Seven Native American tribes in Oklahoma will provide
habitat and food on their lands for monarch butterflies, whose numbers have
plummeted in recent years due to troubles along their lengthy migration route.
Tribal leaders said at a news conference on Tuesday in
Shawnee, southeast of Oklahoma City, they will plant crucial vegetation for the
butterflies, including milkweed and native nectar-producing plants, on their
lands.
Greenpeace has sent its ship Esperanza to the Indian Ocean,
where it is currently in the process of dismantling all of Thai Union’s FADs
that it encounters in the sea. These devices don’t look like much – almost like
floating rafts of junk, tethered by a rope – but they are a serious driver of
overfishing, which is contributing to the near collapse of the tuna industry,
particularly Yellowfin.
This is one of the few studies to clearly investigate the
consequences of smaller size, says Celine Teplitsky from the CNRS in France. It
shows that climate change can affect the lives of animals in indirect and
large-scale ways, “even in places where the change is relatively mild.” Earlier
snowmelts in the Arctic mean that knots grow up with smaller bills, can’t eat
enough in Africa, and die early. Their bodies are sculpted at the poles but
tested in the tropics, thousands of kilometers away.
A retired South African sales executive who emigrated to
Australia 30 years ago is hatching a daring plan to airlift 80 rhinos to his
adopted country in an attempt to save the species from poachers.
Flying each animal on the 11,000-kilometre journey will cost
about $A60,500, but Ray Dearlove believes the expense and risk is essential as
poaching deaths have soared in recent years.
“There’s often a
misconception that Los Angeles is a concrete jungle, when in reality the city
is home to one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world,” said Brian Brown,
the museum’s curator of entomology.
Researchers unveiled
recent discoveries made mostly in back yards, including 12 news species of
flies belonging to a single genus, Megaselia, of the fly family Phoridae,
demonstrating what they said was an extraordinary level of undocumented
biodiversity in areas heavily populated by humans.
“There is no magic
boundary that nature does not come across,” said Greg Pauly, the new centre’s
co-director. “And the reality is we don’t know a lot about the nature here in
LA.”
No comments:
Post a Comment