation Society Malaysia Programme and WWF-Malaysia – congratulates the Department of Wildlife and National Parks Peninsular Malaysia on instituting a nationwide ban on hunting of sambar and barking deer (The Star, July 22).
The two-year moratorium on hunting that will begin this November – the annual month-long hunting season for these species – is welcome news indeed. Both are vital tiger prey species, and an insufficient prey base is one of the threats to the tiger’s survival.
The sambar deer particularly is in a precarious situation. Previously categorised as least concern on the IUCN Red List, it has recently been upgraded to the vulnerable category, due its decline in recent years.
It faces a real threat of local extinction. Sambar deer are difficult to find outside of protected areas and rare even within.
We are pleased that the Department of Wildlife has realised that when populations are in decline, they cannot be sustainably harvested.
The department’s proactive action will hopefully be a step towards allowing wild populations to recover, and take us closer to our target of having 1,000 wild tigers by the year 2020, as set out by the National Tiger Action Plan for Malaysia.
At the end of two years, there should be a multi-site scientific assessment with various stakeholders of both the sambar and barking deer populations to indicate the future sustainability.
LORETTA ANN SHEPHERD,
Mycat Programme
Coordinator
Letter To The Editor:
Response: Ban on hunting of sambar and barking deer
(The Star, 22 Jul 2009)
WWF 22 Jul 09;
Dear Editor,
We, the Malaysian Conservation Alliance for Tigers, comprising the Malaysian Nature Society, TRAFFIC Southeast Asia, Wildlife Conservation Society – Malaysia Programme and WWF-Malaysia, congratulate the Department of Wildlife and National Parks Peninsular Malaysia on instituting a nationwide ban on hunting of sambar and barking deer.
The two-year moratorium on hunting that will begin this November - the annual month-long hunting season for these species - is welcome news indeed. Both are vital tiger prey species, and an insufficient prey base is one of the threats to the tiger’s survival.
The sambar deer particularly is in a precarious situation. Previously categorised as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List, it has recently been upgraded to the Vulnerable category, due its decline. It faces a real threat of local extinction. They are difficult to find outside of protected areas and rare even within.
We are pleased that the Department of Wildlife has realised that when populations are in decline, they cannot be sustainably harvested. The department’s proactive action will hopefully be a step towards allowing wild populations to recover, and take us closer to our target of having 1000 wild tigers by the year 2020, as set out by the National Tiger Action Plan for Malaysia.
At the end of two years, there should be a multi-site scientific assessment with various stakeholders of both the sambar and barking deer populations to indicate the future sustainability.
Letter issued by:
Malaysian Conservation Alliance for Tigers, comprising the Malaysian Nature Society, TRAFFIC Southeast Asia, Wildlife Conservation Society – Malaysia Programme and WWF-Malaysia.
Yahoo News 23 Jul 09;
DHAKA (AFP) – Bangladeshi conservationists said Thursday the discovery of a rare leopard captured by villagers in the southeast of the country renewed hopes for the survival of the critically endangered species.
Professor Anwarul Islam, chief executive of Wildlife Trust of Bangladesh, said the three-month-old clouded leopard cub had been released back into the wild.
It had been caged by villagers in the remote Chittagong Hill Tracts region, which borders Myanmar and Mizoram state in India, for the past three weeks, he said.
"Locals stumbled upon two cubs and their mother eating a monkey in the district of Rangimati three weeks ago. They were only able to capture one cub," he said
"It was tremendous news because many conservationists thought the animal was extinct from Bangladesh due to habitat loss."
He said in most cases where a rare species is captured, villagers sell the animal, but in this case conservationists had convinced them to release it back into the wild.
The species is timid and nocturnal and little is known about it, he added.
The clouded leopard is listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with 100,000 of the species believed to still be living worldwide.
It is mainly found in South and Southeast Asian countries, and the last reported sightings of the animal in Bangladesh were in 1992 and 2005.
Villagers discover 'extinct' leopard cub eating a monkey
Andrew Buncombe, The Independent 24 Jul 09;
Conservationists in Bangladesh are celebrating after remote tribespeople discovered a rare and threatened leopard that was believed to have been extinct in the country for almost 20 years.
Villagers in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in south-east Bangladesh captured the clouded leopard cub after they disturbed it, its sibling and their mother eating a dead monkey in the jungle. The others escaped, but the villagers captured the three-month-old and put it in a cage. It is understood the tribespeople planned to sell the animal but, after news of the discovery spread, conservationists persuaded them to release the leopard back into the wild. They did so yesterday.
"We are delighted. For many years now, we had thought this animal was gone or was going," said Professor Anwarul Islam, head of the Wildlife Trust of Bangladesh. "It's good to know that they are still there and that they are breeding."
The clouded leopard, which famously has large dark patterns on its coat, is considered vulnerable across all of south-east Asia, with loss of habitat through deforestation and the Chinese trade in rare animal parts being blamed for the decline.
Listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, there are an estimated 100,000 living worldwide. Reports suggest that the last sighting of the shy and nocturnal animal in Bangladesh was in 1992.
Mr Islam said the villagers in an area of south-east Bangladesh bordering Burma and the north-east Indian state of Mizoram, had stumbled on the family of animals three weeks ago. They took the cub to their village, where it was fed on chicken and milk. The villagers were anxious about releasing the animal as they feared it would struggle to survive in the wild without its mother.
But Mr Islam said the fact that the leopard had a healthy appetite was a good sign. "Most wild animals do not like to eat in captivity but this cub was eating chickens," he said. "The villagers also tried to feed it milk but apparently he preferred the meat."
Environmentalists have long been on the losing side of a battle in Bangladesh, a desperately poor country where conservation has seldom seemed a priority.
In recent years, however, awareness has grown and organisations such as the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (Bela) have campaigned for the enforcement of orders by the country's courts on issues such as forest protection.
Clouded leopards are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity. There is a breeding programme under way involving zoos in Thailand and the US, and three baby leopards were recently born at the Nashville Zoo.
Christine Breitenmoser-Würsten, a Swiss specialist on large cats who works with the World Conservation Union, said the threat to the clouded leopard varied from location to location. In Burma and southern China local people still hunted the cats for food while elsewhere, pelt-hunters and destruction of habitat represented the biggest danger. Of the discovery of the cub in Bangladesh, she said: "It's very exciting – it's fascinating. I was thrilled when I heard about it."
LiveScience.com 24 Jul 09;
Carnivorous jumbo squid have been washing up on San Diego beaches and swarming in Southern California's coastal waters, freaking out scuba divers and bathers this month, but a biologist now says these beasts are not man-eaters, despite concerns expressed in the media.
Reports started coming in earlier in July that dozens of the squid, also known as Humboldt squid, were washing ashore and interacting with divers. Jumbo squid can grow up to 7 feet long and usually prefer to live in deeper waters. Lately, off-shore divers have reported seeing large groups of the squid, which can swim as fast as 15 mph.
University of Rhode Island biologist Brad Seibel, who has dived with jumbo squid several times, called the reports "alarmist."
For years, Seibel has heard stories claiming that Humboldt squid will devour a dog in minutes and could kill or maim unsuspecting divers.
"However, I want to spread the word that [Humboldt squid] aren't the aggressive man-eaters as they have been portrayed," Seibel said.
"Private dive companies in Mexico play up this myth by insisting that their customers wear body armor or dive in cages while diving in waters where the squid are found," Seibel said. "Many also encourage the squid's aggressive behavior by chumming the waters. I didn't believe the hype, but there was still some doubt in my mind, so I was a little nervous getting into the water with them for the first time."
Jumbo squid have pulled with their tentacles at divers' masks and equipment, and at one diver's arms, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Scientists have no firm idea why the squid have suddenly invaded San Diego's coastal waters, but it could be anything from global warming to a shortage of food or a decline in jumbo squid's predators, according to the newspaper.
Scuba diving at night in the surface waters of the Gulf of California in 2007, Seibel scanned the depths with his flashlight and saw the shadows of Humboldt squid far in the distance.
After he got up his nerve, he turned off the light. When he turned it back on again 30 seconds later, he was surrounded by what seemed like hundreds of the squid, many just 5 or 6 feet away from him. Most were in the 3-4 foot size range, while larger ones were sometimes visible in deeper waters. But the light appeared to frighten them, and they immediately dashed off to the periphery.
The URI researcher's dive was part of a scientific examination of the species, which some call "red devil," to learn more about their physiology, feeding behavior and swimming abilities.
Humboldt squid feed in surface waters at night, then retreat to great depths during daylight hours. "They spend the day 300 meters [nearly 1,000 feet] deep where oxygen levels are very low," Seibel said. "We wanted to know how they deal with so little oxygen."
Seibel said that while the squid are strong swimmers with a parrot-like beak that could inflict injury, they are not man-eaters.
Unlike some large sharks that feed on large fish and marine mammals, jumbo squid use their numerous small, toothed suckers on their arms and tentacles to feed on small fish and plankton that are no more than a few centimeters in length.
Seibel's dives were part of a research cruise with colleagues including Lloyd Trueblood of URI, Steve Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and Alison Sweeney of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Seibel was surprised by the large number of squid he encountered, which made it easy to imagine how they could be potentially dangerous to anything swimming with them. Their large numbers also made Seibel somewhat pleased that they appeared frightened of his dive light. Yet he said the animals were also curious about other lights, like reflections off his metal equipment or a glow-in-the-dark tool that one squid briefly attacked.
"Based on the stories I had heard, I was expecting them to be very aggressive, so I was surprised at how timid they were. As soon as we turned on the lights, they were gone," he said. "I didn't get the sense that they saw the entire diver as a food item, but they were definitely going after pieces of our equipment."
There have been many active discussions among biologists and the dive community about the safety of diving with Humboldt squid, Seibel said.
As a result of his experience, Seibel is preparing a formal report with his recommendations for safely diving with the squid, including suggestions to always carry a back-up dive light and to be tethered to a boat. Any time humans enter the habitat of a large animal, there is potential for dangerous interactions, he said, so divers should use caution.
Researcher Sheds Light On 'Man-eating' Squid; Finds Them Timid, Non-threatening
ScienceDaily 23 Jul 09;
Recent news reports about scuba divers off San Diego being menaced by large numbers of Humboldt's or jumbo squid have raised the ire of University of Rhode Island biologist Brad Seibel. As a leading expert on the species who has dived with them several times, he calls the reports "alarmist" and says the squid's man-eating reputation is seriously overblown.
For years Seibel has heard stories claiming that Humboldt squid will devour a dog in minutes and could kill or maim unsuspecting divers.
"Private dive companies in Mexico play up this myth by insisting that their customers wear body armor or dive in cages while diving in waters where the squid are found. Many also encourage the squid's aggressive behavior by chumming the waters. I didn't believe the hype, but there was still some doubt in my mind, so I was a little nervous getting into the water with them for the first time," Seibel said.
Scuba diving at night in the surface waters of the Gulf of California in 2007, Seibel scanned the depths with his flashlight and saw the shadows of Humboldt squid far in the distance. After he got up his nerve, he turned off the light. When he turned it back on again 30 seconds later, he was surrounded by what seemed like hundreds of the squid, many just five or six feet away from him. Most were in the 3-4 foot size range, while larger ones were sometimes visible in deeper waters. But the light appeared to frighten them, and they immediately dashed off to the periphery.
The URI researcher's dive was more than just a personal test. It was part of a scientific examination of the species some call "red devil" to learn more about their physiology, feeding behavior and swimming abilities.
Humboldt squid feed in surface waters at night, then retreat to great depths during daylight hours. "They spend the day 300 meters deep where oxygen levels are very low," Seibel said. "We wanted to know how they deal with so little oxygen."
Seibel said that while the squid are strong swimmers with a parrot-like beak that could inflict injury, man-eaters they are not. Unlike some large sharks that feed on large fish and marine mammals, jumbo squid use their numerous small, toothed suckers on their arms and tentacles to feed on small fish and plankton that are no more than a few centimeters in length.
The highlight of Seibel's research cruise with colleagues from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute was diving with the impressive animals. Other divers participating were Lloyd Trueblood of URI, Steve Haddock of MBARI, and Alison Sweeney of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Seibel was surprised by the large number of squid he encountered, which made it easy to imagine how they could be potentially dangerous to anything swimming with them. Their large numbers also made Seibel somewhat pleased that they appeared frightened of his dive light. Yet he said the animals were also curious about other lights, like reflections off his metal equipment or a glow-in-the-dark tool that one squid briefly attacked.
"Based on the stories I had heard, I was expecting them to be very aggressive, so I was surprised at how timid they were. As soon as we turned on the lights, they were gone," he said. "I didn't get the sense that they saw the entire diver as a food item, but they were definitely going after pieces of our equipment."
According to Seibel, there have been many active discussions among biologists and the dive community about the safety of diving with Humboldt squid. As a result of his experience, the URI scientist is preparing a formal report with his recommendations for safely diving with the squid, including suggestions to always carry a back-up dive light and to be tethered to a boat. Any time humans enter the habitat of a large animal, there is potential for dangerous interactions, he said, so divers should use caution.
"However, I want to spread the word that they aren't the aggressive man-eaters as they have been portrayed," Seibel said.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Rhode Island.
Christine Dell'Amore, National Geographic News 23 Jul 09;
Attacking from nests as big as pickup-truck beds, invasive western yellowjacket wasps in Hawaii are munching their way through an "astonishing diversity" of creatures, from caterpillars to pheasants, a new study says.
Adult yellowjackets consume only nectar. But they kill or scavenge prey to deliver needed protein to their growing broods.
"They basically just carry it in their mandibles—you see them flying with their balls of meat," said lead study author Erin Wilson, who just finished her Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego.
In their native habitat in the western U.S., the wasps die off in winter. But in Hawaii the wasps survive the winter, possibly due to mild year-round temperatures or subtle genetic changes.
A longer life-span gives the insects more time to build up their nests. So what would normally be a basketball-size nest can become, at the extreme, several feet long—big enough to fill the back of a pickup truck, Wilson said.
The extra room allows a colony of 50,000 workers to explode to 500,000 or more. Larger colonies mean that the insects deplete more prey than in areas where the wasps die off in winter.
Picnic Pests
Western yellowjackets—best known as picnic pests—were accidentally introduced to Hawaii during the 1900s, with the last wave of arrivals, in the 1970s, coming from the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
To learn more about the invaders' impact, Wilson and colleagues studied ten colonies in two national parks where the wasps are now widespread: Hawaii Volcanoes on the Big Island and Haleakala on Maui. (Hawaii map.)
The team collected bits of food from the jaws of 50 wasps and ran DNA analyses to determine what the insects had eaten.
Wilson had guessed that the aggressive bugs mostly go after slow-moving caterpillars and other "big, gooey organisms" and don't bother with many other types of prey.
The introduced wasps' taste for flesh shocked her—the insects' prey spans 14 taxonomic groups of animals, including tree lice, spiders, rats, and geckos.
Although the wasps don't kill larger animals such as birds and lizards, they do scavenge them, the team reports this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In addition, the adult wasps collect huge amounts of nectar, draining resources for native insects and birds such as the Hawaiian honeycreeper.
The wasps' hunger for nectar may even be disrupting pollination of native plants, the study authors write.
Overall, the wasps have been filling in the role of top insect-eater, left open as Hawaii's bird populations dwindle.
But Wilson said that prey insects can easily rebound if yellowjacket nests are removed.
Spiders and caterpillars that had been locally wiped out have returned within a few months when nearby wasp nests were taken out, Wilson said.
Pioneering Method
Picking apart the wasps' "little masticated balls of prey items" and analyzing their molecular structures was an important part of this study, said P. Kirk Visscher, an associate professor of entomology at the University of California, Riverside, who studies social insects.
"It's one of the earlier applications of this [technology, and a] nice demonstration of what it's capable of doing," he added.
Without the DNA work, the researchers would not have been able to identify the precise species that the wasps were collecting.
But according to Visscher, yellowjackets eat pretty much anything in their native habitats, so their wide-ranging Hawaiian diet is "not very surprising."
"Straight for the Head"
Even with an expanded Hawaiian menu, the wasps' vicious killing strategies haven't changed in their new habitat, lead study author Wilson said.
"If you have something like a caterpillar, they'll take their time a bit more, jump on it, and cut it into pieces," Wilson said.
"If you have something that can fight back, like a honeybee … then they go straight for the head," decapitating the bee to disable it.
"The honeybee will still be moving—it's pretty gruesome."
And although humans aren't exactly on the menu, Wilson has been a target of the aggressive insects during her fieldwork.
"You always get stung," she said. "They can sense any heat that's escaping from your [bee] suit, and if you have a tiny little hole, they'll get you."
Robert Goodier, livescience.com 23 Jul 09;
Futurists have proposed that extinct animals could be resurrected some day via cloning of their DNA extracted from bone or frozen tissue.
There is little agreement on this, but a new project to store tiny samples of tissue from endangered animals at New York's natural history museum again prompts questions on whether this approach might be insurance against extinction, not just a valuable data repository for biologists.
In principle, such cloning has already happened. Spanish biologists resurrected an extinct Spanish goat, the Pyrenean Ibex, this year, cloning it from frozen tissue collected before the species' demise in 2000. The clone survived for seven minutes after birth before succumbing to a lung infection, the British media reported. The limited success ignited hopes that cryogenic collections, like the newly expanding one at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), could serve someday as a kind of Noah's Ark for animals that go extinct.
With room for up to 1 million specimens, the AMNH's frozen tissue lab currently stores frozen butterflies, frog toes, whale skin and alligator hides, among many other samples, in nitrogen-cooled vats. The collection is used today for conservation research - the genetic information gives clues to the breadth of the animals' hunting grounds and breeding behaviors. In an agreement signed this month with the National Park Service, the museum will begin storing tissue samples of endangered animals living in the nation's parks. The first samples - blood from a Channel Islands fox - should be delivered in August, museum officials said.
In theory, the frozen cells could be used for cloning, though for now that is not on any museum scientist's current to-do list.
How-to guide
The scientists who cloned the ibex, for instance, followed in the footsteps of embryologist Ian Wilmut, who introduced the world to Dolly the lamb with a paper in the February 27, 1997, issue of the journal Nature, showing that cloning mammals is possible. Both Dolly and the ibex were cloned by somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which scientists sucked the nucleus from an egg cell, then injected the nucleus of a cell from the animal they wished to clone into the empty shell. They then implanted the cell into the womb of a surrogate mother and waited for the birth of the clone.
"In species such as [the ibex], cloning is the only possibility to avoid its complete disappearance," Jose Folch, investigator with the Aragon Center for Food Research and Technology in Zaragoza, Spain, told the London-based Telegraph newspaper.
That was fine for the ibex, but without well-preserved tissue, cloning extinct animals is even more speculative. Time ravages DNA, and even in a frozen state it can slowly degrade. The bits of DNA salvaged from ancient bone or feathers today are tiny fragments of their owners' complete genomes. A few more of the steps for clonal re-creation are accessible now as scientists try to digitally reconstruct the genomes of woolly mammoths and even Neanderthals.
Drawing a genetic map
Researchers have already reconstructed fragments of genetic recipes for extinct animals such as the cave bear, the woolly mammoth and most recently, the moa, a giant bird that was at the top of New Zealand's food chain until 700 years ago, shortly after the arrival of the Maori.
Last year, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome of a Neanderthal that died 38,000 years ago. The mitochondria are the cell's powerhouses that have their own sets of genes.
Those sequences were derived from tissue, bone and feathers that were preserved, but degraded. The technique usually yields only partial sequences. It may only work for samples up to 100,000 years old. After that, time wrecks the DNA beyond use.
Scientists have recently devised another way to sequence ancient genomes using only what they know from those animals' living relatives. "Reverse evolution" is a process that has been used for years to work out the evolutionary history of proteins. But in the past year, a similar technique was applied to genomes.
Benedict Paten and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, developed a model that examines the genomes of many individuals from related species, then it tries to walk back in time to deduce the entire genome of the creature that must have come before. Given human and chimpanzee genomes, he said, they could "put them into our computational pipeline and come up with each of our common ancestors." His work was published in the November 2008 edition of the journal Genome Research.
The computer model, like the bone and hair samples, has its limitations and neither method has produced genomes of long-extinct creatures such as dinosaurs.
"Inevitably, even if you were given theoretical access to the genomes of every living organism, some of ancient DNA has left no living descendants," Paten said.
From bits to birth
Even if scientists could have a complete genome in hand, they would still have to turn the code into a clone.
"Fifteen years ago, the most difficult part of all this was getting the genome sequences, and now we're kind of over that. It's really hard and costs a lot of money but it can be done," said Rob DeSalle, curator of entomology at the museum (AMNH) and editor-in-chief of the new journal Mitochondrial DNA.
In 1998, DeSalle published a book about the science behind Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park," and joked recently that not much has changed since then. "There's this big canyon that you have to get through from sequencing to putting the nucleus into the egg," DeSalle said.
First, chemists would have to create the proper genes. Next, DeSalle said, you have to somehow arrange those genes on a biological scaffolding, sorting them into chromosomes.
With the mammoth, he said, "it's a 10,000-piece puzzle, a really hard puzzle to put together when you have all these tiny fragments. To my knowledge I'm not aware of how someone would do that."
Finally, you have to fold the chromosomes precisely to mimic those of the extinct animal. After taking those still-theoretical steps, the DNA could possibly be injected into an empty egg cell to begin reproduction. Paten pointed out that, as with genetic diseases in animals today, even the smallest error in any of these steps could be disastrous.
If there is no nucleus available for a nuclear transfer and it is too hard to create DNA from a genetic sequence, a third route might be possible.
George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, has proposed that ancient genes could be inserted into the DNA of the animal's living descendants. In that way, a mammoth could be constructed by knocking out the relatively hairless genes of a modern elephant, say, and inserting the genes for hairy hides of a mammoth, and so on, until you have a close approximation of an extinct animal.
But why bother?
However, the gap from the computer screen to the womb is still too wide to cross, and some scientists wonder why we would even try.
"We shouldn't mix up what might be done with what ought to be done," said Dr. David Ehrenfeld, a medical doctor and biology professor at Rutgers University.
Ehrenfeld argues that reintroducing animals into environments where they once thrived is costly, and animals raised in captivity often fail to adapt when they are released. Therefore, he said, future attempts to release clones of extinct animals into the wild will be too expensive and probably won't work.
"Take your mastodon," he said. "Where are you going to put them back? Are you going to put them back in Sweden?" The cost would be "amazing," he said.
Others who spoke to LiveScience agreed that the problems, for now, are insurmountable. Cloning Neanderthals, for example, is an ethical quagmire, Paten said. DeSalle argued that money spent on cloning extinct animals could be more wisely spent; improving agriculture, for example, will be vital to feed growing populations.
There is an easier fix, Ehrenfeld said: "It's always better to save something than it is to fix it after it's gone."
George Marshall, New Scientist 23 Jul 09;
AT A recent dinner at the University of Oxford, a senior researcher in atmospheric physics was telling me about his coming holiday in Thailand. I asked him whether he was concerned that his trip would make a contribution to climate change - we had, after all, just sat through a two-hour presentation on the topic. "Of course," he said blithely. "And I'm sure the government will make long-haul flights illegal at some point."
I had deliberately steered our conversation this way as part of an informal research project that I am conducting - one you are welcome to join. My participants so far include a senior adviser to a leading UK climate policy expert who flies regularly to South Africa ("my offsets help set a price in the carbon market"), a member of the British Antarctic Survey who makes several long-haul skiing trips a year ("my job is stressful"), a national media environment correspondent who took his family to Sri Lanka ("I can't see much hope") and a Greenpeace climate campaigner just back from scuba diving in the Pacific ("it was a great trip!").
Intriguing as their dissonance may be, what is especially revealing is that each has a career predicated on the assumption that information is sufficient to generate change. It is an assumption that a moment's introspection would show them was deeply flawed.
It is now 44 years since US president Lyndon Johnson's scientific advisory council warned that our greenhouse gas emissions could generate "marked changes in climate". That's 44 years of research costing, by one estimate, $3 billion per year, symposia, conferences, documentaries, articles and now 80 million references on the internet. Despite all this information, opinion polls over the years have shown that 40 per cent of people in the UK and over 50 per cent in the US resolutely refuse to accept that our emissions are changing the climate. Scarcely 10 per cent of Britons regard climate change as a major problem.
I do not accept that this continuing rejection of the science is a reflection of media distortion or scientific illiteracy. Rather, I see it as proof of our society's failure to construct a shared belief in climate change.
I use the word "belief" in full knowledge that climate scientists dislike it. Vicky Pope, head of the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Exeter, UK, wrote in The Guardian earlier this year: "We are increasingly asked whether we 'believe in climate change'. Quite simply it is not a matter of belief. Our concerns about climate change arise from the scientific evidence."
I could not disagree more. People's attitudes towards climate change, even Pope's, are belief systems constructed through social interactions within peer groups. People then select the storylines that accord best with their personal world view. In Pope's case and in my own this is a world view that respects scientists and empirical evidence.
But listen to what others say. Most regard climate change as an unsettled technical issue still hotly debated by eggheads. Many reject personal responsibility by shifting blame elsewhere - the rich, the poor, the Americans, the Chinese - or they suspect the issue is a Trojan horse built by hair-shirted environmentalists who want to spoil their fun.
The climate specialists in my informal experiment are no less immune to the power of their belief systems. They may be immersed in the scientific evidence, yet they have nonetheless developed ingenious storylines to justify their long-haul holidays.
How, then, should we go about generating a shared belief in the reality of climate change? What should change about the way we present the evidence for climate change?
For one thing, we should become far more concerned about the communicators and how trustworthy they appear. Trustworthiness is a complex bundle of qualities: authority and expertise are among them, but so too are honesty, confidence, charm, humour and outspokenness.
Many of the maverick, self-promoting climate sceptics play this game well, which is one reason they exercise such disproportionate influence over public opinion. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on the other hand, plays it badly. Rather than let loose its most presentable participants to tell the world how it achieves consensus on an unprecedented scale, it fails even to provide a list of the people involved in the process. It has no human face at all: the only images on its website are the palace or beach resort where it will hold its next meeting.
Since people tend to put most trust in those who appear to share their values and understand their needs, it is crucial we widen the range of voices speaking on climate change - even if this means climate experts relinquishing some control and encouraging others who are better communicators to speak for them.
Another key to achieving a widely held belief in climate change is collective imagination. We will never fully appreciate the risks unless we can project ourselves into the future - and that requires an appeal to the collective emotional imagination. In the past years I have been delighted to observe a growing partnership between scientists and the creative arts, such as retreats for scientists, artists and writers.
It is clear that the cautious language of science is now inadequate to inspire concerted change, even among scientists. We need a fundamentally different approach. Only then will scientists be in a position to throw down the ultimate challenge to the public: "We've done the work, we believe the results, now when the hell will you wake up?"
George Marshall is founder of the Climate Outreach Information Network in Oxford, UK
David Fogarty, Reuters 23 Jul 09;
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Negotiators face a mammoth task to try to agree by the end of the year on the outlines of broader climate pact to replace the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol.
Key issues such as financing climate change adaptation programs in developing nations, transfer of clean-energy technology and disagreements over rich nations' targets to cut planet-warming emissions still need to be resolved.
Following are responses from Howard Bamsey, Australia's special envoy on climate change, on how the negotiations are proceeding as nations step up the momentum to try to seal the pact during a U.N. gathering in Copenhagen in December.
THERE'S LESS THAN FIVE MONTHS TILL COPENHAGEN. IS TIME
RUNNING OUT?
"We've certainly got a long way to go before all the bits of the jigsaw are in place. While some people are now saying we don't expect to fix everything, we're not sorting issues into those we will fix in Copenhagen and those that will come after.
We've just got our heads down and are working as hard as we can with others to complete the task.
"Many countries understand the importance of building confidence. If this is the prisoner's dilemma writ large, overcoming the lack of confidence about the actions of others is pretty fundamental. So an approach which encourages rather than disparages is the right one."
ARE WE LIKELY TO SEE AN AGREEMENT ON HOW FUNDING IS GOING
TO BE RAISED?
"The analysis of the options by individual governments is coming to the point where decisions will soon be able to be taken on that. At the moment, we're talking intensively about options, but there's not yet consensus on which way to go."
THERE'S A POLARISATION BETWEEN RICH AND POOR NATIONS. HOW
TO OVERCOME THIS?
"The analytics are pretty clear. It's in everybody's interest for everybody to deal with this problem. Yes, there will be adjustments that every country will have to make. But in the long run, this goes back to the prisoner's dilemma -- do you want to get out of jail or not? I think we do want to get out. This means we have to find a way of approaching the problem outside the polarized approach you mentioned.
"We recognize that a good agreement to deal with climate change is in our national interest. And perhaps if other countries thought about it in similar terms, many of them would come to the same conclusion that we have, that it's a national interest issue for countries. So if you come at it in that light, it subverts the polarized view of the world that invites a confrontational approach."
WHAT WILL BE A KEY MEASURE OF SUCCESS AT COPENHAGEN?
"A measure of success is how close we come on the questions of targets and commitments, how much action will we generate? And that includes what is required to support that action globally -- financing and technology.
"Adaptation is part of the big picture too and it has to be dealt with effectively for the whole bargain to work. Then I think there's the overarching set of issues around measurement, reporting and verification, how you monitor the action achieved because that's central.
"For us a key measure is: Has this (an agreement in Copenhagen) set us toward achieving a genuine effective global response to global change? And if we're going to achieve that we've got a lot work to do yet."
DEVELOPING NATIONS ARE NOW A LEADING SOURCE OF EMISSIONS.
ARE THEY KEEN TO BE PART OF ANY AGREEMENT?
"Yes, I think so. But developing countries will be very keen to understand that accelerated action on climate change won't compromise their development goals. And I think it's really interesting that in the last few months there's been a focus on the notion of low-carbon development -- there's a lot more attention to this question of planning low-carbon development. It's a way of understanding an alternative path to prosperity."
ARE YOU CONFIDENT OF AN AGREEMENT IN COPENHAGEN?
"I'm personally confident that we'll get an agreement in Copenhagen. But this issue is not going to go away then. We're going to have to continue to develop international cooperation on climate change for many years yet. The science will change, the relationships between countries, the capabilities of countries will change. It's not a case of fixing it once and for all."
(Editing by Alex Richardson)
Reuters 23 Jul 09;
OSLO (Reuters) - Aid of $10 billion from rich nations would be a "good beginning" to launch a U.N. climate treaty due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December, the United Nations' top climate official said on Thursday.
Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, also told the BBC World Service in an interview that rich countries needed to pledge deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and the poor had to slow the rise in their emissions.
But cash was needed to kick-start a deal.
"If we can get in Copenhagen something like 10 billion euros or dollars on the table that will allow developing countries to begin preparing national plans to limit their emissions and adapt to climate change, then that would be a good beginning," he said.
"But even more importantly, Copenhagen has to agree an architecture, a burden-sharing formula, that will allow us to share out the costs of climate action among countries as the needs increase over time," he added.
Costs of fighting climate change in the longer term could be up to $200 billion a year, according to U.N. projections.
Developing nations say the rich have to show willingness to give cash to launch a new U.N pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.
Many developing nations are likely to be hardest hit by climate change such as more droughts, disease, floods, heat waves and rising sea levels.
PITTSBURGH
Environmental group Greenpeace said that far higher figures of about $140 billion annually should be on the table when leaders of the Group of 20 discuss climate finance at a meeting in the U.S. city of Pittsburgh in September.
"De Boer is absolutely right to highlight that this finance question must be resolved to break the deadlock in the international climate talks but $10 billion could only be regarded as a down payment," Greenpeace campaigner Joss Garman said.
De Boer said that rich nations were finding it harder to come up with cash because of the recession. "It's become more difficult to raise financial resources," he said.
He also said developed countries should be guided in planning emissions cuts by what he has often called a "good beacon" of reductions of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
In a 2007 report, a U.N. panel of scientists said cuts of 25-40 percent were needed to avert the worst of global warming. So far, promises by developed nations amount to cuts of only about 10 to 14 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
And de Boer said that developing nations had to sign up to slow the rise of their emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels in factories, power plants and vehicles, as part of a Copenhagen deal.
"If on that piece of paper, China, India, Brazil and other major developing countries have offered national actions that will significantly take their emissions below business as usual ... that for me will be a success," he said.
(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
Dan Martin Yahoo News 24 Jul 09;
BEIJING (AFP) – UN chief Ban Ki-moon called on China Friday to exercise greater leadership in world efforts to curb climate change, saying a new global framework deal cannot be reached this year without Beijing.
"Without China there can be no success this year on a new global climate framework deal," Ban said during a speech to launch a programme promoting environmentally friendly lighting in China.
"But with China there is an enormous potential for the world to seal a deal in Copenhagen."
Ban will oversee a UN summit in the Danish capital in December aimed at hammering out a new climate change pact to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that are blamed for global warming.
While Ban stopped short of explicitly urging China to commit to new emissions curbs, he called on Beijing to seize the initiative.
"Strong signals from China on mitigation actions announced before Copenhagen will help push the negotiating process forward. They can also direct responsibility to other key countries to do more," he said.
China and other developing nations are opposed to any compulsory cuts in their emissions, saying the responsibility for solving the problem rests with the developed countries that have polluted for so long.
But Ban noted that China was a top world emitter of greenhouse gases and said Beijing should play a leadership role on climate change commensurate with its rising global status.
"With global power comes global responsibility," Ban said.
Ban noted that China had made "enormous" progress on promoting the use of green energy sources such as solar and wind power and urged further efforts to limit the country's reliance on the use of heavily polluting coal.
Coal makes up about 70 percent of China's energy consumption. Ban said coal burning accounts for 85 percent of the nation's carbon emissions.
There are mounting expectations that China will propose some sort of limits on its own emissions due to the international pressure and domestic concerns over the effects of climate change on the country, said Greenpeace China's Li Yan.
"We are quite confident that China will come up with some sort of new proposal," said Li, the environment group's China climate change and energy campaigner.
However, she said the form those limits could take remained unclear.
Greenpeace is calling for China to commit to reducing emissions growth by 15-30 percent by 2020, she said.
State press reports this year have said China was prepared to commit to improved energy efficiency as its contribution to the talks, but no details of such targets have been set out.
Ban stressed it was in China's interest to curb emissions, saying climate change would likely increase desertification in the country, cut crop yields and melt Himalayan glaciers -- with harmful effects for China and its neighbours.
"China has long been the world's fastest-growing major economy," Ban said.
"It is also a leading emitter of greenhouse gases, and it is one of the countries most vulnerable to the impact of climate change."
The US Congress is considering legislation that would reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. But China has said such cuts are not enough.
Ban was to meet later on Friday with Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao.
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