Two decades of plummeting population halves number of key species, adversely affecting bees, birds and biodiversity - study

Europe's grassland butterfly population has plummeted in the past two decades, new research published on Tuesday shows, with a near halving in the numbers of key species since 1990.

The precipitous decline has been blamed on poor agricultural practices and pesticides, by the European Environment Agency, which carried out the research. Falling numbers of butterflies are bad news not just for nature-lovers and for biodiversity, but have a knock-on effect on farming, as - like bees - they act as pollinators, and their disappearance harms birds and other creatures that need them for food.

Butterfly populations are a leading indicator of the health of other insect species. The new study therefore suggests many other species of insect, which are also food sources for birds and small mammals, and which play a key role in the health of the countryside, are also under threat.

Scientists from the EEA, the European Unoin's environment watchdog, looked at 17 key species of grassland butterflies, of which seven were common species and 10 more specialist, using data gathered from 1990 to 2011 in 19 European countries. Of the total 17 species, eight have declined, including the common blue, which has suffered a serious fall in numbers; two species remained stable, including the Orangetip; and only one increased. The trend for the remaining six species is still uncertain, including the much-appreciated Lulworth skipper, beloved of butterfly watchers.

Grassland butterflies make up the majority of butterflies in Europe, with over 250 species out of the more than 400 found in Europe. Others species prefer to colonise woods, wetlands, heaths and other habitats. Chris van Swaay, one of the authors of the report, from the Dutch conservation organisation De Vlinderstichting, said that the same pesticides that affect bees - leading to the EU to ban certain products, at least temporarily - also have an effect on butterflies. "The pesticide problem is especially a problem in the intensive agricultural areas of western Europe," he said. "In eastern Europe, it is less of a problem."

A 2-year-old girl was recovering Tuesday after being attacked by a coyote.

The girl was with her mother at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Cypress on July 18 when the attack occurred, authorities said.

"My 3-year-old said 'oh a doggy' and I said 'no that's a coyote.' As I was running over there my daughter Klarissa turned around and it bit her." mother Michelle Luper said.

The coyote bit the girl on her back, then dragged her by the leg toward some bushes.

Texakana, AR (KSLA) -

A buzzard landing on a power line set off a chain of events Tuesday morning in Texarkana that left about 1,200 customers without power and one unsuspecting driver shaken and burned.

Jerry Cunningham says he was driving in the 1700 block of East 9th St. when he heard what sounded like an electrical transformer blowing and then saw power lines arcing in his direction.

The next thing he knew, something hit his car, cracking the windshield and sending sparks flying.

"I had all my windows and sunroof opened. That is where I got these burns from," Cunningham says, pointing to red welted streaks on his side. "It hurts like crazy."

AEP SWEPCO says the buzzard had landed on a ground wire and when that wire broke, it fell on a 12,000 volt transmission line.

Power was restored to customers about an hour later.

Yogyakarta - Indonesia's most volatile volcano spewed smoke and ash Monday, forcing hundreds of people to flee their villages along its slopes, a disaster official said.

Mount Merapi on the main island of Java rumbled as heavy rain fell around its cloud-covered crater, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, disaster mitigation agency spokesman.

The volcano unleashed a column of dark red volcanic material 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) into the air, and the ash made the rain thick and muddy in several villages as terrified residents fled to safety, he said.

The sound was heard 30 kilometers (18 miles) away, but an eruption did not occur and the volcano's alert level was not raised, Nugroho said. The 2,968-meter (9,737-foot) mountain is the most active of 500 Indonesian volcanoes. Its last major eruption in 2010 killed 347 people.

Indonesia, an archipelago of 240 million people, is prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity because it sits along the Pacific "Ring of Fire," a horseshoe-shaped series of fault lines.

A long, silver, unpleasant-looking fish with sharp teeth which washed up at Rabbit Island was dubbed a monster fish by beach visitors.

However, it was likely to be a frostfish, said Nelson-based University of Otago marine educator Richard de Hamel.

Frostfish got their name because they tended to be found on frosty mornings when the temperature dropped and they came to shore, he said.

He recalled that one was found at Ruby Bay four years ago, and another at Mapua. Beach walkers were not the only ones to discover the frostfish at Rabbit Island - seagulls found it to be a large snack.

Source: Fairfax NZ News

Albuquerque - Friday's heavy downpour created a mystery in an Albuquerque backyard. After a lot of rain fell in a short time, the earth opened up revealing a deep underground pit at the home of Alex Sanouvon.

"I've been here 25 years and I have never seen anything like that," said Sanouvon. "Then suddenly, I just hear this collapse and all of the water rushed down and I came to look at it, and there was that hole." Sanouvon said.

The hole is a little less than 10 feet deep and about 3 ½ feet wide. Cinder blocks show the hole was built by someone and a large pipe sits at the bottom.

Sanouvon said when he moved in to the house decades ago, the hole wasn't mentioned..

New Zealanders ran screaming from buildings in Wellington yesterday as a magnitude 6.5 earthquake blew out windows and caused part of the city's port to slide into the sea.

The earthquake struck at 5:09 p.m. local time and was centered offshore, 57 kilometers (35 miles) south-southwest of the capital city, at a depth of 14 kilometers, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was New Zealand's biggest quake since a magnitude 6.3 killed 185 people in the South Island city of Christchurch two years ago, and the strongest to hit the central region of the country since 1942, GNS Science seismologist John Ristau said.

There is an 8 percent chance of another magnitude 6 event or larger in the next 24 hours, and 20 percent over the next seven days, Ristau said in a telephone interview. "A large earthquake can increase stress or decrease stress on neighboring faults, that's what we're looking closely at," he said.

If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, so they say, it will hop right out again. Frogs aren't stupid. Well, okay, but they're not THAT stupid.

However, if you put a frog in a pot of cool water, and gradually turn the heat up under it, the frog will not notice what's happening. It will happily sit there until the water boils, and it dies.

Now, I have never carried out this experiment personally - I prefer my frogs' legs fried - so I can't vouch for the truth of it. It's just a story the environmentalists like to tell. Besides, I already knew that human beings have trouble in detecting slow-moving threats. You can watch us failing to do it every day: we persistently ignore the fact that we are running into trouble at a civilisational level, even though the evidence is all around us.

The foundation of every civilisation is an adequate food supply: human beings simply cannot live at the density of population that civilisation implies without a reliable agriculture. But the supply of good agricultural land is limited, and the number of human beings is not.

You can postpone the problem for a while by increasing the yield of the available land: irrigate it, plant higher-yielding crops, fertilise the soil artificially, use pesticides and herbicides to protect the crops as they grow. But even these techniques have limits, and in many cases we have reached or exceeded them. So we are running into trouble. Why isn't anybody taking action?

Governments everywhere are well aware of the problem: we are now 7 billion people, heading for an estimated 11 billion by the end of this century, and the food situation is already getting tight. So tight, in fact, that the average price of the major food grains has doubled in the past ten years. But everybody finds local reasons to ignore that fact.

Event Time
2013-07-22 07:01:42 UTC
2013-07-22 09:01:42 UTC+02:00 at epicenter

Location
46.042°S 34.825°E depth=10.0km (6.2mi)

Nearby Cities
244km (152mi) WNW of Marion Island, Prince Edward Islands
1538km (956mi) SSE of Port Alfred, South Africa
1558km (968mi) SSE of Port Elizabeth, South Africa
1562km (971mi) SSE of East London, South Africa
1963km (1220mi) SSE of Maseru, Lesotho

Technical Details

36,000 bees found dead in Niestetal (Germany) - HNA

Fipronil is held responsible for the mass death of honeybees.

Mysterious Carp dead in Holter Reservoir (Montana) - KRTV

Hundreds of dead carp are floating in the popular reservoir on the Missouri River between Helena and Great Falls. Bruce Rich, the fisheries bureau chief for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said they're investigating the reason behind the dead carp, but at this point he can only speculate on the cause of their demise.