One of the world’s most endangered whales, the North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), is on a path toward extinction due to collisions with ships and entanglements in fishing gear, according to Cornell University whale expert Christopher Clark.
A paper co-authored by Clark in the latest issue of the journal Science (July 22, 2005) urges emergency measures, such as reducing boat speeds, rerouting shipping lanes around the whales’ migratory paths and modifyin
Tracing the larvae of marine organisms from where they were born to their ultimate destination has been regarded as one of the greatest challenges in ocean science. Managers of marine reserves areas have eagerly sought this information to help determine the optimal size and spacing of marine reserves; well-planned reserves should help ensure that protected populations can sustain themselves as well as provide a source of larvae to maintain exploited populations in areas open to fishing. In a
Ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are threatening the survival of the North Atlantic right whale, one of the most endangered whales with an estimated population of about 350. With eight recorded deaths in the past 16 months and a population growth rate that has declined since 1980, scientists say that unless emergency management actions are taken the population will face a catastrophic decline and become extinct.
A report in the July 22 issue of the journal Science say
Your breakfast this morning came at a cost not only to your wallet. Your bowl of Cheerios and cup of coffee and all the other meals for the other 6 billion people in our world cost the Earth a bit of its water, a bit of its ecological diversity, contributed to its pollution and may one day cost us our livelihood.
In the July 22, 2005 issue of the journal Science, co-author Terry Chapin, professor of ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Institute of Arctic Biology
Paper appears in July 22 edition of Science, says government protections inadequate
The North Atlantic right whale’s future looks grim if the current mortality rates continue, according to Florida State University assistant professor of oceanography Douglas Nowacek and a group of fellow scientists from across the nation. They have co-authored a paper titled “North Atlantic Right Whales in Crisis” that appears in the July 22 edition of the journal Science.
In it, Nowa
East Africa now has some new NASA technology to monitor the tiny particles in the air known as aerosols.
Dr. Michael King, Senior Project Scientist of NASA’s Earth Observing System at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, Md., led a group of NASA scientists that traveled through Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Eritrea from February 26 to March 18, 2005, to find locations to place a number of NASA’s AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) sunphotometer.
A s
Saving large mammals such as elephants and rhino from extinction could be made more effective by focusing efforts on individual species as well as their habitats.
Scientists at the Zoological Society of London’s Institute of Zoology (IoZ) and Imperial College London have identified fundamental new approaches to improve the success of large mammal conservation. Published today in the journal Science, the largest study of its kind analyses key factors linked to the extinction of mam
Researchers from the Université de Montpellier II (France), the Institute of Geology of China, and the ESRF have been able to identify enigmatic fossils from Devonian (about 400 million years) as fructification of charophyte algae. Charophytes are land plants living in fresh water that still exist nowadays. This breakthrough allows researchers to better understand the evolution of these very old plants of the Paleozoic era and to have an improved overview of the climate at this period. The use of p
It is difficult to find out whether animals in the wild have enough food, but research suggests that they are hungry most of the time, according to a new paper published in the American journal, Science, on Friday 22 July.
Researchers at the University of Reading also argue that this surprising conclusion could provide valuable new insights into animal behaviour.
The researchers undertook an analysis of a huge data base, the Global Population Dynamics Database (1),
The environmental impact of what we buy and use is increasingly drawing the attention of business, governments, and consumers. The connection between consumption and environmental impact is analyzed in new and important ways in a special issue of Yale’s Journal of Industrial Ecology.
Articles in the special issue analyze the environmental impact of consumption and U.S. house size, diet change, work time reduction, time use, product life spans and the quality of life. Articl
Cuvier’s beaked whales (Ziphius cavirostris) are an unusual sighting in most parts of the World, but are seen regularly in the Bay of Biscay. On a recent crossing of the Bay, a pod of 8 Cuvier’s beaked whales were observed to be displaying very unusual behaviour.
Cuvier’s beaked whales are amongst the more unusual and rare cetacean sightings globally. Like many species of beaked whale, they are known to inhabit deep-water canyons and slope waters, which tend to be found far from
The UK Chemical Industries Association (CIA) announced today that the chemical sector has achieved and exceeded its 2004 Climate Change Agreement (CCA) target.
The chemical sector has improved its energy efficiency by 19.5% since 1998, this is equivalent to an annual saving of around 3.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
After adjustment for members’ emissions trading, the target increased from 12.1% to 18.9%. The sector has therefore exceeded its target by a
Basking sharks are much more canny predators than previously thought, ecologists have discovered. According to new research published online by the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Animal Ecology, basking sharks are able to reverse their normal pattern of diving at dawn and surfacing at dusk in order to foil the attempts of zooplankton trying to evade capture. As well as shedding new light on basking behaviour, the results have important implications for the conservation of shark speci
Once common wading birds in south-east England look set to be amongst the casualties of this year’s drought.
Numbers of successful breeding lapwing, redshank and snipe have dropped by up to 80 per cent at five RSPB reserves in Sussex and Kent. At Brading Marshes, an RSPB reserve on the Isle of Wight, low spring and summer rainfall has left land parched. Redshanks have gone completely while just one pair of lapwing remains.
The news comes just a week after Southern Wat
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific and technical decisions in assessing risks to human health from pollution at a Superfund site in the Coeur d’Alene River Basin have been generally sound, says a new report from the National Academies’ National Research Council. And the agency’s remediation plans for residential areas should adequately protect residents against the most serious health threats, provided floods do not recontaminate cleaned-up areas. However,
A new study conducted in the Hawaiian Islands has revealed that landscape and erosion play crucial roles in determining soil fertility in tropical ecosystems.
“This study is the first to accurately predict the distribution of nutrients across a complex tropical forest landscape, and then to detect these shifts in nutrient status using airborne sensors,” says Stanford University graduate student Stephen Porder, lead author of the study, which will be published in this week’s onli
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