Elephants Out-compete Rhinos at Salad Bar

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Elephants get first dibs at the African savannah salad bar, which may force rhinos to dine on lower quality food and a more limited diet.

When elephants abound in an ecosystem, a South African study found that black rhinos (Diceros bicornis) tend to eat more grass than in nearby areas with fewer elephants. Grass contains more fiber per the amount of energy it contains, and thus provides rhinos with less nutrition per pound than other floral food sources.

However, when African elephants (Loxodonta africana) are absent, an analysis of rhino poop found evidence that the horn-headed herbivores devour a wider variety of vegetation, including leaves from shrubs, succulent plants and liana vines.

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“Despite extensive evidence of the effects of elephant on food resources in the Addo Elephant National Park (where the study was conducted) and elsewhere few studies have investigated the consequences of this for other large herbivores,” wrote the authors in the journal PLOS ONE. “Surprisingly, where this information exists, the emphasis has been on demonstrating that elephant facilitate herbivore access to habitat and increase the availability and quality of food. This is despite clear evidence that elephants limit herbivore abundances across ecosystems through their ability to monopolize resources.”

The elephant-enforced diet may harm rhino health. Analysis of the chemical composition of rhino droppings found that levels of the important nutrient phosphorus were lower in rhinos living in areas where pachyderms predominated.

Geese Police and Other Crime-Fighting Critters

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An elite gaggle of geese “police,” is now employed to ward off troublemakers in China’s rural Xinjiang province. But they're just the latest example of unexpected security animals hard at work around the world.

The geese are “extremely vigilant” and seem to be “better than dogs” at preventing crime, says Zhang Quansheng, a police chief in Xinjiang’s Shawan county.

Male Fish Lure Females With Genital Claws

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When male guppies fail to win over females with their good looks and dance moves, they turn to another, more aggressive set of tools: claws on the tips of their genitalia.

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Biologists have long speculated that guppies — freshwater fish native to the Caribbean — use tiny claws on the tips of their genitalia to secure mates. But, until now, nobody has tested this theory experimentally. A group of biologists from the University of Toronto conducted an experiment to test the role of the claws in mating, and found that the grippers helped males seal the deal with females that were otherwise unwilling to mate, the researchers report today (July 23) in the journal Biology Letters.

At first, male guppies take on a peaceful approach to mating and put on a bit of a show to attract females. When they are lucky, the females willingly approach them when the show is over. [Top 10 Swingers in the Animal Kingdom]

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"The male will display to the female, extending his body in an S shape and then shimmering, showing these bright spots," said Lucia Kwan, a graduate student at the University of Toronto and a co-author of the report. "If the female is receptive, she glides over to the male."

But, if females don't show interest, males continue to pursue them. They sneak around the female from behind or below, and try to force sperm into her without her cooperation. This behavior is common in guppies in the wild, Kwan said.

To test the role of claws in this mating tactic, the team used a scalpel to slice off the claws from a subset of test guppies, leaving the claws intact in the rest of the test group for comparison. They then placed each male in a tank with a virgin female and waited up to two hours to observe mating behavior. At the end of each trial, the team extracted the females from the tanks and dissected them, removing and quantifying the amount of sperm within each female.

Less Ice Equals More Seal Strandings

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Harp seals mate and rear their young on the sea ice off the east coast of Canada in the spring and move north as the weather warms. But increasing numbers of seals are ending up stranded along the U.S. East Coast, as far south as the Carolinas, far away from where they should be at this time of year.

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As ice levels in the North Atlantic have declined, the number of seals that have wound up on beaches, either dead or in poor health, has increased, new research shows.

The study, published this month in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests that the decline of sea ice is at least partially responsible for the increase in seal strandings, said Brianne Soulen, a study co-author and biologist at the University of North Texas. Demographic factors also play a major role: A large portion of stranded seals are young, and the majority (62 percent) are male, said Soulen, who performed the research while a graduate student at Duke University. [Gallery: Seals of the World]

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Males may be more likely to get stranded because they tend to wander farther afield once on their own, Soulen told LiveScience.

The study was able to mostly rule out the possibility that strandings are due to inbreeding, finding that stranded seals are just as genetically diverse as non-stranded seals.

"Genetics didn't seem to have an influence," Soulen said.

The snow-colored harp seals mate and give birth on sea ice, then mothers nurse and stay with their young. After that, the pups are on their own. The researchers hypothesize that in years with less ice, the ice that exists becomes crowded, and some seals are forced into the water before they've learned how to navigate or how and where to fish, Soulen said. This may lead them to follow groups of fish moving south, or allow them to become disoriented, she added.

Iberian Lynx Doomed by Climate Change?

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The lynx of Southern Europe is in trouble, and those trying to save them are missing the boat, say researchers who predict climate change will finish what the drop in the lynx’s food supply started, unless there’s a new plan.

The lynx, to Americans, is a kind of bobcat. Iberian lynx numbers have been in freefall largely because humans have been over hunting their primary food, which is rabbits.

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But that might not be what pushes the Iberian lynx to extinction, said Miguel Araújo of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, Spain. Climate change could be the death knell for the lynx in the second half of this century. If so, the current conservation efforts will not help them, but only slow their demise.

A new plan is needed to help the rare cats overcome the food scarcity, as well as anticipated climate changes to their habitat in southern Europe, the researchers say.

Araújo and his colleagues used ecological models that included anticipated climate change to investigate the combined effects on prey and conservation efforts for the survival of the Iberian lynx.

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“We show that anticipated climate change will rapidly and severely decrease lynx abundance and probably lead to its extinction in the wild within 50 years, even with strong global efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions,” wrote Araújo and his colleagues in the July 21 edition of the journal Nature Climate Change.

Baddass Shrew Lifts Logs, Can't Be Stomped

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A new species of hero shrew, recently found in Africa, is now known to be one of the strongest, sturdiest mammals in the animal kingdom.

The shrew, Scutisorex thori, measures less than a foot long and weighs only 1.7 ounces, and yet it can lift heavy logs. The appropriately named new “hero,” found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and described in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters, can also often survive attempted squishing.

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Lead author William Stanley, of the Field Museum of Natural History, explained to Discovery News that locals used to demonstrate the sturdiness of these tiny mammals to scientists. When researchers first documented the genus back in the early 1900s, locals immediately recognized the furry shrew.

“'Oh, that’s the hero shrew,' they said,” Stanley explained. “'We use it as a talisman. It renders us invincible to bullets and spears.'”

“At that point,” Stanley continued, “one of the men stood on the tiny mammal for 5 minutes. The shrew walked away unscathed.”

The new shrew, which sports thick, dark hair, appears to be just as strong.

Stanley and his team collected some of the mammals near the village of Baleko in the Congo. Detailed analysis of their body structure revealed that they are similar, yet distinctly different, from the other known hero shrew, Scutisorex somereni.

The most noteworthy feature that the shrews share in common is their unique spine.

“It’s massively reinforced, resulting in tremendous strength,” Stanley said.

Climate Change 10,000 Times Faster Than Evolution

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Evolution can be fast, but not fast enough to keep up with the rate of human-caused climate change, say two researchers who have studied the evolution rates of hundreds of species in the past.

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In fact, many vertebrate species would have to speed up their evolution rate 10,000 times to match today's pedal-to-the-metal rate of global warming, according to John Wiens, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at the University of Arizona, and Ignacio Quintero, a postgraduate research assistant at Yale University.

"A big question is 'Can some species adapt quickly enough to survive?'" said Wiens. “So we looked at 17 groups of animals” comprising 540 species that included amphibians, birds, reptile and mammals, to see how they adapted to temperature changes in the past. “We estimated the rate of climate change for these species.”

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Specifically, they looked at when these species split into new species based on genetic data, which is a measure of their rate of evolution, and compared that to climate changes in the niches where those animals lived at those same times in geological history. What they found was that the species could handle a global temperature change of about one degree centigrade per million years. Their results appear in a paper in the latest issue of the journal Ecology Letters.

The problem, of course, is that humans are un-sequestering and burning millions of years worth of carbon-rich fossil fuels and releasing their heat-retaining gases into the atmosphere at a rate that's causing a temperature rise of perhaps 4 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. So if a species can't move to a nearby cooler habitat, it will be unlikely to evolve out of its predicament and survive.

All this seems to fly in the face of a variety of special cases of rapid evolution that have been documented in birds, reptiles and amphibians. But that's not quite so, explained evolutionary biologist Robert Holt of the University of Florida.

The rate of evolution of a particular group of animals probably has a lot to do with how big a set of genetic tools, or flexibility to develop new traits, a species has to work with. Some species have more than others, Holt said.

Dogs Remember as Well as Humans

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The memory of dogs is more human-like than previously thought, allowing our furry pals to copy our actions, even after delays.

The discovery, outlined in the latest issue of Animal Cognition, means that dogs possess what’s known as “declarative memory,” which refers to memories which can be consciously recalled, such as facts or knowledge.

Humans, of course, have this ability, as anyone playing a trivia game demonstrates. But it had never fully been scientifically proven in dogs before, although dog owners and canine aficionados have likely witnessed the skill first-hand for years.

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Claudia Fugazza and Adám Miklósi of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary conducted the study. A LOT of dog studies happen in Hungary, where people really love their pooches and some of the world’s leading canine researchers live.

The team investigated if dogs could defer imitation, which in this case meant copying what their owners were doing. Eight adult pet dogs were trained using the “Do As I Do” method. (Fugazza is a leading expert on this training method for dogs.) The tasks included copying their owners walking around a bucket and ringing a bell. Can dogs then successfully replicate what they learned after a 10 or so minute distracting break?

Fugazza described what happened next with one owner-dog pair:

The owner, Valentina, got her dog Adila to pay attention to her. She then demonstrated an activity, like ringing a bell with her hand.

Valentina and Adila then took a break, with both doing whatever they wanted to do. Sometimes they played together with a ball, or relaxed on a lawn. Adila happily sniffed around and barked at passers by.

After the break, Valentina went to her original starting position and gave the command “Do it!” Adila knew exactly what came next. The attentive dog rang the bell. Adila even did this when a human stranger, who didn’t even know what the prior activity (bell ringing) was, gave the same command.

Great White Sharks Feast on Fat After Road Trips

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Footage of great white sharks often shows them ravenously feeding on marine mammals, and now a new study reveals that such feasts often occur after the sharks go on long journeys.

The study, published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B, reveals how important protection of established shark feeding grounds are, since so much concentrated feasting takes place at these sites.

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“We know from researchers observing white sharks feeding on whale carcasses that one shark can eat more than 30 kg (66 pounds) of blubber in a single feeding,” lead author Gen Del Raye told Discovery News. “This has been estimated to be sufficient energy to allow a shark to survive for 1.5 months.”

“We also know that the sharks feed fairly frequently on juvenile northern elephant seals at certain seasons,” added Del Raye, who is a researcher at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station and the University of Hawaii. “One of my co-authors, Salvador Jorgensen, for example, has identified the same shark feeding on 3 juvenile elephant seals in the course of one week.”

Del Raye, Jorgensen and their colleagues assessed great white shark fat stores over long periods by examining depth records from pop-up satellite tags affixed to sharks in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Changes in shark buoyancy served as a proxy for how much weight the toothy predators were packing.

As a shark’s single largest organ, the liver, can account for 28 percent of an adult’s body weight. Other fat is stored in the shark’s muscles. While sharks fill up on fatty food after long journeys, no shark has ever been classified as obese. Their lifestyle is probably inherently too active for them to keep the pounds on.

The Loneliest Whale in the World?

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Next fall, a team of documentary filmmakers and scientists will head out into the North Pacific in search of a whale.

They know which whale they’ll be looking for, although nobody is completely sure what species it is. It may be a blue whale, is more likely a fin, but could be a hybrid of the two. No human has knowingly set eyes on it, although quite a few have been listening to it for over 20 years. And there are many more around the world who may not have heard recordings of its vocalizations, but have heard of them, and who have been inspired to write music, poetry and books about the whale that makes them -- a whale they have dubbed the 'loneliest whale in the world.'

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The story begins in the late 1980s, when the U.S. Navy began providing whale researchers with recordings from hydrophone arrays it deployed to listen for submarines in the North Pacific, and which also happened to pick up the haunting moans of baleen whales as they cried out across hundreds of miles of ocean in search of mates.

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In 1989, William Watkins of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution began sifting through those recordings and soon noticed something unusual. Whereas most male fin and blue whales vocalize at a range of about 17-18 Hertz, well below the limits of human hearing and ideal for traveling across vast distances underwater, one whale was consistently vocalizing at a much higher range of 52 Hz.

From 1992, when the Navy made more recordings available, Watkins and his team studied the so-called 52 Hz whale in more detail, triangulating the recordings to track his movements across the North Pacific during mating season. (Outside of mating season, the whales do not generally vocalize.) In 2004, they published a paper in the journal Deep Sea Research, which noted how the whale’s unique vocal properties made it easier to chart its movements.

“It’s very difficult to track a signal consistently in the ocean, without seeing the animal,” explained Mary-Ann Daher, who was part of the team that wrote the paper. “Because if other animals are making sounds at the same frequency, you don’t know if it’s the same guy. But this one, it was the 52 Hz signal that we were able to pick up frequently.”

But that wasn’t the aspect of the research that resonated. What might reasonably have been expected to be a relatively obscure paper in a relatively obscure journal was picked up by media and public alike, who responded to the notion of a whale that was swimming through the ocean, calling out on a frequency no other whale was using, never hearing a response.

The "loneliest whale in the world" was born.

Great Tits Built to Survive Climate Change?

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Early birds get worms in the evolutionary race against climate change.

The great tit (Parus major), a small bird, depends on a boom in caterpillar numbers in the spring to feed their young. However, spring and the caterpillar buffet now arrive earlier due to a warming global climate. If the birds were hard-wired to lay their eggs at the same time every year, they would miss the spring insect surge. That caterpillar catastrophe would leave many young birds starving.

However, great tits in England now lay their eggs earlier in the year which allows the early birds to catch the caterpillar boom, according to a study published in PLOS Biology.

Great tits now lay their eggs an average of two weeks earlier than they did 50 years ago. The birds’ rate of change could allow them to adapt to global warming of 0.5 degrees Celsius per year, suggested the study’s authors from the University of Oxford.

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The key to the great tits’ survival comes from a biological ability known as phenotypic plasticity. Phenotype refers to the physical expression of a living thing’s genetic code along with the influence of environmental factors on the creature. The ability of species to adapt behaviors and physical characteristics to meet environmental needs is phenotypic plasticity.

Smaller birds with faster life cycles, such as the great tit, may have the phenotypic plasticity needed to keep up with climate change. However, other creatures that take longer to reproduce may face challenges.

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“Our results show us under what conditions we can expect species to be able to cope with a changing environment, and under what conditions we should be more pessimistic,” lead author Ben Sheldon said in a press release. “We should be particularly concerned about slow-reproducing species, for which the need to show just the right response to the environment is particularly crucial. A key area for future work is to understand why some species respond by the right amount, and others show the wrong response.”

Why Turtles Love Golf

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Is that a turtle crossing the fairway? Quite possibly: According to new research, golf courses can provide ideal homes for turtles, reports National Geographic News as part of a series on global water issues.

University of Kentucky herpetologist Steven Price and colleagues examined turtles in Charlotte, N.C., netting turtles in ponds on golf courses, cow pastures and local parks.

The ponds on the golf courses seem to be “providing something that other ponds are not,” he told National Geographic. It’s not clear exactly what, although the vast open spaces of golf courses are good for turtle nests.

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The researchers found painted turtles and sliders in similar rates at the golf courses and farm ponds, and golf courses boast a greater variety of species.

Turtles seemed to prefer golf courses with the least amount of development, however: “If golf courses are to be seen as reserves for wetland-dependent animals, golf courses with low housing density should be considered as a more preferable option than courses associated with extensive residential development,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of Herpetology.

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“There’s potential for (courses) to be really good habitat if they’re managed properly,” said Davidson College herpetologist Jacquelyn Guzy, one of the researchers.

And not all courses are, researchers are quick to point out. Courses with lots of space left wild in addition to the groomed fairways offer habitat for many types of animals. But courses without trees that are completely manicured do not.

Photo: A group of turtles sun themselves by the 16th green at the 2013 Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Ga., on April 8, 2013. Credit: Phil Noble/Corbis

Baby Boy or Girl? Mammals Can 'Choose'

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Mammals can skew the male-female ratio of their offspring in order to maximize their reproductive success, new research finds.

The study, published today (July 10) in the journal PLOS ONE, confirms a long-held theory that animals can influence the sex of their young in response to environmental conditions and other factors. The results come from about 90 years' worth of records for 40,000 mammals, ranging from primates to rhinoceroses, at the San Diego Zoo.

Females that produced the most males went on to have up to 2.7 times the number of grandchildren from those sons as those who had even numbers of male and female offspring. (The 10 Strangest Pregnancies in the Animal Kingdom)

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"When mothers produced predominantly male offspring, those male offspring outcompeted their peers," said study co-author Joseph Garner, an ethologist at Stanford University.

Parents that produced more females also tended to produce more offspring from those daughters than those with an even gender split, though the effect was less pronounced.

Still, that doesn't mean mammals are consciously choosing to have a male or a female. Instead, environmental and social cues may be subtly influencing their physiology so that they produce offspring with the best chances of passing on their genes.

The funny animal genre evolved

The funny animal genre evolved in the 1920s and 1930s, as blackface became less socially acceptable. Early black-and-white funny animals, including Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Mickey Mouse (perhaps the most enduring of the kind), Foxy the Fox, Felix the Cat and Flip the Frog, maintained certain aspects of the blackface design, including (especially with the advent of sound film) heavy emphasis on song and dance routines. The increased use of Technicolor and other color film processes in the 1930s allowed for greater diversity in the ability to design new "funny animals," leading to a much wider array of funny animal shorts and the near-total demise (except for Mickey Mouse and a few other Disney characters of the era) of the blackface characters. Song and dance fell out of favor and were largely replaced by comedy and satire. The Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts by Warner Bros. Animation, for instance, introduced dozens of funny animals, many of whom have reached iconic status in American culture. Other notable funny animals from the color film era included Walter Lantz's Woody Woodpecker, MGM's Tom and Jerry (among many others), and Paul Terry's Heckle and Jeckle.
Television changed the dynamic of animation, in that although budgets were much smaller and schedules much tighter, this prompted a shift from the physical comedy that predominated film shorts to more dialogue-oriented jokes (including celebrity impressions and one-liner jokes). Hanna-Barbera Productions focused almost exclusively on these kinds funny animal TV series in the late 1950s and early 1960s, creating an extensive line of funny animal series (Yogi Bear being one of the most enduring franchises). Jay Ward Productions also produced The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, a series representative of the genre (albeit with much stronger Cold War overtones than Hanna-Barbera).

Sharks Slap Fish to Death

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Thresher sharks slap fish to death, according to a new study that adds sharks to the list of ocean predators that can kill with just a slap.

For this latest study, published in PLoS ONE, Simon Oliver of the Thresher Shark Research and Conservation Project and his colleagues observed thresher sharks hunting schooling sardines. The action took place in the waters off of a small coral island in the Philippines.

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Using handheld video cameras, suggesting that they were very close to the sharks, Oliver and his team recorded 25 instances where the sharks slapped their tails on or very near fish. The slaps either killed the sardines outright or stunned the fish so that the shark could easily gulp them down.

Thresher sharks initiated the behavior by drawing their pectoral fins inward to lift their posteriors rapidly. The forceful tail slapping followed. Slaps were so hard that they dissolved gases that bubbled out of the water.

The sharks ate an average of 3.5 sardines after each successful hunting event.

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Clearly this method works, and it’s more efficient than hunting fish one by one. Sardines are on the small side, so a predator could quickly run out of steam trying to chase a single fish, and then another and another.

Most fish species are on the decline, due to overfishing, pollution and other human-caused problems, so the hunting method is increasingly important for sharks.

“This extraordinary story highlights the diversity of shark hunting strategies in an ocean where top predators are forced to adapt to the complex evasion behaviors of their ever declining prey,” said Oliver in a press release.

The tail slaps might also help sharks to communicate with each other, although that hasn’t been proven yet. Humpback and sperm whales slap their tails a lot, turning them into a sort of oceanic Morse code to communicate over long distances.

Crickets Act Differently When Others Are Watching

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Everybody loves an audience—even crickets.

A new study shows that the insects change their aggressive behavior when they know other crickets are watching, the first time this phenomenon has been observed in any invertebrate. Mammals, birds, and fish are all known to be influenced by others.

In recent experiments, male crickets fighting in an arena acted more violently—and upon winning, were more jubilant—when other male or female crickets were in the audience. (See National Geographic's bug videos.)

Found worldwide, crickets live in communities defined by conflicts between individuals, usually to gain access to territories, resources, and mates.

But most previous research has focused on the fighters themselves, without placing them in the social networks in which they live.
Now, the new study reveals that cricket behavior "is much more complex than we give them credit for," said study leader Lauren Fitzsimmons, a biologist at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.

Robert Matthews, a professor emeritus of entomology at the University of Georgia who was not involved in the study, said, "It's an area that should have been looked at long ago.

"Contests don't occur in isolation," he said. "They always are in a social context."
Taking the Stage

For their experiments, Fitzsimmons and colleagues caught male and female crickets from local fields and reared their offspring in isolation in the laboratory. The team then put pairs of either wild-caught males or laboratory-raised males in a small arena at separate times, which always led to fights.

In a glass-separated viewing area adjacent to the arena, the scientists set up experiments with three audience situations: a male watching a fight, a female watching a fight, or no audience. The lab-raised male fighters had a lab-raised audience, and the wild crickets had a wild-caught audience. (See pictures of the world's deadliest animal battles.)

The researchers then videotaped each fight and played them back in slow motion, noting the aggression and overall behavior of the males in the three separate audience situations.

The intoxicated world of the spotted flycatcher

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Spotted flycatchers have commandeered the fence this year. Darting from shadows behind the hedge; landing on a post or wire; pausing to watch for a target; looping out into the field to land back on a further post; launching to snatch an insect on the wing with a blur and then back into the shadows. The spotted flycatchers have learned they have a speed and agility beyond the comprehension of walkers along the fence. They have the confidence now to hunt even while people and dogs are about. Sheep in the field bring more flies and the jackdaws are too slow and otherwise engaged to bother.

The flycatcher sprites appear flitting from post to post along the field's length as you walk beside the fence. They stay a couple of posts ahead, luring you closer and closer, until they flick to the next post or wire. When you get to the kissing gate at the end of the field they vanish. But if you look the way you've come, you'll see them on fence posts behind you going back to the far end. It's a game. However, with a 70% drop in population since the 1960s, climate change, farming changes, a lack of insects and problems crossing the drought-ridden Sahel on migration, the flycatchers' game is deadly serious.

With their grey-browns and faint dotted lines, they are often described as dull-looking birds, as if that makes them less interesting. But like many of the insects they catch and the landscape they inhabit, subtlety has a greater beauty and their aerial hunting dance is astonishing to watch. We, the lumbering pedestrians along the fence path, are enchanted and find ourselves drawn into it. Spotted flycatcher world is intoxicated by the scent of honeysuckle and the flush of dog roses. We hope the insects they snip from the air with those pencil-sharp beaks are feeding a brood that will also return to the fence.

Mr. Badger Should Be Worried: Britain Ponders a Cull

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Britain's Parliament held a four-hour debate in the House of Commons this past Wednesday, and it wasn't about public spending cuts, the war in Afghanistan, or abortion rights.

It was about badgers.
A badger, for those not acquainted with the species, is a mammal about three feet long with gray fur, a mouthful of sharp teeth, and a black-and-white face striped like a zebra crossing. Meles meles, the European badger, is indigenous to the United Kingdom, lives in an underground labyrinth of tunnels called a sett, and feeds on worms and grubs. There are about 300,000 badgers in England.


The badger has been around long enough to have survived two Ice Ages, but if the Conservative-dominated coalition government executes its plan, some 5,000 will not survive two government-led trials that are the prelude to a culling policy that aims to reduce the spread of tuberculosis (known to be carried by badgers) in cattle.


In 1971, a dead badger was found in a barn in Gloucester, autopsied, and found to be infected with TB. The concern—that badgers transmit the bacterium to cows, thereby putting a farm at risk of being shut down until the infection has cleared—has enmeshed scientists, politicians, government bureaucrats, and farmers ever since.


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Last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) announced its intention to test the "safety, humaneness, and efficacy" of culling by targeting 5,000 badgers in Gloucestershire and Somerset—two infection hotspots.


As the proposed cull drew closer, the controversy widened to include celebrities like Queen guitarist Brian May, who led a protest march in London last Saturday and recorded a song called "Badger Swagger"; the rock star Meatloaf; and actress Dame Judi Dench, who posted a video on YouTube calling for a stop to culling.


An anti-culling petition has 235,000 signers, and there's an online threat of a voodoo curse on Environmental Secretary Owen Patterson, a hard-line advocate of the cull. Others have weighed in with tweets, blogs, and letters to the editors of British newspapers. "Cull the politicians instead," one reader wrote the Daily Mail. On the other side, a farmer's wife pointed out that "we wouldn't be having any of this nonsense if this was about culling rats."

200-Year-Old Fish Caught Off Alaska

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In 1813, President James Madison occupied the White House, Americans occupied Fort George in Canada (a result of the War of 1812) and a rockfish was born somewhere in the North Pacific.

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Two hundred years later, that same rockfish was caught off the coast of Alaska by Seattle resident Henry Liebman — possibly setting a record for the oldest rockfish ever landed.

Troy Tydingco of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game told the Daily Sitka Sentinel that the longevity record for the shortraker rockfish (Sebastes borealis) is 175 years, but that fish "was quite a bit smaller than the one Henry caught."

"That fish was 32-and-a-half inches [83 centimeters] long, where Henry's was almost 41 inches [104 cm] — so his could be substantially older," Tydingco said.

PHOTOS: World's Oldest Known Bird
Samples of the rockfish have been sent to a lab in Juneau, where the actual age of Liebman's fish will be determined, according to the Sentinel.

Scientists can estimate the age of a fish by examining an ear bone known as the otolith, which contains growth rings similar to the annual age rings found in a tree trunk.

Animal longevity remains a puzzle to biologists. Some researchers have found that smaller individuals within a species tend to live longer than their bigger brethren. This may be due to the abnormal cell growth that accompanies both larger body size and the risk of cancer.

The longest-lived animal ever found was a quahog clam scooped from the waters off Iceland. The tiny mollusk was estimated to be 400 years old.

At 39.08 pounds (17.73 kilograms), Liebman's fish may also set a record for the largest rockfish ever caught.

"I knew it was abnormally big, [but I] didn't know it was a record until on the way back — we looked in the Alaska guidebook that was on the boat," Liebman told the Sentinel.

He plans to have the fish mounted, so he can continue to tell the fish story that he's already been "getting a lot of mileage" out of, according to the Sentinel.

Dog Disease Infecting Tigers, Making Them Fearless

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Cats and dogs don't usually mix. But a domestic dog virus is posing a new threat to endangered tigers in the wild, experts say—partly by making them less fearful of people. (See tiger pictures.)

Forced into increasingly smaller habitats, tigers are sharing more space with villagers and their dogs, many of which carry canine distemper virus (CDV), an aggressive, sometimes fatal disease that is usually found in dogs but is also carried by other small mammals.

The virus has infected 15 percent of the 400-some Siberian tigers in the Russian Far East, and has killed at least three, according to Wildlife Vets International (WVI), a U.K.-based conservation organization. (Related blog: "Protecting Russia's Last Siberian Tigers.")


Based on odd tiger behavior on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, scientists suspect the virus is a problem there and in other countries. Many of these potentially CDV-infected tigers seem to be unfazed by people, wandering onto roads and into villages.


John Goodrich, now senior tiger program director of the conservation group Panthera, found the first known tiger with distemper in 2003 in Pokrovka, Russia: "This tiger just walked into a town and sat down. She was absolutely beautiful—a healthy-looking young tigress."


Even so, she had a fixed stare and did not respond to stimuli. "The lights were on, but no one was home," said Goodrich, who was then with the Wildlife Conservation Society.


Goodrich and colleagues anesthetized the tigress and found her positive for distemper. They cared for her in captivity for six weeks before she died.


Such fearless behavior is likely a symptom of brain damage caused by distemper, which also causes respiratory disease, diarrhea, seizures, loss of motor control, and sometimes death.


Veterinarians still don't know much about tiger distemper. It seems that the tigers "can get a mild infection that doesn't cause any problem—conversely it can be more serious than it is in the natural host," said Andrew Greenwood, a zoo and wildlife veterinarian at WVI.


Concerned by the development, WVI plans to work with the Indonesian government and veterinarians to launch the world's first tiger-disease surveillance program, which aims to find out how tigers catch distemper, identify the likely source of the virus, and determine how to best tackle it.

"If we get it right, it could help us forestall a major problem, which is the last thing tigers need in their precarious state," WVI director John Lewis said in a statement.

Conservationists estimate that only 3,200 tigers exist in the wild in 13 Asian countries—a 93 percent reduction of their historic range. (See a National Geographic magazine interactive of big cats in danger.)

For Some Arctic Birds, Time of Day Is Irrelevant

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Arctic summers mean migrating animals, a bounty of breeding opportunities, and 24 hours of sunlight. Many plants and animals experience 24-hour cycles telling them when it's time to rest and when it's time to get up—called the circadian rhythm—that are often tied to light cues. So what happens when the sun never sets?

For four species of migrating birds that breed in the Arctic, new research shows that "anything goes," said Bart Kempenaers, a behavioral ecologist with the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology near Munich.

Lapland longspurs (Calcarius lapponicus) exhibit a 24-hour cycle, while semipalmated sandpipers (Calidris pusilla) and pectoral sandpipers (Calidris melanotos) are active around the clock. Red phalaropes (Phalaropus fulicarius) shift from a roughly 21-hour cycle to a 29-hour cycle.

The type of cycle each displays depends on the species, an individual's sex, and their social circumstances.

Arctic residents like the reindeer and a bird called the ptarmigan don't really have a 24-hour cycle, said Kempenaers, co-author of a recent study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Scientists think this enables the permanent residents to take advantage of the midnight sun to feed around the clock. (Read about Scandinavians who walk with reindeer in National Geographic magazine.)

But Kempenaers and colleagues were curious to see what happened with Arctic migrants.

So the scientists studied the activity patterns of four bird species that migrated to the same area near Barrow, Alaska (map) to reproduce during the Arctic's five-week breeding season. (See pictures of other Arctic animals.)

They attached 0.03-ounce (one-gram) radio transmitters to 142 individuals of Lapland longspurs, semipalmated sandpipers, pectoral sandpipers, and red phalaropes.

The radio tags allowed researchers to continuously monitor individual activity levels, which the team then verified with behavioral observations in the field.

How Diving Mammals Stay Underwater for So Long

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Imagine holding your breath while chasing down a giant squid (Architeuthis dux)—multi-tentacled monsters wielding suckers lined with tiny teeth—in freezing cold water, all in the dark. That would take a lot out of anybody, yet sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) do this day in and day out.

The ability to dive underwater for extended periods is a specialized feat marine and aquatic mammals have evolved over millions of years. Diving mammals will slow their heart rate, stop their breathing, and shunt blood flow from their extremities to the brain, heart, and muscles when starting a dive. (Related: "Can Diving Mammals Avoid the Bends?")

But champion divers, such as elephant seals, can hold their breath for about two hours. "It was known that they rely on internal oxygen stores when they're down there," said Michael Berenbrink, a zoologist at the University of Liverpool, England, who specializes in how animals function.

But there was something else going on in the bodies of these animals that researchers were missing, until now.

So what's new? A study published June 13 in the journal Science reports that diving mammals—including whales, seals, otters, and even beavers and muskrats—have positively charged oxygen-binding proteins, called myoglobin, in their muscles.

This positive characteristic allows the animals to pack much more myoglobin into their bodies than other mammals, such as humans—and enables diving mammals to keep a larger store of oxygen on which to draw while underwater.

Why is it important? Packing too many proteins together can be problematic, explained Berenbrink, a study co-author, because they clump when they get too close to each other.

"This [can cause] serious diseases," he added. In humans, ailments like diabetes and Alzheimer's can result.

But myoglobin is ten times more concentrated in the muscles of diving mammals than it is in human muscles, Berenbrink said.

Since like charges repel each other—think of trying to push together the sides of two magnets with the same charge—having positively charged myoglobin keeps the proteins from sticking to each other.

Penguins support gorillas as biscuit makers respond to palm oil threat

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Penguins are coming to the aid of gorillas, according to a survey which reveals that the UK's leading biscuit manufacturers are responding to the environmental threats of palm oil production.

Many of the biggest names in biscuits including Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's and United Biscuits – which makes some of the UK's most popular biscuits including McVitie's Digestive and Penguin – have pledged to reduce the amount of palm oil in their products.

The Rainforest Foundation UK (RFUK) and Ethical Consumer magazine together surveyed over 50 of the UK's biggest biscuit manufacturers about their use of palm oil or its derivatives.

The top scoring companies were the Co-op, M&S, Sainsbury's, Waitrose and United Biscuits. Those at the bottom of the ranking were mostly American-based companies including Asda/Walmart, PepsiCo and Kraft, makers of Ritz and Oreo biscuits.

The project was carried out in response to the increasing threat that palm oil production is posing to the world's rainforest and to the people that rely on these forests for their livelihoods. Palm oil is a core ingredient in many food products but companies are not required by EU law to label products containing it until December 2014.

Having destroyed vast areas of forest in countries including Indonesia, which is home to orangutans, the RFUK says palm oil companies are now planning to expand into the rainforests of the Congo basin in Africa, home to lowland gorillas and other threatened primates. Palm oil companies are also partly responsible for the recent devastating forest fires in Sumatra, which caused pollution episodes in Malaysia and Singapore.

Simon Counsell, executive director of The Rainforest Foundation, UK said: "UK biscuit manufacturers and retailers are showing that it is possible to outright reduce the use of palm oil, which is going to have to occur globally if large areas of Africa's rainforests are to be saved from conversion to palm plantations."

Leonie Nimmo, researcher at Ethical Consumer, added: "This survey clearly shows that environmental campaigning is having a positive impact on the palm oil policies of many companies which is something we wholeheartedly support. Consumers now have a choice in buying biscuits which are reducing the risks to both people and wildlife."

North American Birds Declining as Threats Mount

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Throughout the year, birders look forward to changing seasons and avian scenes as they explore woods, grasslands, and wetlands: the spectacle of spring migration, the songs of breeding birds, the autumn southward flight of wintering species from northern nesting grounds.

Increasingly, though, both casual bird-watchers and ornithologists note a steady decline in numbers—not just of endangered species, but also of common birds not usually considered to be at risk. Study after study, survey after survey show a worrisome downward trend in populations.

A National Audubon Society report called "Common Birds in Decline," for instance, shows that some widespread species generally thought to be secure have decreased in number as much as 80 percent since 1967, and the 19 others in the report have lost half their populations. The figures reflect an array of threats faced by birds throughout North America. (Read about the decline of European songbirds in National Geographic magazine.)

Migrants return from Central America to find that the brushy field where they nested the previous year is now a strip mall.

Millions of songbirds annually suffer bloody death in the claws of domestic cats. Millions more collide with city skyscrapers or communications towers, or fly into the glass windows of suburban houses.

And climate change could degrade or even eliminate habitats in ways that scientists have only recently begun to study and try to forecast.

Threats to songbirds occasionally make splashy headlines, as when Smithsonian scientists released a report in January indicating that free-ranging domestic cats kill far more birds than previously believed: between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds annually in the lower 48 states.

Rare Breed of Killer Whale May Be New Species

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The rarely-seen "type D" orcas—which live in the Southern Ocean—are one of four varieties of killer whale. Researchers recently sequenced type D's genome using material collected from a museum skeleton from 1955. (Watch: "Killer Whales 'Gang Up' to Capture Seal.")

Scientists first spotted type D killer whales in 1955, when a pod of them washed ashore on a New Zealand beach. The stranding stood out as unusual because of the whales' strange appearance. While typical killer whales—types A, B, and C—have streamlined bodies and large, white eye-patches, type D whales have tiny eye markings and large, bulbous heads. (Watch: "Killer Whales vs. Minke Whale.")

The type D pod's stranding resulted in a handful of photos and the collection of one skeleton by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington (map).

According to Robert Pitman, a marine biologist at the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, and a co-author of the new study, for many years researchers thought the whales were the result of genetic mutations because there were no other known sightings.

But some 50 years after the New Zealand stranding, a group of researchers, including Pitman, took a closer look at the documentation of the event. They unearthed other accounts of the weird whales, and found that the New Zealand pod was not the only sighting in history.

"We started seeing photos of this type of animal from various places, all around the Antarctic waters," Pitman said. "The weather is bad down there all the time," he said. "That's why the whale escaped notice from scientists for so many years."