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An odd discovery was made Tuesday in Duson. More than 30 birds were found dead, and as of now no one knows why. The birds had no visible injuries and were just scattered in an area next to a sugar cane field.
"I came here this morning and saw birds all over the ground. One of them fell when I was walking around the property," James Wing said.
When Wing found the dead birds his first thought went to a deadly disease.
"I came here this morning and saw birds all over the ground. One of them fell when I was walking around the property," James Wing said.
When Wing found the dead birds his first thought went to a deadly disease.
© Bruce Graner, Pensacola (Fla.) News JournalDolphins frolic in the wake of a cruise boat just offshore from Fort Pickens State Park in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola Beach, Fla.
From February 2010 to Sunday, the bodies of 830 marine mammals, nearly all bottlenose dolphins and a few whales, have been found along the coast from Louisiana to Apalachicola, Fla., according to figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Of those, almost 150 dolphins found dead on beaches or in marshes were premature, stillborn or neonatal bottlenose.
In the seven years before 2010, the northern Gulf each year saw an average 63 bottlenose dolphin strandings, incidents where injured or sick marine mammals come ashore.
That the number of dolphin deaths continues to be higher than before 2010 worries Teri Rowles, who heads NOAA's investigation team.
"This is the longest unusual mortality event nationally," she said of the dolphin deaths.
© John Kent/FlickrFallow deer, heading to Russia
"North Western Russia will be some kind of hotspot of species richness," said Christer Nilsson, an ecology professor, via Skype from Umeå University in Sweden. "Species will be on the move and there will be new combinations of species."
Red and fallow deer, wild boar, the Eurasian badger, rabbits, mice and beaver will all be on the move as new tracts of habitable land open up.
© Richard Herrmann / Seapics.comBluefin tuna.
Populations of bluefin tuna in the western Pacific Ocean are down by nearly 97 percent from pre-fishing levels, according to a stock assessment by researchers.
"We found the Pacific bluefin stock is being overfished," said Steve Teo, a fisheries biologist at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, Calif., who was involved in the assessment.
The news comes a few days after an enormous, 489-pound (222-kilogram) tuna fetched $1.76 million at a Japanese auction, the Associated Press reported. Strong demand for tuna, primarily for use in sushi, has driven increased harvesting of the fish. Over the past 15 years, its population in the western Pacific has steadily declined and is now at or near an all-time low, Teo told LiveScience.
There are currently no catch limits for tuna in the western Pacific. About 90 percent of the fish that are caught are juveniles, according to the stock assessment.
Amanda Nickson, director of global tuna conservation for the Pew Environment Group, called for a temporary halt to fishing. "We think the most responsible thing to do is to suspend the fishery until we can put measures in place that will ensure that the population decline is reversed," Nickson said.
She called on the governments of the countries that harvest the fish - including Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Mexico and the United States - to do something about the tuna's plummeting numbers.
© Photo: Wolf via Shutterstock
Crime scene tape strung between trees in a hilly park in the working class Mexico City suburb of Iztapalapa marks the place where a teenage couple were found dead last weekend, the flesh torn from their bones.
A week earlier, a young mother and her baby were found similarly mutilated. A cuddly toy and solitary, deflating gas balloon are the only remaining signs of the grim discovery.
It might all look depressingly familiar in the context of Mexico's drug wars, in which tortured bodies dumped in the dust no longer even shock. But in these cases the Mexican authorities have discounted human depravity and are instead blaming a marauding pack of stray dogs, conjuring up a different kind of horror - and a new furore.
© UnknownWildlife Rescue South Coast Inc’s Gerardine Hawkins with one of the rescued grey-headed flying foxes from the local colony that was decimated in Tuesday’s extreme heat.
As temperatures soared above 40 degrees the grey-headed flying fox, which is listed as vulnerable, fell victim to the heat with at least 1000 members of the 11,500 strong colony being found dead.
Volunteers from Wildlife Rescue South Coast along with National Parks staff spent numerous hours in the colony on Tuesday trying to save the dying animals.
It was a rare, breathtaking sight: In a flash, a pod of about 1,000 common dolphins began a stampede, churning across the blue-gray waters off Dana Point at a rapid pace.
Dave Anderson, the captain of Capt. Dave's Dolphin and Whale Safari, said that in the decades he's spent on the water and out among Southern California's dense dolphin population, it's a phenomenon he's encountered only rarely.
Yet last weekend, it happened again ... and it happened twice: once on Saturday afternoon and again on Sunday morning. Boat hands captured Sunday's stampede on video.
"It's one of those things you can hope for it, but you can't plan for it," he said.
"It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of beautiful and interesting things" on the water.
© Wayne Grammes / KeysNet.comGreg Caterino of Tavernier hoists the humpback grouper -- a Pacific Ocean species -- he speared off North Key Largo in late December.
"We've seen the successful marine invasion of lionfish," Reef Environmental Education Foundation Project Director Lad Akins said this week. "We certainly do not want to see it happen again with another Pacific species." Akins, a renowned expert in fish identification, confirmed the speared fish was a humpback grouper. With an array of black spots, it's also known as a panther grouper.
"This is not the first time these have been sighted in Florida," Akins said. "There have been five or six reported as far back as the 1980s, but all from different parts of the state." "The juveniles are really popular in the aquarium trade," Akins said. "It's quite likely that this is released fish."
Young humpback grouper sport a brilliant white color with an attractive spray of black spots. But they outgrow most privately owned saltwater tanks - and cast a hungry eye on other tank fish. "Just like lionfish, they are carnivores," Akins said.
© Common Coast Research and ConservationDead loons lie along the Lake Michigan shoreline.
The rapidly changing ecology of the Great Lakes Basin, brought on in large part by non-native, invasive species, is causing devastation among Michigan's waterfowl, especially common loons.
The common loon, a beloved, iconic bird known for its eerily lonely, two-note call and its beautiful markings, suffered devastating losses along Lake Michigan's northern shoreline this fall. Thousands of dead birds, mainly loons, washed ashore - from the Upper Peninsula, down to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. A large percentage of the dead loons had just entered their first year of breeding maturity.
The reason for the die-off, which follows similar incidents in 2006 and 2007, isn't fully understood. But it is suspected that it is driven by the food chain linking the loon to invasive species, specifically, the quagga mussel, the zebra mussel and the round goby.
