There's something fishy going on in our local waters. No pun intended. According to The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission: six dolphins, a shark, a humpback whale and multiple manatees/sea turtles have washed up in the last two weeks.

"We know the dolphins are related," marine biologist Nadia Gordon said. "As far as the shark and see turtles, I can't answer that."

The morbillivirus is believed to be the cause of the dolphin deaths. The disease has claimed the lives of 80 in Northeast Florida since July 2013. On a bigger scale, 1200 dolphins have been found dead from New York to Florida since July- up from the average 180 a year.

Biologists still have work to do, but they're hoping they get a lead soon.

"We're hoping it will die off soon and we won't have to worry about it anymore," Gordon said.

More than 6000 homes and businesses remain without power in the far north as Cyclone Ita begins to move away from the Queensland coast.

Ergon Energy has restored power to about 20,000 properties since noon on Sunday, although Premier Campbell Newman said the worst-hit areas could go weeks without electricity.

On Monday morning, Energy Minister Mark McArdle said vegetation damage and issues with access had made it difficult to restore power to parts of Kuranda and the Cairns northern beaches.

There were also 736 properties in Townsville that were waiting to be re-connected and 1100 customers offline in the Mackay, Whitsunday and Proserpine regions.

Gusts of 100km/h are forecast between Sarina, near Mackay, and Yeppoon, northeast of Rockhampton on Monday.

But the Bureau of Meteorology said the gales should start easing as Ita weakened to a tropical low and moved away from the coast.

Event Time
2014-04-15 03:57:00 UTC
2014-04-15 04:57:00 UTC+01:00 at epicenter

Location
53.493°S 9.152°E depth=10.0km (6.2mi)

Nearby Cities
394km (245mi) ENE of Bouvet Island, Bouvet Island
2263km (1406mi) SSW of Hermanus, South Africa
2274km (1413mi) SSW of Bredasdorp, South Africa
2285km (1420mi) SSW of Grabouw, South Africa
3071km (1908mi) SSW of Maseru, Lesotho

Technical Details

It is time for many bird species to begin their spring migrations and Snowy Owls are among the many species that migrate. Although most birds migrate without any trouble it seems that more and more snowy owls are being found dead along their migration paths. While most ornithologists believe the recently reported Snowy Owls deaths are not related and only accidents, many are still studying the dead birds to be sure.

When a Snowy Owl wearing a GPS tracking device was found dead near Martha's Vineyard, many people became concerned and wanted to know why this bird and so many others were dying. Tufts University veterinary center and Norman Smith, who is an expert on Snowy Owls, decided to find out what caused the bird's death. They named the bird Sandy Neck.

The team examined the bird and released a report with their findings. The report said,

"The necropsy at Tufts showed no trauma except for a minor deep bruise in her left pectoral, no food in the proventriculus (stomach) or gizzard, and no signs of disease or unusual parasites. As Gus (Ben David) noted, she was in otherwise excellent condition - great muscle mass and fat deposits. Nor was there any water in the respiratory system. Mark Pokras (a veterinarian and professor at Tufts) said if he had to guess, she got swamped, swam to shore and went down from hypothermia - but also couldn't rule out drowning."

A wildfire in Chile has destroyed over 500 homes in six hours and continues to sweep the area, with strong winds fanning the flames. A state of emergency has been declared by the country's president in an effort to help the army battle the fires.

At least two people have been killed in the fire that swept more than 2.5 million square meters (660 acres), according to Chile's National Emergency Office

A third earthquake in less than a week struck Nicaragua early on Monday morning, shaking buildings in the capital, Managua, though there were no immediate reports of damage. An official at Nicaragua's seismological authority said the quake magnitude was 5.6, but its shallow depth had imparted a greater impact.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) said the quake struck some 6 km (4 miles) northwest of Managua at a depth of 14 km. The USGS initially registered the quake at magnitude 5.1. Emergency services in Managua were checking for signs of impact, but did not immediately report any damage. Earthquakes also struck Nicaragua on Thursday and Friday last week. The latter, of magnitude 6.6, was felt as far away as El Salvador and Costa Rica.

Times of India

A slow-moving landslide the size of two football fields is steadily tearing apart a hilltop house from the inside and has prompted the evacuation of about 50 people and several businesses in the well-known skiing town of Jackson, Wyoming, officials said Saturday.

The slow movement, however, has only a 5% chance of becoming the sort of violent landslide that killed 36 people last month in rural Washington state, said Roxanne Robinson, Jackson assistant town manager.

"You know, I think that's on everybody's mind, but I think our slide is different because it's slow moving. Theirs was catastrophic, and ours has been slowly creeping down the hill," Robinson said Saturday.

The 100-foot-deep landslide is moving so slowly that local officials have been able to see how ground cracks are emerging and growing by inches each day the past week. Crews use binoculars to keep an eye on the hill while they stand at a fire truck across the road.

A humpback whale has washed ashore in Ponte Vedra Beach near Mickler's Landing.

According to Nadia Gordon with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), the humpback whale is 31-feet long and badly decomposed.

A crew from FWC was collecting samples from the body Saturday afternoon, and plans to anchor the whale overnight in order to complete the autopsy Sunday.

Gordon said humpback whales wash ashore in northeast Florida about once every 1-2 years, so it is somewhat rare.

Friday in Jacksonville beach a dead dolphin washed ashore in Jacksonville Beach.

The hunt is on today for a black bear who mauled a woman at her home in an upscale central Florida neighborhood, leaving her with injuries to her face, legs and torso and requiring her to get 40 stitches to the head.

Terri Frana of Lake Mary, Fla., went to her garage Saturday evening to grab bicycles for her children to ride down to their neighbor's house when the attack happened, according to her husband, Frank Frana.

As soon as the children left, Frana, 45, saw two bears in the driveway. She walked to the patio area where there were five bears eating trash that they had pulled out of the garage, her husband said.

"The bear got up on [its] hind legs and started to maul her, opened its jaws and put her head in the mouth and dragged her towards the woods," Frank Frana said. "Somehow she was able to pull herself out."

"The bears were various sizes so we think it's probably cubs of different maturity and perhaps a mama bear," the Seminole County Sheriff's Office told ABC News.

The third installment in our new monthly series, the following video compiles footage of 'signs of the times' from around the world during March 2014, connecting the dots between planetary upheaval, social upheaval, and 'cosmic weather' in the form of meteor fireball activity.

The month opened with wild waves hitting the West coast of both the U.S. and Europe, while a string of strong earthquakes 'ripped' the whole length of the Ring of Fire along the Americas. The so-called 'Polar Vortex' returned as much of North America was again plunged into a deep freeze in what seemed like the winter that would never end. Despite suffering both drought and wildfires in February, Washington state was hit with a deluge in March that caused a devastating landslide and claimed 20 lives.

Several serious explosions in apartment complexes occurred in both the U.S. and Europe. Ruptured gas pipelines are assumed to be the cause, but officially they remain unexplained. Interestingly, one of the month's many large urban environment sinkholes opened right outside the Harlem explosion that killed 8, and investigators found unusually high levels of natural methane gas in soil samples from the scene, suggesting localized methane outgassing may have played a role in the buildings' sudden obliteration.

Extreme drought was blamed for a massive die-off of animals in Colombia, yet there was record flooding in neighboring Bolivia. California somehow experienced record drought, record rainfall and record wildfires all in the same month... along with a rare tornado that damaged homes. The weird 'winter wildfire' season continued, with hundreds of wildfires breaking out across the U.S., even as the country was plunged into another deep freeze and battered with heavy rainfall from strong storms. Meanwhile a once rare event, but now occurring several times annually, saw another large tornado hit northern Italy on 23 March.

As meteor fireballs lit up the night sky in Canada, Korea and Central Europe, rare hailstorms hit the Middle East, India and South China, and high drama continued in Ukraine as Crimeans told Obama what they thought of the idea of joining the Western empire by voting to rejoin Russia instead.

In what could well be the most incredible High Strangeness event of the year, an entire commercial plane carrying over 200 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing apparently vanished into thin air. Despite many false leads into what might have happened, to date there is no evidence of the plane having crashed or been hijacked...



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