The Oekologie Times

News and Views in Ecology and the Biological Sciences: Sixth Edition
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Late Evening Edition ~Northern Suburbs
Partly Cloudy, 83 Degrees ~25 cents

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Horns of a Dilemma

Tim Abbott
Should a globally rare and endangered species ever be subject to legally permitted trophy hunting? I’m not talking about commercial whaling thinly veiled as scientific research, or the taking of a handful of elephants from robustly growing populations to provide for the conservation of the rest. No, what has set my teeth on edge are the continuation of fully sanctioned trophy hunting quotas established for southern African black rhino populations by The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Namibia and South Africa in 2004. Lifting the ban allowed both southern African countries to cull 5 rhinos each annually, and was upheld last week at the CITES meeting in The Hague.
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They Eat Their Own

Jennifer Forman Orth
A new study coming out of Australia suggests that cane toads (Bufo marinus) purposely attract their young with the intention of eating them - ABC News Australia has the report. Researchers at the University of Sydney observed the adult cane toads wiggling their toes in a way that encouraged young toads to come close. When they got too close, they got gobbled up. Laboratory experiments (albeit odd ones) indicated that the cane toads have evolved to do their toe wiggling at exactly the right frequency to incite the young toads, likely because they think they’ve found an insect to prey upon.
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Waking up to humanity’s most urgent challenge

G.I.M.
I write often about specific topics within the categories, “population growth” and “corporate economic growth” as they link to to environmental degradation. It seems, however, the larger message concerning the broad impacts of these kinds of growth has yet to gain much traction in the media. It’s time, therefore, to consider what’s at stake if we do not address forthrightly the growth of the human population and our unceasing push for corporate economic growth. I hope to make clear that humanity’s most urgent challenge has little to do with the topics currently making headlines. It is, instead, clearly ecological in nature. Of this we need much more awareness if we hope to achieve solutions.
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Birds Are In Trouble!

Byline: Coturnix
The authors of a recent paper collected information about all known ranges of land birds and made a mathematical model for predicting how those ranges will be affected by global warming on one hand and the land-use on the other by years 2050 and 2100. They use four Millennium Ecosystem Assessment scenarios. Two of those scenarios assume a global response to environmental problems and two assume a local (fragmented) response. Also, two of them assume a proactive approach to environmental threats, while the other two predict that most problems will be dealt with reactively, i.e., after they happen.
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World News Summary

New Hummingbird Species Discovered

Grrrl Scientist, Staff Reporter
According to ornithologists, the Gorgeted Puffleg has been discovered living in the cloud forests of southwestern Colombia. Despite its recent discovery, this stunning rare hummingbird that has violet blue plumage and iridescent green on its throat, is already endangered by the environmentally damaging illegal drugs industry.

“We were essentially following a hunch,” said Alexander Cortés-Diago of the Hummingbird Conservancy in Colombia and co-discoverer of Gorgeted Puffleg. “We had heard that a new species of plant had been discovered in the region in 1994. This discovery and the isolation of the Serrania led us to believe there could also be new species of vertebrates.”
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Limbless Lizard Discovered in India

Grrrl Scientist, Staff Reporter
A new species of limbless lizard was discovered in eastern India, an Indian zoologist revealed today. The newly found 18-centimetre-long lizard (pictured above) resembles a small, scaly snake and it prefers to live in a cool retreat with soft soil.
“The lizard is new to science and is an important discovery. It is not found anywhere else in the world,” Sushil Kumar Dutta, head of the zoology department of at North Orissa University in the eastern Indian town of Baripada.
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Oekologie is a traveling blog carnival reviewing the best ecology and environmental science posts of the month from all across the blogosphere. The last edition is to be found here, at The Voltage Gate, and the next edition will be found here, at The Evangelical Ecologist.
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Section 2 ~ Paleo News

The news that is not so new

Ancient bones tell a horrific story. Details on Page 22.

Ancient Shroom Preserved in Amber

Grrrl Scientist, Staff Reporter
A 100-million-year-old piece of amber was recently found with an ancient mushroom embedded inside. The amber specimen was collected approximately one year ago in Burma by Ron Buckley, a registered nurse, photographer and collector of amber fossils who lives in Florence, Kentucky.

“I knew right away what it was when I looked at it under the microscope,” said Buckley, who has been collecting amber fossils for the past eight years.
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Giant Roadrunner-like Dinosaur Fossil Discovered

Grrrl Scientist, Staff Reporter
Scientists in China revealed that they found a giant bird whose fossilized bones measure 8 meters (26 feet) in length, 5 meters (16 feet) tall and which weighed 1,400 kilograms (3,000 pounds) and lived 85 million years ago. The fossil was uncovered in the Erlian Basin of northern China’s Inner Mongolia, said Xu Xing, a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology & Paleoanthropology in Beijing who co-authored a paper about the find that was published in the journal Nature. This feathered but flightless specimen challenges the prevailing hypothesis about the evolution of birds.
Staff Writer, Grrrl Scientist
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The Agonized Deaths of Dinosaurs Captured in Stone

Grrrl Scientist, Staff Reporter
If you’ve looked at the articulated 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx fossils, you probably have noticed that they all have a weirdly similar pose; their heads are thrown over their backs, mouths open and tail curved upwards. Scientists have been puzzled for years by what caused this distinctive pose, but now two paleontologists propose an explanation: this characteristic posture was the result of agonized death throes triggered by brain damage and suffocation.

This position is not unusual for intact fossils; many dinosaurs and their relatives, as well as many early mammals, exhibit this classic head-back pose. The usual explanation provided by paleontologists is either that the animals died in water and the currents drifted the bones into that position, or that rigor mortis or drying muscles, tendons and ligaments contorted the limbs.
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Local News

Marauding Leopards Captured Trying To Answer Ringing Cell Phones

Grrrl Scientist, Staff Reporter
Just image this: you live in a remote village in India and late one night, you awaken to find that a hungry leopard has wandered into town, and could attack people. What do you do? If you are one of the forest guards in the state of Gujarat, you have prepared for this event by downloading special ringtones onto your cell phone that sound like cows and goats, and you will use that to lure the marauding leopard into a cage.
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Psychedelic Fluorescent Purple Frog Found in Suriname

Grrrl Scientist, Staff Reporter
When scientists investigate new areas of the wilderness, they often discover insect species that are new to science, but last year, a group of researchers went in to the highlands in the South American country of Suriname and found 24 new species of animals, including a spectacular fluorescent purple frog in the genus Atelopus. The frog’s skin is covered with irregular fluorescent lavender loops over a background of aubergine, which is the deep reddish purple-brown color of aubergines (eggplants).
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The Return of the Rimatara Lory

Grrrl Scientist, Staff Reporter
My life’s passion is the birds of the South Pacific, particularly the Loriinae, which are parrots commonly known as the lories and lorikeets. I study them professionally and I have lived with them and bred them for most of my life. So it was exciting to me when I learned that one of my favorite lory species, the endangered Rimatara lorikeet or Kuhl’s lory, Vini kuhlii, experienced a conservation triumph several weeks ago: twenty-seven of the parrots were translocated from the island of Rimatara, in the Cook islands where a small population still exists, to the island of Atiu, where they had been driven to extinction by the Maori hunters several hundred years ago. Officials hope that this homecoming will lead to establishment of a reserve population of the endangered birds.
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Books and Blogs

Reviews of current offerings from the world of words

Direction not Destination

James Millington
Daniel Botkin’s Renegade Blog
Daniel Botkin, eminent Ecologist and author of Discordant Harmonies, has recently started a blog called Reflections of a renegade naturalist. Two recent posts caught my eye.
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Forty Signs of Rain

Grrrl Scientist, Staff Reporter
A friend of mine who is an editor at Random House Publishers sent me a fascinating book about global warming that I think qualifies as “LabLit.” LabLit is short for “Laboratory Literature”; a new genre of fictional science literature that realistically portrays scientists working and living during contemporary times.
This book, Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson (NYC, Bantam Books: 2004), is a peek into the lives of scientist, Anna Quibler, who works for the National Science Foundation (NSF), and her stay-at-home husband, Charlie, who telecommutes as the environmental advisor to Senator Phil Chase. The book also follows Anna’s ascerbic and somewhat mysterious colleague, Frank Vanderwal, a fellow scientist on leave for one year from a biomedical research lab on the West Coast so he can also work at NSF.
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Opinon

Conservation on the EDGE

Jeremy Bruno
About a week or so back I actually checked my MySpace account to find an invite from a new conservation organization called EDGE: Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered, sponsored by the Zoological Society of London. NGOs nowadays are a dime a dozen, valuable but virtually identical. EDGE, however, seems to have, well, an edge.
They published a paper describing the application of their plan in PLoS One, my new favorite publication (a ton of ecology stuff, free and open access). EDGE is based on a relatively simple idea; they seek to prioritize mammalian conservation practice with phylogeny in mind. That’s where the Evolutionary Distinctiveness (ED) comes in. Basically, individual species represent a trove of sorts of evolutionary history. In the author’s words,
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Global Warming Is a Good Thing.

Zenofeller
Let’s sit down and do a bit of math, shall we. The total dry land found on this here Earth stands at 148.9 million square kilometers. Some portions of that land are nice. Some portions and bearable. And some portions are simply uninhabitable.

Take, say, Antarctica. It’s 14 million km². The total population, however, is 27 as of 2003. That comes to about one million km² per capita. Not exactly well developed, is it ? I wonder why. O, wait, it’s fucking cold there, it’s like the North Pole and all, right ? Right.
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Were We Glad the Ribble Was at Low Tide?

S.T.R.

Yes.

Were we glad that the Ribble doesn’t have a barrage, keeping the riverwater at a permanent high level so that the tide never goes out?

You bet.
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Climate Change, Land Use, and Bird Diversity

John Beetham
A study published this week in the open-access journal, PLoS Biology, argues that many species of birds face range reduction due to climate change and landscape alteration. Approximately 400 of the 8750 species studied will lose more than half of their range by 2050. That number could rise to 900-1,800 species by 2100. The largest effects on bird diversity are expected to occur in the tropics because many ranges there are already small.

The study used four scenarios for climate change and land alteration derived from Millennium Ecosystem Assessment models. The scenarios present the likely future distribution of 18 types of land cover under different models of economic development (globalization vs. regionalization) and conservation actions (proactive vs. reactive). Maps created from those scenarios were compared against the current distribution of 8,750 birds (pdf) to identify species that are likely to suffer range loss. (1,125 species (pdf) were not included; most of these appear to be waterfowl, seabirds, gulls, and waders, which are somewhat less dependent on land cover.)
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Health and beauty

If you can’t stand the heat, get infected!

Geospiza News Services
Are viral and fungal infections always a bad thing?

Maybe not if you’re a plant.

In fact, if you’re a plant trying to grow in the hot (65° C) soils of Yellowstone National Park, you’re going to need all the help you can get.
A new study by Márquez, et.al. (1) found that a type of grass (Dichanthelium lanuginosum) is able to grow in the hot soils of Yellowstone National Park because it gets help from some friends. A fungal friend. And that fungal friend is infected with a virus.
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Relationships

Cicadas Plead for Love

Grrrl Scientist, Staff Reporter
After seventeen years underground, immature cicadas are now emerging as full-fledged adults, ready to breed. Adult cicadas live, feed, and breed above ground for approximately two to six weeks before they die. The dark-colored insects are between one and two inches long with transparent veined wings, prominent red eyes and undeniable acoustic talents: the males produce a tremendously loud courtship song that sounds like a combination of a whirring blender and a lawn mover. Basically, cicadas are the most efficient and loudest sound-producing insects in the world.

“I’d be out in the trees working, and have someone five feet from me. We couldn’t talk to one another because you couldn’t hear them,” recalled Tom Tiddens, supervisor of plant healthcare for the Chicago Botanic Garden, of the 1990 cicada eruption.
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Scorpionfly ejaculation

B.E. Matt
Traditional sperm competition theory predicts that rival males will compete not only antagonistically (sperm scoopers, etc), but also numerically (I’ll inseminate more sperm that you do) with rival males. Basically, when females are limiting, and sperm is cheap and limitless, aside from mate guarding, maximization of fertilization success comes with maximization of the ratio:

your sperm : rival male(s) sperm

More recently, researchers have started to recognize that while sperm production is cheap relative to eggs, it’s production is by no means trivial. This adds complexity to the otherwise simple ejaculatory rule. While the current paper by Leif Engqvist in a forthcoming issue of Evolution hints at this complexity, in reality I suspect that the decision is much more complicated.
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Travel and Leisure

Should national natural environments be commoditised for the sake of tourism?

Abdulla Yasir, Travel Editor

Provided herein is a polarised arguement that I prepared for a debate organised amongst MA Tourism 2006/7 students. Thanks to Shahuru and Saud who bombarded me with great thoughts and hypothesis.

Tourism provides great many positive contributions to an environment; unparallel to any other industry in the world today. It allows earths’ inhabitants to use their environment for their environmental and economic benefits. Tourism helps the world acknowledge ones ownership of an environment, restoration and conservation of these national natural and historic assets, preservation of bio diversity, and global safety and security.

Environment is god given; and is the only resource that humanity is born with. If we don’t use our natural environment, it is only as useful as an unknown planet, a thousand light years away in the galaxy. Importantly the distinction between something that we have and others have is our ability to use what we have. It is only by commoditisation that we claim ownership of an environment. Hence, we are supposed to use our natural environment, commoditise it and preserve it through commoditisation.
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The Sucker-Disk Bats of Costa Rica

Brian Switek
When I was 10 or 11 years old, I made a terrible mistake. Pondering the 2 and 1/2 inch wide suction cup that held my plastic basketball hoop to the back of my door, I wondered if it would stick should I apply it to my forehead. The experiment was a success, the suction cup proving somewhat difficult to remove, but I only learned of my folly when my mother asked what in the world had happened to my head. I lied, concocting an elaborate story about how I had tripped and fell, my forehead landing on the upturned cup, but my mother immediately recognized the fib and I told the truth. This did not save me from being called “Hickey-Head” for the next week of school, and I duly learned my lesson.
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Birds of the Caatinga

Birdfreak
One of Brazil’s five major biomes is the Caatinga, located in the northeast part of the country. It not as not nearly as popular as the Amazon Rainforest and very little of it is protected. The Caatinga biome has very wet and very dry seasons, but is always hot. There is great biodiversity, but it is hard to figure out how much because so much has been destroyed.
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Home and Garden

Growing an old-growth forest

Via Negativa, Home and Garden Editor
A couple weeks ago, my mother gave a short walking tour to a couple of guests who were seeing our woods for the first time. “It looks like something out of the Lord of Rings!” they exclaimed. I guess if you’re used to looking at younger forests, the portions of Plummer’s Hollow that have avoided lumbering since the mid- to late-19th century might look pretty impressive by comparison. Our forest doesn’t yet meet even the most minimal definitions of old growth — for example, a median age of half of the dominant tree species’ maximum longevity in the majority of stands — but it does exceed by several decades the average age of private or public forests in Pennsylvania, and is beginning to acquire a number of standard old-growth characteristics that add up, perhaps, to a general impression of enchantment.
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The Slow Loris: Too Cute To Live

Grrrl Scientist, Staff Reporter

Aww, isn’t this cuddly little creature simply adorable??
Apparently thousands of people from around the world agree with you because the slow loris, a small nocturnal and arboreal animal that is endemic to much of Asia, is experiencing population declines due to habitat destruction and trapping for the pet trade.
They certainly make ideal pets because they are small, quiet, and easy to keep in captivity. Slow lorises vary in color from grey to white depending on their species. Additionally, they are certainly cute: their face is round, with large eyes and small ears. They have plump bodies with short limbs, strong grasping hands and feet, and opposable thumbs. The slow loris’s fur coat is dense, woolly and soft, and they have dark rings around their eyes and a dark stripe running along their back. Its short tail is entirely concealed by fur.
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Funny Pages

crossword

cartoons

These words have to do with nature/ecology. Unscramble them. Have fun!

• eerycl
• akrb
• lepsto
• dceure
• uesre
• ecttoiarpinip
• wdorodeapoervatoni
• ioedcstnn

[More games here!]