This included diverse small animals such as hares fish turtles hedgehogs and partridges as well as larger prey such as deer boars horse goats sheep extinct wild
Oysters found fixed to the ship's hull suggest it at least languished in the water for some time before being buried by layers of trash and dirt.
Previous investigations found that the vessel's timbers had been damaged by burrowing holes of Lyrodus pedicellatus a type of shipworm typically found in high-salinity warm waters a sign that the ship at some point in its life made a trip to the Caribbean perhaps on a trading voyage.
Wayne Trivelpiece an Antarctic penguin researcher with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric administration's Southwest Fisheries science Center based in La jolla Calif. agrees that climate change is a serious threat to these and other penguin populations around the world.
So while salmon and tuna are fit for consumption lobsters clams and oysters are not.
Flying animals: The Torah provides a list of forbidden birds but does not specify why these particular flying creatures are outlawed.
The U s. Fish and Wildlife Service lists the Florida panther the Costa rican puma and the Eastern puma as endangered.
They're found mainly in many fish nuts seeds and oils from plants. Some examples of foods that contain these fats are salmon trout herring avocados olives walnuts and liquid vegetable oils such as soybean corn safflower canola olive and sunflower.
Studies show that eating foods rich in unsaturated fats lowers LDL (bad) cholesterol and raises HDL (good) cholesterol.
Whole grains nuts fish meat dark green vegetables legumes and many fruits contain significant amounts of magnesium.
But what if I told you that there is a place in Brazil where cattle graze on native grasses seasonally replenished by an annual flooding cycle where ranches are dotted with lakes full of fish where rivers support giant river otters
It is possible that the same human ingenuity that gave us industrial production of ammonium for manufacturing fertilizer will find a way to use oceans for hydroponics along with aquaculture to sustainably produce sufficient food for the world.
and foraged on lichen and algae for food. The locust's abdomen shows hints of decay and the insect is surrounded by ants inside the amber suggesting the ants might have been carting off the carcass for a meal.
A dinosaur spider armored fish and ghost shrimp are some the other creatures named for the naturalist.
and 2 percent snails ants and grubs. Gorillas live in groups. Groups of gorillas are called troops or bands.
NASA's Terra satellite went leaf peeping last week from its perch about 438 miles (705 kilometers) above the planet.
I do believe that we can do a much better job of managing fisheries, and that in doing so, we can recover much of the bounty that has been lost.</
perhaps deliberately acts described as mass murder by Australian Prime minister Kevin Rudd. Could climate change be responsible for the wildfire,
Prime minister Kevin Rudd, whose Labor party holds a slim majority in the House of representatives and none in the Senate, is under pressure to alter the plan
In November 2007, a wave of public concern about climate in drought-ridden Australia helped Rudd win office over incumbent John Howard.
Rudd will need support from the Coalition, made up of the Liberal and National parties, or the Greens, says Andrew Macintosh, associate director of the Australian National University's Centre for Climate Law and Policy in Canberra.
Groom is optimistic that policies can be shaped to promote options that have the least impact on land use and habitat change, such as algae for biofuels,
A quarter of fish sampled from 291 streams across the United states between 1998 and 2005 contained levels of mercury higher than those deemed safe for human consumption,
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,
The launch of Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to study Mars and collect soil samples from one of its moons has been postponed to 2011, together with China's first Mars probe,
The US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed on 22 october to designate around 500,000 square kilometres of critical habitat 96%of which is sea ice for the polar bear.
After a bitter and lengthy controversy over water management, four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in Oregon and California will be removed to restore salmon runs.
but the US Fish and Wildlife Service says there are now more than 650,000 in the United states, the Caribbean and Latin america.
Prime minister Kevin Rudd declined to call a snap election. The government said that there would be another chance to vote for the scheme
any given food source (such as krill) can support a lot more biomass in a whale than in a small animal such as a penguin.
whose populations have been reduced drastically, such as bluefin tuna and some species of shark. These guys are huge,
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has denied endangered-species protection to the American pika (Ochotona princeps.
In one, a single country unilaterally pumps aerosols into the stratosphere to block the Sun's rays
the poachers will go on, says Erasmus Tarimo, the director of wildlife at Tanzania's Ministry of Natural resources and Tourism.
and Tanzania are the biggest and worst poachers in Africa, says Wasser, who led the DNA research.
Shellfish could supplant tree-ring climate data: Nature Newsoxygen isotopes in clamshells may provide the most detailed record yet of global climate change,
according to a team of scientists who studied a haul of ancient Icelandic molluscs. Most measures of palaeoclimate provide data on only average annual temperatures,
But molluscs grow continually, and the levels of different oxygen isotopes in their shells vary with the temperature of the water in
Because clams typically live from two to nine years, isotope ratios in each of these shells provided a two-to-nine-year window onto the environmental conditions in
For larger clams we could do daily. It's an important step in palaeoclimatic studies, he says,
Technically, the molluscs record water temperatures, not air temperatures. But the two are linked closely specially close to the shore,
what may be the world's oldest clam, he says, that might give a continuous record going back 400 years.
and rocked by supernova shock waves and cosmic rays. The grains were far harder to catch than the comet particles.
says Ray Akhurst from the entomology division of CSIRO in Canberra. Aroian adds, Even at a quarter a pop,
and will include a'no-take'reserve where all commercial fishing is banned. The declaration has angered the Mauritian government,
is thought to have been killed off by poaching and the introduction to its habitat of carnivorous fish.
and to interview local fishermen about their experiences during and after the spill. In some cases, their memories now constitute the only available data about the effects of the Ixtoc I spill,
vez, a fisheries biologist at the Autonomous University of Campeche in Mexico. Another colleague will be analysing the samples collected to see
Thirty years ago, most fishing villages were isolated so that locals knew little about the disaster playing out just a few kilometres away.
Carlos Castillo, now 78, was an avid skin diver at the time who used a speargun to catch fish for his small restaurant.
Before Ixtoc I, he could catch 30 kilograms of grouper, snapper or snook in two hours,
because fish were dying or leaving for cleaner waters. I told my wife,'Sorry, we have to buy fish.'
'They began serving freshwater fish or fish trucked in from other regions. The spill years were devastating for fishermen, many of
whom had nowhere else to turn for income or food, but fisheries recovered faster than most researchers expected.
Ch ¡vez says that Campeche shrimp-catch records, for instance, suggest that within two years fishermen were pulling in normal hauls again.
Locals say that fish catches improved substantially within three to five years. Tunnell points out that the Gulf may have been healthier and more resilient then,
so it's difficult to say whether species in the northern Gulf will rebound as quickly from the current spill.
But the curtailment of commercial fishing owing to fears over contaminated seafood may hasten the recovery of exploited species. In some parts of Campeche,
however, there are ominous signs that not all ecosystems fared as well. After leaving Champot  n, Tunnell and his colleagues travelled about 125 kilometres north to the tiny village of Isla Arena,
More disturbing is the absence of oysters around Isla Arena where they were once so abundant that local fishermen say they could chop off a mangrove branch
and pluck off enough of the molluscs to feed their families. The oysters never returned after Ixtoc I, according to the fishermen,
and there is no research to explain why. As far as I know, this is one of the least-studied ecosystems in Mexico,
says Tunnell. He says that he's intrigued by the oyster story and hopes to do follow-up research on the topic.
So far, Tunnell says, Ixtoc I's main lesson for those responding to the current spill is that sandy beaches
Steve Murawski, chief science adviser for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration's National Marine Fisheries Service, says that he
As for the fishermen near the Ixtoc I site, they are well aware of the new disaster unfolding to the north.
The blooms consume much of the oxygen dissolved in the water, killing fish and other plant life,
Nature Newsplants made the evolution of large, complex animals such as predatory fish possible, a study of ocean sediments suggests.
which destroyed trees, impacted the livelihoods of fishermen and others who are dependent on the river and presented scientists with
or agribusiness companies, including Syngenta Seeds in Slater, Iowa and General mills in Le Sueur, Minnesota.
fish and plants won't be able to survive, and the river will die. How can we change the way we use
such as the US Forest Service or Fish and Wildlife Service, says Cameron, also a conference organizer.
Left turn saves snails from snakes: Nature Newsevolutionary advantage often makes for show-stopping stuff a cheetah's speed, for example,
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,
Snail genera tend to be either dextral (right-coiling) or sinistral (left-coiling but the genus Satsuma contains both dextral and sinistral species. In most land snails,
the switch between dextrality and sinistrality is controlled by a single gene, meaning that reversals are likely to occur frequently.
However, sinistral Satsuma snails cannot mate with their dextral relatives, leading scientists to wonder how left-coiling individuals arising from random genetic mutation would be able to find sexual partners.
Ordinarily, these snails would be expected to die out because the vast majority of potential mates would be dextral,
thanks to the fact that common snake predators that can easily eat dextral snails struggle to consume the sinistral ones.
Hoso and his colleagues first looked at how effectively the snake Pareas iwasakii preys on Satsuma snails.
were able to eat all of the dextral snails fed to them, but only 12.5%of the sinistral snails.
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
more than would be expected were there not some driving force behind its evolution. 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,
who specializes in snail evolution. But Masaki has shown the snake might actually speed up the fixation of sinistrality,
Tuna quotas Fisheries regulators are showing little mercy to the Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), which is in danger of being wiped out by commercial fishing.
On 27 november at a meeting in Paris, members of the Madrid-based International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas,
which manages tuna fishing, voted for 2011 catch quotas in the Mediterranean sea to be set at 12,900 tonnes,
only slightly lower than this year's 13,500 tonnes. Susan Lieberman, director of international policy for the Pew Environment Group in WASHINGTON DC, says the agreement showed that management of high seas fisheries was flawed and inadequate.
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.
to relocating fish to cooler lakes farther north. Because of the large uncertainties in the estimated impact of climate change, some researchers prefer to avoid putting dollar figures on climate-change costs at all.
but congregate in groups of tens of thousands to form multicellular'slugs'that migrate to new areas
forming the multicellular slug when scant food supplies prompted a move to new hunting grounds. Debra Brock, a molecular biologist at Rice university in Houston, Texas, who led the study,
so that coastal land could be used for agriculture, aquaculture and beach resorts. When coastal wetlands are drained,
sea lettuce that stores little carbon and algae attached to rocks. Data from Landsat satellites revealed the true extent of mangroves only last year.
Arctic fishing Fishing catches in the seasonally ice-free Arctic Sea by Russia the United states and Canada were 75 times greater than reported to the United nations'Food and agriculture organization from 1950 to 2006, according to estimates published last week (D. Zeller et al.
Nature Newsmassive Amazonian characid fish may carry seeds more than five kilometres across forest flood plains,
Although fish have long been suspected of having an important role in seed distribution, proof of their ability to carry fertile seeds such distances has been lacking.
and her team had discovered previously thousands of seeds in the guts of Colossoma macropomum fish in Peru's Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve1.
and found that the location of wild fish varied by as much as 5. 9 km.
Combining this with data from captive fish on how long seeds are retained in their guts, the authors predict that C. macropomum probably have a mean dispersal distance of 337-552 metres
and put the fish on a par with other long-distance seed movers of the animal world African hornbills and Asian elephants.
and invaded by fish. Seed dispersal by fishes has been appreciated under in the past although written about for decades as of great potential value in this important ecological role,
says Michael Horn, a biologist who studies this subject at California State university, Fullerton. Many fish may provide a hugely important link between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems,
and not only in the Amazon. In the African tropics, for example, it is likely that fish distribute grass seeds,
and fish in North america and Europe probably also move seeds around. However, both of these are understudied woefully, Horn notes,
in part because it is much easier to study seed distribution by birds and terrestrial mammals.
Horn's own research has shown an involvement for fish in distributing fig tree seeds in Costa Rica3.
The study predicts that larger fish will distribute seeds further. However, most of the team's radio-tracked fish did not come close to the maximum reported size for C. macropomum,
which can reach a whopping 30 kg. Overfishing in the Amazon region has devastated C. macropomum's numbers
if humans had not already over-fished the rock lobster off Tasmania we'll never know.
the fact that many are dying after high ocean temperature events may have something to do with humans stressing them with pollution, dynamite fishing, recreational activities and coastal development.
Gillard's predecessor Kevin Rudd twice failed to get a carbon-cutting bill past his Senate.
Dire threats to coral reefs More than 60%of the world's coral reefs are threatened directly by local human activities such as coastal pollution and destructive fishing.
The extent of mangrove forests has declined by as much as 50%over the past half century because of development, over-harvesting and aquaculture,
-and fish and marine algae to doses several thousand times greater-than are considered generally safe. Radioecologists with The french Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety (ISRN) in Cadarache converted concentrations of radioisotopes measured in the soil and seawater into the actual doses that various groups of wildlife were likely
The team found that flatfish, molluscs, crustaceans and brown seaweed offshore of Fukushima received radiation doses that,
Nature Newsmany UK ecosystem services, including fish catches and soil quality, are declining or have already become degraded as a result of over exploitation, poor management and habitat change,
Nakanishi is coordinating seven teams to study the impact of the disaster on soil, plants, animals, fisheries and forests for the next decade,
such as olive pits and fish bones, but the vast majority of them are discovered empty and unmarked.
as well as fruit, fish, meat and resin. He says the DNA approach offers great promise for advances in terms of analysing amphora contents from archaeologically documented wrecks,
But only half the reserve is off-limits to fishing; in other areas, commercial and recreational fishing is allowed.
Green politicians and conservation groups have condemned this concession. See page 14 for more. NASA/JPL-CALTECHEVENTSCURIOSITY bound for Mars NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, also known as Curiosity, is on its way to Gale crater on Mars. The 900-kilogram rover (pictured,
Russia's Mars mission, Phobos-Grunt, is not faring so well: stuck in low-Earth orbit,
Fish and rice flourish together in paddieswhen fish were introduced into flooded paddy fields, farmers were able to grow the same amount of grain as in conventional rice monocultures
These rice-fish co-cultures could lessen the environmental impact of agricultural chemicals and help make rice farming more profitable,
In areas where land and water are limited for developing both rice and fish production it is important to conduct RF rice-fish co-culture,
Xin Chen, lead author of the study and a professor at Zhejiang University, China, told Scidev.
The fish used in the study were an indigenous carp species that is considered a delicacy,
Fish significantly lower the risk of rice sheath blast disease and reduce the amount of weeds and harmful pests such as the rice planthopper.
and allowing fish to remain active even during the hottest months. And insects attracted to the plants provided extra food for the fish.
More from Scidev. Net. Zainul Abedin, a farming systems specialist at the International Rice Research Institute, in the Philippines, said:
As fish catches are becoming smaller, this approach will be increasingly important for ensuring that food production provides people with enough protein.
and tomato broil has a recipe where the two main ingredients (shrimp and tomato) share 1-penten-3-ol,
Fisheries push The United nations has stepped up a push to encourage sustainable fisheries. Its general assembly on 6 december adopted a draft resolution that urges nations to reduce
With many fish stocks being harvested at unsustainable levels and many suffering from a lack of data on actual catch levels the resolution also encouraged states to"increase their reliance on scientific advice to manage fisheries.
Name and shame Funding agencies in Canada will no longer keep secret the identities of researchers they support who commit misconduct.
Stephen Mayfield, director of the San diego Center for Algae Biotechnology at the University of California San diego, calls the work"a very sophisticated engineering feat,
The drought has left thousands of fishing boats stranded on the exposed lake bed (pictured. Puravida Fotograf  a/Demotix/Corbischilean reserve scorched by wildfires Forest fires in Chile have ravaged almost 15,000 hectares of native forest and steppe in the Torres del Paine National park in Patagonia burning more than 8
Phobos-Grunt, is expected to fall back to Earth
Rules tighten on use of antibiotics on farmsthe US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is now moving to protect key antibiotics known as cephalosporins,
because"H5n1 is not the sole pandemic candidate, and low pathogenic viruses are just as likely, if not more likely,
which genes get turned on and off in insects and fish, but this is the first study to look at nonhuman primates,
Farmers can keep cattle away from damp fields that are home to the fluke s snail host,
a salmon with a gene prompting faster growth, and a hog engineered to excrete less-toxic manure.
Aquabounty, the GE salmon company, based in Maynard, Massachusetts, fears that it, too, may have to pull its product
With salmon frozen in the pipeline, Exemplar s piglets might skip to the front of the queue."
improving yields and profits of crops, fish and livestock; improving sustainability and environmental integrity, and climate change adaptation and mitigation;
Fisheries reform Europe s attempts to overhaul its much-criticized fisheries policy took a step forward at a meeting in Luxembourg on 12 Â June.
and pledged to return fish stocks to levels that produce the maximum sustainable yield by 2020.
effectively allowing Europe s fisheries to continue on their current unsustainable path. Any reforms still need to be negotiated with the European parliament.
elevated mercury levels were much more common in those who ate a lot of fish: 18%of people who ate 12 Â
or more fish meals each month had unhealthy mercury levels, in contrast to just 6%and 7%of low and moderate fish consumers, respectively.
Fernandez discovered that the most-consumed fish species in Madre de dios, such as the mota (Calophysus macropterus) and doncella (Pseudoplatystoma fasciatum), had the highest levels of mercury.
Fernandez is now leading a project to conduct a more extensive survey of the levels of mercury in fish and humans.
and the Phobos-Grunt mission to the Martian moon Phobos in November. E. Mik/Polfoto/PA Imagesmisconduct fall out A prominent Danish neuroscientist could lose her Phd and medical-sciences doctorate,
Sputnik 1. Lovell also worked on radar and cosmic rays; he was knighted in 1961 for his contributions to radio astronomy.
Scientists estimate that 75 percent of the world s fisheries are in serious decline habitats like coral reefs are threatened,
We are directing additional funding to Gulf Coast restoration to bring back the fisheries and coastal ecosystems
establishing a"pollution diet for the Bay that will help restore the natural habitat for fish and other wildlife.
We are also investing more in monitoring our fishing stock in coastal areas so we have the most accurate data possible on the health of our fisheries.
These are significant steps that are helping us improve the health of our oceans and build more robust fisheries.
The federal government has a vital role to play in conducting sound science and making the resulting data available.
A Romney Administration will safeguard the long-term health of fisheries, while welcoming input from the fishermen most affected at every step
and seeking to accommodate the needs of these small businessmen wherever possible. We live in an era
Waldrappteamiconic ibis shot A bird that had been reared hand by researchers as part of a project to save a rare species of ibis was killed by poachers in Italy on 13 october.
A fast-growing salmon developed by Aquabounty in Maynard, Massachusetts, has been under review since 1995; in 2010, an FDA scientific advisory panel evaluated 21 Â years of data on the fish
and deemed it safe for the environment and human consumption (see Nature 467,259; 2010), yet the agency has announced still not a final decision.
and Aquabounty s salmon is swimming against the tide of politics. Legislation introduced last year in the US House of representatives
The protest in Congress comes mainly from salmon-exporting states such as Alaska, Washington and Oregon,
amid fears that an inexpensive new source of salmon would undermine the industry. Politicians also reference unforeseen dangers from GE foodstuffs.
In the 17 Â years that the salmon has been under review Aquabounty has spent more than US$60 Â million on,
for example, showing that its allergenic potential is no greater than that of Atlantic fish. To ensure that the mainly sterile GE salmon can t mate with native species,
the company keeps them in multiwalled tanks on a mountain in Panama. If the fish were to be sold commercially,
they would be reared similarly isolated from the ocean. The prospects for research are better outside the United states. Last year,
including a fast-growing carp and cows that produce milk with reduced allergenic potential. However, a Chinese researcher who asked to remain anonymous
the government has proposed a cull of coastal sharks in response to a swimmer s death,
and a bit of a red herring, says Oliver Phillips, a tropical ecologist at the University of Leeds, UK.
Her successor will face questions about catch limits in ocean fisheries, and will need to resolve cost overruns
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