Back To Wild

According to latest news on the National Geographic, a conservation plan was announced today which aims at protecting some of the world’s oddest and most neglected animal species.

The Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) program, led by the Zoological Society of London, focuses on animals that have a very different evolutionary histories and face the risk of extinction.

This project brought together the existing data on the species relatedness and the threat status to develop a list of around hundred top animals.

In 2007 the project will focus on ten high priority species from that list “with potential for slipping through the gaps without notice,” said Samuel Turvey, a project scientist with the zoological society.

“Of the top 100 species which we’re focusing on, more than 70 percent receive either no conservation attention or extremely limited attention,” Turvey said.

“For 20 years conservationists recommended things that needed to happen that no one ever acted on,” he added. “We need to make sure that what happened to the Yangtze River dolphin never happens to any other species.”

EDGE will also try and raise awareness about the animals and their, fund research studying the species in their natural habitats, and then help execute conservation plans.

Ten Targeted Animals

Following are the focal species of The Zoological Society of London for 2007:

Long-beaked echidna: These are a spine-covered and egg-laying mammals that belong to the island of New Guinea’s last surviving indigenous animal that are characterized by long beaks that is around two-thirds the length of their heads.

These animals are being threatened by the traditional hunting method along with the forest habitat loss to farming, logging, and mining are the primary threats to long-beaked echidnas.

Hispaniolan solenodon: This shrew like insectivore is a native to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola and is of the size of a large brown rat. It is one of the few mammals that produces toxic saliva, which it injects into the prey through a special groove present in the front tooth.

These animals are slow and clumsy, and don’t know how to protect themselves from predators like the dogs and cats that are threatened by the habitat loss caused by human activity and deforestation.

Bactrian camel: This animal can survive without food for days continuously without food and water. The camels have lost their habitat to mining and industrial development and compete for food and water with the domestic camels.

Pygmy hippopotamus: This is a very small relative of the commonly known hippopotamus this has a different round head and eyes on the side of the head instead of the front, and separated toes with sharp nails unlike its cousins.

These pygmy hippopotamus have reduced in numbers because of logging, farming, and human interference. It is also being hunted for its meat.

Slender loris: This is a small monkey with long, slender arms and legs which is found only in Sri Lanka. This animal has a very small face with big round eyes, that provide an excellent night vision.

These animals are losing their habitats due to logging, agriculture, and development and are hunted for their meat and body parts, which are used in folk medicine.

Hirola: This is one of the world’s rarest and most endangered antelope, this is present in Africa.

There are many reasons for its extinction, to name some of them, Disease, predation, and competition which can be found in Somalia and Kenya. Even though it is illegal to hunt Hirola , it is a very serious danger.

Golden-rumped elephant shrew: This animal has a bright yellow patch of fur on its rear that resembles a long, elephant-like trunk. This is of the size of a small cat, it is the largest of the elephant shrews and has long, spindly legs, large eyes and ears, and a long, partially naked tail.

The shrews exist in Kenya, and are found only in fragmented and small patches of coastal forest. Habitat destruction is a major threat.

Bumblebee bat: This weighs around 0.07 ounce (2 grams), and is the smallest mammal in the world. This bumblebee-sized creature has a swollen, piglike nose, relatively large ears, and small eyes covered by fur.

These animals are threatened by tourist curiosity and forest burning near their caves in Thailand.

Long-eared jerboa: Very little is known about this small and jumping rodent with huge ears. This resembles a mouse with a long, tufted tail and elongated hind legs, and its ears are about a third larger than its head.

These animals Living around the desert habitats of northwest China and southern Mongolia, face habitat disturbance from livestock grazing. The animal’s water sources are drying up, though the reason is still unknown.

Governments of various countries have to take important steps to shift the energy policies towards a climate friendly energy policies to avoid any global economic depression, according to industrialized countries.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), involves around 26 governments, says that if business continues as usual then it can lead to extreme prices and sudden gaps in the energy supply. It can also lead to a huge growth in the climate affecting gases like carbon dioxide emissions.

“The energy future we are facing today, based on projections of current trends, is dirty, insecure and expensive,” says IEA’s Executive Director Claude Mandil. “New government policies can create an alternative energy future which is clean, clever and competitive.”

Grim Future

The IEA, which is based in Paris, was asked by world leaders at the last two G8 summits, at Gleneagles in Scotland and St Petersburg in Russia, to advise on a future energy scenarios. In response to it a book is being published, which looks into how countries can reduce their dependence on the imported fossil fuels.

This is an effort towards a future where the demand for global energy is reduced and slowed down. This will help in slowing down the demand for global energy to as less as 10%. This major change could be possible with an increased investment in improving the energy efficiency of vehicles, buildings, appliances and industrial motors,

Use Renewable Energy

The IEA also recommends an increase in the use of renewable energy sources, like biofuels for vehicles. It also says nuclear power could also make a “major contribution” in cutting fuel imports and curbing CO2 emissions.

Under the IEA’s proposed scenario, by 2030 global emissions of CO2 would still rise, but be 16% less than with business as usual. But this will require “strong policy action” by governments, it says, otherwise energy demand and CO2 emissions could both increase by more than 50%, threatening “severe and irreversible environmental damage”.

According to a recent genetic analysis, amphibians have come back in a big way after a spell of extinctions during their evolution.

Biologists look at the amphibians as the first effected due to environmental change. They are the worst effected because of their skin being extremely sensitive. They are more prone to absorbing the toxins in the atmosphere and water and thus suffer from fungal infections more often.

Their skin also doesn’t protect them from the harmful ultra violet rays which cause genetic mutation. A recent research also claimed that the amphibian population has reduced in the recent years. Around 43% of the populations of amphibian species is declining.

A closer look at their latest evolutionary tree shows that amphibians have an amazing capacity to revert back from the environmental changes, according to Kim Roelants of Vrije University in Brussels, and colleagues.

Come Back…

Recent research had suggested that the amphibian class as a whole had recovered very well from mass extinction, that affected all life on earth.

“For instance, right after dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, at the Cretaceous-Tertiary border, there was a huge explosion of frog species,” he says.

Until now, biologists lacked a detailed evolutionary tree of amphibians: fossil records of the amphibians were rare. So the researchers turned to genetic analysis of the amphibians DNA to reverse-engineer the evolutionary tree.

According to a recent lunar rock study, earth’s satellite has an iron core. This finding makes the theory that moon was formed from the debris of a Mars-size planet that collided with Earth.
“This is the most positive evidence so far that the moon contains a core,” said Larry Taylor, director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. “It’s looking more like a planet every day.”

“Our moon is too big to be a moon,” Taylor said. “It’s huge compared to the moons we see around other planets, so it has always been suspected that there was something strange in its origin.”
The Huge collision
According to the common moon-creation theory, it was caused by the “giant impact” or “big whack” theory. “This impactor hit, and everything was thrown every which way,” Taylor said. “Material was shattered, melted, vaporized, and thrown out into orbit. Some of that material condensed and aggregated into the moon.”
It is said that the impactor’s remains came together to become a part of the moon, as did large parts of early Earth’s mantle (the layer between core and crust), which were hurled spaceward.
Some rock samples that were gotten from NASA’s Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 moon missions of the early 1970s have thrown some light on, according to Taylor and colleagues’ study.

The moon rocks suggest that the lunar mantle is very low in elements that bond easily with iron, such as gold and platinum like Earth’s mantle, but with even lower levels of those elements.
What happens during the formation of any terrestrial planet is that it undergoes a melting state early in its formation,” Taylor said. “In that state you get the separation of metallic iron into a core.”
When cores formed on Earth and other terrestrial planets these iron-loving elements were largely scavenged from the silicate mantle and transferred down into the metallic core, which would explain the relative lack of these elements in both Earth’s mantle and the moon’s.
Though he doesn’t discount this idea, Richard Walker, a geologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, sees a second option.
“It could be that the [amount] of these elements in the silicate portion of the impactor and the proto-Earth were quite low at the time of impact, so that when the moon formed, it simply did not contain a high abundance of the elements in question,” said Walker, who was not involved in the study.

A team of European researchers had found new organisms when they analyzed the DNA sequences that were present in samples of sea water.The Genetic evidence is suggesting the presence of an unknown kind of microalgae, which the researchers called as picobiliphytes (”pico” means “a trillionth of a part of”) because of their very minute size.

“These organisms represent a new evolutionary lineage,” said team member Fabrice Not. Not is a marine biologist at the Institut de Ciències del Mar, a part of Spain’s National Research Council.
“The discovery didn’t provide any sister relationship to any other groups of organisms known to date. It means that this new group is probably a high-rank taxon [group] in terms of classification,”. “In fact, the divergence of this group from known organisms is as great as the difference between land plants and animals,” Connie Lovejoy, a biologist at Universit Laval in Canada and another member of the research team, said in a statement.

The Story Beyond

Over an year the research team had tried techniques to see and count the tiny picobiliphytes, the scientists have not been able to grow microalgae in the lab. The scientists confirmed that picobiliphytes contain pigments called phycobilins that give out an orange fluorescent radiance when placed under blue light.

Another organism must have lived inside the picobiliphytes and provided them with an energy supply in the form of the light-absorbing pigments, that are not mentioned.In this case, judging from the type of pigments involved, the picobiliphytes probably got their pigments from a reddish microalgae, he added.

Biodiversity

Actually this discovery is a great boom for biodiversity. This is primarily pure fundamental research with no commercial application. The main fields this research impacts is the discovery of the microbial ecology and the evolution of eukaryotes’ that contain the cells that also have a nucleus.

Robert Andersen, director of the Provasoli-Guillard National Center for Culture of Marine Phytoplankton in Maine, says the discovery is “terrific” and could have “considerable value” commercially. Andersen said other phycobilin-producing algae are commercially grown for their pigments, which are used in products such as cosmetics.

“Phycobilipigments are also rich sources of protein, and they are used as a food source in aquaculture hatcheries,” he said. If the new picobiliphytes can be grown in sufficient quantities to provide such a nutrient source, he added, “they will really be valuable.”

According to Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he can find the radio signals that could leak from other alien civilizations in the other planets.

This allows him to catch signals from any form of television or radio signals. This concept is very different from the other radio programs that are also searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

These actually just look for some high-frequency signals that are consciously beamed across the space to contact the distant civilizations. Extraterrestrials may not always think of sending messages to the other planets in the universe.

“However, our own civilization is transmitting power unintentionally through radio and TV broadcasting and military radars.” “An interesting question is whether we can eavesdrop on another civilization at the frequencies that we are ourselves transmitting in,” he said.

Intensified Search

Loeb says he can detect the leaked signals by intensifying his search with the use of a new generation radio telescope that is designed to study low-frequency radio emissions in the distant universe.
He and his colleagues are waiting to test this theory with the Mileura Wild-Field Array that is presently under construction in Australia and is said to start operations in 2008.

In the current configuration, the array is sensitive to Earth-like civilizations that may exist on a planet orbiting one of around thousand stars around 30 light-years away, Loeb said.
If any, radio emissions can be detected from a distant planet, some more additional observations will allow the astronomers to tell about the host star’s mass, the orbit of the planet, and the distance between the two. For more information visit National Geographic.