Animals
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Question

Philippines: Virus kills 200 hogs in San Simon, rapidly spreading in Pampanga

Joel Mapiles
Business Mirror
Thu, 28 May 2009 19:54 UTC
City of San Fernando - More than 200 swine in San Simon town were found dead recently due to Porcine Reproductive Syndrome (PRRS) virus.

The Provincial Veterinary Office (PVO) said the rapid spread of PRRS among hogs and piglets in Apalit, Mexico, San Luis, Bacolor and in the City of San Fernando has reached an alarming proportion.

Mayor Rodrigo "Digos" Canlas said he accompanied the PVO officers in giving vaccines to afflicted pigs in some of the big and backyard piggeries in San Simon to avoid the mortality increase.

Augusto Baluyut, provincial veterinarian, said the PRRS first erupted in San Simon and it is continuously spreading in more towns in the province.

Baluyut recalled that two years ago, over 40 percent of the piggeries in the towns of Porac, Lubao, Santa Rita, Guagua were severely affected by PRRS, which caused financial setbacks to the owners of backyard farming.
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Binoculars

UK: Where Have All Our Birds Gone?

David Adam
The Guardian
Sun, 24 May 2009 03:51 UTC
Image
© East News / Rex FeaturesA family of Starlings has chosen a post box for the third year running in an Essex seaside town to raise their young brood.
People have been listening to skylarks singing in Britain for 10,000 years. But now they, and many other much-loved species, are vanishing fast.

The B1042 that winds from the Bedfordshire town of Sandy towards the village of Potton is a difficult road to cross. Fast and twisty, there are several blind bends where pedestrians must take their lives into their hands. That is trickier than it sounds, for most pedestrians who cross the B1042 already have a pair of binoculars in their hands.

The road separates the grand headquarters of the RSPB, home to hundreds of birdwatchers, from some unkept fields, home to hundreds of watchable birds - hence the regular skips across the tarmac.
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Fish

Shellfish reefs are 'most imperilled sea habitat'

Peter Aldhous
New Scientist
Sun, 24 May 2009 19:23 UTC
Image
© Getty Images / GlowimagesAn American costal shellfish reef. These are at risk, because their importance as ecosystem engineers has been overlooked until now
Globally, 85 per cent of reefs have been lost. Destructive fishing practices, disease and coastal development threaten many of the survivors. What sounds like an apocalyptic vision of the future for the world's tropical corals is in fact a chilling assessment of the current state of reefs built in cooler waters by oysters and other bivalve shellfish.

According to a report from The Nature Conservancy (TNC), released this week at the International Marine Conservation Congress in Washington DC, shellfish reefs are the world's most imperilled marine habitats - faring worse than coral reefs and mangrove forests.

"Shellfish like oysters, cockles and mussels have been feeding people for millennia," says co-author Robert Brumbaugh, a member of TNC's global marine team based in Summerland Key, Florida. "But there is very little appreciation for their plight." Shellfish biologists hope that TNC's global survey will galvanise conservation efforts in a similar way to the 1998 report of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, which raised the alarm on tropical reefs.
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Arrow Down

Australia's Tasmanian devil declared endangered


Agence France-Presse
Thu, 21 May 2009 19:10 UTC
Tasmanian devil
© Agence France-Presse/Torsten BlackwoodAustralia's Tasmanian devil, the world's largest surviving marsupial carnivore, will be listed as endangered because of a contagious and deadly cancer, the government said
Australia's Tasmanian devil, the world's largest surviving marsupial carnivore, will be listed as endangered because of a contagious and deadly cancer, the government said.

"This disease has led to the decline of about 70 percent of the Tasmanian devil population since the disease was first reported in 1996," Environment Minister Peter Garrett said in a statement.

Devil facial tumour disease, which is spread through biting, kills the animals usually within three months by growing over their faces and mouths, preventing them from eating.
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Bug

U.S.: Destructive Ants Marching on San Antonio

Deborah Knapp
KENS 5
Wed, 20 May 2009 14:54 UTC
Crazy Ant
© UnknownClose-up view of a Raspberry crazy ant. Entomologists say the public must learn about the destructive Rasberry crazy ant and help prevent them from spreading.
A destructive menace is heading west on Interstate 10 toward San Antonio.

It's the crazy Raspberry ant that was first spotted in Houston in 2002. No one knows where it came from or how to control it, but it reproduces faster than any insect experts have ever seen.

"This is an alien species," says Sam Houston State University Entomologist Dr. Jerry Cook. "This is in higher densities than any other insects I've ever seen. They number in the billions and cover everything around them."

"Where you'll have 200,000 ants in a big fire ant mound, you'll have billions of crazy ants in one area, in that one group. They form a carpet of ants over acres that is several inches thick."
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Better Earth

Blue whales return for the first time in 40 years

Geoffrey Lean
The Independent
Sun, 17 May 2009 19:39 UTC
Image
© Mike JohnsonBlue Whale
Decades after a ban on hunting the world's largest animals, the creatures have made their way back to waters off Alaska and Canada

Blue whales - thought to be the largest animals ever to have inhabited the Earth - have returned to the seas off Canada and Alaska for the first time since hunting them ceased more than four decades ago. New research suggests that they appear to have rediscovered an old migration route that they abandoned at the height of the slaughter.

The research, by US and government scientists and a private research institute focussing on marine mammals, comes as whales face their greatest ever danger in over 20 years, as key governments threaten to breach the international moratorium on commercial whaling.

It has so far spotted 15 of the blue whales, which can weigh up to 200 tons, in the Gulf of Alaska and off British Columbia, and identified four of them as having been previously seen off southern California. Long ago, before commercial whaling began, they used to migrate between the two areas, heading north in summer in search of food - they can each consume four tons of tiny crustacean krill a day. But they were hunted close to extinction, with their numbers reduced from some 200,000 world wide to between 5,000 and 12,000.
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Bizarro Earth

Japanese fruit farmers stung badly by bee shortage

Masafumi Ueda and Yoshinobu Motegi
The Asahi Shimbun
Sat, 02 May 2009 07:24 UTC
From Yamagata to Kagoshima prefectures, farmers are bemoaning a shortage of Western honeybees --crucial in the pollination of melons, cherries, strawberries and other crops.

According to the farm ministry's Animal Health Division, imports of Western honeybees ground to a halt last year after an outbreak of a contagious disease was confirmed in 2007 among beehives from Australia.

Honeybees from Australia accounted for about 80 percent of imports to Japan. Moreover, mass bee deaths have been occurring in Europe and the United States.
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Bell

US: Bat Illness Spells Trouble For Farmers

Jenny Jones
Daily News-Record
Mon, 11 May 2009 18:10 UTC
Harrisburg, Virginia - Although they are largely misunderstood, bats are considered among the most beneficial animals in the United States.

So the recent discovery of a rapidly spreading fatal disease called White-Nose Syndrome in Virginia bats, possibly including those in Endless Caverns near New Market, has biologists and elected officials scrambling to save the small-winged mammals.

The syndrome takes its name from the ring of white fungus that often appears on infected bats' snouts and other body parts. Bats infected with the disease also typically have low body fat, dehydration and demonstrate abnormal behavior.

Scientists don't know what's causing the disease that has wiped out hundreds of thousands of bats since first showing up in the northeast about three years ago. They also don't know how the disease is spread or how to stop it from infecting more bats, which, in most cases, are disease resilient.
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Bizarro Earth

Mystery worms turn on northwest China herdsmen

Kirby Chien
Reuters
Fri, 08 May 2009 15:44 UTC
Beijing - An invasion of unidentified worms has forced 50 herdsmen and their families from their grassland homes, taking 20,000 head of livestock with them, in northwest China's Xinjiang region, state news agency Xinhua said Friday.

The worms are packed up to 3,000 per square meter and chew through the grasslands like lawnmowers, leaving only brown soil in their wake, Xinhua said.

The agency described it as the worst plague in three decades in Usu, about 280 km (175 miles) west of the Xinjiang capital Urumqi.

Local experts could not identify the 2-cm (1 inch) long, thorny green worm with black stripes and samples had been sent to Xinjiang Agricultural University, Xinhua said.
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Bizarro Earth

Brazil's other big forest in dire straits

Andy Coghlan
New Scientist
Sat, 09 May 2009 17:05 UTC
Image
© Andre Seale / SplashdownDirect / Rex FeaturesVinaceous Amazon, a critically endangered parrot found only in the South American Atlantic Forest.
The ongoing degradation of the Amazon rainforest has obscured the plight of its smaller sibling: the Atlantic forest in Brazil, which is a biodiversity hotspot. Once covering about 1.5 million square kilometres, the rainforest has been reduced to about one-tenth of its original area in the past 500 years, a new study has shown.

The Atlantic forest supports more than 20,000 species of plants, 260 mammals, 700 birds, 200 reptiles, 280 amphibians and hundreds of unnamed species.

Unless the damage is halted, monkeys and birds unique to the region will go extinct, including iconic species such as the golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia) and the northern woolly spider monkey (Brachyteles hypoxanthus), both among the most endangered of all the world's monkeys.

"Unfortunately, the forest is in very bad shape," says Jean Paul Metzger at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. "Species extinctions will occur more rapidly and, since 30 per cent of the species are endemic to the region, they will disappear forever."
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