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An expedition to Millennium Atoll, a remote coral atoll in the Central Pacific, has uncovered an almost completely undisturbed underwater ecosystem that could serve as an important reference for restoration projects throughout the Pacific Ocean.

The survey findings, published recently in the journal PLoS One, describe an abundance of giant clams (Tridacna maxima) within the atoll lagoon, as well as large populations of blacktip reef sharks and Napoleon wrasse (Cheilinus undulatus).
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The expedition findings highlight the importance of protecting the atoll, which belongs to the Republic of Kiribati and is a member of the Southern Line Islands chain. Although relatively abundant at present, the sharks, clams, sea turtles, lobsters and Napoleon wrasse of Millennium Atoll are vulnerable to exploitation by fisheries; therefore, protecting the atoll and regulating any fishing in the area is crucial for the preservation of this unusually pristine ecosystem.
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Additional information from oceandots.com.

Millennium (formerly known as Caroline Island) is located in the southern group of the Line Islands, being the easternmost island in the Line Islands chain. The islands of Vostok and Flint are located 232 km to the west and 230 km to the southwest, respectively; Kiritimati is situated around 1,500 km to the northwest. Millennium is an atoll formation with an elongated, slightly crescentic, shape measuring 9.7 km in length and 2.3 km in width.

On the reef rim there are 39 islets — South Island (104 ha), the 4.2 km-long Long Island (76 ha) and Nake Islet (107 ha) being the largest — with a combined area of 3.9 km². They enclose a 9 km long, shallow lagoon that is 5-7 m in depth and up to 500 m across. Within the lagoon are numerous coral heads and patch reefs — some of which form east-west barriers across the lagoon. The surrounding reef flats — averaging 500 m in width — are continuous around the perimeter of the atoll with no reef-crossing passage connecting the interior waters of the lagoon with the surrounding ocean. Instead water exchange takes place via numerous spillways as the tides rise and fall.

BBC

cloudedleopard.org

The Sundaland clouded leopard, a recently described new species of big cat, has been caught on camera.

The film, the first footage of the cat in the wild to be made public, has been released by scientists working in the Dermakot Forest Reserve in Malaysia.

The Sundaland clouded leopard, only discovered to be a distinct species three years ago, is one of the least known and elusive of all cat species.

Two more rare cats, the flat-headed cat and bay cat, were also photographed.

Details of the discoveries are published in the latest issue of Cat News, the newsletter of the Cat Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

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a tourist is thought to have taken a 30 second video of a wild Sundaland clouded leopard in 2006, but that video has never been made public.

Until 2007, all clouded leopards living in Asia were thought to belong to a single species.

However, genetic studies revealed that there are actually two quite distinct clouded leopard species.

As well as the better known clouded leopard living on the Asian mainland (Neofelis nebulosa), scientists determined that a separate clouded leopard species lives on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

The two species are thought to have diverged over one million years ago.

This leopard is now known as the Sunda or Sundaland clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi), though it was previously and erroneously called the Bornean clouded leopard.

Since 2008, it has been listed as vulnerable by the IUCN.

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During the surveys, the research team also discovered a juvenile samba deer (Cervus unicolor) which had been killed by a clouded leopard.

The scientists suspect a large male clouded leopard made the kill, and had removed part of the front right leg.

Despite being a commercial forest that is sustainably logged for wood, the Dermakot Forest Reserve in Sabah, which is an area of approximately 550km square kilometres, holds all five wild Bornean cat species.

[Photo: Alain Compost/WWF-Canon, cloudedleopard.org]

reefvideo.net

coralsforconservation.com

Coral Gardening from Jonathan Clay on Vimeo.

Many reef aquarium owners get their corals by trading them with nearby reefkeepers. Once corals get to a certain size it’s pretty easy to propagate (or frag) them by cutting off a branch here or a a few polyps there. It’s usually cheaper and easier than buying from a local dealer and the corals tend to do much better in the long run, because they haven’t gone through so much shipping stress. It’s also a good way to “insure” your corals because if anything ever happens to a coral you in your aquarium, you can just go back to your friend and ask him to cut you off a piece of the coral you gave him. The hobby has begun to depend on tank raised corals so much that many places that sell corals are beginning to change their stock to include more corals that are grown inside aquariums.

In this video by Jonathon Clay, locals and resort owners who live around large reefs are propagating corals in a similar fashion as reef hobbyists. A group called Corals for Conservation teaches people to preserve declining reefs and fish populations by coral gardening. The idea is that by preserving and regrowing reefs, fish will come back to the area and help replenish areas that have been over-fished.

The methods they use are very similar to that of the common aquarium keeper. The main difference is that it is on a larger scale and they use the ocean as their aquarium. It is a genius idea, promotes conservation, educates, creates jobs and supports the local community. Hopefully we will see more of these projects popping up throughout the world.

This is a sequence from the film “Fragile Paradise“, part of the BBC’s documentary series “South Pacific.“

Center for Biological Diversity

Pint-sized rabbit relatives, pikas live in high-elevation boulder fields surrounded by mountain meadows throughout the western United States. Specially adapted to cold alpine conditions, they cannot tolerate high temperatures. Rising temperatures and drier conditions in summer can expose the animals to heat stroke, reduce food in mountain meadows, and make conditions too hot for them to find food. In winter, because they remain active rather than hibernate, pikas rely on insulating snowpack and their dense coats to keep them warm – but the loss of winter snowpack due to climate change exposes them to deadly winter cold snaps.

Rising temperatures caused by greenhouse gas pollution have already caused drastic losses of lower-elevation pika populations. More than a third of documented pika populations in the Great Basin mountains of Nevada and Oregon have gone extinct in the past century as temperatures warmed. In California, pikas have moved upslope in Yosemite National Park over the past century, and they have largely disappeared from the Bodie Hills in the Sierra Nevada mountains in recent decades. Scientists project that global warming will virtually eliminate suitable habitat for the pika in this century if greenhouse gas emissions are not drastically reduced.

It’s not too late to prevent the extinction of the pika, but we must act quickly to slow global warming. The Fish and Wildlife Service needs to hear from you. Please use the form below to support the listing of the American pika and urge the government to reduce greenhouse gas pollution to levels that will protect the pika and other wildlife species from extinction.

Click here for the form.

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WWF

The American pika, a small flower-gathering relative of the rabbit, may be one of the first mammals in North America known to fall victim to global warming if heat-trapping emissions are not reduced soon.
American pikas are typically found in rocky areas, called talus, within alpine regions of the western United States and southwestern Canada. Many hikers, while passing through pika habitat in these rocky areas, have heard these shy creatures call and whistle to each other.

Since food is difficult to obtain in winter in the alpine environment, pikas cut, sun-dry, and later store vegetation for winter use in characteristic ‘hay piles.’ They are often called ‘ecosystem engineers’ because of their extensive haying activities.

emagazine.com

Yale University researchers are shocking the clean tech sector with cells that produce their own energy, á la the electric eel. Eels’ thousands of cells, called electrocytes, generate up to 600 volts of electricity—about 50 car batteries’ worth of juice. Using this process as a guide, scientists have designed a blueprint for artificial cells that create 28% more juice than one eel electrocyte. Though years from implementation, artificial cells could replace lithium-ion batteries in medical implants like pacemakers and hearing aids. These bio-batteries would recharge naturally using the body’s own replenished energy source (food), thereby eliminating replacement surgeries and medical waste. Plus, the artificial cells are free of toxins like nickel and vanadium oxide, a bonus for the body and the earth. “If it breaks, there are no toxins released into your system,” says researcher Jian Xu. “It would be just like any other cell in your body.”

AP

A hatchling of a rare reptile with lineage dating back to the dinosaur age has been found in the wild on the New Zealand mainland for the first time in about 200 years, a wildlife official said Thursday.

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Tuatara are the last lizard-like descendants of a reptile species that walked the Earth with the dinosaurs 225 million years ago, zoologists say.

There are estimated to be about 50,000 of them living in the wild on 32 small offshore islands cleared of predators, but this is the first time a hatchling has been seen on the mainland in about 200 years.

The New Zealand natives were nearly extinct on the country’s three main islands by the late 1700s due to the introduction of predators such as rats.

Empson said the hatchling is thought to be about one month old and likely came from an egg laid about 16 months ago. Two nests of eggs — the size of pingpong balls — were unearthed in the sanctuary last year and tuatara were expected to hatch around this time.

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The youngster faces a tough journey to maturity despite being in the 620-acre (250 hectare) sanctuary and protected by a predator-proof fence. It will have to run from the cannibalistic adult tuatara, and would make a tasty snack for the morepork (native owl), kingfisher and weka (New Zealand’s endemic flightless rail), Empson said.

“Like all the wildlife living here, he’ll just have to take his chances” Empson said.

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About 200 tuatara have been released since 2005 into the Karori Sanctuary, which was established to breed native birds, insects and other creatures.

Tuatara have unique characteristics, such as two rows of top teeth closing over one row at the bottom and a pronounced parietal eye — a light-sensitive pineal gland on the top of the skull that gives the appearance of a third eye.

sciencenow

A new study predicts for the first time that a major population of Atlantic cod, near Newfoundland, Canada, will essentially go extinct within 20 years, despite best attempts to manage it. “This is the most shocking and disturbing news I’ve ever heard about a marine fish population,” says fisheries biologist Jeffrey Hutchings of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.

Atlantic cod is a symbol of boom-and-bust commercial fishing. After 50 years of heavy harvesting in the late 20th century, the Canadian cod fishery collapsed in the early 1990s. Total bans ensued, and fisheries managers expected to see a recovery. However, after 15 years of little to no fishing, local populations show no sign of rebounding. In fact, some will continue to spiral downward, according to projections reported in this month’s issue of the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

Biologists Douglas Swain and Ghislain Chouinard of Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans used well-established models of fishery stocks to predict the future of the fourth largest population of cod, in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, southwest of Newfoundland. The models took into account the population’s productivity, based on the proportion of young fish that mature, the growth of adults, and natural mortality rates. The results were sobering: The southern Gulf cod stock will be extirpated (local extinction defined as less than 0.3% of the species’ original biomass) within 20 years if limited fishing is allowed. Even if the fishery is completely closed, the stock will hit rock bottom in 38 years.

The main problem, according to Swain and Chouinard, is that adult cod have been dying at an unusually high rate in recent years. No one knows why, but Swain suspects the cause might be increased predation by seals. The problem may be more widespread: The neighboring Scotian Shelf cod population also took a nosedive in the 1990s based on data from a Canadian report published in 2003. Furthermore, while most other cod populations off Canada appear to be stable, the same could have been said about the southern Gulf population up until a few years ago, says Swain.

Although biologists have traditionally assumed that stocks will rebound if fishers simply stop fishing, Hutchings notes, the new study of cod is an “extremely compelling example of the fallacy of that assumption.” As for extirpation of a cod population, Hutchings says he never considered it possible until this analysis. However, fisheries biologist Ralph Mayo of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, says the outlook could be better for smaller U.S. cod stocks in the Gulf of Maine and on Georges Bank. “The Gulf of Maine population has even been increasing,” he says. That, of course, is small consolation for Canada.

National Geograpohic One fish—the goliath grouper—has suddenly become two. The Atlantic goliath grouper, found in warm waters of the Americas and western Africa, is a separate species from the goliath grouper that roams tropical reefs of the eastern Pacific Ocean, a new genetic study shows. The newly identified Pacific goliath grouper can grow more than 6 feet (1.8 meters) long and weighs nearly 1,000 pounds (454 kilograms). Since the oceangoing giants are identical in body shape and markings, scientists hadn’t thought to analyze their genes. : The goliath groupers split off into two species about three and a half million years ago, when the Atlantic and the Pacific became separated by modern-day Panama. But the new species may be short-lived, experts warn: The Pacific grouper will likely join the Atlantic grouper as critically endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.

Photograph courtesy Rachel Graham/Wildlife Conservation Society

CNN

An estimated 125,000 Western lowland gorillas are living in a swamp in equatorial Africa, researchers reported Tuesday, double the number of the endangered primates thought to survive worldwide.

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The last census on the species, carried out during the 1980s, estimated that there were only 100,000 of the gorillas left worldwide. Since then, the researchers estimated, the numbers had been cut in half.

WCS survey teams conducted the research in 2006 and 2007, traveling to the remote Lac Tele Community Reserve in northern Republic of Congo, a vast area of swamp forest.

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Though researchers did spot some gorillas, they based their estimate on the number of gorilla nests found at the site, Rainey said. Each gorilla makes a nest to sleep in at night.

“This is the highest-known density of gorillas that’s ever been found,” Rainey said.

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While the discovery in northern Congo indicates that the gorilla population remains stable in some areas, it is likely that gorillas will remain critically endangered because the threats facing the species are so great, Rainey said. iReport.com: Share photos and video of gorillas in zoos or the wild

“We know very little about Ebola and how it spreads,” he said. “We don’t even know the animal that spreads it around.”

The goal now, Rainey said, is to work with the Congolese government and donors to protect the areas in which the gorillas are known to be living.

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Illegal hunting and habitat loss have also threatened the Cross River gorillas, found in the highlands of Cameroon and Nigeria. Only about 250 to 300 are estimated to remain in the world, the WCS says.

War, habitat loss, poaching and disease are the major threats to the mountain gorillas, made famous by researcher Dian Fossey and the film “Gorillas in the Mist.” The mountain gorilla population is starting to recover after decades of conservation work. From a population of around 230 in the 1970s, the mountain gorillas now number around 700, the WCS says.

Poaching and war have also threatened populations of Grauer’s gorillas in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the former Zaire. The WCS estimates their population to be around 16,000.

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Conservation International and the International Union for Conservation of Nature issued the report.

Forest clearings draw large numbers of Western lowland gorillas searching for food.

University of Washington Office of News and Information

A fish that would rather crawl into crevices than swim, and that may be able to see in the same way that humans do, could represent an entirely unknown family of fishes, says a University of Washington fish expert.The fish, sighted in Indonesian waters off Ambon Island, has tan- and peach-colored zebra-striping, and rippling folds of skin that obscure its fins, making it look like a glass sculpture that Dale Chihuly might have dreamed up. But far from being hard and brittle like glass, the bodies of these fist-sized fish are soft and pliable enough to slip and slide into narrow crevices of coral reefs. It’s probably part of the reason that they’ve typically gone unnoticed — until now.

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Husband and wife Buck and Fitrie Randolph, with dive guide Toby Fadirsyair, found and photographed an individual Jan. 28 in Ambon harbor. A second adult has since been seen and two more — small, and obviously juveniles — were spotted March 26, off Ambon. One of the adults laid a mass of eggs, just spotted Tuesday.

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Anglerfishes — also called by names like frogfishes and toadfishes — are found the world over and typically have lures growing from their foreheads that they wave or cause to wiggle in order to attract prey. Get too close to the lure and you’re lunch.

The newly found individuals have no lures so they seek their prey differently, burrowing themselves into crevices and cracks of coral reefs in search of food.

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With its unusual flattened face, the fish’s eyes appear to be directed forward, something Pietsch says he’s never seen in 40 years as an icthyologist, a scientist who studies the structure, classification and habits of fishes. Most fishes have eyes on either side of their head so that each eye sees something different. Only very few fishes have eyes whose radius of vision overlaps in front, providing binocular vision, a special attribute well developed in humans that provides the ability to accurately judge distance.

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Whether the new fish represent a new family will entail DNA testing and a close examination of a specimen, says Pietsch, whose anglerfish work is currently funded by the National Science Foundation. Scientists have already described 18 different families of anglerfishes and this is probably a 19th, Pietsch says. Families are large groupings, for example, all dog species belong to the larger family that includes wolves, coyotes and, even, hyenas. One can see an example of an anglerfish family, the one named Antennariidae, at http://www.tolweb.org/Antennariidae/21993, a part of the Tree of Life Web project.

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The fish were seen in 15 feet of water. It’s possible the fish could be found at other locations, Pietsch says. All other anglerfish families have ranges broader than a single island group and ocean conditions like those at Ambon are found at various places across Indo-Australian waters.

  M. Snyder, starknakedfish.com/divingmaluku.com

The leglike pectoral fin for walking is the clue that this newly found fish is an anglerfish, even though it does not have a lure on its head for attracting prey. Its flat face and forward-looking eyes are just two of a host of reasons why University of Washington professor Ted Pietsch thinks the fish found in January probably represents a new family of vertebrate animals.