Seals threatened Two Alaskan seal species may become the first animals since the polar bear in 2008 to be listed as'threatened'under the US Endangered Species Act because of climate change.
On 3 december, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration proposed adding Arctic ringed seals (Pusa hispida) and Pacific bearded seals (Erignathus barbatus) to the threatened list
citing diminished sea ice in their native habitats. The final decision will be made after a period of 60 days to allow public comment;
Bulfone-Paus bears substantial responsibility for the postdocs'scientific misconduct, the committee charged. See go. nature. com/ik1pgp for more.
The 2. 5-metre, mid-infrared telescope is mounted on the back of a Boeing 747 that flies in the stratosphere above much of the atmospheric water vapour that absorbs infrared light.
Left turn saves snails from snakes: Nature Newsevolutionary advantage often makes for show-stopping stuff a cheetah's speed, for example,
or a moth's almost perfect mimicry of tree bark. In some snails, however, it's simply down to a poor fit with a snake's jaw.
Some species of Satsuma snail have shells that coil to the left, Â which probably evolved
because the snakes that prey on them have specialized jaws for feeding on the molluscs'right-coiling ancestors,
a study1 published today in Nature Communications suggests. Snail genera tend to be either dextral (right-coiling) or sinistral (left-coiling
thanks to the fact that common snake predators that can easily eat dextral snails struggle to consume the sinistral ones.
To investigate the effect that living alongside snake predators might have had on the evolution of sinistral species
Hoso and his colleagues first looked at how effectively the snake Pareas iwasakii preys on Satsuma snails.
They found that the snakes, which have more teeth on the right side of their jaws than the left,
Comparing the global distributions of both snakes and snails, the researchers found that sinistral snail species have evolved more often in areas in
which predator and prey coexist. And a DNA-based family tree of the snail genus showed that sinistrality has arisen independently at least six times in Satsuma
We knew the snakes had trouble picking up sinistral snails, says Menno Schilthuizen, an evolutionary ecologist at the National Museum of Natural history of The netherlands in Leiden,
But Masaki has shown the snake might actually speed up the fixation of sinistrality, suggesting this is a very plausible speciation mechanism.
Nations pledge to double tiger numbers Thirteen countries that are home to the world's last wild tigers have pledged to try to double the animal's numbers to about 7
000, and to significantly expand its habitat by 2022 (the next Chinese year of the tiger.
and a loan package from the World bank for some tiger-range countries. One of the challenges will be to prevent poaching
and trade in tiger skins (pictured 墉 a seized skin in Kolkata, India). US energy boost The United states needs to triple its annual federal funding 墉 from US$5 billion to $16 billion 墉 for energy'research, development, demonstration and deployment,
Studies in animals suggest that exposure to bisphenol A a hormone-disrupting plasticizer used in food-can linings
Polar-bear pad The US Fish and Wildlife Service has set aside roughly 484,000 square kilometres in Alaska and the surrounding seas as a'critical habitat'for the polar bear (Ursus maritimus),
more than two years after the species was given a protection status of'threatened'by the US Endangered Species Act.
but federal agencies have to ensure that proposed activities don't jeopardize polar bears and their habitat.
Scientist threatened Animal-rights activists mailed razor blades and a'threatening note'to neuroscientist David Jentsch at the University of California, Los angeles, in November, the university said last week.
is scheduled to make its first attempt to launch a spacecraft into orbit on its Falcon 9 rocket and return the craft to Earth.
says Tim Wheeler of the University of Reading, UK, who studies the impact of climate change on agriculture
Wheeler says that, in general, the new numbers seem reasonable if on the high side. He adds that the costs of dealing with the environmental and human problems already facing the world could swamp the additional costs of future climate change the cost of achieving the United nations Millennium Development Goals,
Researchers have begun already sampling birds and will begin to do the same for insects in February.
Logging is due to start in the second half of the year, after which the oil palm will be planted.
shows that this'bacterial husbandry'is similar to the behaviour of other social animals, such as fungus-farming ants although compared to the ants,
which actively feed, nurture and defend their crops, the amoebae are relatively primitive farmers, with no active cultivation at the new site.
It was thought previously that slime moulds were strictly predators of bacteria, forming the multicellular slug when scant food supplies prompted a move to new hunting grounds.
After artemisinin At least US$175 million is needed to halt the spread of malaria parasites that are resistant to artemisinins,
Nature Newsresearchers have made genetically modified chickens that can't infect other birds with bird flu. The H5n1 strain of influenza which raged through Southeast asia a decade ago
The birds carry a genetic tweak that diverts an enzyme crucial for transmitting the H5n1 strain.
although large-scale distribution of the genetically modified (GM) birds will one day be feasible, their study is meant only to show proof-of-concept of the technique.
H5n1 outbreaks are controlled by swiftly culling the animals. In poor countries, however, there are lots of small farms,
few health regulations and long-held cultural practices involving birds. In the developing world, we cannot follow the slaughter strategy used in the developed world,
Instead, developing countries try to control H5n1 by vaccinating birds. This doesn't prevent them from silently acquiring mild forms of the disease and
transmitting it to healthy birds. What's more, flu viruses mutate quickly and are famous for evading vaccines.
the GM birds wouldn't have these issues. They carry a genetic'cassette'dubbed a short-hairpin RNA,
These animals can be crossbred to produce chickens that carry the cassette in every cell. The researchers infected decoy-carrying birds with H5n1
and housed them with uninfected birds, some with the transgene and some without. Most of the birds that received the primary infection died,
but didn't pass on the flu to any of their uninfected cagemates. The researchers found that the amount of virus present in the infected GM birds was not significantly different from that in non-transgenic controls.
It must be something above and beyond the effect on replication that's having this effect,
says Tiley. It could be, for example, that the hairpin disrupts the packaging of the virus,
preventing it from being taken up normally in the next animal. Sang says that using their methods
it costs approximately £50, 000 (US$79, 000) to produce a small number of stable transgenic birds you can characterize
She and Tiley argue that getting similar transgenic birds into global production would be possible
and 75%of them originate in animals, according to ILRI figures. They can have severe socioeconomic, health and environmental impacts:
and slaughtering affected animals. But these methods are not always effective for herds in Africa
Ward's team found that Lucy's metatarsal was more like that of a modern human than a chimpanzee.
For the tree-dwelling chimpanzee, the fourth metatarsal lies flatter against the ground, and the middle of the foot is mobile.
This flat-footed structure grants chimpanzees tremendous flexibility and allows them to grasp branches in trees.
whether A. afarensis had a flexible foot like a chimpanzee or a more humanlike arched one.
many had speculated that the species had feet that were something of a compromise between those of chimpanzees and humans.
president of the Forest Products Association of Canada in Ottawa, lauded former antagonists for working together on how to meet the needs of humanity without trashing the environment, our own nest.
Under the agreement, 21 forestry companies and 9 environmental groups are discussing ways to preserve large sections of Canada's northern forest a big storehouse of carbon and a crucial habitat for the threatened woodland caribou
(Rangifer tarandus caribou) without diminishing lumber and pulp production. The companies that hold the rights to log roughly one-quarter of Canada's boreal forest have agreed to discuss giving them up in some unspecified areas;
In the first track, working groups of company officials and environmentalists in seven provinces are trying to identify areas of caribou habitat to be removed from logging plans.
and insects, would make the wood produced there the most environmentally preferable in the world,
has said that the agreement means upwards of 20 million hectares of caribou habitat need to be conserved.
What we agreed to do is to increase the protected areas in the caribou range in ways that won't disrupt the work of our mills.
but it obviously won't be close to the total 29 million hectares of caribou habitat. The original agreement pledged to respect the principles of ecosystem-based management,
Switzerland, led by climate modeller Thomas Stocker, who is co-chairman of Working group I for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Stocker and his team analysed an Antarctic ice core and found no evidence of a change in the ratio,
In an e-mail to Nature, Stocker said that Ruddiman's latest paper merely reiterates in extenso all of the points made earlier.
Although Stocker acknowledges that peatland estimates need to be quantified better, he cited a recent analysis by his institute suggesting that carbon emissions from land-use change are neither sufficient nor properly timed to explain the rise in CO2 levels in the Holocene4.
Kaplan says that Stocker's land-use analysis contains some of the same problems and assumptions as others that have come before.
and her colleagues radio-tracked 24 of the animals during three flood seasons at the reserve
and put the fish on a par with other long-distance seed movers of the animal world African hornbills and Asian elephants.
in part because it is much easier to study seed distribution by birds and terrestrial mammals.
a worrying development given the emerging proof of the importance of these animals to the ecosystem (see also:
But even without this demand, the animals'time in the highlands is almost up. Winter snows will arrive soon,
Take the endangered Quino checkerspot butterfly Euphydryas editha quino of Southern California. We do know that climate change is important:
and warm the butterfly's habitat it will cause increased starvation and extinction. But many populations are affected also by an invasive geranium from the Mediterranean
which is out-competing the butterfly's host plant. This is further aided by air pollution from Los angeles and San diego,
placed in areas the butterflies can colonize as climate shifts. So how is climate change affecting Earth's flora and fauna?
Climate change is impacting biodiversity worldwide. Spring comes, on average, two weeks earlier. Almost two-thirds of species, including many birds, frogs, butterflies, trees and grassland flowers, breed or bloom earlier.
More than 50%are changing where they live. There is a consistency in the global pattern of more than 1,
But we cannot be sure that global warming is the reason a local butterfly or wild flower species is becoming extinct or expanding northwards?
Plants and animals often respond to rising winter temperatures whether due to climate change or to increased urbanization,
In a local area a given park or reserve conservation managers need to know what they can do to manage for a complex set of changes that may include habitat fragmentation, pollution, presence or absence of certain predators, and so on.
Scientists have linked previously the extinction of Costa rica's iconic mountaintop golden toad Bufo periglenes to climate change.
The golden toad was endemic to Costa rica's Monte Verde preserve. It went through three major population declines each preceded by an extremely dry and hot year2.
The third such event was followed by toad extinction. What has happened looks like a clear case of extinction driven by three extreme years.
The long-spined sea urchin Centrostephanus rodgersii, for example, has moved from the warming seas off mainland Australia
Likewise, many terrestrial plants and insects are moving or expanding pole-wards. Are these not clear fingerprints of climate change?
Sure, the sea urchin is probably shifting due to warming waters. As it shifts, it's been devastating local ecosystems.
If you have data over a large area like our butterfly study of all of Europe3 then you can definitely say the northward shifts of two-thirds of European butterflies in the UK, France, Sweden,
Koh and his colleagues found that the conversion to oil-palm plantations had put four species of bird at risk of extinction in Borneo,
NASA's other two shuttles are each due to fly once more this year before the agency's shuttle fleet retires.
Nature Newspolicy Events People Research Funding Trend watch Coming up Policy Wolf delisted The grey wolf will be removed from the US government's endangered species list in some northwestern states
Grey wolf populations have recovered significantly in northwestern states, but environmental campaigners such as the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona, bemoaned the fact that politicians had lifted protection rather than waiting for due process under the Endangered Species Act.
The US$55-million project follows a mouse brain atlas released in 2006, and a map of the mouse spinal cord two years later.
See go. nature. com/l9923y for more. Funding Golden rice funds The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving US$18. 6 million to research on transgenic, nutritionally fortified rice and cassava.
Size doesn't always matter for peacocks: Nature Newsthe sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, Charles darwin wrote in 1860,
makes me sick. The seemingly useless, even cumbersome, gaudy plumage did not fit with his theory of natural selection, in
which traits that help to secure survival are passed on. But Darwin eventually made peace with the peacock's train,
and its plumage has become the poster child for his theory of sexual selection, in
which ostensibly useless traits can evolve when they are preferred by choosy females. In recent years,
Research in which peacocks'tails were plucked experimentally, published online this month in Animal Behaviour1, now suggests that the answer is yes but only sometimes.
Dakin and a colleague, Robert Montgomerie, tracked three populations of feral peacocks and peahens during the spring breeding season,
They found that males with very few eyespots in their tail feathers a measure of the size of the tail were unattractive to females
Beginning in the 1980s, Marion Petrie, a behavioural ecologist at Newcastle University, UK, examined the role of the peacock's tail in mating rituals.
I started to work on peacocks because Darwin had suggested it, and nobody had gone out and tested the idea,
Plucking feathers from a male's train ruined his chances2. Later, French scientists found that males with lots of eyespots had stronger immune systems than less showy males
I think there's clear evidence that peahens use a peacock's tail in their mate choice,
We propose that the peacock's train is an obsolete signal for which female preference has already been lost
Dakin repeated Petrie's experimental work by plucking the feathers of peacocks. She noticed a drop in their success with peahens.
and on average, those with the most eyespots didn't mate any more than males with less extravagant tails.
but that the trait could help to weed out particularly unfit males that are missing lots of feathers.
but is convinced not that the natural variation in the number of eyespots on a tail is so small.
She also says that males do shed not feathers at random, and peacocks that manage to hold onto their plumes are likely to be the healthiest and fittest.
Still Petrie admits that traits such as the number of eyespots are only rough measures of tail quality,
With a limited labour force but ample subsidized chemical fertilizers available in most rural areas, dumping nutrient-rich animal manure has become an easier and cheaper option than using it to fertilize crops.
And animal feed in China is loaded with additives such as antibiotics and heavy metals, making many farmers reluctant to use manure as a replacement for chemical fertilizers.
birds and forest-dwelling mammals were exposed to daily doses up to 100 times greater -and fish and marine algae to doses several thousand times greater-than are considered generally safe.
However, the dose rates were still high enough to reduce the reproductive success of birds rodents and trees-in particular pine and spruce.
The reported values are written not in stone but they're definitely plausible, says Nick Beresford, a radioecologist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Lancaster, UK.
Radiation effects on egg hatching and the survival of newborn mammals still need to be surveyed
over how radiation affects the fitness of birds and invertebrates. A recent study2 that reports reduced survival in barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, where dose rates are now barely above natural values,
has met with sharp criticism3. Some researchers are reporting-possibly biased results downright contrary to established paradigms of radioecology, says Hinton.
Gr ae'Â msv ae'Â tn spewed a plume of material some 20 kilometres into the sky,
Nature Newsfor Scott Cornman, the honeybee genome is prized a resource, yet he spends much of his time removing it.
Cornman, a geneticist for the Bee Research Laboratory of the US Department of agriculture (USDA) in Beltsville, Maryland, is trying to characterize the various pathogens that plague the honeybee (Apis mellifera), arguably the world's most important insect.
His strategy is to subtract the honeybee genome from every other stray bit of genetic residue he can find in bee colonies, healthy and diseased.
soon after the honeybee genome was sequenced (Honeybee Genome Sequencing Consortium Nature 443,931-949; 2006), and for many it was a chance to marvel at a field transformed.
There has been made a lot of progress on how disease affects honeybees at the molecular level, says Christina Grozinger, director of Pennsylvania State university's Center for Pollinator Research in University Park, one of the conference organizers.
Around the same time that the genome was published first, honey  bee colonies across much of the Northern hemisphere began to show alarming declines.
A syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) has been causing the insects to die off in large numbers,
leaving well-provisioned hives suddenly empty. Meanwhile other parasites, such as the Varroa mite (Varroa destructor),
which spreads harmful viruses, continue to take their toll. Annual surveys in the United states show that almost 35%of all colonies die during a typical winter.
as well as potential strategies for protecting the insects from a multitude of threats. At the meeting, Cornman presented data showing that hives affected by CCD have higher levels of microscopic gut fungi called Nosema,
and a greater prevalence of several viruses, two of which had not been detected in bees before. Yet despite having a multitude of enemies
In some insects, double stranded-rna RNA, a hallmark of viral infection, can provoke a specific antiviral immune response.
At the meeting, Michelle Flenniken, a virologist at the University of California, San francisco, presented evidence that, in honeybees, it can also trigger a general immune response that might ward off a variety of threats.
This may be a new viral response that hasn't been characterized well in honeybees, says Flenniken,
and promotes pests and water loss. Additional rainfall, meanwhile, is beneficial up to a point. The authors used their modelling results to estimate the effect that temperature
It shows that the window in which infected cattle can transmit the disease to other animals is actually shorter than previously believed and
while monitoring a complex set of data such as blood samples, temperature and lesions on the animals.
Previous estimates based on isolation of the virus from infected animals have come up with significantly longer periods of infectivity.
The paper is fantastic in terms of being one of the few studies that quantify how infectious animals are as a function of how long they've been infected and
near Coventry, UK, also points out that much of the modelling used to predict disease spread and best responses to outbreaks actually works on the level of the farm, rather than of the individual animal.
The amount of work that went into this for just eight animals being infected was enormous.
and animals living in the vicinity of the damaged power plants, but they also give researchers a unique opportunity to study the effects of radiation on populations that would be impossible to recreate in the lab. Tim Mousseau,
finds that bird species with orange feathers living in the fallout zone seem to be more susceptible to radiation than their drabber gray and black fellows1.
and that this molecular trade-off is shaping bird populations around the former nuclear power plant.
One of the team, Anders M ¸ller from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, donned a radiation-protection suit to make four bird-watching trips between 2006 and 2009 to the Red
In a 2007 analysis of the data from the first bird counts made in spring 2006,
Mousseau and M ¸ller found that birds whose feathers were coloured with bright yellow and red carotenoid-based pigments showed a decline in abundance as radiation levels increased,
though there was no comparable correlation for bird species with melanin-based colouring, such as brown, black and reddish-brown2.
what gives redheads their hair colour and Red Forest birds such as the hoopoe (Upupa epops) their distinctive palette of light browns and their orange crown feathers.
or help the birds blend in to their environment, but they have a chemical cost. Making phaeomelanin consumes large amounts of a tripeptide called glutathione (GSH) which is an antioxidant molecule that can also protect tissues from radiation damage by mopping up free radicals.
or phaeomelanin pigments on the distribution and abundance of bird species in the Red Forest.
would use up a bird's stocks of GSH, making it more susceptible to radiation. The researchers reanalysed the survey data on 97 bird species in search of differences between orange-brown birds, assigned a phaeomelanin score from 0 to 5 depending on the intensity and extent of the colours,
and grey or black birds, to which they assigned a eumelanin score. Eumelanin levels, it turned out, had no correlation with bird abundance in relation to background radiation,
but birds with relatively high levels of phaeomelanin became rarer as radiation levels increased. Biologist Kevin Mcgraw of Arizona State university in Tempe says that pigments are good ecological tools:
these colours are real-life indicators of population viability and individual health. If we can amass long-term data sets before these disasters we can get a sense of the changes that occur due to humans.
Nevertheless, he and other biologists have argued for years that scoring bird pigments by eye is not as persuasive as a chemical analysis,
but that the size of the study makes that difficult: It'd be real tough to ask them to do intense pigment sampling for 97 species. But Galv ¡
what will become of Beachy's pet project: the controversial overhaul of NIFA's flagship competitive grants programme, the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI.
The grasshoppers have infested already Saudi arabia's Red sea coast. Special locust squads, guided by satellite data to the breeding grounds,
But international agricultural officials worry that some of the grasshoppers might escape to Yemen, where they often breed.
and toxins',including camel, goat and sheep pox viruses. The report was a response to an executive order from US President Barack Obama last year.
Events Primate peril Employees at a major US primate-research centre and the animals it houses, all survived unscathed a massive chemical explosion at a nearby plant on 14 june.
The New Iberia Research center in Louisiana holds 6, 500 macaques and 360 chimpanzees. Some 1, 900 rhesus and pigtail macaques were housed within 350 metres of a fire and multiple explosions at the Multi-Chem facility in New Iberia,
but none seemed to be harmed; they are now being monitored for stress and other adverse affects.
Employees were evacuated safely from the centre. See go. nature. com/xow5dw for more. Iran in orbit again Iran has placed its second satellite into orbit, according to state media.
Janet Woodcock, the FDA's top drug-approval official, says that the difference extends to all categories of drug.
but the more likely source of the bacteria is animals. 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.
But how do pathogenic E coli arise in the first place? This is where bacteriophage come in. The bacterium in this outbreak, currently recognised as strain O104:
He says they saw Shiga-toxin-producing phage transfer between E coli in response to sub-therapeutic levels of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin in vitro and in the intestines of mice.
Phage are particularly abundant in the guts of ruminants says Alfredo Caprioli, from the European Reference Laboratory for verotoxin-producing E coli in Rome,
such as protozoans. The toxins kill the other microbes, giving these bacteria an advantage. Not only are more E coli strains being infected with Shiga toxin,
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