Where Cows and Capybara Roam (Op-Ed) Julie Kunen is executive director for WCS's Latin america and Caribbean Program.
But what if I told you that there is a place in Brazil where cattle graze on native grasses seasonally replenished by an annual flooding cycle where ranches are dotted with lakes full of fish where rivers support giant river otters
and increases the chance of conflict between people their cows and predators with fewer and fewer prey options.
Empowering Communities Can Help (Op-Ed) Andrew Steer is the president and CEO of the World Resources Institute a global research organization that works in more than 50 countries.
To start male lactation has been observed in a few domesticated animals including cats goats and guinea pigs on rare occasions.
Facts About Male Bighorn sheep Rams are male bighorn sheep animals that live in the mountains and often settle arguments with fights that include ramming their heads into others.
Not to be confused with mountain goats rams can be identified by their long curved horns; long fur;
Some of the ram's relatives are goats bison buffalo antelopes and cattle according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information system (ITIS.
Rocky mountain bighorn rams have massive horns that weigh more than all of the bones in their bodies. A set of horns can weigh 30 lbs.
Bighorn sheep live in the Rocky mountain region of North america ranging from Mexico northward across the western United states and into Canada.
Thanks to their amazing balance bighorn sheep can stand on ledges that are only 2 inches (5 centimeters) wide.
) The only better mountain climbers in the animal world are mountain goats. Desert bighorn sheep a subspecies live in Death valley California as well as Nevada Texas and northern Mexico.
They can live on desert mountains as high as 4000 feet (1200 m). They get most of their water from eating plants to survive according to the Natural history Museum of Los angeles. Rams are herbivores.
Female bighorns are pregnant for about 175 days or about 25 weeks. They usually have only one lamb at a time.
The taxonomy of bighorn sheep according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information system (ITIS) is: Bighorn sheep are endangered not according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
It is estimated that there are 15500 to 15700 bighorn sheep in Canada and more than 42000 in the United states. It is believed that there could be several thousand bighorns in Mexico.
Almost all bighorn populations are increasing or stable. ITIS lists one subspecies Ovis canadensis auduboni the Badlands bighorn as extinct.
Nina Sen contributed to this article h
#Innovative Entertainment Model Designed to Get Kids Outside This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.
A second grader is about to start learning environmental science along with a cute purple alien named Plum and Plum s friends.
He goes online to a site where he can easily find these animated characters in webisodes#and games.
#Buffalo Facts Water buffalo & Cape buffalo Buffalo are large members of the Bovidae family. There are two types of buffalo:
the African or Cape buffalo and the Asian water buffalo. They are dark gray or black animals that look a lot like bulls.
Buffalo are confused often with bison. Early American settlers called bison buffalo because the animals are similar in appearance.
However while bison are also bovines (a subfamily of bovids) they are in a different genus from true buffalo.
Other bovines include domestic cattle oxen yaks four-horned antelopes bongos and kudus according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information system (ITIS.
The water buffalo is the largest bovine. It is 8 to 9 feet (2. 4 to 2. 7 meters) from head to rump with its tail adding an extra 2 to 3. 3 feet (60 to 100 centimeters.
They weigh a massive 1500 to 2650 lbs. 700 to 1200 kilograms. The African buffalo is smaller
but they are still quite impressive in size. They are 4. 26 to 4. 92 feet long (130 to 150 cm) from head to hoof
Water buffalo live in the tropical and subtropical forests of Asia. They are named aptly for they spend most of their time in water.
and herbs but water buffalo will also eat aquatic plants. Both African and Asian buffalo will eat shrubs
which are called calves. Usually they have one calf at a time and the female will carry the calf for a gestation period of 9 to 11 months before giving birth.
Once the calf is born a water buffalo will stay with its mother for around three years.
Then male calves will be moved to the all-male herd while the female calves stay with the female herd.
Females become pregnant every other year. Water buffalo tend to live around 25 years according to the University of Michigan
while African buffalo live around 26 years. The taxonomy of buffalo according to ITIS is: Water buffalo were domesticated more than 5000 years ago.
Humans use the meat milk horns and leather. Buffalo are used also for transportation and to pull plows.
Wild water buffalo are endangered according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They have a population of less than 4000 though it is uncertain
what the exact numbers are. The African buffalo is endangered not and has a population of 900000 according to the African Wildlife Foundation.
Male water buffalo have horns that curve backward. These horns can grow to 5 feet (1. 5 meters) long.
Females also have horns but they are much smaller. African buffalo have a democracy. When they are ready to travel they will stand
Goodbye Galapagos goats: Nature Newslike many remote islands, the Galapagos islands that fired Charles darwin's imagination are both a hotbed of biodiversity
All 80,000 or so goats (Capra hircus) on the 58,500-hectare Santiago Island have been eradicated in just 52 months.
Goats were introduced successfully to Santiago Island, which sits in the middle of the Galapagos archipelago, over the 1920s and 1940s.
The goats grazed the island mercilessly causing erosion, threatening the survival of rare plants and trees and competing with native fauna, such as giant tortoises.
Filipe Cruz from the Galapagos National park service in Ecuador and his colleagues turned their attention to goats.
From 2001 to 2005, the researchers hired large teams of local residents to cull the goats.
The goats were herded first into corrals by people on horseback wielding air horns and firing rifles.
The captured goats were killed then humanely. Other goats were hunted on foot, with the help of dogs or by a large group hunting together in a line,
combing the island. But the goats proved difficult to eradicate. In 2004, the teams used helicopters to help them spot
and kill the animals. And finally, between 2004 and 2005, the teams used'Judas'goats and'Mata hari'goats.
The Judas goats were goats that had been captured from nearby islands and then released with radio collars to lead hunters to the last few goats.'
'Mata hari'goats sterilized female Judas goats in chemically induced oestrous helped to lure out otherwise wary male goats.
An account of the eradication is published in the Journal of Wildlife Management1. The island has been monitored
since 2005 and now seems to be goat free. The eradication effort cost a total of US$6. 1 million dollars,
but more than one-third of that was spent on eradicating the last 1, 000 goats and monitoring to make sure the job was done.
It is very easy and cost-effective to remove the first 90%of the goats;
it is very hard and expensive to get the last 10, %says Josh Donlan of Cornell University in Ithaca, New york,
since the neighbouring Isabela Island of goats, Donlan says, which at a whopping 459,000 hectares is even larger than Santiago Island.
As the goats disappeared the plant life on Santiago bounced back, including some invasive plants such as blackberry (Rubus niveus).
Nature Newson 13 january, the US Department of agriculture (USDA) launched a service that allows dairy-cattle breeders to double their chances of selecting the best bulls to sire milk-producing cows.
which bull would be likely to sire calves that were good milk producers. The test costs about $225
when a bull is born, thus avoiding the $25, 000-50,000 cost of raising a bull for five years to see
if it sires good milk-producing offspring. The best bulls become elite breeders, says Van Tassell,
The others become hamburger. Previously, DNA tests allowed a typical breeder to select the best bull some 35%of the time,
Companies in New zealand and The netherlands have set up private services for cattle breeders; and, following the USDA's lead,
If villagers can get a few cows to care for if they have clean water and their children can go to school,
early-stage human-cow, human-mouse and human-rabbit hybrid embryos fail to grow beyond 16 cells (Y. Chung et al.
cow, mouse and rabbit eggs with nuclei from human non-sex, or somatic cells. Human-human embryos developed normally
Advanced Cell Technology previously cloned an endangered bull of the gaur species, using eggs from the common cow to create hybrid gaur-cow embryos.
However, these two species are related closely. It may be possible to create hybrid embryos using human somatic cells and eggs from nonhuman primates,
The study suggests the Botai culture was a distinct centre of domestication, separate from the'Fertile Crescent'area, between the Mediterranean sea and the Gulf, where cattle,
sheep and goats were domesticated first, says Outram. The findings are unusual he says, because animal domestication typically occurs in cultures that have adopted agriculture,
Nature Newsa white-faced, red-coated Hereford cow named Dominette has become the first cow to have sequenced its genome.
Information from the 5-year, US$53-million cow-genome project is being used to trace the genetic legacy of bovine domestication after centuries of careful breeding.
Cattle breeders are eagerly incorporating the information into their breeding programmes (see No bull: genes for better milk.
Cows (Bos taurus) were domesticated first up to 10,000 years ago. Now, the world's agricultural herds are teeming with 1. 2 billion cattle,
says Patrick Cunningham, an animal geneticist at Trinity college Dublin in Ireland and chief scientific adviser to The irish government.
and by 2007, dairy herds in the United states were producing 34%more milk from about half as many cows as they were in 1960.
Economically, cattle are the most important partner species of animal we have, Cunningham says. But the bovine genome is large at 3 billion bases,
We have very little knowledge of the genes that are involved in cattle breeding says James Womack, a genome researcher at Texas A&m University in College Station,
These genetic markers were used then to characterize the genetic diversity found in nearly 500 cattle from 19 breeds.
and intensively bred for specific traits the modern cattle population is about as diverse as humans,
and a member of the bovine sequencing team. This could be because the cattle populations that formed the basis for those first farmed herds were very diverse.
But Harris Lewin, a genome biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who also assisted with the analysis of the genome
Cattle may occasionally mated with aurochs large, wild cows that lived in Europe until their extinction in the seventeenth century providing periodic infusions of new genes,
he says. Despite this diversity, years of breeding cattle for meat and milk have weakened the herds,
says Cunningham, which is evident in recent declines in longevity and fertility. Genetic markers will help breeders to improve the health of their herds as well as the quality
without having to wait for calves to reach adulthood. Improved genetic techniques could push up agricultural yields by as much as 50%or 12 gallons of milk per cow each year,
estimates Van tassel. The new sequence also shows that the human genome is more similar to the genome of cattle than to mice suggesting that, for some diseases,
cows could be a better model for research, says Lewin. In the past, work on cattle led to the development of the smallpox vaccine and in vitro fertilization techniques.
Geneticist Michel Georges of the University of Li  ge in Belgium worries that the focus on improving agricultural herds could cause researchers to stop investigating the biology underlying those improvements.
There is more to be done with these domestic animal resources rather than just developing these genomic selection methods,
many landowners try to boost their income by clearing a hectare or two each year for farms or cattle grazing.
According to Seralini, eating Bt brinjal reduced appetite in goats, increased prothrombin time (the time it takes blood to clot) in goats and rabbits,
ranging from soil practices such as tillage to sustainable livestock programmes to regulate the amount of cattle in a region.
The team reports its findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 1 Lions normally dine on grazing animals such as zebra and wildebeest
Browsing animals, such as giraffes and antelopes, have different ratios of carbon isotopes to grazers because their food shrubs and trees versus grasses carries out different types of photosynthesis. The team characterized the humans'isotope ratios by taking advantage of a fluke of history,
Cattle disease faces total wipeout: Nature Newswhat does it take to wipe a scourge off the face of the Earth?
whether the problem is in people or cattle. World health bodies say that within 18 months they will celebrate the eradication of rinderpest, the world's most devastating cattle disease.
It would become only the second disease that humans have wiped from the globe after smallpox,
and since then it has killed millions of cattle and other wildlife throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle east and the Indian subcontinent.
which can kill 80-90%of infected cattle within ten days, is caused by a morbillivirus a group of viruses that also includes measles.
regional efforts and focused on widespread vaccination programmes and on long-term monitoring of cattle and wildlife.
as both will test positive for antibodies against the virus. Cows also pass on antibodies to their offspring through their milk.
and calves younger than two years old then need to be tested. It is a difficult,
Nature Newsrinderpest, the world's most devastating cattle disease, will be declared eradicated within 18 months, according to world health bodies.
It not only kills cattle and other wildlife, it also causes famines when people in developing countries lose the beasts they need to plough their fields,
Rinderpest, otherwise known as cattle plague, has killed many millions of cattle and other wildlife around the world since it first spread from Asia to Europe in the herds of the invading tribes, causing outbreaks during the Roman empire in 376-386.
diarrhoea and dehydration and the disease kills 80-90%of infected cattle in just 7-10 days.
The programme's success depended on widespread vaccination programmes and long-term monitoring of cattle and wildlife.
as both will test positive for antibodies against the virus. Cows also pass on antibodies to their offspring through their milk.
vaccinations must stop for a period of two years and calves less than two years old tested.
such as the golden takin, he notes. The idea of inbreeding in Qinling is also at odds with the most recent genetic analyses,
New zealand's GM cattle under fire: Nature Newsscientists in New zealand whose work with genetically modified (GM) animals had been threatened by A high Court ruling have been given a reprieve.
Agresearch currently holds two approvals to develop and test GM cattle in containment. The first was obtained 11 years ago.
which new approvals are required to enable further development and breeding of the cattle. Agresearch had hoped to transfer their herd of 100 GM cows to the 4 new linked applications,
but the legal action and subsequent delays forced them to make more specific interim applications. The original approvals were amended on 11 march to allow existing GM cattle to escape a threatened cull.
A further application that will enable Agresearch to resume breeding the cows is under consideration, with a decision expected from ERMA in Mid-april.
Despite the recent Court of Appeal ruling in Agresearch's favour, Barry Scott, head of the Institute of Molecular Biosciences at Massey University in Palmerston North, New zealand,
Nature Newsthe chief veterinary officer of The netherlands has defended the country's decision to cull thousands of goats in an effort to control an unprecedented outbreak of Q fever.
however, epidemiological studies pinpointed goats as the source of the disease in an area increasingly densely populated by humans and dairy farms over the past decade,
It can trigger abortions in goats and sheep and causes flu-like symptoms and sometimes pneumonia in humans.
After more than 2, 200 confirmed human cases of the disease last year, the Dutch government slaughtered over 50,000 dairy goats on 55 of the country's nearly 400 farms in an effort to prevent the disease from spreading further.
Vaccination of dairy goats is now mandatory everywhere in the country. After the first round of vaccinations in the southern Netherlands in 2008, initial findings showed that the vaccine,
But the first infected goats to be vaccinated were slaughtered in 2009. That put a crimp in possible findings from this year's lambing season
project leader on Q fever in goats for the Central Veterinary Institute (CVI) in Wageningen, The netherlands.
CVI researchers will attempt to analyze data from the dead goats, he says, but in the end, documenting the impact of the vaccinations may have to wait at least another year.
where testing will begin this summer on sheep and goats on both dairy and meat farms,
and reductions in poverty. go. nature. com/jr2rlc Number crunch 4%The proportion of global anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions emitted by dairy cows,
In the Amazon, deforestation is linked often to the expansion of soy farming and cattle ranching.
Then she campaigned to get mountain villagers to switch from grazing goats to sheep, as she saw that the goats were destroying the pine forests.
In the beginning, the villagers wanted to kill us, says¡ambel, who had studied the origin of village farming in Turkey2.
The goats would make a ruckus at night, but sheep are quiet. We sleep in peace now,
All it takes is one bull in really poor condition to wander into a risky habitat
This change could threaten the livelihood of the thousands of nomads who survive by raising cattle on the plateau.
The Tibetan alpine meadow grassland is used by local people to graze their yaks and sheep.
is engaging in classic black sheep syndrome: members of a group may be annoyed by public criticism from outsiders,
can trigger abortions in goats and sheep and cause flu-like symptoms and sometimes pneumonia in humans.
and agriculture ministries coordinated their efforts poorly before they ordered a cull of more than 50,000 dairy goats in 2009,
could allowing cattle to graze in the country's Alpine National park the picturesque setting for the film The Man from Snowy River reduce the risk of bushfires?
The letter's organizers claim that the trial is a naked attempt to use the imprimatur of science to allow cattle to graze in an ecologically sensitive area,
The decision in question is the return of cattle to portions of the 646,000-hectare park, a landscape of deep ravines, high plateaux and snow gum trees.
In the 1950s, as many as 100,000 head of Aberdeen angus and Hereford grazed in the park, according to Mark Coleman, president of the Mountain Cattlemen's Association of Victoria.
Gradual restrictions since then culminated in a park-wide grazing ban in 2005 after a Victoria government review found that cattle didn't reduce the intense wildfires that can visit the region,
Coleman says that the cattle do stop fires, by eating the vegetation that forms potential fuel,
when 400 head of cattle were allowed back into the park, the government of Victoria announced that they were part of a research trial.
but merely testing methods suitable for measuring the impact of cattle on fuels and on ecosystem functions.
Australia's environment minister, demanded that the state ask the federal government for approval to release the cattle.
The demand means that the cattle must be removed from the park until the federal government has reviewed the matter.
and the cattle would have been taken down from the mountains by Mid-april anyway. Furthermore it is not clear
Ninety per cent of the general public couldn't give a shit about the cattle or the environment,
Researchers from the United kingdom studied the direct transmission of foot-and-mouth disease from one cow to another in a unique experimental setup that might also find applications in the study of other pathogens.
In 2001, a foot-and-mouth outbreak in UK cattle triggered a mass cull and restricted access to many parts of the countryside.
It shows that the window in which infected cattle can transmit the disease to other animals is actually shorter than previously believed and
and his team exposed eight cows to one form of the virus. They then attempted to transmit the virus from these'source'cows to other bovines in a biosecure compound on the Pirbright site,
The team found that the cattle in their study were not infectious until around 0. 5 days after clinical signs appeared,
Charleston and his co-authors suggest that the fact that cattle are less likely to be infectious before showing clinical signs means that
In the 2001 outbreak, some 700,000 cattle were culled to fight the disease, says co-author Mark Woolhouse, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
goat and sheep pox viruses. The report was a response to an executive order from US President Barack Obama last year.
Nature Newswomen, beansprouts, cucumbers, bacteria, cows: the cast of the current European Escherichia coli outbreak is already a crowd.
Pathogenic E coli are passed typically to humans from ruminant animals (cows or sheep) via faecal contamination in the food chain or through consumption of raw milk or meat products.
traditional bushmeat species such as apes and antelope are no longer easily available owing to over-hunting and, in some cases,
for example, cows and other ruminants have complicated digestive systems involving multiple stomachs filled with microbes that process plants many times to extract the maximum nutrition.
for example, or because the images are too poor to make out cattle, or appear to contain hay bales or sheep instead."
whereas Jelinek s team analysed individual cows.""Of the data that were looked useable, they only at 50%of the cows.
It s very subjective, Burda adds. His team's reanalysis of  the Jelinek data actually does support the theory that cattle can magneto-sense,
says Burda. In a response to the reanalysis, Jelinek and colleagues say that in some cases they suspect each team may have looked inadvertently at different pictures,
The Jelinek team says that it only looked at cows far from power lines, and that the slopes are few
"Sheep, horses, hay bales, rocks, cows with unsatisfactory resolution, cows near a track, settlement or feeder, were taken not in the analysis. SÃ nke Johnsen, who studies magneto-reception at Duke university in Durham,
as the alignment of individual cows in herds is unlikely to be independent. Overall, he says that the original results,
The iceberg that eventually calves from the breaking ice shelf will cover around 880 square kilometres,
woolly rhinos, wild horses, reindeer, steppe bison and musk ox. The researchers created a series of snapshots of the European,
woolly mammoths and the Eurasian populations of musk oxen went extinct as populations became more and more isolated from one another.
Musk-ox remains are rarely found at sites where humans lived, for example, and the species'range has little overlap with that of humans.
Musk oxen cope poorly with high summer temperatures, for example, and are now found only in the North american Arctic and Greenland.
while Eurasian musk ox would do well, Willerslev says. This could mean that it will be difficult to determine which modern species are at greatest risk of extinction,
On 4 january, the agency banned unapproved uses of cephalosporins in cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys a ban that it had ordered already in 2008,
On 4 Â January, the agency said that it would prohibit certain uses of cephalosporins in farm animals including cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys,
and reviewers considering fears about whether it could keep pathogens safely contained in the middle of prime US cattle country.
and would have a devastating effect on the US cattle industry if it escaped. US research with live foot
wrote cattle rancher Paul Irvine in a submitted statement. What happens next will depend, in part, on the NAS s judgement of the facility s risks and benefits.
The result from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) suggests that oxygen abundances throughout the Galaxy are more variable than expected.
and principal investigator for IBEX.""This is the stuff that stars, planets and people are made of, he says."
The US$100-million IBEX mission was launched in October 2008 with the goal of mapping the heliosphere,
The IBEX spacecraft is far from this boundary, in orbit around the Earth, but it has detectors that are sensitive to neutral atoms that can enter the heliosphere.
where they are caught by  IBEX.""I call it the 15-billion-mile hole-in-one,
Although a previous NASA mission, Ulysses, measured neutral helium from beyond the heliosphere, IBEX is the first to measure heavier elements, such as oxygen and neon,
IBEX found the ratio of oxygen atoms to neon atoms to be lower in the Local Cloud than the average ratios for both the Solar system and the Galaxy as a whole
Based on the speeds and directions of the neutral atoms, the IBEX team was also able to refine its picture of the shape of the heliosphere.
That has led the IBEX team to picture the leading edge of the heliosphere as flatter, or more snub-nosed than previously imagined."
says Priscilla Frisch, an IBEX investigator at the University of Chicago.""All the data indicate we re going to leave it in the next few thousand years
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