For Cats, a Big Gulp With a Touch of the Tongue

Cutta Cutta, who inspired the study, belongs to a researcher at M.I.T.

It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose.

Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now. With the use of high-speed photography, the neatness of the feline solution has been captured.

The act of drinking may seem like no big deal for anyone who can fully close his mouth to create suction, as people can. But the various species that cannot do so — and that includes most adult carnivores — must resort to some other mechanism.

Dog owners are familiar with the unseemly lapping noises that ensue when their thirsty pet meets a bowl of water. The dog is thrusting its tongue into the water, forming a crude cup with it and hauling the liquid back into the muzzle.

Cats, both big and little, are so much classier, according to new research by Pedro M. Reis and Roman Stocker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined by Sunghwan Jung of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Jeffrey M. Aristoff of Princeton.

A Study of Cat Lapping

Writing in the Thursday issue of Science, the four engineers report that the cat’s lapping method depends on its instinctive ability to calculate the point at which gravitational force would overcome inertia and cause the water to fall.

What happens is that the cat darts its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water.

The tongue is then pulled upward at high speed, drawing a column of water behind it.

Just at the moment that gravity finally overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down — snap! The cat’s jaws have closed over the jet of water and swallowed it.

The cat laps four times a second — too fast for the human eye to see anything but a blur — and its tongue moves at a speed of one meter per second.

Being engineers, the cat-lapping team next tested its findings with a machine that mimicked a cat’s tongue, using a glass disk at the end of a piston to serve as the tip. After calculating things like the Froude number and the aspect ratio, they were able to figure out how fast a cat should lap to get the greatest amount of water into its mouth. The cats, it turns out, were way ahead of them — they lap at just that speed.

To the scientific mind, the next obvious question is whether bigger cats should lap at different speeds.

The engineers worked out a formula: the lapping frequency should be the weight of the cat species, raised to the power of minus one-sixth and multiplied by 4.6. They then made friends with a curator at Zoo New England, the nonprofit group that operates the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston and the Stone Zoo in Stoneham, Mass., who let them videotape his big cats. Lions, leopards, jaguars and ocelots turned out to lap at the speeds predicted by the engineers.

The animal who inspired this exercise of the engineer’s art is a black cat named Cutta Cutta, who belongs to Dr. Stocker and his family. Cutta Cutta’s name comes from the word for “many stars” in Jawoyn, a language of the Australian aborigines.

Dr. Stocker’s day job at M.I.T. is applying physics to biological problems, like how plankton move in the ocean. “Three and a half years ago, I was watching Cutta Cutta lap over breakfast,” Dr. Stocker said. Naturally, he wondered what hydrodynamic problems the cat might be solving. He consulted Dr. Reis, an expert in fluid mechanics, and the study was under way.

At first, Dr. Stocker and his colleagues assumed that the raspy hairs on a cat’s tongue, so useful for grooming, must also be involved in drawing water into its mouth. But the tip of the tongue, which is smooth, turned out to be all that was needed.

The project required no financing. The robot that mimicked the cat’s tongue was built for an experiment on the International Space Station, and the engineers simply borrowed it from a neighboring lab.

Nicolas Wade, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/science/12cats.html

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Well spotted

Evolution and coat colour

The reason why some cats are plain and others are patterned

HOW the leopard got his spots is, famously, the subject of one of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories”. Kipling suggested they were handprints made by the leopard’s human friend. More plausibly, he had an explanation for what the spots are for: to break up the animal’s shape when it is hiding in the dappled light of the forest.

These days, the human-handprint theory of the leopard’s spots has fallen out of favour. Instead, a more prosaic idea has gained ground, based on what is known as reaction-diffusion pattern formation, in which chemicals that trigger the differentiation of cells in an embryo interact with one another to produce patterns that are then reflected in the fates of nearby cells. But that, too, has its difficulties. Just how much a process like this can be shaped by natural selection is unclear.

Reaction-diffusion patterns (which can be created in a laboratory using standard reagents) are simple and deterministic. That simple reactions of this sort sometimes result in cryptic patterns could be a coincidence. Nevertheless, the details of the patterns produced vary, according to things like how rapidly the chemicals diffuse. That could be selected. Different cats do, indeed, have different patterns. So researchers at the University of Bristol, led by William Allen, have been deconstructing these patterns, trying to match the elements to cats’ habits and habitats, and thus show whether the patterns are evolving. They published their results this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

The reaction-diffusion process can be mimicked by a computer, and the program’s parameters manipulated to produce patterns matching those of cat coats. That, the researchers hoped, might help illuminate what is going on. They trawled the world wide web for pictures of wild cats, found the best six for each of 37 species, and roped in a group of human volunteers to choose which of the program’s outputs were most similar to real coats.

The patterns produced had five parameters: how plain they were, how irregular, how complex, how big the spots were and whether the pattern had a perceptible direction to it. The volunteers’ judgments about which artificial patterns best matched which natural ones were almost perfectly consistent. That allowed Mr Allen to assess which parameters contribute to each species’s pattern, and thus which are correlated with behaviour.

The biggest distinction—no surprise, but nice to confirm—is that spotted cats are forest cats and plain ones prefer open countryside. In that, Kipling was right. An analysis based on the relationship between the species, though, shows that evolutionary lines can swap from spots to no spots, and vice versa, as the habitat dictates. Moreover, the more a species prefers the forest, the more irregular the pattern it sports, and the more complex. (Size and direction have no effect.) Even among forest-dwellers there are differences. Those that tend to spend their time actually in trees, as opposed to wandering around on the ground between them, have more irregular and complex patterns. And, crucially, there is no relationship between a cat’s pattern and how sociable it is. That knocks on the head an alternative explanation for coat patterns, namely that spots are some form of signal between animals of the same species.

Mr Allen and his colleagues made one other observation. Some species of cat regularly produce melanic forms—the so-called black panther (actually a melanic jaguar) being the most familiar.

The data seem to rule out one obvious explanation for melanism: the idea that black cats, with their unusual appearance, have more success hunting because their prey are not keeping an eye out for predators that look like them. Melanic forms, though, are particularly prevalent in species with complicated lives—those that inhabit a range of habitats, are active both day and night, and move between the ground and the trees. What advantage melanism brings in these circumstances is obscure. One for Kipling, perhaps. “How the jaguar got his melanocytes.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/node/17304477

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Cracking the Mystery of How Sloths Got Long Necks

NO RIBS? An anatomical quirk may tell why sloths have up to 10 vertebrae.

It is not quite how the elephant’s child got his long nose, but still it is research worthy of Rudyard Kipling: scientists said Monday that they have figured out how sloths got their long necks.

Throughout the animal kingdom, most mammalian creatures, from mice to giraffe, have a seven-vertebrae neck.

Sloths, however, are a puzzling exception. They can have as many as 10 vertebrae, posing one of the enduring enigmas for scientists, who have long wondered what explains the anatomical quirk.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge in England said they now think they have the answer.

After analyzing the development of the vertebral column in sloths they made a startling discovery: the part of the skeleton which they had long believed to be part of the sloth rib cage is, in fact, analogous to the bottom of the mammal’s “neck.”

In other words, the bottom neck vertebrae of sloths show a similar sequence of development as the top rib cage vertebrae of other mammals, both of which start at eight vertebrae down from the head.

The research, published Monday in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that the bottom “neck” vertebrae of sloths are developmentally the same as rib cage vertebrae of other mammals — just without ribs.

“Even though they’ve got eight to 10 ribless vertebrae above the shoulders, unlike the seven of giraffes, humans, and nearly every other species of mammal, those extra few are actually rib cage vertebrae masquerading as neck vertebrae,” said Robert Asher, of the zoology department at Cambridge.

By observing the position of bone formation within the vertebral column, they determined that all mammals, including sloths, are similar in when they develop the eighth vertebra down from the head — whether or not it is actually part of the neck.

The unusual anatomy has to do with how the sloth evolved millions of years ago, in contrast to other mammals.

The Cambridge researchers said the new results support the interpretation that the limb girdles and at least part of the rib cage derive from different embryonic tissues than the vertebrae, and that during the course of evolution, they have moved in concert with each other relative to the vertebral column.

In sloths, the position of the shoulders, pelvis, and rib cage are linked with one another, and compared to their common ancestor shared with other mammals, have shifted down the vertebral column to make the neck longer, the researchers said.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/science/19sloth.html?_r=1&ref=science

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Predatory Cats Return to the Harz Mountains

For the past decade, conservationists have been releasing zoo-bred Eurasian lynx in Germany’s Harz mountains, with the goal of returning them to their natural habitat. The lynx, once targeted by hunters because they threatened farm animals and local game, disappeared from the region nearly 200 years ago.

On Easter Sunday, 2009, officials at Germany’s Harz National Park opened the gates to their wooded enclosure and let out two young lynx. The brother and sister, who had been found orphaned by the roadside a few months before, were once again on their own in the wild. And, witnesses said, they didn’t look back.

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Eurasian lynx are known for the whisker-like fur on their faces and the tufts of hair that sprout like paintbrushes from their ears.

Pamina is a hand-raised lynx who lives in an enclosure the public can visit in Bad Harzburg. She is too friendly with humans to be successful in the wild.

The goal of the Harz Lynx Project is for the population to grow enough that the cats spread out to find their own territory and eventually join with other populations in Bavaria and the Czech Republic.

Unlike wolves, who have to learn hunting behavior, “even a domesticated cat can catch a mouse,” Anders said.

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After spending some time in the Harz, a low mountain range in northern Germany, the male, dubbed “M2,” continued on the move. He traveled southwest some 110 kilometers (68 miles) to Kassel, tracked with a GPS collar, and covered wide swaths of land. He crossed the Werra River, and even made it over the autobahn, using one of a number of “green bridges” in Germany built exclusively for wildlife.

M2′s journey was followed closely by conservationists with the Harz Lynx Project, a program that began reintroducing zoo-born lynx into the wild in this part of Germany in 2000. So far, they have released 24 lynx — nine males and 15 females — who came from zoos and wildlife preserves in Germany and Scandinavia. The program is sponsored by the Harz National Park, the states of Lower Saxony, Saxony Anhalt and Thuringia and other organizations.

The goal of the project is for cats like M2 to be able to reach other lynx populations in forests in Bavaria or the Czech Republic, and to reestablish a wild lynx population in the region.

“Another 100 kilometers, and he would have reached another population,” Ole Anders, head of the Lynx Project, says. “I am quite optimistic.”

Hunted to Near Extinction

The Eurasian lynx once freely roamed the forests of central Europe, but by 1900 they faced extinction after centuries of being targeted by hunters, who reviled them for killing their local game and livestock, and who prized their fur.

Their cousin, the smaller Iberian lynx, is the most endangered cat species in the world, and is the focus of conservation efforts in Spain. Most of the 7,000 to 8,000 Eurasian lynx now living in Europe are found in the Nordic countries, with scattered populations in western and central Europe.

Prior to the project’s efforts, the last lynx living in the Harz forest was killed in 1818 by a group of 17 hunters. A monument was built on that spot near Lautenthal, commemorating the death of the predatory cat.

And while some attitudes have changed in the last 200 years, the plan to reintroduce the lynx was still met with initial resistance by some individual hunters who were afraid that they would kill the local roe deer population, and farmers who feared their livestock would become easy prey.

“Hunters are not, in general, positive towards the introduction of animals by man into an area, because normally that causes more problems than it solves,” said Torsten Reinwald, of the German Hunting Federation.

‘Good for Biological Diversity’

But in the case of lynx, the hunters’ associations made an exception, believing that there was adequate scientific evidence that the surroundings could support the lynx again.

“Most hunting associations — over 90 percent — are registered as environmental conservation organizations,” Reinwald said. “This predator coming back into Germany, this is a really good thing for biological diversity.”

The hunters’ association in Lower Saxony, home to the Harz forest, supported the program from the outset. Florian Röfling, a spokesman for the group, said that they no longer worry that the roe deer population will decline.

Still, Reinwald said, some hunters believe that the roe deer behave differently and are harder to find when lynx populations are present.

Farmers can receive compensation from the federal government if they think one of their animals has been attacked by a lynx, but instances have been rare. For example, a €6,000 fund established in Bavaria in the late 1990s for such incidents hasn’t been exhausted, Reinwald said.

The Lynx As A Tourist Attraction

Locals in the Harz forest are now celebrating the cats’ return, and are cashing in on their appeal to tourists. Lynx likenesses peer out from storefronts and restaurant windows in Bad Harzburg, where three lynx, who are too tame to live in the wild, are housed in a public enclosure. More than 8,500 tourists came last year to view the public feedings of the animals.

Seeing a lynx in the wild is extremely difficult, although numerous sightings are reported within the Harz mountains each year, and can be tricky even at the wooded enclosure in the Harz.

But one of giant cats is not camera shy. Pamina, a hand-raised lynx who seeks out human companionship, is a local favorite. On one recent afternoon, she nuzzled against the leg of a caretaker. She stood as tall as the caretaker’s hip, and had the mannerisms of a housecat. But those looks deceive — Pamina also has the strength to attack a deer her size and pin it down until it dies.

With a beard of whiskers and the tufts of hair sprouting from her ears like paintbrushes, Pamina charmed the crowd as she sauntered around the enclosure.

Anders is hesitant to give estimates on the current population of the animals — who are loners in the wild — until more data can be collected. Andreas Kinser, a forestry expert with the German Wildlife Federation, said that the lynx population in the Harz mountains is likely between 50 to 60 animals. In Bavaria, the estimates run from 50 to 100, according to officials with the Bavarian National Park.

Risks Include Poachers And Highways

Some scientists have questioned whether or not reintroducing the lynx will be successful. The authors of a 2005 study published in the scientific journal Conservation Biology, argue that a population in the Harz Mountains would only be viable if mortality rates remain low. Modern highways and the threat of poachers make that all the more difficult. Even in protected areas in Poland poaching accounts for more than 70 percent of lynx deaths, the study stated.

Anders points out that the 2005 study was based on a model and not in lynx in the wild, and he thinks the actual situation is better than the model suggested. It is impossible to tell what the actual mortaility rate is since dead lynx are rarely found, he said.

If the lynx from the Harz can connect with other populations in the Bohemian and Bavarian forests scientists will worry less about inbreeding, which is now a concern. It will also prove that the Harz population is sufficiently established, since lynx have to spread out to find their own territory. M2′s odyssey already provides a good example that this actually could happen.

“It is our challenge to do the best job we can, give the lynx a good start and find out if they are able to survive — not in computer models but in the real world,” Anders said. “If they make it, we will score a win for another big threatened mammal species. If not, we would have to face the fact that in Germany, the age of the lynx and its habitat is definitely over.”

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Full article and photos: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,719988,00.html

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To Help Jaguars Survive, Ease Their Commute

A jaguar in the Pantanal, Brazil, the world’s largest wetland.

Héctor Porras-Valverdo tried to adopt a Zen attitude when he discovered recently that jaguars had turned two of his cows into carcasses.

The jaguars’ numbers may have dwindled, but they still roam the forests here in eastern Costa Rica, making their presence known by devouring the occasional chicken, pig or cow.

“I understand cats do this because they need to survive,” said Mr. Porras-Valverdo, 41, a burly dairy farmer.

A few years ago, he acknowledged, his first reaction might have been to reach for a gun. But his farm now sits in the middle of land that Costa Rica has designated a “jaguar corridor” — a protected pathway that allows the stealthy, nocturnal animals to safely traverse areas of human civilization.

In the past few years, such corridors have been created in Africa, Asia and the Americas to help animals cope with 21st-century threats, from encroaching highways and malls to climate change.

These pathways represent an important shift in conservation strategy. Like many other nations, Costa Rica has traditionally tried to protect large mammal species like jaguars by creating sanctuaries — buying up land and giving threatened animals a home where they can safely eat, fight and breed to eternity.

But in the past decade or so, scientists have realized that connecting corridors are needed because many species rely for survival on the migration of a few animals from one region to another, to intermix gene pools and to repopulate areas devastated by natural disasters or disease. Placing animals in isolated preserves, studies have found, decreases diversity and risks dulling down a species — like preventing New Yorkers and Californians from getting together to procreate.

“It was kind of an epiphany,” said Alan Rabinowitz, a zoologist who is president of Panthera, an organization that studies and promotes conservation of large cats. “We were giving them nice land to live on when what they were doing — and what they needed — was an underground railway.”

He said critical migration routes were especially vulnerable in rapidly developing countries, where new roads, shopping malls, dams, playgrounds and subdivisions could spring up overnight, blocking the animals’ passage. To correct this oversight, Costa Rica and other countries have begun identifying and protecting corridors for jaguars and other large mammals, like tigers, snow leopards and pandas.

Most of the corridors are not obviously demarcated pathways, but virtual trails, “protected” in the sense that builders and planners are not permitted to introduce obstacles to the animals’ movements through the area.

The idea is not to stop building entirely, but to adjust development so that animals can move through landscapes that humans also occupy. A tall fence surrounding a shopping mall may be forbidden, for example, or a two-lane road may have to be substituted for a proposed four-lane highway.

Local residents must also be persuaded not to shoot wild intruders or otherwise drive them away when they are in transit, a shift in thinking that is already taking root here.

“Of course jaguars sometimes have conflicts with communities, but now people have been educated to change their thinking — not to see them as so dangerous,” said Víctor Fallas Ramírez, an agronomist who grows ornamental plants here.

The threat of global warming has added to the urgency of creating corridors because animals will need to shift habitats as temperatures rise from climate change.

“This is an idea that people are finding very compelling, and especially compelling now because with changing climate, species will need the capacity to move,” said Norman Christensen, a professor of ecology at Duke University, whose team is working to define corridors in Central America, India and Africa.

While Dr. Christensen called Costa Rica “the poster child” for its efforts, he said corridors for large mammals were also being created in places like Uganda and China. The World Bank is financing corridor projects in Brazil and Peru; more important, the bank’s transportation planners are working with conservationists to ensure that building highways and laying train tracks so humans can move freely does not destroy that movement for animals, Dr. Christensen said.

Part of the reason that conservationists had in the past focused exclusively on preserves was that there was a lack of good data on the travel and breeding patterns of large animals like jaguars; these big predators favor dense jungles and are nocturnal and extraordinarily shy.

So when new techniques allowed scientists to take a first look at the jaguar genome a decade ago, they were shocked to discover that jaguars from the northern reaches of Mexico had exactly the same genetic makeup as those from the southern tip of South America.

That meant that over time, some jaguars were moving up and down the Americas to breed; otherwise, the isolation of jaguar populations in different regions would have caused their genetic makeups to diverge. At least some males from Colombia were traveling to Panama to mate, and others were moving from Mexico to Belize.

“It was surprising, but it seemed to say they had one continuous habitat,” said Dr. Rabinowitz, the zoologist.

Scientists were convinced that jaguars would never cross a water barrier as wide as the Panama Canal, smack in the middle of their extended habitat. But when they set up cameras to spot jaguars near the canal, they discovered that, every so often, a brave animal took the plunge, ensuring the continuity of genes in the north and south.

Costa Rica now requires developers to consider whether a new construction project would interrupt an essential corridor, or else to make other arrangements for jaguars to travel safely through the area.

The fact that jaguars and other large cat species travel at night and do not hunt when they are on the move makes it easier for them to co-exist with humans.

“The bottom line is big cats can live with people,” Dr. Rabinowitz said. “That’s not true of all animals.”

He continued, “The problem with the paradigm of conservation is it’s been seen as a confrontation between nature and development, that won’t let progress happen.”

In Costa Rica, Panthera is conducting research to better define the routes taken by jaguars and lobbying politicians and developers to respect them. The organization also sponsors community outreach programs to resolve what the researchers term “jaguar conflict issues.”

“Many places don’t want the corridors,” said Roberto Salom, Panthera’s regional coordinator here. “We’ve made alliances with lots of leaders and educators, but it’s a very slow process.”

Here in the jungles of Central America, jaguars are regarded as mystical and dangerous. According to local legend, indigenous people turn into jaguars when they enter the jungle, and then shake off their spots when they return to the village.

“I’ve seen the tracks, but never an animal,” said Enoc Bajo Chiripó, an indigenous leader who is working with the group. “But you can smell when they’re around.”

Families in the region tell jaguar stories the way New Yorkers talk about their families’ arrivals at Ellis Island.

“My grandmother saw it at the place where agouti and peccaries come to eat,” said Jordi Ortiz-Camacho, 12, speaking of a jaguar. “My grandfather killed it with a stick because his gun didn’t work.”

While local farmers are now willing to forgive a dead cow or two to allow jaguars to survive as a species, they are often reluctant to make larger sacrifices. Just outside Las Lomas, a proposed hydroelectric project would involve building a huge dam across a valley, creating a body of water a third of a mile wide and more than three miles long. As planned, it would block a jaguar corridor.

The new project will mean jobs, an increase in property values and improved basic services for the area, including roads and piped water, said Mr. Fallas Ramírez, the agronomist. And the community, he said, cannot just forsake all that.

“For us, and the jaguars, it’s just an obstacle,” said Mr. Salom, the biologist, who is looking into alternative solutions, like an animal bridge or a smaller dam. “So we’re thinking, ‘How can we mitigate this?’ ”

Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/science/earth/12jaguar.html

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Edge of the world

A historical tale of a Dutchman and a Japanese midwife

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. By David Mitchell. Sceptre; 469 pages; £18.99. To be published in America by Random House in June; $26.

DAVID MITCHELL, a British novelist, has a reputation for courage and panache as a writer. A devoted post-modernist, who plays with structure as easily as words, his work has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. His best known book, “Cloud Atlas”, came within a whisker of winning the award in 2004, but the judges could not throw off the suspicion that it was just a bit too clever for its own good.

His new novel is structurally his most conventional; a linear narrative, it is the first book Mr Mitchell has written wholly in the third person. It opens with the story of a Japanese midwife, Orito Aibagawa, who in 1799 thwarts a senior adviser to the emperor to save the life of a newborn princeling and his concubine mother. Just six pages long, it is a virtuoso piece of writing, full of oddities and magical phrasing. But it also serves to confuse the reader.

The book’s main focus, it turns out, is not the Japanese midwife at all, but a priggish Dutchman, Jacob de Zoet, who has left behind a fiancée in Holland to make his fortune with the Dutch East India Company on an island off Nagasaki. Japan had deliberately isolated itself from the rest of the world by the 18th century, a state of affairs that affords Mr Mitchell endless literary opportunity.

Catching sight of the magnificent Miss Aibagawa, de Zoet falls passionately in love. All too soon, though, the Dutchman falls foul of the Japanese. Miss Aibagawa’s father dies, leaving huge debts, and the midwife is sold into slavery at a mysterious shrine.

When the hero and heroine are separated, the book still has 300 pages to go. Mr Mitchell fills the gap with a number of clever, if somewhat disconnected set pieces. The result is uneasy. As so often happens with his writing, the reader is left feeling more seduced than satisfied.

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/culture/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16056393&source=hptextfeature

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Dog Days in China

I see the Beckhams, David and Victoria (Posh), have acquired a couple of “micro pigs” as pets and that said pigs (65 pounds when fully grown) are now a fashionable item in Britain, at least among those who can afford a $1,000-plus price tag.

Perhaps Beckham is heeding Churchill, who had a penchant for pigs. The great man’s verdict: “Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig. He just looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.”

Churchill’s view has some scientific basis. Pigs are smart and sociable. They’ve had a pretty bad rap, however. Two of the world’s great monotheistic religions — Judaism and Islam — prohibit their consumption. Generally, the notion of pigs as pets seems bizarre or repellent.

Why? There’s nothing rational about the view that taking a pig for a walk on a leash is weird, while eating a pork chop, if you so choose, is reasonable. But then, after a visit to China, it seems to me that reason has little or nothing to do with the way we view animals and food.

The Chinese, for example, eat dog (as well as cats, but I’m going to focus on dogs here). They ascribe to dog meat a formidable “warming” quality — the Chinese divide nutrition into “hot” and “cold” elements and seek balance between them — which makes it prized in many regions during winter.

Now, we are appalled in the West at the notion of eating dog while considering it natural to have a dog as a pet — I own a Beagle myself (“Ned”) and I’m very fond of him. This is the inverse of the preponderant Western view of pigs: fine to eat (religious objections aside) but not to pet.

But do pigs have any more or less of a soul than dogs? Are they any more or less sentient? Do they suffer any more or less in death? Are they any more or less part of the mysterious unity of life? I think not.

There is a rational, and for some people a spiritual, case for being a vegetarian: Killing animals is wrong. However I cannot see a rational argument for saying eating dogs or cats is barbaric while eating pork or beef is fine. If you eat meat you cannot logically find it morally or ethically repugnant to eat a particular meat (I’m setting cannibalism aside here.)

That’s the theory at least. Yet I must confess I’ve been having a hard time. My bout of anguish began a few weeks back on a wintry night in central China, in the restless megalopolis of Chongqing. I was cold, wet and seeking refuge.

“What’s that?” I asked my resourceful interpreter, Xiyun Yang, pointing to a steamy, crowded establishment with a big red neon sign (the Chinese approach is, when in doubt, make it gaudy).

“You don’t want to know.”

“I think I do.”

“It’s a dog restaurant.” It was then that I noticed the image of a puppy with floppy ears beside the Chinese characters.

I gave Xiyun a long, hard look. “Dog’s really good,” she said. “I love it.”

Images of Ned (and his floppy ears) popped into my head, as well as thoughts of what I’d tell my daughter, but I’d come to admire Xiyun’s gastronomic antennae (particularly for Sichuan noodles) and I tend to adhere to the I’ll-try-anything-once school. In we went.

The menu was predictably dog-dominated: dog paws, dog tail, dog brain, dog intestine, even dog penis. We went for a dog broth, simmered for four hours, with Sichuan pepper and ginger. It was warming, with a pepper-tingle. The meat was tender, unctuous, blander than pork, but stronger than chicken. Later, the owner, Chen Zemin, explained how the best dogs for eating had yellow coats, weighed 30 pounds, and did miracles for arthritis.

I’ll take Chen’s word for it. Dog was not easy for me. The memory has proved hard to digest.

As it happened, our meal came shortly before the eruption of a furious online debate in China over a proposed “anti-animal maltreatment” law that would outlaw the eating and selling of dog and cat meat, making it punishable by fines of more than $700 and 15 days of detention.

The legislation, now under review, immediately came under heavy fire. One restaurant owner in the Chaozhou region declared: “This is ridiculous! You make dog and cat meat illegal, but aren’t chickens, duck, goose, pig, cow, lamb also animals?” Another noted a local saying: “When the dog meat is being simmered, even the gods become dizzy with hunger.”

I’m with these indignant protesters. I’m not happy that I ate dog. But I’m happy China eats dog. It so proclaims both a particularity to be prized in a homogenizing world and its rationality. Anyone who doesn’t want China to eat dog must logically embrace pigs as pets.

But, as I’ve learned, logic has its limits. It’s the heart not the head that governs this world under the sway of the dizzy gods.

Roger Cohen, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/opinion/05iht-edcohen.html

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No Place Like Foam for Tropical Frogs

A tiny foam nest created by tungara frogs. The dots are eggs.

Around the tropics, there are hundreds of species of frogs that build their nest out of foam, as a home for eggs or larvae.

Foam is a pretty flimsy building material, yet frog nests are not slapdash affairs. As Malcolm W. Kennedy and Laura Dalgetty of the University of Glasgow point out in a study published in Biology Letters, they are built in deliberate fashion with specific characteristics.

The researchers looked at the tungara frog, Engystomops pustulosus, which is found in the Caribbean and Central America. It builds its nests in small puddles or ponds.

Dr. Kennedy said the male did the foam-making, first taking a fluid from the female and mixing it with pond water to create a “raft” of sorts. The fluid includes surfactant molecules that reduce the surface tension of the water, making the foam. It also contains proteins that, by preventing infections and inhibiting enzymal action, protect eggs from pathogens in the water and the harsh tropical sunlight.

Once the raft is built, the female starts to deliver three or four eggs with each batch of fluid, and after fertilizing them, the male puts the eggs into the bulk of the nest as it is made.

“You’d think that the eggs should be randomly mixed in, but they’re not,” Dr. Kennedy said.

No eggs are placed in the outer half-inch or so of the mound, which forms a protective cover.

Dr. Kennedy said that further study of the female’s fluid might be worthwhile. “Here’s a compound that protects very sensitive cells against bacterial and fungal infection,” he said. “That kind of a cocktail of molecules could be really useful for medical purposes.”

Henry Fountain, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/02obfoam.html

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Bear Drama in Southern Poland

Ursine Escapade

The Polish authorities just wanted to tranquilize the bear and transport her further away from their village. But the bear woke up — and gave chase. Now, she’s headed for a zoo.

It was enough to make anyone nervous. Three weeks ago, a brown bear wandered out of the forest and into the southern Polish town of Przemysl. Even worse, the bear decided to check out a local school — and many of the locals decided to try their luck at a bit of up-close-and-personal nature photography.

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On Thursday, two rangers near the town of Chorzow in southern Poland sought to tranquilize a bear which had wandered too close to the town. The results left a lot to be desired.

When the men approached, the bear suddenly woke up and gave chase. The bear is thought to be the same one that had been captured and removed from the village of Przemysl three weeks ago.

After capturing the bear three weeks ago, officials released her again deep in the forest.

But she appears to have developed a taste for proximity to humans. And a resistance to tranquilizers.

The animal is thought to have escaped from a Ukrainian wildlife park some 40 kilometers away from Przemysl.

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Authorities quickly put an end to the ursine escapade and tranquilized the bear, which had escaped from a wildlife park in a Ukrainian town some 40 kilometers away. But instead of bringing the bear back to its home, the bear was released deep in the forest in the hopes that it would henceforth steer clear of humans.

It didn’t. On Friday, the she-bear was back, this time nosing into the village of Chorzow. And this time, efforts to tranquilize her proved decidedly unsuccessful. Despite apparently succumbing to a first injection, the bear suddenly awoke when authorities approached. A chase ensued, with a second ranger having to come to the aid of his companion.

Authorities now want to lock the bear safely away in a zoo.

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Full article and photos: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,674922,00.html

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Scientists Find a Shared Gene in Dogs With Compulsive Behavior

OBSESSIVE A Doberman pinscher sucking on its flank, one behavior among dogs that have compulsive disorders in which a genetic variation was found.

Scientists have linked a gene to compulsive behavior — in dogs.

Researchers studied Doberman pinschers that curled up into balls, sucking their flanks for hours at a time, and found that the afflicted dogs shared a gene. They describe their findings — the first such gene identified in dogs — in a short report this month in Molecular Psychiatry.

Dr. Nicholas Dodman, director of the animal behavior clinic at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, in North Grafton, Mass., and the lead author of the report, said the findings had broad implications for compulsive disorders in people and animals.

CAPTIVITY Confined animals, like this polar bear and her cub at a zoo in Austria, can develop a disorder.

Estimates have obsessive-compulsive disorder afflicting anywhere from 2.5 percent to 8 percent of the human population. It shows up in behavior like excessive hand washing, repetitive checking of stoves, locks and lights, and damaging actions like pulling one’s hair out by the roots and self-mutilation.

The disorder has been used in popular movies and television shows to define characters like the reclusive writer Melvin Udall, played by Jack Nicholson, in “As Good as It Gets” and Adrian Monk, played by Tony Shaloub, in the television series “Monk.”

Similar disorders are known in dogs, particularly in certain breeds, including Dobermans.

Dr. Dodman and his collaborators searched for a genetic source for this behavior by scanning and comparing the genomes of 94 Doberman pinschers that sucked their flanks, sucked on blankets or engaged in both behaviors with those of 73 Dobermans that did neither. They also studied the pedigrees of all the dogs for complex patterns of inheritance. The researchers identified a spot on canine chromosome 7 that contains the gene CDH2 (Cadherin 2), which showed variation in the genetic code when the sucking and nonsucking dogs were compared.

The statistical association led to further investigation to determine for which protein the gene contained instructions. It did for one of the proteins called cadherins, which are found throughout the animal kingdom and are apparently involved in cell alignment, adhesion and signaling.

Cadherins have also been recently associated with autism spectrum disorder, which includes repetitive and compulsive behaviors, said Dr. Edward I. Ginns, senior author of the report in Molecular Psychiatry and director of the Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Dr. Dennis Murphy, a psychiatrist who was not associated with the study, said the results had the potential to advance understanding of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Dr. Murphy, also chief of the Laboratory of Clinical Science in the National Institutes of Mental Health’s Division of Intramural Research Program, is now working on finding and sequencing the CDH2 gene in humans to see whether it is linked to obsessive-compulsive behavior.

People with obsessive-compulsive disorder often engage in normal behavior that has become extreme, ritualized, repetitive and time-consuming, and suffer from anxiety and obsessive thinking.

Because the disorder involves obsessive thoughts and because of the difficulty of understanding animal cognition, the same kinds of behavior in animals has commonly been referred to simply as compulsive disorder.

As scientists learn more about the underlying molecular causes of this condition, they increasingly use “obsessive-compulsive disorder” to apply to animals and people.

Recent rough estimates by Dr. Karen L. Overall, a veterinarian specializing in animal behavior at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, suggest that up to 8 percent of dogs in America — five million to six million animals — exhibit compulsive behaviors, like fence-running, pacing, spinning, tail-chasing, snapping at imaginary flies, licking, chewing, barking and staring. Males with the problem outnumber females three to one in dogs, she found, whereas in cats the ratio is reversed.

Dr. Overall said dogs usually developed compulsive behavior between ages 1 and 4. Some of the Dobermans in Dr. Dodman’s group began earlier, with blanket sucking at around 5 months and flank sucking at 9 months.

Dogs can be treated, but if they are not, compulsive behavior is one of the main reasons that people give them up for adoption or euthanasia, according to veterinary behaviorists.

Dr. Overall said in an earlier paper that environmental causes might outweigh genetic factors in development of compulsive behaviors in some cases.

She said the practice of “hanging” a dog up by its choke collar, a form of discipline advocated by some trainers, produced compulsive behaviors. Dogs from puppy mills or shelters, rescue dogs and those that are confined and bored dogs or anxious also seem prone to compulsive behavior, she said.

Other domestic animals, notably cats and horses, as well as some of the animals at zoos, exhibit compulsive behaviors, including wool-sucking in Siamese cats, and locomotion disorders like stall walking and weaving in confined horses and pacing in captive polar bears, tigers and other carnivores used to ranging across large territories.

Although antidepressants, particularly selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and clomipramine, a tricyclic antidepressant, and behavior modification have proved effective at controlling compulsive behavior in dogs and people, they do not appear to correct underlying pathologies or causes, Dr. Ginns said. Those causes are likely to be as varied as the compulsive behaviors and as complex as the interplay of multiple genes and the environment.

“Stress and anxiety, as well as physical trauma and illness, can trigger repetitive behavior that then takes on a life of its own,” Dr. Ginns said.

But he believes that in many cases there is an underlying genetic predisposition that responds to environmental stimuli in such a way that once-normal behavior turns into something pathological. Those genetic dispositions may differ markedly between different behaviors.

Some geneticists say that because of their detailed pedigree and the similarity of their genes to those of humans, dogs make an ideal model for studying human behaviors and pathologies, especially those involving complex patterns of inheritance. Few humans keep detailed genealogies for themselves, but they are diligent in recording every detail in the ancestry of their purebred animals.

“Nick and I share an interest in pedigrees,” Dr. Ginns said in explaining how he and Dr. Dodman became collaborators with Kerstin Lindblad-Toh and her gene sequencers at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, the same group that sequenced the dog genome now proving so valuable to both human and canine geneticists.

Mark Derr, New York Times

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/science/19dogs.html

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Look out! A great step for locust-kind

University of Cambridge undated handout photos of a locust walking along a ladder. Scientists have shown for the first time that insects, like mammals, use vision rather than touch to find footholds. They made the discovery thanks to high-speed video cameras that they used to film desert locusts stepping along the rungs of a miniature ladder. The study sheds new light on insects’ ability to perform complex tasks, such as visually-guided limb control, usually associated with mammals.

Locusts watch where they walk using a visual guidance system similar to that of humans, scientists have learned.

 In a series of experiments, researchers observed the insects climbing a ladder while a high speed camera caught every stumble and missed step.

The locusts’ task was made more difficult by having one eye painted over, or having their antennae or front leg sensors removed.

Locusts watch where they walk using a visual guidance system similar to that of humans, scientists have learned.

In a series of experiments, researchers observed the insects climbing a ladder while a high speed camera caught every stumble and missed step.

The locusts’ task was made more difficult by having one eye painted over, or having their antennae or front leg sensors removed.

The scientists also watched what happened when a rung of the ladder was removed mid-step.

They discovered that, rather than “feeling” their way, the insects relied on vision to pinpoint every foothold.

Humans and other mammals do much the same thing, though in a more complex fashion.

The locusts displayed a level visual brain processing previously thought to be too sophisticated for insects, according to the scientists.

Dr Jeremy Niven, from Cambridge University, who led the study reported in the journal Current Biology, said: “Visually guided limb control is often thought to be complicated and require sophisticated computations because you have to place your limb in a position you can only see, not touch.

“The visual control of limb placement in the locusts suggests that this can be achieved by much smaller-brained insects. It’s another example of insects performing a behaviour we previously thought was restricted to relatively big-brained animals with sophisticated motor control, such as humans, monkeys or octopuses.”

The study revealed some key differences between the way locusts and humans walk.

Having no binocular vision, the insects rely on visual input from a single eye to control leg movements on that side of their body.

Unlike humans and other mammals, such as cats, locusts also commit themselves to a particular foothold before lifting a leg. If something changes mid-step, they miss their target.

In contrast, a human will be watching for unexpected hazards while taking a step and can make adjustments if necessary.

It was a long fascination with insect vision that led Dr Niven to investigate locust ladder walking.

“Most studies of insect vision have concentrated on insects using vision during flight because insects such as bees and flies do spend a lot of time flying,” he said.

“Other insects, such as stick insects, crickets and cockroaches, spend a lot of time walking, but they all have relatively small eyes and long antennae to ‘feel’ their way through the environment.

“Locusts spend time both walking and flying and have short antennae and large eyes. This started us thinking about whether it was possible for locusts to use vision to find footholds.”

He added: “The study really emphasises how insects can achieve similar results to vertebrates like humans or cats with few neurons, probably by simpler mechanisms.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/look-out-a-great-step-for-locustkind-1849788.html

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Animal pictures

Deer in the snow in Knole park, Sevenoaks, Kent

Two brown bears engage in a bit of “bear knuckle” fighting in front of a spectacular, snow-topped mountain range. The duel was captured on camera in Hallow Bay, part of the Katmai National Park, Alaska

A bobcat sits on a saguaro cactus in Tucson, Arizona. The bobcat came halfway down the cactus only to be chased back up by another bobcat

This bird could be nature’s real-life answer to the famous chopstick fly-grabbing Mr Miyagi. Caught on camera in Kenya, the bird grabs a fly straight from the air

A veined octopus crawls along the ocean floor holding one half of a coconut shell. Australian scientists have filmed the octopus collecting coconut shells for shelter. Researchers believe this is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal

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Full article and photos: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/6840710/Animal-pictures-of-the-week-18-December-2009.html

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Half a Lifetime Spent in Pursuit of Waterbirds

A great frigatebird, top, and red-footed boobies, on Christmas Island.

Twenty years ago, Theodore Cross traveled 16 time zones, from New York to Moscow, Irkutsk and Yakutsk, and finally to the tundra of the Kolyma Delta, in northeastern Siberia, to catch a coveted glimpse of an Arctic bird, the Ross’s gull. Mr. Cross did spot one gull, but its nest was overtaken by a parasitic jaeger before he could return with his blind and his long telephoto lens. The trip was a failure.

Two weeks later, the unexpected happened: a Ross’s gull showed up in Baltimore. Thousands of birders converged on the spot for the rare sighting.

“They call it the bird that launched 20,000 binoculars,” Mr. Cross said.

His 344-page volume, “Waterbirds” (W. W. Norton & Company), is part visual encyclopedia, part memoir of a nearly half-century pursuit of birds. In intimate portraits of birds, like tiny sandpipers and the “flying boxcar” of a bar-tailed godwit, and in personal anecdotes of his birding adventures, Mr. Cross, 85, describes how he spent the first half of his life oblivious to birds only to become one of their most ardent photographers and advocates in the second half. Now, he writes, “the memories of them help me accept the brevity of the time that lies ahead.”

Among his favorites are the roseate spoonbill, which was hunted to near extinction a century ago for pink plumes to adorn women’s hats, but has been making a comeback.

The red-tailed tropicbird of Christmas Island is known for its acrobatics. At midday Mr. Cross said, “they take to the air and engage in unbelievable pirouettes, somersaults in a deafening clatter of noise.”

MASKED BOOBY 

The bar-tailed godwit flies 6,800 miles each year from Alaska to New Zealand without food, water or rest in what Mr. Cross calls “one of nature’s miracles.” And the semipalmated sandpiper, small enough to fit into a teacup, migrates between South America and the Arctic, “through gales and hurricanes, over mountains and ocean.”

“Birds are very much like people in some ways,” Mr. Cross said. “The reddish egret will pretend it’s leaving its nest, the way humans sometimes pretend they’ve lost interest in a boyfriend or girlfriend. But sure enough, they’re going to come back.”

The white tern is incredibly friendly. “If you visit any island in the South Pacific,” he said, “a dozen or more of these little guys will come out and greet you.”

Mr. Cross hopes someday to capture the perfect picture, which he describes as “two reddish egrets in courtship with their fantastic feathers flared up and pointed to the sky.”

Thomas Lin, New York Times

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Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/science/15bird.html

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Animal pictures

A jaguar named Antonia looks after her baby called Bonita at the zoo in Saarbruecken, Germany.

Cheetah mother, Msichanga with her young at Switzerland’s Zoo Basel.

Goldilocks the polar bear.

Baby Elephant Rani having fun at the Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg, Germany.

Whoopie stuck closely to her mother Maggie in the first weeks of her life but now she jumps and climbs around the enclosure on her own.

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Full article and photos: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/6729230/Animal-pictures-of-the-week-4-December-2009.html?image=1

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Clues to What Birds Do on a Trans-Sahara Trip

Nobody ever said migrating thousands of miles through the air twice a year was easy. But few detailed studies have been conducted on just how difficult bird migration can be. That is because birds are tough to track; conventional techniques like banding can provide only limited information about their travels.

But technology has ridden to the rescue, in the form of small satellite tags. Tags that can gather GPS data and transmit it to a satellite are getting so tiny — the puniest are on the order of one-third of an ounce, including the battery — that they can now be attached to large birds to track their travel over long distances.

Scientists in Sweden have done this, and have gained some valuable information about how raptors cope with migrating across the Sahara, between Sweden and West Africa, in spring and fall. In short, it’s a very rough journey.

Roine Strandberg and Raymond H. G. Klaassen of Lund University and colleagues tracked 90 trans-Sahara flights by juvenile and adult ospreys, honey buzzards and other raptors. As reported in Biology Letters, the mean distance traveled, from one edge of the desert to the other, was about 1,000 miles. Mean travel time was six and a half days.

The researchers found that in 40 percent of the flights, there was evidence of odd behavior — the birds slowed down, stopped for an hour or more, changed course or, in some cases, turned around and headed back where they came from. The researchers suggest that strong headwinds or dust storms were responsible.

Deaths also occurred, particularly among juveniles. About one in three young birds died on their first trip. “That’s much higher than we expected,” Dr. Klaassen said.

Adult mortality was only about 2 percent, the researchers said, but adults faced a different problem: those that were delayed by weather had less breeding success than those who made it to the nest on time.

“They only have a good summer if they make the crossing in one attempt,” Dr. Klaassen said. “If they have to stop or turn back, there’s a big risk they won’t have breeding success.”

Henry Fountain, New York Times

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/science/08obtrip.html

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Boom! Hok! A Monkey Language Is Deciphered

A male Campbell’s monkey in Tai Forest, Ivory Coast.

Boom boom! (I’m here, come to me!)

Krak krak! (Watch out, a leopard!)

Hok hok hok! (Hey, crowned eagle!)

Very good — you have already mastered half the basic vocabulary of the Campbell’s monkey, a fellow primate that lives in the forests of the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast. The adult males have six types of call, each with a specific meaning, but they can string two or more calls together into a message with a different meaning.

Having spent months recording the monkeys’ calls in response to both natural and artificial stimuli, a group led by Klaus Zuberbühler of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland argues that the Campbell’s monkeys have a primitive form of syntax.

This is likely to be a controversial claim because despite extensive efforts to teach chimpanzees language, the subjects showed little or no ability to combine the sounds they learned into a sentence with a larger meaning. Syntax, basic to the structure of language, seemed be a uniquely human faculty.

Still, species like gibbons and whales make complex vocalizations in which the order of the sounds seems to have some effect on their meaning, though it is hard to say what. Dr. Zuberbühler’s team reports deciphering some of the Campbell’s monkey’s communication system in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Krak” is a call that warns of leopards in the vicinity. The monkeys gave it in response to real leopards and to model leopards or leopard growls broadcast by the researchers. The monkeys can vary the call by adding the suffix “-oo”: “krak-oo” seems to be a general word for predator, but one given in a special context — when monkeys hear but do not see a predator, or when they hear the alarm calls of another species known as the Diana monkey.

The “boom-boom” call invites other monkeys to come toward the male making the sound. Two booms can be combined with a series of “krak-oos,” with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. “Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo” is the monkey’s version of “Timber!” — it warns of falling trees.

There is yet another variation on this theme, Dr. Zuberbühler’s team reports. Into the “Timber!” call, the Campbell’s monkeys insert a series of up to seven “hok-oo” calls. The combined call indicates the presence of other monkey groups and is heard most often when the monkeys are on the edge of their home range.

The meaning of monkey calls was first worked out with vervet monkeys, which have distinct alarm calls for each of their three main predators: the martial eagle, leopards and snakes. But the vervets did not combine their alarm calls to generate new meanings, unlike human words that can be combined in an infinite number of different sentences.

If the Zuberbühler team’s observations are correct, the Campbell’s monkeys can both vary the meaning of specific calls by adding suffixes and combine calls to generate a different meaning. Their call system, the researchers write, “may be the most complex example of ‘proto-syntax’ in animal communication known to date.”

Dr. Zuberbühler said he planned to play back recordings of given calls to the Campbell’s monkeys and to test from their reactions whether he had correctly decoded their messaging system.

Nicholas Wade, New York Times

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Full article and  photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/science/08monkey.html

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Animal pictures

Baby Rothschild giraffe Sara and her mother Juji play in their enclosure at the zoo in Hanover, Germany.

Red or Lesser Pandas at Wenling Zoo, China.

This huge Griffon Vulture was feeding on a carcass when the aggressive fox attacked.

A male peacock spider shows off a stunning array of colours as it performs an impressive mating ritual in front of a watching female.  Male peacock spiders keep their “tails”, which are flap-like extensions of their abdomen, folded down by their side until they spot a brown coloured female.

Bulan was born on September 20, 2009 and is the fifth baby born to Bini.

A dormouse hibernates in its nest.

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Full article and photos (1) to (5): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/6671062/Animal-pictures-of-the-week-27-November-2009.html?image=1

Photo (6): http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2009/nov/30/charlotte-higgins-is-away

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Europe’s Wild Boar Population Exploding

Climate Change’s Clear Winners

Europe is waging war on the boar, whose numbers have been surging as a result of global warming and the large-scale cultivation of maize and rapeseed for biofuel. While violent confrontations with humans are on the rise, the animal is respected for its intelligence — and remains dear to German hearts.

Barely a week goes by in Germany without a news story about a human encounter with wild boars — joggers getting chased up trees, boars smashing their way into living rooms and tearing up the furniture, even whole hordes of the shaggy beasts rampaging through village streets. Last year, two police officers were so scared of a marauding boar that they leapt onto a low balcony and opened fire on it with their service revolvers. They missed.

It’s not the boars’ fault. The species of pig may look fearsome with their big heads, short legs and tusks that can grow to 20 centimeters (eight inches). But they are naturally shy animals and only become aggressive when they feel trapped or threatened. Confrontations with humans have become commonplace because the wild boar population is exploding across Europe as a result of human activity — global warming and radical changes in agricultural land use.

In Germany, hunters shot a record 450,000 boars in the 2008/2009 season, which runs year-round beginning on April 1, according to figures from the German Hunting Federation (DJV). That was up by a third from the previous season and gives the best available indication of the population. The total number of boars roaming the forests, suburbs and maize fields of Germany is now estimated at between 2 million and 2.5 million.

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Germany alone has between two million and 2.5 million wild boars, and the population has been increasing across Europe. The species of pig may look fearsome with its big heads short legs and tusks that can grow to 20cm. But it’s a naturally shy animals and only becomes aggressive when it feels trapped or threatened.

German pensioner Günter Kuhla from Spremberg in Brandenburg feeding his unlikely pet, a 160 kilogram wild boar. It wandered onto his farm when it was a piglet and had lost its mother. In Germany, hunters shot a record 450,000 boars in the 2008/2009 season which runs from April 1 to March 31, according to figures from the German Hunting Federation (DJV). That was up by a third from the previous season.

Barely a week goes by in Europe without news stories about a human confrontation with wild boars — joggers getting chased up trees, boars smashing their way into living rooms and tearing up the furniture. But not all encounters are violent. Here, young tourists feed wil boar in Vierhouten in the Netherlands.

The French revere the wild boar almost as much as the Germans. Here, thousands of people turned out in the northeastern town of Bogny-sur-Meuse last year to watch a monumental wild boar sculpture, destined to be erected along a nearby highway as the symbol of the Ardennes region.

Two German symbols — the Dachshund and a very young wild boar, getting on remarkably well. The adaptability and intelligence of wild boars inspire a degree of awe, but above all it’s their close association with the German forest — so deeply rooted in the Teutonic psyche — that gives them a special status here.

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It’s the same story in France, where 500,000 boars were shot last year. In Poland, it was 200,000, and their numbers have also been increasing in Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the whole of eastern Europe, Torsten Reinwald, a biologist and expert on wild boars at the DJV, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. And boars are also thriving in Asia and the Americas.

“Wild boars are the clear winners of climate change and of the change in nature caused by humans,” said Reinwald. “But it’s wrong to say there’s a plague of them. We have 4 million hares in Germany, and they’re still on the endangered species list.”

Gorging on Maize and Acorns

Warmer winters in recent years have reduced the death rate of older boars and of young ones born late in the year, and the rise in carbon dioxide levels has intensified the sunlight and led trees to produce more acorns and chestnuts — a high-energy delicacy for boars, whose reproduction naturally increases with the amount of available food.

“A sow can produce a litter of up to eight piglets per year,” Reinwald said. “And because their reproduction depends on weight rather than age, we’re seeing boars of just nine months — mere teenagers — producing young.”

Boars also have a penchant for maize and rapeseed, now being grown in vast quantities for biofuel. In Germany, the switch from traditional small fields with varied crops to gigantic swaths of agricultural land devoted just to one crop has provided wild boars with veritable hypermarkets in which they can gorge themselves after the winter, Reinwald said.

In the eastern state of Brandenburg, there are maize fields eight square kilometers (almost 2,000 acres) in size. “You can’t spot wild boars in there,” Reinwald said. “They have shelter, water and food.”

A total of 27 percent of Germany’s surface area is devoted to cultivating just three crops — wheat, rapeseed and maize. Add to that all the woodland, which covers more than a fifth of the country, and you have a vast area in which boars can frolic and flourish.

Adaptable, Intelligent, Disciplined

They roam in close-knit, well-organized groups, also known as sounders, of around 20, and they are led by sows. Boars have been known to grow to a weight in excess of 200 kilograms (440 pounds), although the average adult weight is between 50 and 90 kilograms.

It’s not surprising that they are doing so well. They eat anything from discarded pizzas and doner kebabs to maize and acorns, and they’re highly adaptable. Despite their weight, they are agile and can reach speeds of up to 50 kilometers per hour (31 mph) over short distances. They are also excellent swimmers and are renowned among hunters for their intelligence.

One sign of their brainpower is the tactic they adopt when devouring maize. When they enter the fields, they leave the outer edges of the field intact, presumably to hide what they’re doing, hunters say.

Their ability to learn also shows how clever they are. “They have a well-organized social structure, and if the lead sow senses danger, they all follow her. They know the routes used by hunters, and when they hear the sound of car doors slamming, they immediately retreat to the edges of the hunting area and hide in reeds until the danger has passed,” said Reinwald. “They know, ‘if we go there, we’re safe.’”

It’s not that they can read the signs. But they have a keen instinct and they learn from observation.

Boared Yet?

Roaming boars cause some 25,000 traffic accidents in Germany per year, but that’s just a fraction of the 200,000 crashes involving deer, Reinwald adds. The damage to crops and the danger they pose to herds of domestic pigs — such as transmitting swine fever — are bigger problems.

The invasion of cities is also causing concern. Berlin has a wild boar population estimated at between 8,000 and 10,000. They are frequently spotted digging up gardens or trotting along train tracks and quiet streets. “People make it worse by feeding them,” Reinwald said. “In Berlin, buses avoid some stops because boars hang around there begging, just because someone decided to put out maize for them.”

When cornered, they show fierce courage, especially if they’re protecting their young. In fact, boars have been known to smash their way through electric fences in a blaze of sparks. “That may also be due to short-sightedness, though,” Reinwald admitted.

In Texas, which has similar problems, officials plan to use poisons and chemicals against them. But Reinwald says hunting is the only effective way to reduce their numbers: “Poisons and contraceptives will only do more damage to the environment, and they don’t work.”

Dear to the German Heart

Germany’s 350,000 registered hunters have their hands — and gun magazines — full trying to cull the boar population. Group hunts with beaters and dogs and 30 or 40 hunters are most effective, but it still takes an average of 16-18 man-hours to kill one wild boar.

Moonlit, snowy nights are best, when the dark outlines of the beasts are easily visible against the bright ground and bare trees. Machine guns would probably reduce the man-hours involved, but they are banned from German forests.

Besides, despite all the marauding and hunting, wild boars are dear to the nation’s heart. Their adaptability and intelligence inspire a great degree of awe; but, above all, it’s their close association with the German forest — so deeply rooted in the Teutonic psyche — that gives them a special status here. “Wild boars belong here; it’s a symbolic animal for Germany,” Reinwald said.

And, of course, they make good sausages, too — another thing dear to the German heart. “Their meat is considered a delicacy,” Reinwald said. “But with the increase in hunting, the price of wild boar meat has dropped. In eastern Germany, you can get a kilo for less than a euro ($1.50).”

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Full article and photos: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,663411,00.html

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Animal Pictures

Three month old hyena Kai with mum Ngozi from the Denver Zoo.

A trio of male Australian big-bellied seahorses vie for the attention of a female seahorse at Living Coasts, Torquay, Devon. In a move that gives hope to overweight men everywhere, the female seahorse picks the male with the biggest belly.

A hungry praying mantis carefully edges its way up a twig before pouncing on a tree frog. Fortunately (for the frog) the mantis stayed hungry.

A Sambar, an Asian deer, is chased by a tiger at the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger reserve near Nagpur in the Indian State of Maharashtra. The battle went on for 24 hours, with the deer escaping three times before finally falling prey to the tiger.

This is the first outing for Perth Zoo’s latest arrival: a baby Sumatran Orangutan born to 39-year-old mother, Puteri.The infant weighed just under two kilograms at birth.

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Full article and photos: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/6617101/Animal-pictures-of-the-week-20-November-2009.html

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Animal, Vegetable, Miserable

LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the meat they eat comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals humanely treated? Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone’s dinner?

Some of these questions, which reach a fever pitch in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, pertain to the ways in which animals are treated. (Did your turkey get to live outdoors?) Others focus on the question of how eating the animals in question will affect the consumer’s health and well-being. (Was it given hormones and antibiotics?)

None of these questions, however, make any consideration of whether it is wrong to kill animals for human consumption. And even when people ask this question, they almost always find a variety of resourceful answers that purport to justify the killing and consumption of animals in the name of human welfare. Strict ethical vegans, of which I am one, are customarily excoriated for equating our society’s treatment of animals with mass murder. Can anyone seriously consider animal suffering even remotely comparable to human suffering? Those who answer with a resounding no typically argue in one of two ways.

Some suggest that human beings but not animals are made in God’s image and hence stand in much closer proximity to the divine than any non-human animal; according to this line of thought, animals were made expressly for the sake of humans and may be used without scruple to satisfy their needs and desires. There is ample support in the Bible and in the writings of Christian thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas for this pointedly anthropocentric way of devaluing animals.

Others argue that the human capacity for abstract thought makes us capable of suffering that both qualitatively and quantitatively exceeds the suffering of any non-human animal. Philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, who is famous for having based moral status not on linguistic or rational capacities but rather on the capacity to suffer, argue that because animals are incapable of abstract thought, they are imprisoned in an eternal present, have no sense of the extended future and hence cannot be said to have an interest in continued existence.

The most penetrating and iconoclastic response to this sort of reasoning came from the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer in his story “The Letter Writer,” in which he called the slaughter of animals the “eternal Treblinka.”

The story depicts an encounter between a man and a mouse. The man, Herman Gombiner, contemplates his place in the cosmic scheme of things and concludes that there is an essential connection between his own existence as “a child of God” and the “holy creature” scuffling about on the floor in front of him.

Surely, he reflects, the mouse has some capacity for thought; Gombiner even thinks that the mouse has the capacity to share love and gratitude with him. Not merely a means for the satisfaction of human desires, nor a mere nuisance to be exterminated, this tiny creature possesses the same dignity that any conscious being possesses. In the face of that inherent dignity, Gombiner concludes, the human practice of delivering animals to the table in the form of food is abhorrent and inexcusable.

Many of the people who denounce the ways in which we treat animals in the course of raising them for human consumption never stop to think about this profound contradiction. Instead, they make impassioned calls for more “humanely” raised meat. Many people soothe their consciences by purchasing only free-range fowl and eggs, blissfully ignorant that “free range” has very little if any practical significance. Chickens may be labeled free-range even if they’ve never been outside or seen a speck of daylight in their entire lives. And that Thanksgiving turkey? Even if it is raised “free range,” it still lives a life of pain and confinement that ends with the butcher’s knife.

How can intelligent people who purport to be deeply concerned with animal welfare and respectful of life turn a blind eye to such practices? And how can people continue to eat meat when they become aware that nearly 53 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for human consumption? The simple answer is that most people just don’t care about the lives or fortunes of animals. If they did care, they would learn as much as possible about the ways in which our society systematically abuses animals, and they would make what is at once a very simple and a very difficult choice: to forswear the consumption of animal products of all kinds.

The easy part of this consists in seeing clearly what ethics requires and then just plain doing it. The difficult part: You just haven’t lived until you’ve tried to function as a strict vegan in a meat-crazed society.

What were once the most straightforward activities become a constant ordeal. You might think that it’s as simple as just removing meat, eggs and dairy products from your diet, but it goes a lot deeper than that.

To be a really strict vegan is to strive to avoid all animal products, and this includes materials like leather, silk and wool, as well as a panoply of cosmetics and medications. The more you dig, the more you learn about products you would never stop to think might contain or involve animal products in their production — like wine and beer (isinglass, a kind of gelatin derived from fish bladders, is often used to “fine,” or purify, these beverages), refined sugar (bone char is sometimes used to bleach it) or Band-Aids (animal products in the adhesive). Just last week I was told that those little comfort strips on most razor blades contain animal fat.

To go down this road is to stare headlong into an abyss that, to paraphrase Nietzsche, will ultimately stare back at you.

The challenges faced by a vegan don’t end with the nuts and bolts of material existence. You face quite a few social difficulties as well, perhaps the chief one being how one should feel about spending time with people who are not vegans.

Is it O.K. to eat dinner with people who are eating meat? What do you say when a dining companion says, “I’m really a vegetarian — I don’t eat red meat at home.” (I’ve heard it lots of times, always without any prompting from me.) What do you do when someone starts to grill you (so to speak) about your vegan ethics during dinner? (Wise vegans always defer until food isn’t around.) Or when someone starts to lodge accusations to the effect that you consider yourself morally superior to others, or that it is ridiculous to worry so much about animals when there is so much human suffering in the world? (Smile politely and ask them to pass the seitan.)

Let me be candid: By and large, meat-eaters are a self-righteous bunch. The number of vegans I know personally is … five. And I have been a vegan for almost 15 years, having been a vegetarian for almost 15 before that.

Five. I have lost more friends than this over arguments about animal ethics. One lapidary conclusion to be drawn here is that people take deadly seriously the prerogative to use animals as sources of satisfaction. Not only for food, but as beasts of burden, as raw materials and as sources of captive entertainment — which is the way animals are used in zoos, circuses and the like.

These uses of animals are so institutionalized, so normalized, in our society that it is difficult to find the critical distance needed to see them as the horrors that they are: so many forms of subjection, servitude and — in the case of killing animals for human consumption and other purposes — outright murder.

People who are ethical vegans believe that differences in intelligence between human and non-human animals have no moral significance whatsoever. The fact that my cat can’t appreciate Schubert’s late symphonies and can’t perform syllogistic logic does not mean that I am entitled to use him as an organic toy, as if I were somehow not only morally superior to him but virtually entitled to treat him as a commodity with minuscule market value.

We have been trained by a history of thinking of which we are scarcely aware to view non-human animals as resources we are entitled to employ in whatever ways we see fit in order to satisfy our needs and desires. Yes, there are animal welfare laws. But these laws have been formulated by, and are enforced by, people who proceed from the proposition that animals are fundamentally inferior to human beings. At best, these laws make living conditions for animals marginally better than they would be otherwise — right up to the point when we send them to the slaughterhouse.

Think about that when you’re picking out your free-range turkey, which has absolutely nothing to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. All it ever had was a short and miserable life, thanks to us intelligent, compassionate humans.

Gary Steiner, a professor of philosophy at Bucknell University, is the author of “Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status and Kinship.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opinion/22steiner.html

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When Mountain Lions Hunt, They Prey on the Weak

Predators may notice illnesses in mule deer.

Predators do not always play fair. Sometimes they choose their victims based on physical condition, preferring young, old, sick or injured prey.

That is the idea, although surprisingly it has not been tested much. But now researchers have found that one predator does, in fact, show a preference for less-than-fully-capable victims. The findings may have implications for the spread of chronic wasting disease among deer populations.

Working in the northern Front Range of Colorado, Caroline E. Krumm and Michael W. Miller of the state’s Division of Wildlife, and colleagues, sampled adult mule deer carcasses known to have been killed by mountain lions, testing them for chronic wasting disease, a degenerative neurological illness that is similar to mad cow disease.

They also sampled tissue from deer killed by hunters in the same area, to get an idea of the infection rate in the general population. Since the deer generally do not have obvious symptoms, hunter-killed deer would have close to a random chance of being infected.

As reported in Biology Letters, they found that the prevalence of infected deer among the mountain-lion-killed group was higher than among the hunter-killed group, suggesting that the big cats actively seek out infected prey.

Dr. Miller said the mountain lions might notice signs of illness that were too subtle for humans to see — slightly slower reaction times, for example.

He said there was no evidence so far that mountain lions were susceptible to the disease. But by consuming infected carcasses, the animals may be keeping infectious agents out of the environment, reducing transmission to healthy deer.

Henry Fountain, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/science/17obprey.html

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In Search of the Geep

Q. I have a soft-drink bottle cap with a trivia item printed inside that says that if a sheep and a goat mate, the offspring is a geep. Can this be true?

A. It is sort of true. A geep is not actually an offspring of the sexual mating of one sheep and one goat; rather, it is an animal resulting from the physical mingling of very early embryos of the two species and thus has four parents — two sheep and two goats. The scientific term for an animal with mingled cells from two species is chimera.

The first well-known geep was born in 1984 after scientists at the Institute of Animal Physiology in Cambridge, England, combined goat and sheep embryos of four to eight cells each and placed them in sheep and goat wombs for gestation. Six live animals were born, but the scientists found that only one had blood proteins from both sheep and goats. It showed patches of both goatish hair and sheepish wool.

Further research at the University of California, Davis, soon produced several more successful chimeras, for the purpose of studying vital processes in livestock pregnancies.

An actual sheep-goat hybrid is possible. In a true hybrid, the genetic material from the two species is mingled at conception, with half the chromosomes coming from one parent and half from the other. Because goats and sheep have mismatched numbers of chromosomes (60 and 54, respectively), the resulting offspring, if it survives, is sterile.

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/science/17qna.html

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Skunk’s Strategy Not Just Black And White

Predators with experience of skunks avoid them both because of their black-and-white coloration and their distinctive body shape.

Predators with experience of skunks avoid them both because of their black-and-white coloration and their distinctive body shape, according to UC Davis wildlife researcher Jennifer Hunter. The study was published online Oct. 21 in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

Hunter wanted to know how predators know a skunk is a skunk. Biologists had assumed that the distinctive black-and-white color scheme was a marker saying, “keep away.”

Hunter prepared taxidermy mounts of skunks and of gray foxes, an animal about the same size but a distinctly different shape. Some of the stuffed skunks she dyed gray, and some of the foxes she dyed black-and-white. She then placed the animals at 10 sites around California — in locations where skunks were abundant as well in areas where they were uncommon — and monitored them with infrared video cameras.

In locations where wild skunks were not commonly found, predators such as bears, mountain lions, bobcats and coyotes would approach, lick, roll on or attempt to drag away the stuffed skunks as well as the stuffed foxes. But in places where skunks were common, potential predators gave anything skunk-like, either in shape or color, a wide berth.

“They wouldn’t go near them,” Hunter said.

The results suggest a much stronger learning component in prey recognition than was previously thought, Hunter said. She was also surprised to find that body shape, not just color, was important. Previous studies, mostly conducted in the laboratory rather than in the wild, had suggested that animals have an inbuilt tendency to avoid brightly colored or multicolored prey.

The study also raises the question: Does anything actually eat skunks? Possibly not, Hunter thinks.

While numbers of most animals are controlled by predators above them in the food chain, skunks may be a rare example where the main check on their numbers comes from disease, food supply or lack of habitat — factors that depend mainly on the number of skunks themselves.

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Full article and photo: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091111092053.htm

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The deep-sea crab that eats trees

M. andamanica, a wood-muncher

Deep under the ocean, there is a species of crab that eats trees.

The crab survives by eating wood that has sunk to the ocean floor, comprising trunks and leaves swept into the sea, as well as the odd shipwreck.

Inside the stomach of the crab, also called a squat lobster, are bacteria and fungi that help digest the wood.

The discovery, published in the journal Marine Biology, adds to evidence that these so-called ‘wood falls’ help support special underwater communities.

“At first sight, it seems improbable,” says PhD student Caroline Hoyoux of the University of Liège, Belgium.

“Munidopsis andamanica is a species only found in the deep sea and yet it eats ‘terrestrial food’,” she says.

Sunken wood degraded by wood-boring bivalves

Ms Hoyoux and colleagues based at the University of Liege and at the Natural History Museum and Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France made the discovery while studying which animals colonise wood falls.

Among worms, bivalves and a host of crustacean species they found Munidopsis andamanica, a species known as a galatheid crab, or squat lobster.

Further investigation of the crabs mouthparts and gut contents revealed they feed exclusively on wood.

“We were surprised, because crustaceans are often regarded as predators or scavengers. The fact I found M. andamanica consistently feeding on vegetal remains, especially wood, instead of eating molluscs or [worms] breaks with the general a priori about the diet of squat lobsters,” says Ms Hoyoux.

Sunken treasure

The importance of wood falls and the communities they host are only just being appreciated.

Although first discovered in the late 19th century, it was not until the late 1970s that scientists began to study the animals that colonise them.

Until this century, these were mainly thought to be wood-boring molluscs.

“However, crustaceans are the second most important group, according to the number of species and individuals,” says Ms Hoyoux.

Another species of galatheid crab clings to a piece of wood

She is studying wood fall crustaceans for her PhD thesis and as part of the international DiWOOD project, which seeks to learn more about animals colonising deep-sea wood.

“The wood falls that we study are principally natural tree debris that have sunk and reached the deep sea floor. They consist of real wood as well as plant fragments like leaves, seagrass, coconuts etc.”

To collect the animals, Ms Hoyoux and colleagues mimic real wood falls by immersing mesh boxes baited with wood.

The mesh is wide enough to allow crustacean larvae to colonise the wood, but too small the allow the animals to escape as they grow.

After a year, these boxes are brought to the surface and the animals collected.

Animal riches

Among those found are 15 species of decapod, one species of isopod and one amphipod, including hermit crabs, shrimp and galatheid crabs of the genus Munidopsis and Munida.

The squat lobster is thought to bite off small splinters of wood which it then passes through a ‘gastric-mill’ of strong teeth used to grind the wood down.

A branch or trunk trawled from hundreds of metres underwater

The crab’s gut then contains bacteria and fungi that produce enzymes that help digest the cellulose in the wood.

The ecological importance of wood falls rivals that of whale falls, where highly specialised communities of deep-sea animals colonise the bodies of dead whales and dolphins that drift to the sea bed.

“Although they are not as quantifiable as whale falls, they could be more important,” says Ms Hoyoux.

“It is strongly assumed that these vegetable debris constitute an important and significant contribution of food to the deep-sea fauna.”

They could even be important stepping stones in the colonisation of more extreme deep-sea environments such as hydrothermal vents, say the researchers.

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Full article and photos: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8353000/8353068.stm

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For Elephant Seals, a Restful Downward Spiral

Northern elephant seals are long-distance mariners, voyaging for two to eight months at a time without making landfall. And when they are at sea, they spend up to 90 percent of their time on underwater dives.

So this question arises: How and when do they sleep, or even just rest?

Past research had identified certain types of dives that include a period of slow descent that might be a siesta of sorts, for resting or digesting. Now a study has revealed more information about these so-called drift dives that strongly suggests they are a resting period, with the animals spiraling down in the water like a falling leaf through the air.

Yoko Mitani of Hokkaido University in Japan and colleagues attached special data loggers to six young northern elephant seals off the California coast. In addition to the usual information like depth and water temperature, the loggers capture acceleration and magnetism data along three axes, providing a profile of a dive in three dimensions.

The data, published in Biology Letters, showed that during certain dives, after the seals swam to a depth of about 500 feet, they leveled off, turned over on their backs and coasted slowly down, rolling and yawing slightly as they descended. This slow phase lasted on average about 10 minutes.

Dr. Mitani said the seals occasionally even struck bottom without any apparent reaction — an indication that they might have been sleeping. She said the slow drifting dives probably allowed the seals to rest without descending so far that they would have to expend extra energy to resurface.

Henry Fountain, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10obseal.html

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Pigs Prove to Be Smart, if Not Vain

We’ve all heard the story of the third Little Pig, who foiled the hyperventilating wolf by building his house out of bricks, rather than with straw or sticks as his brothers had done. Less commonly known is that the pig later improved his home’s safety profile by installing convex security mirrors at key points along the driveway.

Well, why not? In the current issue of Animal Behaviour, researchers present evidence that domestic pigs can quickly learn how mirrors work and will use their understanding of reflected images to scope out their surroundings and find their food. The researchers cannot yet say whether the animals realize that the eyes in the mirror are their own, or whether pigs might rank with apes, dolphins and other species that have passed the famed “mirror self-recognition test” thought to be a marker of self-awareness and advanced intelligence.

To which I say, big squeal. Why should the pigs waste precious mirror time inspecting their teeth or straightening the hairs on their chinny-chin-chins, when they could be using the mirror as a tool to find a far prettier sight, the pig heaven that comes in a bowl?

The finding is just one in a series of recent discoveries from the nascent study of pig cognition. Other researchers have found that pigs are brilliant at remembering where food stores are cached and how big each stash is relative to the rest. They’ve shown that Pig A can almost instantly learn to follow Pig B when the second pig shows signs of knowing where good food is stored, and that Pig B will try to deceive the pursuing pig and throw it off the trail so that Pig B can hog its food in peace.

They’ve found that pigs are among the quickest of animals to learn a new routine, and pigs can do a circus’s worth of tricks: jump hoops, bow and stand, spin and make wordlike sounds on command, roll out rugs, herd sheep, close and open cages, play videogames with joysticks, and more. For better or worse, pigs are also slow to forget. “They can learn something on the first try, but then it’s difficult for them to unlearn it,” said Suzanne Held of the University of Bristol. “They may get scared once and then have trouble getting over it.”

Researchers have also found that no matter what new detail they unearth about pig acumen, the public reaction is the same. “People say, ‘Oh yes, pigs really are rather clever, aren’t they?’ ” said Richard W. Byrne, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of St. Andrews. “I would recommend that somebody study sheep or goats rather than pigs, so that people would be suitably impressed to find out your animal is clever.” His feigned frustration notwithstanding, he added, “if you want to understand the evolution of intelligence and social behaviors, it’s important to work on animals like pigs that are not at all closely related to us” but rather are cousins of whales and hippos.

So far, and yet so near. Last week, an international team of biologists released the first draft sequence of the pig genome, the complete set of genetic instructions for making the ruddy-furred Duroc breed of Sus scrofus. Even on a cursory glance, “the pig genome compares favorably with the human genome,” said Lawrence Schook of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the team leaders.

“Very large sections are maintained in complete pieces,” he said, barely changed in the 100-million-plus years since the ancestors of hogs and humans diverged.

Dr. Schook is particularly eager to see if the many physiological and behavioral parallels between humans and pigs are reflected in our respective genomes. Pig hearts are like our hearts, he said, pigs metabolize drugs as we do, their teeth resemble our teeth, and their habits can, too. “I look at the pig as a great animal model for human lifestyle diseases,” he said. “Pigs like to lie around, they like to drink if given the chance, they’ll smoke and watch TV.”

Pigs have been a barnyard staple for at least 8,000 years, when they were domesticated from the wild boar in Asia and Europe. Domestication was easy, given that they loved to root around in dump sites. “The pigs were hard to hunt, but if you put the garbage out, a lot of them would be drawn out from the woods,” Dr. Schook said. “After a while, people realized, we don’t have to hunt them. All we have to do is put a fence around our garbage.”

Pigs were tireless composting machines. “They fed on our scraps,” Dr. Byrne said. “Everything we produced, they turned into good meat.” Pork is among the world’s most popular meats; in many places, pigs are a valuable form of currency. “In parts of New Guinea, they’re so important to villages that they’re suckled by people,” he said.

Of course, pigs aren’t always handled so lovingly, and these researchers denounced factory farms. “I’m German and I love sausage, but I would never eat pork that isn’t free range,” Dr. Held said.

Even in domesticity, pigs have retained much of their foreboar’s smarts. Dr. Byrne attributes pig intelligence to the same evolutionary pressures that prompted cleverness in primates: social life and food. Wild pigs live in long-term social groups, keeping track of one another as individuals, the better to protect against predation. They also root around for difficult food sources, requiring a dexterity of the snout not unlike the handiness of a monkey.

Because monkeys had been shown to use mirrors to locate food, Donald M. Broom of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues decided to check for a similar sort of so-called assessment awareness in pigs. They began by exposing seven 4-to-8-week-old pigs to five-hour stints with a mirror and recording their reactions. The pigs were fascinated, pointing their snouts toward the mirror, hesitating, vocalizing, edging closer, walking up and nuzzling the surface, looking at their image from different angles, looking behind the mirror. When the mirror was placed in their pen a day later, the glass-savvy pigs greeted it with a big ho-hum.

Next, the researchers put the mirror in the enclosure, along with a bowl of food that could not be directly seen but whose image was reflected in the mirror. They then compared the responses of the mirror-experienced pigs with a group of mirror-naïve pigs. On spotting the virtual food in the mirror, the experienced pigs turned away and within an average of 23 seconds had found the food. But the naïve pigs took the reflection for reality and sought in vain to find the bowl by rooting around behind the mirror. No doubt the poor frustrated little pigs couldn’t wait to get home, crack open a beer and turn on the TV.

Natalie Angier, New York Times

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10angier.html

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Riding high

The horse genome

The DNA of the domesticated horse shows evolution at work

Just a song at Twilight

THE genomes of many mammals have now been completed, including the cow, the dog, the chimpanzee and, of course, the human. This week it was the turn of the horse to have its DNA sequence decoded. With it emerged further evidence of how horses have been close human companions and, like other mammals that share an evolutionary history with man, how they could help the understanding of hereditary diseases. But there was also a surprise: horses have a newly forming part in their genetic make-up which shows the evolutionary process in action in a way that has not been seen before.

A team of researchers led by Claire Wade, then at the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, collaborated on the project, which is reported in the latest issue of Science. They analysed DNA from a mare called Twilight (pictured above) to reveal a genome that consists of up to 2.7 billion base pairs (the “letters” in which the genetic message is written). This is slightly larger than the genome of a dog, but smaller than that of a human or a cow. They also compared Twilight, a thoroughbred, with members of other horse breeds.

The surprise was found on equine chromosome 11, in the form of a developing centromere. This is the nexus of a chromosome, from which its arms dangle. Relatively little is known about centromeres. They are difficult to analyse, not least because they contain highly repetitive DNA sequences. But every chromosome has one, and they play an essential role in ensuring that when a cell divides, each daughter inherits a copy of every chromosome in the mother cell.

The appearance of a new centromere, therefore, lets geneticists examine the process by which new chromosomes come into existence. The new horse centromere seems common to all breeds, and has not yet acquired any repetitive DNA. This discovery solves one mystery: centromeres appear before repetitive DNA, rather than being caused by it. And it opens more lines of research.

The equine genome also indicates how extensive crossbreeding was in horse evolution. Domestication probably began 4,000-6,000 years ago, with wild horses initially being hunted for food, and then herded for the same purpose, before being harnessed to provide power and transport. This was unlike the domestication of dogs, where a small number of wolves probably domesticated themselves, by cosying up to groups of people and acting as four-legged garbage-disposal units, before being selectively in-bred into the varieties seen today. In horses, a large number of mares but few stallions appear to have been involved in the development of the genome, and—with the exception of thoroughbreds—there was also a lot of genetic sharing between breeds.

That pattern is partly a consequence of the fact that herds of horses usually contain a lot of mares guarded by a single stallion. And then there was the effect of Genghis Khan and his descendants, whose armies travelled with their ponies across much of Eurasia. According to Dr Wade, who is now at the University of Sydney, “war and conquest, with the horse as a means of transport, meant the genetics were spread widely”.

As well as developing new centromeres, chromosomes also reorder their genes during the course of evolution. The researchers found that 53% of horse genes appear on their chromosomes in the same order as they do in humans—in contradistinction to dogs, where the figure is 29%. Since, even with this relatively low level of synteny, as the relationship is called, dogs have proved useful in the study of some human diseases, the researchers hope that the high-synteny horse could be similarly illuminating.

They tested this by looking for the as-yet unknown genetic mutation involved in what is called the leopard complex. This afflicts spotted horses, particularly a breed called Appaloosas, with a form of night blindness similar to one that sometimes afflicts people. Horses with a single copy of the gene in question (inherited from either sire or dam) have white patches that contain polka dots. If they have two copies (one from each parent), they show no spots in their patches and are likely to suffer from night blindness. From millions of possibilities, the researchers were able to whittle the culprit down to being one of two candidates that reside in an area of the genome that is also responsible for coat markings. The dog may be man’s best friend, but his horse may thus prove to be more genetically helpful.

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/node/14793356

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Spirit bears become ‘invisible’

The benefits of being different

On a few islands in western Canada, white ‘spirit bears’ walk the woods.

Now scientists have discovered why these striking animals, a race of black bear, survive.

White bears are less visible to fish than their black counterparts, making them 30% more efficient at capturing salmon in the islands’ rivers.

Elsewhere, similar white bears appear rarely, probably because those that do become vulnerable to predators such as grizzly bears and wolves.

The researchers have published their findings in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.

Most black bears (Ursus americanus) in North America have a coat that is uniformly black.

That provides camouflage within the forest habitats in which most bears live.

However, the spirit bear, also known as the kermode bear (Ursus americanus kermodei), is a race of black bear that has a white coat.

The white fur is produced by a recessive form of a gene, or allele, that maintains itself in the black bear gene pool. This is much like how red hair occurs in humans.

This race of white bear has a restricted distribution, occurring mainly on Gribbell Island and Princess Royal Island off the coast of western Canada, 500 km north of Vancouver.

“The spirit bear is a total oddball,” says Dr Thomas Reimchen from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.

White black bears hardly ever appear in the general population.

Yet “here on these two small islands you suddenly get 20-30% of the bear being white,” says Dr Reimchen, who studied the animals with colleague Mr Dan Klinka.

Invisible bears

Rather than make the bears stand out, the white colour actually makes the bears disappear, the researchers discovered.

Each autumn, salmon fill the islands’ rivers as they migrate to their spawning grounds.

At night, black bears and white bears have similar rates of success at capturing salmon.

But the white bears come into their own during the day.

“In the daytime the white bear is 30% more efficient than a black bear in capturing salmon,” says Dr Reimchen.

The two researchers made the discovery by observing the hunting techniques of the two types of wild black bear, including bears stalking, lunging for and running after salmon.

“The white bear was more successful in any one of those techniques during the daytime compared to the black bear,” he says.

They also conducted experiments on the reaction of the salmon.

By draping themselves in white and black costumes, they confirmed that salmon try to evade white coloured objects far less than black.

“We hadn’t expected such a clear result as we got with our experimental work,” Dr Reimchen says.

“The salmon were twice as likely to return to the area with the white costume than the dark costume.”

The scientists believe that the white bears’ lighter colour makes them less visible to salmon in daytime, and that dark coloured predators are more easily spotted against the bright surface of the water.

Visible to some

That hunting prowess gives white bears a distinct advantage, with the salmon protein helping them better fatten up for the winter, and successfully raise young.

But if white coats are better, why don’t white bears exist in large numbers elsewhere among the black bear population?

Researchers suspect the coat makes white bears more vulnerable to other predators, which do not exist on Gribbell Island and Princess Royal Island.

“Probably one of the reasons they are not common on the mainland is grizzly bears kill black bears and wolves kill black bears,” Dr Reimchen says.

“The white bear may simply be at a disadvantage by nature of its visibility.”

It might also be that the genetic mutation that causes the white coat exists on these islands and nowhere else, and it persists because the bears are isolated.

The first nation Tsimshian people have a legend that the bear is a relic from a glacial age where it would be suited.

This is consistent with recent research that suggests coastal bears survived through glacial periods.

Disappear for good

The spirit bears’ future survival is not guaranteed, however.

Isotope analyses of the bears’ hair shows what they eat, and a study by the researchers reveals that white bears are much more dependent on salmon than their black counterparts.

But overfishing and habitat destruction have caused a dramatic decline in salmon numbers along the west coast of North America over the past 100 years.

“I would be dubious if the white bears persist when their salmon disappear, and they are almost gone already,” says Dr Reimchen.

“These bears do not have an opportunity to switch to anything else.”

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Full article and photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8344000/8344367.stm

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New Clues To Extinct Falklands Wolf Mystery

Falkland wolf (Dusicyon australis). (Original description: Canis antarcticus.) (Credit: Darwin, C. R. ed. 1838. Mammalia Part 2 No. 1 of The zoology of the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. By George R. Waterhouse.

Ever since the Falklands wolf was described by Darwin himself, the origin of this now-extinct canid found only on the Falkland Islands far off the east coast of Argentina has remained a mystery. Now, researchers reporting in the November 3rd issue of Current Biology who have compared DNA from four of the world’s dozen or so known Falklands wolf museum specimens to that of living canids offer new insight into the evolutionary ancestry of these enigmatic carnivores.

“One of the big draws for an evolutionary biologist is that this species had a big influence on Darwin’s ideas about how species evolve,” said Graham Slater of the University of California, Los Angeles, noting that Darwin recognized differences between the East Falkland and West Falkland wolves as evidence that species are not fixed entities. But the wolves’ circumstances were also just downright puzzling.

“It’s really strange that the only native mammal on an island would be a large canid,” Slater explained. “There are no other native terrestrial mammals — not even a mouse. It’s even stranger when you consider that the Falklands are some 480 kilometers from the South American mainland. The question is, how did they get there?”

Possible explanations for the wolves’ presence on the islands, which have never been connected to the South American mainland, range from dispersal by ice or logs to domestication and subsequent transport by Native Americans. Ultimately, the Falklands wolf died out because it was perceived as a threat to settlers and their sheep, although fur traders took out a lot of the population as well.

Biologists have also puzzled over the Falklands wolf’s ancestry. It had been suggested that they were related to domestic dogs, North American coyotes, or South American foxes. Slater said the wolves were the size of a coyote, but much stockier, with fur the color of a red fox. They had short muzzles, just like gray wolves, and thick, wooly fur.

Slater’s team now reports that the Falklands wolf’s closest living relative is actually the maned wolf — an unusually long-legged, fox-like South American canid. The researchers also found that the four Falklands wolf samples that they examined shared a common ancestor at least 70,000 years ago, which suggests that they arrived on the islands before the end of the last ice age and before humans ever made it into the New World. That rules out the prevailing theory that Native Americans had anything to do with their presence on the islands.

“The biggest surprise was that the divergence of the Falklands wolf from its closest living relative, the maned wolf, occurred over 6 million years ago,” Slater said. “Canids don’t show up in the South American fossil record until 2.5 million years ago, which means these lineages must have evolved in North America. The problem is that there are no good fossils that can be assigned to the Falklands wolf lineage in North America.”

Given that maned and Falklands wolves split so long ago, there should be fossils of their close relatives in South America, Slater said. And in fact, the researchers may have a candidate: a species from Patagonia called Dusicyon avus, which went extinct 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. Slater says that’s a possibility that study coauthor Alan Cooper at the University of Adelaide in Australia is further investigating now.

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Full article and photo: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091102121449.htm

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Great whites near shore more often than believed

Shark experts surprised by research in Pacific

White shark biologist Scot Anderson looks on as a large white shark glides past

For years, humans have thought of great white sharks wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore.

We were wrong.

Pacific white sharks spend months near the northern and central California coast between August and February foraging among elephant seals, sea lions and other prey, according to a new study published online Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. The team of 10 California-based researchers determined that these sharks probably pass close to populated beaches and have been spotted as far inland as the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, east of the Golden Gate Bridge.

“It shows you how wild it is off our West Coast of North America. This is Yellowstone,” said Stanford University marine sciences professor Barbara A. Block, who co-wrote the paper.

By tracking their movements, scientists determined that the fearsome predators make such precise, regular migrations each year between the California coast and the Hawaiian islands that they have become genetically distinct from their counterparts on the other side of the Pacific.

The fact that “a major concentration” of great whites can ignore the humans who might have crossed their path there “shows us the sharks are really minding their own business. The number of interactions with people is very small, considering,” said Stanford University post-doctoral scholar Salvador J. Jorgensen, the paper’s lead writer.

The findings represent nearly a decade of work, during which scientists tagged 179 great white sharks that roam the Pacific. They lured the creatures to their boat with a carpet decoy designed to look like a seal, and used a lance to attach the tags with the aid of 2.3-inch titanium darts.

They used three technologies to track the sharks’ movements: satellite tags, which archive travel data by measuring the light in the sea and using astronomical math to determine where they are swimming; acoustic tags, which register a precise location when a shark comes within about 820 feet of a receiver; and mitrochondrial DNA sampling, which maps the animals’ genetic lineage through their maternal line.

While researchers set up acoustic receivers in four central California locations where they knew the sharks would congregate — Año Nuevo Island, South Farallon Island, Point Reyes and Tomales Point — they discovered by accident that several white sharks entered the mouth of the San Francisco Bay. That is because the five great whites set off receivers established by another team, which had put them there to track migrating salmon.

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Tracking a predator

Scientists spent eight years tracking the movements of 179 great white sharks and discovered that these predators have very predictable migration patterns between Hawaii and the North American coast. Dots below show approximate locations where 68 sharks tagged with satellite sensors were recorded at various times.

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Just as important, the scientists were able to determine through satellite tagging that great whites left the California coastline each winter and traveled 1,240 to 3,100 miles to the Hawaiian islands. Scientists have called a certain location along the route the white shark cafe, because they suspect that mating or foraging may take place there.

Tagging records from May and June show that male white sharks “converge in a very specific area of the cafe,” Jorgensen said, while female sharks move in and out of the area. “It adds a little more evidence to the argument that this could be an important reproductive area.”

Jorgensen said the great whites swimming off California probably descended from migrants that came from areas near Australia and New Zealand during the late Pleistocene Epoch, as many as 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.

The new findings have several significant conservation implications for great whites, which rank as one of the world’s most protected shark species. Researchers are conducting a census of the creatures off California’s coast because their exact numbers are unknown, and they may be able to identify areas of their migration routes that need additional protection.

Even Block, however, said she looks at places such as Carmel Point with a new perspective now that she knows the extent to which white sharks frequent the area. The scientists hope to put additional receivers near popular beaches to monitor shark movements.

“When I go to the beach there, I look at it differently,” she said. “These animals are coming in so close to shore because that’s where the pinnipeds [seals and sea lions] are.”

Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post

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Full article and photo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/03/AR2009110303028.html

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