Nations fight back on ivoryit has been a bad year for Africa s elephants. Thousands have been killed as poachers rush to cash in on soaring ivory prices,
The cyanide poisoning of up to 300 Â animals at watering holes in a game park in Zimbabwe last month served as a particularly unpleasant reminder of the lengths to
Official numbers for elephant killings in 2013 are still being prepared, but researchers told Nature that it is likely to be a near-record year.
And figures for ivory hauls in media reports collected each month by conservation group Save the Elephants,
chair of the elephant specialist group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
He estimates that around 50,000 elephants were killed in 2011, given the amount of ivory seized,
Figures from TRAFFIC and Save the Elephants suggest that between 25,000 and 35,000 of the animals are killed each year.
traffic/Elephant Trade Info system/cites"Those numbers may be off by some margin. But based on the number of recent seizures, the elephants are being killed at their highest rate yet,
says Wasser, who estimates from news reports that 38 Â tonnes of ivory have been seized this year.
secretary-general of the Geneva-based Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)."
Using sound to combat elephant poacherssome positive outcomes from the CITES meeting are already being seen on the ground,
The conservation group WWF snapped the photos using a camera trap in Vietnam, and announced the finding on 12 Â November.
The idea of introducing aphid alarm pheromones into wheat to protect it against aphid attack that comes out of that group.
The spatial ecologists have done remarkable work on monitoring the movement of a whole range of insects using horizontal and vertical radar to follow migration paths.
That s actually groundbreaking because although we know quite a lot about bird migration, we know almost nothing about insect migration.
Jason Chapman s group has demonstrated there s a lot more to insect migration than simply following the wind.
The other area that is outstanding is the lipid-biochemistry work of Johnathan Napier. His group has done fantastic fundamental work in plant lipid biochemistry.
and Wildlife Service will destroy its stockpile of contraband elephant ivory on 14 Â November, officials announced last week.
Major research funders and institutions, coordinated by the London-based group Understanding Animal Research, say that they want to be more open about how animals are used in research.
as well as trends in emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCS) ozone-depleting substances that also trap heat in the atmosphere between 1880 and 2010.
Fungus discovery offers pine-wilt hopethe pine-wood nematode is a major pest in the forests of China.
The worm, which causes pine-wilt disease, has killed more than 50 million trees and resulted in economic losses of US$22 billion since 1982.
a team of Chinese ecologists has made a discovery that could halt the march of the nematode (Bursaphelenchus xylophilus).
Sun Jianghua and his colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Zoology in Beijing have identified a fungus that has a crucial role in the worm s life cycle,
In Asia, pine-wood nematodes spread with the help of Japanese pine sawyer beetles (in the Monochamus genus). The worms enter the respiratory system of hatching beetle pupae in the trunks of diseased trees
and then hitchhike in the beetles when they move to healthy trees. As the young beetles feed, the nematodes leave through the insects'mouths.
Once infected trees often die within a year and their hollow trunks provide an ideal place for mature beetles to mate
and lay eggs in. The pests seem to prefer certain pine forests over others, but the reason has not been clear."
"While the nematodes have invaded China for more than  three decades, pine forests are affected not equally,
says Sun."A burning question is what makes an alien species invasive in some habitats but not the others.
at least as far as the pine-wood nematode is concerned. In an eight-year survey, at six sites in southern China, Sun and his colleagues found that tree infestation was higher in the presence of a previously unknown species of tree fungus,
"Although we knew that pine-wood nematodes feed on not only the vascular tissue of pines but also tree fungi,
says Sun. Â To examine the fungi s role in the relationship, the team fed nematodes and beetles with different types of fungus in a Petri dish.
The nematodes feeding on Sporothrix sp. 1 mated more, had more offspring and developed faster than those feeding on other species of fungi."
"The fungus also allowed the beetles to survive better and grow faster, says Sun. The researchers found that Sporothrix sp. 1 also increased the trees'production of diacetone alcohol,
which increases growth and reproduction in the beetles and nematodes. The key now, says Mota,
The nematode, which is native in North america, also wreaks havoc in other Asian countries, such as Japan and Korea.
Since its first detection in Portugal in 1999, the pest has spread into Spain and threatens forestry in other European countries2."
called fatty acid ethyl ester, induces juvenile nematodes into a dispersal stage a prerequisite for the hitchhiking step3.
and reproduction of the nematode as well as its dispersal are now"two potentially promising strategies to prevent the nematodes from infecting trees,
"Phylogenetically, it s really the equivalent of the duck-billed platypus and monotremes, says Claude depamphilis, a plant evolutionary biologist at Pennsylvania State university in University Park, who co-led researchers on the Amborella Genome Project.
Just as the platypus genome yielded insights into the emergence of mammals, Amborella s gives a glimpse at changes that helped flowering plants,
But the duplication in Amborella predates all the other polyploids, says depamphilis, who led a team in 2011 that inferred this ancient duplication from more limited genetic data4.
as we have with animals. In the same way that biologists are now starting to understand the power and influence of the trillions of microbes living in and on the human body,
although poisonous to livestock, were resistant to attack by weevils. This spawned a niche industry that develops
and markets endophyte-hosting turf varieties that repel pest attacks without being toxic to animals.
occupy level 2. Foxes, which eat herbivores, sit at trophic level 3. Cod, a fish that eats other fish, claims level 4. Polar bears and orcas,
which have few or no predators and eat other mammals with gusto, hold the top positions levels up to 5. 5. The study,
led by Sylvain Bonhommeau, a fisheries scientist at The french Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea in S Â te,
estimates that humanity's global median trophic level was 2. 21 in 2009, which puts us on a par with other omnivores,
"We are closer to herbivore than carnivore, says Bonhommeau.""It changes the preconception of being top predator.
The study also looked at how eating patterns have changed over time. The researchers calculated the human trophic level for 176 countries for each year from 1961 to 2009 using a data on 102 types of food from animal fat to yams compiled by the Food and agriculture organization (FAO) of the United nations. Ref. 1globally,
or animal-based foods, says Kastner. But changes were not uniform across the globe. Countries such as China and India, where hundreds of millions of people have lifted themselves out of poverty
Nicole Dutrariver dolphin found A new species of river dolphin, found in Brazil s Araguaia River basin,
Plant killers protect rainforest diversityvoracious pests may be foes of individual plants, but they can benefit forests.
which specialized pests dine on it. Those pests then keep dominant plants in check giving other species room to flourish."
"The more common a plant is, the more aggressively it is attacked, says Keith Clay, a plant ecologist at Indiana University in Bloomington,
many research teams have gathered evidence that plant-munching insects and other predators keep populations of plant species in check.
But few were able to establish that this mechanism also boosted plant diversity, says Clay.
Yellowstone grizzlies face losing protected statusfor the US government, the grizzly bears of Yellowstone national park in Wyoming embody a stunning success story:
More than 700 bears now roam the region, up from 136 in 1975, when the grizzly (Ursos arctos horribilis) was listed as threatened after decades of deadly clashes with ranchers, hunters and park visitors.
But the US Fish and Wildlife Service is expected now to lift the legal safeguards, after a government advisory panel of wildlife officials endorsed delisting the bear last month.
Conservation groups have pushed back, saying that the government has estimated under  the threat that climate change poses to the bears food supply,
especially stands of whitebark pine. As the Yellowstone region has warmed, mountain pine beetles and blister rust fungus once thwarted by the cold,
dry climate have devastated the trees, depriving grizzlies of energy-rich pine nuts. Moreover, say conservationists, invasive fish have crowded out native cutthroat trout in Yellowstone Lake at the heart of the park,
reducing another important food source for the bears.""We have unprecedented an situation with deteriorating foods,
and an ecosystem that is unravelling, says Louisa Willcox, the Northern Rockies representative at the Center for Biological Diversity in Livingston, Montana.
The centre was one of several groups that sued the US government in 2007, following an earlier attempt to delist the bear.
After two years, a district-court judge restored protection, citing concerns about the declining whitebark pine and its effect on the bears diet.
A report delivered in November by the US Geological Survey s Interagency Grizzly bear Study Team describes a resilient and healthy bear population that has adapted to the loss of pine nuts by eating more elk and bison
keeping fat stores at levels that allow the bears to survive and reproduce. For Christopher Servheen, a biologist who oversees grizzly-bear recovery efforts at the Fish and Wildlife Service in Missoula, Montana, that is not surprising."
"Bears are flexible, he says.""It s easier to say what they don t eat than
what they do eat. Source: IGBSTBUT other researchers suspect that the change carries a steep price."
A reliance on meat heightens the risk that adult bears will come into contact with humans,
including livestock owners and hunters seeking elk, he says. For young bears, it may increase the frequency of potentially deadly interactions with aggressive adult male bears and wolves.
Critics also argue that the government is basing its decisions on flawed population estimates. A study published last July suggests that the government s figure of 741 Â bears is inflated (D. Â F. Â Doak and K. Â Cutler Conserv.
Lett. http://doi. org/q3d; 2013). ) The number of survey flights used to count bears has tripled since the mid-1990s,
but, the study argues, the model used to extrapolate population figures from the flights tallies does not account for increased observation time.
because the model assumes that female bears will reproduce consistently throughout their 30-year lives, with no decrease in fertilityas they age.
Mattson says that population estimates have jumped in the past by more than 100 Â bears when the statistical method has shifted."
but so has the grizzly bears range (see Home on the range), which cancels out any observer bias from increased search hours.
And although the govern  ment s official estimate of the population did jump from 629 to 741 bears this year,
That is in part because the revision takes into account a 2011 demographic study of bear survival rates based on radio-collar tracking data the first such study
But even that is unlikely to be the last word on the grizzlies: conservation groups are already gearing up to sue.
Perhaps the only point on which the US government and its opponents agree is that there will be more legal wrangling over the Yellowstone bears future."
But sometimes animals do not display such logic. For example, honeybees (Apis mellifera) and gray jays (Perisoreus canadensis) 2 have been seen to violate IIA,
and so have hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus) 3."On witnessing such behaviour in the past, people have assumed simply that it is not optimal,
says mathematical biologist Peter Trimmer of the University of Bristol, UK, a co-author of the latest study."
points out that some examples of seemingly irrational behaviour in foraging decisions are understood already to result from the animals rarely having all their options available at once."
"Some of what we perceive as irrational behaviour would then simply be the result of presenting animals with the unusual case of a simultaneous choice,
for example by training animals to forage for items that have different probabilities of disappearing and reappearing."
Animal activism Anti-terrorism police in Italy are investigating the targeting of four scientists at the University of Milan who use animals in their research.
) At Louisiana State university in Baton rouge, researchers will assess the long-term risks to bees from chemicals used in large-scale mosquito-abatement programmes.
its nine research centres and the National Zoo. Previously, she was senior vice-president for research and graduate-school dean at Pennsylvania State university in University Park.
showing the country s intention to thwart a worrying rise in elephant poaching (see Nature 503,452;
US ICEFOSSIL felony A fossil retailer from Eagle, Colorado, pleaded guilty on 2 january to conspiracy to smuggle dinosaur bones and other fossils into the United states from China and Mongolia.
Other items include a sabre-toothed cat skull and dinosaur eggs. Rolater has agreed also to pay a $25,
is scheduled to launch 28 of its Doves on 8 Â January. Each toaster-sized device weighs about 5 Â kilograms
fine enough to make out individual moving vehicles, crowds of people and groups of animals. Cosmonauts carried out a spacewalk on 27 december to mount Urethecast's video camera on the hull of the Russian Zvezda module,
that the mass-market consumer the long tail has been neglected almost completely, says Scott Larson, chief executive of Urthecast.
Landsat, NASA s Earth-observation workhorse, for example, has a resolution of 15-100 Â metres depending on the spectral frequency, with 30 Â metres in the visible-light range.
Examples of primer pheromones are rare in mammals; the male effect in goats and sheep,
and a similar effect in mice and rats, where the presence of males can speed up puberty in females,
It has long been thought that pheromones have pivotal roles in reproductive success in mammals but the mechanisms are known scarcely,
The researchers found that male goat pheromones are synthesized generally in the animal's head skin,
Peter Brennan, a physiologist at the University of Bristol, UK, says that the work will be useful in husbandry in goats and other ruminants, such as sheep,
The group is now looking to find similar pheromones and pathways in other economically important livestock animals, such as sheep and cows
It was found in poultry in the live-bird markets of southern China s Guangxi province in late January,
They subsequently dropped off sharply after the prompt, temporary closure of live-bird markets, which were identified quickly as the places where most human infections occurred.
an avian virus that is sporadically infecting humans from a reservoir in poultry, and there is no evidence of any continued human-to-human spread.
H5n1, by contrast, is lethal to birds, making outbreaks easier to spot and control. And despite extensive sampling of farms, wholesale markets and other parts of the poultry supply chain, the only strong link to H7n9 found so far is live-bird markets.
The difficulty of surveillance and of sampling China s huge poultry industry it produces 6 billion birds annually means that this is unlikely to be the full picture
however. Such uncertainty is also hampering efforts to develop effective control measures that are less drastic than closing the markets,
On 11 Â February, the United states also announced a domestic ban on selling African elephant ivory.
More than 20,000 elephants and 1, 000 Â rhinoceroses were poached in the past year in Africa. See go. nature. com/qjupqc for more.
Study revives bird origin for 1918 flu pandemicthe virus that caused the 1918 influenza pandemic probably sprang from North american domestic and wild birds, not from the mixing of human and swine viruses.
A study published today in Nature1 reconstructs the origins of Influenza a virus and traces its evolution and flow through different animal hosts over two centuries."
Worobey and his colleagues analysed more than 80,000 gene sequences from flu viruses isolated from humans, birds, horses,
pigs and bats using a model they developed to map evolutionary relationships between viruses from different host species. The branched tree that resulted showed that the genes of the deadly 1918 pandemic virus are of avian origin.
Birds have been implicated in the deadly strain s origins before. A 2005 genetic analysis of the 1918 pandemic virus pulled from a victim s preserved tissue concluded that it most closely matched viruses of avian origin2.
But a 2009 study3 found instead that the viral genes circulated in humans and swine for at least 2 to 15 years before the pandemic and combined to make the lethal virus. Gavin Smith, an evolutionary biologist at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical school at the National University of Singapore,
notes that it identified an avian relationship for two genes in the 1918 virus, but not for six genes,
but there is evidence that the influenza virus evolves at different rates in different hosts faster in birds than in horses, for example.
The analysis also reveals a shared ancestor for almost all avian flu strains and an H7n7 virus that struck down horses and mules throughout North america in 1872.
"Transmission between horses and humans seems to have been key to some epidemics when horses were an intimate part of our lives,
says Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State university in East Lansing.""We now have this idea that the source for a lot of influenza virus we see now worldwide is potentially equine,
whereas the dogma has been for so long that its avian, says Pybus.""It s a fascinating study,
and quite a surprise
Nations pledge to make poaching a'serious crime'In a renewed effort to stop the dramatic rise in poaching that is devastating African wildlife,
With more than 20,000 elephants and 1, 000 rhinos poached in the past year in Africa, and an estimated global illegal trade in wildlife products of US$20 billion a year a figure that does not include timber
pledged to strengthen their legislation to ensure that the trade of wildlife is regarded as a serious crime a technical definition under United nations rules that should ensure tougher penalties for those convicted of dealing in elephant ivory, rhino horn and other animal products.
and to support an existing ban on international trade in elephant ivory. At a press conference, UK foreign secretary William Hague said that the meeting"will turn out to have been a historic conference and a turning point.
and a conference run by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in March in Bangkok.
The country has pushed previously to allow one-off legal sales of elephant ivory something that many scientists believe could further fuel demand and hence poaching.
The surge in elephant and rhino poaching in the past few years is believed widely to have been driven by the growing economies in the far east, especially China,
which two men were caught with around half a million euros'(US$680, 000) worth of rhino horn, yet each received fines of just  500.
there was a sense at the meeting that the attention now being given to the subject might bring changes that will make a difference to animals currently under threat."
said French environment minister Philippe Martin. UK animal research The british government says that it is committed still to cutting the number of animals used in research,
Wolf plan flawed The US government s proposal to weaken protection for grey wolves (Canis lupus) is not based on good science,
The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) says that wolves in the lower 48 Â states no longer face extinction (see Nature 501,143-144;
which is engineered to be resistant to insect pests. 12-13 february London hosts a global conference on the illegal trade in wildlife.
ecologists have watched wolf and moose populations on Isle Royale in Lake superior wax and wane in response to each other, disease and the weather.
But for the longest predator-prey study in the world, the wolf is now at the door.
Devastated by inbreeding, the wolf population has dropped from 30 individuals a decade ago to just 10 Â spotted in field counts so far this year,
leading the US National park service to consider importing new animals for a genetic rescue. Now, nature is intervening
and could either save the landmark project without the need for tranquillizer darts and wolf crates,
or sound its death knell. As temperatures plummeted last month, Lake superior froze for the first time in six years.
The 24-kilometre ice bridge could let wolves from the Canadian mainland cross to the US island,
bringing an influx of genes (see Wolf island). But project scientists say that the opposite is more likely:
free to roam, the last wolves could leave the island in search of mates. Â That would put an end to a study that has provided textbook ecology lessons for generations.
It has shown how predation can structure populations of prey: when wolf numbers plummet, moose populations tend to soar (see Ecosystem in flux.
And it has offered insights into wolf behaviour, moose physiology, the life cycle of moose ticks and how wolves might be driven to form packs to ward off scavengers such as ravens, rather than for any hunting advantage.
 Through the decades, the search for cause and effect in the ecosystem has been rendered much easier by isolation from the mainland s human and animal populations.
Occasionally, however, Lake superior freezes. The very first wolves came to Isle Royale over an ice bridge in the early 1940s, some 30 years after the first moose.
The lake froze nearly every year at the beginning of the study but that has changed. The most recent ice bridge was in 2008;
when a wolf that biologists called the old grey guy came to the island. He sired 34 Â pups
 Whether any wolves have crossed this year s ice bridge will not be clear immediately. The scientists are conducting their annual population survey,
but snow fills wolf tracks very quickly. If new wolves do arrive their presence will probably be confirmed in the coming months,
when DNA is extracted from faeces samples. Source: John Vucetich/Rolf Petersonjohn Vucetich, co-leader of the project and an ecologist at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, says that the need for an influx of genes is becoming urgent.
In the past two decades, wolf skeletons have displayed spinal deformities that can painfully pinch nerves and affect gait and generally reduce fitness.
this might explain why the number of moose needed to support a given number of wolves has increased:
the predators attacking efficiency may be compromised (J.  R ¤ikkã nen et  al. Biol. Conserv. 142,1025-1031;
Moose eat balsam fir trees. When the moose population expands, unchecked by predation, fewer fir seedlings can grow large enough to escape into the canopy above the reach of moose
and reproduce. There is already a missing generation of trees from between about 1910, when the moose arrived on the island,
and 1940, when the wolves came. Most of Isle Royale s balsam firs are thus either older than 100 years and near the end of their lives
or young and short enough to be browsed to death. If the trees do not achieve escape in the next decade
or so, says Vucetich, "large portions of Isle Royale are not going to generate balsam fir, which is a really basic component of a boreal forest ecosystem."
Canine parvovirus, probably caught from a domestic dog, caused the wolf population to fall from around 50 to 14 in the early 1980s.
And in 2012, three wolves were found dead in an abandoned mining pit. Given this history of human influence,
the argument that leaving the wolves alone would be allowing nature to take its course does not sway most ecologists.
David Mech a US Geological Survey wolf biologist based in St paul, Minnesota, argues in favour of"watchful waiting.
He says that much can be learned from studying how inbreeding affects population persistence, and that the knowledge would be useful for conservation biologists,
inbred populations of endangered species. He is convinced not that the wolves will die out; they have hit low numbers before
new wolves can be brought in quickly. But Vucetich says that it could be five years before the last wolf dies
and scientists confirm its demise, and another five before federal bureaucracies approve a genetic rescue
He fears that a decade without significant moose predation would leave the fir trees devastated. Phyllis Green, superintendent of the Isle royale national park, is considering three alternatives:
Himalayan heights pose no problem for beesalpine bumblebees can hover happily in pressure conditions equivalent to an altitude of 9, 000 metres higher than the peak of Mount everest.
the bees'adaptable flight might help them to escape predators elsewhere, the authors suggest.""My first reaction was Wow,
Bumblebees are often found above 4, 000 metres and have been recorded foraging as high as 5, 600 metres.
But the physiological factors that might stop the insects reaching high altitudes are understood not well.
whether bumblebees vertical range was limited by aerodynamics and physiology. Working in the mountains of Sichuan, China,
the duo caught five male bumblebees (Bombus impetuosus) foraging at 3, 250 metres and placed them in a plexiglas chamber.
three could fly above 8, 000 metres; and two got to above 9, 000 metres.
Instead, the insects increased the angle through which they beat their wings.""They re essentially sweeping their wings through a wider arc,
000 metres would provide a formidable challenge for bumblebees. Such changes were simulated not in the flight chamber."
 If so, why do alpine bumblebees have that extra capacity for upward thrust? Dillon suspects that it is required for other tasks,
such as escaping predators and carrying heavy loads.""If they were already maxing out their performance just to fly at,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011