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"It probably would be the first time that seismic testing had ever been implicated in this kind of mass mortality of dolphins," say Hardy Jones, a wildlife documentary maker for the last thirty years.
Thousands of dolphins wash up on the northern coast of Peru. Are they victims of seismic testing?
The debate over high-decibel seismic testing is not just local.
Scientists in South America are researching whether it's the cause of mass marine life deaths.
In February of this year, thousands of dolphins began dying and washing up on Peruvian beaches.
During that same time period, BPZ energy was doing a seismic survey in the same area where the dolphins had turned up.
The mystery surrounding their deaths continues to be a subject of discussion among many in the scientific community.
It's a tragic sight.
Rain and cold weather this summer saw honey yields from hives fall by almost three-quarters, the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) said today.
The average crop per hive was down 72% compared to 2011, with just 3.6kg (8lb) of honey produced compared to an annual average of 30lb (13.6kg), the annual honey survey by the BBKA revealed.
The survey of 2,712 beekeepers in England, Northern Ireland and Wales found that 88% said this summer's bad weather caused the fall in honey yields.
The cold, wet conditions forced the BBKA to issue a midsummer warning to feed colonies if necessary to avoid starvation.
But in London, which recorded the worst results with just 2.5kg (5.6lb) of honey harvested on average, beekeeping experts said that in addition to the bad weather there was a lack of food for bees in the city.
© Andy Hall for the ObserverDiseased ash tree saplings near Framlingham, Suffolk, England
The number of woodland sites in the east of England found to be infected with deadly ash dieback has leapt to more than 20.
The main concentration of cases of ash dieback - which has wiped out swaths of trees in the rest of Europe - are in mature ancient forests in East Anglia, along the coast where easterly winds arrive from Scandinavia. By Friday there were just two confirmed sites, but surveys have now turned up many more, the Forestry Commission said.
"The new cases will have to be confirmed by scientists, but it certainly looks as if there are more than 20 suspicious sites and we will continue to survey, although we really only have a one- or two-week window now to detect new cases before the autumn leaf drop makes it very difficult to see," said Stuart Burgess of the Forestry Commission.
© Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesMore than 40 whales stranded on a beach in North Andamans, in this photo released by the Andaman and Nicobar Islands department of environment and forests on Oct. 25.
Scientists are still trying to figure out why.
Individual whales have occasionally beached themselves in the Andamans, but never before in these numbers, said Samir Acharya, president of Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, a nongovernmental organization based in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar islands. "This happens once in a while, every year or every second year," he said, but "the numbers this time are really large."
A group of 41 short-finned pilot whales were found near Elizabeth Bay, on the west coast of North Andaman Island, by local fisherman on Oct 21, said Ajai Saxena, additional chief conservator of wildlife in Port Blair, in a telephone interview on Friday. The whales are four to six meters (about 12 to 18 feet) long each and as heavy as four tons, he said.
Officials who conducted a post-mortem investigation on one of the whales did not find any unnatural cause of death, Mr. Saxena said. The 41 whales are being buried in pits on the beach.
Whales migrate in a group, called a pod, to the cold waters of Antarctica because of an abundance of food, Mr. Acharya said, and migrate back to warmer waters during winter to mate and give birth. They use sonar for direction, emitting sounds and using their echos to judge the depth of the water and the direction they are traveling.
© The RSPBFisherman have been stunned by the number of birds landing on their vessels
An appalling combination of fog and winds around England's coast this week have created terrible conditions for migrating birds, with some fishermen reporting to the RSPB the deaths of many exhausted and disorientated 'garden' birds plunging into the sea around their vessels.
England's east coast, from Northumberland to Kent, has seen the arrival of many birds, including redwings, fieldfares, bramblings and blackbirds, perhaps numbering in their millions this week. The RSPB believes these birds may be the lucky survivors which have managed to cross the North Sea, but the Society concedes many others may have perished before making landfall.
© BBC News
The Atlas moth is the biggest moth in the world and is normally found thousands of miles away in South East Asia.
When it landed at a house in Ramsbottom, it was so large the Blackmore family "thought it was a bat".
The moth, which only lives for a week, has since died but 30 of its offspring are being reared at a butterfly farm in Bolton.
How the moth arrived in Ramsbottom is a mystery although it's believed to have escaped from a private collection.
Watch Video
© CorbisGreenlings are in the family of Hexagrammidae marine fish and include lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus).
More than a year and a half after an earthquake and tsunami destroyed the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan, many fish in the area contain levels of radioactive cesium that are just as high as they were soon after the disaster.
The finding suggests that the region's coastal-dwelling fish are still being exposed to new sources of cesium, possibly from the seafloor or from contaminated groundwater that's flowing into the ocean. And even though most fish sampled in the new study had levels of cesium below safe limits for consumption, some fish contained surprisingly large amounts.
Japan has already closed fisheries near Fukushima to reduce human exposure. The new results suggest that it may be a long time before levels of radiation in the ocean decline after nuclear disasters like the Fukushima meltdown.
"If (the cesium) is in the seafloor, it could be many years or even decades for that to go away," said Ken Buesseler, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Mass. "That implies we're going to have an issue in coastal fisheries for a long time to come in Japan. We certainly can't say we're out of the woods yet."
"Just because you haven't read about it in the news" lately, he added, "doesn't mean it has gone away."
Because the Japanese rank among the most voracious consumers of seafood in the world, the country's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has been closely monitoring radiation levels in coastal fish since the Fukushima disaster in March of 2011.
The FAO has alerted Algeria, Morocco, Libya and Mauritania to prepare for the arrival of desert locust swarms, the Rome- based agency wrote in an e-mailed statement today. The conflict in Mali, which has asked for international military assistance to help it deal with an Islamist occupation of the country's northern region, makes it unlikely all locust infestations there will be found and treated, the FAO said.
"Prevailing winds and historical precedents make it likely the swarms, once formed, will fly to Algeria, Libya, southern Morocco and northwestern Mauritania," Keith Cressman, the FAO's senior locust forecasting officer, was cited as saying in the statement. "Once there, they could damage pastures and subsistence rain-fed crops."
© The Daily Examiner, AustraliaThis strange creature was found at Lake Wooleweyah at the weekend.
Local man Stuart Boxsell came across the fish - about two metres long - in the shallows on Sunday. Unfortunately the fish was in a bad way and died shortly after it was found.
It has since been identified as a southern ribbonfish (trachipterus jacksonensis) - a rarely-seen, deep-sea-dwelling creature.
While the question of what it is has been solved, what it was doing out of its natural habitat in the shallows of Lake Wooloweyah remains a complete mystery.
Anyone who can shed some light on this puzzle can email us on coastalviews@dailyexaminer .com.au.
© BBCAbout 75% of rats in the West have built up a resistance to poisons.
An increasing number of rats in areas of the west of England are mutating to become more resistant to commonly sold poisons, a university study has found.
Scientists at Huddersfield University said about 75% of rats in Bristol, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire had built up a resistance.
The most serious mutations have affected rats in Bath and Wiltshire.
Experts have blamed the rise on the incorrect use of poisons where dosages which are too low have been used.
Rats which are resistant to the poison are fattened up by the bait. Those that survive then mate with other resistant rats, allowing a generation of rats resistant to existing poisons to build up.
Mutations have previously been found in many parts of the UK but the Huddersfield University study is the first time the extent of resistance has been measured in the West.
