Animals
S


Bug

Hives bigger, killer bees meaner this year, say experts after attacks


Cable News Network
Fri, 16 Sep 2011 20:30 UTC
Image
© GettyA killer bee expert says it's been a record year for big hives
Are the killer bees meaner than ever in 2011? The Killer Bee Guy thinks so.

They're much more ornery this year, according to Reed Booth, also know as The Killer Bee Guy. "This is the worst I've seen in 10 years," Booth told CNN affiliate KOLD-TV in Tucson this week.

Booth spoke after taking out a 200-pound hive of a quarter-million killer bees on a Bisbee farm earlier this week. The bees had swarmed after their hive in an outbuilding on the farm was disturbed. They killed a 1,000-pound hog and and sent a pregnant 800-pound sow into a coma. The piglets were lost, KOLD reported.

"A thousand-pound pig is a huge thing," Booth said. "I'm kinda surprised that they did kill it."

Farmer Jane Hewitt said the attack was frightening.

"I jumped into a car but the passenger side window was down, and they came in a black cloud towards me. I tried to swat at them and get them out the drivers side window," she told KOLD.
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Butterfly

Cold UK Summer Hits Butterflies


ButterflyConservation.org
Fri, 16 Sep 2011 10:49 UTC
Image
© Unknown
UK butterflies have suffered following the coldest summer for 18 years, the world's biggest butterfly count has revealed. More than 34,000 people took part in the Big Butterfly Count 2011, seeing 322,000 butterflies and day-flying moths. But the survey, by Butterfly Conservation, found that the average number of individual butterflies seen per count was down by 11% compared with last year's figures. The Common Blue butterfly was the biggest loser with numbers down by 61%.

The survey also revealed something of a North/South divide for one species with three times as many Small Tortoiseshells recorded per count in Scotland than in England. Hopes had been high for a bumper butterfly summer after parts of the UK basked in a record-breaking warm, dry spring. But the balmy conditions gave way to chilly temperatures and prolonged spells of rain as the summer of 2011 became the coldest since 1993.

Butterfly activity is impaired by low temperatures and heavy rain so they are unable to fly, feed, find mates or lay eggs during bad weather. Richard Fox, Butterfly Conservation Surveys Manager said: "The fantastic response of the UK public to Big Butterfly Count 2011 has given us a detailed snapshot of how butterflies fared this summer. Twice as many counts were carried out this year as in 2010.
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Attention

UK: Baffling behaviour of bottlenose dolphins recorded for the first time

Rachael Misstear
Wales Online, UK
Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:47 UTC
Dolphin Behaviour_1
© Wales Online, UKThe bottlenose dolphin calf is tossed out of the water.
Scientists in West Wales have been left puzzled by aggressive behaviour displayed by female dolphins thought to be chastising her calf.

The team taking part in the Cetacean Survey Training Course in New Quay, Cardigan Bay, watched the newborn bottlenose dolphin calf being repeatedly tossed into the air by its mother.

The actions, never before recorded by the team, may have simply been some unusually rough play or possibly a means of disciplining or teaching a newborn, say the scientists.

Sea Watch research director Peter Evans said the demonstration may have been a lesson to stay away from male dolphins since they have, on occasion, been recorded attacking and even killing newborn calves.

"The phenomenon of aggressive behaviour against porpoises sometimes leading to death has in the past been attributed by some scientists to misdirected infanticide by male dolphins, since young dolphins have been observed being attacked by adults, generally presumed to be males," said Mr Evans.
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Question

Blue Whale Song Recorded Above Water

Philip Friedman
BelmontShore-Naples Patch
Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:12 UTC

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Off Long Beach, a blue whale made what may have been the first above-surface vocalization ever witnessed, and NBC News happened to have cameras rolling.

A camera crew from NBC News captured what may be a first and aired it tonight: the song of a blue whale above the water. It is a low groan but you can hear it loud and clear.

The extraordinarily rare performance occurred off the coast of Long Beach, where four blue whales treated a boatful of whale watchers and the news crew to a wild show few people have ever seen.

Alisa Schulman-Janiger, an American Cetacean Society researcher, told Pete Thomas Outdoors it was a once in a lifetime experience.

"We heard it through the air, loud and clear," she said. "It was a strange, alien sound. It really was an extraordinary thing."

Three smaller male blue whales were pursuing one large female blue whale. They were swimming faster than normal and in tight circles when the female surfaced along side the Christopher out of Harbor Breeze Cruises.
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Bizarro Earth

Is the End of Salmon Near?

Emily Sohn
Discovery News
Wed, 14 Sep 2011 06:00 UTC
Salmon
© Getty ImagesA school of Chinook salmon. New research shows the fish could vanish from many rivers by the end of the century.

A warming climate is likely to wipe out spring-run Chinook salmon in at least one California watershed by the century's end, found a new study.

No matter which climate projections the researchers used, warmer waters spelled major trouble for the fish in the coming decades if people do nothing to help the fish. And the findings are likely to apply to a variety of salmon species up and down the West Coast, especially in California where temperatures are closest to the tipping point.

"I saw the results almost a year ago, and I just sat at my desk and cried," said Lisa Thompson, a fisheries biologist at the University of California, Davis. "Fish weren't making it through to the end of the century in almost all cases."

"Things look grim," she added. "But there are things we can do."

For the last five years, Thompson and colleagues have been studying spring-run Chinook salmon in the Butte Creek watershed, in the Central Valley of California. These types of fish are particularly sensitive to climate change because adults spend their summers in freshwater streams before spawning in the fall. And compared to the Pacific Ocean, where the fish spend the rest of the year, streams are far quicker to warm up in hot conditions.

More than a million spring-run Chinook used to live in the waters of the Central Valley, Thompson said. Today there are fewer than 10,000 of them -- a decline of 99 percent.
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Bulb

Sea Urchins See With Their Whole Body


ScienceDaily
Mon, 12 Sep 2011 05:00 UTC
Sea urchins
© University of GothenburgSea urchins see with their entire body despite having no eyes at all.
Many animals have eyes that are incredibly complex -- others manage without. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have shown that sea urchins see with their entire body despite having no eyes at all. The study has been published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Most animals react to light and have developed a very sophisticated way of seeing complex images so that they can function in their surroundings. Good examples include insects' compound eyes and the human eye. Charles Darwin and other evolutionary biologists were bewildered by the eye's complexity and wondered how this kind of structure could have evolved through natural selection.

But some creatures, such as sea urchins, can react to light even though they do not have eyes. Previous studies of sea urchins have shown that they have a large number of genes linked to the development of the retina, which is the light-sensitive tissue in the human eye. This means that sea urchins have several genes that are coded for a widely occurring eye protein, opsin.
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Question

Australia: Biologists Baffled By Unusual Whale Behaviour

Melissa Brown
ABC, Australia
Fri, 09 Sep 2011 01:12 UTC
Whale Migration
© ABC, AustraliaBiologists say a number of whales did not migrate north over winter as usual.

Marine biologists are baffled by a change in the behaviour of whales visiting Victorian bays this year. The Dolphin Research Institute says a number of humpback whales remained in Western Port and Port Phillip bays throughout the migration season instead of travelling north.

Institute spokesman Jeff Weir says scientists are unsure what has caused the change in their migration pattern. He says they also saw the animals competing for the first time off Mount Martha and Mornington.

"These are big animals, the size of tourist buses, playing demolition derby under the water and then sometimes reaching the surface banging into each other jostling for position in the pod," he said.

Mr Weir says it is the kind of behaviour normally seen when the animals are mating in northern Australia.

"I mean, it possibly is simply numbers of whales are picking up again and the populations are increasing," he said.

"Maybe they're just spreading themselves more evenly around our coast. The critical thing will be to monitor it in the years to come."
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Question

Goat Born With A Human Face?


Kenya Citizen TV
Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:15 UTC
They say wonders will never cease. And residents of jomvu village in Mombasas Changamwe constituency woke up to a shocking incident this morning.The discovery that a goat had given birth to a miracle kid with human features.

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Question

King Crab Invading Antarctica


redOrbit
Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:09 UTC
King Crab
© NOAA

Global warming is the most likely cause of a growing number of king crabs that have been marching along the sea floor toward West Antarctica, according to a report by biologists on Wednesday.

The intruder, 'Neolithodes yaldwyni Ahyong and Dawson', a bright-red deep-sea predator that had previously been spotted only in the Ross Sea, on the other side of West Antarctica, is now living and reproducing in abundance on the western edge of the icy continent.

Writing in the journal Proceedings B, scientists said the crabs are currently thriving in the Palmer Deep, a basin cut in the continental shelf. They believe the crabs were washed in during an upsurge of warmer water.

The crabs are ravenous predators on the sea floor and could likely change the ecosystem profoundly if they spread further, researchers warn. The crab is known as an "ecosystem engineer" because it digs into the sea floor to feast on worms and other tiny animals, an activity that can have repercussions across the marine food web if these crabs continue to multiply and spread out.

A team of scientists, led by Laura Grange of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, lowered a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), named the Genesis, into the Palmer Deep in March of last year as part of a long-term probe into biodiversity in the waters off Antarctica.
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Info

Mysterious Killer Whale Population Preys on Sharks


Anchorage Daily News
Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:21 UTC
Offshore orcas
© McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceOffshore orcas
Scientists have documented a coordinated, gruesome attack on a school of sleeper sharks by a little-studied group of orcas that ranges from California to Alaska's Aleutian Islands. An article published recently in the journal Aquatic Biology tells of a 2008 feeding frenzy in British Columbia waters just south of the Alaska border, reports the Canadian Press.
The [orcas] were hyperventilating, arching their backs and diving deep.

On the hydrophone, [Canadian scientist John] Ford could hear their excited songs.

Minutes passed and then a chunk of tissue -- about 250 grams in size and later proven to be part of a liver -- floated to the surface, coming to rest in a slick of oil.

More and more tissue and oil soon appeared, covering an area of ocean in a sheen hundreds of metres in size and flattening the water's ripples.
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