and Canada and is popular partly because of its resistance to insects and diseases according to the U s. Forest Service.
#Birds of a Feather: Whooping cranes Need Parents More Like Them Whooping cranes have made an astonishing comeback in North america thanks in part to some bizarre conservation methods.
Over the past 13 years dozens of cinnamon-brown chicks have been raised in captivity to be released into the wild
Strange as it sounds this elaborate game of roleplay has helped establish a new flock of whooping cranes that migrates each year from Wisconsin to Florida.
The birds raised by humans are turning out to be bad parents and scientists don't know exactly where they're going wrong.
The people trying to save whooping cranes are now testing a new approach: They're matching some chicks with adult bird parents that can hopefully step in where humans are failing.
Quest for Survival: Photos of Incredible Animal Migrations A tentative success story In 1940 there were just 22 whooping cranes in the world.
Today there are about 550. The only natural migrating population that still exists is a flock that spends its summers in Canada and flies down to the Texas Gulf Coast for the winter.
Nonmigratory flocks live in Florida and Louisiana. Some birds live their whole lives in captivity. And then there's the Eastern Migratory Flock
which was created artificially as part of a whooping-crane reintroduction project starting in 2001. Today the flock has about 95 birds that spend their spring and summer in wetlands at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge and elsewhere in central Wisconsin.
Sometime this month or perhaps in early November the flock will fly to the southeastern United states. The whooping cranes learned this migrating route from humans.
Eggs laid by captive whooping cranes in Maryland Wisconsin and Alberta are incubated. When they hatch the chicks are raised by humans cloaked in white costumes with a beaked puppet on their hands to teach the birds to eat and drink.
See Photos of the World's Cutest Baby Wild Animals I don't know that they actually think of us as whooping cranes said Glenn Olsen a veterinarian at the U s. Geological Survey's (USGS) Patuxent Wildlife Research center in Maryland who said he spends much of May through July
in one of those costumes. The chicks are always in sight of actual adult whooping cranes Biologists just don't want the birds to be handled by people in street clothes Olsen told Live Science.
If the cranes are to become truly wild they can't get too cozy with humans he said.
When the chicks are about 6 months old they are released in Wisconsin. Then comes the most critical time in their life:
their first migration. To learn the route the birds follow an ultralight aircraft piloted by a costume-clad human all the way down to the Southeast.
If the chicks don't experience that first migration they won't ever learn to migrate. We have great success in doing this in that the birds survive Olsen said.
Captive-raised chicks that are released into the wild seem to thrive; they even pair off with mates
That's a big problem because for whooping cranes to become totally self-sustaining in the wild they'll need to raise wild-born chicks themselves.
Olsen and other biologists think the birds'strange upbringing might have something to do with their tendency to abandon their eggs.
Parenting practice Costume-rearing is really a very odd way to raise a crane said John French the leader of the USGS whooping-crane project at Patuxent.
French and others suspect there's some learned behaviors whooping-crane parents naturally impart that humans handlers can't teach.
We know that we can't provide dozens of opportunities for learning that parents that are actually birds can.
We know they get much more exercise from parents that are actually birds. French Olsen and their colleagues are trying out a new method called parent-rearing
which relies on captive whooping crane parents not costumed human handlers to care for exercise and feed the chicks after they hatch.
These young birds were put in predator-resistant pens at Necedah near other free-ranging whooping cranes including pairs of adults without chicks of their own.
These whooping-crane couples tend to adopt other chicks and when it comes time to migrate the adults will lead the fledglings southward.
Last year two parent-reared birds successfully migrated Olsen said. Most likely the chicks raised by adoptive parents will pair up with birds raised by humans.
It's hoped that the adopted chicks will be able to pass along good parenting habits.
The scientists will have to wait a few years before they know whether they've been successful as whooping cranes don't typically start nesting until they're about 3 years old.
Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+.+Follow us@livescience Facebook& Google+.+Original article on Live Science i
Also in such an arms race plants have it harder than herbivores because their lifespan can be hundreds of times longer than the average leaf-eater
which is usually a small insect. That is why a single tropical tree may have hundreds of distinct chemical compounds in its defence arsenal against herbivores which makes the analysis harder.
This is where advances in data analysis prove handy. To understand these defences on an ecosystem scale requires the use of metabolomics
if it were a random process in other words the Red Queen seems to be in action.
and total numbers) between trees and herbivores but that may not actually be true according to Jeff Ollerton professor of biodiversity at the University of Northampton.
and their herbivores and then record their interactions. While other explanations will certainly have some role to play Coley
#Extreme Cold Could Halt Invasive Insect Air so cold it makes your nose hair crackle could be a good thing for the country's nearly one billion ash trees according to the U s. Department of agriculture.
The record cold snap sweeping much of the United states blasted states hit hard by the emerald ash borer an invasive beetle that was detected first in 2002.
borer larvae living under the bark of ash trees the USDA wrote today in a Facebook post.
and reproduction of the insect Frelich told MPR. Read more: MPR Email Becky Oskin or follow her@beckyoskin. Follow us@livescience Facebook & Google
Climate, Animals & Plants The Permian period was the final period of the Paleozoic era. Lasting from 299 million to 251 million years ago it followed the Carboniferous period
Fossils of the shallower coastal waters around the Pangaea continental shelf indicate that reefs were large and diverse ecosystems with numerous sponge
and coral species. Ammonites similar to the modern nautilus were common as were brachiopods. The lobe-finned
and spiny fishes that gave rise to the amphibians of the Carboniferous were being replaced by true bony fish.
Arthropods continued to diversify during the Permian period to fill the niches opened up by the more variable climate.
True bugs with mouthparts modified for piercing and sucking plant materials evolved during the Permian. Other new groups included the cicadas and beetles.
Two important groups of animals dominated the Permian landscape: Synapsids and Sauropsids. Synapsids had skulls with a single temporal opening
and are thought to be the lineage that eventually led to mammals. Sauropsids had two skull openings
and were the ancestors of the reptiles including dinosaurs and birds. In the early Permian it appeared that the Synapsids were to be the dominant group of land animals.
The group was diversified highly. The earliest most primitive Synapsids were the Pelycosaurs which included an apex predator a genus known as Dimetrodon.
This animal had a lizard-like body and a large bony sail#fin on its back that was used probably for thermoregulation.
Despite its lizard-like appearance recent discoveries have concluded that Dimetrodon skulls jaws and teeth are closer to mammal skulls than to reptiles Another genus of Synapsids Lystrosaurus was a small herbivore about 3 feet long (almost 1 meter) that looked something like a cross between a lizard and a hippopotamus.
It had a flat face with two tusks and the typical reptilian stance with legs angled away from the body.
In the late Permian Pelycosaurs were succeeded by a new lineage known as Therapsids. These animals were much closer to mammals.
Their legs were under their bodies giving them the more upright stance typical of quadruped mammals.
They had more powerful jaws and more tooth differentiation. Fossil skulls show evidence of whiskers which indicates that some species had fur
and were endothermic. The Cynodont(#oedog-toothed#)group included species that hunted in organized packs.
Cynodonts are considered to be the ancestors of all modern mammals. At the end of the Permian the largest Synapsids became extinct leaving many ecological niches open.
The second group of land animals the Sauropsid group weathered the Permian Extinction more successfully
and rapidly diversified to fill them. The Sauropsid lineage gave rise to the dinosaurs that would dominate the Mesozoic era.
Scientists estimate that more than 95 percent of marine species became extinct and more than 70 percent of land animals.
In the tropics in June the sun is low casting long shadows when the MODIS or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer sensors that fly aboard NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites snap images
Oh just a butterfly he said dismissively. I just smiled to myself because unlike him
I knew that this wasn't just any butterfly it was a monarch butterfly. Yes it is beautiful
Its bright colors send a message to potential predators warning them of the danger they'll find within.
so heartbreaking to hear that the number of monarch butterflies that migrate across the United states each year
Although the number of butterflies varies from year to year this estimate is a precipitous drop from a high of 1 billion in 1997 and down from a long-term average of 350 million over the last 15 years.
It signals a species in crisis. The decline of monarch butterflies over the last decade or more has coincided with the wide-scale adoption of genetically modified crops that are resistant to the weed-killer glyphosate also known as Round up.
The problem is that monarch butterflies are milkweed dependent on. It's the only type of plant that they use for laying their eggs.
This explains why the loss of butterflies from a specific region could have such a large impact on the overall population size.
Drought particularly in Texas is believed to also be posing a threat to these butterflies as they try to make their way from Mexico across the United states to Southern Canada and back in the span of a year.
And deforestation of the butterflies'wintering habitat continues to be a concern. However given that the widespread adoption of Round up Ready crops has eliminated largely the monarch's most essential habitat by removing milkweeds from the landscape it's time to reconsider
Besides its beautiful appearance and usefulness as a pollinator the monarch's long-distance round-trip journey is a unique phenomenon that scientists still don't fully understand.
So much more than'just a butterfly.''This Op-Ed was adapted from Monarch butterfly population hits a new low on the NRDC blog Switchboard.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.
Grasshoppers with a Side of Fungi (Op-Ed) Doug Turnbull is a hard-science-fiction writer.
That project which focused on studying mammals in Mars gravity could possibly be adapted for the study of plants.
Mars settlers could also turn to grasshoppers as an additional food resource. While not popular in most European countries and the Anglo-sphere grasshoppers are a major source of animal protein in Asia Africa and South america.
They have a tremendous advantage over many other meat sources because of their extremely efficient conversion of vegetable matter into insect protein.
Grasshoppers are twice as efficient when converting vegetable mass into protein as pigs and five times as efficient as cattle.
In addition the husbandry associated with raising grasshoppers is compared relatively simple to that needed for cattle chickens
Finally it would be much easier to transport insects to Mars than to send large animals.
The insects could become part of the Mars culture too. Future settlers on the Red planet would likely come from all over the world
and many would not suffer from the Eeeew factor many Westerners associate with eating insects.
So grasshoppers may become a meat staple for Mars residents. Of course this would depend upon the guaranteed reliability of grasshopper containment systems.
Mars settlers certainly would not fare well with the grasshopper equivalent of Star trek's tribbles.
Speaking of Star trek a version of its food replicator is in the process of moving from science fiction to science fact.
Scientists have synthesized successfully meat using a 3d printer to align stem cells from animals in laboratory Petri dishes creating both hamburger
The grasshoppers would make a better dessert if dipped in the 3d printed chocolate. Perhaps in the future the list of 3d printed proteins will include fish.
hidden from the sun###oeno sylvan nymphs Here found a home nor Pan but savage rites And barbarous worship altars horrible On massive stones upreared;
Sussman endured leech bites coral stings a broken wrist a solo drive along the Pan-American Highway
She also photographed 2000-year-old brain corals off the coast of Tobago and 13000-year-old underground forests of dwarf mobola trees with crowns of leaves poking above the surface of South african soil.
If the ancient animals and plants featured in this book could look upon us they might feel sorry for us.
#Most Interesting Science News articles of the Week<p>This week we have zebra stripes on the Earth the most accurate timekeeper and even weird techni-quarks.</
</p><p>The so-called zebra stripes form when the electric field around Earth generated by the planet's rotation previously thought to be too weak to impact the fast-moving particles creates a striped pattern in the inner electron belt.</
<a href=http://www. livescience. com/44583-earth-magnetic-field-zebra-stripes-source. html target=blank>'Zebra Stripes'in Earth's Magnetic field Have Surprising Source
what is being called a baby chupacabra the legendary animal said to roam the countryside in search of blood.
so because it is said to drain the blood from animals such as goats chickens and other livestock.</
because it makes up part of the backbone of DNA you can t make DNA without phosphorus. We get our phosphorus by eating plants that have drawn up phosphorus through their roots or by eating animals that ate the plants (or from expensive tablets).
Manure from horses cows pigs or chickens has the nitrogen phosphorus and other goodies that plants need.
as a result of the drought heavy rains and pest outbreaks made worse by climate change. That means higher prices at the store but also greater challenges for the farmers producing our food.
(even if as we saw in the horse meat scandal the label does not always accurately describe the contents).
When they found this latter bug on the cucumbers they thought they had found the culprit.
New bugs will always make life difficult for scientists. The German outbreak also pointed to another unavoidable issue:
Lady Caravaner the Knight-captain began keeping wonderful composure-Knights are very good at that much like trained cats-my name is Captain Lynniac.
Remarkably prescient for a dog. I just wanted to say that all Dukes are traitors all Knights are liars
He had watched his men beaten by outlaws he considered less than dogs and without weapons. And apparently he had no more use for honor
It seems to overlook the fact that many of the most important classes of prescription drugs like ACE inhibitors for high blood pressure (first developed from Brazilian snake venom) beta blockers (from hallucinogenic Mexican fungi)
Herndon and his colleagues in Peru have recorded indigenous people employing hallucinogenic frog slime to heighten sensory acuity.
And I have observed medicine men in the northeastern Amazon using insects to treat arthritis and bacterial infections indicating that local wisdom regarding the healing potential of plants
and animals has been underestimated. When I entered the field of rainforest conservation more than three decades ago there were two basic areas of focus:
and the animals that had eaten plants the carbon ends up in our bodies. The sixth-lightest element on the periodic table carbon exists in nature as two stable isotopes:
and models (both spear and net fishing) and fish shows up in offering lists. There is also a lot of archeological evidence for fish consumption from sites such as Gaza
#Pocket Pets? Mini Hedgehog and Tiny Tapir Fossils Found in Canada A miniature hedgehog smaller than a mouse
and a pint-sized tapir are the first mammals ever found at a fossil site in British columbia known for exquisitely preserved plants insects and fish.
The new fossils date back about 50 million to 53 million years ago to the warm Eocene epoch
These are the first two mammals ever found at the dig site in Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park
We know a bit about it in the high Arctic said study researcher Jaelyn Eberle the curator of fossil vertebrates at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural history.
See Images of the New Hedgehog & Tapir Fossils When they looked at it under a hand lens they realized it was a fossil vertebrate Eberle told Live Science.
The bone turned out to be a partial jaw and some teeth belonging to a previously unknown species of hedgehog dubbed Silvacola acares from the words for tiny forest dweller in Greek and Latin.
This little hedgehog would have been only about 2 inches (5 centimeters) long smaller than a house mouse.
Its molars were a mere millimeter (0. 04 inches) long so small that paleontologists declined to chip the animal's tiny jaw from the rock surrounding it.
Instead the study researchers sent the whole hunk to Penn State university to be scanned with high-resolution computed tomography (CT) a technique that yields virtual slices of the interior of an object.
The tapir was equally surprising. Greenwood and his colleagues found it in coal-rich rock beds in the park the site of a swampy spot in the Eocene
Balmy British columbia The tapir is a species of the Heptodon genus which is part of a group that is the oldest in the tapir lineage.
Species of Heptodon would have been about half the size of modern tapirs which weigh around 330 to 660 pounds (150 to 300 kilograms).(
During the time these creatures lived other animals were pipsqueaks too the earliest known horse
which started out evolutionarily the size of a mini schnauzer shrunk to housecat size during the warmest part of the early Eocene.)
Heptodon probably ate leaves which makes sense as it shows up in many forested Eocene environments Eberle said.
#Facts About Bats Bats are the only mammals that can fly. They are also among the only mammals known to feed on blood.
Common misconceptions and fears about bats have led many people to regard the creatures as unclean disease carriers
but bats are actually very helpful in controlling the population of crop-destroying insects. There are more than 900 species of bats in the world.
megabats and microbats. Megabats (formally bats in the Megachiroptera suborder) include flying foxes and Old world fruit bats.
They tend to be larger than microbats (Microchiroptera suborder) but some microbats are actually larger than some megabats.
Flying foxes (Genus pteropus) are the largest bats. Some species have wingspans of 5 to 6 feet (1. 5 to 1. 8 meters)
and weigh up to 2. 2 lbs. 998 grams) according to the Oakland Zoo. One of the smallest megabats the long-tongued fruit bat (Macroglossus minimus) has a wingspan of only 10 inches (25.4 centimeters) according to the Smithsonian Institution.
This bat weighs about half an ounce (14 g). Among microbats the largest species is the false vampire or spectral bat (Vampyrum spectrum) with a wingspan of up to 40 inches (1 meter.
It weighs 5 to 6. 7 ounces (145 to 190 g). The smallest bat is the bumblebee bat according to the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology.
It grows to only about 1. 25 inches long (3 cm) and weighs about 2 grams (0. 07 ounces).
Bats live all over the world except for some islands and the Arctic and Antarctica. They mostly prefer warmer areas that are closer to the equator
and they can be found in rain forests mountains farmland woods and cities. Bats have two strategies for weathering the cold.
In this short-term form of hibernation a bat reduces its metabolic rate lowers its body temperature and slows its breathing and heart rate.
Bats roost in trees caves mines and barns anyplace that provides shelter from the weather protection from predators
and seclusion for rearing the animals'young. Bats live together in groups called colonies which contain 100 to 1000 bats.
These mammals are also nocturnal meaning that they sleep during the day and are awake at night.
In the day they sleep upside down from trees or the roofs of caves holding on with their sharp claws.
Flying Mammals: Gallery of Spooky Bats Most bats eat flowers small insects fruits nectar pollen
and leaves though it depends on the type of bat. Megabats usually eat fruits and microbats generally eat insects.
The Malayan flying fox has a big appetite. It can eat half its body weight every day. The vampire bat outdoes even that though eating twice its weight in one day.
The brown bat can eat up to 1000 small insects in an hour according to the Defenders of Wildlife organization.
Some bats will squeeze fruits in their mouths and drink the juices. Vampire bats like a juice of a different type though.
They do indeed drink blood mainly from cattle and deer but they don't suck blood like the legends say Rather they make A v-shaped cut and then lick up the blood according to the San diego Zoo.
Bats have some unique mating behaviors not seen in other animals. Male and female bats meet in hibernation sites called hibernacula where they breed.
Bats'swarm'around in huge numbers chasing each other and performing spectacular aerobatics biologist John Altringham told Live Science in a 2013 article.
Related: Animal Sex: How Bats Do it It's not clear how the bats choose their mates Altringham said
but it may be that females seek out the most agile males. During the swarming event breeding pairs will go off to secluded spots in the cave to mate in private.
Researchers have found that female short-nosed fruit bats perform oral sex on their mates to prolong the act;
male Indian flying foxes do the same thing to females. Mating occurs in the late summer and early autumn
and the females store the males'sperm until the next spring. A pregnant female will carry her young for a gestation period of 40 days to six months.
Young bats drink milk from their mothers to survive much like other mammals. The mothers and pups stay in groups separate from the males.
Many bat species around the world are threatened with extinction. The Red List from the International Union for Conservation of Nature identifies more than 250 species as endangered vulnerable or near threatened.
Bulmer's fruit bat is the world's most endangered bat. It is only found in one cave in Papua new guinea.
This white powdery-looking fungus a member of a group of cold-loving fungi calledgeomyces coats the muzzles ears
and wings of bats and has meant death for hundreds of thousands of the animals in the northeastern United states. Related Devastating Disease Found in Endangered Gray Bats Bats see using echolocation.
The animals make high-frequency yells and analyze the location of objects around them by perceiving how the sound bounces back off the object.
Research at the University of Bristol in the United kingdom published in 2011 in the journal Behavioral Processes shows that the angle at which sound bounces back can tell the bat the object's size.
To discover this the researchers studied flight patterns of the bats after objects were placed in the animals'paths.
Some horseshoe bats can hover and pluck insects from spider webs according to the BBC. An anticoagulant in vampire bat saliva has been adapted for use in increasing blood flow in patients with stroke or heart disease
#Banned Drone May have damaged Yellowstone Spring The U s. National park service has an important message for visitors: Leave your drones at home!
Unmanned aircraft were banned officially from U s. national parks in June 2014. But just last week on Aug 2 an unidentified tourist crashed a drone straight into the famous rainbow-colored Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone national park in Wyoming.
#Climate and Civilization Killed Egypt's Animals If you took a cruise along the northern stretch of the Nile some 6000 years ago you wouldn't have seen any pyramids
but you might have spotted a giraffe or an elephant taking a drink at the bank of the river.
At that time the Nile wasn't surrounded by desert; rather the warmer wetter landscape resembled the current scenery of sub-Saharan East Africa.
Today Egypt's elephants and giraffes are extinct. So are its cheetahs and aurochs and wildebeests.
But animal bones and images of animals on ancient artifacts reveal what creatures once roamed the region.
A team of researchers looked at Egypt's rich archaeological record and found that most mammal extinctions over the last six millennia were linked to periods of big change in terms of climate and human civilization.
We were amazed just at the diversity of animals in the artifacts Yeakel told Live Science.
It got us thinking about how we could use representations of animals in the historical record to understand how animal communities have changed.
There are rock art drawings of hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses from the early Holocene. The tombs of Egyptian pharaohs are decorated with hunting scenes that show
Import records of cheetahs and lions reveal when certain animals might have been considered exotic after disappearing locally.
The researchers found that Egypt was home to 37 large-bodied mammals (those over 8. 8 lbs. or 4 kilograms) during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene.
Today just eight of those creatures remain: the golden jackal the ibex the Barbary goat the Egyptian fox the Dorcas gazelle the wild ass the striped hyena and the slender-horned gazelle
which is on the verge of extinction. Our simplest observation was that the community changed in a very nonrandom way Yeakel said.
The stability of the ecosystem tended to unravel during periods of major climate change and sociopolitical turnover the scientists found.
and overhunting might have driven the decline of large herbivores such as elephants giraffes and native camels
which then indirectly affected the populations of the predators that ate the herbivores. Agriculture was also on the rise during this period.
and competition with farmers might have also hurt herbivore populations. A third possible driver could have been the climate;
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011