Biologists all over the world are turning to this seemingly harsh mantra referring to the rescue efforts of birds that have been harmed by the oil spilled in the Gulf. Instead of cleaning birds whose feathers have been soaked and matted with oil, researchers are now encouraging a “quick and painless” death instead of a slower one that results even after the birds have been cleaned.
Survival rates among birds that have been cleaned are less than one percent. The ones that do survive and are released into the wild only survived for about a week in efforts to clean birds after an oil spill in the UK in 2002. The reason for this is that the cleaning and preening instincts of birds are stronger than their instincts to feed. Once cleanup teams get to the birds they have most likely consumed more oil from cleaning their own feathers than their kidneys or liver can handle. Even after they are cleaned, their feathers are not in good condition and they continue to neglect their feeding instincts in order to preen.
Most of the birds in the Gulf that are being cleaned as a result of the spill are thousands of brown pelicans that have only been taken off the endangered species list last year. Is it worth it to take the time and effort to clean these birds just for that reason?
Also I wonder if the oil that still remains in the bodies of cleaned birds that do survive has a chance to stick around in the bird meat that predators eat? Is that a probability that’s high enough to cause concern for chemicals spreading throughout the food chain?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,693359,00.html
Queensland locals and tourists have long been aware of the threat that deadly box jelly and irukandji pose to beachgoers. Queensland though, is farther north up the coast than many popular tourist destinations. These destinations are soon to be put on the list of high risk areas for potentially fatal jellyfish stings. As global warming takes its toll, the abundance and longevity of these dangerous creatures is increasing.
Scientist and jellyfish researcher Jamie Seymour warns that “For irukandji, 30 or 40 years ago the length of the season was about a month to a month-and-a-half,” he said. “The length of the season now is about five-and-a-half to six months. It’s increasing as water temperatures go up.” In addition to these changes, both box jellies and irukandji jellyfish habitat will spread south within 5 years to the Sunshine Coast – surfer’s paradise.
The second part of the article discusses the threat these shifts cause to the tourism industry as well as what must be done to manage the growing problem.
What are some of the proposed solutions? Are there flaws with any of these solutions and how would you address them?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/12/2790923.htm
There are a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to the study of Ammonites. A common organism millions of years ago, we see many fossils of them today. These fossils are what provide the base of information that we do know about these ancient creatures. They were mollusks with spiral shaped shells separated into chambers. These chambers found in the shell may be indicators of the age of ammonites. The more chambers and hence the bigger the shell, the older the ammonite was. Much of the things we do know about ammonites comes from our knowledge of a similar animal that still exists today as well as during the existance of ammonites – the nautilus.
In fact much of what we know about ammonites comes from animals other than the ammonite itself. Animals that grew on and with the ammonite like tube worms can be compared to find growth rate and other aspects of the ammonite’s pathology. For example the tube worms still exist today and can be used to note the development of the ammonite that fossils show to be the host of these worms.
I thought the oxygen isotope indicators in the ammonites shell is really interesting. Not only can researchers use these isotopes to predict how long it took and the way in which each chamber in the shell formed but they also serve as an indicator of the conditions of the water that the ammonite lived in or was exposed to. Different patterns in the shell when compared to these isotopes suggest warmer and cooler water.
What other kinds of organic chemicals or isotopes found in their shell can be used to gather more information about ammonites?
In a recent global climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark major legislators and diplomats from all over the world discussed solutions for the planet’s diminishing coral reefs. Today coral reefs make up less than .25% of the ocean floor and that miniscule figure is getting smaller due to changes in the marine habitat brought on by climate change. For example in the Florida Keys, “the live coral cover has diminished by 50 to 80 percent in the past 10 years,” says Margaret Miller, a coral reef researcher at the National marine Fisheries Service.
At the meeting in Copenhagen scientists and researchers suggested freezing coral samples in liquid nitrogen. This would allow researchers to save several samples of coral species and possibly reintroduce them if conditions become suitable for coral in the future. ”Well it’s the last ditch effort to save biodiversity from the reefs which are extremely diverse systems,” says Simon Harding from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). The reefs are important in many aspects of the marine ecosystem and are indicators of the overall health of shorelines.
It’s clear that many of the world’s coral reefs are disappearing and some kind of solution must be administered. This is undeniably a creative solution but the method and details of carrying out the plan must be carefully thought out. It seems that if samples were saved with the goal of reintroducing them later, that the process of reconstructing a reef would be very difficult. Also, if conditions in the ocean are changing chemically as well as changing in temperature (and therefore killing coral) how would conditions in the future return to those which are suitable for reefs in the first place?
From: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112731816
For more than fifty years scientists have been using neurons from squid to study how messages are sent and received in the human brain. Squid neurons are used because they accurately resemble the human neuron except for the fact that the axons are much bigger and therefore easier to study. So big in fact that they have been nicknamed “giant neurons” and can be seen with the naked eye.
Just recently German researcher Henrik Alle has questioned this practice because of the enormous amount of energy used by one of these “giant neurons” to send messages. “I thought I cannot believe personally that nature would waste such energy,” states Alle. Logically, he reasons, as organisms become more complex they waste less energy in sending and receiving neural messages. Alle and his team performed a series of experiments that found that rats’ neurons use less than a third of the energy squid neurons use. This shows that using these neurons for neuroscience may no longer provide an accurate model.
Though the conveniently large size of the neurons closely resemble many aspects of a neuron in a human nervous system, the specific ways in which squid neurons use energy to transmit messages aren’t accurate substitutes for studying the nervous systems of more complex organisms. This seems funny to me that for fifty whole years scientists may have made false conclusions in neuroscience because they were studying a false representation of a human neuron. I wonder how research and experimenting techniques will have to change because of this discovery?
Click here for a few videos that demonstrate the kind of testing that was being done on squid neurons.
