Animals
S


Blackbox

More than 10,000 earthworms found dead in a parking lot of 250m2 North Japan


The Extinction Protocol
Mon, 13 Aug 2012 10:14 UTC
Image

In Komatsu city Ishikawa, more than 10,000 earthworms were found dead in a parking lot. Ishikawa prefecture is facing Japan / Korea Sea. Mr. Kobayashi is living near the parking lot. He comments he found earthworms dead in the evening of 8/5/2012. It kept increasing and now it's scattered around in the 250 m2 of the area. There are about 500 dead worms in the space for one car. Because 16 cars can park there, more than 10,000 worms are dead in the whole area including the passageway.

A former director of an insect's museum visited the place to comment it is rare to see this many worms dead at once. It's an ordinary type of earthworm. He assumes they came from the near greenery to the parking lot for water because of the intense heat and died there.
Read More...
Attention

Cold summer leaves honey shortages in UK as wet weather confines bees to hives

Richard Gray, and Nigel Burnham
The Telegraph, UK
Sun, 05 Aug 2012 04:52 UTC
British honey shortages have been predicted this year by bee keepers after the wet summer weather has forced them to feed their colonies with emergency supplies of sugar and syrup.
Image
The wet UK summer weather has left honey bees confined to their hives

Prolonged periods of rain since April has meant honey bees across the country have been unable to forage during the peak flowering season when they normally gather plentiful supplies of nectar to feed their broods of larvae and produce honey.

Bee keepers are now bracing themselves for some heavy losses in their bee colonies unless they can benefit from a change in the weather.

The National Bee Unit at the government's Food and Environmental Research Agency has issued a starvation alert warning that bees are at risk of starving to death due to the poor weather conditions.

Officials at the British Bee Keepers Association have also warned that honey crops this year are expected to be particularly poor.

Tim Lovett, the association's director of public affairs, said many key crops such as oil seed rape and fruit trees had flowered during the wettest periods, meaning bees were unable to gather nectar.
Read More...
Cow Skull

Swedish experts baffled by 'mystery' elk illness


TheLocal.se
Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:43 UTC
Image

A unexplained illness has been plaguing the elk community of southern Sweden, with experts perplexed as to why so many are being found dead or dying.

The elk population around Blekinge in southern Sweden has been threatened by an unexplained disease.

14 adult elk have recently been found in the woods in severe states of paralysis, emaciation and blindness.

The blindness has resulted in some falling victim to traffic accidents; however experts have been left scratching their heads at to what is actually causing the illness.

"There is no scientific explanation," said Lennart Balk of the Stockholm University to the Aftonbladet newspaper.
Read More...
Question

In Pakistan, A Peacock Mystery - They Are Dying in Droves

Michele Langevine Leiby
The Washington Post
Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:38 UTC
Pakistani Peacock
© Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty ImagesA Pakistani villager carries an ailing peacock at Buphohar village in Thar desert in Sindh province last week. Dozens of wild peacocks have died suddenly in Pakistan, prompting experts to fear an outbreak of the highly contagious Newcastle disease.
Islamabad - The wild peacocks of Pakistan were dying in droves. Was the government covering it up?

That was the question Pakistanis were raising last week as reports persisted from the Thar desert area of southern Sindh province about peacocks whirling themselves to death in mad dances that appeared to have no earthly explanation.

By midweek, more than 120 peacock deaths had been reported - and the toll would keep rising - but the government would only acknowledge that 11 peacocks had died. Newspapers carried photos of children carrying corpses of the magnificently plumed fowl.

It turned out that the answer to the strange deaths was relatively simple: The peafowl were suffering from Newcastle disease, a contagious viral infection that causes dehydration, affects the brain and often causes the birds to spin.

The disease - known as Ranikhet in Pakistan - hit Thar and six other districts in Sindh. Thar alone is estimated to have 70,000 peacocks.

The peacock is wild in the province. Some poor villagers, including members of the Hindu community, keep the birds for their valuable feathers.
Read More...
Fish

North American freshwater fishes race to extinction


scienceblog.com
Fri, 10 Aug 2012 05:03 UTC
North American freshwater fishes are going extinct at an alarming rate compared with other species, according to an article in the September issue of BioScience. The rate of extinctions increased noticeably after 1950, although it has leveled off in the past decade. The number of extinct species has grown by 25 percent since 1989.

The article, by Noel M. Burkhead of the US Geological Survey, examines North American freshwater fish extinctions from the end of the 19th Century to 2010, when there were 1213 species in the continent, or about 9 percent of the Earth's freshwater fish diversity. At least 57 North American species and subspecies, and 3 unique populations, have gone extinct since 1898, about 3.2 percent of the total. Freshwater species generally are known to suffer higher rates of extinction than terrestrial vertebrates.

Extinctions in fishes are mostly caused by loss of habitat and the introduction of nonindigenous species. In North America, there are more freshwater fish species in a typical drainage to the east of the Great Continental Divide than to the west, where a greater proportion of species have gone extinct or are found nowhere else.
Read More...
Sun

Record Heat Kills Thousands of Fish

Grant Schulte
Wric.com
Sun, 05 Aug 2012 09:58 UTC
Thousands of fish are dying in the Midwest as the hot, dry summer dries up rivers and causes water temperatures to climb in some spots to nearly 100 degrees.

About 40,000 shovelnose sturgeon were killed in Iowa last week as water temperatures reached 97 degrees. Nebraska fishery officials said they've seen thousands of dead sturgeon, catfish, carp, and other species in the Lower Platte River, including the endangered pallid sturgeon. And biologists in Illinois said the hot weather has killed tens of thousands of large- and smallmouth bass and channel catfish and is threatening the population of the greater redhorse fish, a state-endangered species.

So many fish died in one Illinois lake that the carcasses clogged an intake screen near a power plant, lowering water levels to the point that the station had to shut down one of its generators.
Read More...
Stop

Whale Is Found Dead In Australia Swimming Pool

Jonathan Samuels
Sky News
Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:06 UTC
The dead body of an 11m-long whale has been discovered in an open-air swimming pool in Australia.


Early morning swimmers discovered the humpback whale, which had been washed into the ocean pool in Sydney by heavy seas.

The 30-tonne young adult mammal was washed up at Newport beach, ending up in the man-made swimming baths which are filled with sea water.

"It does have some external injuries but there's no way of knowing whether they were ante-mortem or post-mortem," said Wendy McFarlane from the Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA).

Ms McFarlane said one possible explanation for the otherwise seemingly healthy animal to die at sea could be that it had been struck by a ship.

It is thought the whale died several days ago.

The beach has now been closed due to the risk of sharks being attracted to the area by the rotting carcass.

The authorities are now deciding how best to remove the whale.

They may try to wash it back out to sea at high tide, or resort to the least preferred option of cutting it up and removing it in sections.
Read More...
Bizarro Earth

An avian flu that jumps from birds to mammals is killing New England's baby seals


Terra Daily / SPX
Wed, 01 Aug 2012 08:57 UTC
Image
© Unknown
A novel avian influenza virus has acquired the ability to infect aquatic mammals and was responsible for an outbreak of fatal pneumonia that recently struck harbor seals in New England, according to scientists at the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, New England Aquarium, USGS National Wildlife Health Center, SeaWorld and EcoHealth Alliance.

Wildlife officials first became concerned in September 2011, when seals with severe pneumonia and skin lesions suddenly appeared along the coastline from southern Maine to northern Massachusetts. Most were infants (less than 6 months), and a total of 162 dead or moribund seals were recovered over the next 3 months.
Read More...
Fish

Mutant Fish with Transparent Scales Discovered at Japanese Fishery Among 300,000 Regular Opaque Fish

Steven
Rocket News 24
Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:20 UTC
Ayu Fish
© Rocket News 24
The ayu, or sweetfish, is a summer delicacy in Japan. Usually coated in salt and grilled over a charcoal fire, the fish is known for its refreshingly sweet taste and is consumed widely by Japanese people every year.

While a typical specimen is similar to a small trout in appearance, an ayu with translucent scales was discovered at a fishery in Gifu prefecture late last month.

We think the issue here isn't why this happened, but how on earth were they able to spot the little guy...

The 15 centimeter see-through ayu was found among a batch of 300,000 fish. While the scales aren't completely transparent, you can still the general shape and color of the fish's innards and skeleton.

The staff at the fishery are puzzled as to why the mutation occurred, pointing out that they have not once changed cultivation methods in their 40 years of operation.
Read More...
Fish

Divided Dolphin Societies Merge 'For First Time'

Matt Bardo
BBC Nature
Mon, 30 Jul 2012 15:40 UTC
Dolphins
© Ina AnsmannTwo become one: the unification of these two socially distinct groups of bottlenose dolphin demonstrates the intelligence and social adaptability of the species.
A unique social division among a population of bottlenose dolphins in Australia's Moreton Bay has ended, according to a new study.

The dolphins lived as two distinct groups that rarely interacted, one of which foraged on trawler bycatch.

But scientists think that a ban on fishing boats from key areas has brought the two groups together.

They believe these socially flexible mammals have united to hunt for new food sources.

The findings are published in the journal Animal Behaviour.

The Moreton Bay dolphins were thought to be the only recorded example of a single population that consisted of groups not associating with each other.

The split was dubbed "the parting of the pods".

But since the study that discovered the rift, trawlers have been banned from designated areas of the bay leading to a 50% reduction in the fishing effort.

A key area of the bay to the south, where the social split was first observed by a previous study, has been protected.
Read More...