Category Archives: News

EXTINCT SPECIES: Man claims to have purchased Tasmanian tiger pelt for $5

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The image of Bill Warren with his Tasmanian tiger pelt was taken by Charlie Neuman. The other images below depict the tiger in captivity and as a hunted animal.

A man claims to have purchased a Tasmanian tiger pelt from a garage sale in San Diego for just five dollars, but the pelt, if verified, is worth thousands more. From the San Diego Union Tribune:

[Bill] Warren might turn a $5 buy into $70,000 after finding what appears to be the pelt of an extinct Tasmanian tiger at a garage sale.

Warren found the unusual looking animal skin in Rainbow in June. The owner had bought the skin some 30 years ago at another garage sale in Boston.

“I didn’t know what it was, and neither did she,” Warren said. But he had a hunch it was something interesting.

.       .       .

“They’re a very rare item to come across,” said Andrew Snooks from Armitage Auctions in Australia.

Snooks said the auction house is negotiating with Warren to obtain the pelt. After the house confirms that the pelt is indeed a Tasmanian tiger, it will go up on the auction block.

Snooks said the last Tasmanian tiger pelt sold at the auction house went for $68,000, and a rug made from eight pelts sold for $260,000.

Of course, there is still the business of verifying the pelt. Warren sent photos of the animal skin to John Long, vice president of research and collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Long responded by e-mail that it looked like a Tasmanian tiger, but only expensive testing could confirm it.

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, Thylacinus cynocephalus, is a presumably extinct species of marsupial carnivore. It once ranged from Papua New Guinea to Australia and south into Tasmania, and “wild thylacines were present until the early 1900s; the last known captive specimen died in Hobart Zoo in 1936.”

The extinction of the thylacine is blamed on competition with the dingo, which probably arrived with humans thousands of years before. In more modern times, the targeted eradication of the thylacine on the island of Tasmania — the species’ last stronghold — helped doom the unique animal to extinction (although it may still exist in very remote regions of Tasmania).

The thylacine is an example of convergent evolution. It’s neither a tiger or a dog. Although it strongly resembles a dog, coyote, or wolf, it’s not related to these species, which belong to the family Canidae. The thylacine belongs to the family Thylacinidae, and they’re also marsupials, while dogs are placental mammals.

Images found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

POLLUTION: BP dispersants “causing sickness”

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Image via Jennifer Aitken

BP used at least “1.9 million gallons of widely banned toxic dispersants” to treat the 4.9 million barrels of oil that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon drilling-rig disaster, and the consequences of treating the oil with dispersants has the potential to make both people and wildlife sick. Via Dahr Jamail at Aljazeera.net:

Naman, who works at the Analytical Chemical Testing Lab in Mobile, Alabama, has been carrying out studies to search for the chemical markers of the dispersants BP used to both sink and break up its oil.

According to Naman, poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from this toxic mix are making people sick. PAHs contain compounds that have been identified as carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic.

Fisherman across the four states most heavily affected by the oil disaster - Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida - have reported seeing BP spray dispersants from aircraft and boats offshore.

“The dispersants are being added to the water and are causing chemical compounds to become water soluble, which is then given off into the air, so it is coming down as rain, in addition to being in the water and beaches of these areas of the Gulf,” Naman added.

“I’m scared of what I’m finding. These cyclic compounds intermingle with the Corexit [dispersants] and generate other cyclic compounds that aren’t good. Many have double bonds, and many are on the EPA’s danger list. This is an unprecedented environmental catastrophe.”

.       .       .

Gruesome symptoms

“I started to vomit brown, and my pee was brown also,” Matsler, a Vietnam veteran who lives in Dauphin Island, said. “I kept that up all day. Then I had a night of sweating and non-stop diarrhea unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.”

He was also suffering from skin rashes, nausea, and a sore throat.

At roughly the same time Matsler was exposed, local television station WKRG News 5 took a water sample from his area to test for dispersants. The sample literally exploded when it was mixed with an organic solvent separating the oil from the water.

Naman, the chemist who analyzed the sample, said: “We think that it most likely happened due to the presence of either methanol or methane gas or the presence of the dispersant Corexit.”

“I’m still feeling terrible,” Matsler told Al Jazeera recently. “I’m about to go to the doctor again right now. I’m short of breathe, the diarrhea has been real bad, I still have discoloration in my urine, and the day before yesterday, I was coughing up white foam with brown spots in it.”

As for Matsler’s physical reaction to his exposure, Hugh Kaufman, an EPA whistleblower and analyst, has reported this of the effects of the toxic dispersants:

“We have dolphins that are hemorrhaging. People who work near it are hemorrhaging internally. And that’s what dispersants are supposed to do…”

By the middle of last summer, the Alabama Department of Public Health said that 56 people in Mobile and Baldwin counties had sought treatment for what they believed were oil disaster-related illnesses.

“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol,” Dr. Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist, and Exxon Valdez survivor, told Al Jazeera.

“Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” she continued, “Spill responders have told me that the hard rubber impellors in their engines and the soft rubber bushings on their outboard motor pumps are falling apart and need frequent replacement.”

“Given this evidence, it should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known,” Dr. Ott added.

“In ‘Generations at Risk’, medical doctor Ted Schettler and others warn that solvents can rapidly enter the human body. They evaporate in air and are easily inhaled, they penetrate skin easily, and they cross the placenta into fetuses. For example, 2- butoxyethanol (in Corexit) is a human health hazard substance; it is a fetal toxin and it breaks down blood cells, causing blood and kidney disorders.”

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitization, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, genetic mutations, cardiac arrhythmia, and cardiovascular damage.

Even the federal government has taken precautions for its employees. US military officials decided to reroute training flights in the Gulf region in order to avoid oil and dispersant tainted-areas.

Corexit 9527 is some nasty stuff. Via Wikipedia:

Corexit 9527, considered by the EPA to be an acute health hazard, is stated by its manufacturer to be potentially harmful to red blood cells, the kidneys and the liver, and may irritate eyes and skin.[14][24] The chemical 2-butoxyethanol, found in Corexit 9527, was identified as having caused lasting health problems in workers involved in the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.[25] According to the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, the use of Corexit during the Exxon Valdez oil spill caused people “respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders”.[16] Like 9527, 9500 can cause hemolysis (rupture of blood cells) and may also cause internal bleeding.[4]

According to the EPA, Corexit is more toxic than dispersants made by several competitors and less effective in handling southern Louisiana crude.[26] On May 20, 2010, the EPA ordered BP to look for less toxic alternatives to Corexit, and later ordered BP to stop spraying dispersants, but BP responded that it thought that Corexit was the best alternative and continued to spray it.[3]

Reportedly Corexit may be toxic to marine life and helps keep spilled oil submerged. There is concern that the quantities used in the Gulf will create ‘unprecedented underwater damage to organisms.’[27] Nalco spokesman Charlie Pajor said that oil mixed with Corexit is “more toxic to marine life, but less toxic to life along the shore and animals at the surface” because the dispersant allows the oil to stay submerged below the surface of the water.[28] Corexit 9500 causes oil to form into small droplets in the water; fish may be harmed when they eat these droplets.[4] According to its Material safety data sheet, Corexit may also bioaccumulate, remaining in the flesh and building up over time.[29] Thus predators who eat smaller fish with the toxin in their systems may end up with much higher levels in their flesh.[4]

A “presidential commission tasked with investigating the causes of the Deepwater Horizon accident” has determined that there wasn’t enough scientific evidence to guide governmental agencies in making their decisions to use dispersants. Via Science Now:

According to the working paper, a lack of studies on dispersant toxicity meant that the Coast Guard’s Thad Allen, EPA’s Lisa Jackson, and NOAA’s Jane Lubchenco were “seriously handicapped” when deciding whether the chemicals should be used. “Because federal agencies had failed to plan adequately, they did not possess the scientific information that officials most certainly would have wanted to guide their choices.” But the paper concludes that their decision to use dispersants was reasonable under the circumstances, noting that the trio quickly consulted with a group of 50 experts. So far, the use of dispersants appears to have had greater benefit than cost.

The appeal of dispersants is that they break up oil into small droplets, which are less harmful to birds and other wildlife. The droplets are also thought to break down faster. And releasing dispersants at the gushing wellhead was intended to help protect workers on the surface by reducing the amount of oil and associated volatile organic compounds. The problem was the lack of adequate toxicity data on the dispersants themselves. Officials didn’t know the possible impacts on marine life, given the hundreds of thousands of gallons being used over several months (more than 2.5 million in all). They also didn’t know the relative toxicity of the various dispersants.

The commission staff members also concluded that the lack of planning led to delays in response; according to interviews with Coast Guard responders, EPA field staff hadn’t been delegated the authority to grant permission for dispersants to be used and were inexperienced with dispersants, thus delaying the response. The Coast Guard sources also felt that “EPA scientists with such experience were not being adequately consulted in EPA’s decision-making process.”

CLIMATE CHANGE policy & politics

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Image via Neubie on Flickr

Even with a Democratic majority, climate change legislation didn’t pass, but at least it was there. However, due to widespread climate change denialism within the Republican Party, a GOP win could mean the end of climate change policy altogether. Via NPR:

The more carbon that gets released into the atmosphere, the higher the average temperature rises.

That’s a scientific fact.

Human activities, such as driving, flying, building and even turning on the lights, are the biggest contributor to the release of carbon.

That too, is a fact.

And yet the majority of Republicans running for House and Senate seats this year disagree.

.       .       .

Bill McKibben, scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont and the founder of 350.org, says it is a tragedy that conservatives are turning their back on the science behind climate change.

“On this issue maybe more than most, we need that interplay of liberal and conservative,” he says. “Liberals are good at sort of pointing the way forward in kind of progressive new directions and conservatives are good at providing the anchor that says human nature won’t go along with that. That back and forth has been very useful.”

If Republicans take control of the House this November, McKibben says, he doesn’t see a future for climate change policy.

“Look, the Democrats — with a huge majority — couldn’t pass climate change legislation even of a very, very weak variety this year, so I doubt there’ll be any action over the next two years.”

That is, unless conservatives decide to team up with liberals.

“We desperately need conservatives at the forefront of the fight,” McKibben says. “The sooner that conservatives are willing to accept the science, the reality, the sooner we can get to work with their very important help in figuring out what set of prescriptions, what combination of market and regulation will be required in order to deal with the most serious problem we’ve ever stumbled into.”

Despite the lack of merit in their own explanations for the nonexistence of climate change, Republicans reject years of peer-reviewed climate research and observations. Apparently, former Vice President Dick Cheney was the catalyst for the widespread climate change denialism within the Republican Party. Via the New York Times:

According to Congressional inquiries, White House officials, encouraged by Mr. Cheney’s office, forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from separate reports in 2002 and 2003. (Christine Todd Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, has since described the process as “brutal.”)

The administration also sought to control or censor Congressional testimony by federal employees and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate and minimize threats to the environment.

Nothing, it seemed, could crack the administration’s denial — not Tony Blair of Britain and other leaders who took climate change seriously; not Mrs. Whitman (who eventually quit after being undercut by Mr. Cheney, who worked for the energy company Halliburton before he became vice president and received annual checks while in office); and certainly not the scientists.

In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change, Mr. Cheney insisted that there was not enough evidence to just “sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that’s going to try to solve the problem.” To which Mrs. Whitman, by then in private life, said: “I don’t see how he can say that with a straight face anymore.”

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line.

Since the Tea Party movement is rife in climate-change denialism, big polluters, which are corporations that acquire their profits from polluting the environment, are backing the Tea Party. Via the Guardian:

BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama’s energy agenda, the Guardian has learned.

An analysis of campaign finance by Climate Action Network Europe (Cane) found nearly 80% of campaign donations from a number of major European firms were directed towards senators who blocked action on climate change. These included incumbents who have been embraced by the Tea Party such as Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, and the notorious climate change denier James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.

The report, released tomorrow, used information on the Open Secrets.org database to track what it called a co-ordinated attempt by some of Europe’s biggest polluters to influence the US midterms. It said: “The European companies are funding almost exclusively Senate candidates who have been outspoken in their opposition to comprehensive climate policy in the US and candidates who actively deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by people.”

Obama and Democrats have accused corporate interests and anonymous donors of trying to hijack the midterms by funnelling money to the Chamber of Commerce and to conservative Tea Party groups. The Chamber of Commerce reportedly has raised $75m (£47m) for pro-business, mainly Republican candidates.

“Oil companies and the other special interests are spending millions on a campaign to gut clean-air standards and clean-energy standards, jeopardising the health and prosperity of this state,” Obama told a rally in California on Friday night.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining in a big Republican win is the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas tailoring rule. Via the Emerging Issues Law Blog:

The Tailoring Rule covers large industrial facilities like power plants and oil refineries that are responsible for 70 percent of the GHGs from stationary sources. The proposals announced are a critical component for implementing the Tailoring Rule and would ensure that GHG emissions from these large facilities are minimized in all 50 states and that local economies can continue to grow.

The Clean Air Act requires states to develop EPA-approved implementation plans that include requirements for issuing air permits. When federal permitting requirements change, as they did after EPA finalized the GHG Tailoring Rule, states may need to modify these plans.

In the first rule, EPA is proposing to require permitting programs in 13 states to make changes to their implementation plans to ensure that GHG emissions will be covered. All other states that implement an EPA-approved air permitting program must review their existing permitting authority and inform EPA if their programs do not address GHG emissions.

Because some states may not be able to develop and submit revisions to their plans before the Tailoring Rule becomes effective in 2011, in the second rule, EPA is proposing a federal implementation plan, which would allow EPA to issue permits for large GHG emitters located in these states. This would be a temporary measure that is in place until the state can revise its own plan and resume responsibility for GHG permitting.

States are best-suited to issue permits to sources of GHG emissions and have long-standing experience working together with industrial facilities. EPA will work closely and promptly with states to help them develop, submit, and approve necessary revisions to enable the affected states to issue air permits to GHG-emitting sources. Additionally, EPA will continue to provide guidance and act as a resource for the states as they make the various required permitting decisions for GHG emissions.

EPA will accept comment on the first proposal for updated state implementation plans for 30 days after publication in the Federal Register. A hearing on the second proposal for the federal implementation plan was held on August 25, 2010, and the EPA will accept comment for 30 days after that hearing. The agency is working to finalize these rules prior to January 2, 2011, the earliest GHG permitting requirements will be effective.

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NEW SPECIES of snailfish discovered in one of the world’s deepest ocean trenches

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Scientists observe a new species of snailfish living at 7000 meters (or about 23,000 feet) below the ocean surface in a deep ocean trench. According to one scientist, “The immense isolation of each trench draws parallels with island evolution theory popularised by Darwin’s finches.” More via Physorg.com:

These latest discoveries provide a new insight into the depths at which fish survive and the diversity of populations which could exist in the deepest points of oceans across the globe.

Dr Alan Jamieson from the University of Aberdeen’s Oceanlab, who led the expedition said: “Our findings, which revealed diverse and abundant species at depths previously thought to be void of fish, will prompt a rethink into marine populations at extreme depths.

“This expedition was prompted by our findings in 2008 and 2009 off Japan and New Zealand where we discovered new species of snailfish known as Liparids – inhabiting trenches off Japan and New Zealand at depths of approximately 7000m — with each trench hosting its own unique species of the fish.

“To test whether these species would be found in all trenches, we repeated our experiments on the other side of the Pacific Ocean off Peru and Chile, some 6000 miles from our last observations.

“What we found was that indeed there was another unique species of snailfish living at 7000m — entirely new to science, which had never been caught or seen before.

REDISCOVERED SPECIES: Several species (and one subspecies) thought extinct rediscovered

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  1. A species of skink—the Vosmer’s writhing skink (Lygosoma vosmaerii)—has been rediscovered in India. Apparently, the skink hasn’t been seen since 1839. More via The Hindu:

    Zoologists from Osmania University have rediscovered a species belonging to the lizard family, which was last seen way back in 1839 in the then Bengal province. The species, thought to be extinct till now, has been identified as Lygosoma Vosmaerii and is also known as Vosmer’s Writhing Skink. It was found by the research team at Jaggayyapet, Krishna district, Andhra Pradesh.

    2. Image showing Thyreophora cynophila via Wikipedia

  2. After 160 years, Thyreophora cynophila, a unique species of fly, which specializes on feeding off carcasses at a particular stage of decomposition, has been rediscovered in Spain. More via the BBC:

    Thought to be the first fly driven to extinction by humans, it was also considered one of Europe’s few endemic animals to have disappeared for good.

    The bizarre fly was considered ‘mythical’ due to its orange head, its preference for living on dead animal carcasses, and the fact it was rarely sighted even in the 19th Century.

    .       .       .

    Changes in livestock management in central Europe, improved carrion disposal following the Industrial Revolution, as well as the eradication of wolves and other big bone-crushing carnivores could have helped eliminate the fly.

    Video: Thyreophora cynophila

  3. A flowering plant, Clermontia peleana singuliflora, has been rediscovered on Hawaii after almost 100 years of absence. More via First Post:

    flower thought to be extinct for almost 100 years has been rediscovered in Hawaii. The species of lobelia was found growing on native trees and ferns in rainforests covering the slopes of the Kohala volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii.

    The flower, known as ‘oha wai’ in Hawaiian, was last seen on the island in 1909 and last collected on the nearby island of East Maui in 1920. It had never been recorded on the slopes of Kohala before.

    Conservation worker Jon Griffin explained how researchers made the unexpected discovery. “We were surveying a rare tree snail population when we came across a native lobelia plant that we were unable to identify,” he revealed.

    He said they sent photographs of the flower to Dr Thomas Lammers, a botanist at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, who identified it as Clermontia peleana singuliflora, which had not been seen for 90 years and was believed to have died out.

    4. Image showing the Sierra Nevada red fox by Keith Slausen

  4. The Sierra Nevada red fox has been rediscovered in the central California. This subspecies of red fox hasn’t been seen since the 1990s. More via National Geographic:

    The Sierra Nevada red fox subspecies hadn’t been seen in central California since the 1990s and was considered gone from the area. Only one other population of Sierra Nevada foxes are known, farther north in the Lassen Peak region (see map).

    But U.S. Forest Service officials suspected photographs taken by a trail camera near the Sierra Nevada mountains’ Sonora Pass (see map) in August had captured a Sierra Nevada red fox gnawing on a “bait bag” of chicken scraps.

    Researchers at the University of California, Davis, ran DNA tests on saliva samples from the bag, and sure enough, the spit confirmed the fox as a Sierra Nevada. Testing saliva is “not uncommon,” said Ben Sacks, director of the Canid Diversity and Conservation Unit of the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory.

    “We thought they were gone,” Sacks added. “We were wrong.”

    5. Image showing Hyperolius sankuruensis by Jos Kielgast / Conservation International

  5. Three species of amphibians—two species of frogs and one species of salamander—have been rediscovered around the world. More via Wildlife Extra:

    The three animals that have been rediscovered so far include a Mexican salamander not seen since it was discovered in 1941, a frog from the Ivory Coast not seen since 1967 and another frog from Democratic Republic of Congo not seen since 1979.