Ghost Turtles

Kondos Outdoors

ALSO TODAY: NATURE INVESTMENT EVENT — Per release: “The Nature Conservancy and JPMorgan Chase will unveil “NatureVest,” an initiative that will accelerate private investment in land and water conservation funding at 12:15 PM at the Newseum. A panel discussion will feature Rachel Kyte, VP and Special Envoy for Climate Change at the World Bank Group; Joel Dobberpuhl, CEO of Jetstream Capital; Doug Petno, CEO for commercial banking at JPMorgan Chase & Co; and Mark Tercek, CEO of the Nature Conservancy. Marc Gunther, editor at large at Guardian Sustainable Business will moderate.”

They’re a quiet bunch, the hundreds of animals residing at the well-guarded botanical oasis in California’s Ojai Valley. They’ve been brought to the Turtle Conservancy from countries around the world, like modern-day refugees escaping certain and persistent perils. | For years, the conservancy has worked on the front lines of the battle against smugglers, including on behalf of the ploughshare tortoise from Madagascar. The species is among the rarest tortoises on Earth; experts believe that only a few hundred still exist. Their rarity, along with a golden shell, has laid a high price on their head. | "Turtles and tortoises are arguably the most threatened group of animals on the planet," says Eric Goode, founder of the . "Out of the 330 species of turtles and tortoises, over half of them are threatened with extinction."

The Turtle Conservancy continues to flourish and is constantly expanding both its in situ and ex situ efforts to save the world’s remaining populations of turtles and tortoises employing a creative combination of both time-tested and unique conservation strategies. The TC has active in situ projects in China, Madagascar, Guyana, India, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, South Africa, and the United States.

The great spotted cuckoo is a parasitic bird that plops its eggs in nests of other birds, so others can care for its chicks. Those chicks might aid the caretaker bird by helping to repel predators. [Cuckoo nestlings excrete a foul-smelling fluid that smells] "So bad that it might protect the nest by repelling predators. [Daniela Canestrari at the University of Oviedo in Spain] tested this idea by putting the noxious substance into chicken meat and then trying to feed it to feral cats. In the journal Science, they report that the cats wouldn’t touch the stuff. The chemical analysis showed that it contains all kinds of caustic compounds."

It’s fight against invasive species every day in Florida. Burmese pythons and Cuban tree frogs are some of the animals that moved in uninvited. There’s also this giant lizard, the Argentine black and white tegu. Tegus are coming out of hibernation right now and they’re hungry. They eat eggs of native animals that conservationists want to protect. | The tegus are native to South America, but now have breeding populations in three Florida counties. They’re kept as pets but some escape or might be set loose when they get too big.

A plan in New York state to has drawn protests and petitions on all sides. While some see elegant white birds gliding across the water, others see a dangerous aggressor destroying the local ecosystem. | According to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the swans — which don’t honk but make hoarse, frog-like grunts — are not native, and they destroy and attack native species. Amanda Rodewald, director of conservation science at Cornell University, says they’ve threatened loons and least terns. | "We are worried about them in New York because of the black tern population that we have," Rodewald says. Black terns there, she says, have only a few nesting colonies remaining. | The swans eat and pull out large amounts of submerged aquatic vegetation, destroying food sources for other birds. But what makes a nonnative species invasive? | Adam Welz, an ornithologist and filmmaker who lives in Brooklyn, says that when European songbirds were introduced in America, they failed to take. But in 1890, when a group of Shakespeare enthusiasts released 60 European starlings in Central Park, they multiplied into the millions.

Project SNOWstorm* is a collaborative research effort by Project Owlnet, the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art and many independent researchers, agency and organizational partners. We are working together to learn more about the historic snowy owl irruption of 2013-14. [*SNOW is the four-letter code that bird banders and birders use for the Snowy Owl.]

Snowy owls are among the largest birds in North America, but scientists know very little about their behavior. The owls spend most of their days far from humans, hunting rodents and birds in the flat expanses of the Arctic Circle. In the winter, the owls move south, but they don’t usually reach the United States. Most years, only a few are spotted in the northernmost states — a rare treat for birders. But this winter was different. | Owls started to appear all over the United States right around Thanksgiving — in Nebraska, in Kentucky — even as far south as Georgia. , a biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, was shocked when he saw not one but two snowy owls on a small stretch of Maryland beach. | Something huge is going on," Brinker told his colleagues. "We won’t see something like this for a long time — probably for the rest of our lifetimes." | This rapid population boom — called an "irruption" by ecologists — is the largest the East Coast has seen in 40 or 50 years.

Think you have a long commute? Well it’s probably nothing compared to the red-necked phalarope’s. NPR’s Scott Simon talks to Malcie Smith of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds about their record-breaking migration and how scientists tracked the tiny birds.

While many of us may prefer to never again see temperatures drop below zero like they did earlier this week across the country, the deep freeze is putting warm smiles on the faces of many entomologists. That’s because it may have been cold enough in some areas to freeze and kill some damaging invasive species of insects, including the tree-killing emerald ash borer.

Ripple et al 2014
Science 10 January 2014:
Vol. 343 no. 6167
DOI: 10.1126/science.1241484
Abstract: Large carnivores face serious threats and are experiencing massive declines in their populations and geographic ranges around the world. We highlight how these threats have affected the conservation status and ecological functioning of the 31 largest mammalian carnivores on Earth. Consistent with theory, empirical studies increasingly show that large carnivores have substantial effects on the structure and function of diverse ecosystems. Significant cascading trophic interactions, mediated by their prey or sympatric mesopredators, arise when some of these carnivores are extirpated from or repatriated to ecosystems. Unexpected effects of trophic cascades on various taxa and processes include changes to bird, mammal, invertebrate, and herpetofauna abundance or richness; subsidies to scavengers; altered disease dynamics; carbon sequestration; modified stream morphology; and crop damage. Promoting tolerance and coexistence with large carnivores is a crucial societal challenge that will ultimately determine the fate of Earth’s largest carnivores and all that depends upon them, including humans.

Big, fierce animals — lions and tigers and bears, for example — are relatively scarce in nature. That’s normal, because if you have too many, they’ll eat themselves out of prey. But top predators are now so rare that many are in danger of disappearing. That’s creating ripple effects throughout the natural world that scientists are still trying to figure out. Carnivore biologist William Ripple and other "carnivorists" published a study in this week’s issue of the journal Science that lists the benefits that predators provide. They note that in places where predators are reintroduced (such as in Yellowstone National Park), deer and elk — and vegetation — return to a more natural state.

Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Lord Kelvin are remembered as unimpeachable geniuses. But over the course of their careers, they each made tremendous errors — not just faulty equations but fundamental misunderstandings. In Brilliant Blunders, Mario Livio showcases those failures and the surprising discoveries they lead to. “Science is presented as this direct march to the truth,” Livio, a NASA astrophysicist, tells Kurt Andersen. “Being a scientist myself, I know that’s very far from the truth. So I really wanted to give this picture of the zig-zag path with lots of false starts.”

Andrea Barrett dropped out of a graduate program in zoology, but has never left science behind. Nearly all of her books, including the National Book Award-winning story collection Ship Fever, are set in moments when the grand sweep of science intrudes upon the inner lives of individuals. Although the five stories in Barrett’s new book Archangel are short, their sweep is indeed grand; “I like to think of them as little tiny novels,” Barrett notes. A young teacher encounters Darwin in a classroom in 1873; a soldier confronts the changing mechanics of war in 1919; and, in 1920, a widowed astronomer faces an existential crisis triggered by Einstein’s theories. Each wrestles with that thrilling, difficult moment when one’s certainty about the world smashes up against new discoveries.