New sea life found near Phillipines

I particularly like the quote "We don't know what it is ... it might be something new."

From the Toronto Star:

Scientists discover rare species, including tentacled orange worm and black jellyfish, in the Celebes Sea

Oct 17, 2007 04:30 AM

Oliver Teves
ASSOCIATED PRESS

MANILA, Philippines–Scientists exploring a deep ocean basin in search of species isolated for millions of years found marine life believed to be previously undiscovered, including a tentacled orange worm and an unusual black jellyfish.

Project leader Dr. Larry Madin said yesterday that U.S. and Philippine scientists collected about 100 different specimens in a search in the Celebes Sea south of the Philippines.

Madin, of the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said the sea is at the heart of the "coral triangle" bordered by the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia: a region recognized by scientists as having a high degree of biological diversity.

The deepest part of the Celebes Sea is 5,000 metres. The team was able to explore to a depth of about 2,770 metres using a remotely operated camera.

"This is probably the centre where many of the species evolved and spread to other parts of the ocean, so it's going back to the source in many ways," Madin told a group of journalists, government officials, students and U.S. Ambassador Kristie Kenney and her staff.

The project involved the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and National Geographic magazine in co-operation with the Philippine government, which also provided the exploration ship.

The expedition was made up of more than two dozen scientists and a group from National Geographic, including Emory Kristof, the underwater photographer who was part of the team that found the wreckage of the Titanic in 1985.

The group returned to Manila yesterday after spending about two weeks in the Celebes Sea off Tawi-Tawi, the Philippines southernmost provincial archipelago nearly 1,130 kilometres south of Manila.

Madin said the specimens included several possibly newly discovered species. One was a sea cucumber that is nearly transparent which could swim by bending its elongated body. Another was a black jellyfish found near the sea floor.

The most striking creature found was a spiny orange-coloured worm that had 10 tentacles like a squid, Madin said. "We don't know what it is ... it might be something new."

He said it would take "a few more weeks" of research to determine whether the species are newly discovered.

Madin said the Celebes Sea, being surrounded by islands and shallow reefs, is partially isolated now and may have been more isolated millions of years ago, leading scientists to believe that "there may be groups of organisms that have been contained and kept within" the basin since then.

Brain-Eating Amoeba

Brain-Eating Amoeba Kills Arizona Boy

CDC: Cases Are Spiking In 2007

POSTED: 7:44 pm PDT September 26, 2007

UPDATED: 8:59 am PDT September 28, 2007

PHOENIX -- A 14-year-old Lake Havasu boy has become the sixth victim to die nationwide this year of a microscopic organism that attacks the body through the nasal cavity, quickly eating its way to the brain.Aaron Evans died Sept. 17 of Naegleria fowleri, an organism doctors said he probably picked up a week before while swimming in the balmy shallows of Lake Havasu.According to the Centers For Disease Control, Naegleria infected 23 people from 1995 to 2004. This year health officials said they've noticed a spike in cases, with six Naegleria-related cases so far -- all of them fatal.Such attacks are extremely rare, though some health officials have put their communities on high alert, telling people to stay away from warm, standing water.

"This is definitely something we need to track," said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational water-born illnesses for the CDC."This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better," Beach said. "In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases."

Organism Lives In Lake Bottoms

Though infections tend to be found in southern states, Naegleria has been found almost everywhere in lakes, hot springs, even some swimming pools. Still, the CDC knows of only several hundred cases worldwide since its discovery in Australia in the 1960s.The amoeba typically live in lake bottoms, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment. Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose -- say, by doing a cannonball off a cliff -- the amoeba can latch onto the person's olfactory nerve.The amoeba destroys tissue as it makes its way up to the brain.People who are infected tend to complain of a stiff neck, headaches and fevers, Beach said. In the later stages, they'll show signs of brain damage such as hallucinations and behavioral changes.Once infected, most people have little chance of survival. Some drugs have been effective stopping the amoeba in lab experiments, but people who have been attacked rarely survive, Beach said."Usually, from initial exposure it's fatal within two weeks," Beach said.Researchers still have much to learn about Naegleria, Beach said. For example, it seems that children are more likely to get infected, and boys are infected more often than girls. Experts don't know why."Boys tend to have more boisterous activities (in water), but we're not clear," he said.

Texas, Florida Report Cases

In addition to the Arizona case, health officials reported two cases in Texas and three more in central Florida this year. In response, central Florida authorities started an amoeba telephone hot line advising people to avoid warm, standing water, or any areas with obvious algae blooms.Texas health officials also have issued news releases about the dangers of amoeba attacks and to be cautious around water. People "seem to think that everything can be made safe, including any river, any creek, but that's just not the case," said Doug McBride, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services.Lake Havasu City officials also are discussing how to deal with rare amoeba attacks in the wake of Aaron Evans' death. "Some folks think we should be putting up signs. Some people think we should close the lake," city spokesman Charlie Cassens said. City leaders haven't yet decided what to do.Beach warned that people shouldn't panic about the dangers of brain-eating amoeba. Infections are extremely rare when compared with the number of times a year people come into contact with water. And there have been occasional years during the past two decades that experts noticed a similar spike in infections.The easiest way to prevent infection, Beach said, is to simply plug your nose when swimming or diving in fresh water."You'd have to have water going way up in your nose to begin with" to be infected, he said.

Aaron's Infection Started With Headache

The Evans family lives within eyesight of Lake Havasu, a bulging strip of the Colorado River that separates Arizona from California. Temperatures hover in the triple digits all summer, and like almost everyone else, the Evans family looks to the lake to cool off.On Sept. 8, he brought Aaron, his two other children and his parents to Lake Havasu to celebrate his birthday. They ate sandwiches and spent a few hours splashing around one of the beaches."For a week, everything was fine," he said.Then Aaron got the headache that wouldn't go away. Evans took him to the hospital, and doctors thought his son was suffering from meningitis. Aaron was rushed to another hospital in Las Vegas.Evans tried to reassure his son, but he had no idea what was wrong. On Sept. 17, Aaron stopped breathing as David held him in his arms."He was brain dead," David said. Only later did doctors realize the boy had been infected with Naegleria."My kids won't ever swim on Lake Havasu again."

The CDC Fact Sheet on Naegleria

Climate Expert James Hansen Talks About the Brooklyn Tornado

From Wired News:

NASA scientist and Columbia University professor James Hansen is widely acknowledged as the godfather of global warming science, so it made sense to ask him whether climate change caused yesterday's tornado in Brooklyn. Responded Hansen,

No, you cannot blame individual events like that on climate change, as it was possible for them to occur even without the human-made changes to the atmosphere. However, it is fair to ask whether the human changes have altered the likelihood of such events. There the answer seems to be yes. Storms driven largely by latent heat, and that includes thunderstorms, are expected to become stronger as the air becomes warmer and contains more moisture. Global warming does cause just such a tendency.

Which is, roughly speaking, akin to what I said in my post, only less incendiary and much more scientifically informed.

In June, Hansen said a global warming tipping point is just a decade away. My fellow WiSci wordslave Steven Edwards wrote about that here. Hansen also comes up in this Wired News q-and-a with Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker correspondent who two years ago wrote this soup-to-nuts series on climate change.

Freshwater dolphin possibly extinct

From the Toronto Star:

Intensive search of Yangtze River in China fails to find single member of species

Aug 08, 2007 04:30 AM

Michael Kahn
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY

LONDON–The long-threatened Yangtze River dolphin in China is probably extinct, according to an international team of researchers who said this would mark the first whale or dolphin to be wiped out due to human activity.

The freshwater dolphin, or baiji, was last spotted several years ago and an intensive six-week search late last year failed to find any evidence that one of the rarest species on Earth survives, said Samuel Turvey, a conservation biologist at the Zoological Society of London, who took part in the search.

He said the dolphin's demise, which resulted from overfishing, pollution and lack of intervention, might serve as a cautionary tale and should spur governments and scientists to act to save other species verging on extinction.

"Ours is the first scientific study which didn't find any," he said in a telephone interview. "Even if there are a few left we can't find them and we can't do anything to stop their extinction."

The team, which published its findings in the Journal of the Royal Society Biology Letters today, included researchers from the United States, Britain, Japan and China. The survey was also authorized by the Chinese government, Turvey said.

The last confirmed baiji sighting was 2002, although there have been a handful of unconfirmed sightings since then. The last baiji in captivity died in 2002, Turvey said.

The dolphins will now be classified as critically endangered and possibly extinct.

Arctic thawing faster than forecast

From the Toronto Star:


Melting of ice cap is three decades ahead of international science panel's gloomiest prediction with experts saying the problem could further accelerate global warming

May 02, 2007 04:30 AM

Deborah Zabarenko
Reuters

WASHINGTON–The Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.S. ice expert said yesterday.

This means the Arctic Ocean could be free or nearly free of summer ice by 2020 – three decades sooner than the global science panel's gloomiest forecast of 2050.

No summer ice on the northern ocean would further accelerate global warming, said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado.

"Right now ... the Arctic helps keep the Earth cool," Scambos said in a telephone interview. "Without that Arctic ice, or with much less of it, the Earth will warm much faster."

That is because the ice reflects light and heat back into space; without it, the much darker land or sea absorbs more light and heat, making it more difficult for the planet to cool down, even in winter, he said.

Scambos and co-authors of the study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, used satellite data and visual confirmation of Arctic ice to reach their conclusions. They present a far different picture than that obtained from computer models used by the scientists of the United Nations-backed intergovernmental panel.

"The IPCC report was very careful, very thorough and cautious, so they erred on the side of what would certainly occur as opposed to what might occur," Scambos said.

The range of what might occur included a much later melt up north, or a much earlier one, Scambos said.

"It appears we're on pace about 30 years earlier than expected to reach a state where we don't have sea ice, or at least not very much, in late summer in the Arctic Ocean," he said.

Scambos discounted the notion that the sharp warming trend in the Arctic might be due to natural climate cycles, adding: "There aren't many periods in history that are this dramatic in terms of natural variability."

He said he had no doubt that this was caused in large part by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which he said was the only thing capable of changing Earth on such a large scale over so many latitudes.

Asked what it would take to fix the problem – the topic of a new report by the intergovernmental panel to be released on Friday in Bangkok – Scambos said a large volcanic eruption might hold Arctic ice melting at bay for a few years.

But he sees continued warming as inevitable in the coming decades.

"Long-term and for the next 50 years, I think even the new report will agree that we're in for quite a bit of warming," Scambos said.

"We just barely now, I think, have enough time and enough collective will to be able to get through this century in good shape.

"But it means we have to start acting now and in a big way," he added.

Shark disappearance threatens sea life

From the Toronto Star:

Mar 29, 2007 03:24 PM

Canadian Press

HALIFAX – The near extinction of several species of sharks is causing a dangerous ripple effect through the marine food chain, according to a new study that links their virtual disappearance to depletions of other sea life.

The report by a team of researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax has found that species that were once the primary food source for certain types of large sharks are undergoing a population boom because there aren't as many sharks to prey on them.

The scientists contend that the explosive increase in about a dozen types of smaller sharks, rays and skates has caused a cascading effect throughout the ecosystem as they begin to deplete limited nutrient sources and alter nature's complex food web.

"It's incredibly serious," said Julia Baum, who co-wrote the report to be released Friday in the journal Science. "Everyone knows that the oceans are being overfished and it's the top predators that are being disproportionately hit by overfishing.

"Because they structure everything underneath them in the food web, we may be drastically changing and restructuring how the oceanic food web functions and operates."

The report states that shark populations off the eastern United States are in an even steeper decline that originally thought. Using data from fisheries logs and research surveys from 1970 to 2005, the team discovered that the abundance of several types of so-called great sharks has dropped by more than 99 per cent.

The bull and dusty sharks are verging on extinction, while hammerheads and great white sharks are in dangerously low numbers, Baum said, due largely to overfishing.

The controversial practice of finning – slicing the shark's fin off and then tossing the carcass overboard – has led to precipitous drops in most strains of the large predators globally, the report said.

"What we're seeing is a higher risk of extinction of these species in these areas, and the term we use as ecologists is functional elimination," Baum said, adding that finning kills as many as 73 million sharks a year worldwide for an industry that supplies fins for soups and other uses.

"It means that these great predators can no longer play their roles in the ecosystem as top predators. So they're no longer controlling the species in the food web below them."

The researchers, including the late Ransom Myers who passed away Tuesday, cited a specific example of how the removal of sharks is affecting other species.

Baum, a marine biologist, said they have for the first time linked the decimation of bay scallops in waters off North Carolina to an increase in cownose rays, which eat the delicacy. Sharks feed on the rays, but because there are now so few sharks, the ray population has been allowed to grow to more than 10 times what it was a decade ago.

Cownose rays have wiped out scallop beds to the point that the fishery has been closed every year off North Carolina since 2004.

"This ecological event is having a large impact on local communities that depend so much on healthy fisheries," said Charles Peterson, a professor of marine sciences and biology at the University of North Carolina and co-author of the report.

Baum said it's not clear what the increase in the other species will mean for the food chain and the wider ecosystem, but it's likely skates, rays and smaller sharks are disrupting the wider natural order in oceans around the world.

The loss of the bay scallop has already caused disruptions to seagrass, an important habitat for other marine life, because rays plow through the growth in search of scallops. Rays may also be inhibiting the recovery of oysters, hard clams and soft-shell clams.

Ken Frank, a fisheries scientist with the federal Fisheries Department, said the findings add to what he had discovered in an earlier research paper that looked at how the disappearance of cod affected the food chain.

Frank, whose study was published in Science in 2005, found that the collapse of cod and other large species led to a cascade effect. As the number of large predators declined dramatically, the fish they preyed on – herring, capelin, shrimp and snow crab – experienced a population explosion.

"There are interdependencies among the species, and when you cause these imbalances, you're going to get some effect elsewhere," he said from his office in Halifax.

"For many decades, it was thought this type of cascade effect was possible only in simplified systems like ponds, so seeing this occur in the marine system is alarming. It means we're modifying the way energy is flowing through these systems."

This latest scientific paper follows groundbreaking research Myers and Baum did in 2003 that found shark populations in the Atlantic had plunged dramatically since the mid-1980s.

"We know better now why sharks matter," Baum said. "Keeping top predators is critical for sustaining the health of the ocean."

Mystery illness devastates honeybee colonies

From New Scientist:

• 12:31 14 February 2007
• NewScientist.com news service
• Roxanne Khamsi

A mysterious illness is devastating honeybee populations across the US from California to Florida, claiming up to 80% of colonies in some areas. The losses of honeybees could disrupt the pollination of food crops, researchers warn.

Beekeepers are finding once-healthy colonies abandoned just a few days later, says Jerry Bromenshank, at the University of Montana at Missoula and Bee Alert Technology, a company monitoring the problem: “In most cases the only one left is the queen, along with a few young bees.”

The absence of dead bees makes it difficult to know what ails them and where they have gone. Furthermore, experts cannot track the spread of the mysterious illness. “The problem is that it strikes out of the blue,” says Bromenshank.

At a loss for an explanation, researchers have referred to the honeybee decline as “colony collapse disorder”. Reports of the problem have intensified in recent weeks and spanned 22 states, but some beekeepers say that they began seeing their colonies decline almost two years ago.

Almonds and apples

Researchers say colony collapse disorder might be a re-emergence of a similarly mysterious illness that struck US honeybees in the 1960s. Experts never pinpointed the cause behind that previous bee crisis, according to Bromenshank. He notes that in light of this some people have jokingly termed the problem the “disappearing-disappearing illness”.

But beekeepers and farmers see no humour in the potential economic costs of drastic honeybee decline. Almond crops are immediately vulnerable because they rely on honeybee pollination at this time of year. And the insect decline could potentially affect other crops later in the year, such as apples and blueberries.

Bromenshank speculates that dry conditions in the autumn reduced the natural food supply of the honeybees, making them more vulnerable to some sort of virus – such as deformed wing virus – or fungal infection. He notes that the abandoned colonies are not repopulated by other honeybees or insects for at least a few weeks. This, he says, is consistent with the presence of toxic fungal residues from the dying bees that repel other insects from re-inhabiting the colony.

Other scientists have tentatively blamed the problem on pesticides or chemicals specifically designed to control mites in bee colonies.

--

This seems related to colony collapse disorder, which has struck before.