Mongabay.com's Picture of the Day is from Bolivia."Kaaiyana’s tolerance of observers is a testimony to the absence of hunters in this area, and her success as a mother means there is plenty of food for her and her cubs to eat," said John Polisar, coordinator of Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Jaguar Conservation Program. WCS released the photos.
Launched earlier this year, the Proyecto Tesoros de Nicaragua ( Proyecto TESÓN), a joint effort to clean up the San Juan River catchment, has already demonstrated how public-private partnerships can work to build a more pristine and sustainable Nicaragua.
"Big cat" is not a precise biological term, it is just a verbal shorthand for distinguishing the larger members of the taxonomic family Felidae from smaller ones. Some people formally define "big cats" as the four Panthera species: the tiger, lion, jaguar, and leopard. But other people also include cheetah, snow leopard, clouded leopard, and cougar under the "big cat" umbrella.Read more at The Guardian. Or simply watch the video from Big Cat Rescue:
Big cats make interesting sounds. For example, only Panthera can roar. For this reason, they are often collectively known as "the roaring cats". Roaring requires special morphology of the larynx and hyoid apparatus in the animal's throat. Interestingly, despite having hyoid morphology similar to roaring cats, snow leopards cannot roar.
Conservation in ACTION
Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) set up the camera traps to try and identify jaguars based on the unique patterns of their spots. Once the images were collected, the team ran them through software originally designed to recognize tigers by their stripes.Read more about it at National Geographic Daily News.
The 19 jaguars found by the project represent a record number for a single camera-trap survey in the country.
In antiquity, killing a jaguar was often part of a religious ceremony or a mark of status. But as ranches and settlements sprang up across Latin America, jaguars lost their religious significance. Demonized as dangerous predators, they were routinely shot. The fashion craze for fur after World War II added to the carnage; in 1969 alone, the United States imported nearly 10,000 jaguar pelts. Only a 1973 international ban stemmed the trade. Killing jaguars is now illegal throughout their range, but enforcement is minimal, and the cats have been wiped out in El Salvador and Uruguay. Meanwhile, over the past century people have razed or developed 39 percent of jaguars’ original habitat across Central and South America.
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Panthera’s Jaguar Corridor Initiative aims to connect 90 distinct jaguar populations across the Americas. It stems from an unexpected discovery. For 60 years, biologists had thought there were eight distinct subspecies of jaguar, including the Peruvian jaguar, Central American jaguar and Goldman’s jaguar. But when the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity in Frederick, Maryland, part of the National Institutes of Health, analyzed jaguar DNA from blood and tissue samples collected throughout the Americas, researchers determined that no jaguar group had split off into a true subspecies. From Mexico’s deserts to the dry Pampas of northern Argentina, jaguars had been breeding with each other, wandering great distances to do so, even swimming across the Panama Canal. “The results were so shocking that we thought it was a mistake,” Rabinowitz says.
Panthera has identified 182 potential jaguar corridors covering nearly a million square miles, spanning 18 nations and two continents. So far, Mexico, Central America and Colombia have signed on to the initiative. Negotiating agreements with the rest of South America is next. Creating this jaguar genetic highway will be easier in some places than others. From the Amazon north, the continent is an emerald matrix of jaguar habitats that can be easily linked. But parts of Central America are utterly deforested. And a link in Colombia crosses one of Latin America’s most dangerous drug routes.
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“My vision was to ranch by example,” Kaplan says, “to create ranches that are more productive and profitable and yet are truly jaguar-friendly.”
A record number of jaguars have been identified in one of the world's most biologically diverse landscapes. Using technology first adapted to identify tigers by stripe patterns, researchers for the Wildlife Conservation Society have identified 19 individual jaguars by spot patterns in the rainforests of Bolivia, a record number for a single camera trap survey in the country.We're so excited to follow in their footsteps with our own Jaguar Conservation Initiative.
"We're excited about the prospect of using these images to find out more about this elusive cat and its ecological needs," said WCS conservationist Robert Wallace. "The data gleaned from these images provide insights into the lives of individual jaguars and will help us generate a density estimate for the area."
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| Schoolchildren from Ostional, Nicaragua named this Hawksbill Brasilia |
Dr. McCrary has spent the past decade studying how a small, short-lived tilapia farm degraded Lake Apoyo in Nicaragua. “One small cage screwed up the entire lake — the entire lake!” he said of the farm, which existed from 1995 to 2000.
Waste from the cages polluted the pristine ecosystem, and some tilapia escaped. An aquatic plant called charra, an important food for fish, disappeared, leaving the lake a wasteland. Today, some species of plants and fish are slowly recovering, but others are probably gone forever, said Dr. McCrary, who works for the Nicaraguan foundation FUNDECI.Read the entire article, which reminds us that choices we make here affect ecosystems near and far.
Biology, Politics, and the Emerging Science of Human Nature
James H. Fowler* and Darren Schreiber
In the past 50 years, biologists have learned a tremendous amount about human brain function and its genetic basis. At the same time, political scientists have been intensively studying the effect of the social and institutional environment on mass political attitudes and behaviors. However, these separate fields of inquiry are subject to inherent limitations that may only be resolved through collaboration across disciplines. We describe recent advances and argue that biologists and political scientists must work together to advance a new science of human nature.
PDF: http://dmschreiber.ucsd.edu/Publications/FowlerSchreiberScience2008.pdf
As ocean pollution experts meet in Hawaii, disturbing new report chronicles effects of decades of plastic pollution on sea turtles—and what we can do about it.Learn more: http://www.seaturtle.org/plasticpollution/
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Experts on plastic pollution from around the world, determined to solve this growing problem, have gathered this week for the Fifth International Marine Debris Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, a mecca for green sea turtles.
Now, in a recent editorial published in the Marine Turtle Newsletter, marine biologists Colette Wabnitz, PhD, of the University of British Columbia and Wallace "J." Nichols, PhD, of the California Academy of Sciences, lay out the entire disturbing history of plastics in the ocean, from the first scientific report to the latest surveys, to call attention to the concerns from 1972 to today. The report is grim, but provides a ray of hope in the form of proactive steps that can and should be undertaken to curtail overproduction and careless discard of single-use plastics.
The authors were careful to acknowledge that certain plastics have done much good in the world. The report firmly lays the blame at the feet of so-called "disposable" plastics: commonly used beer cups, water bottles and caps, grocery bags, plastic utensils, and so forth, intended to be used just once and thrown away. While these plastics are cheap and convenient, they are also durable and buoyant—making for a potent and deadly combination in the water.
Though plastics like these do break down from exposure to sunlight and other elements, the molecules of plastic never fully biodegrade—they just break into smaller and smaller pieces but never completely disappear. Eventually, many of these small particles get blown or washed into tributaries that feed rivers which flow to the ocean where plastics coalesce in ocean currents. Here they swirl in the eddying currents forming a sort of plastic soup where they float virtually forever and are often—the whole pieces and broken bits—ingested by the creatures of the sea. Once in the guts they can do great harm, or even kill, animals such as sea turtles.
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"Sea turtle researchers and conservationists have a unique role to play in our cultural evolution away from plastic pollution, as we have watched the havoc the surge of plastic has caused first hand", notes Dr. Colette Wabnitz of the University of British Columbia.
"Sea turtle researchers from around the world have been submitting photos of interactions with plastic to the Image Library on Seaturtle.org. Given the amount of disposable plastic I see alongside the road everyday and the garbage my kids pick up whenever we go to the beach, the results are not surprising", added Dr. Michael Coyne, founder and director of SeaTurtle.org.
For all of you who have been following Pretoma’s activities and supported our campaigns, many thanks. We need your help again. We are finalists in a competition called “Change Makers” to support the work we do in the Nicoya Peninsula promoting a sustainable snapper fishery. Please, take the time (only two minutes) and vote at the following site: http://www.changemakers.com/node/95324?breadcrumb_type=finalistsWe bwould also like to ask for your vote for our Nat Geo Changemakers finalist program entitled Environmental Learning Leadership Adventure and Stewards (ELLAS) which supports women enviropreneurs in sustainable tourism surrounding the La Flor Wildlife Refuge.
La iniciativa “ELLAS” que promueve el Organismo No Gubernamental Paso Pacífico, el cual fue escogida por Geotourism Challenge 2010, auspiciado por National Geographic, Ashoka Changemakers y Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, como uno de los 12 finalistas entre más de 250 participantes de diferentes países del mundo, lo que permite visibilizar el rol de la mujer nicaragüense en un tema de vital importancia para el país, como explicó Liza González, Director Nacional de Paso Pacífico.
If you haven't yet voted, you may do so here: http://www.changemakers.com/The Environmental Learning, Leadership, Adventure, and Stewardship Initiative (ELLAS) por su siglas en inglés, es un programa que da liderazgo a mujeres para colaborar en la protección del Refugio de Vida Silvestre La Flor, San Juan del Sur, Rivas, a través del turismo sostenible para darlo a conocer como un destino conocido a nivel mundial en la práctica del geoturismo.
From our January newsletter:One of the world’s greatest treasures, sea turtles, is threatened by extinction. With the continued rise of poverty and lack of food resources, egg poaching has become a mainstream commodity and a means for survival. This man-made epidemic has been on the rise for decades, and is most prominent along the beaches of Nicaragua’s Pacific Slope. Poachers, viewed like pirates, roam the coastline depleting sea turtle eggs to make a quick dollar.
This year I had the opportunity to attend the Clinton Global Initiative where I learned of this epidemic by the non-profit organization, Paso Pacifico. Paso Pacifico’s mission is to restore and conserve the natural ecosystems of Central America’s Pacific slope by collaborating with landowners, local communities and involved organizations to promote ecosystem conservation.Read the whole piece here.
There are other smaller caves in Masaya. Park rangers know where they are. I have been to only one, which was a cave with a large colony of vampire bats. In the video (also from April 2009) if you look carefully you can see some females with babies hanging on their chests. Many tropical bat species are capable of reproducing throughout the year, although many will have peak reproduction in the rainy season when fruits and insects are most abundant. To my knowledge, these bats are found in the caves throughout the year. In the dry season, however, bats are easier to spot as they are attracted to pools of water where they come to drink.
This is a video I filmed of nectar bats feeding on a jicaro tree in Montibelli private reserve, which is about 30 minutes from Masaya. This video was filmed in April 2009. It's easiest to watch nectar bats in the dry season (January through April) since that is when many of the tree species in the dry forest flower.
There are two main lava tube caves, and several smaller caves. The largest cave has a colony of what I believe may be thousands of bats, but we have not done any counts. We have captured five species leaving this cave, Pteronotus parnelli, P. personatus, P. gymnonotus, and P. davyi. On one occasion I caught 3 Mormoops megalophylla which was the first time that species had been recorded in Nicaragua but I have not caught it since then, so I do not know if they were just there "by accident". All of these bat species are insect eating bats. It is hard to film in that cave, as it is very humid inside (camera lenses fog over) and the bats hide in branches of the cave that are difficult to access, but it is possible to film just inside of the mouth of the cave, or to film the bats emerging from the cave.
The second cave, which is the cave that tourists can enter when with a park ranger, is much more pleasant and dry, but it has relatively few bats. I am not sure if the bats I saw in there were Carollia (fruit eating) or Glossophaga (nectar feeding) bats. There are many areas in and near Masaya where you can spot fruit and nectar feeding bats.
One of the major uncertainties about global climate change is the effect of clouds, which cool the climate by reflecting incoming solar radiation back to space, but also warm the climate by trapping heat that might otherwise escape. So as the planet warms, will clouds change in ways that counter warming by greenhouse gases (a negative cloud feedback), or further amplify it (a positive cloud feedback)?
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Although the data only cover the past decade, and therefore represent short-term climate fluctuations, they do corroborate several leading global climate models that yield a similar feedback and an increase in global temperature of several degrees Celsius for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
