Conservation International

In exacting detail, the Ant Protocol sets forth guidelines for scientists studying the critical insects – from collecting the surface layer of forest floor known as “leaf litter,” to sifting its finest contents into a device known as the “Winkler apparatus,” and finally to capturing the ants that fall to the bottom for scientific study and identification.

But why such extensive procedures for ants?

“The leaf litter layer doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves,” says John Longino, a member of Conservation International’s Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Initiative and lead scientist for the Ant Protocol. “That layer under your feet is just concentrated biodiversity.”

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Pooling scientists from around the world, the TEAM Initiative quantifies and forecasts changes in biodiversity in tropical forests, in part by identifying ants. The Ant Protocol helps to ensure that various scientists collect data in the same manner, allowing them to come to conclusions more efficiently. If scientists are lucky, they’ll find a species in the Winkler they never knew existed. It is a process that Longino compares to finding a needle in the haystack.

Despite the odds, Longino identified one new ant species and rediscovered another in September 2006 at the TEAM Initiative’s Volcán Barva site in northern Costa Rica.

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Longino also identified a worker of Typhlomyrmex prolatus, a species that was previously only known from a lone queen collected near San Jose, Costa Rica around 1940.

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© Piotr Naskrecki
The nearly 12,000 known species of ants provide imperative services within their environment, such as loosening the soil and making it friendlier for small sprouting plants.

National Geographic
The United Nations has estimated that only about ten million sharks are harvested each year. Some conservationists, however, put the number at closer to a hundred million.

But until now estimates of the shark harvest were little more than guesses, because the numbers depended on shark fishers to report their catches.

The shark-fin industry, concentrated in a few Asian trading centers, is secretive and wary of any attempts to regulate, or even investigate, its practices.

To make matters murkier, most fisheries-management groups give little attention to sharks, because they are often considered bycatch—fish caught by accident—given their low value per pound.

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In their effort to accurately estimate the number of fins harvested—and therefore the number of sharks killed—the scientists conducted interviews with traders and studied almost 400 fin samples.

In the end the researchers concluded that from 1996 to 2000 26 to 73 million sharks were traded yearly. The annual median for the period was 38 million—nearly four times the UN estimates but considerably lower than those of many conservationists.

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www.msnbc

A half-mile section of China’s Yellow River turned “red and smelly” after an unknown discharge was poured into it from a sewage pipe, state media said Monday.

The incident in Lanzhou, a city of 2 million people in western Gansu province, follows a string of industrial accidents that have poisoned major rivers in China over the last year, forcing several cities to shut down their water systems.

It wasn’t immediately clear what was tainting the section of the Yellow River, which is a drinking water source for millions. Environmental protection officials took samples and were trying to determine whether the sewage was toxic, the official Xinhua news agency said.

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China’s cities are among the world’s smoggiest, and the government says its major rivers, canals and lakes are badly polluted by industrial, agricultural and household pollution.

Environmental protection has taken on new urgency for Chinese leaders following a November 2005 chemical spill in the Songhua River in northeastern China which forced the city of Harbin to shut down its water supply for days and sent toxins flowing into Russia.

And an arsenic pollution case in Hunan province last month cut water supplies to 80,000 people.

Last week, state media cited China’s State Oceanic Administration as saying the Bohai Sea, the body of water between China and the Korean peninsula, was so polluted it would “die” within 10 years.

Hundreds of millions of people live without adequate supplies of clean drinking water. Throughout the country, protests have erupted over complaints by farmers that uncontrolled discharges by factories are ruining crops and poisoning water supplies.

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Red-tainted liquid pours out of a sewage pipe Monday and into China’s Yellow River in Lanzhou.

reuters

Hippos at a national park in Congo’s war-torn east could be wiped out by the end of the year unless action is taken to stop rebel militia slaughtering them for their meat and ivory, conservationists said.

Experts say more than 400 hippos have been killed by Mai Mai fighters in the last two weeks in Virunga National Park, which once boasted Africa’s greatest concentration of the beasts.

The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) said a recent survey found less than 900 hippos remaining in the remote jungle park, compared with 22,000 recorded there in 1988.
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Virunga, on Democratic Republic of Congo’s border with Rwanda, is Africa’s oldest national park and once boasted the highest density of large mammals in the world.

But in the last 10 years it has also been at the heart of two wars, during which poaching spiralled out of control and a plethora of national armies and rebel groups fought over territory and natural resources.

Rwanda’s 1994 genocide led to an influx of refugees and militia fighters in the area, followed by DRC’s 1998-2003 war, which sucked in foreign forces and resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe that killed some 4 million people.

(pix from www.pbs.org)

The Independent

Iceland has decided to resume commercial whaling, in defiance of the 20-year-old international whaling moratorium. The country joins Norway in openly hunting the great whales for profit. In recent years it has been killing a small number of animals annually but saying it was hunting them for “scientific” reasons, as does Japan.

Iceland’s current permits include 200 minke whales from 2003-07, of which 161 have been caught, leaving 39 for 2007. It will now allow whalers to harpoon a commercial quota of 30 minke whales and nine fin whales in the year to the end of August 2007.

The huge fin whale, second in size only to the blue whale, the world’s largest animal, dropped in numbers catastrophically during the 20th century because of hunting. It is listed as an endangered species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

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However, environmentalists are strongly opposed to the move. “We strongly urge Iceland to abandon its plans to resume commercial whaling. It’s cruel, there’s no money in whaling, hardly anyone in Iceland eats whale meat and now they want to expand their whaling to include an endangered species – it’s crazy,” said Robbie Marsland, UK director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

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Recent polling by Gallup in Iceland revealed that only 1.1 per cent of Icelanders eat whale meat once a week or more, while 82.4 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds never eat whale meat… IFAW urges Iceland to protect its booming whale watching industry, which attracts thousands of tourists to Iceland every year.

Tourism groups and whale watching organisations in Iceland have voiced their concerns over the effects of scientific whaling on their economy. To pursue commercial whaling, and to add endangered fin whales to the list, will risk serious damage to Iceland’s tourism industry, as well as its international reputation.”

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While Norway and Japan have taken whales since 1986, the Norwegians commercially and the Japanese under the guise of science, the Icelanders have had an on-off relationship with hunting.

The Norwegians allowed a quota of 1,052 minke whales in 2006, while Japan caught 850 minke whales and 10 fin whales in Antarctic waters last season.

Associated Press

A new survey of coral reefs along Madagascar’s southwestern coast found massive damage from coral bleaching caused by rising sea temperatures, researchers said Thursday.

However, the survey team, funded by Conservation International and led by the conservation groups Blue Ventures and the Wildlife Conservation Society, said scientists also discovered several small reefs with corals that appeared to be resilient to rising sea temperatures and that could be used to reseed damaged reefs.

Algae called zooxanthellae live within the coral, give it its brilliant reds, oranges and browns and through photosynthesis provide 98 percent of the coral’s food. Warmer sea temperatures block the photosynthesis and cause the coral to shed the algae, leaving the coral white and possibly leading to the death of the coral.

Sea temperatures in many tropical areas have been rising over the past 100 years and coral bleaching has become common.

The survey in southwest Madagascar found that some reefs had lost up to 99 percent of their coral cover.

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Madagascar's coastal waters are believed to have some of the highest diversity of marine species in the Indian Ocean. Many marine creatures depend on the reefs for their own survival.

During the survey, scientists recorded 3,865 species of fish along the reefs off southwestern Madagascar. They said 20 of those species had never been recorded in Madagascar. The survey team believes further research may reveal more than 500 fish species living among the reefs.

The team also recorded 164 species of hard coral, including 19 that were previously unknown to inhabit Madagascar's waters. Another four coral species could not be identified and may be new to science.

In this undated file photograph released by Blue Ventures, Matt Somerville, left, and Katie Yewdall survey recent coral bleaching at reefs near Andavadoaka, a remote village located along the southwest coast of Madagascar. A number of coral bleaching events where rising sea temperatures cause corals to turn white and ultimately die have struck Madagascars southwest coast over the years. (AP Photo/Blue Ventures, Ho)

For those who rem early in the year when I mentioned abt the movie by Al Gore, The Inconvenient Truth, Now we got a chance to watch it locally in Singapore. Actually got this through a friend. For those interested, dun miss it. Do also note that I’m not in any political party.

JC

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The Workers’ Pary Youth Wing is organising a group movie screening for the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” at GV Plaza on 30 Oct.

“An Inconvenient Truth” (http://www.climatecrisis.net) is a documentary where Al Gore (former US Vice President) exposed the myths and misconceptions surrounding global warming. He delivered a passionate and inspirational lecture, presenting the scientific facts about the coming Climate Crisis, and educated us about what people are doing to accelerate the deadly progress of global warming. There is still time to make a difference, but everyone has to do his part before it is too late.

See what the web is saying about the movie at http://www.technorati.com/search/an%20inconvenient%20truth

Details of the screening are as follows:

Date: 30 Oct 2006 (Monday)
Time: 1900hrs
Venue: GV Plaza Hall 2 – Plaza Singapura Level 7
Ticket Price: S$5 per ticket (free seating)

msnbc

The switch to new ultra-clean diesel fuel is going smoothly and supplies should be readily available at pumps when the rules take effect on Sunday, U.S. officials said Tuesday. That will mean less pollution, fewer health issues and possibly the start of a renaissance for diesel cars in the United States.

In a move to cut precursors to smog and tiny particles spewed by diesel-burning engines, the government has required U.S. refiners to make fuel with less than 15 parts per million of sulfur for use in on-road vehicles beginning Oct. 15.

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Margo Oge, director for the Environmental Protection Agency’s transport and air quality office, said that “we expect wide availability of (clean diesel fuel) across the country at numbers significantly higher than we had expected.”

U.S. refiners currently produce about 2.4 million barrels per day of the new diesel, enough to satisfy some 90 percent of on-road demand, Oge said.

EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson called the new standard ”the single greatest achievement in clean fuel since lead was removed from gasoline” in the 1970s and said it would provide about $150 billion in health benefits every year.

That includes preventing 20,000 premature deaths and tens of thousands of respiratory ailments like bronchitis and asthma, the EPA said.

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“This new fuel will help to open up markets to clean diesel passenger cars, pickup trucks, and delivery vehicles that are 30 percent more efficient than current fleets with similar reductions in carbon dioxide emissions,” the EPA added in a statement. “In addition to the fuel economy and carbon emission benefits, a new fleet of clean diesel vehicles will have lower maintenance costs, longer engine life, and typically lower fuel costs.”

The rules were finalized by the Clinton administration and later implemented by the Bush administration after a brief delay.

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]]> http://projectpowerplant.com/blog/2006/10/11/httpwwwmsnbcmsncomid15211662/feed/ 0 http://projectpowerplant.com/blog/2006/10/09/rising-seas-could-leave-millions-homeless-in-asia/ http://projectpowerplant.com/blog/2006/10/09/rising-seas-could-leave-millions-homeless-in-asia/#comments Mon, 09 Oct 2006 16:56:14 +0000 godzilla http://projectpowerplant.com/blog/?p=77 reuters Millions of people could become homeless in the Asia-Pacific region by 2070 due to rising sea levels, with Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, China and Pacific islands most at risk, says Australia’s top scientific body. A climate change report by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) found global warming in the Asia Pacific region could cause [...]]]>

reuters

Millions of people could become homeless in the Asia-Pacific region by 2070 due to rising sea levels, with Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, China and Pacific islands most at risk, says Australia’s top scientific body.

A climate change report by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) found global warming in the Asia Pacific region could cause sea levels to rise by up to 16 cm (six inches) by 2030 and up to 50 cm (19 inches) by 2070.

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Sea level rise between 30 to 50 cm (11 to 19 inches) would affect more than 100,000 km (62,140 miles) of coast, particularly China’s Pearl Delta and Bangladesh’s delta, said the report.

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The Independent

Climate change will condemn the already endangered lemurs of Madagascar to extinction, a study shows.

Patricia Wright, of Stony Brook University in New York, studied the island’s sifikas lemur over 20 years. She found that even a subtle reduction in rainfall in lemur habitats could cause extinction because they are so reliant on water during their reproductive cycle.

Her study revealed that in times of reduced rainfall, infant lemurs are unable to feed properly because females rely on large quantities of water to produce enough milk.

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Lemurs are found only in Madagascar, which is often referred to as the “eighth continent” by scientists because of the incredible diversity of species found on the island.

Lesley Dickie, a Madagascar expert at London Zoo, said three new species of lemur have been discovered in the past year alone and many more may yet be discovered. “The real concern is that some of these species are disappearing before we find them,” she said.

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www.lemurs.us

Lemurs are small primates known as “prosimians,” which, roughly translated, means “pre-primates” or “before monkeys.” Native only to the island of Madagascar and the neighboring Comoro Islands, lemurs resemble the oldest ancestors of primates which existed tens of millions of years ago.
Exact classification of some types of lemurs is a subject of debate, but it’s generally accepted that there are five families of lemurs with about a dozen genera and just over 30 living species. Some species of lemurs are now extinct, including one ancient lemur said to be as large as a gorilla — over 400 pounds. Some prosimian species contain a number of subspecies, all with distinct characteristics, which brings the total types of living lemurs to around 50.

Today’s lemur species range in size from the tiny pygmy mouse lemur, weighing in at about an ounce, to the 15-pound indri lemur and the sifaka, which are both about the size of a standard house cat.