Melbourne -- The search for answers presses on about why high-profile wildlife are dying in the Indian River Lagoon.

"It's one thing to die a quick death," said Megan Stolen from Hubbs SeaWorld Research Institute. "It's another to sort of waste away."

That's why there's a sense of urgency for biologists, who are trying to figure out why 30 dead dolphins have turned up since the beginning of the year in the Indian River Lagoon of Brevard County.

"We do see a few patterns in that the dolphins that we have found in the lagoon are very skinny, but aside from that, we don't see anything that really connects them," Stolen said.

Most of them are decomposed, limiting on what researchers can learn.

Many of the dolphins have been found with near-empty stomachs.

"We really don't know what they've been eating, that takes a whole new level of scientific inquiry," Stolen said.

Meanwhile, researchers are looking for a possible connection to other wildlife turning up dead in the lagoon.

Approximately 100 manatees have died since July 2012 due to a common, but unknown cause.

Of the more than 130,000 people forced to flee their homes in rioting between Buddhists and Muslims over the last year in western Myanmar, around half are living in low-lying camps near the sea, the United Nations says.

Human rights organizations have issued repeated warnings that the displaced people are at risk of disease and hunger during the rainy season, which begins this month and continues until around September.

"We're definitely very concerned," said Vivian Tan, a spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency. "We are working around the clock, trying to get as many people out of low-lying areas and into decent shelters."

Projections on Saturday by the United States Navy Marine Meteorology Division estimated that the cyclone would reach land around Wednesday. According to the same calculations, the center of the storm will be just south of Chittagong, a major city in Bangladesh, and rain and strong winds would also hit areas in Rakhine State in Myanmar, where the camps are.

Although the storm could change direction or lessen in intensity, aid groups say even heavy rains would create very difficult conditions for the displaced families, who are camped out in muddy fields vulnerable to tidal surges.

Myanmar is prone to violent tropical storms. A cyclone in 2008 killed more than 150,000 people in the country's Irrawaddy River delta. Another storm in 2010 in western Myanmar, in roughly the same areas as those under threat now, displaced tens of thousands and killed more than 100.

A locust plague of epic size is devastating the island nation of Madagascar, threatening the lives of 13 million people already on the brink of famine.

Billions of locusts are destroying crops and grazing lands across half the country. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) expects the plague to get worse, with two-thirds of the country likely to be affected by September.

The FAO says $22 million is needed by the end of this month to control the plague. And with each female locust laying up to 180 eggs, another $19 million will be needed to stop the plague recurring.

"We know from experience that this plague will require three years of anti-locust campaigns," says Annie Monard, who coordinates the FAO's locust response.

Living so close the ocean, residents at The Moorings at Squantum Gardens are used to the full spectrum of sea scents wafting over to their building.

"Maybe occasionally you get bad smells, but it was never this constant, six weeks of this now," said Don Duggan, who's lived in the apartment community for seniors since it opened in 2007. "You can smell it walking the hallway."

The mysterious odor - a potent mix of sulfur and rotten eggs - hits the nose at the intersection of Quincy Shore Drive and East Squantum Street. The city has hired chemists from UMass Boston to test water samples for the presence of any bacteria that could contain clues about the smell's origin.

"The city immediately took bacteria samples to see if it was sewage; those tests came back negative," city spokesman Christopher Walker said. "But we're still waiting to determine exactly what it is."

Walker said preliminary indications are that the smell is linked to a naturally-occurring phenomenon, perhaps red algae.

"Unfortunately, it appears to be something at this point that's occurring in nature and doesn't have an immediate remedy, other than waiting for nature to run its course," he said.

Event Time
2013-05-11 20:46:56 UTC
2013-05-11 08:46:56 UTC-12:00 at epicenter

Location
17.944°S 175.075°W depth=205.4km (127.6mi)

Nearby Cities
139km (86mi) NW of Neiafu, Tonga
353km (219mi) N of Nuku'alofa, Tonga
576km (358mi) SW of Apia, Samoa
613km (381mi) ESE of Lambasa, Fiji
613km (381mi) SW of Tafuna, American Samoa

Technical Details

For the second year running, a spring die-off of hundreds of spawning-age red drum has occurred in Mobile Bay.

Alabama Marine Resources Department personnel, who surveyed the situation on the water Thursday, estimate finding nearly 400 floating in the bay with about 100 dead hardhead catfish mixed in.

Red drum are commonly called redfish, with the larger specimens known as bull redfish because of their hard-charging fighting ability when hooked by fishermen.

A die-off involving the same size and number of redfish and catfish happened during the last couple of days in April 2012.

It's a rite of spring, birds flying back to the Northland after a long winter.

But an especially long winter this year has caused big problems for the loon population.


"He needs a much larger area to achieve lift," said Erica LeMoine, Program Coordinator for LoonWatch, of a lone loon in a pond near Ashland.

The loons are turning up grounded because many Northland lakes, the bird's springtime landing pads, are still frozen.

"This late spring definitely has a detrimental effect. Especially when we have this type of weather," said LeMoine, "They found a loon in a wet, paved parking lot, in farm fields down by Rhinelander."

The loons are grounded, unable to move on land due to the mechanics of their body.

Raptor Education Group, Inc. has rescued 57 loons so far this spring.

Firefighters have extinguished 15 out of 25 forest fires in the Russian Far East over the past 24 hours, the regional forestry department reported Saturday.

"Out of 25 forest fires, 15 have been put out, seven are active in the Republic of Sakha [Yakutia], with one of them contained, and three others have been contained in the Khabarovsk Territory," the department said in a statement.

Over the past day, fire covered some 936 hectares in the region. As of Friday morning, the figure was nearly 13,000 hectares.

On June 9, 2008, at least 60 dolphins stranded along the coast of Cornwall, England, in what was by far the largest common dolphin mortality ever seen in British waters. For hours, rescuers tried to lead them back to sea - often unsuccessfully, as some of the animals were panicked and others just milled about in tight circles, resistant to saving. The forensic investigation that followed involved 24 experts from five countries and multiple government agencies.

Now their verdict is in, and the most probable cause was naval exercises.

For several days before the strandings, the British Royal Navy ran a large, multinational event (which included the U.S. Navy and involved active sonar and other disruptive activities) off the Cornish coast. That event, the investigators concluded, was closely correlated in space and time with the dolphins entering Falmouth Bay and eventually coming ashore. All other possible causes - disease, algal blooms, malnourishment - were eliminated.

The implication of naval exercises in a mass stranding will come as no surprise to those who have followed this issue in the United States. Nor will the Royal Navy's perfunctory denials in media accounts, which seem awfully similar to what we have heard over the years from the U.S. Navy.

In the case of mass strandings, what Navy officials always seem to demand after the fact is some definitive, minute-by-minute record of the victims' movements before beaching, as though it were possible to stick a tag on every whale and dolphin in the sea. Until biologists can provide that infeasible level of proof, the U.S. Navy refuses responsibility. But really, the Cornwall case is simple: a gun was fired, there were bodies, and no one else was in the room.

Event Time
2013-05-11 02:08:14 UTC
2013-05-11 06:38:14 UTC+04:30 at epicenter

Location
26.784°N 57.841°E depth=36.4km (22.6mi)

Nearby Cities
85km (53mi) ESE of Minab, Iran
157km (98mi) E of Qeshm, Iran
161km (100mi) ESE of Bandar 'Abbas, Iran
172km (107mi) ENE of Khasab, Oman
359km (223mi) NNW of Muscat, Oman

Technical details