Synopsis: 4.4. animals:


Nature 00004.txt

Halting the African armyworm: Nature Newsa plague of crop-eating caterpillars has struck Liberia and a second wave could spread across West Africa in the next few weeks,

the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations (FAO) has warned. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Liberia's president, has declared a state of emergency

and appealed for international aid. The African armyworm is the caterpillar of the night-flying moth Spodoptera exempta,

and is a major crop pest, usually found in eastern Africa. From October to December one of the rainy seasons the moths lay their eggs on grasses and crops in Kenya and Tanzania.

Their hatched larvae which grow to 2-5 centimetres long, march in groups, devouring any food sources they come across.

They subsequently pupate to form moths, each of which can fly up to 1, 000 kilometres and lay 1, 000 eggs in its 10-day lifetime.

Armyworms have attacked, with varying intensity, 48 times in the past 55 years, says David Grzywacz, an expert on the caterpillars at the Natural resources Institute of the University of Greenwich, UK.

The second wave of moths generally fly north or south of eastern Africa, to countries such as Ethiopia or Zambia.

Liberia in western Africa, was prepared simply not to deal with the threat, he says. The caterpillars have munched through cocoa, bananas and maize (corn),

and are defecating in water supplies. So far more than 100 villages and around 500,000 people have been affected,

says Arthur Tucker, of Liberia's Ministry of Agriculture. This is an emergency on the scale of a major locust outbreak,

says the FAO's Christopher Matthews. Many of the armyworms have bored now into the ground,

When they re-emerge as moths in a week to 12 days he says, a second wave may spread into neighbouring countries such as Guinea and Sierra leone.

Worms have already been seen in six towns in Guinea and moths have been spotted in some regions of Liberia,

Tucker says. The caterpillars can be sprayed with pesticides as soon as they are detected. Tanzania has a network of pheromone traps set up as monitoring devices to attract the moths

as soon as they appear. The country also stockpiles pesticides to deal with the caterpillars. But because it was taken by surprise,

Liberia was unable to deal with the threat fast enough. Initially farmers who could not get hold of pesticides set fire to worms

and crops, says Tucker. Government teams are now spraying pesticides imported from Accra in Ghana,

he says. Unfortunately, the pupae have burrowed now underground and are out of reach of pesticides, so Liberia must prepare for a second wave of moths.

The idea of using pheromones to corral the moths together for destruction won't work, says Grzywacz there will be too many to control cost-effectively.

Neighbouring countries are already spraying pesticides in preparation. Grzywacz is working on spraying a biological control agent

The virus attacks the worms every year, but usually occurs too late in their outbreak cycle to prevent serious crop damage.

If the weather conditions continue to be good for armyworms (generally scattered showers and warm), he says,

then the next wave of moths will be initiating a second generation of outbreaks in a few weeks,

the weather conditions may turn against the armyworms and things may gradually subside.


Nature 00012.txt

Cutting out the chemicals: Nature Newsozone experts are exploring ways to curb powerful greenhouse gases of their own making under the Montreal Protocol,


Nature 00016.txt

and trees and competing with native fauna, such as giant tortoises. After having eradicated pigs from the island,

with the help of dogs or by a large group hunting together in a line, combing the island.

and kill the animals. And finally, between 2004 and 2005, the teams used'Judas'goats and'Mata hari'goats.

because in the end you are actually killing fewer animals. The same group has cleared since the neighbouring Isabela Island of goats,

and birds, such as the Galapagos rail (Laterallus spilonotus) have returned as well. The project is among the most spectacular of a new wave of very ambitious island eradications.


Nature 00024.txt

like bark beetles, says Mantgem. Bark beetles have caused many massive tree die offs in the region in recent years.

And the mortality increases that Mantgem and his team captured may be symptoms of climatic stress that make the forests more liable to such catastrophes.

they can become more susceptible to things like the pine beetle, says Werner Kurz of the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria, British columbia.


Nature 00032.txt

it marked the virus's first known foray outside primates, and raised fears of a potential threat to human health.

The Ebola Reston virus was discovered first, in 1989, in crab-eating macaques imported to the United states from the Philippines.

Since then, the virus has killed most infected monkeys, yet had no effect on the 25 people that it infected unlike three of the four other strains of Ebola,

Because few people come into close contact with primates in the Philippines, the risk of catching Ebola Reston in this way is relatively low.

similar to its mode of attack in monkeys. Further pathology tests are due to begin in spring at the Australian Animal health Laboratory in Geelong, Victoria.

as is the case with monkeys, the infections resulted from contact with a reservoir of the virus,

rather than spreading from animal to animal. In 2005, outbreaks of human Ebola in Gabon and the Republic of the Congo were traced back to colonies of bats (E. M. Leroy et al.

The virus is likely to be spread by bat droppings falling into the pigs'feed,


Nature 00034.txt

For a decade, breeders who want to locate the best bull have the animals'semen tested for its DNA,


Nature 00036.txt

possibly because large birds that act as seed dispersers have gone extinct in the area. And most of the regrown areas surveyed by her team are within 100 metres to two kilometres of primary forest,


Nature 00041.txt

in order to destroy fungi, insects and weeds, pesticides do not have to be so hazardous that they are carcinogenic,

The EFSA will then draw up a list of approved pest-destroying ingredients that can used in crop-protection products.

The directive promotes the use of non-chemical pest-control methods, bans aerial crop spraying without specific authorization and curbs the use of pesticides in areas such as parks and playgrounds.


Nature 00093.txt

We want to switch the current perception of Bangladesh from the iconic vulnerable country where all these journalists fly to to see vulnerability to make it the iconic adaptive country,


Nature 00120.txt

which has been modified to be resistant to insects. But on 16february, a committee of experts appointed by each of the 27 EU countries was unable to muster the'qualified majority'--one that represents 62

It has approved already two more insect-resistant maizes--BT1507, which is owned jointly by Pioneer and Dow Agrosciences, and BT11,


Nature 00158.txt

Nature Newsthe creation of human-animal hybrid embryos proposed as a way to generate embryonic stem cells without relying on scarce human eggs has met with legislative hurdles and public outcry.

human-mouse and human-rabbit hybrid embryos fail to grow beyond 16 cells (Y. Chung et al.

UK, who is developing mouse-pig hybrid embryos. The paper outlines only one set of conditions used to create the embryos,

It may be possible to create hybrid embryos using human somatic cells and eggs from nonhuman primates,

but primate eggs are also in short supply, says Lanza. Although Hui Zhen Sheng from the Shanghai Second Medical University in China and her colleagues have reported creating human-rabbit embryos (Y. Chen et al.

but in mice it happens at the two-cell stage, and this mismatch may disrupt development.


Nature 00187.txt

The work in question was done in 1947 by the Dutch researcher Niko Tinbergen on the begging behaviour of herring-gull chicks.

Tinbergen argued that animals come into the world with instincts already adapted to their environments. Adult gulls have a red spot on their lower bill.

Tinbergen who shared the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973, presented wild chicks with model birds bearing spots and measured how much they pecked at the model.

The story that made it into the textbooks is that chicks have a powerful innate tendency to peck at red dots,

but by the time of his books The Study of Instinct (1951) and The Herring gull's World (1953),

Tinbergen did other experiments with gull chicks showing for example, that they will peck even at a disembodied red spot on a stick

and found that Tinbergen's intuition had been correct after all the birds tended to peck more often at red spots.

who studies bird behaviour at the University of Cambridge in the UK and was involved not in the new study.

whether you're looking at bird behaviour or particle physics, says Harry Collins, a sociologist of science at Cardiff University.


Nature 00211.txt

Evidence for ancient horse ranch uncovered: Nature Newshumans rode and milked horses as early as 3500 BC,

say an international group of researchers. The findings come from ancient settlements in Kazakhstan, where horse jawbones showed signs of bridling

and ceramic cooking vessels contained traces of horse milk. Researchers also found that the horses'leg bones resembled those of domestic rather than wild horses.

The discovery of horse milk is just amazing, says David Anthony, an archaeologist at Hartwick College in Oneonta,

New york. Combined with previous findings that people discarded horse manure at those sites, he says,

it is pretty unequivocal evidence for domestication. Scientists have debated long when humans first domesticated horses.

Indirect clues such as horse bones buried with other domesticated animals in human graves, go as far back as 4500 BC.

Horses also show shifts in body size range from around 2500 BC, but the changes are not as dramatic as those in other domesticated animals.

More definitive evidence emerges at roughly 2000 BC, when horses were buried with chariots. Settlements of the Botai culture in northern Kazakhstan, dated around 3500 BC,

have attracted attention because they contain masses of discarded horse bones that far outnumber remains from other animals,

as well as tools that may have been used for processing hides. But some scientists have argued that the mix of ages among the killed horses suggests the Botai were hunting wild herds rather than raising

and slaughtering their own horses. Alan Outram, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, UK,

and his colleagues took a three-pronged approach to investigate the possibility of Botai horse domestication.

First, they looked at the lower leg bones of Botai horses, and found that they were more slender than the bones of Palaeolithic Siberian wild horses.

Instead, the bones resembled those of Bronze age domestic horses and modern domestic Mongolian horses. Studying the teeth and jawbones of the horses,

they also detected tooth wear and extra jawbone growth, suggesting the animals'mouths had been damaged by bridling.

Finally the team analysed the hydrogen isotope ratios of fat residue in pottery shards and found two distinct signatures that seemed to correspond to horse carcass fat and mare's milk.

We've not just got domestic horses we've got domestic horses that seem to have been ridden

and milked, says Outram. The findings appear in Science1. 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,

whereas the Botai were hunter-gatherers. Although the milk evidence is convincing, the leg bone and bridling analyses are less definitive,

says Anthony. Horses naturally vary in size across different regions, he says, so the leg differences may not necessarily be due to domestication.

Anthony also notes that the methods used to analyse tooth and jaw damage are preliminary

It is possible that horses were domesticated even earlier than 3500 BC, says Carles Vil Â,

the horses were modified already, he says. Outram's team plans to perform further excavations on Botai sites to look for features related to corrals.

They may also investigate sites in Russia to look for earlier evidence of horse domestication.


Nature 00234.txt

Plants genes get fine tailoring: Nature Newsafter decades of searching, plant biologists have found a way to selectively snip out one gene


Nature 00252.txt

Economically, cattle are the most important partner species of animal we have, Cunningham says. But the bovine genome is large at 3 billion bases,

In the absence of genomic information, breeding programmes have relied on tracking the physical characteristics of the animals,

although diversity has decreased greatly over time as would be expected for an animal that has been domesticated and intensively bred for specific traits the modern cattle population is about as diverse as humans,

and much more diverse than dogs, says Kim Worley, a genome researcher at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas,

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,

There is more to be done with these domestic animal resources rather than just developing these genomic selection methods,


Nature 00277.txt

Droughts, insect invasions, fires and storms would cause widespread forest destruction. The impacts of these fires and pest infestations will lead to an additional release of carbon into the atmosphere,

which again exacerbates climate change, says Buck. In a warmer world, subtropical and southern temperate forests such as those in the western United states, northern China

increasing the incidence of fire and pests. This would lead to more carbon being released a recent report in Science2 found that a 2005 drought in the Amazon basin released about 1. 2 billion-1. 6 billion tonnes of carbon (See'Climate change crisis for rainforests'.

the short-term positive impacts would be cancelled out by damage from increased insect invasions, fires and storms.

The mountain pine beetle has devastated the forests of western Canada. The outbreak currently covers 14 million hectares roughly 3. 5 times the size of Switzerland,

says Allan Carroll, an insect ecologist with the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria, British columbia. By 2020, the projected end of the outbreak, about 270 megatonnes of carbon will have been emitted to the atmosphere3.

To date, fire-prevention policies in regions such as western North america have sought to suppress forest fires altogether leaving forests more susceptible to large-scale fires and insect attack.

The mountain pine beetle outbreak and the climate signal associated with it is the canary in the coal mine about future disturbances.


Nature 00421.txt

Nature Newsthe water plumes erupting from the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus could be caused by a liquid ocean lurking many kilometres underground rather than by geysers erupting from a salty ocean just beneath the moon

The absence of sodium in the plumes pouring out of vents at Enceladus's south pole rules out geysers from water just below the surface.

or molecular sodium both in the plumes and in one of Saturn's rings thought to be fed by these plumes, the E ring.

If geysers caused Enceladus's plumes, then they would throw up salt-rich jets giving out a strong sodium signal that could be spotted by ground-based telescopes.

These grains travel out into space in the plumes along with salt-poor ice grains that are formed like snowflakes from pure water vapour.

Salt-rich grains are frozen directly ocean water dragged up by strong vapour flow says Postberg.

The absence of sodium in the plume does not contradict his theory because the small amounts of sodium he would expect to see would not be detectable using the Keck telescope.

But other models exist to explain Enceladus's plumes apart from oceans or geysers. One of these suggests that reservoirs of clathrates gassy molecules locked up in the lattice of another molecule exist below the surface.

which carry up ice particles with them to form the icy plumes. These ice particles could carry up salt as well

Kieffer also says that the other gases present in the plume including methane, carbon dioxide and nitrogen can only be accounted for with the clathrate model.

Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa cruz, had suggested that the plumes came directly from the solid ice shell,

such as the absence of sodium in the plumes. There really ought to be some there, he says.


Nature 00445.txt

So far the role of animals has not been demonstrated in the virus's epidemiology or spread,

Whereas flu surveillance has improved over the past six years in poultry and wild birds, pigs have been below the radar,

The avian H5n1 flu virus leads to serious disease in poultry and causes huge economic losses,

It is now clear that the animal -and public-health communities underestimated the potential for pigs to generate a pandemic virus

such as the avian H5 subtype, explains Capua. The consensus was that a pandemic could not be caused by H1,

H2 and H3 bird viruses, meaning that they would have no immunity. This shows that the world needs a comprehensive surveillance system of all influenza subtypes


Nature 00466.txt

these cells are diploid (containing two copies of the genome), like the body cells of the plant, rather than haploid (containing one copy of the genome) like normal reproductive cells.

The triple mutants are reminiscent of a mutant reported last year by Imran Siddiqi and his colleagues at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular biology in Hyderabad


Nature 00524.txt

resistant to a variety of insects and diseases and able to withstand the vagaries of climate change,


Nature 00540.txt

and other animals for years before they emerge as a worldwide threat to human health.

swine and human flu viruses would have swapped genes with avian viruses, ultimately giving rise to the dangerous assortment of genes carried by the 1918 virus. This work suggests that the generation of pandemic strains

not only in humans but in other mammalian and avian hosts, is key to identifying possible pandemic strains and their future evolution.

and their colleagues compiled the available data on known bird, swine and human flu viruses and created family trees based on DNA sequence information.

the researchers determined that a precursor to at least one 1918 flu gene was present in mammals before 1911.

The results run counter to previous hypotheses that the human 1918 flu strain had evolved directly from a bird flu virus2.

Instead, the new findings suggest that an avian strain entered pig and human populations, and then swapped genes with mammalian flu viruses before becoming a pandemic.


Nature 00541.txt

the pandemic H1n1 (swine flu virus currently circling the globe bears an uncanny resemblance to an influenza virus that wreaked havoc nearly a century ago,

The study also included experiments in a veritable menagerie of animals including mice, miniature pigs, ferrets and macaques.

In all but the pig, the virus yields an infection in the lungs that is more severe than would be expected from an average seasonal flu, according to Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues,

and produces more severe disease in ferrets than seasonal flu (see Swine flu reaches into the lungs and gut).

Kawaoka's team observed this virulence in mice and macaques as well, but pigs showed no outward signs of disease

Nevertheless, one alarming feature of the macaque results was the development of severe pneumonia that extended throughout the lungs, notes Earl Brown, a virologist at the University of Ottawa.


Nature 00556.txt

Nature Newsthe ability to adapt to a new environment may not always be beneficial for long-term success in flour beetles at least.

Beetles that were offered and ate a novel food, even with their ancestral food all around them, suffered over multiple generations, according to a study presented last month at the Evolution 2009 meetings in Moscow, Idaho.

We saw that these beetles have a massive degree of behavioural plasticity but that their evolutionary success was hindered due to their adaptability,

Agashe tested Tribolium castaneum, the ubiquitous flour beetle, by offering the beetles wheat flour their ancestral diet and maize (corn) flour,

The researchers tracked how much of each flour the beetles had consumed by looking at the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in ground-up beetle carcasses.

After only two weeks, Agashe found, the beetles'diet shifted to almost 30%maize flour. This was a never-before-seen food source,

The researchers let the beetles multiply through six generations, and tracked adult and larval numbers to assess immediate as well as long-term success. There was only a 4%increase in corn use over six generations, reports Agashe.

In other words, the beetles ate a lot of maize initially but then the rate tapered off. Furthermore the beetle populations that shifted to eating maize most quickly tended to have the lowest population sizes and stability.


Nature 00563.txt

Pests could overcome GM cotton toxins: Nature Newslaboratory studies suggest that it may be possible for insects to overcome two disparate toxins produced by genetically modified cotton.

The results strike a cautionary note at a time when developers are racing to create crops that produce many different pesticides.

Insects can become resistant to individual insecticides in much the same way as bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics.

and create crops that produce multiple toxins that target the same pest. This is the current trend of all the companies,

Missouri, intends to launch a line of maize (corn) that contains eight different genes that make the crop resistant to herbicides and to attack by insects.

The main way that insects become resistant is by altering the binding site of the toxin,

if the insects altered the Cry1ac binding site, it's not going to give cross resistance to Cry2ab.

But when Tabashnik and his colleagues tried to selectively breed insects that were resistant to Cry2ab

The researchers were studying pink bollworm (Pectinophora gossypiella) a particular nuisance in the cotton fields of the southern United states. Crops expressing Cry1ac have held thus far largely the pest at bay,

and there has been no sign of Cry1ac resistance emerging in the insects. Tabashnik wanted to learn more about how insects may become resistant to the less-studied Cry2ab protein,

so the team raised a number of different laboratory strains of pink bollworms on a diet that contained the toxin.

To their surprise they generated a strain of pink bollworm that was not only resistant to 240-times higher levels of Cry2ab than normal,

but also to 420-times higher concentrations of Cry1ac. Although the binding sites of the two toxins differ,

both toxins are activated via the same pathway in the insect. A change in the protease responsible for activating the toxins could provide an avenue to cross-resistance,

Other changes in the insect's ability to cope with damaged cells could also play a part,

But this does not pose a threat for control by the current pyramided Bt cotton of this insect Tabashnik says.

The resistant pink bollworms were able to withstand high concentrations of both toxins in their diets,

Evolution by insects is not something that scientists are going to stop.


Nature 00581.txt

Renewable technologies increase energy sprawl: Nature Newsmillions of hectares of land will be needed to meet growing energy demands in the United states over the next two decades, according to new'energy sprawl'estimates.


Nature 00584.txt

and the number of animals used in the tests could rise by 20 times to 54 million.

according to a non-peer-reviewed report from the US Geological Survey (USGS). More than two-thirds contained levels exceeding the Environmental protection agency's level of concern for the protection of fish-eating mammals,

and Animal Use in the Life sciences meets in Rome. http//www. aimgroup. eu/2009/WC7 31 august-4 september The World meteorological organization hosts the Third world Climate Conference in Geneva. http://www


Nature 00611.txt

wrinkle-faced bat (Centurio senex) has been an enigma to biologists for a long time. Now, a team led by Elizabeth Dumont at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst has discovered that the oddly-shaped skulls include jaws that are more powerful than not just other fruit bats but also much larger predatory bats,

which need to be able to sink their teeth into tough hides. When I first saw them I thought

which is roughly 20%stronger than that of any other known bat of the same size and approaches the strength of some of the strongest predatory bats.

Hyenas have large bite forces that allow them access to a wider array of foods

than other carnivores. Clearly wrinkle-faced bats must be eating something that few competitors can I wish I knew what that was,


Nature 00642.txt

GM crop lures pest killers: Nature Newsresearchers have created transgenic maize plants that fight off pests by emitting a chemical to attract insect-killing nematode worms. 1the method,

demonstrated in agricultural field trials at the University of Missouri's Bradford Research and Extension Center in Columbia, could help farmers to control crop pests by luring natural parasites or predators.

This could avoid the problems associated with synthetic pesticides, which can damage ecosystems and tend to lose their impact as pests acquire resistance.

European and US researchers, headed by Theodoor Turlings, a chemical ecologist from the University of Neuch ¢tel in Switzerland

which attracts nematodes that kill western corn rootworm an insect whose larvae are major maize pests in North america.

This mimics the natural defensive strategies of many plants, which release volatile organic compounds to attract pest enemies

when their tissues are damaged. Many maize varieties already contain a gene to make this compound.

and infested the plots with rootworm before releasing around 600,000 nematode parasites. Root damage by rootworm larvae was less in the transgenic maize,

and 60%fewer adult rootworm beetles emerged from such plants. Although the team has created not a commercially viable crop,

the study shows that it is possible to enhance biological pest control. People have been thinking about this method of pest control for a very long time,

he says. The main problem is that researchers don't know the key compounds to target in most plants.

And the approach could be combined with other transgenic pest control methods such as using genetically modified crops that carry toxins.

Guy Poppy, a chemical ecologist from the University of Southampton, UK, agrees that the method should allow farmers to reduce crop damage without eradicating the entire population of pests in a field's ecosystem-allowing biodiversity to remain mostly unchanged.

future studies should address the effects that enhancing natural chemical signals might have on a whole ecosystem including the resident populations of insect-killing nematodes.

if it were not being emitted continually by the plants it would be better to guide the nematodes to the plants most in need of protection,

His team's next step is to work out ways of making plants emit the compound only when under attack by pests.


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