Filming wildlife in one's backyard

Roy lives in central Oklahoma, in a forested area rich in biodiversity, in contrast to the flatter plains of Western Oklahoma.
                                               

Oklahoma -- including the land Roy has preserved and enhanced as prime bird habitat -- is located in the Central Flyway, a bird migration route followed by many species of warblers, vireos, buntings, grosbeaks and other species that winter in Central and South America and nest in North America. Many of these birds travel through his land, where they are rejuvenated as they migrate.

Roy's love of nature was nurtured by his veterinarian grandfather and his father, who was a naturalist and avid birder. By the age of five he was raising baby mourning doves and spending many hours each week with his father learning to observe, appreciate and understand nature. He says lesson one was "Sit down, shut up, quit moving and just watch."

Think about how much better off we would be if we all took that advice. Not only would we learn to appreciate other organisms, but we might even realize they have just as much right to survive, raise their families, and live in peace as we do.

We might even come to recognize how much we have in common with them.

By the time he was 10 years old he was doing field work with Dr. George M. Sutton, world-renowned artist, writer, explorer and professor of ornithology at the University of Oklahoma.

Roy's photography career began almost by accident. For his birthday one year, his wife helped him dig a pond on their heavily-forested land. Birds began showing up at the pond almost immediately, including some he couldn't identify. He got a video camera so he could have a record of the new ones and learned to recognize them. Since then he has identified more than 150 species on his land.

Over the years his career has evolved, and now includes successful television programs such as "The Birds of Roy's Pond," which depicts a wide range of birds, including spotted towhees, American goldfinches, pine siskins, summer tanagers, great-crested flycatchers, brown thrashers, gray catbirds, cardinals, Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, and a number of warblers -- as well as a thriving business of photographing his birds on bird feeders for companies who manufacture and sell feeders.

Although he has filmed all over the U.S., he prefers to highlight the rich diversity of birds and other wildlife in Oklahoma. Neher says, "Although I live and breathe wildlife conservation, my programs don't beat people over the head with the gloomy forecast for the future of wildlife. Instead, I prefer to entertain my viewers with beautiful images and the joy of observing these wonderful creatures."

DNA kit set to boost fight against wildlife crime

The Department of Environmental Affairs has launched a DNA barcoding kit to help officials to combat wildlife crime.
                                         

The kit was produced in partnership with the International Barcode of Life Project (iBOL) and University of Johannesburg (UJ).

Known as LAB-IN-A-BOX, the kit makes rapid species identification possible for border officials within a few hours.

The LAB-IN-A-BOX launch took place at the opening of the seventh iBOL conference, which ends on Friday. This is the first time that this event is held on the African continent with the venue of choice being the Kruger National Park, which is home to the big five.

Much like barcodes on consumer items such as food cans at a supermarket, the DNA barcoding kit gives information such as the type of species, access to information on their biology, ecology and socio-economic significance.

Training on how to use the kit will be provided by the African Centre for DNA Barcoding (ACDB) at UJ.

Usually, a sample gets taken and sent to a laboratory to find out what animal or plant species is involved. This can take days. However, LAB-IN-A-BOX is set to change this by making it possible to rapidly analyse DNA from an animal or plant at the port of entry, with reliable results.

The department said this make a whole new range of enforcement responses become possible.

According to LAB-IN-A-BOX creator, Sujeevan Ratnasingham, in developing countries where inspectors at ports of entry may have limited knowledge and expertise, the need for rapid DNA identification is even more pressing.

"Many threatened animals and plants are trafficked out of developing countries, which do not have adequate resources to combat these crimes. LAB-IN-A-BOX aims to improve the situation by addressing two challenges - rapid detection and successful prosecution. It does this by reducing the cost of adopting DNA analysis infrastructure and by simplifying usage of DNA analysis tools.”

The kit will allow for the tracking of animals and is certain to improve capacity to care for endangered species.

Study Finds Dogs Are Kept Awake At Night Worrying, Too

Have trouble dozing off at night after a stress-filled day? You're not alone.
                                             

Our furry canine pals are also more likely to have a disturbed night's sleep after a day of anxiety, new research has shown.

Hungarian researchers monitored the sleep patterns of pet dogs after "positive" experiences -- like being patted by their owner and playing games -- and "negative" experiences, such as being separated from their owner and approached threateningly by a stranger.

Unsurprisingly, the dogs' personalities affected the way they responded, with more playful pooches less likely to be stressed out by being approached by a stranger than their shyer counterparts.

But overall, the doggos who'd been exposed to stressful experiences didn't sleep as well, spent more time in REM sleep (the active sleep stage characterised by increased heart rate) and woke up more quickly.

The findings were published on Wednesday in The Royal Society scientific journal.

Interestingly, the anxious dogs actually fell asleep faster than their chilled-out counterparts, despite not sleeping as well. The researchers attributed this to something called stress-induced quiescence -- a protective sleep in response to stress.

"(This is) a phenomenon that can be induced by several stressors, and that can also be observed as part of the human immune response during sickness," they wrote.

So don't forget to say goodnight to your four-legged pal tonight -- it just might help them sleep tight.

Plant hitchhikers that just refuse to be left behind

A while ago I very much enjoyed an article by Helen Dillon in which she mused on the challenges and opportunities presented by downsizing from her much-admired Dublin garden, and home of 44 years, to a smaller property.
                                             

Much of her article was concerned with the plants she intends to take with her and, even more interestingly, those she plans to leave behind. Among the plants she’s had enough of is the purple-leaved lesser celandine, Ficaria verna ‘Brazen Hussy’, although she admits that it will probably hitch a lift on some plant or other and turn up in the new garden, whether she likes it or not.

I sympathise; during my recent move from one end of the country to the other, I brought a few plants with me. Not very many, mainly because I knew that in the short term there was nowhere to put them, but even so I was impressed by how many unintended hitchhikers I had also brought with me. These include foxgloves, forget-me-nots, opium and Welsh poppies, dog violets and assorted aquilegias.

While returning from a walk in the national park, I would occasionally drop in at Steve’s nursery to say hello. On one of these occasions, Steve scraped some green stuff off a lump of tufa and said ‘Here, have some of this’. ‘This’ turned out to be Mentha requienii, by far the smallest and also most charming of the mints; a native of Italy, Sardinia and Corsica, it’s usually known as Corsican mint. Barely 1 cm tall, it bears a superficial resemblance to mind-your-own-business (Soleirolia soleirolii), but is a superior plant in every way, with tiny mauve flowers and a pungent mint smell.

Animal cruelty is given own ranking

CAMPASPE Shire ranked 34th of Victoria’s 79 local council areas for animal cruelty reports, placing it 19th on a per capita basis.
                                                 

The data comes after a list of hotspots on the issue was released by RSPCA Victoria last week.

RSPCA Victoria received 10,180 cruelty reports across the state in 2016-17 — about 28 per day.

Of these, 106 were concerns about the welfare of animals in the Campaspe region, which equates to one report for every 350 residents in the area.

Last year Campaspe ranked 41st and 30th on a per capita basis.

RSPCA chief executive Liz Walker said understanding the rate of cruelty reporting and the different offences in local areas is critical to ensuring that RSPCA Victoria directs its education, advocacy and enforcement efforts to the places that need it most.

As with last year’s data, reports received in 2016-17 about animals not receiving basic care far outnumbered all other offences reported.

“It’s disappointing to see that, for the second year in a row, too many Victorian animals were reported to us because of concerns about very basic issues: food, water, shelter and vet care when they’re sick or injured. These kinds of problems are so preventable.

Reports received from Campaspe included 51 reports of animals with insufficient food, water or shelter (4,763 across the state) and 48 concerns about hygiene, grooming and housing conditions (3,349 statewide).

Welfare concerns for dogs, cats and horses continue to make up the majority of issues reported.

Animals injured, orphaned in storm being cared for at Dane County Humane Society's Wildlife Center

Dozens of critters injured or orphaned in a storm that raged through the region Wednesday night have found refuge at the Dane County Humane Society’s Wildlife Center.
                                         

Jackie Edmunds, the center’s wildlife rehabilitation training coordinator, said Friday that 67 animals have been brought in over the past two days.

Birds were displaced from their nests due to high winds, and squirrels had to escape flimsy nests destroyed due to falling trees. The struggling animals were rescued after people saw them in their yards or neighborhoods and called the center, Edmunds said.

Among the injured animals are an American toad with an eye injury and a red-tailed hawk with spinal trauma. Other animal patients include American robins, mallard ducklings and sandhill cranes.

Bats, despite being nocturnal animals, cannot see in the dark. Instead they have evolved a similar ability known as use echolocation to navigate and locate prey at night. The bat emits a very high frequency sound and listens for the echo that bounces off objects. The difference in time between emitting the sound and hearing the echo allows the bat to build up a mental “picture” of its environment. Sounds that take longer to bounce back indicate that the surroundings are further away.

Of course, Magneto’s magnetic powers can produce a much wider range of effects, from lifting and manipulating metal objects to rearranging matter (a power definitely not seen in animals). However, his daughter Polaris has the ability to perceive the world as patterns of magnetic energy, which actually isn’t too dissimilar to the powers present in the animal kingdom.

Even ugly animals can win hearts and dollars to save them from extinction

The Earth is home to millions of species, but you wouldn’t know it from the media’s obsession with only a few dozen animals like tigers and gorillas.
                                                 

This narrow focus makes the most of popular fascination with large and cute creatures. Conservationists take advantage of these nonhuman celebrities to raise awareness about important issues and to seek donations to help save endangered animals. Given the multi-billion-dollar funding shortfall for nature conservation, public support is crucial.

Very popular species attract the most wildlife conservation funding. But what about the Nimba otter shrew, the Cuban greater funnel-eared bat or other threatened yet obscure species? And don’t all imperiled green spaces, not just the homes of snow leopards and orangutans, deserve attention?

These campaigns are very different. WWF-US raises money for a broad set of projects, addressing global issues from climate change and illegal wildlife trade to forest and ocean conservation. The EDGE campaign we analyzed focuses on saving 100 threatened mammal species.

Given these contrasting approaches, we wanted to see if and when marketing makes a difference. To do this we also had to account for whether the species used for fundraising mattered. This involved measuring an animal’s “appeal,” which depends on lots of factors, such as whether it is cute, large or famous. To see which animals were the most appealing, we showed 850 conservation supporters a random selection of the animal photos featured on the WWF-US and EDGE websites and asked these volunteers to rank the photos.

Let’s first consider WWF-US, which raises money through animal “adoptions.” When people donate, they signal their support for the well-known species. In return they get a stuffed toy, photos of the animals and adoption certificates. But the money WWF-US raised funds projects that benefit more than just the “adopted” animals.

Sabah to fight nature with nature

Researchers are racing against time to breed a tiny insect that they hope will destroy an aquatic plant that is drying up lakes and ponds around Sabah.
                                           

State Agriculture Department director Idrus Shafie said the Salvenia Molesta had thus far infested 19 out of the 20 oxbow lakes in the Kinabatangan region in Sabah’s east coast.

He said the fast-growing aquatic fern that could double its area from 10sq m to 20sq m in just three days choked lakes and ponds in Kota Belud, Tuaran, Paitan and Papar.

They believed the fern, native to South America, was brought in as an ornamental plant for aquariums and later discarded in drains or lakes where it began to spread rapidly.

He said the department was alerted about the infestation by Kinabatangan villagers in 2015 and were shocked when satellite imagery showed that almost all of the oxbow lakes there were choked with the weed.

The plants dry up the lakes as they displace the water.

“They are upsetting an entire eco system,” Idrus added.

He said the department brought in more than 350 of the Cyrtobagous salviniae weevils from Melaka last year and had been breeding these insects at its research centre in Tuaran and at the Tungog oxbow lake in the Kinabatangan.

“The weevils will take at least another year before we have enough to contain the situation.”

The weevils, originally from Australia, were used to control a similar infestation of the water ferns in the peninsula during the 1980s.

He said there was no fear of the insects – about the size of rice weevils – getting out of control as they were host specific in that they only consumed that particular water fern.

Australians are spending $12 billion a year on their pet animals

Australians are spending $12 billion a year on food, grooming, vets and insurance for their animals, making the pet care industry one of the major growth hot spots of the country’s business sector.
                                     

There are an estimated eight million pet owners, primarily of cats and dogs, which means Australia has one of the highest domestic animal ownership rates in the world.

And as more people choose to live by themselves with their animals, the growing level of spending has prompted new businesses to enter the market to take advantage of the boom in spending on pets.

On most days during the week Gustavo Montagut can be found around Sydney’s off-leash beaches and parks in the east with a pack of up to 10 dogs.

Mr Montagut, 30, left Colombia after studying marketing at university for a decade, to travel and learn the art of dog grooming in Shanghai.

He has increased the number of dogs he regularly takes out from 15 to as many as 105 in three months. He charges $45 a dog for four hours’ care. “I realised I didn’t want to just walk dogs anymore; I started to think of the idea of dog adventures,” he said.

It is estimated that 5 per cent of all Australian pets are insured, which is ahead of the 2 per cent in the United States but well behind Britain’s 25 per cent, which is the highest in the world.

In Australia, it is estimated that $600 million was spent last year on clipping and grooming services — owners can spend $150 every month for professional dog groomers — $500m on short-term boarding kennels and accommodation and $200m on training and behavioural programs.

Total spending in the pet industry, an estimated $12bn, was up 42 per cent last year over the figure for 2013. PetSure’s number of customers has risen from 45,000 in 2009 to 390,000 so far this year, which means its compound annual growth rate has been in the mid-20 per cent range for the past three years.

Flowers bloom anew in fluorescent photos

The flowers that Craig Burrows photographs have an otherworldly quality. They shimmer and glow with tints of hot pink, bright yellow and iridescent green. The images are a combination of cool photography and science know-how. Burrows records the fluorescence of plants, when they emit light that is normally invisible to the naked eye. Burrows uses ultraviolet-induced visible fluorescence (UVIVF) photography to capture the ethereal glow.

Burrows discovered the photographic technique online several years ago.

"I saw UVIVF photos done by Alex Holovachov and thought they were spectacular," he tells MNN. "I wanted to try it myself, so between the post he did explaining it, and actually talking to him, I figured out what it would take to get started."

Since then he's shot dozens of plants including calla lilies, hollyhocks, hawthorns, Mexican sunflowers and the purple alyssum shown above.

Burrows collects samples while he's out on walks in his Los Angeles-area neighborhood and brings them back to his home studio to shoot them.

"Outdoors there's a lot of light from street lights, moon, stars, etc. which would overwhelm the fluorescent glow," he says. "It requires either a near-total-dark setting, or very powerful UV source to ensure that the fluorescence is much brighter than any ambient light."

A controlled environment is important because the slightest movement can have a huge impact.

"The long exposures mean that any tiny movement is captured, so a controlled environment with minimal airflow is best," he says. "Some of the photos are at greater than 1:1 reproduction which means even a 0.1mm movement in the flower may span a couple dozen pixels."

Burrows relied on knowledge he picked up in school to better understand the properties of fluorescence.

Although Burrows likes creating the images of flowers and fluorescence, his portfolio goes far beyond plants. It includes haunting landscapes and abandoned urban scenes.

"I'm drawn to imagery of natural processes, whether strictly that of nature (plants, animals, landscapes), or those of human nature (urban decay, abandonment, vandalism)," he says. "In the former, I like the lack of human presence, even if humanity's constructs have some presence. With the latter, while the subject is created by man, its existence or state of being implies again, a lack of humanity. It's what's abandoned or unseen. Even graffitied edifices imply that it could only have happened if there was nobody there to stop it, whether because it went unseen, or because nobody cared. I think my ideal of something to shoot would be where nature is reclaiming something man-made, or pristine nature like the Bolivian salt flats."

Harvesting sharks could be key to saving them

Sharks and their relatives face an existential crisis unprecedented in their 420 million years on the planet. A global trade in products from these animals fuels the capture of tens of millions of individuals a year. Strong demand combined with poor fishery regulation and high levels of incidental catch have resulted in many populations being overfished, with some now facing extinction.
                                         

New research, appearing in the February 6 issue of Current Biology2, is filling that gap, and the findings bolster the idea that around the world, some sharks are being fished sustainably. Nicholas Dulvy, a marine conservation biologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and shark ecologist Colin Simpfendorfer of James Cook University in Australia recently examined global stock assessments of 65 shark populations of 47 species. They found 39 of the populations, representing 33 different species, are fished sustainably—that is, they are harvested at levels that allow them to remain stable in size and not edge toward extinction. Although these 33 species account for only a small fraction of the world’s sharks, rays and their kin the chimeras (collectively referred to as sharks), which in total number more than 1,000, they are proof of concept that sustainable shark fishing is possible.

Indeed, by definition, exploiting a resource sustainably requires whole animal use, Simpfendorfer explains. In the case of MSC-certified Atlantic dogfish, the heads become lobster and crab bait; back meat becomes British fish and chips; belly flaps are a German delicacy; liver supplies nutraceuticals; fins and tails headline east Asian soup; and leftovers become agricultural fertilizer, says Massachusetts-based attorney John Whiteside, Jr., who helped east coast U.S. dogfish fisheries achieve MSC status.

But for sustainable shark fishing to work, its products have to be labeled and traceable back to a well-managed source—a requirement that very few of the sustainably harvested fins currently on the market now meet. Traceability depends on careful management of product “chain of custody” with specific information carried through from capture vessel to retailer. Ideally the products have a closed chain of custody, meaning no uncertified products come in from the sidelines, explains Glenn Sant, Fisheries Trade Programme Leader at TRAFFIC International, the wildlife trade monitoring group co-founded by World Wildlife Fund and the IUCN, who was not part of the study. “Industries have been doing this for a long time,” he observes, with bar codes making traceability of products easy and cheap. Traceability challenges are not technological. They lie in gaining sufficient transparency to discern whether the fishery had adequate management within the product’s country of origin.

Fish Gene Bank to Help Cope with Climate Change

INDIA - Experts have recommended setting up a common gene bank for vulnerable fish species as well as setting up fish sanctuaries in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change on fish stocks.
             

The recommendations were made after the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) submitted the Country Status Report (CSR) about the impact of climate change on coastal fisheries and aquaculture sector.
The ICAR institute, the leading fish research body in the country, presented the report at a meeting between the SAARC Agriculture Centre (SAC) and representatives from the SAARC nations held through video conference, the TimesOfIndia reported.
The report exposed disruptions caused by climate change in areas such as marine ecosystem, fish stock, harvesting sector, aquaculture, market and trade. The present condition of fishing communities was also included in the report.
During the conference, members representing fisheries and aquaculture sector of SAARC member countries reviewed remedial steps to be taken to mitigate the impact of climate change and finalised a set of recommendations to be followed by member countries.
In the recommendations, the meeting prioritised developing collaborative and comprehensive efforts to address climate vulnerabilities. Conduct of awareness programmes on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and expansion of open sea cage farming and pen culture in coastal water bodies were also listed among the recommendations.
Among the other noteworthy recommendations finalised during the meeting include introduction of saline temperature tolerant and fast-growing fish species for coastal aquaculture, establishment of fish sanctuary for improvement of natural stocks and setting up common gene bank for vulnerable species.