The characteristic koalas, kangaroos, possums and wombats of Australia share a common American ancestor, according to genetic research from Germany.


A University of Muenster team drew up a marsupial family tree based on DNA.

Writing in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology journal, they suggest a single marsupial species moved from the Americas to Australia.

Marsupials differ from other mammals in that mothers carry their young in a pouch after birth.

As well as the familiar Australian species, the family includes the opossums and shrew opossums of North and South America, and also has a presence in Asian countries including Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

"I think this is pretty strong evidence now for the hypothesis of a single migration [to Australia] and a common ancestor," said Juergen Schmitz, one of the research team.

Tracing relatives

The research was made possible by the recent sequencing of genomes from two marsupials - the gray short-tailed opossum (Monodelphis domestica) from South America, and the Australian tammar wallaby (Macropus eugenii).

The Muenster researchers looked for DNA elements called retroposons.

These are fragments that have been copied and inserted back into DNA in a random fashion at some point during the animal's evolutionary history.

They are among the "jumping genes" that can scatter genetic information along the genome.

If two species carry the same retroposon but a third does not, that indicates that the first two are more closely related to each other than they are to the third.

Sometimes one retroposon is inserted in the middle of another, again giving vital clues as to the sequence of events in a family's evolution.

Using this method, they showed that the American opossums separated from the main lineage first.


Then at some stage an ancestral species migrated to Australia and gave rise to the various families found there now.

When exactly this happened is still unknown, as this kind of analysis does not show when in evolutionary time the retroposons were inserted.

"Maybe it's around 30-40 million years ago, but we cannot say because jumping genes do not give this information," Dr Schmitz told BBC News.

"It's now up to other people, maybe from the palaeontology field, to find out when exactly it happened."

The overall marsupial history is virtually a circular migration.

The earliest identified species (Sinodelphys szalayi) is known from 125-million-year-old fossils found in China.

Subsequently the family - or perhaps a single species - moved across the super-continent of Gondwana into what is now South America.

The marsupial family began expanding about 70-80 million years ago.

After crossing into Australia, they penetrated north into the Indonesian archipelago - almost returning to their Chinese homeland.

source (and photos): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10774536

The Asian Rhino Foundation was founded in April 2006 by Maaike Leenen and Jeroen Rijnierse, students of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. No other organization in the Netherlands, or elsewhere on the European mainland, had a foundation focusing on the Asian rhino species and the local community.

You can click here to go directly to the article.

Many thanks to the Asian Rhino Foundation for providing us with the article.

Researchers have discovered the fossilised remains of an ancient whale with huge, fearsome teeth.

Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists have dubbed the 12 million-year-old creature "Leviathan".

It is thought to have been more than 17m long, and might have engaged in fierce battles with other giant sea creatures from the time.

Leviathan was much like the modern sperm whale in terms of size and appearance.

But that is where the similarity ends. While the sperm whale is a relatively passive animal, sucking in squid from the depths of the ocean, Leviathan was an aggressive predator.

According to Dr Christian de Muizon, director of the Natural History Museum in Paris, Leviathan could have hunted out and fed on large sea creatures such as dolphins, seals and even other whales.

"It was a kind of a sea monster," he said.

"And it's interesting to note that at the same time in the same waters was another monster, which was a giant shark about 15m long. It's possible that they might have fought each other".

The researchers speculate that Leviathan was able to feed on very large prey up to 8m long. It would catch the prey in its huge jaws and tear it apart quickly and effectively with its giant teeth.

A 3m-long fossilised skull of the creature was discovered by researchers in southern Peru in 2008. Dr de Muizon's student, Olivier Lambert was among them.

"It was the last day of our field trip when one of our colleagues came and told us that he thought he'd found something very interesting. So we joined him and he showed it to us," he said.

"We immediately saw that it was a very large whale and when we looked closer we saw it was a giant sperm whale with huge teeth."

The teeth were more than twice the length and diameter of those found in modern sperm whales and they were on the upper and lower jaws.

Sperm whales only have teeth on their lower jaw.

Dr Lambert and his colleagues had speculated that such a fierce creature might once have existed on the basis of discoveries of individual teeth.

Now, the discovery of the skull means that the Leviathan is not merely the stuff of myth and legend.

"Finally we found it," said Dr Lambert. " It was a very exciting moment".

The researchers do not know why this ancient whale died out. They speculate that the ecology and environment changed so that the creature had to change its feeding habits.

That may have led to the emergence of today's much gentler sperm whales, with the carnivorous niche filled by killer whales as conditions swung back again.

The authors of the report in Nature, who are all whale experts, are fans of the novel Moby Dick, which involves a ferocious white sperm whale.

So taken are they with the novel that they decided to dedicate their discovery to the author, Herman Melville, and give the creature its full scientific name of Leviathan melvillei.

source (and photos): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_ ... 461066.stm

Images of oil-covered birds are among the most vivid symbols of the wildlife damage wrought by the Deepwater Horizon spill. The brown pelican, which graces the Louisiana state flag and was just brought back from the brink of extinction last year, has been hit especially hard.

As of Monday night, 1,007 damaged birds have been catalogued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Of those, 594 were found dead and the remaining 413 birds were brought to rehabilitation centers like the one at Fort Jackson, La., run by the International Bird Rescue Research Center, along with federal and Louisiana state wildlife officials.

Once brought to Fort Jackson, the birds are treated for dehydration and are fed before the difficult clean-up operation begins. They are first bathed in warm vegetable oil, followed by a scrubbing in dishwashing liquid. The birds are closely monitored by veternarians like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife's Sharon Taylor, who release recovered birds back into the wild.

Taylor told the NewsHour during a recent reporting trip that the number of birds rescued is "small compared to the number of animals that are directly impacted -- that we were either never able to find because they were lost out at sea, or that scavengers got onshore, so it's a small percentage of the numbers actually impacted by the oil spill."

Please visit the website to watch a short video update: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/201 ... risis.html?

source: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/201 ... risis.html?

Cane toads, one of the world's most destructive invasive species, have started killing native wildlife outside of Australia.

Cane toads are poisonous, secreting a toxin that kills predators not adapted to eat them, and as a result the toads have caused a decline in native Australian reptiles and marsupials.

Now scientists have discovered that the toads are also killing boa snakes in the West Indies, suggesting that other predators in the Caribbean and elsewhere may also be at risk.

The cane toad is a large toad species, which secretes a powerful bufogenin toxin.

Its native range extends from northern South America through Central America and into the southern United States.

In the early to mid 19th Century, the toad was intentionally introduced to islands in the Caribbean, including Jamaica in 1844, and then through the South Pacific.

The toad was introduced to eat and control pests of sugar cane, including rats and beetles.

However, the toad has had a destructive impact in many places where it has spread, out-competing native species.

More recently, the toad has devastated populations of amphibian predators, including large lizards, snakes and marsupials, in Australia.


The threat there continues to grow as the toads spread west across the country from Queensland into New South Wales and the Northern Territory.

Cane toads are so prevalent in Australia that people in the Australian state of Queensland have even taken part in a mass capture of the poisonous amphibians, as part of a collective effort at pest control.

Threat widens

Now scientists have documented the cane toad killing rare native fauna in the Carribean.

Dr Byron Wilson, at the University of West Indies in Jamaica, and his colleagues there and in the US have found numerous examples of cane toads poisoning Jamaican boas (Epicrates subflavus), large predatory snakes that are endemic to the island of Jamaica.

The boa, also known as the yellow snake, is Jamaica's top native terrestrial predator.

Already rare, the snake is threatened by habitat destruction and introduced dogs and pigs.

"To our knowledge, this is the first report of cane toads causing mortality in naturally occurring predators outside of Australia," say the authors in the journal Biological Invasions.

"Although cane toads have been present on Jamaica for more than 160 years, it is clear from our observations that Jamaican boas have not yet learnt to avoid this toxic prey species."

The researchers now fear that the toads could pose a threat to the snake across its island range.

They also worry that other species in Jamaica and on other Caribbean islands are at risk from bufotoxin poisoning.

source (and photos): http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_ne ... 728758.stm

Humpback whales form lasting bonds, the first baleen whales known to do so.

Individual female humpbacks reunite each summer to feed and swim alongside one another in the Gulf of St Lawrence, off Canada, scientists have found.

Toothed whales, such as sperm whales, associate with one another, but larger baleen whales, which filter their food, have been thought less social.

The finding raises the possibility that commercial whaling may have broken apart social groups of whales.

Friends reunited

Details of the discovery are published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

Dr Christian Ramp and colleagues of the Mingan Island Cetacean Study group based in St Lambert, Canada have been studying whales in the Gulf of St Lawrence since 1997.

Together with researchers from Germany and Sweden, the scientists are recording the movements of baleen whales including blue, fin, minke and humpback whales, adding to a set of data that stretches back 30 years.


Baleen whales, which are the largest of all whales, possess huge baleen plates in their mouths, which they use to filter out small prey such as krill and plankton from the water.

Using photographic identification techniques, the researchers can spot which individual whales appear from one year to the next.

During this study, they have found that the same humpback whales reunite each year.

Having spent the rest of the year apart migrating and breeding, individual humpbacks somehow find each other again in the open ocean each summer, spending the season feeding together.

The longest recorded friendships lasted six years, and always occurred between similar-aged females, and never between females and males.

"I was very surprised by the prolonged duration," Dr Ramp told the BBC.

"I was expecting stable associations within one season, not beyond. I was particularly surprised by the fact that only females form these bonds, especially females of similar age."

Underwater enigma

The discovery has puzzled the researchers who made it.

"In toothed whales, you find strong bonds in killer whales, between entire families, and sperm whales between females and juveniles. They basically stay together all their life. There are also strong associations in bottlenose dolphins," Dr Ramp adds.

But "as far as we know, baleen whales are regarded as less social than toothed whales."

There is some evidence that humpbacks in Alaska form stable groups to feed on herring, and female right whales are thought to be more gregarious than males.

However, until now, baleen whales have not been known to reestablish bonds between individuals from one year to the next.

Forming such friendships clearly benefited the female humpbacks, as those that had the most stable and long-lasting associations gave birth to the most calves.

Dr Ramp and his colleagues suspect that the whales form bonds to improve their feeding efficiency each year.

"Staying together for a prolonged period of time requires a constant effort. That means that they feed together, but likely also rest together. So an individual is adapting its behaviour to another one."

How the whales find each other each summer is also an enigma.

"It's an excellent question and I would like to know the answer," says Dr Ramp.

"Where do they meet, and how do they recognise each other?"

He suspects the whales use sound to find and recognise other individuals.

Whaling wipe out

So far, studies on blue and fin whales suggest that these species do not form such friendships.

But the discovery that humpbacks do might have further implications.

Dr Ramp speculates that humpback whales associating with one another may have made it easier for them to be caught in the past by commercial whalers.

As yet, there is no evidence to support this. But if that did occur, it would also mean that whaling may have removed social groups of humpbacks, and their preference to form friendships with other whales.

"Maybe the social traits are re-evolving due to rebounding populations, or they are completely different to the ones before, due to changes in the environment."

source (and photos): http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_ne ... 722626.stm

Saltwater crocodiles enjoy catching a wave and can travel hundreds of kilometres by "surfing" on ocean currents, a study suggests. Australian researchers used sonar sensors and satellite transmitters to monitor 20 reptiles' movements.


They found the crocodiles undertook numerous trips of over 10km (6.2 miles), but only when a current flowed in their direction of travel.

The results of the research appear in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

The TV personality Steve Irwin, who was nicknamed The Crocodile Hunter, but died in 2006, took part in the study.

Estuarine or saltwater crocodiles are the world's largest reptiles and can grow up to 5.5m in length.

They are poor swimmers and mainly live in salt water - but their "home" spans over thousands of kilometres of the south-east Pacific.

Researchers have long been puzzled by how crocodiles managed to spread themselves so widely.

"Of all the amazing things animals can do, the ability of certain species to migrate significant distances across formidable geographical barriers is one of the most remarkable," write the authors of the recent study.

Although the crocodiles spend most of their life in salt water, they are not considered marine animals as they rely on land for food and water.

The open sea

During the research, a team led by Dr Hamish Campbell, from the University of Queensland, captured 20 crocodiles living in the North Kennedy tidal river in Queensland, northern Australia, and tagged them with satellite transmitters.

They found that during the period of study, eight of them ventured out into the open ocean. One travelled from the river mouth all the way to the west coast of the Cape York Peninsula, in Queensland's far north. That amounts to a total of 590km covered over 25 days.

To do that, the ocean-trotter hitched a ride on a current within the Gulf of Carpentaria (that separates Cape York from Arnhem Land, to the west). This current occurs seasonally, during the summer monsoon.

"[These crocodiles] can survive for long periods in saltwater without eating or drinking, so by only travelling when surface currents are favourable, they would be able to move long distances by sea," commented Dr Campbell.

It took another adventurer - a 4.84m-long male - just 20 days to go more than 411km from from the east coast of Australia's Cape York Peninsula through the Torres Strait (which divides Australia from New Guinea) to the Wenlock River on the west coast of Cape York.

When the crocodile arrived in the Torres Strait, strong currents were flowing in the opposite direction to where it was headed.

So the animal waited in a sheltered bay for four days and continued its trip when the currents changed direction.

Important clues

The scientists also tagged 27 crocodiles with sonar transmitters and spent a year tracking their every move inside the North Kennedy River with underwater receivers.

They found that both male and female crocodiles regularly travelled more than 50km from home, swimming to the river mouth and back.

But the team discovered that crocodiles would only set out on a long journey within an hour of the tide changing. This allowed them to "catch a wave".

They put their trips on hold when the tides reversed, moving out of the river and on to the banks.

Dr Campbell said that the results of the study gave important clues to understanding the evolution of the world's largest reptiles.

"This not only helps to explains how estuarine crocodiles move between oceanic islands, but also contributes to the theory that crocodilians have crossed major marine barriers during their evolutionary past," he said.

source (and photos): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_ ... 260382.stm

21st Century Tiger is a wild tiger conservation partnership between the Zoological Society of London and Global Tiger Patrol which raises funds for carefully chosen tiger conservation projects.

You can click here to go directly to the article.

Many thanks to 21st Century Tiger for providing us with the article.

Scientists have found the first animals that can survive and reproduce entirely without oxygen, deep on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea.

The team, led by Roberto Danovaro from Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy, found three new species from the Loricifera group.

He told BBC World Service they were about a millimetre in size and looked like jellyfish in a protective shell.

"We plan to go back and see if there are new surprises for us," he added.

One of the three new Loriciferans (so-called because of their protective layer, or lorica) has already been officially named Spinoloricus Cinzia, after the professor's wife.

The other two, currently designated Rugiloricus and Pliciloricus, have still to be formally described.

They were discovered in the course of three oceanographic expeditions conducted over a decade in order to search for living fauna in the sediment of the Mediterranean's L'Atalante basin.

The basin, 200km (124m) off the western coast of Crete, is about 3.5km (2.2m) deep and is almost entirely depleted of oxygen, or anoxic.

Eggs included

Bodies of multicellular animals have been found previously in sediment taken from an anoxic area - or "dead zone" - of the Black Sea, Professor Danovaro told BBC News. But these were believed at the time to be remains of organisms which had sunk there from adjacent oxygenated areas.

What the team found in the L'Atalante dead zone was three species of living animals, two of which contained eggs.

Although it was not possible to extract the animals alive in order to show that they could live without oxygen, the team was able to incubate the eggs in anoxic conditions aboard on the ship.

The eggs hatched successfully in a completely oxygen-free environment.

"It is a real mystery how these creatures are able to live without oxygen because until now we thought only bacteria could do this," said Professor Danovaro, who heads Italy's Association of Limnology (the study of inland waters).

"We did not think we could find any animal living there. We are talking about extreme conditions - full of salt, with no oxygen."

The discovery of the new Loriciferans represents, he said, a "tremendous adaptation for animals which evolved in oxygenated conditions".

Dead zones in the world's oceans, he added, were expanding all the time.

Commenting in the journal BMC Biology, Lisa Levin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said that before this discovery, "no one had found [animals] capable of living and reproducing entirely in the absence of oxygen".

"Loriciferans are rarely reported," she noted.

"Whether they were overlooked or are exceedingly rare and thus not sampled is unclear. Perhaps scientists have been looking for them in all the wrong places."

Considering the implications of creatures which can exist without oxygen, she said that greater study of animal-microbe interactions in the extreme environment of Earth's oceans could help answer questions about the possibility of life existing on other planets with different atmospheres.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8609246.stm

JAIPUR: Tourist haven Ranthambore woke up to a grisly morning on Monday: a tiger had killed a man on the forest’s periphery. The tiger had gone for the man’s throat and shoulders.

So, is there a man-eater at large in Ranthambore which sees a steady stream of visitors, including VVIPs like Priyanka Gandhi and Sheila Dixit? Forest officials were quick to deny this, arguing that this was an accident.

“There are canine marks on the shoulder and throat of the man. Though the buttocks of the man appear to be eaten, we are ruling out that this was done by the tiger. He must have been eaten later by jackals which also roam in the area,” an official of the state forest department said.

But the rare occurrence has left forest officials worried. The last time a tiger killed a man in the state was in the early 1990s. This happened in Sariska, when a big cat mauled a sadhu.

This time, the tiger killed a 50-year-old villager Badri Kumar on Sunday morning. The body was recovered on Monday morning when his relatives began searching for him after he did not return home Sunday night.

A resident of Edna-Shayampura village on the periphery of the national park, Badri had gone looking for wood with his donkey near Darrah, on the edge of the forest. The donkey, too, was killed. The man’s body has been sent for post-mortem.
“The reason why we are ruling out that the buttocks of the person was eaten by the tiger is because if it had begun eating him, it would obviously have eaten a lot more,” the official added. They are now trying to identify the tiger from the pug marks.

“We have recovered a partially chopped tree in the forest area. It appears that after hacking the tree he was loading the wood on the donkey when the tiger attacked,” an official said.

At this Badri must have either raised an alarm or tried to pelt stones at the tiger. “Irritated by this, the tiger retaliated and attacked him,” the official added.

The body of Badri was recovered about 100 metres away from the body of the donkey. The donkey had been partially eaten by the tiger.

“Since no one was a witness to the incident most of what we are drawing up are inferences after visiting the area. Had the person run away he would not have been attacked by the tiger. We think it was a male tiger for the males are aggressive and attack when pelted with stones,” the official said.

But doesn’t a tiger which tastes human blood turn man-eater? Officials, however, ruled this out. “This killing was purely accidental. In the case of a man-eater, the tiger specially hunts human beings and kills them for food. But here the tiger did not damage the man’s body,” the official said.

source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home ... 713952.cms

Two adult tigers on Saturday escaped from an enclosure at the Assam State Zoo in Guwahati,triggering panic among nearly 10,000 visitors who were inside the zoo at that time, wildlife officials said.

A zoo spokesperson said the two big cats managed to sneak out of their iron enclosure when three animal keepers were disinfecting it by opening one of the cage doors.

"The two tigers came out of the enclosure and started walking lazily in the open leading to great amount of panic and fear," zoo warden Narayan Mahanta said.

The zoo, the only one in Assam, was teeming with people with an estimated 10,000 visitors inside the premises when the two tigers walked out of the enclosure.

"We immediately evacuated the visitors and tried to locate the cats before tranquilising one of them relaxing by the side of a pool inside the zoo," Mahanta said.

A large contingent of police and wildlife officials rushed to the zoo and managed to tranquilise the other tiger around noon.

"The entire operation took us about three hours before both the cats were tranquilised and taken to safety. They are now under observation by a team of veterinarians," the zoo warden said.

No one was injured with the tigers slowly walking around the zoo even as thousands of visitors simply ran for their lives seeing the cats on the prowl.

"We were terrified to see the two big tigers majestically walking past and simply ran for life," a visibly shocked Arun Das, a college student, said.

"I saw the tigers from say a distance of about 20 feet from me."

Zoo authorities have since ordered a probe to find out how the tigers managed to get out of the enclosure that also houses seven other big cats.

"We have already begun a high level enquiry into the incident, although I must say all the animal keepers engaged in the zoo are dedicated and experienced," Mahanta said.

In 2007, a 50-year-old man was mauled to death by a tiger in the same zoo when he scaled a barricade and went close to the enclosure to click photographs of the cats, while another visitor in 2008 was seriously injured by a Himalayan black bear after he jumped into the animal's enclosure as baffled visitors looked on.

Last month, a visitor lost his wallet inside the tiger cage after he leaned against the wall to have a closer view of the animals.

source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city ... 517116.cms

Ever wondered what you look like if you were an animal? It is now possible for all Iphone users.. IFAW, together with Sharewire BV and Rapp released Manimal. A new app where you can transform friends into animals.

The application costs EUR 1.59 and helps to support the work of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

Click here to get to the Itunes Store directly

NEW DELHI: A young male tiger that strayed out of Panna tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh is keeping the wildlife officials on their toes for the past 20 days.

Though it has been localised in the forests of the Sagar district, a team of 70 personnel including Wildlife Institute of India (WII) experts, forest
guards and senior officials from the state forest department are keeping their fingers crossed about its whereabouts now.

"They have put up around 3 km long white cloth on the boundaries of the forest as a deterrent measure and released some animals
(as prey) to ensure that the animal remains within the range till it is trapped," MP Chief Wildlife Warden R S Negi told PTI.

The personnel are searching for the tiger with antennae to receive signals about its presence from the very high frequency system on the radio-collar around its neck.

"Fall in temperature to 12 degrees Celsius during night has made our men's task all the more difficult. Their food and daily needs are being taken care of at the possible extent. We pray that the feline should not enter human habitat or attack anyone," P R Sinha, director of the WII, added.

Officials feel that the animal which is exhibiting strong "homing instinct", could be trying to move to its original home in Pench Tiger Reserve 300 km away, from where it was brought nearly a month ago.

"Homing instinct" is the ability of an animal to perceive direction that is beyond the usual human senses and help the lost animal either to return to their home base or trail their owners.

source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home ... 360544.cms

Wolves, not seen in the wild in Scotland for hundreds of years, could be ready for a comeback on a Highland estate.

The Alladale Estate near Ardgay in Sutherland has announced it is to seek a zoo licence within the next two months so it can let the animals roam in a wilderness reserve. It is the latest move by estate owner Paul Lister, who plans to release a series of wild animals in enclosures on the estate.

Reserve manager Hugh Fullerton-Smith announced his intention to apply to Highland Council for the licence in an advert in a local paper.

European elk and wild boar are already housed in enclosures on the 23,000-acre estate. If the licence is granted, they will be joined by eight European wildcats and three European wolves.

Both Mr Lister and Mr Fullerton-Smith were unavailable for comment yesterday.

Mr Lister, son of Noel Lister, the co-founder of the MFI furniture chain, bought Alladale in 2003 and had indicated his intention of introducing Scotland's "big five" to the area – grey wolves, brown bear, lynx, boar and bison.

Two years ago, the estate gained a Dangerous Wild Animal Licence to keep elk and wild boar in specially constructed enclosures.

In application papers sent to the council, Mr Fullerton-Smith said: "The Alladale Wilderness Reserve facility will be unlike any present conventional UK zoo, both in types of enclosures it uses and the way in which only a limited number will view the animals."

The animals will be housed in three separate, fenced areas complete with shelters and service buildings. The wolves will be fed on a range of natural carcasses and game off-cuts, and the reserve will be surrounded by a 37-mile electric fence.

Only guests staying at Alladale will be allowed on to the reserve. The maximum daily number of visitors will be 35, although school parties are expected to increase that to about 70 on some days.

A public consultation will be carried out. Mr Lister says the reserve would create 75 to 100 jobs. He believes Alladale could benefit from the eco-tourism market.

Dave Morris of Ramblers Scotland said: "We expect to oppose the issue of this zoo licence. Approving it would prevent people exercising their statutory rights of access over a large area of land."

source: http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Wolve ... 5925331.jp

POACHERS see this rhino as their way to get rich quick - for its horn is now worth more than gold for the first time in a decade.

Demand in south Asia has doubled the price of horn, used in medicine, in just 18 months. It stands at £36,300 a kilo, while gold is £24,600.

An average horn weighs 7kg. That has triggered the largest number of killings in 15 years. In 2007, 13 rhinos were killed in South Africa - but this year that rose to 84. Zimbabwe and Asian countries like India and Nepal have also been hit.

Powdered horn has been in high demand since a Vietnamese minister claimed it helped cure his cancer.

Expert Mark Cawardine said: "This latest onslaught shows that we'll never be able to declare rhinos safe."

source (and photos): http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/ne ... -gold.html

We have some exciting news to share! Let's first set the scene...

In August 2008, Heiko and I visited the Painted Dog Conservation project in Zimbabwe. Their efforts to educate the local community and involve them in the protection of Africa’s Painted Dogs is just brilliant. We were impressed!

There are very few Painted Dogs (also known as Wild Dogs) remaining in the wild. Being nomadic, they travel great distances, only staying in the same location when they have pups. So when we came across a pack of 24 dogs during our trip to Tanzania in February 2009, it was incredible; we could not believe our eyes. It was one of the highlights of our trip!

In March 2009 after we returned home, we visited Beekse Bergen Safaripark to attend a talk given by Greg Rasmussen and Peter Blinston from the Painted Dog Conservation project and it was great to see how the project was progressing. We also learned that a lot of the support for the project comes from the Netherlands, there is a foundation here: Stichting Painted Dog Conservation.

We wrote an article about the talk on our website (here’s the link) and not long after, we received an email from the Chairman of Stichting PDC and our support of the Painted Dogs snowballed, as did their support of zoocrew.eu.

When it came time to design the Painted Dog Conservation 2010 Calendar, Stichting PDC asked if they could use the photos we had taken in Tanzania and we sent off several high resolution images to their designer/printer.

Last week I went to visit the Chairman to collect several of the calendars for our own distribution. We weren’t sure what to expect but we knew that one of our images had been selected. I assumed it would be a standard wall calendar with 12 images, one for each month. What I discovered was a 100×70cm poster-size wall calendar, with only one image: mine! And the image credit is for zoocrew.eu! So exciting!

I know some of you have been waiting to see what it looks like, and it’s so hard to give a sense of scale in a photo… but here you go, here’s a peek (click on the images to enlarge):


Yay, image credit for zoocrew.eu

And here’s the whole poster:

Awesome! Thank you Stichting PDC!

If you see this poster in your local zoo, or anywhere – the distribution is big! Do let us know, or upload a pic to the gallery, we’d love to see!

Don't forget, we also have a Facebook fan page and you can follow us on Twitter too see you there!

originally posted at: http://www.tigscreations.com/blog/2009/ ... -calendar/

Bears in a zoo in eastern Germany have lost their fur, but international experts cannot work out why.

Three spectacled bears in Leipzig Zoo are in various states of baldness, with the worst being hairless all over.

Zoo curator Gerd Noetzhold said he had discovered that zoos throughout Europe and further afield had encountered the same problem, but no-one knew why.


One expert suggested it could be caused by climate and the diet of the bears, whose native habitat is South America.

The bears come from the Andean mountains of Ecuador, Peru and northern Bolivia.

The bears - named Dolores, Bianca and Lolita - are suffering from itchiness as well, so animal keepers apply ointments to soothe their skin.

"This problem with the spectacled bears is not just in Leipzig," Mr Noetzhold told the BBC World Service.

"There are other zoos in Europe and overseas having the same problem.

"And so we've had an international working group of zoo vets looking at this for some time already."

Gerard Baars, director of the International Bear Foundation, said he had never seen such a condition before.

"I could hardly believe it is a bear although I have been dealing with bears all my life," he told the BBC's Europe Today programme.

Tropical needs

Symptoms first appeared in the animals about two years ago.

"I suggested that feeding and climate can both be a factor because they are tropical animals that we have relocated to our climates," Mr Baars said.

Mr Baars, who said he was to travel to Leipzig Zoo to offer advice, urged the zoo to make special preparations for the winter.

"The bears should be kept indoors and they should make an imitation of a tropical climate with hot temperatures, humidity, straw and bedding on the floor."

The mountain bears have a seasonal pattern influenced by climate, behaviour and food, he said.

"We in zoos are not very good at imitating natural seasonality," he added.

source (and photos): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8345550.stm

“Dozens of animals are dying every day, there are carcasses everywhere,” said Cynthia Moss, a renowned conservationist who studies the elephants of Kenya’s Amboseli National Park.

The drought has forced up to 4 million Kenyans to rely on donated food and water for survival as the crops wither and cattle die on the barren land. The international aid group Oxfam warns that close to 23 million people across East Africa face severe hunger after five years of little or no rain.

Roughly one in 10 Ethiopians and Kenyans, and half of all Somalis, need handouts to survive.

Meanwhile the World Food Program — responsible for feeding many of these people — is struggling to raise funds in the face of the worldwide economic downturn and faces a financial shortfall that means it simply does not have enough food to feed all the hungry.

As the East African savannah dries to a dustbowl, the wildlife with which Kenya is synonymous is also dying in droves threatening the country’s economy which is heavily reliant on tourism for foreign earnings.

The elephants of Amboseli in southern Kenya are one of the iconic images of Africa gracing coffee table books and glossy magazines. In the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, the continent’s highest peak, the herds lumber across the savannah watched by thousands of tourists every year who pay large sums for the privilege.

This year, however, visitors to the grassless plains are as likely to see the rotting vulture-picked carcasses as the live versions of the “big five” — buffalo, elephant, leopard, lion and rhino.

“This is the third year without rain so all the grass is gone. What we’re left with is a barren land of carcasses,” Moss told GlobalPost. “The tourists are appalled. They can’t drive a hundred meters without coming across a dead animal.”

Moss said this year’s drought is about as bad as she has known in 37 years of researching Amboseli’s elephants. “We had very bad droughts in '76, '84 and 2000 but this is the worst I’ve seen. The old Maasai — the wazee — say it hasn’t been this bad since the 1960s.”

Of 170 elephants born in Amboseli in 2008 and 45 more born this year about half have died, “and we’ll lose more before the rains come” said Moss.

Elsewhere the situation is scarcely better. The Maasai people’s traditional ranging lands in southern Kenya are turned to scorched dirt where the hot wind blows tall twisting dust devils across the landscape. And Kenya’s Rift Valley, usually a fertile breadbasket, is a parched dustbowl of withered crops and emaciated cattle.

Nestling in this great geological fissure that runs the length of the country is Lake Nakuru, famous for its flocks of pink flamingos but here the waters have receded as the four rivers that feed the lake are all dry.

In northern Kenya the situation is worse still. North of Mount Kenya is where the worst of the drought is biting for the local Samburu people, semi-nomadic pastoralists. These pastoralists rely on moving with their cattle in search of fresh grazing land, the problem is there’s little left.

Many have lost their entire herds, and therefore their livelihoods and lifestyles. In September there were horrific scenes just outside Nairobi where hundreds of cattle were buried in mass graves — they died of drought and starvation before reaching the slaughterhouse.

“North of Mount Kenya is the worst area, it is dry to the bone,” said Julius Kipngetich, director of Kenya Wildlife Service, the government agency responsible for the country’s many national parks and animals. “I was there last week and I have never seen it so dry, even the rivers have stopped flowing.”

On the edge of this now desolate landscape is Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, a 62,000-acre reserve. “As of yet we haven’t lost a single animal but all around Lewa everything is dying,” said Elodie Sampere, a spokesperson for Lewa.

The conservancy’s managers have started a supplementary feeding program for the rhino, buffalo, zebra and eland to help them survive the drought. This is something Lewa can afford to do as a privately run and funded company but as Sampere pointed out: “People are dying as well. It’s difficult to argue that animals should be fed when that is happening.”

Kenya’s cash-strapped government cannot even afford to feed its people, let alone its animals, but with the tourism industry bringing in a little under $500-million a year it cannot be ignored.

“This is the worst drought in recent history and the impact on Kenya’s wildlife has been very severe,” said Kipngetich. “We’ve lost a lot of hippos especially in Tsavo, many antelopes in Amboseli and a high number of elephants to the north of Mount Kenya.”

However, it may not be all bad news for Kenya’s wildlife and its tourism industry.

In the Maasai Mara where hundreds of thousands of wildebeest make their annual migration and tens of thousands of tourists come to watch, some paying over $500 a night for luxury accommodation in swish camps, the drought is having less of an impact.

“Here on the western side of the Mara there hasn’t been a drought at all so as a consequence we’ve had one of the best migrations ever with more than half a million wildebeest,” said Brian Heath, chief executive of the privately run Mara Conservancy.

“We haven’t seen any animals die as a result of the drought [but] I think the Mara is better off than most of the rest of the country.”

And even in Amboseli it seems there may be room for optimism as longed-for rains are predicted in the coming weeks. “The drought is a temporary thing,” Moss said, “because what is so amazing about the savannah ecosystem is how quickly it recovers when the rain comes. I’ve been here for many years and it still amazes me.”

source (and photos): http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/afri ... ine-maasai

Leo Foundation - Lions, skilled predators of wild and domestic prey

Lions in West-Africa behave differently than their conspecifics in the South and Eastern region of the continent. Findings proven by research projects supported by the Leo Foundation.

You can click here to go directly to the article.

Many thanks to the Leo Foundation for providing us with the article.

A starving lion cub has been found left to die in a cage in the sweltering Mediterranean sun on waste ground in Beirut, an animal welfare group said yesterday.


“His life is in danger, and he cannot be more than two years old,” said veterinary surgeon Munir Abi Soueid, who is currently caring for the cub in a centre outside Beirut that specialises in the care of wild animals.

The Lebanon-based group Beirut for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (BETA) found the cub yesterday morning after it received an anonymous call saying that it had been spotted in Karantina, just east of Beirut.

The animal “had not eaten in days and was in a very bad state,” BETA vice president Elena Husseini told AFP. “He was not moving. His abdomen seemed swollen, he was very weak and had high blood pressure.”

The public prosecutor’s office granted BETA custody of the cub after the organisation filed a complaint.

source (and photos): http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/a ... rent_id=17

Dot Earth likes a good animal photo as much as the next blog, particularly when the animal is beautiful and endangered. So we’re pleased to present a photograph of a snow leopard, taken by a camera trap in the Wakhan Corridor in northeastern Afghanistan. (Here’s more on camera traps and Afghanistan’s elusive wildlife.)

Camera traps are used by conservationists to document the presence of animals that because of their rarity, behavior or other factors would otherwise be seldom seen. The basic trap consists of a camera and a means of triggering it — often an infrared device or some other motion sensor.

Workers try to set the traps in areas the target animal is likely to pass through — en route to a water or food source, for example. And the sensor is calibrated so that smaller animals or swaying tree limbs shouldn’t trigger it. Despite all this, camera traps don’t always capture their quarry. And even when they do, the subject is sometimes out of focus, or half out of the frame or plagued by red eye. And sometimes you get a fabulous shot of the animal’s derriere.

This photograph, though, is spectacular (if a trifle cockeyed). The trap was set up by workers with the Wildlife Conservation Society, the people who run the Bronx Zoo and undertake conservation projects around the world. In the Wakhan Corridor they are conducting wildlife surveys with the eventual goal of establishing a protected area.

source (and photos): http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/ ... istan/?hpw

Life on Earth is under serious threat, despite the commitment by world leaders to reverse the trend, according to a detailed analysis of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™.

You can click here to go directly to the article.

Many thanks to the International Union for Conservation of Nature for providing us with the article.

The six-month-old cub is so rare it is thought there are fewer than 20 others like it - all in captivity.

The female tiger, which has been named Fareeda, was born to two white Bengal tigers. Fareeda's brother Shahir and sister Sitarah both bear the typical black tiger stripes in common with 99 per cent of their species.
Fareeda, who was hand-reared by keepers at Cango Wildlife Ranch, near Cape Town, South Africa, is part of a unique breeding programme to keep the White Bengal species alive.

Keepers at the ranch were delighted when Fareeda and its siblings were born on Christmas Day last year, but even more surprised to see Fareeda's rare lack of markings.

Odette Claassen, 52, from Cango Wildlife Ranch, said the keepers had to wait six months before they could be sure Fareeda definitely did not have stripes.

She said: "Some cubs develop stripes in their first few months but after six months it's clear that Fareeda is truly one of the rarest of her kind.

"When she was born Fareeda had noticeably pale colour it did cause a stir of excitement amongst the staff.

"But we knew there was the possibility of the cub's very light black and ginger stripes darkening over time existed.

"Most white Bengal tigers are bred in the US from a single male captured in the 1950s, but Fareeda is the first to be born in Africa, which is very special.

"She has a lovely nature and loves playing with her brothers and sisters, although she has nipped me a few times when she wants a feed.

"White Bengal tigers are not albino, they have distinctive blue eyes, and they used to be found in Northern India before they died out.

"My hope is that one day Fareeda and her kind can be returned to their native habitat and that is why it is so important to educate people about tigers and keeping the breeding programmes going."

source (and photos): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... ripes.html

A tigress was found dead at Mirchiwani village in forest, near here.


"The feline was found dead yesterday and the tigress body after postmortem has been disposed off on Friday, divisional forest officer (DFO) P S Champawat said.

He said that the autopsy report was awaited, adding viscera of the stripped animal had been sent to laboratory in Sagar.

Champawat said that the tigress was around six-year-old and no injury was found on her body. About the cause of the death, the DFO said that it will be known after the viscera report in a week-time.

The tigress had killed a cow and calf near Mirchiwani some time back, forest department sources said.

The tigress might have been poisioned by some villagers in an act of vengeance, they suspected.

source (and photos): http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Heal ... 735316.cms

SHENYANG, June 19 (Xinhua) -- With the help of 35 PLA doctors and nurses, a female Siberian tiger with a deformed pelvis underwent a Caesarean operation, and gave birth to two male cubs on Wednesday in Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning Province.

The seven-year-old tiger Mao Mao was put on pills since she entered puberty period because pregnancy and birth-giving endangered her life, said Wang Meizheng, manager of Shenyang GuipoBear and Tiger Park, adding that Mao Mao suffers from a deformity in her pelvis and hind legs.

"When we noticed Mao Mao's big tummy, it was too late for a pregnancy termination operation," said Wang.

Mao Mao then enjoyed the privilege of her favorite food: beef, ox heart, and chicken heart. Other tigers had the daily portion of5 kg meat, and Mao Mao could have 7.5 kg.

She showed prenatal signs on Tuesday morning, but had failed to give birth before Wednesday morning when a team of doctors and nurses came to carry out a Caesarean operation on her.

The No. 202 Hospital of the People's Liberation Army sent a team to the park. The 35 doctors and nurses were divided into four units: an aesthesia, caesarean operation, newborn cub rescue, and nursing.

"If we didn't carry out a caesarean operation, Mao Mao would have died giving birth, and her two cubs would have been stillborn," said Bai Xiaozhong, vice director of the hospital.

After one hour's operation, Mao Mao gave birth to two cubs.

"No one knows who is the father of the two cubs," said Wang Meizheng, manager of the Guaipo Bear and Tiger Park in Shenyang.

Mao Mao was unable to breast feed her cubs, and they were fed with milk powder, but if this continues they will suffer fur-shedding. The park is considering seeking a dog-mother to breast feed the two cubs.

The life span of a tame Siberian tiger is about 26 years.

source (and photos): http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009- ... 566756.htm