China arrests three for endangered animal trade

THE TIMES OF INDIA

BEIJING: Chinese police have busted a criminal gang involved in illegal trade of endangered animals, seizing hundreds of bear paws, bear meat and animal carcasses from their possession, local officials said.

Three men, all natives of the region, were arrested in a rented residence in the regional capital of Nanning this month after a three-month investigation, according to Nanning city police.

Authorities believe at least 43 black bears were slaughtered for the bear paws. The animals and their body parts are believed to be worth 20 million yuan ($3.15 million), Xinhua news agency reported.

Some of the carcasses, including those of pangolins and tortoises, were sealed in a refrigerator and disguised as tea, police said.

Police said the suspects ordered the endangered animals from the city of Dongxing, which borders Vietnam’s city of Mong Cai to the south, and sold them in southern Chinese cities, including Nanning, Guangzhou and Kunming.

It is not known whether the animals were smuggled across the border.

Officials have dealt with multiple animal smuggling cases on the China-Vietnam border over the last few years, seizing snakes, cobras and turtles.

Great Indian Bustard on verge of extinction

THE TIMES OF INDIA

JAIPUR: It may soon be the end of the Great India Bustard (GIB), the state bird of Rajasthan. Repeated apathy of the government and a lack of will has pushed this bird to the brink of extinction in the desert state. Even the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List 2011of threatened birds has classified GIB as ‘Critically Endangered,’ the highest level of threat. Currently, there are just 250 GIBs in the country.

The winter count of the bird in the state was registered at 89, a mere shadow of the pride that the state held once for having more than half of the its entire population in the country. The bird, found only in India, has its presence also in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharastra and Karnataka.

According to Rajpal Singh, the state coordinator of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) for Nature, which conducts the survey along with the state forest department, the bird is now mainly confined to the desert with just one or two found in Ajmer, an area that once had the bird in abundance. Even the grasslands of Bhilwara and Kota have only a few of these birds.

Singh blames the lack of will by the government in protecting the bird and in saving its habitat as the reason for the gradual disappearance of the bird. “The Sonkaliya area in Ajmer used to be known for the GIB habitat but over the years, the grasslands have disappeared due to illegal mining and rampant agriculture thus affecting the habitat of the bird.”

The Sonkaliya comprises a cluster of 43 villages and due to the large presence of the GIB here, it was declared as a closed area with hunting strictly banned in the zone under the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. At that time, hunting was not banned. A ban on hunting came only in 1992.

Later the Act was amended in 2002 and provisions were made in it so that areas such as Sonkaliya that had large presence of a species could either be declared as a conservation reserve, if it happened to be on a government revenue land, or a community reserve if were on a community land.

“But the state did not initiate any move to declare the area as a reserve. Illegal mining began and as a result the entire habitat of the bird disappeared. In the deserts in western Rajasthan, including areas such as Jaisalmer, Barmer, Bikaner and the Rajasthan canal along with rampant animal husbandry adversely affected the bird,” Singh added.

White abalone on brink of extinction, study finds

AP/SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

White abalone, the endangered shellfish that once numbered in the millions off the Southern California coast, have declined precipitously over the last decade and are on the brink of extinction, a study has found.

In research published this week, scientists for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported “a dramatic and continued decline” in the population of hard-shelled sea snails, a trend that has only worsened since they were protected from overfishing in the 1990s.

Underwater surveys found a 78 percent drop in the number of white abalone lodged between rocks off the coast of San Diego since 2002, with most of those remaining either so old or isolated from one another they can no longer reproduce. Researchers warned that, without the ability to spawn a new generation, the aging sea creatures, which can live up to 35 years, will not be able to recover on their own.

“At this point, without human intervention, the species could go extinct within our lifetimes,” said co-author Melissa Neuman, white abalone recovery coordinator for NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service.

The report, published in the journal Biological Conservation, urges “immediate, proactive conservation” by breeding white abalone in captivity and releasing them in the wild, saying it may be the only way to save them.

“The study highlights a new sense of urgency about the importance of captive breeding,” said Kevin Stierhoff, lead author of the study and research fisheries biologist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, which operates an aquarium facility designed to culture young white abalone to boost wild populations. The University of California, Aquarium of the Pacific and Cabrillo Marine Aquarium are working on similar captive breeding programs, he said.

White abalone were abundant in kelp forests and rocky reefs from Point Conception to Baja California until the 1970s, when they were harvested in large numbers. The fishery was shut down in 1997. White abalone, one of the seven abalone species that live in California waters, was listed as a federally endangered species in 2001.

Only a few thousand are left.

‘Cockroaches are essential for environment’

BUSINESS STANDARD

The mere sight of a cockroach sends a shiver down the spine of many, but the most despised insect is actually essential to the survival of the Earth’s delicate ecosystem, an Indian-origin biologists has claimed.

According to Srini Kambhampati, professor and chair of the biology department at the University of Texas at Tyler, the sudden disappearance of Earth’s 5,000 to 10,000 cockroach species would have ramifications far beyond your filthy apartment.

“Most cockroaches feed on decaying organic matter, which traps a lot of nitrogen. Cockroach feeding has the effect of releasing that nitrogen (in their feces) which then gets into the soil and is used by plants, Prof Kambhampati told Life’s Little Mysteries.

“In other words, extinction of cockroaches would have a big impact on forest health and therefore indirectly on all the species that live there,” he said.

Prof Kambhampati, who is a graduate from Andhra Pradesh Agricultural University, also warned that the Earth’s 5,000 to 10,000 cockroach species are also an important source of food for many birds and small mammals like mice and rats.

In turn, these predators are themselves prey to many other species like cats, coyotes, wolves and reptiles, as well as eagles and other birds of prey.

None of these animals rely solely on cockroaches for food, Kambhampati said, so they probably wouldn’t go extinct, but their numbers would drop. Parasitic wasps, which specialise in parasitising cockroach eggs, do rely entirely on the cockroach.

“These would almost certainly become extinct,” he noted.

“Extinction of cockroaches would have a big impact on forest health and therefore indirectly on all the species that live there,” he said.

Furthermore, the disappearance of cockroaches would mess with something truly vital for us all, called the nitrogen cycle, he added.

Endangered fin whale found dead near Pt. Reyes

MERCURY NEWS

POINT REYES NATIONAL SEASHORE, Calif.—A rare, endangered fin whale has been found dead at a beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore, the apparent victim of a ship strike.

The Marin Independent Journal reported (http://bit.ly/MrOJ4y) the 47-foot-long juvenile whale washed up near Wildcat Beach on Friday with severe injuries.

Dr. Frances Gulland of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito said the whale’s spine was fractured, likely as a result of being hit by a vessel.

Fin whales can grow to nearly 90-feet in length, and are the second-largest mammals on the planet behind the blue whale.

The filter feeders are also the fastest large whales, reaching speeds of 25 mph.

The rare whales exist around the planet, with a population of about 2,000 currently estimated to live off the Washington and California coasts.

Chimp champ Goodall crusades against deforestation

JAMAICA OBSERVER

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) — Even in the veritable tower of Babel that is the United Nations’ largestever conference, it’s safe to assume that Jane Goodall was the only one speaking chimpanzee.

“Ooh, ooh, ooh, ah, ah,” the iconic British conservationist chanted into the microphone, delivering a series of melancholic bursts she said roughly translated as “please help”.

“I think that’s what chimpanzees would be saying if they could articulate it that way,” Goodall told participants at a meeting last Thursday of the conservationist umbrella group Avoided Deforestation Partners.

The event took place on the margins of the UN’s Rio+20 mega-conference on sustainable development, which has drawn an estimated 50,000 diplomats, environmentalists, policymakers and concerned citizens from across the globe to Rio de Janeiro.

The world’s forests are among the crucial, life-sustaining environmental systems scientists say are teetering on the brink of a tipping point. The UN’s Environment Programme warned earlier this month that the planet’s systems — which also include air, land and oceans — “are being pushed towards their biophysical limits”, after which sudden and catastrophic changes could ensue.

Environmentalists had cast Rio+20 as the last, best chance to avert such a scenario, and the event attracted a host of high-profile personalities, including Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and media mogul Ted Turner, who urged policymakers to take action on their pet causes.

However, the three-day conference was beset by bickering between rich and poor countries, and environmental protection groups have lashed out in chorus against the event’s final document, which they say is grossly inadequate.

Goodall, a Cambridge Universitytrained ethnologist who’s among the top advocates for the chimps she has studied for more than half a century, spoke movingly of the deforestation that has encroached on Tanzania’s Gombe National Park, where she began studying chimps.

The chimpanzee population of equatorial Africa once numbered in the millions, but deforestation and other threats have slashed their numbers to an estimated 170,000-300,000, making the chimp an endangered species.

Goodall said a recent flight over Gombe, a tiny 30-square-mile sliver of a park perched on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, brought the devastation of the surrounding landscape into sharp relief.

“The trees were gone, the hills were bare,” she said.

Outside the park, trees had been cut down by the impoverished locals for firewood and for plots of land on which to eke out a living.

She said both the kind of “desperate poverty” that surrounds Gombe and, on the other end of the spectrum, the unquenchable appetites for consumer goods in wealthy countries, were to blame for deforestation.

“The unsustainable lifestyles of those not living in poverty is leading to the actions… of the big mining companies, the big petroleum companies and the big logging companies” — the enemies of forests worldwide,” she said.

Goodall also singled out spiralling population growth as another of the main culprits driving deforestation, which organisers of Thursday’s conference say results in the loss of one acre of forest every second.

“It’s population growth, the sheer numbers of us; it’s having a devastating effect on the forests,” she said.

Britain’s Prince Charles concurred.

In a lengthy address beamed into the Rio meeting via video, the prince said that the burgeoning human population will inevitably lead to the clearing of more forest land for agriculture to feed people’s “insatiable and ultimately unsustainable appetite for meat”.

He cautioned that innovative and region-specific solutions, such as integrating crops on forest floors, will prove necessary if any of the world’s forests are going to remain standing.

He also made a compelling argument for just how important it is that they do remain standing: Deforestation itself is a major source of greenhouse gases, spewing out more pollutants annually than the global transportation. Plus, forests help stave off climate change by fixing carbon dioxide and play a crucial role in feeding streams and rivers.

Again and again, the meeting’s highprofile speakers emphasized how much previous UN environmental conferences had left undone — and how time was running out for the world’s forests and the plants, animals and humans that depend on them.

“For me and I’m sure many others, there’s a terrible sense of deja vu when I recall those expressions of urgency 20 years ago,” said Charles, referring to the Rio+20’s predecessor, the Eco 92 conference, which helped put climate change on the world agenda.

The prince stressed that time is running out, a point he made in a previous address, he said Thursday.

“I said that we have less than 100 months left to act to avoid catastrophic change. That was 40 months ago,” said the prince. “We simply can’t wait for the international frameworks to be put into place. If the pace of the negotiations and the speed… is too slow to arrest the present rate of depletion, then it seems to me we have no option but to forge ahead by taking action now and then linking to the international frameworks when they finally emerge further down the line.”

While neither the prince nor chimpanzee champion Goodall appeared to put much faith in the outcome of the Rio+20 conference, they said increasing public awareness of the scope of the problem was heartening.

“More and more of the public have begun to understand what’s going on out there,” she said, “and people are beginning to vote in the grocery store with what they buy.”

Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/environment/Chimp-champ-Goodall-crusades-against-deforestation#ixzz1zgoPQJra

George death means species extinct

BELFAST TELEGRAPH

The famed Galapagos giant tortoise Lonesome George has died, according to Ecuadorean officials.

The Galapagos National Park said in a statement that the tortoise, estimated to be about 100 years old, died on Sunday.

He was believed to be the last living member of the Geochelone abigdoni species and had become a symbol of the islands that helped inspire Charles Darwin’s ideas on evolution.

Various mates had been provided for Lonesome George over the years in unsuccessful attempts to keep his subspecies alive.

Scientists had said he was not especially old and had expected him to live another few decades at least.

The park said the cause of his death would be investigated.