Animals
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Better Earth

Doing battle with the red devils of the Pacific

Peter Aldhous
New Scientist
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:37 UTC
Mexican fishing fleets call them diablos rojos, or "red devils" - and when Stanford University graduate student Julie Stewart wrestles the first Humboldt squid aboard our research vessel, the Fulmar, in California's Monterey Bay, it becomes obvious why.

This beast is angry, and has flashed from white to a deep maroon. It's nearly 1.5 metres long, including the tentacles, which flail in Stewart's hair until she can offload the catch into a cooler filled with seawater. That only gives the squid ammunition, as it can now fire a powerful jet of water and ink at anyone who strays into its sights.

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Frog

Transparent frogs, tiny geckos and snail-sucking snakes

Shanta Barley
New Scientist
Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:34 UTC
Image
© Paul S Hamilton / RAEISee-through diversity
An expedition to the coastal rainforests of western Ecuador has discovered 30 new species of frog and a slug-sucking snake.

The team of scientists, who work for Reptile and Amphibian Ecology International, also identified four new species of stick insect, three species of lungless salamanders, a tiny, scaly-eyed gecko known as Lepidoblepharis buschwaldii and a bushmaster - the longest viper in the world.

Most of the new animals were discovered in the forests of Cerro Pata de Pájaro, a mountain overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Its cloud forests are particularly fecund: 14 of the 30 new species of frog discovered were found in a patch of cloud forest just a couple of miles wide, according to the press release.

The newly-discovered frogs are "rain" frogs of the genus Pristimantis, which lay their eggs in trees. As the eggs hatch, miniature versions of the adult frogs - some the size of a pinhead - fall into the water below.
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Sheeple

Turkey: Sheep Gives Birth to Human-Faced Lamb


The Daily Telegraph
Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:32 UTC
Image
© The Daily Telegraph
A sheep gave birth to a dead lamb with a human-like face. The lamb was born in a village not far from the city of Izmir, Turkey.

Erhan Elibol, a vet, performed a caesarean on the animal to take the lamb out, but was horrified to see that the features of the lamb's snout bore a striking resemblance to a human face.

"I've seen mutations with cows and sheep before. I've seen a one-eyed calf, a two-headed calf, a five-legged calf. But when I saw this youngster I could not believe my eyes. His mother could not deliver him so I had to help the animal," the 29-year-old veterinary said.

The lamb's head had human features on - the eyes, the nose and the mouth - only the ears were those of a sheep.
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Fish

Thousands of dead crabs wash up on Kent beaches


BBC News
Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:18 UTC
Image
The crabs should not pose a danger to people or animals
Thousands of dead crabs have been washed up on Kent's beaches after being killed by the cold weather.

The velvet swimming crabs are littering beaches around Thanet, along with smaller numbers of whelks, sponges and anemones.

It is the second year that icy temperatures have killed off the sea creatures in such large numbers.

Last year the Environment Agency set up an inquiry amid fears a mystery virus could be to blame.
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Fish

Record Cold Kills Thousands Of Fish


WPLG Miami
Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:48 UTC
Image
© WPLG Miami
Fort Lauderdale -- As Florida's record cold snap moves out, the impact near-freezing temperatures have had on wildlife continues to threaten the state's fragile ecosystem.

Freezing fish, thousands of them, line the coast of South Florida from Key West to Fort Lauderdale.

"Cold water stress is causing all of these fish to die. We are seeing freshwater fish, saltwater fish, all turning up belly up," said Officer Jorge Pino of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Pino ad the FWC patrol the state's waterways.

"The problem is the cold weather is altering the oxygen levels in the water, and that's causing the fish to die," he said.
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Igloo

Guinea: Record cold snap destroys crops, kills hundreds of animals


Reuters
Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:28 UTC
Near-freezing temperatures in north-central Guinea in January destroyed crops and livestock on which thousands of people depend for food as well as cash.

Elderly locals told IRIN they had never seen cold this intense in Mali, a town in Guinea's Labé region.

"The vegetation looks as if it was burned in a fire," Hannibal Barry of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told IRIN from Mali on 19 February during a joint evaluation by UN agencies, local authorities and NGOs.

Temperatures dropped to 1.4 degrees Celsius from 17 to 26 January, according to a preliminary report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP).

The cold wiped out crops - mainly potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, onions and bananas - across five districts in Mali. It is not yet known how many hectares were destroyed, Mamadou Saliou III Diallo, head of agricultural operations at the Mali prefecture, told IRIN after visiting the affected areas.
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Igloo

Fruits freeze, iguanas drop from trees in Freezing Florida


MSNBC
Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:51 UTC
Image
© Wilfredo Lee/APA stunned iguana lies on the sidewalk after having fallen from a tree Wednesday in Surfside, Florida. The non-native species becomes immobilized in the cold.
Tourist beachgoers wrap up as Arctic blast hits so-called Sunshine State

Across the so-called Sunshine State, oranges and strawberries are freezing, icicles are hanging off palm fronds, and iguanas paralyzed by the cold are falling out of trees.

Temperatures have plunged as low as the 20s in recent days, forcing people used to wearing flip-flops year-round to put on earmuffs.

"I am a warm-weather boy. There's no way I'm going out there," laughed Archie Adkins of Pensacola Beach as he pointed at bundled-up beachgoers.
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Compass

San Francisco's famous sea lions relocate to Oregon

Keely Chalmers
KGW.com
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 07:28 UTC
Thousands of San Francisco's famous sea lions now calling the Oregon Coast home after their mysterious disappearance from San Francisco's famous Pier 39.

Marine experts now believe the sea mammals headed 500 miles north to the Sea Lion Caves near Florence, beginning in October, about the same time San Francisco's population began to dwindle.

Pier 39 is well known for the sea lions that crowd its docks. But those docks are now empty - and the El Nino weather pattern is likely to blame, scientists believe.
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Fish

Great Lakes Threatened by Carp Invasion

Philip Sherwell
The Daily Telegraph
Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:00 UTC

They are the voracious Asian invaders that have evaded poisoning, lock gates and hi-tech electronic barriers as they penetrated thousands of miles of American rivers and canals, devouring most of the food in their path.

Now the silver and bighead carp, originally imported from Taiwan, face the might of the US Army in a last-ditch effort to prevent them from reaching the largest freshwater system in the world - the Great Lakes and their connecting rivers that straddle the Canadian border.
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Hourglass

Massive octopus kill still a mystery

Lisa Abend
Time
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:44 UTC
more_dead_octopus
© William Manning / CorbisDead octopuses have been washing up on shore in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal
What is killing the octopus of Vila Nova de Gaia? That question has obsessed the Portuguese city - located just across the Douro River from Porto - since Jan. 2, when 1,100 lb. (500 kg) of dead octopus were found on a 1.8-mile (3 km) stretch of local beach. The following day, another 110 lb. (50 kg) appeared; later there was just one expired creature. "It's very strange that so many should be killed, and in such a confined area," says Nuno Oliveira, director of the Gaia Biological Park, a nature refuge on the outskirts of Vila Nova de Gaia. "There's nothing in the scientific literature for this kind of mass mortality among octopus."

Twelve hundred pounds is a lot of dead cephalopod, especially when no one seems to know for sure what killed them. Local biologists have ruled out pollution or contamination because no other species were affected. And although some suggest that perhaps a boat, illegally fishing the multilegged creatures, threw them overboard in a panicked attempt to avoid detection, that possibility also seems unlikely. "The sea has been very rough," says Oliveira. "No one has been out fishing for days."
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