December 17, 2007, 10:27 PM CT

Vacuuming Kills Fleas In All Stages

Homeowners dogged by household fleas need look no farther than the broom closet to solve their problem. Researchers have determined that vacuuming kills fleas in all stages of their lives, with an average of 96 percent success in adult fleas and 100 percent destruction of younger fleas.

In fact, the results were so surprisingly definitive that the lead scientist, an Ohio State University insect specialist, repeated the experiments several times to be sure the findings were correct. The studies were conducted on the cat flea, or Ctenocephalides felis, the most common type of flea plaguing companion animals and humans.

The lead researcher also examined vacuum bags for toxicity and exposed fleas to churning air in separate tests to further explore potential causes of flea death. He and a colleague believed that the damaging effects of the brushes, fans and powerful air currents in vacuum cleaners combine to kill the fleas. The study used a single model of an upright vacuum, but scientists don't think the vacuum design has much bearing on the results.

"No matter what vacuum a flea gets sucked into, it's probably a one-way trip," said Glen Needham, associate professor of entomology at Ohio State and a co-author of the study.

The results are published in a recent issue of the journal Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 13, 2007, 10:08 PM CT

Immediate action needed to save corals

The journal Science has published a paper today that is the most comprehensive review to date of the effects rising ocean temperatures are having on the worlds coral reefs. The Carbon Crisis: Coral Reefs under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification, co-authored by seventeen marine researchers from seven different countries, reveals that most coral reefs will not survive the drastic increases in global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 unless governments act immediately to combat current trends.

The paper, the cover story for this weeks issue of Science, paints a bleak picture of a future without all but the most resilient coral species if atmospheric CO2 levels continue on their current trajectory. Marine biodiversity, tourism and fishing industries and the food security of millions are at risk, the paper warns. Coral reef fisheries in Asia currently provide protein for one billion people and the total net economic value of services provided by corals is estimated to be $30 billion.

Dr. Bob Steneck, of the University of Maine and co-author of the paper, said the time was right for international leaders to commit to meaningful action to save the worlds coral reefs: The science speaks for itself. We have created conditions on Earth unlike anything most species alive today have experienced in their evolutionary history. Corals are feeling the effects of our actions and it is now or never if we want to safeguard these marine creatures and the livelihoods that depend on them......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

December 13, 2007, 10:00 PM CT

Wild chimpanzees may not have menopause

A pioneering study of wild chimpanzees has observed that these close human relatives do not routinely experience menopause, rebutting prior studies of captive individuals which had postulated that female chimpanzees reach reproductive senescence at 35 to 40 years of age.

Together with recent data from wild gorillas and orangutans, the finding -- described this week in the journal Current Biology -- suggests that human females are rare or even unique among primates in experiencing a lengthy post-reproductive lifespan.

"We find no evidence that menopause is common among wild chimpanzee populations," says lead author Melissa Emery Thompson, a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at Harvard University. "While some female chimpanzees do technically outlive their fertility, it's not at all uncommon for individuals in their 40s and 50s -- quite elderly for wild chimpanzees -- to remain reproductively active".

While wild chimpanzees and humans both experience fertility declines starting in the fourth decade of life, most other human organ systems can remain healthy and functional for a number of years longer, far outstripping the longevity of the reproductive system and giving a number of women several decades of post-reproductive life.

By contrast, in chimpanzees reproductive declines occur in tandem with overall mortality. A chimpanzee's life expectancy at birth is only 15 years, and just 7 percent of individuals live to age 40. But females who do reach such advanced ages tend to remain fertile to the end, Emery Thompson and her colleagues found, with 47 percent giving birth once after age 40, including 12 percent observed to give birth twice after age 40......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 11, 2007, 10:31 PM CT

New carbon calculator conserves forests

A quick and cool way to help combat climate change is now available at www.conservation.org/carboncalculator.

Lively videos and stunning images are featured in Conservation Internationals (CI) new online carbon calculator, which helps people easily calculate how much they are adding to global greenhouse gases. The CI carbon calculator offers a way to offset those emissions by helping protect tropical forests from being burned and cleared.

Tropical deforestation emits at least 20 percent of total greenhouse gases that cause climate change -- more than all the worlds cars, SUVs, trucks, trains and airplanes combined. Sporting a novel, upbeat design, CIs user friendly calculator determines personal or family carbon emissions from home energy, vehicle, travel and diet behaviors, or from an individual event or travel.

Most people dont realize that the meat and food items they eat, the soaps and shampoos they use, even some of the biodiesel and ethanol biofuels powering their cars come from cleared tropical forests, said Michael Totten, CIs Chief Adviser for Climate, Water and Ecosystem Services. This calculator shows them how big of an impact they are making, and how to offset the damage by protecting tropical forests that contain some of the worlds richest biological diversity and life-sustaining benefits critical to the wellbeing of local populations......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

December 11, 2007, 10:28 PM CT

Building blocks of life formed on Mars

Organic compounds contain carbon and hydrogen and form the building blocks of all life on Earth. By analyzing organic material and minerals in the Martian meteorite Allan Hills 84001, researchers at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory have demonstrated for the first time that building blocks of life formed on Mars early in its history. Previously, researchers have thought that organic material in ALH 84001 was brought to Mars by meteorite impacts or more speculatively originated from ancient Martian microbes.

The Carnegie-led team made a comprehensive study of the ALH 84001 meteorite and compared the results with data from related rocks found on Svalbard, Norway. The Svalbard samples occur in volcanoes that erupted in a freezing Arctic climate about 1 million years agopossibly mimicking conditions on early Mars.

Organic material occurs within tiny spheres of carbonate minerals in both the Martian and Earth rocks, explained Andrew Steele, lead author of the study. We observed that the organic material is closely linked to the iron oxide mineral magnetite, which is the key to understanding how these compounds formed.

The organic material in the rocks from Svalbard formed when volcanoes erupted under freezing conditions. During cooling, magnetite acted as a catalyst to form organic compounds from fluids rich in carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O). This event occurred under conditions where no forms of life are likely to exist. The similar association of carbonate, magnetite and organic material in the Martian meteorite ALH 84001 is very compelling and shows that the organic material did not originate from Martian life forms but formed directly from chemical reactions within the rock. This is the first study to show that Mars is capable of forming organic compounds at all......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

December 11, 2007, 8:33 PM CT

Scat sniffing dogs detecting rare California carnivores

Researchers at the U.S. Forest Service Redwood Sciences Lab and University of Vermont found scat sniffing dogs might be the best way to confirm the presence of rare carnivores in forested areas like the Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains.

In 2003 and 2004, they compared the ability of dogs, remote cameras and hair snares to detect fishers, bobcats and black bears at 168 sites throughout Vermont. Dogs had the highest detection rate for targeted species and were the most cost-effective, as per findings published last summer in The Journal of Wildlife Management.

U.S. Forest Service researchers with the Pacific Southwest Research Station used detection dog teams from the University of Washingtons Center for Conservation Biology last summer to study a Pacific fisher population in the Sierra National Forest. The study will help determine how efforts to reduce wildland fire risks there might affect the animal.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has ruled the fishers listing under the Endangered Species Act as warranted, but precluded because of other priorities and a lack of funds.

Land managers often have difficulty detecting forest carnivores because they tend to be elusive, solitary and on the go. Common methods for confirming a species at a site include using remotely-triggered cameras and barbed wire snares that snag hair. Both methods require the use of bait that can lure animals away from their typical range......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

December 10, 2007, 10:38 PM CT

For the fruit fly, everything changes after sex

Director Barry Dickson and his group are interested in the genetic basis of innate behaviour. They focus on the reproductive behaviour of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Two years ago, the team was able to identify the fruitless gene as a key regulator of mating behaviour.

For 20 years, researchers have been trying to identify another molecular switch which changes the behaviour of female insects after mating. It makes them lose interest in further sexual contact and start laying eggs. Mosquitoes, once fertilized, look out for a meal of blood and may transmit the malaria parasite along the way.

The trigger for the behavioral switch is a factor present in the seminal fluid of male insects. This sex peptide (SP), as it is called in Drosophila, has been known to researchers for quite a while. Nilay Yapici, a PhD student in Barry Dicksons team, has now identified the receptor (SPR) responsible for the effect of SP and thus revealed the underlying molecular mechanism. She also showed that the gene for SPR is active in the reproductive organs as well as the brain of the flies.

To get this far, it took two years of painstaking work and a scientific tool which was developed over the past few years by the Dickson group. This Drosophila RNAi Library is a collection of 22,000 fly strains and has recently been made available to scientists worldwide. Due to this collection, it is now possible to switch off any chosen gene in the fly. By doing so, neurobiologists are able to identify genes that influence behaviour......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 10, 2007, 9:26 PM CT

To catch a panda

EAST LANSING, Mich. Michigan State Universitys panda habitat research team has spent years collecting mountains of data aimed at understanding and saving giant pandas. Now a graduate student is working to catch crucial data thats black, white and furry.

Vanessa Hull, 25, a Ph.D. candidate, is in the snowy, remote mountains of the Sichuan Province of China which also is the heart of panda habitat. Shes hoping to capture, collar and track up to four wild pandas using advanced global positioning systems.

Hull, a student in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife in the MSU College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, is among the first since the 1990s in this crucial area to obtain permits to trap the pandas and fit them with GPS collars. She and the team will map where these elusive creatures go, effectively letting the pandas tell the scientists the habitat they like best.

Reintroducing captive pandas into the wild is a very difficult process because pandas in captivity arent used to be in wild, they dont have the survival skills, Hull said. The scientists in China want to collaborate with us closely.

Researchers can mesh what the pandas tell them with that mountain of data. It can help them identify the most hospitable panda neighborhoods, learn how to preserve those and create more......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 10, 2007, 9:22 PM CT

Threatened Birds May Be Rarer

Geographic range maps that allow conservationists to estimate the distribution of birds may vastly overestimate the actual population size of threatened species and those with specific habitats, as per a research studypublished online this week in the journal Conservation Biology.

"Our study observed that species ranges in general tend to get overestimated, but that this trend is especially pronounced for birds that are threatened, rely on specialized diets or have small habitats," said Walter Jetz, an assistant professor of biological sciences at UC San Diego and the lead author of the study, which will appear in the recent issue of the printed journal. "This suggests that a number of threatened species of birds may be even rarer than we believe and are in greater danger of going extinct".

"Our findings indicate that the ranges of most vulnerable bird species are experiencing the highest overestimation, thereby painting a rosier picture of their distributions than is actually the case," said Cagan Sekercioglu, a senior research scientist at Stanford University and a co-author of the study. "This suggests that the conservation status of a number of narrow-ranging, specialized and threatened bird species may be worse than we think".

Jetz, Sekercioglu and James E.M. Watson of Britain's Oxford University reviewed geographic range overestimation and its potential ecological causes for 1,158 bird species across 4,040 well-studied survey locations in Australia, North America and Southern Africa. Comparing the range maps with actual bird surveys, such as those conducted by the Audubon Society, the researchers observed that most species actually occur in only 40 to 70 percent of the range suggested by their range maps. In other words, these birds are not actually found in 30 to 60 percent of their supposed range......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

December 6, 2007, 8:20 PM CT

Climate change would increase bird extinctions

Where do you go when you've reached the top of a mountain and you can't go back down?

It's a question increasingly relevant to plants and animals, as their habitats slowly shift to higher elevations, driven by rising temperatures worldwide. The answer, unfortunately, is you can't go anywhere. Habitats shrink to the vanishing point, and species go extinct.

That scenario is likely to be played out repeatedly and at an accelerating rate as the world continues to warm, Stanford scientists say.

By 2100, climate change could cause up to 30 percent of land-bird species to go extinct worldwide, if the worst-case scenario comes to pass. Land birds constitute the vast majority of all bird species.

''Of the land-bird species predicted to go extinct, 79 percent of them are not currently considered threatened with extinction, but a number of will be if we cannot stop climate change,'' said Cagan Sekercioglu, a senior research scientist at Stanford and the lead author of a paper detailing the research, which is scheduled would be published online this week in Conservation Biology.

The study is one of the first analyses of extinction rates to incorporate the most recent climate change scenarios set forth earlier this year in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the Nobel Peace Price with Al Gore......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source