Linces reintroducidos se acercan a Castilla-La Mancha
Hispania, una hembra de lince de dos años reintroducida en el área del valle del río Guarrizas (Jaén), campea por el sur de la provincia de Ciudad Real. Un dato que permite a los científicos albergar cierto optimismo sobre una posible expansión de la especie, de la que de momento, se conservan dos núcleos uno en Doñana y otro en Andújar (300 ejemplares), además de los 96 nacidos en los centros de cría en cautividad, según el censo de 2011. “Era lo previsto, porque la zona por donde se le ha visto es una continuidad de Sierra Morena, a unos siete kilómetros, con un hábitat bueno y suficiente densidad de conejo. Los planes son que se establezcan en 2017, pero una cosa es lo que piensas y otra cómo se comportan los bichos”, aclara Miguel Ángel Simón, director del programa de conservación del lince.
En todo caso, el científico advierte de que hay que tener paciencia, porque aunque va todo bien, hay que esperar a que empiece a haber competencia entre ellos. “Lo normal es que primero se asienten en las proximidades del núcleo de Andújar y en el sur de Ciudad Real. En Castilla-La Mancha están trabajando con los propietarios de las fincas, para conseguir un hábitat adecuado y que "no solo se les reciba, sino que se les dé la bienvenida", matiza Simón.
La noticia habla de la reintroducción de los linces ibéricos
en la zona de Castilla-La Mancha. Los científicos confían en el crecimiento de
núcleos de esta especie en extinción en toda la continuidad de Sierra Morena.
En mi opinión es necesario que se reintroduzcan nuevas
especies en libertad para que se produzca un aumento de la especie, ya que en
cautividad es difícil que estén y se sientan en las mismas condiciones que en
libertad. Aunque también, al ser una especie ‘’nueva’’, deberían estar más
vigilados que otras que estén acostumbrados en vivir en el bosque.
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Una agricultura con menos emisiones, energía y gastos
El vínculo entre agricultura y medio ambiente es continuamente noticia en Europa. La Comisión Europea acaba de hacer pública la petición a los Estados miembros de suspender por dos años el uso de determinados plaguicidas en cultivos de girasol, colza, maíz y algodón por contribuir al declive de las poblaciones de abejas. Pocos días antes, el Comité de Agricultura del Parlamento Europeo realizó una votación sobre la reforma de la Política Agraria Común (PAC) que asociaciones ecologistas como SEO/BirdLife y WWF calificaron de apoyo mayoritario hacia políticas poco comprometidas con los aspectos ambientales y sociales.
Un proyecto europeo financiado dentro del programa Life acaba de dar a conocer los primeros resultados que demuestran que hay margen para la mejora ambiental, social y hasta económica. Se trata de AgriClimateChange, impulsado por la Fundación Global Nature con el objetivo de luchar contra el cambio climático desde la agricultura. Jordi Domingo, técnico valenciano de la fundación, declara que, tras la puesta en marcha de acciones en más de 25 explotaciones de cítricos, olivos, plátanos y tomates en invernadero en Valencia y Canarias, “se ha comprobado que es posible reducir entre un 10% y un 20% los consumos energéticos y emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero con medidas sencillas y realistas.”
La Comisión Europea decidió suspender el uso de pesticidas y
plaguicidas durante, al menos, durante dos años. Y se ha iniciado un proyecto,
AgriClimateChange, con el objetivo de luchar contra el cambio climático desde
la agricultura.
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In a Warming World, Look to the Herbivores
In the unending quest for effective ways of adapting to climate change, it seems that musk ox and caribou may have some of the answers.
According to a study published this week, the large herbivores that inhabit Greenland and other regions in the far north can play an important role in maintaining biodiversity in a warming climate.
In the course of a 10-year Arctic field experiment, the Penn State biologist Eric Post found that the animals held back the growth of some plant species that would otherwise be likely to dominate the local ecosystem as temperatures rose.
Beginning in 2002, Dr. Post simulated a warmer environment in the remote community of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, by building 8,600-square-foot “warming chambers” – cone-shaped hollow structures in which the animals were allowed to graze on the plants that grew under the new conditions.
The musk ox and caribou were excluded from separate areas of the same size that were also subjected to a rise in temperature of 1.5 to 3 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), a level of warming that scientists project will occur over the next century.
Shrubs like willow and birch became more dominant as temperatures rose, shading other plants and producing leaf litter that cools the soil and reduces nutrients for competing species, thereby lowering species diversity.
Shrubs like willow and birch became more dominant as temperatures rose, shading other plants and producing leaf litter that cools the soil and reduces nutrients for competing species, thereby lowering species diversity.
But in the enclosures with grazing herbivores, those dominant species were largely kept in check, allowing the other plants to do better than they did in the areas from which the animals were excluded, Dr. Post found.
“In those areas where caribou and musk ox were able to graze freely, shrub responses to warming were muted, and species diversity within the plant community was maintained,” he wrote.
Dr. Post suggests that his research may have implications for other ecosystems. “I think the relationships we see in Greenland would certainly apply to a wider variety of similarly generalist herbivores in other systems,” he wrote in an e-mail. “One example may be moose, whose browsing can have huge effects on plant community composition, nutrient cycling rates and ecosystem function.”
He said the current decline of moose in northern Minnesota, for which scientists have not pinned down a cause, could thus have “major consequences.”
Dr. Post’s paper adds yet another wrinkle to the debate over how climate change may affect biodiversity. A 2012 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presented evidence from fossil records that rising temperatures have spurred an increase rather than a decline in biodiversity. Yet even emergent species won’t be able to keep up with the current rapid rate of climate change, meaning that the rate of extinctions will increase, it concluded.
The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, concluded that the animals may hold the key to the maintenance of plant diversity and therefore must be protected.
“What this experiment suggests is that factors that threaten the persistence of large herbivores may threaten the plant communities they exist in as well,” Dr. Post said.
“Conservation of these herbivores in the rapidly changing Arctic will require careful mediation of interacting stressors such as human exploitation, mineral extraction, and the direct effects of climate change,” he said.
The news explains that herbivores can play an important role in climate change we are experiencing in recent years. Because large herbivores may threaten the existing plant community. Even so, explained in the news, this in them the key to tackling climate change.
In my opinion, although it is necessary perservar natural sites, you first need to raise awareness of what is hurting our planet at our expense.
With small gestures years could slow global warming and thus perservar animal and plant species.
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On Our Radar: Salt Lake Smog
The Environmental Protection Agency has singled out the Salt Lake region as having the nation’s worst air for much of January, when an icy fog smothers valleys and traps soot for days or weeks at a time. The air is so tainted that more than 100 Utah doctors are pressing the authorities to lower highway speed limits, curb industrial activity and make mass transit free for the rest of the winter. [Associated Press]
To divert food from the waste stream, a grocery store chain in Northern California takes a chance on selling apples that have “a Goldilocks” problem— they’re the wrong size, are slightly blemished, or their color is less than ideal, although they taste just right. The apples cost far less than the stores’ other fruit and bear a special label. [N.R.D.C. Switchboard]
Maine regulators are poised to decide whether the terms proposed by Statoil of Norway, which is seeking to build a $120 million wind turbine demonstration project off the state’s coast, are favorable enough for ratepayers. Four wind turbines on floating structures would be tethered to the seabed in 460 feet of water off Boothbay Harbor. [The Portland Press Herald]
The first known nest of one of the world’s most endangered birds, the Stresemann’s bristlefront, has been discovered in Brazil. The world population estimate for the bird is less than 15 after decades of fires, logging and the clearance of humid valley-floor forest for ranching and agriculture.
The news talks about salt lake polluted air due to pollution from factories, road traffic and the fact that public transport is provided.
It is important to give importance to this fact since the polluted air of a place thousands of miles we could also affect us. Besides the factories should control waste thrown outside because the environment belongs to everyone, and it is the duty of all to care.
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In Flies’ Innards, Vital Clues to Biodiversity
How many mammal species live in the forest? It sounds like a simple question, but the actual distributions of shy, small or rare mammals are often murky, confounding conservationists seeking to protect them.
Yet a paper published online on Tuesday in the journal Molecular Ecologyexplores a new way to track biodiversity: by capturing flies that feed on carcasses. The flies’ stomachs offer DNA diaries of their recent meals, giving scientists clues to which animals live and die in the forest.
“The animals are there, but you just don’t see them,” said Fabian Leendertz, a wildlife epidemiologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin and an author of the paper. “Those flies will find them and will tell us what is there.”
Dr. Leendertz’s team captured 115 carrion flies in forests in Ivory Coast and Madagascar by baiting traps with meat. After mashing up the flies and extracting DNA, they were able to identify 20 mammalian species that the flies had fed on, including the endangered Jentink’s duiker, of which only an estimated 2,000 or so remain.
Because carrion flies are notoriously indiscriminate eaters, they yield DNA from a broad sample of species. The flies are also widely distributed — one of their more commonly recognized representatives is the bluebottle fly — so the method could be used throughout much of the world.
“It’s a way to measure biodiversity in areas that are not easily monitored in traditional ways,” said Ida Schnell, a doctoral researcher at the Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.
Traditional methods of measuring biodiversity include counting animals directly or looking for traces of them like droppings, tracks or nests. More recently, scientists have embraced technological solutions like setting up camera traps that detect motion and photograph wildlife passing by. Such cameras often miss rare or small animals, however.
Scientists also gather feces and other biological samples and extract DNA to study mammalian populations. But these types of samples tend to be most useful for zeroing in on a species already known to be present.
Invertebrates that feed on flesh and blood have the potential to help with the first step of the research process: finding out whether a species is present at all.
Ms. Schnell was a co-author of a paper last spring for which researchers used land-dwelling leeches’ blood meals to assess biodiversity.
After testing only 25 leeches captured in a Vietnamese rain forest, her team managed to identify DNA from several rare species, including the Annamite striped rabbit.
After testing only 25 leeches captured in a Vietnamese rain forest, her team managed to identify DNA from several rare species, including the Annamite striped rabbit.
Biologists had been using camera traps in the hope of spotting the rabbit but had had no success and wondered if it had gone extinct.
Dr. Leendertz said that carrion flies could also help scientists monitor wildlife disease epidemics, alerting them to unexpected die-offs. His team is collecting flies regularly in the Taï National Park in Ivory Coast and is looking for signs of anthrax, which has a history of killing primates in the area.
Students are trapping flies at 25 rain forest locations throughout Africa as part of a larger biodiversity monitoring program. Dr. Leendertz’s group has even set up flytraps near Berlin to see what the local forest has to offer.
Ms. Schnell said:“You can just get so, so, so many huge data sets with this method. I really think that’s a big improvement in conservation biology.”
Molecular Ecology magazine published an article explaining a new way to track biodiversity. This new way is through the capture of flies that feed on corpses, and is easier to manage biodiversity produced in areas where the traditional way is not enough.
In my opinion it is a very interesting and innovative new ways of life. In addition to this form of tracking biodiversity can be controlled from disease epidemics.
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Tigers and pandas live in Asia, kangaroos and koalas in Australia and polar bears and snowy owls in the Arctic. The world can be divided into regions based upon the unique types of animals that live there. Or so the thinking went when Alfred Russel Wallace published the scientific world’s first global biodiversity map in 1876.
More than a century has come and gone since Wallace released this groundbreaking work, yet his map largely still serves as a cornerstone for understanding modern distributions of biodiversity. An updated version was due, a group of researchers decided.
“Wallace’s map still makes a lot of sense,” said Jean-Philippe Lessard, an ecologist at McGill University in Montreal who was formerly at the University of Copenhagen. “We’re not inventing anything here, we’re just implementing Wallace’s vision at an age where we have tons of DNA and more information on where species are on the planet.”
As Craig Leisher noted here last month, Wallace is something of a folk hero among biologists. He simultaneously thought up the theory of evolution by natural selection alongside Charles Darwin yet also made time for clambering around collecting specimens in the most exotic spots in the world. His wanderings and studies eventually led to that first map of animal distributions across the continents.
Wallace recognized that the world is divided into so-called biogeographic regions, which today we know reflect the breakup of the continental plates roughly 200 million years ago. As the former mega-continent of Pangaea split apart, the evolutionary branches of those species cleaved off from one another. Millenniums of isolation following this divergence led to Australia’s wildly unique marsupials, for example, and Madagascar’s beloved lemurs.
Wallace recognized that the world is divided into so-called biogeographic regions, which today we know reflect the breakup of the continental plates roughly 200 million years ago. As the former mega-continent of Pangaea split apart, the evolutionary branches of those species cleaved off from one another. Millenniums of isolation following this divergence led to Australia’s wildly unique marsupials, for example, and Madagascar’s beloved lemurs.
Wallace recognized these differences and produced a map identifying six major global biodiversity regions. Other maps have been produced since, but for this new effort, the researchers decided to take into account not only the current distribution of vertebrates, but also how they relate genetically.
“Genetic sequencing allowed us to do things that weren’t possible before,” Dr. Lessard said. “Looking at these evolutionary links allows us to know which parts of the world are more closely related to other parts of the world.”
With a team of 14 international colleagues, Dr. Lessard helped compile and analyze the phylogenetic relationships of 21,037 species of amphibians, birds and mammals. Whereas Wallace highlighted six major animal realms, the team identified 11, and within those realms made 20 regional distinctions. The results were published online today by the journal Science.
A few surprises turned up in their analyses. For example, new realms in Central America, East Asia and Oceana emerged. The northernmost stretches of the Canadian tundra make more sense grouped with the Palearctic realm, which encompasses Siberia, Europe and North Asia, than with North America’s Nearctic realm. “Apparently, plant people kind of informally recognized that grouping in the past,” Dr. Lessard said. “But for animals, I’ve never seen a map of biogeographic regions showing that connection.”
The dividing lines will soon be uploaded and freely accessible on Google Earth, and the researchers hope to add information detailing which big animal families are found in each realm and region for curious citizens or researchers to explore.
The new map is by no means definitive, however. As more animal groups are added — reptiles, for example, or freshwater fishes — the lines between regions and realms may shift. Although the required distribution and genetic data needed to incorporate those additions are still lacking, Dr. Lessard and his colleagues used scalable methodology to build their map, so adding more animal classes should be fairly straightforward.
The maps may also shift as the planet warms as a result of climate change. Having this baseline may help scientists understand how species distributions change in the coming decades. “The earth will surely change, but we don’t know how it will change,” Dr. Lessard said. “We know what biodiversity on the planet looks like now, but 50 years from now we could come back and redo the whole thing so we can quantify those changes in the future.”
The article explains the importance of Wallace's theory is that the world is divided into several biogeographic regions, is now known as continental plates. Thus, Wallace biodiversity identified six regions, as shown on the map.
It is true that progress has been made in science since Wallace presented his theory, but because it is possible that biodiversity was related to what the now exposed at the time. Still a great biologist, but he lacked means to end his theory.
Counting the Vanishing Bees
A new method for monitoring the decline in bee populations may prove a useful tool in much-needed conservation efforts. It requires only a few hundred pan traps: bright shallow bowls partly filled with soapy water or propylene glycol.
When United Nations experts noticed that crop production was flagging in seven countries around the world, from Brazil to Nepal, they contacted Gretchen LeBuhn, an associate professor at San Francisco State University who studies bees.
“The U.N. thought that the problem might be tied to a decline in bee populations,” Dr. LeBuhn said. “I was hired to see if it would be feasible to monitor this decline.”
Her results, published in the most recent issue of Conservation Biology, outline the new monitoring method, which is remarkably cheap and efficient for tracking national, regional or global bee populations. At any of these scales, the pan traps can do the job at a cost of less than $2 million over five years.
Globally, insect pollination is responsible for almost $200 billion of agricultural production every year, with 70 percent of the main crops used for human consumption dependent on pollinators. The annual contribution of pollinators to essential ecosystem functions like water and habitat health, though not directly valued by markets, likely exceeds $200 billion.
Despite the economic stakes, a decades-long scientific narrative of bee decline and growing concern about an acceleration of this decline, there is no fixed network for tracking bee populations.
“No one really monitors bees,” said Sam Droege, a biologist at the United States Geological Survey and a co-author with Dr. LeBuhn. “Talk all you want about declines, but it’s based on nothing, really — no census, no survey.”
A critical feature of the published program is its ability to capture very slight population changes of 2 to 5 percent in a small window of time, thereby acting as an early-warning system. “Insect populations naturally go up and down a lot,” Dr. LeBuhn said. “Because they’re so variable, detecting a trend can be hard.”
An even subtler and more intractable challenge is identifying bees once they’ve been collected. Outside of about a half-dozen experts across the country, very few people can efficiently identify bees by genus, much less by species.
“A lot of effort will be required for retraining the next generation of taxonomists,” said Sydney Cameron, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a science adviser to the Bumblebee Specialist Group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
For the most part, grants available to taxonomists have shriveled as specialties like genomics gain ascendance in biology, Dr. Cameron said. “But this may be a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater,” she said. “We need taxonomy to understand what’s happening in the biological world.”
In the case of agriculture, poor productivity of a particular crop could be caused by the disappearance of a single, very efficient pollinator. Without data at the species level, this crucial fact might be overlooked.
Mr. Droege, who is among a handful of expert bee taxonomists, is using the findings from the article in Conservation Biology to build a national monitoring network that he hopes will include a partnership with Canada. He will probably be the project’s sole identifier of specimens.
But even with the development of a network, there is no central repository, federal or private, for the data. Dr. LeBuhn directs The Great Sunflower Project, a citizen-science program with 100,000 volunteers reporting daily pollinator observations. She is not sure what to do with the vast and growing collection of information.
“I’m sitting on an amazing data set,” she said. “If I got hit by a car tomorrow, somebody would probably do something with it, but it’s not feeding into anything like the U.S.D.A.”
To underline the importance of systematic monitoring, Dr. LeBuhn recounted how a former student, Quinn McFrederick, surveyed bumblebees in San Francisco’s urban parks in 2004 and discovered that a bee species that had been one of the city’s most common ones in the 1990s had disappeared entirely.
“Wow, I thought. The most common bumblebee in San Francisco disappeared, and none of us noticed, not even me, a biologist,” Dr. LeBuhn said. “That really got my attention.”
The article talks about the decline of bee populations, as agricultural production has declined and did not know the cause of this.
From my point of view it is important to keep the bee population growing because of them there is much of the pollination of flowers.
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SUPERRATÓN EN ACCIÓN
La noticia habla sobre un extraño caso en el que dos ratones fueron servidos a una serpiente de terrario que acababa de salir del periodo de hibernación. El hecho fue que la serpiente se disponía a comerse uno de los ratones, cuando el otro se lanzó a su cabeza para liberar a su compañero.
Finalmente, el dueño que había visto lo sucedido dejo en libertad al valiente ratón.
En mi opinión es un gesto raro de ver en un ratón pues no son animales muy atrevidos.
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EL MAR DE EUROPA, A LA VISTA
El articulo habla del hallazgo de un mar de agua salada bajo la luna de Júpiter, Europa. Han encontrado en la superficie del planeta Júpiter una sal de sulfato de magnesio que solo está presente en entornos acuosos.
Es un artículo muy interesante puesto que si hay rastros de un mar de agua salada, puede que también se encuentren nuevas especies de viva en otro planeta que no sea la Tierra.
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TRAS LOS SECRETOS DEL RORCUAL AUSTRAL
Este articulo habla de los pocos conocimientos que se tienen sobre la especie Balaenoptera bonaerensis pues solo se sabe que son mamíferos ded 7-10 m y pesas unas 7 tonelas. Pero aun se desconoce tanto su reproducción o esperanza de vida.
Por ello, la Fundación Nacional de Ciencia ha comenzado una investigación para conocer mejor a estos curiosos animales.
Desde mi punto de vista es importante saber la forma de reproducción de todos los animales para así poder ayudarlos si están en peligro de extinción. Además se puede controlar mejor a sus crías para protegerlas en caso de que estuvieran en peligro.
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