Larry Ray : Democrats 'On a Wing and a Prayer'

Battered Monarch Butterfly resting in Texas on trip home. Photos from Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.
Getting it on:
Monarchs have a tough lesson
for flighty Democrats

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / November 16, 2010

These photos were taken in Texas recently. They show a battered migrating Monarch butterfly feeding on milkweed nectar and resting after clearly flying in very windy conditions.

Someone suggested that the beaten up butterfly, merely resting on its 5,000 mile migration flight from Canada back to Central Mexico, literally "on a wing and a prayer," could be symbolic of "The Democratic Party after their recent election mauling."

Nice idea, wonderful photos, suggesting strength and determination. But given the Democratic party's recent implosion, if they were scheduled to all move in one direction, like a mass migration, they would argue, delay, fight, and piddle around, and those who actually got airborne would fly an erratic path probably at the wrong time of year to procreate. Which is why the Monarchs do it.

And speaking of procreation, when today's Democrats aren't getting screwed by Republicans they wind up screwing themselves. Even Monarch butterflies are smarter than that.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Family Values : 'Living Fossil' Becomes a Daddy at 111

Big Daddy! The tuatara looks little different from its Jurassic relatives. Photo by Frans Lanting / National Geographic.
After 40 years of celibacy, grumpy centenarian reptile finally gets frisky.
January 26, 2009

A rare New Zealand reptile has become a father, possibly for the first time, at the age of 111.

The keepers of Henry, a tuatara, had thought he was past his prime - especially after showing no interest in females during 40 years in captivity.

But he mated with 80-year-old Mildred last July and 11 of the eggs she produced have now hatched.

Henry's keepers have put his newfound vigour down to a recent operation to remove a tumour from his bottom.

'Love story'

Henry arrived at Southland Museum in the South Island city of Invercargill in 1970 and, his keepers say, soon became overweight and idle.

He was known for his foul temper and had a tendency to attack other tuatara - forcing the museum to keep him in solitary confinement for many years.

But since his operation, Museum tuatara curator Lindsay Hazley said he had had a "major personality transplant."

"I have done lots of eggs before but these are just special because they are Henry's," Mr Hazley told the Southland Times.

Tuatara, which are found only in New Zealand, are sometimes referred to as "living fossils."

They are the only surviving members of a family of species which walked the Earth with the dinosaurs more than 200 million years ago.

The museum now has about 70 of the rare creatures, and Mr Hazley is hopeful that Henry might provide more offspring in the future.

He lives with three female tuatara "in great harmony," said Mr Hazley, and described the hatching of the eggs as "the completion of a love story."

Source / BBC News

Thanks to Dian Donnell / The Rag Blog

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1 in 4 Mammals Now Thought to Face Extinction

A fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus), one of the world's mammals that is declining in population. More than a third are probably threatened with extinction. Photo by Mathieu Ourioux / AFP / Getty Image.
'What we are facing is a very rapid, accelerating rate of extinction happening right now that is very unnatural.'
By Dan Vergano / October 6, 2008

Many animals worldwide, from toads to tigers, face extinction, a "terrifying possibility" underlined by the release Monday of a report on mammals.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) predicted earlier that one in eight bird, one in three amphibian and one in three coral-reef species are endangered.

"Extinction is normal and natural, but what we are facing is a very rapid, accelerating rate of extinction happening right now that is very unnatural," says IUCN biologist Michael Hoffmann. The mammal report comes as the IUCN — the world's largest organization of environmental groups, with 11,000 scientist members from 160 nations — opened its yearly meeting in Barcelona. "Our results paint a bleak picture," he says.

Land mammals face their greatest risk of extinction in South and Southeast Asia, where 79% of monkey and ape species are threatened, the report finds. Forest-cutting and expanded farms are destroying the homes of species such as the fishing cat. Habitats from India to Java are threatened by marsh-clearing.

Sea mammals are under particular threat in the North Atlantic, North Pacific and Southeast Asia, where dolphin species suffer from fishing and pollution because of factory and farm runoff.

"Overall, about 30% of animal species face declines," says World Wildlife Fund biologist Sybille Klenzendorf, an expert on tiger conservation. Steep declines in the population of marine mammals, such as the Gulf of California's vaquita porpoise, began a decade ago, she says, while land mammals steadily lost numbers over the century.

"It's not all doom and gloom," Hoffmann says. Some species, such as African elephants and black-footed ferrets in North America, have rebounded. With habitat preserves, captive breeding and laws against hunting, many more species could be saved, he says. But the IUCN report notes it lacked data for 836 of the world's mammal species, possibly because those creatures have become extinct.

Source / USA Today

Thanks to S. M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

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Berkeley Scientists : World In 'Mass Extinction Spasm'

Amphibians are dying even in remote Sierra Nevada.
Scientists: Humans To Blame

'Behind all this lies the heavy hand of Homo sapiens'
By John Boitnott / August 12, 2008

"There's no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now," said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. "Amphibians have been around for about 250 million years. They made it through when the dinosaurs didn't. The fact that they're cutting out now should be a lesson for us."

New species arise and old species die off all the time, but sometimes the extinction numbers far outweigh the emergence of new species, scientists said.

Extreme cases of this are called mass extinction events. There have been only five in our planet's history, until now, scientists said.

"There's no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now."

David Wake, UC Berkeley

The sixth mass extinction event, which Wake and others argue is happening currently, is different from the past events.

"My feeling is that behind all this lies the heavy hand of Homo sapiens," Wake said.

The study was co-authored by Wake and Vance Vredenburg, research associate at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley and assistant professor of biology at San Francisco State University.

There is no consensus among the scientific community about when the current mass extinction started, Wake said.

It may have been 10,000 years ago, when humans first came from Asia to the Americas and hunted many of the large mammals to extinction.

It may have started after the Industrial Revolution, when the human population exploded. Or, we might be seeing the start of it right now, Wake said.

No matter what the start date, data show that extinction rates have dramatically increased over the last few decades, Wake said.

The global amphibian extinction is a particularly bleak example of this drastic decline, he said. In 2004, researchers found that nearly one-third of amphibian species are threatened, and many of the non-threatened species are on in decline.

Amphibians dying even in remote Sierra Nevada

The Bay Area's back yard provides a striking example, Wake said. He and his colleagues study amphibians in the Sierra Nevada, and the picture is grim there, as well.

"We have these great national parks here that are about as close as you can get to absolute preserves, and there have been really startling drops in amphibian populations there, too," Wake said.

Of the seven amphibian species that inhabit the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, five are threatened.

Wake and his colleagues observed that, for two of these species, the Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged Frog and the Southern Yellow-legged Frog, populations over the last few years declined by 95 to 98 percent, even in highly protected areas such as Yosemite National Park.

This means that each local frog population has dwindled to 2 to 5 percent of its former size.

Originally, frogs living atop the highest, most remote peaks seemed to thrive, but recently, they also declined.

There are several frog killers in the Sierra Nevada, Wake said.

The first hint of frog decline in this area came in the 1990s, and researchers originally thought that rainbow trout introduced to this area were the culprits - they like to snack on tadpoles and frog eggs.

The UC Berkeley team did experiments in which it physically removed trout from some areas, and the result was that frog populations started to recover.

"But then they disappeared again, and this time there were carcasses," Wake said.

The culprit is a nasty pathogenic fungus that causes the disease chytridiomycosis.

Researchers discovered the fungus in Sierra Nevada frogs in 2001.

Scientists have documented over the last five years mass die-offs and population collapses due to the fungus in the mountain range.

But the fungus is not unique to California. It has been wiping out amphibians around the world, including in the tropics, where amphibian biodiversity is particularly high, Wake said.

"It's been called the most devastating wildlife disease ever recorded," Wake said.

Global warming and habitat constriction are two other major killers of frogs around the world, Wake said. The Sierra Nevada amphibians are also susceptible to poisonous winds carrying pesticides from Central Valley croplands.

"The frogs have really been hit by a one-two punch," Wake said, "Although it's more like a one-two-three-four punch."

The frogs are not the only victims in this mass extinction, Wake said.

Scientists studying other organisms have seen similarly dramatic effects.

"Our work needs to be seen in the context of all this other work, and the news is very, very grim," Wake said.

The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health helped support the study.

Source / NBC11.com

Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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Sotten Treeshrew On Non-Stop Bender

Heavy Drinker: A pen-tailed treeshrew is shown wearing a radio collar. The clawed, big-eyed treeshrews were observed slurping up a beer-like brew from flowers of the bertam palm in the West Malaysian rainforest. The natural brew contains up to 3.8 percent alcohol, which is very close to the alcohol content of most human-manufactured beers. Photo by Annette Zitzmann.
Furry critters thrive on fermented nectar...
By Jennifer Viegas / July 28, 2008

Even the most ardent beer fans would have trouble subsisting on their favorite brew day in and out, but scientists have just discovered that the pentailed treeshrew lives off a frothy, fermented nectar that smells like beer and has its same alcohol content.

Humans previously were thought to be the only animals that regularly imbibed alcohol, but the soft-furred, slender treeshrews drink far more than most humans ever could for their body weight, and have been doing so for up to 55 million years.

But are the treeshrews forever tipsy?

"They show no obvious signs of drunkenness when observed from only 9.8 feet away away," lead author Frank Wiens told Discovery News. "However we do not rule out psychopharmacological effects induced by alcohol."

"On the contrary, I believe that some psychological effects induced by alcohol, such as effects on the brain, mood and learning, are crucial in this system," added Wiens, a researcher in the Department of Animal Physiology at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.

Wiens and his team made the discovery, outlined in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, after first detecting a "strong alcoholic smell reminiscent of a brewery" from flowers of the bertam palm in the West Malaysian rainforest Segari Melintang Forest Reserve in the State of Parak. Nectar from this plant frequently frothed up and out of the palm's long, tubular flowers.

The researchers conducted video surveillance of visitors to the plant and determined that many species bellied up to the bar-like scene, particularly at night, when the number of visits more than doubled. Nocturnal imbibers included the gray tree rat, the Malayan wood rat, the chestnut rat, the slow loris and the pentailed treeshrew.

The latter two animals spent far more time than the others did moving up and down the palm flowers and licking off the available nectar and pollen. The shrews stayed an average of 138 minutes per night, while the lorises fed for an average of 86 minutes each night.

The natural brew contains up to 3.8 percent alcohol, which is very close to the alcohol content of most human-manufactured beers. Given variations in alcohol content and amounts consumed, Wiens and his team say the clawed, big-eyed treeshrews would have a 36 percent chance of being drunk, by human standards, on any given night.

Wiens said there are even "reports of Malaysian indigenous people harvesting the nectar in former times," with these people getting "a buzz from the nectar."

While he suggested the treeshrews might also experience some kind of pleasant sensation, they appear to handle their alcoholic diet well. Analysis of hair plucked from the creatures revealed extremely high concentrations of a compound known as ethyl glucuronide. This is the end product of a chemical process that gets rid of alcohol and other toxic things from the body.

"In humans, only a negligible amount of the consumed alcohol is detoxified via this pathway," Wiens said.

The process explains why a small amount of alcohol can help reduce anxiety and stress in people, while conferring certain other medical properties, but larger amounts can often lead to health problems and alcohol addiction.

Since the pentailed treeshrew is believed to be ecologically and behaviorally close to extinct, ancestral primates that lived over 55 million years ago, the researchers theorize early shrews and primates were exposed to potentially harmful alcohol levels early in their development, but that humans and most other modern primates either weren't exposed to it as much, or lost the beer-guzzling adaptations as the years went on.

Webb Miller, a Penn State University professor of biology, computer science and engineering, has also studied treeshrews, along with flying lemurs. Miller and his team found that, despite their diminutive size and physical differences, the rainforest dwellers are closely related to us.

Miller said "now that we know their relationship to primates," treeshrews and flying lemurs, in particular, "are going to be much more important species to study."

In the future, Wiens and his team hope additional studies on pentailed treeshrews and their favorite food might help to explain how alcohol consumption emerged in humans and why certain groups possess different levels of tolerance. Asian individuals, for example, possess a low metabolic tolerance for alcohol that protects against alcoholism. Wiens said evolved adaptations to toxins found in rice could have resulted in that ability.

Source / Discovery News

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Bush Urges Expanded Drilling Of Alaskan Wildlife

Hole in one! Workers near Alaska's Lake Teshekpuk take a core sample from a grizzly bear cub. Image courtesy The Onion.
Drilling of polar bears, grizzlies, porpoises planned

WASHINGTON, DC — Following a recent ruling by a U.S. District Court that blocked the sale of 1.7 million acres of federally protected caribou, President Bush urged Congress Tuesday to pass an appropriations bill that would enable expanded drilling of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's animals.

"There are over 100 billion tons of untapped, domestic wildlife lying beneath, on, and above the surface of Alaska's North Slope region," said Bush during a White House press conference. "We have an obligation not only to our society, but to future generations, to begin drilling these polar bears, grizzlies, harbor porpoises, Roosevelt elks, sea otters, muskrats, and snowshoe hares immediately."

According to Secretary Of The Interior Dirk Kempthorne, who recently toured the Lake Teshekpuk area with a team of bio-mineralogists, one in four animals drilled in early tests have shown positive yield.

"We can achieve our goal without disturbing the delicate balance of the ecosystem," said Kempthorne, looking on as rig operators took exploratory core samples of 20 bearded seals in order to gauge the mammals' interior density. "But if the government opens up the nearly 200 species of birds, fish, and marine and land mammals to public drilling, the U.S. would be capable of churning out over 9.3 billion barrels of wildlife each year—more than three times the amount we currently drill."

Wildlife prospectors in other parts of Alaska applaud Bush's position, saying that, if funding is increased, drillers will be able to tap larger, higher-yield animals such as grizzly bears and musk oxen.

"The technology is there, but there's little economic incentive to drill anything larger than timber wolves," said Cal Fowler, an independent prospector and former wildcat driller. "With more federal money we can invest in necessary hardware, such as more durable annular diamond-impregnated drill bits, which can bore two-inch diameter holes deep through a solid bull-walrus midsection in seconds."

Drill foremen have already begun digging shallow exploratory holes through the surface flesh of over 5 million animals to provide workspace for the drillers and their equipment. Once this step is complete, an electrical generator powered by a large diesel engine will plunge rotating carbide-steel-tipped drill bits through the animal, boring through the skin, bone, or blubber at speeds of up to 6,500 rpm. The drillers will then guide the direction of the borehole using top-drive rotary steerable wellbores, which allow them to drill through targeted areas in the wildlife with incredible precision.

Walking through a field of steadily pumping Canada lynx, Fowler defended wildlife drilling as "one of the most environmentally responsible methods of drilling," saying that it is a renewable resource, and the ecologically sensitive wildlife refuge is almost completely unaffected since pre-existing environmental laws ensure that the drilling of individual animals will not damage the environment.

Energy giant ExxonMobil has already begun to widen its wildlife-drilling efforts in response to the Bush Administration's stance.

"We have set up an offshore production platform capable of efficiently extracting over 15,000 Arctic grayling fish from the Beaufort Sea each day, and then drilling them," ExxonMobil Chief Engineer For Wildlife Drilling Operations Frank Salinas said. "And advances in horizontal directional drilling may soon allow us to simultaneously drill through two arctic foxes three miles apart."

"It's an exciting time to be in the wildlife-drilling field," Salinas added.

Bush's call for more wildlife drilling has come under fire by alternate wildlife-use advocates, who call his policy shortsighted.

"The administration should be encouraging research into viable new technologies," said Sylvia Hermann, chairman of Advocates For Cleaner-Burning Fauna. "The energy produced by solar generators could be used to incinerate vast herds of moose, even in the coldest winter months. Wind-produced electricity could electrocute Beluga whales in their own habitats, with no need for offshore drilling, and hydroelectric dams could be used to drown grizzly bears. Perhaps one day geothermic heat could be harnessed to broil entire wildlife-rich regions alive."

Continued Hermann, "It's vital that we preserve the arctic wildlife so that our children, and our children's children, will still have animals to drill when they grow up."

The Bush administration is also proposing the creation of a Strategic Wildlife Preserve, a series of 15-million-cubic-meter above-ground tanks that would store an emergency supply of over 700 million tightly packed animals.

Source. / The Onion

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