Ronalisa Parida iamin.in Wed, 03 Feb 2016 18:22 UTC
The body of the sperm whale
The sight of dead body of a 35 feet long and 10 feet round sperm whale washed ashore shocked locals on Tuesday near Kantiagada village that under Ganjam block.
The whale is suspected to have died five days back.
Informing about the body that washed ashore, Khalikote Forest Ranger, Dilip Kumar Martha, said, "We doubt that the whale died four or five days back. Initial investigations suggest that the whale died after being hit by a ship. The Odisha museum has also been informed about the whale if they ever want to preserve it. If they don't, the whale will be buried near the coast."
The elephant is said to have attacked its handler first, before turning on Mr Crowe. This is another elephant on the same park where Mr Crowe was killed
Thai authorities said Tuesday that a Scottish tourist was gored by an enraged elephant and trampled to death during a trekking tour on the resort island of Koh Samui.
Gareth Crowe, 36, and his stepdaughter, Eilidh Hughes, 16, were riding the adult elephant when they were thrown from the animal, police told Agence France-Presse. Crowe's stepdaughter and the elephant's handler were able to escape, but Crowe — who had a prosthetic leg, police said — could not outrun the elephant, Samui District Chief Paiboon Omark told AFP.
Crowe was wounded by the elephant's tusk and trampled. He died after being transported to a local hospital.
According to Thai news reports, the elephant — named Rambo but also known as Golf — became upset when his handler, called a mahout, climbed down to take a picture for the tourists.
Bleak scene: The creatures are male and about the same age as a number of others who have washed up on the coast of northern Europe over the last few weeks
Eight dead sperm whales have died after they were washed up on a German beach today, taking the total number of dead whales to 23 after a devastating number of beachings during the past month across northern Europe.
The eight whales found near the northern town of Friedrichskoog were young bulls, around the same age as the animals discovered three weeks ago at various North Sea spots.
They were lying close to each other in the mudflats of a restricted area of the Wadden Sea national park, the Schleswig-Holstein regional environmental authority said in a statement.
Since the 1990s, a total of 82 sperm wales have been found stranded in the Wadden Sea in Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany.
The sperm whale is the largest of the toothed whales, and the largest toothed predator.It can measure up to 20 metres (67 feet) long and weigh over 50 tonnes.
There are various theories why the whales end up in the North Sea rather than the Atlantic - but the nutrient-poor waters can prove catastrophic for them
Shocking: At least 23 whales have been stranded across the coastline of northern Europe and may have come from a single whale pod
A 24-foot humpback whale was among four marine mammals that washed ashore last weekend, along a stretch of the Oregon and Washington coastline, according to Keith Chandler, the manager of Seaside Aquarium.
The whale was found on the beach in Seaside on Sunday, a harbor porpoise washed up near Fort Stevens on Saturday and a striped dolphin was found on Cannon Beach on Saturday, Chandler said. Another striped dolphin washed up in Ocean Park, Washington, also on Saturday.
Chandler said the deaths could be in some way connected and all of the mammals were dead before they reached the shore.
"It's quite a wide area, but it's a big ocean," he said. "We had some really heavy surf, so when you see one, you often see more than one."
He explained that the deaths could be disease-related, or another issue. But there were no obvious signs of trauma.
The BC Coroners Service says a Tk'emlups Indian Band elder who died after she was mauled by a dog Saturday night was trying to feed her grandson's dog at the time.
RCMP and paramedics rushed to a property on West Shuswap Road Saturday night after being called by a frantic relative.
78-year-old Kathleen Green was pronounced dead at the scene.
"We would like to extend our deepest condolences to the family who have suffered a recent loss. She was a well respected elder in the community," says Chief Fred Seymour, Tk'emlups Indian Band.
The mass of dead seabirds that have washed up on Alaska beaches in past months is unprecedented in size, scope and duration, a federal biologist said at an Anchorage science conference.
The staggering die-off of common murres, the iconic Pacific seabirds sometimes likened to flying penguins, is a signal that something is awry in the Gulf of Alaska, said Heather Renner, supervisory wildlife biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.
"We are in the midst of perhaps the largest murre die-off ever recorded," Renner told the Alaska Marine Science Symposium on Thursday. While there have been big die-offs of murres and other seabirds in the past, recorded since the 1800s, this one dwarfs most of them, Renner said.
"This event is almost certainly larger than the murres killed in the Exxon Valdez oil spill," she said.
After that spill -- at the time, the nation's largest -- about 22,000 dead murres were recovered by crews conducting extensive beach searches in the four months after the tanker grounding, according to the Exxon Valdez Trustee Council, the federal-state panel that administers funds paid to settle spill-related claims for natural-resource damages.
Now, hundreds and thousands of dead murres are turning up on a wide variety of Alaska beaches, including nearly 8,000 discovered this month on a mile-long stretch in Whittier, she said. A preliminary survey in Prince William Sound has already turned up more than 22,000 dead murres there, she said. Starving, dying and dead murres are showing up far from their marine habitat, in inland places as distant as Fairbanks, hundreds of miles from the Gulf of Alaska coast, making the die-off exceptionally large in geographic scale.
Even if she weren't an expert, the bird die-off would be obvious to Renner. She lives in Homer, where the beaches are "littered" with murre carcasses, she said.
Herders in Marsabit County are counting loses following an outbreak of a mysterious disease that is killing camels.
Bubisa and Shuur in Marsabit North Sub-County are the worst hit by the calamity with ward representative Pius Yatani describing the situation as alarming.
"I received the report on January 19 on the deaths and so far more than 500 camels have perished. I believe the disease may have erupted earlier,'' said Turbi-Bubisa Ward Rep.
Mr Yatani said he had appealed to the county government for urgent intervention.
He said a team of vets was already on the ground supplying vaccines donated by the county government to the pastoralists.
Hundreds of seagulls have been found dead on the Sea of Galilee's western shore, with an initial inquiry pointing to botulism poisoning.
Another 78 injured birds were given emergency first aid at the Tel Afeq National Park veterinary hospital's quarantine station in Tel Aviv, with some being tested to eliminate any suspicion that they may have contracted bird flu, the Walla website reported Thursday.
The gulls were subsequently transferred to the wild animal hospital at the Ramat Gan Safari, some of them in serious condition.
Botulism spores are commonly found in soil and water. They produce the botulinum toxin in conditions such as low oxygen and hot temperatures.
A nearly 40-foot whale drew large crowds on Mumbai's popular Juhu beach on Friday until it was removed with the help of a crane. The whale, weighing around 20 tonnes, had washed up on Thursday night.
It was noticed by lifeguards and joggers who called the police.
A forest official assessed that the "Bryde's Whale" had been dead for two or three days.
"There are no wounds. A postmortem will be done and we will try to preserve its skeleton," said Makarand B Ghodke, conservator in the Mumbai Forest Department.
The number of farm animals killed in the record-low cold snap since last week rocketed to more than 8,900 - 11 times the figure released two days earlier, agriculture officials said on Wednesday.
Mountainous Son La Province replaced Quang Ninh Province in the previous report to become the hardest-hit locality with 2,756 animals frozen to death. This accounted for 38 per cent of the total.
Dead cattle, goat, horses and pigs were found across seven communes in Son La, one of which was Van Ho Commune, where snow fell for the first time in decades.
The northwestern province of Dien Bien was the second hardest-hit, with 641 out of 7,134 farm animals killed.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well... You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect...
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
- Michael Crichton
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