FOXNews.com - Scientists Rebuild Wooly Mammoth Blood: "The lumbering, shaggy-haired woolly mammoth once thrived in the frigid Arctic plains despite having originally migrated from a more tropical climate. A new study has found tiny genetic mutations that changed the way oxygen was delivered by its blood could be responsible for its tolerance to the cold climate.
The woolly mammoth was an elephantid species and most closely related to today's Asian elephants. It went extinct around 13,000 years ago.� But because the mammoth lived in the Arctic, many remains of the species have been found preserved in the permafrost.
Ancestors of both the mammoth and Asian elephant originated in Africa around 6.7 million to 7 million years ago and stayed for about 4 million years before moving up into Southern Europe and then farther up into what is now Siberia and the northern plains of Canada around a million years later.
At around the same time 'a cataclysmic event occurred on Earth -- the Ice Ages,' said Kevin Campbell of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, who led the study into the ancient animal's blood, which is detailed in the May 2 online issue of the journal Nature Genetics."
Monday, May 17, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Wildlife Production Systems
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521349147
This book, first published in 1989, examines the controversial position of commercial utilisation in relation to wildlife conservation. Production of large mammals has earned respectability as an agricultural strategy and its evaluation has been listed as a priority requirement in the World Conservation Strategy. However, many authorities question whether wildlife production is a viable economic and environmental strategy, and suggest that it runs counter to its claimed purpose. This book evaluates this controversy by chronicling the changing role of wildlife and by reflecting on the implications of these trends. The book should be of interest to people both applauding and deploring the use of wildlife in this economic role.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Book to be published celebrating renowned UBC zoologist's life
Book to be published celebrating renowned UBC zoologist's life
By Larry Pynn, Vancouver SunApril 20, 2010
Ian McTaggart-Cowan in 2001. One of Canada's preeminent zoologists and early conservationists, he died Sunday just short of his 100th birthday.
Photograph by: ..., Vancouver Sun files
METRO VANCOUVER -- Wayne Campbell remembers Ian McTaggart-Cowan as the professor who kept him out of jail.
The retired curator of birds for the Royal B.C. Museum was just out of high school and busy at his hobby of egg collecting one June day in 1964. He was rummaging about for the common yellowthroat warbler when he found one at Deer Lake, next to Oakalla Prison Farm in Burnaby.
"I saw a female fly into a clump of sedges," Campbell recounted from his Victoria home on Tuesday. "The prisoners had finished their farming and had gone back to their cells.
"I was about 300 to 400 yards into the prison property. I crept, it was damp...and there was the nest.
"I collected it and the eggs and when I got back to the shore, guess what, there were two RCMP waiting for me. What do you do?"
Campbell hadn't brought his scientific egg-collecting permit, issued by the federal government. So he called McTaggart-Cowan, whom he'd met only once a few months earlier, in hopes a good reference might bail him out of trouble.
"He said he was very grateful I'd found the eggs and nest of this bird because they weren't well represented in the UBC collection."
It also didn't hurt that one of the Mounties took his zoology 101 course from McTaggart-Cowan.
Book to be published celebrating renowned UBC zoologist's life
Thursday, November 5, 2009
The Canadian Press: Scientists warn caribou collapse not unlike disappearance of cod stocks
Scientists warn caribou collapse not unlike disappearance of cod stocks
By Bob Weber (CP) – 6 hours ago
YELLOWKNIFE — Once, caribou wandered over the Arctic tundra in herds that took days to pass.
So great were their numbers - even 20 years ago - that they were able to shake off man's puny imprint on the great barren lands like so many flies on a rump.
"There was so much caribou all over that even our plane, our scheduled flights, couldn't land on the airstrip," recalled Alfonz Nitsiza of Wha Ti, a tiny aboriginal community northwest of Yellowknife.
"The caribou were on the airstrip. It was full of caribou, all our communities were."
Today, scientists fear caribou are the new cod.
"If we want a counterpart to start looking at what may be happening with the caribou, look at the northern cod," said Anne Gunn, a caribou biologist and former Northwest Territories researcher.
Once a gigantic bloom of life that sustained entire societies, the cod fishery was closed in 1992 after a near-total collapse of fish stocks. The subsequent bust of Newfoundland's outport culture was nearly as complete.
Recent surveys on two major caribou herds in Canada's North suggest the same thing may be happening there. And as scientists begin to unlock the secrets of that decline, aboriginals who still depend on the great herds to feed both body and soul are rethinking old assumptions.
"The elders are saying that there is a cycle, that caribou go away somewhere but they come back," Nitsiza said. "This time, the caribou may not come back."
Biologists say 15 of the world's 23 herds are shrinking. Only six herds, generally the small ones, are growing.
The Canadian Press: Scientists warn caribou collapse not unlike disappearance of cod stocks
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
World Environment News - Kilimanjaro's Ice May Disappear By 2033 - Planet Ark
Kilimanjaro's Ice May Disappear By 2033
Author: Katrina Manson
DAR ES SALAAM - The ice on Africa's highest mountain could vanish in 13 to 24 years, a fate also awaiting the continent's other glaciers, a study said Monday.
U.S.-based researchers Lonnie Thompson and colleagues said glaciers on Kilimanjaro, Tanzania's snow-capped volcano which attracts 40,000 visitors a year, could disappear.
"There is a strong likelihood that the ice fields will disappear within a decade or two if current conditions persist," said the study, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal.
The research blames warmer temperatures due to climate change and drier, less cloudy conditions than in the past.
"The climatological conditions currently driving the loss of Kilimanjaro's ice fields are clearly unique within an 11,700-year perspective," said the study, adding that the mountain lost 26 percent of its ice cover between 2000 and 2007.
At 5,896 meters high, Mount Kilimanjaro is one of the east African country's top tourism draws, offering tourists a taste of the tropical and the glacial within a five-day climb.
It brings in an estimated $50 million a year. Tourism is the leading foreign exchange earner in the poor country, earning $1.22 billion in 2008.
"The loss of the ice fields will have a negative impact on tourism in tropical east Africa," said Thompson in an email to Reuters.
Home to elephant, leopard and buffalo, as well as expansive views of the Rift Valley, the mountain known as "the roof of Africa" was first scaled by a European, Hans Meyer, 120 years ago. While its Kibo peak rises above the clouds, it can be reached with little more than a walking stick and some puff.
"The loss of the glaciers is an indicator of climate change under way in this region which impacts not only the glaciers on the summit but the weather patterns that bring rainfall to the lower slopes," said Thompson.
World Environment News - Kilimanjaro's Ice May Disappear By 2033 - Planet Ark
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Edmonton Journal Digital
The fact that two coyotes attacked and killed 19-year-old Taylor Mitchell in Cape Breton Highlands National Park on Tuesday was strange for two reasons, say experts: Coyote attacks on humans are very rare — and two animals attacking together, even more so.
BRIAN GAVRILOFF, THE JOURNAL, FILE
A coyote likely larger than this western variety killed a woman in Nova Scotia.
“There are literally thousands of these animals between Windsor, (Ont.) and St. John (N.L.),”said Brad White, a coyote expert at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., “and I don’t know another incident like this. It’s a very exceptional thing.”
While coyotes have been known to kill pets and small livestock, the animals that attacked Mitchell were probably coyote-wolf hybrids, White said.
Wolves are more likely to hunt in packs and are less picky about what they prey on, White explained. But the intermingling in the early 1900s between the normally solitary coyote and the wolf might explain the attack on Mitchell. “A human could look like prey to them — but still, I’ve never heard of an eastern coyote attacking a human.”
Meanwhile, a biologist with the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources said he’s seen no reason to suspect the animals were coyote-wolf crosses. Don Anderson noted there are no wolves in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick. “We do have a larger coyote that’s bigger than the western version,” he said. “It does travel in groups, as opposed to the western, which tends to travel alone.
“I can’t say that there aren’t some out there that are hybrids with dogs, or wolves, for that matter, but I don’t think the whole population is based on that,” he said.
White said the odds are also against the two coyotes having rabies. “Two diseased animals attacking would be unlikely, because it’s unlikely the progression of something like rabies, which is a lethal disease, would be parallel in two animals,” he said. “Usually, they’d be in different stages.”
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Associated Press: Mighty caribou herds dwindle, warming blamed
The Associated Press: Mighty caribou herds dwindle, warming blamed
By CHARLES J. HANLEY (AP) – Oct 4, 2009
ON THE PORCUPINE RIVER TUNDRA, Yukon Territory — Here on the endlessly rolling and tussocky terrain of northwest Canada, where man has hunted caribou since the Stone Age, the vast antlered herds are fast growing thin. And it's not just here.
Across the tundra 1,500 kilometers (1,000 miles) to the east, Canada's Beverly herd, numbering more than 200,000 a decade ago, can barely be found today.
Halfway around the world in Siberia, the biggest aggregation of these migratory animals, of the dun-colored herds whose sweep across the Arctic's white canvas is one of nature's matchless wonders, has shrunk by hundreds of thousands in a few short years.
From wildlife spectacle to wildlife mystery, the decline of the caribou — called reindeer in the Eurasian Arctic — has biologists searching for clues, and finding them.
They believe the insidious impact of climate change, its tipping of natural balances and disruption of feeding habits, is decimating a species that has long numbered in the millions and supported human life in Earth's most inhuman climate.
Many herds have lost more than half their number from the maximums of recent decades, a global survey finds. They "hover on the precipice of a major decline," it says.
The "People of the Caribou," the native Gwich'in of the Yukon and Alaska, were among the first to sense trouble, in the late 1990s, as their Porcupine herd dwindled. From 178,000 in 1989, the herd — named for the river crossing its range — is now estimated to number 100,000.
"They used to come through by the hundreds," James Firth, 56, of the Gwich'in Renewable Resources Board said as he guided two Associated Press journalists across the tundra.
The Associated Press: Mighty caribou herds dwindle, warming blamed
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Do animals have personalities? - The Globe and Mail
Anne McIlroy
From Saturday's Globe and Mail Published on Friday, Oct. 09, 2009 4:41PM EDT Last updated on Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009 1:21AM EDT
You can tell a lot about the personality of a bighorn sheep by trying to wrestle one to the ground.
The aggressive animals, like the ram nicknamed Psycho, put up a fight every time. The docile ones never require a half-nelson: They freeze as soon as they are touched and calmly sit down.
Researchers who trap, weigh and measure the bighorn sheep every summer in the mountains near Nordegg, Alta., have been kicked and dragged by the more combative beasts. The scientists are taking part in a Ram Mountain trap-and-release study, started in 1972, that has provided crucial data about the growth and health of the bighorn sheep population. In recent years, the study has also offered Canadian biologists a remarkable opportunity to investigate personality differences in the 125-kilogram animals.
Not many researchers study personalities in wild animals, a field that until relatively recently was dismissed by critics as a foolish attempt to attribute human characteristics to other creatures. But since the early 1990s, biologists have demonstrated that hyenas, chimps, squirrels, birds, octopuses, fish and spiders have measurable personality differences. They can be shy or bold, aggressive or passive, loners or social.
A number of studies – including a recent paper on the Ram Mountain bighorn sheep – have demonstrated that these traits have a strong genetic component.
In their study in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, researchers from the University of Sherbrooke and the University of Alberta report that more aggressive rams and ewes tended to have offspring that were also fighters. The more docile ones had lambs that were more likely to grow up to be easygoing.
Now, they are looking for genes linked to those traits. If they are successful, their work could explain behaviour in other species too.
“The question is: Are the same genes that are influencing behaviour in sheep in humans?” Jocelyn Poissant says. A doctoral student, he spent three summers wrestling sheep. This year, however, he stayed in the lab to analyze their DNA. It was easier on his knees.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Western Producer - U of A gateway to vet college - 2009-10-08 edition
Western Producer - U of A gateway to vet college - 2009-10-08 edition
U of A gateway to vet college
this document web posted: 2009-10-08By Mary MacArthur
Camrose bureauStudents looking for a way to enroll in veterinary school may only have to look as far as the University of Alberta.
Fourteen of the 20 first year spaces reserved for Alberta residents at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon are filled with students from the U of A's Faculty of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences (ALES).
Western Producer - U of A gateway to vet college - 2009-10-08 edition
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