Squirrels Have Skills
No endangered species here, just a GoPro camera at risk.
Really Old Fish
What will happen as global warming makes Greenland green
again and its local waters warm?
The Greenland shark has
long been belittled as sluggish, homely and dim-witted. But now the species can
demand respect: scientists say it is the planet’s longest-lived vertebrate, or
animal with a backbone.
Eight of 28 Greenland
sharks profiled in a new study in today’s Science were 200 years or older, by
scientists’ best estimates. One enormous female was aged at least 270 when she
was caught - and she may well have been 390. That would make her possible birth
date in the era of Rembrandt and Galileo.
We’re All Immigrants
Interesting that the common understand of how the first
humans came to the New World has a new twist.
The first Americans –
the earliest people to cross from Siberia to Alaska and begin the colonisation
of two vast continents linked by a narrow isthmus – could not have simply
followed the deer and the buffalo across dry land during the last ice age 13,500
years ago. They would have been in the right place, but at the wrong time, a
new study shows.
What is now the Bering
Strait would indeed then have been dry land. There was, as scientists have
known for many years, an open 1500km corridor of grassland between two great
ice sheets that would have made migration deep into North America possible.
But, according to a
new study in Nature, this route wasn’t fully open for traffic until 12,600
years ago.
This means the very
first pre-Columbian settlement of America, perhaps by people known to
archaeologists as the Clovis culture, must have been either by sea, or by
hugging the Pacific shoreline, long before the ice sheets retreated and the
ocean closed in to flood the Bering Strait and separate the Old World from the
New.
African Wild Dogs – Life is Tenuous
The challenge of saving predators when they come in contact with members of the local community
usually don’t end this well.
It was Sunday, the
26th of June – the evening before AfriCat’s annual health check was about to
start . . .
Team AfriCat and the participating vets were in preparation for an early start the following day, when we received a phone call after sunset from the Chairperson of Okamatapati Conservancy (a communal conservancy approx. 160 km east of Okonjima) - a communal farmer was in possession of nine orphaned Wild Dog pups.
The concerned farmer apparently
suffered a loss of four-six cattle and in his misery, chased the adult pack off
his property leaving nine abandoned pups behind. Instead of killing them (which
is normally the case, by closing the den and burying the pus alive – or by
throwing fuel down the hole and setting the den alight or by poisoning a
carcass which usually kills the whole pack), the farmer contacted the
Chairperson, who assured him that AfriCat would assist with the relocation of
the pups.
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