Archive for August 2011

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AUSTRALIANS RALLY AGAINST LIVE EXPORTS


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THOUSANDS across the country have protested against live animal exports as independent Senator Nick Xenophon echoed their calls for the cruelty to cease.
Rallies, organised in each state capital and Canberra, called on Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to allow MPs a conscience vote on the issue.
The future of live exports will go before federal parliament this week with two bills to be debated, including one which would phase it out by 2014.
Groups opposed to the trade, including the RSPCA and Animals Australia, believe a conscience vote would bring it to an end.
The bills were prompted by video footage of abuse at an Indonesian abattoir recently aired byFour Corners.
The subsequent outcry prompted the federal government to impose a temporary ban on exports to Indonesia, which resumed last month.
In Adelaide, Senator Xenophon said no Australian should ignore the cruelty of the live trade.
"The industry will give you a thousand reasons why we can't stop it," he said.
"They say that we can't process meat here, even though that would mean creating value and creating jobs for our nation."
In Melbourne people wept as Animals Australia investigator Lyn White recalled some of the cruelty she had witnessed at slaughterhouses in Indonesia and the Middle East.
"I have stood in front of workers in a Dubai marketplace to stop them from throwing Australian sheep three metres through the air like bags of wheat," she told the crowd.
"I have stood in Indonesian slaughterhouses for six consecutive nights witnessing a level of brutality to animals that I hoped I would never see from our fellow human beings.
"This is not about animal rights, this is about ending human wrongs."
Greens MP Adam Bandt, who introduced one of the bills before federal parliament, also backed calls for a conscience vote on the issue.
"Members ... from all sides of parliament should vote with their heart and with their head," Mr Bandt said.
"It's what the Australian people want."
Among the crowd in Sydney, Jill Trotter, who came with her dog Zoe, said she felt strongly about live animal exports.
"There's no need to send live animals overseas, it just doesn't have to happen and there are humane ways of killing animals," Ms Trotter said.
"They would have known that this was going on in Indonesia for a long time and that's what is really sad."

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POACHERS' CAMERA PORTRAYS ITS OWN MASTER'S MISDEEDS


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This tiger, its image captured by a hidden camera in 2010, was identified as one killed by poachers recently in Thailand.


This image was among those retrieved from a cell phone camera left behind by tiger poachers in Thailand.

Two suspects arrested in Thailand after park rangers recovered images on cell phone

Two men suspected of killing endangered tigers in Thailand have been arrested, a U.S. conservation group said Thursday, and the key evidence turned out to be cell phone images of them with their prizes.

A phone with the images was seized after a gun battle between Thai park rangers and suspected poachers in a protected area, the Wildlife Conservation Society said in a statement.

"The rangers also found other evidence of poaching, including animal body parts and insecticides that are sometimes used to poison tigers," the group stated.

The images led to three men, one of whom escaped and two who were arrested. The group is thought to have killed up to 10 tigers in the region — a significant number given that only 2,500 breeding adult tigers are left in the wild globally.

"When confronted with 'trophy' images of themselves posing over a dead tiger, the suspects claimed the big cat was poached in Myanmar in 2003," WCS said. "According to WCS Thailand staff, however, the tiger (identified by its unique stripe patterns) was a well-known male tiger that researchers had tracked with camera traps in Thailand for at least three years between 2008-2011."

The society said it believes the men are part of "an organized crime ring that WCS and other partners have been tracking in this region for the past year."

The cell phone also contained images of elephant tusks, suggesting the men had illegally hunted elephants as well.

The Wildlife Conservation Society, based in New York, has helped Thailand and other governments with funding and training for beefed up patrols to protect wildlife.

"Such work comes with great risk to the park rangers working on the frontlines of enforcement," WCS noted. "One officer was shot in a nearby community on Friday in what is believed to be retaliation for the recent poaching arrests. The ranger remains in serious condition in the hospital."

Tigers have lost ninety percent of their historic range — which spread across Asia from Turkey to eastern Russia — according to TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring group funded by the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Tigers are poached mainly for their pelts and bones, which are used in traditional Asian medicines.

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GLOBAL WARMING MAY COOK SEA TURTLE EGGS


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THE GIST:
  • Scorching sands pose the greatest long-term threat from climate change to sea turtles.
  • Sea level rise is a more important threat in the short term -- until about 2030.
  • Evaluating the intensity of these threats could help conservation efforts.

When they emerge onto beaches around the world to lay their eggs in the sand, sea turtles expose themselves to a trio of threats from climate change: cyclones, rising seas and warming temperatures.
A new study finds that for the world's largest population of sea turtles -- in Australia's northern Great Barrier Reef -- blazing hot sands pose the greatest threat to the animals' breeding success over the long term.
The researchers predict that from now until 2030, sea level rise will do the most harm to turtle breeding grounds. However, by 2070, sands in many areas will be so scorching that eggs could not survive.
"Different studies look at how a single climatic process is going to affect nesting grounds," study lead author Marianna Fuentes of James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, told Discovery News. "But all the climatic processes are going to happen simultaneously."
The new work on sea turtles -- gentle, charismatic denizens of our oceans that keep ecosystems balanced by grazing kelp and algae -- evaluated the combined effects.
Fuentes and her colleagues gathered what was known from studies of individual threats and surveyed experts' views of their relative significance. They published the findings in Global Change Biology.
Experts were most certain about the effects of warming beaches. Sand temperatures determine the sex ratio of turtle eggs. "With increasing temperature we get more female turtles being produced," Fuentes said.
Warmer temperatures also bring reduced hatchling success, more deformities, and, above about 91 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius), the eggs die.
Installing shady areas on the beach, replanting vegetation along beach edges, or relocating eggs to cooler places are all possible strategies for protecting eggs from overheating, Fuentes said.
The findings could also help prioritize conservation efforts. "In the long term, it doesn't really matter if you mitigate against impacts from sea-level rise because increasing temperatures will be causing most of the damage," Fuentes said.
But it's not quite that simple, she noted. Breeding grounds may move in response to sea level rise in ways that could not be anticipated in the study.
Also, the relative importance of these threats may vary in other regions.
"It would be really interesting to use the tool in different areas," said Marianne Fish, program leader for the Marine Turtle and Climate Change Program at the World Wildlife Fund.
Fish studies turtles in Latin America and the Caribbean, and suggests the ranking of threats may be different in her region.
"I think some of the threats we face are very different," she said. "In the Caribbean, there is a lot of coastal development. As sea levels rise, if you have a building right behind the beach, there's nowhere for that beach to move."
"Sea turtles have been around for so long, and they have adapted to past climate change," Fuentes said. "We think they have the biological capacity to adapt. But they are a lot less resilient than before because their population is reduced and the nesting areas that they have available are reduced. It is a lot harder for them to adapt than it was in the past."

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New Pit Viper Found—One of World's Smallest


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A good thing recently came in a small package for scientists: A new snake species found in China is one of the littlest pit vipers in the world.
Yang and colleagues found the species during a recent survey of forests in Maolan National Nature Reserve in Guizhou, China. At a maximum length of about 2.6 feet (0.7 meter), the new pit viper is the smallest known so far in the country.

The new snake, Protobothrops maolanensis, was an unexpected "surprise gift for us," study leader Jian-Huan Yang said in an email.

Though the grayish brown species easily blends into its habitat, the ground-dwelling species ended up being the most common snake found during the research, noted Yang, of Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou.

Scientists have found two other new pit vipers in China so far in 2011:Sinovipera sichuanensis and Protobothrops maolanensis, he added.


Bad Luck Snake?

The group of snakes known as pit vipers includes well-known species such as the copperhead, the rattlesnake, and the water moccasin.

All known pit vipers are venomous, although their potency varies across species.

The toxicity of the new pit viper species is not yet known, but "kindly local peoples warned me that this snake is very poisonous," Yang added.

"They said that some local peoples had been bit by this snake and then got poisoning—one was dead who had not got treatment in time."

Yang's team also found dead snakes that had been killed by people—the Miao, a local minority, believe that a snake encountered in the wild will bring bad luck unless it's killed immediately, he said.

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ORGANIZED CRIME WIPING OUT WILDLIFE


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Sophisticated, organized criminal syndicates involved in the illegal trade of animal body parts are wiping out wildlife, to the point that several subspecies have already gone extinct, according to a paper in the journal Oryx.

The Sumatran rhinoceros is thought to have gone extinct in Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia due to poachers working in crime rings, and two subspecies of African rhino have suffered similar fates. Tigers, elephants, saiga antelopes, and even a little anteater known as the pangolin are all at dangerously low numbers due to relentless hunting by the criminals.

Author Elizabeth Bennett, vice president of species conservation for the Wildlife Conservation Society, told Discovery News that the crime syndicates "are likely to involve similar networks -- and even the same people -- as the organized crime networks involved in illicit arms and drugs smuggling. But they are networks, globally linked, like inter-connected spider webs."

She says numerous species are targeted, from turtles and snakes, along with much larger animals. Aside from people coveting exotic pets, many people believe in traditional "remedies." Rhino horns, for example, are mostly made of keratin, the same fibrous protein found in human hair and fingernails, but people in some cultures still think of them as an aphrodisiac.

The illegal wildlife trade would not exist were it not for such customer demand.

"The single greatest core driver is increasing wealth, especially in East Asia," Bennett said. "That is leading to greatly increased demand for high-value wildlife products. That demand can now be met because of greatly increased access, largely by roads often built to extract natural resources (logs, minerals) throughout wild areas."

Technology allows the criminals to stay in constant contact with each other. When alleged tiger poachers were recently caught in the Western Forest Complex of Thailand, for example, most had cell phones in hand, likely waiting for instructions. Bennett points out that these traders are light on their feet, frequently changing routes and modes of operation as enforcement commences in any one place.

She believes another key to their success "is that part of the system involves fake permits somewhere along the trade chain. An animal might be poached illegally in Africa, sent illegally to another country where paperwork (such as a CITES permit) is introduced or changed, so then an illegal animal become a 'legal' one, since the paperwork gives it legitimacy."

"So much of the legal wildlife trade in this country (the U.S.)," she added, "is probably from animals that were hunted illegally at the start."

Over the past few years, conservationists have become especially concerned about rhino populations. In 2010, a record 333 rhinos were killed in South Africa alone as a result of poaching. Already in 2011, at least 200 rhinos have been killed in the country, many from the world famous safari destination Kruger National Park.

"Poaching is being undertaken almost without exception by sophisticated criminals, sometimes hunting from helicopters and using automatic weapons," said Joseph Okori, World Wildlife Fund's African Rhino Program director. "South Africa is fighting a war against organized crime that risks reversing the outstanding conservation gains it made over the past century."

While the criminals are becoming wealthier, the poor global economy has weakened conservation groups' ability to counter the crimes.

"We are almost losing a rhino a day," Kevin Bewick of the Anti-Poaching Intelligence Group Southern Africa told Discovery News. "At this rate, they will soon be wiped out. Anti-poaching units are extremely underfunded and are not receiving support from the South African government."

Bennett, however, remains hopeful that citizens and governments can fight the crime syndicates and win.

"Scientifically based patrols and intelligence networks are relatively low tech and not too costly," she said. "Involvement of local community members as rangers and 'eyes and ears' is also not expensive. Development of apps to aid in species identification again is not too costly."

She concluded, however, that "the core costs will always lie with governments, who have the legal authority to enforce…The governments of the key wildlife consuming nations for these high-end products are not poor, and could allocate additional resources to customs and others as needed. Developed country governments with good technical expertise could contribute that, as well as funds, to support less developed countries with the key wildlife needing protection."

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