and the animals already threatened or endangered are wiped out this century. Barnosky studies biodiversity changes and extinction rates that occurred in the deep past,
or Age of man, will be marked by a rapid decline in biodiversity as animals and plants disappear from the planet forever.
Many animals and plants have evolved to occupy specific geographical niches such as islands or mountain lakes.
such as the giant tortoises of the Galapagos, the lemurs of Madagascar or the koalas of Australia.
South america got its first large carnivore oe the jaguar from North america oe which proceeded to eat much of the native fauna,
resulting in the loss of many species. Dominant force Humans have been orchestrating tectonic-scale species migrations of their own,
Some species including rats, goats, rhododendron, wheat and eucalyptus are found around the world while many others have become rare or vanished.
or like the jaguar simply consume them to extinction. We've also been spreading pests and diseases from place to place
often causing local extinctions. Isolated human populations have even been wiped out in this way, when we've introduced diseases such as flu, smallpox,
Meanwhile, we've been artificially boosting the populations of certain select species, such as cows, dogs, rice, maize and chickens oe most
The combined weight of humans and the animals we've domesticated now outweighs all the wild back-boned creatures on the planet's surface by a ratio of 95 to 5
Ten thousand years ago, at the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch, the weight of humans and domesticated animals was just 0. 1%of the total.
while trying to route out the more harmful invasives that out-compete unique flora or fauna.
whereas rats and goats that eat the food of rare tortoises are being eliminated. In other places,
or introduce animals to restore the functions that the pre-human ecosystem once provided oe such as reducing soil erosion,
or exist only in human-made environments like zoos or private breeding colonies far from their natural habitat,
such as the lemur sanctuary in the Caribbean that Virgin boss Richard Branson proposed last year.
we are beginning to understand how we could bring extinct animals back from the dead.
Scientists are hopeful of cloning mammoths and even restoring our own extinct cousin, the Neanderthal.
even if successful for individual animals, could not be applied practically to restore the intricate diversity of life that existed before humans took over the planet.
Will we ever  get rid of bed bugs? Nothing makes the skin crawl more than the idea that tiny bloodsucking bugs could be living in our bedrooms.
Around the size of a lentil, the common bed bug*,Cimex lectularius, can drink up to seven times its own weight in blood in one feeding,
leave nasty, itchy bumps on their human hosts, and hide unseen for months on end.
Since the late 1990s, the bed bug has become an increasingly common urban nuisance in homes and hotels worldwide.
A 2010 survey from the University of Kentucky and the National Pest Management Association found that 95%of US pest control companies had treated a bed bug infestation in the previous year
Only last month, New york's Department of health and Mental hygiene, a resource for other people with bed bug infestations, had to fumigate one of its floors.
According to the survey, the majority of pest control operators from Europe, Africa, Australia and North america said bed bugs were the most difficult insect pest to control, more so than ants, termites and even the formidable cockroach.
bed bug treatments grew by a quarter each year between 2000 and 2006. The worst aspect about this is that we thought we had tackled the bed bug problem before.
Clive Boase a pest management consultant in Suffolk and author of the London survey, says that UK bedbug numbers began decreasing in the 1930s, thanks to changes in social housing and public health policies,
which led to the demolition of old publicly-funded housing and teams of inspectors checking homes for vermin, respectively.
New pesticides introduced in the 1940s, including DDT, also helped to bring numbers down, and by the 1950s infestations were rare.
Or, is there any relief to be found in the myriad bed bug products and services on the market, from growth regulators to heat treatments?
an entomologist and bed bug expert from Virginia Tech, are"not practical to use in a widespread way because of the cost.
Because bed bugs live primarily in the bedroom, chemical companies must provide extensive toxicity data to prove it is safe for indoor use,
as it might come into contact with people or pets. But, proving that a pesticide works
Even if making a new bed bug insecticide were lucrative, there are other challenges. There is the problem of figuring out how a chemical has to function in order to best kill bed bugs cheaply, efficiently and safely.
This requires intimate knowledge of the bed bug's basic biology. But, because bed bugs were at such low levels for decades,
interest in studying them waned. Starting in the early 2000s, once it was clear the resurgence was real
and that bed bugs weren't going anywhere, scientists had to relearn bed bug basics from scratch, starting with fundamental aspects as how to raise them in a lab. Then there is the problem of paying for the research.
While dozens of labs now work on the basic science of bed bugs worldwide, funding remains low in part
because bed bugs are known not to spread disease. Finally, there is the problem of insecticide resistance. Even DDT, the supposed miracle cure, wasn't immune to this.
Five years after the pesticide was in widespread use in the US, DDT-resistant bed bugs popped up in Hawaii;
in the 1950s and 1960s, resistant strains were found elsewhere in the US and in Japan, Korea, Iran, Israel and French guiana,
to name a few. No chemical insecticide is immune to resistance, particularly if it is overused. Today, roughly 90%of bed bugs have a genetic mutation that makes them resistant to pyrethroids,
a class of insecticides commonly used for bed bugs that work in a similar way to DDT. Stopping spread So,
chemicals are not the sole answer. Neither, it seems, are any other options when used alone."
Still, chemicals and other tactics can be used in an integrated pest management strategy, where they are used sometimes sparingly along with heat treatments (bed bugs die at 45c), desiccants such as silica gel and diatomaceous earth that fatally dry the bugs out,
or vacuuming and getting rid of clutter. Biological tactics are emerging as another possible option. Insect growth regulators,
or IGRS, are chemicals that prevent bed bugs from completing their lifecycle, stunting their growth so they can't reproduce.
But IGRS are slow-acting, and the bugs will still bite even if they can't breed.
On the horizon, perhaps, are modified genetically versions of symbiotic bacteria that live in the insect's gut,
including Wolbachia, which may be exploited for pest management. Or, the bugs'pheromones, which tell them where to go
and who to mate with, may also be used reengineered and against them. In the meantime, public awareness measures can keep bed bugs from spreading.
Good practices include: checking hotel room beds before unpacking, being mindful of belongings like a coat draped carelessly on an unknown couch,
washing clothing in hot water and vacuuming suitcases after travelling, and avoiding discarded furniture on the street.
and box springs in encasements specifically intended to keep away bed bugs, which may make the bed easier to treat
 But, with cheaper tools, we may be able to knock bed bug levels back down everywhere. Or at least, he adds,
Â*Many people write"bedbugs Â, but entomologists use two words when describing Cimex lectularius, because it is a"true bug  (Hemiptera).
Entomologists always use two words for insects that are true to the common name they have oe so for example,
house fly is two words because those are actually flies, but butterfly is one word
because they aren't flies. If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future,
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Best of the web: Planets, pandemics and powerthe vanishing groves Ross Andersen Aeon 16 october 2012 A superb essay on the world's oldest trees, the bristlecone pines of California,
and their interaction with humans, land and climate. They live high up in small alpine pockets;
their record is one of astonishing endurance in inhospitable climates. In times of drought they virtually shut down,
butterflies and All but, says Harris, the conclusions the doctor drew from his sublime adventures seemed alarmingly unscientific.
warming the habitats for plants and animals, melting glaciers and ice sheets, increasing the frequency of wildfires and raising sea levels.
And we are doing this at such a rapid pace that animals and plants may not have time to evolve to the new conditions.
On 10 october 2003, a researcher watched as a female elephant named Eleanor collapsed. Her swollen trunk had been dragging on the ground
An elephant named Grace, a member of a different social group, galloped towards Eleanor and tried to heave Eleanor back to her feet with her massive tusks,
The parade of elephants that followed may oe in some deep, fundamental way oe be no different from those who gather to pay respects to a dignitary lying in state.
Over the course of several days, the carcass was visited by five other elephant groups, including several families that were unrelated completely to Eleanor.
The elephants sniffed and poked the body, touching it with their feet and trunks. Even though the carcass had been visited by jackals, hyenas, vultures,
and was under the control of lions by the fourth day, the elephants were rarely more than a few hundred metres away during daylight hours.
Since interest in the carcass was limited not just to Eleanor's relatives, the observing scientists tentatively concluded that elephants had generalised a response to the dead.
Supporting evidence for his conclusion comes from other studies, both observational and experimental. While these behaviours are clearly different from human death rituals,
they're still unique as far as elephant behaviour goes. Underwater ritualsbut humans and elephants aren't the only ones to visit the bodies of the recently deceased.
On 6 may 2000 a dead female dolphin was spotted on the seabed, 50 metres from the eastern coast of Mikura Island, near Japan.
Two adult males remained with the body at all times, leaving the body only briefly to return to the surface to breathe.
As the cause of death was attempted unknown, divers to retrieve the body. However, the presence of the two males prevented a successful retrieval.
 It's far from being documented the only instance of dolphin death rituals. On 20 july 2001, a dead sub-adult male was spotted on a nearby seabed,
Like the African elephants, the attending dolphins nudged and pushed at the carcass with their beaks and heads,
 And when a dead dolphin calf was spotted by another group of scientists near the Canary islands in April 2001,
whenever even a seabird attempted to approach the floating calf, it would immediately be chased away by the other dolphins.
When an infant chimpanzee dies, his or her mother will carry the lifeless body around for days.
When a three-month-old female chimpanzee was killed in June at the LA Zoo keepers allowed Gracie to retain her infant's body for several days
so that she'd be able to carry out this sort of chimpanzee grieving process. This chimpanzee ritual was described in depth after researchers in Zambia chanced upon a female named Masya who was interacting with the dead body of her four-month-old infant.
Writing in the American Journal of Primatology, researcher Katherine Cronin speculates: The behaviours expressed by this female chimpanzee
when she first endures physical separation from her dead infant provide valuable insight into  the possible ways in which chimpanzees gather information about the state of responsiveness of individuals around them (hence learning about Ëoedeath').
'Similar practices have been observed among gorillas, baboons, macaques, lemurs, and geladas. Elephants, dolphins, and chimpanzees all have complex social behaviours that we only partly understand.
Since it is so rare for humans to observe a natural death in the wild,
most of the information that we do have comes from non-experimental case studies thanks to quick-thinking researchers.
Even still, the available evidence offers an important reminder that humans are not the only animals who respond to death in a particular way.
And the list of nonhuman animals that seem to do so keeps expanding: recent reports suggest that giraffes
and western scrub jays may mourn as well, each with their own customs. But we humans like to convince ourselves that we are somehow special, unique among the entire animal kingdom.
And in some ways, we are. But for every facet of life that is unique to our species, there are hundreds that are shared with other animals.
As important as it is to avoid projecting our own feelings onto animals, we also need to remember that we are, in an inescapable way, animals ourselves.
Is it possible that we're simply offering post-hoc explanations in an effort to justify behaviours to which we're naturally driven?
The mortician who carefully embalms the recently deceased may have a great deal more in common than he realises with the chimpanzee who painstakingly removes parasites from her dead infant.
What bonds us with the chimpanzee in this sense is that we are, in our different ways,
simply trying to understand death. If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future,
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DNA barcoding: The hi-tech fight against fake foodinvestigations in New york's Chinatown are a regular occurrence,
but Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis'mission was purely scientific. The professor of genetics at Barnard College sent his students out to trawl the markets'open-air displays of exotic fish, fruit and vegetables,
and purchase anything being sold as crocodile meat. When they brought the meat back and analysed it,
they found it wasn't from crocodile at all. Its origins weren't exactly clear, but for all the world it looked suspiciously like some kind of python.
Slice it and package it in the right way and one reptile's meat looks oe and may even taste oe like another.
From mislabeled crocodile to fake fur, a global industry has thrived for centuries by supplying shops and markets with fraudulent or counterfeit products.
Until now, perhaps. Scientists and authorities think they can finally put an end to this unscrupulous trading by using a technique that can identify species from its genetic material like a barcode on a cereal box.
To see how authorities are beginning to use this method to tackle fraud, you need to travel just over 10 miles from Chinatown's markets to a large,
There, on the fifth floor, one lab is trying to catch everything from fraudulent fish, to mislabeled toy cats, to illegally prepared sheep placenta in traditional Chinese medicine.
Instead, they often get parts of the animal in the form of pills, snippets of hair,
They then compare the sequence they have with a database of animals and plants. If it matches something in the database
all animals have it; it accumulates small differences as species diverge; and it's relatively easy to extract,
It simply doesn't have information about many creatures, like pythons from Southeastern Asia, for instance.
So for barcoding to become really useful for someone like Kolokotronis examining the crocodile meat in Chinatown,
 There are sometimes workarounds for answering questions that barcoding can't. Birck laughs as he describes one case in which they got a little snippet of fur that had come from a stuffed cat.
but someone at customs suspected it was real cat fur that had been glued onto the outside of the toy.
A quick look under the microscope confirmed that it was, in fact, real cat hair. The US Customs and Border Protection is hoping to open similar testing facilities in other ports over the coming years.
in the form of vast quantities of guano oe bird droppings oe which indigenous people had been using for centuries as a soil enricher.
and creepers that blocked their way. Over time, their perseverance paid off as their hand-drawn maps began to reveal long-forgotten parts of the massive Mayan city of Caracol.
where the leaders kept their stores of hummingbird and macaw feathers, the dominant currency. A year later
she calls it) to let the community help diagnose pest and disease problems and showcase their work.
which records"sightings  of giant squids and whale-like animals. During the visit, the pair began to wonder
"It could be a sample of an extinct animal that has nothing to do with the Yeti myth,
along with unstudied primate species and subspecies of bears, some people believe the legends could describe distant relations.
range from surviving collateral hominid species, such as Homo neanderthalensis or Homo floresiensis, to large primates like Gigantopithecus,
For example, the Indonesian cryptid Orang Pendek("short person Â) is described often in Indonesian folklore as a small, hairy, manlike creature not dissimilar to Homo floresiensis.
"In the light of the Flores skeleton, a recent initiative to scour central Sumatra for'Orang Pendek'can be viewed in a more serious light.
"If animals as large as oxen can remain hidden into an era when we would expect that scientists had rustled every tree
and bush in search of new forms of life, there is no reason why the same should not apply to new species of large primate,
it seems increasingly unlikely that large mammals, and especially humanlike species, remain undocumented,  says Dr Murray Cox from the Institute of Molecular Biosciences, Massey University in  New zealand."
So perhaps the possibility of new mammal species there cannot be discounted completely. Â Ëoeproper science'But, others are less forgiving.
or the Orang Pendek to show us real evidence, or otherwise hold your peace, Â he says.
including a low-cost nutcracker for farmers in Morocco and a solar-powered incubator for guinea fowl in Burkina faso.
zero-energy system for keeping camel milk cool in soaring temperatures that commonly reach 45c (113 Fahrenheit).
or hunting large mammals to extinction oe their effects were localised. Boy, have changed things. In 1900, there were 1. 6 billion of us;
which more than 90%of the weight of all terrestrial vertebrates is made now up of humans
and the animals we've domesticated. The quest for resources to supply us all with materials
but as many of the other animals and plants we share our planet with. If you would like to comment on this article
and start discussing some bird in the tree, I would still be looking for the bird
when they were finished, Â he says.""For everybody else, the bird jumped out. But to me, it was just part of the background.
 All that changed when the lights went down and the previews finished. Almost as soon as he began to watch the film,
Their studies in cats, and many other studies since, suggest that if the developing brain isn't exposed to overlapping images from the two eyes,
water taken up by plants is eaten by animals that breathe out water vapour, returning the water to the soil for the plants by way of rain.
Environmentally, the new reservoir can be a haven for wildlife, especially birds; however, inappropriate flooding of vegetation can cause greenhouse gas emissions and poison the water for fish.
and animals to cope with, resulting in dead zones around the shores of reservoirs. Fish that lay their eggs in the shallows among submerged tree roots,
ranging from cataloguing stars in the distant corners of the universe with Galaxy Zoo to predicting the complex three dimensional structures of protein structures with Foldit.
trees from which they harvest a particularly delicious and tradable species of caterpillar. People are equipped with touchscreen devices with icons for various options like"valuable tree  that they can select
Tigers: Can we afford to save them? The tiger makes no secret of its danger,
prowling around in a yellow and black stripy catsuit, a trend it shares with other perilous beasts from wasps to snakes.
And it occurs to me, while I am stealthily stalking one on foot, that this is not the cleverest thing to be doing.
population of Bengal tigers. Nobody knows how many tigers there are in the park because years of insurgency in Nepal have made it difficult to carry out surveys.
However, with tiger parts attracting a high price on the Asian health potions market, poaching remains a highly profitable prospect in this impoverished region.
As wild tigers (Panthera tigris) become scarcer, the price on their heads goes up: tiger bones are sold for hundreds of dollars in Taiwan, Korea and China, according to WWF figures.
A bowl of tiger penis soup (to boost virility) goes for $320, a pair of eyes (to fight epilepsy) for $170,
and powdered tiger humerus (for treating ulcers and typhoid) for $3, 200 per kilo in Seoul, according to the conservation charity.
Dropping numbersi was in Nepal to see one of the country's estimated breeding population of 120-one of perhaps 3,
000 tigers left in the world, down from 100,000 in 1900. They are the largest of the four"big cats Â
and used to be found anywhere from Siberia to Bali to Turkey. But hunting and habitat encroachment by humans have over the past century reduced their range by more than 90
%and caused the extinction of three subspecies (including the Balinese tiger). There are now six subspecies left, all of
which are classed as endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature,
including the Siberian tiger, which, weighing up to 660 pounds (300 kilogrammes), is the largest; and the Bengal tiger,
which, with almost 2, 000 individuals is the most numerous. More worrying, their numbers have fallen by at least 40%in the past decade alone.
Conservationists say that the animals may go extinct within two decades. But here is the big question:
if we"run out  of tigers? Useful, or not? After all, most people never get to see them in the wild anyway,
Moreover, all the alarming figures above relate only to tigers in the wild oe they are endangered far from in captivity.
More than five times as many tigers live in captivity as in the wild, perhaps 20,000. As we bring about what Anthony Barnosky, of University of California Berkeley,
And are wild tigers worth the $350 million global fund set up to rescue them? There is no evidence whatsoever that potions made from tiger parts have a medicinal effect that cannot be attained using other ingredients.
We do not depend on tigers for meat or skins. They do not provide transport or help plough our fields.
Unlike their far smaller cousins, you can't keep one at home to stroke and pet oe well,
Likewise, there are plenty of dogs in Britain, whereas the wolf was eliminated from the island state by the 18th century.
In fact, more than 90%of the weight of all the land vertebrates is made now up of humans
and the animals we have domesticated. Megafaunal biomass (that's anything weighing more than 97lbs, or 44kg) is greater now than at any time
since humans evolved 200, 000 years ago, Barnosky says, despite our voracious impact on everything from giant sloths to North american bison.
And that is because of the recent huge population expansion by us and our chosen creatures. Conservation benefitsbut many people would argue that tigers are an iconic animal;
culturally important in several nations. That has not been enough to protect other iconic animals,
such as the Asiatic lion, which once ranged from Northern europe down to South Asia and now persists in tiny numbers (reportedly derived from just 13 individuals) in one small reserve in India.
Or the Barbary lion, the biggest and heaviest lion that was used by the Romans to fight gladiators,
and which went extinct in 1922 when a hunter shot the last one. The WWF justifies protecting tigers by pointing out the co-benefits for other wildlife.
Individual tigers have such a big range that by protecting each tiger around 38 square miles (100 square kilometres) of forest is conserved,
including other endangered animals such as rhinos, as well as the vital ecosystem services humans rely on from food to water management.
Because tigers are a top predator, they help regulate and conserve local biodiversity by, for example, helping keep the herbivore numbers down,
which allows tree saplings to mature. Conservationists also argue that tigers are good for the local economy
because they attract wildlife/eco tourists to deprived areas in the developing world. So, if we are going to keep wild tigers,
how will we do it? Most conservation strategies rely on guarding the cats against poachers and protective farmers.
Successful efforts on India have relied on bureaucratic form-filling with identification requirements for everyone who wishes to visit tiger reserves,
armed guards and compensation for villagers whose cattle are eaten by tigers. Habitat conservation is key to preventing the animals'extinction in the wild.
Consumers are urged not to buy timber products made from tiger-inhabited forests, such as Asia Pulp & Paper brands accused by the WWF and Greenpeace of rainforest destruction in Sumatra.
But consumer pressure is unlikely to be enough. One option might be to improve tigers'commercial value in the wild through tourism.
A plan being mooted to save the orangutan an endangered ape that shares territory with tigers, is to charge tourists a hefty"conservation fee  to see them.
Permits to view mountain gorillas in Rwanda cost at least $500. Moral imperativeperhaps the biggest problem with conserving the tigers'habitats,
though, is that the cats typically inhabit the crowded regions of the world most heavily populated by humans,
including India and China. The answer in the Anthropocene, may be assisted migration-to create a new habitat for them in foreign parts.
That's what Li Quan, a former fashion executive is trying to do. Li took two South China tigers
which are extinct in the wild and number less than 60 in captivity oe from zoos in China to a reserve she has created in South africa.
There, she hopes to successfully breed them, allow them to learn the skills of a wild tiger,
and eventually introduce them into reserves back in China. It is an ambitious plan and one that may be helped by findings that captive tigers in China actually retain broad genetic diversity now lost in their fewer wild relatives,
meaning that there is a the possibility of"rewilding  tigers. And this genetic wealth also allows for the option of cloning tigers
should we be reduced to the last few. Ultimately, the reason for conserving tigers may be less to do with their ecosystem or tourist economy benefits,
but simply because they are magnificent creatures. We have a moral and ethical imperative to save them in the wild,
Barnosky contends. I don't want to be part of generation that destroyed the last wild tiger. I too like knowing that there are still tigers living in the wild.
Back in Nepal, I hear the unmistakable sound of bones being crunched by a hefty jaw.
Siteram motions for me to remain still while he tiptoes forward. I can smell the tiger now oe an incredibly strong musky odour,
mixed with the scent of meat oe and I start to sweat and my knees tremble a little.
As I round the bush, a dry twig snaps loudly beneath my foot and I catch sight of a blur of powerful movement.
With a massive bound, the enormous flame-coloured beast leaps away, disappearing deep inside the forest.
It is still warm where he had been lying, with fresh blood and chewed up deer bones.
It takes a while for my heart to return to its usual pace but it takes longer for the grin to fade.
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