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.

PLUS MORE WAYS ANIMALS COPE WITH COLD

Even though here in the southern hemisphere summer is getting into full swing, many creatures around the world are experiencing freezing temperatures. Our winter survival skills often involve staying indoors with plenty of blankets, cocoa, and mindless TV at the ready.
                 

But wild animals don't have that luxury—they have to tough it out in the cold. That made Weird Animal Question of the Week wonder: “What are some cool ways animals stay safe and warm in winter?”

WINTER COATS

Some species pile on the layers, like the Arctic musk ox, whose soft undercoat—called qiviut—insulates them from -50 degree Fahrenheit temperatures. Polar bears have an extra layer of fat to keep toasty.
Others grow thicker fur in the fall, like white-tailed deer, and some even grow lighter coats to blend into the snow, Sharon Chester, author of The Arctic Guide, Wildlife of the Far North, says via email.

North American mammals such as the Arctic fox, least weasel, Arctic hare, and ermine have this adaptation, Chester says.
The camo works if snow is consistent, Chester says, but it's tougher if snow arrives late and melts early—which is happening more due to global climate change. A 2016 study reported snowshoe hares in Montana that were mismatched to their environment experienced a 7 percent decrease in survival rate.

Wood frogs, which range from the southeastern U.S. to the Arctic Circle, "hunker down in some leaf litter and freeze solid" into a "frogcicle," says Greg Pauly, curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

The Arctic ground squirrel, or siksik, can drop its body temperature below freezing while it's hibernating. This is likely due to another process called supercooling, in which the body temperature can go below the freezing point without forming ice.

Ant genomes rewrite history of Panama land bridge

Colliding tectonic plates pushed up a strip of land from the watery abyss that once divided North and South America, forming the isthmus of Panama. But a study now hints that this happened millions of years earlier than scientists had thought.
               

Evolutionary and population-genetics data from Eciton army ants, which can only travel on dry ground, suggest that the isthmus formed 4–8 million years ago. The research, published on 25 October in Molecular Ecology1, challenges the long-held idea that the link between continents emerged no more than 3 million years ago.

“Our genomic data is very strong evidence that the army ants crossed this region much earlier in time than the model of the simple closure of the isthmus suggests,” says Corrie Moreau, associate curator at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, and co-author of the study. She notes that recent geological studies have also hinted that the isthmus may have emerged earlier than 3 million years ago.

Genetics and geology collide

Moreau and her colleagues used a technique called genotyping to sequence small fragments of DNA from the genomes of multiple individuals from all nine Eciton species, which are found from Brazil to southern Mexico. This allowed the researchers to compare genetic variations both between species and within different individuals of the same species.

Anthony Coates, a geologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, is sceptical of any evidence contradicting the isthmus’s 3-million-year age. “There are still a series of investigations in different disciplines that all converge on the same number of around three million years ago. This is extremely rigorous evidence,” Coates says.

The geological battle lines, it seems, have been drawn. Whether they can form an ideological land bridge similar to the physical one that researchers are studying remains to be seen.