| NATURE AND ECOLOGY
New Orleans mayor pushing residents to leave FEMA trailers
(AP)
 AP - Lingering fears about formaldehyde fumes inside federally issued trailers and the impending hurricane season have Mayor Ray Nagin pushing to empty thousands of the structures, intended as temporary housing after Katrina.
Japan aims to cut emissions by 60-80 pct by 2050: reports - AFP
Eel Fishing Multiplies The Accidental Capture Of Other Fish By Eight
In the Ebro River delta, the fishing of elver (an eel, Anguilla anguilla) leads to the accidental capture of other fish species, with the capture of one ton of elver possibly resulting in the capture of up to 8.2 tons of accompanying species. Researchers who have assessed the effects of this method of fishing and identified the most fragile species, propose improvements in current methodologies.
VIDEO: Monks Join Cyclone Cleanup
 | Buddhist monks and Myanmar (Burma) government workers began cleaning the cyclone-struck city of Yangon (Rangoon). But the situation remains grim in the country's delta region. Warning: graphic imagery. |
Global climate change: What it means to Iowa - DesMoinesRegister.com
Tuna traders shut down at worlds largest fish market
Five of the world's principal tuna suppliers were forced to stop doing business at the seafood industry's largest trade fair by almost 100 environmental campaigners this morning.
The Greenpeace volunteers entered the European Seafood Exposition in Brussels - where many UK supermarkets buy from the 1,600 exhibitors - at 10am. Using fishing nets and chains, they shut down the tuna traders' stands and used the public address system to urge industry buyers to purchase only sustainable seafood.
The campaigners are calling for a worldwide ban on the sale of threatened tuna, such as bluefin, until stocks recover.
The European Seafood Exhibition is the largest event of its kind in the world and exhibitors' average sales reach millions of euros.
The five seafood suppliers shut down by Greenpeace are: Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan, the world's largest tuna trader and owner of Princes, the UK food and drink group; Spain's Ricardo Fuentes, which controls an estimated 60 per cent of Mediterranean bluefin tuna production; Dongwon Fisheries from Korea, which has a 75 per cent share of the Korean tuna market; Azzopardi Fisheries of Malta, the largest tuna farmers in the Mediterranean; and the Taiwanese Moon Marine, who are heavily involved in tuna longline fisheries in Indonesia.
Speaking from the Seafood Exposition, Willie Mackenzie of Greenpeace said:
"These companies are responsible for pushing tuna towards commercial extinction. Unless urgent action is taken, overfishing and the destructive and short-sighted methods of these companies could see the end of the tuna trade, because there won't be enough left.
"Put simply, there are too many ships chasing too few fish.
"Designating large areas as ‘marine reserves', would allow the seas and fish stocks to recover and ensure a sustainable future for the fishing industry. Failing to do so spells disaster for conservation, disaster for fish stocks, and disaster for the long term interests of fishermen."
Worldwide, up to 90 per cent of stocks of large predatory fish - including tuna, swordfish, cod, and halibut - have already been lost.
For more information, contact the Greenpeace press office on 020 7865 8255.
GREENPEACE NEWS At last some action on bottom trawling
Bottom trawling, possibly the most destructive fishing method yet devised by man, is to be regulated across the whole North Atlantic ocean. The process, which involves dragging nets weight down by metal girders across the seabed, is notorious for its wastefulness. Besides legitimate target species such as cod, plaice and sole, vast quantities of corals, sponges and other deep sea creatures are destroyed as bycatch. The devastation caused is so great that Greenpeace has been calling for some time for a moritorium (suspension of activity) on bottom trawling. Now it looks as though some progress may be being made.
The Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), whose members include Canada, the European Union, Norway, Iceland, Russia and the US, yesterday announced plans to regulate the activities of its fleets in line with a 2006 United Nations resolution. The resolution calls for urgent action to protect deep-sea corals and other vulnerable ecosystems from the impacts of bottom trawling on the high seas. The UN originally set a deadline for all regional fisheries treaty organizations to fully implement its plans by December 2008.
NAFO, whose members have the largest fleet of bottom trawlers in the world, is the first to start complying. It has agreed that all high seas bottom fishing within its areas will be subject to impact assessments by the end of 2008, and that fishing areas should be closed or fisheries prohibited where damage to corals, sponges and other deep sea species cannot be prevented. NAFO has set itself an ambitious work schedule over the next several months to complete the assessments and begin identifying areas on the high seas that require protection.
If, as NAFO promise, they implement the majority of UN's recommendations it would be good news, setting a precedent for protection of deep-sea ecosystems across the whole of the North Atlantic. Crucially, it would also be an acknowledgement that our seas are not a limitless resource which can be endlessly exploited without any consequences, but one which must be carefully and sustainably managed if we want to continue to harvest their bounties.
Video: Bottom trawling
 A brief history of the platypus, in 5 parts
Who isn’t fascinated by the strangest of mammals, the platypus? It has fur and lactates, like a mammal. It has a bill and webbed feet, like a bird. It lays eggs and produces venom, like a reptile. It finds prey using electroreception, like sharks. The platypus is so weird that when first described, many scientists assumed that it was a hoax.
To celebrate the publication of the draft platypus genome, here’s a brief guide to this wondrous creature.
Part 1. The Dreamtime Story
We scientists think that we’re very smart when it comes to explaining the natural history of Australia. However, the original inhabitants of this country have a rather different and quite compelling explanation, which goes by many names, but is most often known as the Dreaming. During the Dreaming, ancestral spirit beings in the form of animals wandered across the land, leaving behind their offspring, descendants and landforms.
To aboriginal people, the platypus was clearly half-water-rat, half-duck. There are several stories that explain the origin of this strange animal, but most of them concern a female duck (often named Daroo) and a wiley, male water rat, named Biggoon, or sometimes Bilargun. It goes like this.
“Daroo the Duck lived with other ducks in a secluded pond and all were in fear of the Mulloka, or Water Devil, which lurked in deeper waters. Thus, they never strayed far from their pond. One day, however, Daroo decided to disobey the elders’ advice and ventured out downstream. She stumbled across the territory of the “Water Devil”, Bilargun the Water Rat. He threatened duck with his spear when she tried to flee, and dragged her underground into his burrow. He forced her to mate with him, and she remained his captive for weeks before escaping.
When it came to hatching season, all the other ducks emerged from the reeds to parade their newborn ducklings. On the other hand, Daroo was ashamed to lead out two extraordinary offspring. They had fur instead of feathers, a bill and webbed feet, and a spike on each hind leg, reminiscent of the Water Rat’s spear. Daroo was ashamed and taunted, so she left the pond with her offspring, the first of the platypuses.”
Part 2. The Island Continent
So here’s the alternative version. Around 170 million years ago a landmass named Gondwana, made up of most of the continents in the present-day southern hemisphere, began to drift apart. A large portion of East Gondwana initially headed south, but about 50 million years later the northern part changed its mind, deciding to become India and Madagascar. Some 40 million years after that, the Indo-Australian plate also had a change of heart, rotated around and set off north once more. Gradually it separated from Antarctica, the ocean around its coastlines widening and deepening and so the island continent of Australia and neighbouring New Guinea was born.
On board the new island was a cargo of small creatures that to our eyes, must have resembled furry reptiles. Isolated from the rest of the world, they would eventually diversify into the mammal species of Australia. It just so happened that the environmental conditions in this new land favoured certain types of mammal more so than in the rest of the world. One group, the marsupials, developed external pouches in which to nurture their embryonic young and took to hopping around on their hind legs. Another group, the monotremes, went off in an all-together more bizarre direction. This road will lead to two very different monotremes: a spiny, land-dwelling ant-eating creature called an echidna and an aquatic animal, the modern-day platypus.
Part 3. The Colonists
Fast-forward another 80 million years to the present day, or as good as: 1798. It’s 10 years since the First Fleet sailed into Port Jackson to establish the colony of Sydney. The second governor of New South Wales, John Hunter, is a keen amateur naturalist and has watched an aboriginal hunter spear what the settlers call a “water mole”. He sends the skin with an accompanying sketch back to England, where it is received by a curator at the British Museum named George Shaw.
Part 4. The Journal Article
You’ve probably never read the journal The Naturalist’s Miscellany: or Coloured Figures of Natural Objects Drawn and Described Immediately from Nature but in 1799, it was an important natural history journal. It’s also where Shaw described the animal that he named Platypus anatinus, flat-foot duck. Shaw, like many others, could barely contain his scepticism:
“Of all the Mammalia yet known it seems the most extraordinary in its conformation; exhibiting the perfect resemblance of the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped. So accurate is the similitude, that, at first view, it naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means…”
The creature was later renamed Ornithorhynchus anatinus, but the word platypus was kept for the common name. Once scientists accepted that it was not a hoax, they realised that the platypus occupied an important position in mammalian evolution. The big question was: did it lay eggs? After much debate, a Scottish zoologist named William Hay Caldwell demonstrated that they do and sent a succinct, four-word telegram to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Montreal: “Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic.”
Part 5. The Genome
210 years after the platypus was first described, the draft genome of a female specimen called Gennie appears in Nature.
When you look at a platypus, your first thought is: it’s part mammal, part bird, part reptile. What’s really cool about the Nature publication is that when you look at the platypus genome, you see exactly the same thing. Here are some of the highlights:
Platypus have multiple sex chromosomes; the males have 5 X and 5 Y, which segregate into 5X and 5Y sperm
How these combine to determine sex and gene dosage is not understood
The X chromosomes are similar to bird Z but not human X, implying a bird-like ancestor for the platypus X
The same gene duplications responsible for venom production arose independently in reptiles
The platypus immune system has several unique features; in particular, a far large number of natural killer receptor genes than any other mammal
In general, the protein-coding genes exhibit a mosaic of mammalian (e.g. milk production) and reptilian (e.g. egg-laying) features
The non-coding protein genes include 10 times as many predicted snoRNAs as therian mammals and a variety of miRNA candidates, most of unknown function
It’s clear from the paper that we’ve only just begun to use genomics to understand monotreme biology and compare the prototherian mammals with their therian relatives. Let’s hear it for the platypus; bizarre mammal supreme and Australian icon.
Further reading
Genome analysis of the platypus reveals unique signatures of evolution. Nature 453: 175-183. Abstract | Full text
Relevant abstracts from Genome Research Platypus Genome Special
Hall, B.K. (1999). The Paradoxical Platypus. BioScience 49(3): 211-218. JSTOR link
This is a wonderful historical account and should be made more widely available.
Platypus biology at the Australian Platypus Conservancy (Source: What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate)
Fishing out the Pirates of the Mediterranean
Just a few days into our three-month “Defending Our Mediterranean” tour, and already the Arctic Sunrise has come face-to-face with pirates. In the early hours of the morning, we confiscated almost two kilometres of illegal driftnet, containing dead, undersized bluefin tuna - and a small sea turtle.
FACTBOX-Climate change meetings this year
(Reuters) - This week's meetings in the United States on climate change are the latest in a series of decisions taken this year on an issue increasingly at the top of the international agenda:
Berkeley researchers identify photosynthetic dimmer switch
(DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) The pigment-binding protein CP29, one of the "minor" light-harvesting proteins in green plants, has been identified as a valve that permits or blocks the critical release of excess solar energy during photosynthesis. Furthermore, it has been proposed that the opening and closing of this valve can be controlled by raising or lowering ambient pH levels.
MPs warn of inadequate flood cash
The amount of money pledged by the Government to prevent a repeat of last summer's devastating floods is "inadequate", MPs warned today. 
Benn gives go-ahead for new GM potato trial
Ministers have given permission for thousands of GM potatoes to be grown in Britain, a decision that is bound to provoke a new confrontation with environmentalists. 
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China Launches Olympic Effort to Fight Disease
Earthweek - May 9, 2008
Chinese officials say they are launching a massive public hygiene program to battle a recent viral outbreak that has killed 30 children, as well as to curb the spread of any other diseases prior to this summers Beijing Olympic Games.
Disaster Recovery Center to Open Monday in Fort Kent
Augusta, Maine Officials from Maine Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will open a Disaster Recovery Center in Aroostook County to assist individuals and business owners impacted by the flooding that occurred beginning April 28. The center will be at:
Tomato stands firm in face of fungus
(Public Library of Science) Scientists at the University of Amsterdam have discovered how to keep one's tomatoes from wilting -- the answer lies at the molecular level. The story of how the plant beat the pathogen, and what it means for combating other plant diseases, is published May 9 in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens.
Weiler Assumes Official Role as NASA Science Chief
Administrator Michael Griffin announced Wednesday that Ed Weiler will remain as NASA's associate administrator for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. Weiler was named interim chief of the directorate March 26.
McCain sharply critical of Bush response to Katrina
(Reuters)
 Reuters - Republican U.S. presidential
candidate John McCain on Thursday sharply criticized the Bush
administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina and vowed,
"Never again."
Myanmar Facing Risk of Another Big Storm
Weather experts say Myanmar could face another big cyclone this season.
Everythings coming up corals
(University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science) Two University of Miami students have received prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships from the NSF for their doctoral work on coral reefs. In fall they will be joined by Ross Cunning, who also received an Honorable Mention in the same NSF competition. They will all be part of the team working in the lab of 2008 Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation Dr. Andrew Baker who is helping to develop groundbreaking techniques to enhance the thermal tolerance of corals, and help them to survive dangerously warming oceans.
Depleting oil supplies threaten meltdown in society
Oil supplies peaked in 2006, say analysts, furthermore future shortages could mean mass unrest around the globe
Germany Hosts Global Conference on Biological Diversity - Promoting a Global Response for Addressing the Unprecedented Loss of Biodiversity
"Renewing agricultural diversity of crops and livestock backed by a functional natural support system is the international community's best long-term solution to meet the global food challenge,"said Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity prior to the start of the global conference on biodiversity on 19 May 2008 in Bonn, Germany.
NASA to Broadcast Earth Views in High Definition Television
Since humans first flew in space, nothing has captivated astronauts more than the view of home out the window of their spacecraft.
NASA Statement on Student Asteroid Calculations
The Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has not changed its current estimates for the very low probability (1 in 45,000) of an Earth impact by the asteroid Apophis in 2036.
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