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Photo courtesy: CC BY 2.0 Tambako the Jaguar
As if ripped from the pages of some poorly written anteater-themed soap opera, the mystery surrounding a recent birth at a conservation facility in Connecticut is leading some to summon the phrase 'immaculate conception'.
(Dun, dun, duuun.)
However, my die-hard reader will remember that back in 2008, I did a blog about Tidbit the shark who passed on with a fully-developed pup in her womb. The staff at the aquarium who did the autopsy were amazed because Tidbit had not been exposed to a male shark - this was a virgin birth.
Officials at the LEO Zoological Conservation Center in Greenwich say that a giant anteater under their care, with the totally made-up sounding name Armani, was somehow able to bear an offspring despite living without a male companion for nearly a year. Shades of Tidbit.
According to her keepers, Armani had been living with a male up until August of last year, when he was moved out to protect their first-born. Yet somehow, eight months later she had yet another -- and gestation for these animals lasts six months! Gasp!
Armani has some explaining to do. But she is, of course, an anteater, and they're notoriously tight-lipped.
With an absence of any solid explaination, the speculation has begun. Officials considered that Armani may have delayed the development of a previously-fertilized egg, but that has been ruled as unlikely for the species. There are species who reproduce through delayed egg implantation. The female has the ability to retain fertilized eggs until conditions are ideal for reproduction.
Zoologist Stacey Belhumeur has another theory: covert coupling. By all accounts, Armani had no access to her former companion after they were separated, but forbidden lovers tend to find a way regardless -- particularly among the young and the restless.
"My guess is they thought they had him separated," Belhumeur tells the Science Times. "We've seen incredible feats of breeding success. We've had animals breed through fences."
And sure enough, the conservation center admits that Armani and her former (or present) mate do indeed share a fence. Not the most ideal bedding ground, to be sure, but it'll do in a pinch.
Still, it's reassuring to know that both baby and mama are both healthy and well, despite the dubious circumstances that led to the birth.
It's riveting drama, refreshingly free of the cheesy music and awkward product placement that tend to spoil the suspended disbelief on daytime television. Unless, perhaps, you're an ant, in which case this all must be quite terrifying.
Photo courtesy: anoldent/CC BY-SA 2.0
Researchers and programmers have come up with modeling software for all kinds of complex systems, including modeling how the earth's systems may alter with climate change. But what has yet to be modeled is a deeply complex natural ecosystem from soil microbes and fungi all the way up to apex predators and giant trees. Just wrapping one's head around the scope of such a task is exhausting, and yet the knowledge that could be gained by creating such modeling software would be invaluable, and would help make smart policy changes regarding conservation. Which is why Microsoft is giving it a go. In fact, climate change models have been so successful, it's no wonder researchers are interested in using the same sort of system for biodiversity.
Drew Purves, head of Microsoft’s Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Group (CEES) and his colleagues at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, United Kingdom, are working with the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC) to create software that will accurately model a natural ecosystem -- or as they put it, a general ecosystem model (GEM).
Microsoft's Green Blog states, "Building a GEM is challenging — but not impossible. Microsoft Research and the UNEP-WCMC have spent the past two years developing a prototype GEM for terrestrial and marine ecosystems. The prototype is dubbed the Madingley Model, and is built on top of another hugely ambitious project that the group just finished, modeling the global carbon cycle. With this as starting point, they set out to model all animal life too: herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores, of all sizes, on land in the sea."
The major challenge facing the project is, obviously, the need for as much data as possible. To make a GEM work, large-scale global collection of ecological data is needed. After all, how are we to model an ecosystem if we don't know much about how the ecosystem functions or even what organisms exist within it. The challenge needs to be met with the collaboration of all the governments around the world. If enough data can be collected and software devised to use the data for accurate modeling, then scientists would have an incredibly powerful new tool for illustrating how policy choices would affect ecosystems.
Madagascar's Manambe Palm (Dypsis decipiens) is threatened with extinction. Photo courtesy: M. Rakotoarinivo/RBG Kew
Madagascar's forests are shrinking, and that's bad news for palm trees on the majestic island. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced this week that extinction threatens 83 percent of the island's native palm trees.
Palms are an important part of Madagascar's forests, which are home to a wide variety of life. All 192 species of palm tree assessed in this study are unique to the island. Palm trees are also important for Madagascar's communities, providing edible palm hearts and materials for house construction. The main threats to palm trees come from loss of habitat due to logging and agriculture, and the harvesting of the trees for palm hearts and seeds.
"The figures on Madagascar's palms are truly terrifying, especially as the loss of palms impacts both the unique biodiversity of the island and its people," said the IUCN's Jane Smart, in a statement from the conservation group. "This situation cannot be ignored."
The palm trees were added in the latest installment of the IUCN Red List, which catalogues plants and animals that are in danger of going extinct.
"The majority of Madagascar's palms grow in the island's eastern rain forests, which have already been reduced to less than one-quarter of their original size, and which continue to disappear," said William Baker, from the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, in a statement. This decline "threatens all of the remarkable wildlife that occurs there," he said.
One recently discovered tree, the Tahina palm (also known as the suicide palm), has been classified as critically endangered. This tree is large enough to be seen on Google Earth, growing up to 59 feet (18 meters) tall. A couple months after flowering and producing seeds, it dies. There are only 30 mature Tahina palms left in the wild, according to the release.
All of the species studied are listed as at least "threatened," a step below "endangered." But many do qualify as "endangered," or even "critically endangered," meaning there's an imminent risk of extinction unless immediate action is taken.
To protect the palms, habitat must be protected through partnerships with local people, the IUCN said. That's a challenge given the political instability of the country, the release noted. The Kew Royal Botanic Gardens has started several conservation projects to protect certain palm species.
Among other forest mammals, giant anteaters were found to be virtually extinct. Photo courtesy: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Large vertebrates are rapidly going extinct in the small forest fragments remaining after mass deforestation in Brazil.
Led by England’s University of East Anglia (UEA), an international team of scientists assessed the long-term effects of hunting and forest fragmentation on tropical biodiversity in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil.
About 90 percent of the area has been deforested for agriculture, grazing, and development with most remnants smaller than a football pitch. On average, these patches contained only four of the 18 mammal species being surveyed.
“We uncovered a staggering process of local extinctions of mid-sized and large mammals,” said study co-author Gustavo Canale from the State University of Mato Grosso (UNEMAT) in a press release.
The study revealed that white-lipped peccaries were completely extinct, and other mammals like jaguars, woolly spider monkeys, and giant anteaters were nearly extinct.
“You might expect forest fragments with a relatively intact canopy structure to still support high levels of biodiversity,” said study senior author Carlos Peres from UEA in the release. “Our study demonstrates that this is rarely the case, unless these fragments are strictly protected from hunting pressure.”
The researchers found that fragments in protected areas had the most number of species in the region.
“We therefore recommend the implementation of new strictly protected areas, such as national parks and biological reserves, including forest fragments containing populations of endangered, rare, and endemic species, particularly those facing imminent extinctions,” Canale said.
However, many existing protected areas are under threat from degradation and being downsized or degazetted.
“Human populations are exploding and very few areas remain untouched by the expanding cornucopia of human impacts,” Peres said. “It is therefore essential to enforce protection in areas that are nominally protected ‘on paper.’ The future of tropical forest wildlife depends on it.”
Photo courtesy: Dorothy Voorhees/CC BY-SA 2.0
Plenty of research has been done trying to calculate how ecosystems are going to be hit by climate change, how much productivity in a particularly ecosystem will change, but until now not so much on how extinctions and biodiversity loss will change productivity.
The bad news is that this new research shows biodiversity loss alone, if worst-case scenarios play out, would be as bad as the impact of climate change.
Report lead author David Hooper from Western Washington University says, "Some people have assumed that biodiversity effects are relatively minor compared to other environmental stressors. Our results show that future loss of species has the potential to reduce plant production just as much as global warming and pollution." (Science Daily)
Key word in the quote is 'potential'.
The study found that at the low range of projections for plant species loss (1-20%), the impact on ecosystem plant growth will be low in comparison to other environmental changes. In the intermediate range of species loss projections (21-40%), the effect is "comparable in magnitude" to climate change. At the high end of species loss however (41-60%), "the impact of species loss ranked with those of many other major drivers of environmental change, such as ozone pollution, acid deposition on forests, and nutrient pollution."
Perhaps all of that is fairly intuitive, at least at the high end (remove that much biodiversity and the impact is likely to be large), but now we have some sort of quantification of it.
Read the research: A global synthesis reveals biodiversity loss as a major driver of ecosystem change.
Photo courtesy: Cause2
When I first moved into my condo 15 years ago, I thought I lived in a ladybug flight path. They were all over the balcony, they flew in the windows, they were everywhere. I loved it!! I have always loved ladybugs - it's been a lifelong love affair.
Unfortunately, my ladybugs do not visit me as much anymore. Actually, they are few and far between nowadays. They have gone the way of the frog, the grasshopper, the garden snake and many other disappearing species I remember from childhood.
The Lost Ladybug Project is tracking ladybugs throughout the US and Canada in an effort to gain added insight into their disappearance. Great family activity to do with the children; and, the website has content designed especially for children.
This from Cause2:
Scientists are asking children, adults, families, educators and everyone from two to 102-years-old to join a citizens-science group to help our ladybugs.
Ladybugs were once one of the most common bugs found across the U.S. and Canada. Controlling pests that attack farm harvests, balancing the ecosystems in forests and fields, their industriousness is an important part of the ecosystem.
During the past two decades as invasive look-alike ladybugs expanded their territories and pollution and habitat loss have crowded them out, species of Native ladybugs began vanishing and the invasive species began increasing. These include the multicolored Asian ladybug, checkerboard ladybug and the seven-spotted ladybug.
The larger, rounder multicolored Asian ladybug had been introduced as a biological control for scale bugs then mass produced across the lands. It even eats ladybug larvae. The checkerboard ladybug, which is small and yellow, hitched a ride from Europe through the St. Lawrence River in the 1960s and has since been traveling steadily southward. The seven-spotted ladybug, also from Europe, came to North America in 1956. Its population extended its range as the Native nine-spotted and two-spotted began disappearing.
“This has happened very quickly and we don't know how this shift happened, what impact it will have, and how we can prevent more native species from becoming so rare,” said John E. Losey, Cornell University entomologist.
In June 2007 the Lost Ladybug collaborators, headed by Losey, received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to expand the program throughout New York and extend it nationally. Their goal is to use citizen science to bring more participation in the search for the bugs. The ladybugs are collected into vials with twigs and drops of water. The date, time and place they were found are written down. The discoveries are placed on a gray square and their pictures are taken. Digital images are sent to the project's website, or color prints can be mailed to the university. The ladybugs are returned to where they were found.
The database will help scientists understand the shifting changes on earth, help farmers with crops and further understanding of rare species and the ecosystems in which they live. There are more than 5,000 species of ladybugs around the earth. About 450 are Native to North America. It’s not yet known if the new species inhabiting the continent will serve the same function or favor the same habitats as the native species.
In turn, youth will learn about the place of the ladybug in the community of nature and the importance of biodiversity and conservation for the web of life through hands-on participation in research. Educational materials, books, collection vials and nets are provided through Cornell University.
The project's website will post instructions for finding collection sites, making nets, photographing ladybugs, submitting data and uploading photos. The website will also offer an automated identification feature to provide people with real-time feedback on species that have been collected. Ladybug lore, myths, songs and culturally based stories are being posted to explain the relationships between ladybugs, pests and our food.
As of this year, more than 3,000 ladybugs will be in the new data display sent in by hundreds of participants across the U.S. and Canada.
For more information visit the Lost Ladybug Project.
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