Snoring Doormouse

cuteness alert from Caro D

Ottawa to reintroduce iconic bison to Banff National Park

from the calgary herald
by CLARA HO

Banff could be the next home where the buffalo roam.

Federal Environment Minister Peter Kent is scheduled to make an announcement Friday with details about reintroducing “an iconic Canadian animal” to Banff National Park, which government officials have confirmed is bison.

Kent, minister responsible for Parks Canada, is expected to provide details on a public consultation process for the animal’s reintroduction to Banff.

While officials have not specified the breed of bison, the most recent Banff park management plan, from 2010, includes details on the reintroduction of the plains bison, described in the document as “a keystone species that has been absent from the park since its establishment.”

Last year the Eleanor Luxton Historical Foundation held a public meeting on its own plan to reintroduce plains bison to the park. The plan indicated that the Bow Valley and Red Deer Valley could support modest bison herds.

Harvey Locke, a Luxton foundation director, said Wednesday he’d be thrilled to see bison make a return.

Bison were hunted to near-extinction in the 1800s, during European settlement of the West.

“It’s a species that speaks to a terrible mismanagement of nature in the 19th century,” Locke said.

Since then the species has made a managed comeback, and is not widely distributed in the wild, he said.

Reintroduction of bison has been discussed since 1997, when the park’s buffalo paddock was closed following the Banff-Bow Valley study, which looked at maintaining the park’s ecological integrity while providing appropriate access to visitors.

“Bison is a native species to the Canadian Rockies,” Locke said. “For the park to be complete, it needs wild bison.”

Dave Ealey, spokesman with Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, said his department encourages efforts to re-establish the ecological balance of the park.

But the department, which is not involved with Friday’s announcement, is also interested in seeing what Parks Canada’s plans are for keeping the animals within park confines.

“These are large animals and the consequences of large, free-roaming bison in parts of the province, if they expand outside the national park boundaries, could be significant,” Ealey said.

There are ranchers not too far from the borders of Banff who could come into close contact with the large animals. Bison could also end up on public land frequented by industrial and recreational users.

And the animals could be a road hazard, depending on where they are released in the park, Ealey said, adding bison lingering on the roadways has been a problem for motorists at Elk Island National Park, east of Edmonton.

Alberta Sustainable Resource Development has extensive experience with bison re-establishment programs, specifically in the Hay-Zama area in northwestern Alberta, Ealey said.

“We’ve been doing ongoing work to try to manage the numbers of that particular population effectively because they just blossomed as a population success story,” he said. “Those are the sort of things we’re aware of when it comes to wildlife management and those types of reintroductions. So we’d like to know a little more about how that’s being approached (in Banff).”

Moose falling on face

i have to include Strombo's comment on this "Miraculously the moose isn't even the best part of this video... "

via the George Stroumboulopoulos facebook page

Bath Time for Baby Sloths

this is to counter balance the post about death today. -MA

Nate Hallinan - "real life" smurf

from Nate Hallinan.com



from Nate Hallinan.com:

"The Smurf is actually the result of a symbiotic relationship between two organisms. We believe that Smurfs put their 'embryos' in the button of a developing mushroom. From a
distance, Smurfs seem like they are wearing a hat and pants but as you can see this is a fallacy. The fungus provides camouflage and protective epidermal layers for the creature, while the creature provides nutrients and mobility for the spreading of spores.

Smurfs are believed to be a hunter gatherer society. As you can see, this little guy is returning from a successful venture. It is generally difficult to spot a Smurf; they
are very apprehensive and cunning. Sadly though, it is rumored that they are hunted for their medicinal properties. It's hard to determine but it is thought that there are
not many colonies of Smurf left."

Myth Busting: The Truth About Animals And Tools

from NPR
by JON HAMILTON



A wasp uses a pebble as a hammer. An octopus carries around a coconut shell to hide in. A shrike impales its prey on a sharp thorn.

Those are just a few examples of animal tool use that appear in the new book Animal Tool Behavior by Robert W. Shumaker, Kristina R. Walkup and Benjamin B. Beck. The book updates an edition published in 1980 by Beck. And in the new version, the authors try to dispel a number of persistent myths about animals and tools.

Shumaker tells me about some of those myths during a walk around The Indianapolis Zoo, where he is vice president of life sciences. (He is also a member of the adjunct faculty at the University of Indiana.)

As we approach a female polar bear named Tundra, Shumaker says one myth he hopes to deflate is that tool use is limited to monkeys and apes. Polar bears offer a powerful rebuttal of that idea, he says. In zoos, they often throw objects with great force and accuracy. It's less clear whether this sort of tool use occurs in the wild. But there are anecdotal reports from early Arctic explorers of polar bears using projectiles to hunt.

"One of the stories we have is polar bears getting up on a cliff and hurling great chunks of ice down on something like a walrus to kill it," Shumaker says.

Another common misconception: Tool use requires fingers, or at least hands, Shumaker says. Apparently, no one bothered to tell dolphins. "They have nothing to hold tools with except their mouth," he says, "and yet they are still innovative and creative."

Dolphins play with just about any object they find, Shumaker says. In some cases, the objects are merely toys — but they become tools when used to manipulate another object or creature for a specific purpose. And dolphins do that kind of manipulating a lot, says Jodie Baker, who is in charge of marine mammals at the zoo. As we speak over the din of dolphin splashes and chatter, Baker sees a dolphin named Kimo preparing to manipulate us with a tool — in this case, a buoy.

"If you walk by the pool and there's a dolphin playing with a toy, they'll typically throw it in your direction to get your attention," she says.

That's a form of tool use known as baiting or enticing. But scientists have collected lots of examples of dolphins doing other things with tools, Shumaker says.

"One is a dolphin that found a piece of tile and took it down to the bottom of their pool and used it to scrape algae off the bottom of their pool and then they ate the algae," he says.

And wild dolphins in Australia sometimes flush out their prey with a sponge, he says. "They hold the sponge on their rostrum, and then they use that as they disturb the sandy bottom to get fish like flounder that are down in the sand."

Genetics Or Intelligence?

One of the most widespread myths about tool use is that it is a sign of intelligence. Of course, some really smart animals do use tools. But so do creatures like the bolas spider, which is named after the throwing weapon used by South American gauchos. The spider's version of the bolas is a ball made from the same silk it uses to spin a web, Shumaker says.

"When an insect flies by, they throw it and it attaches to the insect because it's sticky and they reel them in," he says. "It's very complex. Very impressive. Very dramatic. But all available information tells us that it's completely controlled from this animal's genetic history." In other words, it's programmed behavior, not something the spider figured out. Genetic programming is also the reason hermit crabs carry around another creature's shell and ant-lions throw sand at their prey.

When intelligent animals do use tools, though, they often do so in very creative ways, Shumaker says.

At the zoo's spacious elephant enclosure, Tim Littig, a senior animal trainer, points toward a baby elephant named Kalina, who is standing next to her mother, Kubwa. Kalina has been able to nurse without any help, Littig says. But things were trickier with Kubwa's previous baby, he says.

"Her last calf was a little smaller than this one and required a step stool to be able to reach her mammary glands to nurse," Littig explains. "Kubwa would move the stool around so the calf could stand up on the stool to nurse."

Technically, that made her baby the tool user. But it was Kubwa who figured out how to use the tool. And that sort of problem-solving is a sign of intelligence, Shumaker says.

So is figuring out how to make a tool — a skill many scientists once thought of as uniquely human. Shumaker says those scientists must not have spent much time around orangutans. Then he takes me to the orangutan enclosure for a demonstration.

I'm holding a large microphone, which Shumaker reminds me not to point at the orangutans, lest they think it's a weapon. But the animals aren't frightened. Several orangutans reach through the steel mesh and make it clear to Shumaker that they want to have the microphone. Shumaker tells a female named Knobi that she can touch it, which she does several times. When I move it out of reach, though, Knobi walks off and comes back with a small tree branch.

"She's making a reaching tool to try and get your microphone," Shumaker explains as Knobi breaks off one forking branch so the limb will fit through the steel mesh.

But this reaching tool isn't long enough, so Knobi fetches a branch that's 5 or 6 feet long. I stay where I am as Knobi prods at the microphone with the tool.

"She's doing her best to draw the mic in," Shumaker says to me. Then to Knobi he says: "I'm sorry; you cannot have it. Good job with your tool."

As we walk away, we can see Knobi grabbing an even larger branch.

Using Symbols As Tools

Just 10 or 15 years ago, scientists were still debating whether orangutans in the wild also made tools, Shumaker says. Now it's clear they do, and there are several examples in Animal Tool Behavior. The book also offers scientific documentation of other species making tools in the wild. New Caledonian crows make hooks out of twigs to catch prey. Wild chimpanzees make wooden spears for hunting.

Perhaps the most surprising and controversial findings in the new book involve what scientists refer to as symbolic tool use. "These are examples where we see tools being used to represent something else or to provide a change in psychological state," Shumaker says

Symbolic tool use is something people do every time they pay for an item with paper bills or coins. And some monkeys and apes in captivity have learned to use tokens that they trade for various foods.

But Shumaker is more intrigued by the sort of symbolic tools that can affect emotions. There are lots of examples of this in people. Children often have a special stuffed animal or blanket that is much more than a toy. The object represents comfort or security to them, and they use it to feel better.

It's one more behavior that scientists once considered uniquely human. But Shumaker says there is more and more evidence that some animals use symbolic tools in much the same way.

"We would see great apes in times of great stress or sadness, like a female who had an infant that died," Shumaker says. "That female would create something that researchers called a doll and then [she] treated it exactly as she had treated her infant that had recently died."

Shumaker says scientists are still debating the significance of examples like this. But he says the fact that such a debate is even taking place shows how much things have changed since the 1960s, when scientists first realized that humans weren't the only ones using tools.

Happy (Belated) Holidays everyone

Revenge of the Meerkat

Rats Free Trapped Friends, Hint at Universal Empathy

from WIREDhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
By Brandon Keim

With a few liberating swipes of their paws, a group of research rats freed trapped labmates and raised anew the possibility that empathy isn’t unique to humans and a few extra-smart animals, but is widespread in the animal world.

Though more studies are needed on the rats’ motivations, it’s at least plausible they demonstrated “empathically motivated pro-social behavior.” People would generally call that helpfulness, or even kindness.

“Rats help other rats in distress. That means it’s a biological inheritance,” said neurobiologist Peggy Mason of the University of Chicago. “That’s the biological program we have.”

In a study published Dec. 7 in Science, Mason and University of Chicago psychologists Jean Decety and Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal describe their rat empathy-testing apparatus: An enclosure into which pairs of rats were placed, with one roaming free and the other restrained inside a plastic tube. It could only be opened from the outside, which is exactly what the free rats did — again and again and again, seemingly in response to their trapped companions’ distress.

The experiment built on research conducted several years ago by geneticist Jeff Mogil at McGill University, where mice were shown capable of “emotional contagion” — a slightly scary-sounding term denoting a tendency to become upset when cagemates were in pain. This might not seem surprising, but anecdotes from wild animal observations don’t pass academic scrutiny, and it hadn’t before been shown in captive mice. It hinted at unexpectedly sophisticated cognition: Mice were supposed to feel pain, but not each other’s, at least not outside children’s stories.

At the time, ethologist Frans de Waal of Emory University, whose work has helped redefine what’s known scientifically about thoughts and feelings in chimpanzees and dolphins and elephants, said Mogil’s experiment “justifies speaking of ‘empathy’” — the ability to both put oneself in the shoes, or paws, of another, and to become emotionally involved in their situation. Sure, mice almost certainly weren’t so empathic as humans, but maybe they had the seeds of it. Maybe empathy wasn’t the result of some high-powered cognitive process, as most biologists and psychologists preferred to think, but a relatively simple phenomenon.

Wrote de Waal in Scientific American, “This mouse experiment suggests that the emotional component of this process is at least as old as the mammals and runs deep within us.”

Still, it was hard to know what to think, and emotional contagion didn’t equal empathy. Maybe the mice were simply fearful for themselves. But the possibility was open for investigation. And around the same time as the McGill studies, Bartal — then researching cancer in Israel — noticed rats at her lab becoming distressed when surgeries were performed on other rats. She couldn’t shake the feeling that empathy was involved. When she read about a rat bringing food to a trapped rat, she again thought about empathy.

Bartal went to the University of Chicago, where she joined with Decety, a leading scholar on empathy and prosocial behavior, and Mason, who’d been intrigued by Mogil’s work. Together they designed the new study — and not only did they find what might be empathy, but the rats acted on it.

Once rats learned to free their trapped and agitated partners, they did so almost immediately in trial after trial. The behavior was clearly deliberate. When the restrainer was empty, rats ignored it. When stuffed rats were restrained, the rats ignored them. “It’s compelling evidence that it’s the distress of the trapped cagemate motivating this helping behavior,” said Mason. “It is a huge leap up to use emotional contagion to actually do something, to actually help another individual.”

To make sure the rats weren’t responding to some immediate social reward — a rat version of a thank-you hug — the researchers tweaked the apparatus so that trapped rats were released into a separate cage. Again, the rats freed each other. When given the opportunity to eat chocolate treats first, rats were as likely to release their companions first, and even shared the chocolate with them.

“Empathy is a truly powerful motivator, on a par with the desire for chocolate!” said de Waal, who was not involved in the new study.

According to de Waal, the results “show for the first time that rodents are not just affected by the emotions of others, but that empathy motivates altruism.” He believes the rats responded to an instinctive urge to make their compatriots feel better, just as humans and chimpanzees and some cetaceans do. “The mechanism must ancient,” said de Waal.

However, the researchers stopped short of ascribing the results to a conclusive display of empathy. It’s possible the rats were less concerned with alleviating the suffering of brethren than soothing their own upset feelings. Perhaps the trapped rats’ distress calls were simply loud and annoying, and the free rats wanted to quiet them. One potentially important experimental condition — the opportunity for free rats to simply leave — wasn’t tested.

“The reservation I have is that it’s very difficult to demonstrate empathy. You have to show that the animal is putting itself in another’s shoes, and I’m not sure that’s demonstrated here,” said Joshua Plotnik, an Emory University psychologist and collaborator with de Waal. But Plotnik still called the observations “very exciting.”

According to Mason, further tests are planned in which rats’ stress responses will be damped by drugs. If a rat feels no distress itself but still frees a trapped companion, or if a trapped rat expresses no distress but is still rescued, empathy will seem more likely. “We can figure this question out. It’s completely tractable,” said Mason. “And this experimental model is unbelievably easy to set up. It’s our fervent hope this model will be used by many people to look at helping behavior.”

Cognitive mechanisms thought to underlie empathy and helpfulness could be tested, Mason said. So could the effects of personality traits, sex differences — females rats seemed more helpful, which tracks with studies of chimps and humans — or genetic and environmental variables. Indeed, the tests needn’t be restricted to rats, but could involve any species amenable to captivity.

For Bartal, whether rats were motivated by their companions’ distress or their own is less interesting than the simple fact they responded at all. “The bottom line here is that nature is very smart. Nature made it rewarding for us to end the suffering of another,” she said.

While the researchers didn’t discuss mechanisms underlying the possible empathy, Bartal and de Waal suspect it’s linked to the lengthy care and nursing provided, as in all mammals, by mother rats. “Mammals that need nurture and care after they’re born would require some form of empathic connection between mother and offspring,” Bartal said. Sociality could be another important factor. Rats live in large family groups with complex hierarchies, and empathy is especially important in social settings.

Rats also share basic neurological features, such as a highly developed limbic system and various hormones and neurotransmitters, with all other mammals. These could provide a common ancestral origin for empathy, said Bartal, or evolution could have shaped them independently in converging ways. All roads could lead to empathy.

Of course, mammals don’t have a monopoly on intelligence or sociality or maternal care. Octopi are extraordinarily smart. So are many birds, which also care for their young and can live in large colonies. The seeds of empathy, if that’s what the rats have, could be scattered widely. “Nature has an interesting way of using different structures for similar functions,” said Bartal.

Citation: “Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats.” By Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, Jean Decety, Peggy Mason. Science, Vol. 334 Issue 6061, Dec. 9, 2011.

Pictures: "Lost" Leopard—And Poachers—Seen in Afghanistan

From National Geographic

Photograph courtesy WCS Afghanistan Program

This cat's out of the bag—a camera trap recently captured a Persian leopard in Afghanistan's central highlands, where the big cat had been thought locally extinct.

The newly released photographs, taken in the fall, include this September shot of an adult leopard investigating the camera, "appearing to threaten it with canines exposed," according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, which helped set up the camera traps. The images are "indisputable proof" that the big cat is hanging on in the region, the group said.

The camera traps also captured dozens of pictures of other wildlife species, including lynx, wild cats, wolves, red foxes, and stone martens.

"To see such a varied array of wildlife after we have endured so much conflict gives us hope for Afghanistan's future," Mostapha Zaher, director general of Afghanistan's National Environmental Protection Agency, said in a statement.

"Intact ecosystems represent a foundation for our country's reconstruction and development. This is also our heritage, our natural resources, our fauna and flora. It is incumbent upon all of us to conserve and protect our environment and hand it over to the next generation of the citizens of Afghanistan."

Scientists a step closer to cloning mammoth

from Japantimes

The thighbone of a mammoth found in August in Siberia contains well-preserved marrow, increasing the chances of cloning one of the extinct beasts, Japanese and Russian scientists confirmed recently.

The teams from the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum in eastern Russia and Kinki University's graduate school in biology-oriented science and technology will launch full-fledged joint research next year to clone the giant mammal, which is believed to have become extinct about 10,000 years ago, they said.

By transplanting nuclei taken from the marrow cells into elephant egg cells whose nuclei have been removed through a cloning technique, embryos with a mammoth gene could be produced and planted into elephant wombs, as the two species are close relatives, they said.

Securing nuclei with an undamaged gene is essential for the nucleus transplantation technique, but doing so from mammoths is extremely difficult and scientists have been trying to reproduce a mammoth since the late 1990s, they said.

In the Sakha Republic, global warming has thawed its almost permanently frozen ground, leading to numerous discoveries of frozen mammoths. But cell nuclei are usually damaged or have not been kept in a frozen state even when they have been found in a good overall condition, a Russian museum official said.

This time, however, there is a high likelihood that biologically active nuclei can be extracted as the frozen marrow found when museum scientists cut open the thighbone Nov. 13 was fresh and in excellent condition, according to the official. The bone was found near Batagay in northern Sakha.

The technique for extracting nuclei, meanwhile, has improved dramatically in the past few years and some undamaged nuclei have been successfully taken from badly preserved mammoth tissue fragments, albeit at low rates, said the Kinki University team based in Osaka Prefecture.

The museum, located in the republic's capital, Yakutsk, soon notified the Japanese side, with which it has had close ties through joint research since 1997, including professor Akira Iritani and associate professor Hiromi Kato.

Iritani confirmed that the outstanding condition of the marrow has increased the chances of cloning a mammoth, and said the Japanese team will try to obtain elephant eggs for the research project, although he added this would not be easy.

holy shit: Engineered Avian Flu Could Kill Half the World’s Humans

Thanks to Zoran A for the link!

from sciencemag

Scientists Brace for Media Storm Around Controversial Flu Studies
by Martin Enserink

Locked up in the bowels of the medical faculty building here and accessible to only a handful of scientists lies a man-made flu virus that could change world history if it were ever set free.

The virus is an H5N1 avian influenza strain that has been genetically altered and is now easily transmissible between ferrets, the animals that most closely mimic the human response to flu. Scientists believe it's likely that the pathogen, if it emerged in nature or were released, would trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with many millions of deaths.

In a 17th floor office in the same building, virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center calmly explains why his team created what he says is "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make"—and why he wants to publish a paper describing how they did it. Fouchier is also bracing for a media storm. After he talked to ScienceInsider yesterday, he had an appointment with an institutional press officer to chart a communication strategy.

Fouchier's paper is one of two studies that have triggered an intense debate about the limits of scientific freedom and that could portend changes in the way U.S. researchers handle so-called dual-use research: studies that have a potential public health benefit but could also be useful for nefarious purposes like biowarfare or bioterrorism.

The other study—also on H5N1, and with comparable results—was done by a team led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Tokyo, several scientists told ScienceInsider. (Kawaoka did not respond to interview requests.) Both studies have been submitted for publication, and both are currently under review by the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), which on a few previous occasions has been asked by scientists or journals to review papers that caused worries.

NSABB chair Paul Keim, a microbial geneticist, says he cannot discuss specific studies but confirms that the board has "worked very hard and very intensely for several weeks on studies about H5N1 transmissibility in mammals." The group plans to issue a public statement soon, says Keim, and is likely to issue additional recommendations about this type of research. "We'll have a lot to say," he says.

"I can't think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one," adds Keim, who has worked on anthrax for many years. "I don't think anthrax is scary at all compared to this."

Some scientists say that's reason enough not to do such research. The virus could escape from the lab, or bioterrorists or rogue nations could use the published results to fashion a bioweapon with the potential for mass destruction, they say. "This work should never have been done," says Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute who has a strong interest in biosecurity issues.

The research by the Kawaoka and Fouchier teams set out to answer a question that has long puzzled scientists: Does H5N1, which rarely causes human disease, have the potential to trigger a pandemic? The virus has decimated poultry flocks on three continents but has caused fewer than 600 known cases of flu in humans since it emerged in Asia in 1997, although those rare human cases are often fatal. Because the virus spreads very inefficiently between humans it has been unable to set off a chain reaction and circle the globe.

Some scientists think the virus is probably unable to trigger a pandemic, because adapting to a human host would likely make it unable to reproduce. Some also believe the virus would need to reshuffle its genes with a human strain, a process called reassortment, that some believe is most likely to occur in pigs, which host both human and avian strains. Based on past experience, some scientists have also argued that flu pandemics can only be caused by H1, H2, and H3 viruses, which have been replaced by each other in the human population every so many decades—but not by H5.

Fouchier says his study shows all of that to be wrong.

Although he declined to discuss details of the research because the paper is still under review, Fouchier confirmed the details given in news stories in New Scientist and Scientific American about a September meeting in Malta where he first presented the study. Those stories describe how Fouchier initially tried to make the virus more transmissible by making specific changes to its genome, using a process called reverse genetics; when that failed, he passed the virus from one ferret to another multiple times, a low-tech and time-honored method of making a pathogen adapt to a new host.

After 10 generations, the virus had become "airborne": Healthy ferrets became infected simply by being housed in a cage next to a sick one. The airborne strain had five mutations in two genes, each of which have already been found in nature, Fouchier says; just never all at once in the same strain.

Ferrets aren't humans, but in studies to date, any influenza strain that has been able to pass among ferrets has also been transmissible among humans, and vice versa, says Fouchier: "That could be different this time, but I wouldn't bet any money on it."

The specter of an H5N1 pandemic keeps flu scientists up at night because of the virus's power to kill. Of the known cases so far, more than half were fatal. The real case-fatality rate is probably lower because an unknown number of milder cases are never diagnosed and reported, but scientists agree that the virus is vicious. Based on Fouchier's talk in Malta, New Scientist reported that the strain created by the Rotterdam team is just as lethal to ferrets as the original one.

"These studies are very important," says biodefense and flu expert Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. The researchers "have the full support of the influenza community," Osterholm says, because there are potential benefits for public health. For instance, the results show that those downplaying the risks of an H5N1 pandemic should think again, he says.

Knowing the exact mutations that make the virus transmissible also enables scientists to look for them in the field and take more aggressive control measures when one or more show up, adds Fouchier. The study also enables researchers to test whether H5N1 vaccines and antiviral drugs would work against the new strain.

Fouchier says he consulted widely within the Netherlands before submitting his manuscript for publication. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funded the work, has agreed to the publication, says Fouchier, including officials at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (NIH declined to answer questions for this story.) Now, Fouchier is eagerly waiting for NSABB's judgment.

Osterholm says he can't discuss details of the papers because he's an NSABB member. But he says it should be possible to omit certain key details from controversial papers and make them available to people who really need to know. "We don't want to give bad guys a road map on how to make bad bugs really bad," he says.

But some scientists say the board's debate comes far too late, because the studies have been done and the papers are written. "This is a good example of the need for a robust and independent system of PRIOR review and approval of potentially dangerous experiments," retired arms control researcher Mark Wheelis of the University of California, Davis, wrote to ScienceInsider in an e-mail. "Blocking publication may provide some small increment of safety, but it will be very modest compared to the benefits of not doing the work in the first place."

Scientists have long discussed whether to have mandatory reviews of dual-use studies before they begin, and given the global risks, some have even argued for some international risk assessment system for pandemic viruses. For instance, a proposal by four researchers from the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland would have classified Fouchier's work as an "activity of extreme concern" that would have required international pre-approval.

But NSABB advised against such mandatory systems in 2007, and most countries don't have formal mechanisms in place to review studies before they start. (In the United States, it's "recommended" that researchers ask an institutional review board for advice if they think a study raises concerns.) Fouchier's study was greenlighted in advance by the Dutch Commission on Genetic Modification (COGEM), but that only means the panel is satisfied with safety procedures at Fouchier's lab, explains chair Bastiaan Zoeteman; it's not COGEM's job to decide whether a study is desirable. NIH didn't give the funding proposal a special review either, says Fouchier.

"The creation of a pandemic virus has been the classical example of dual-use research of concern the past decade," says Ebright. "It's remarkable that the NSABB is discussing it in 2011."

Keim agrees about the need for reviews up front. "The process of identifying dual use of concern is something that should start at the very first glimmer of an experiment," he says. "You shouldn't wait until you have submitted a paper before you decide it's dangerous. Scientists and institutions and funding agencies should be looking at this. The journals and the journals' reviewers should be the last resort."

NSABB does not have the power to prevent the publication of papers, but it could ask journals not to publish. Even Ebright, however, says he's against efforts to ban the publication of the studies now that they have been done. "You cannot post hoc suppress work that was done and completed in a nonclassified context," he says. "The scientific community would not stand for that."

"Teddy Bear," the porcupine, doesn't like to share...

BBC Wildlife Camera-trap Photo of the Year 2011: The Winners

From from discoverwildlife.com

Congrats to Jojo Head for her elephant snap from Loango, Gabon!

Sex With Animals Linked to Penile Cancer

From LiveScience
by Jennifer Abbasi

For many people, bestiality is a bad joke, but for some it could be a matter of life or death, according to a new study finding that men who had sex with animals in their lifetimes were twice as likely to develop cancer of the penis as others.

The study of 492 men from rural Brazil found that 35 percent of study participants, who ranged from 18 to 80 years old and included both penile cancer patients and healthy men, reported having sex with animals (SWA) in their lifetimes. A team of urologists from centers around Brazil co-authored the paper, which looked at risk factors for penile cancer in men who had visited 16 urology and oncology centers in 12 Brazilian cities. In addition to SWA, three other risk factors for penile cancer were found: smoking, the presence of premalignant lesions on the penis and phimosis, a condition where the foreskin cannot be retracted over the penis.

Men who had sex with animals also reported a higher incidence of sexually transmitted diseases.

Of the 118 penile cancer patients, 45 percent reported having sex with animals, compared with 32 percent of healthy men, who visited the medical centers for benign conditions, check-ups or cancer prevention. Fifty-nine percent of men who had sex with animals did so for one to five years, while 21 percent continued the behavior, also known as zoophilia, for more than five years. The subjects reported a variety of frequencies for their sex acts, ranging from monthly to daily. [

The researchers found no association between penile cancer and the number of animals the men used over time, the species (which included mares, cows, pigs and chickens, among other animals) or the number of other men who also participated. However, the higher rate of reported sexually transmitted diseases in men who had sex with animals could be a result of group sex, said lead author Stênio de Cássio Zequi, a urologist inSão Paulo. More than 30 percent of subjects practiced SWA in groups.

Thirty U.S. states, under their animal cruelty legislation, have enacted laws that prohibit sexual contact between humans and animals, according to Michigan State University College of Law.

Theorizing a causal role
Sex with animals could be as ancient as sex itself. "Since time immemorial, this habit has been described in folk music, theater, jokes and oral traditions," Zequi told LiveScience. "In some antique civilizations there were temples or rituals designated for SWA practices." Yet SWA is underrepresented in scientific literature, and the new study is the first to link the practice to male genital cancers. Penile cancer accounts for up to 10 percent of cancers in men in Asia, Africa and South America, although it is rare in the U.S.

Micro-injuries to the penis are a well-recognized risk factor for the development of penile cancer. Such physical trauma could explain how sex with animals causes the cancer.

"We think that the intense and long-term SWA practice could produce micro-traumas in the human penile tissue," Zequi said. "The genital mucus membranes of animals could have different characteristics from human genitalia, and the animals' secretions are probably different from human fluids. Perhaps animal tissues are less soft than ours, and non-human secretions would be toxic for us," he explained.

Zequi theorizes that micro-lesions caused by this toxicity could facilitate the action of some yet unrecognized microorganism during contact between different mammalian species.

Tobias Köhler, a urologist at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine who was not involved in the research, said the study was rigorous. "It adds to our knowledge of cancer prevention and gives us epidemiological data we never really had before on sex with animals.”

Köhler, who specializes in sexual medicine, speculates that the friction during SWA causes micro-lesions. "The vagina in humans has moisturizing properties, which prevent penile injury. With animals, you're at higher risk for micro-trauma, like cuts and scratches. And then whatever pathogens are there, like bacteria and viruses, are more likely to cause a problem."

Köhler said it's "absolutely plausible" that microorganisms present during sex with animals could cause penile cancer, citing the fact that human papilloma virus (HPV) causes cervical and penile cancer.

He postulated that the lifestyle of men who have sex with animals could also be a factor. "The study reported that these men also have more sex with prostitutes," Köhler said. "Are they using condoms when they have sex with people? Are they engaging in higher infectious-risk anal intercourse with people?"

However, Zequi said that SWA remained as a significant risk factor for penile cancer in the analysis, independent of lifestyle choices.

Circumcision also seems to play an important role in the development of penile cancer in men who have sex with animals. In global populations where the foreskin is removed soon after birth, the rates of penile malignancies are near zero. Uncircumcised men may develop more micro-traumas during sex, according to one theory on why circumcision protects against cancer. Smegma, the white secretion that collects around the glans of the penis in uncircumcised men, is composed of fatty acids that have been shown to be highly carcinogenic, and could also help to explain the increased risk. [5 Myths About the Male Body]

"As the majority of subjects in our study were uncircumcised, or were circumcised later, this may have contributed to the incidence of penile cancer," Zequi said. "I have no doubt that when both the conditions are present in [the] same man, the risks are multiplied by each other, configuring the most unfavorable scenario andthe highest risk for this cancer," he said, referring to both an uncircumcised penis and incidence of sex with animals.

Not just a rural problem
The subjects recruited from the study all grew up in rural areas of Brazil. The researchers wrote that they chose this population to investigate because sex with animals is common in rural areas with high rates of penile cancer, and a connection seemed plausible. In fact, Zequi said he was not surprised that 35 percent of participants had had sex with animals.

"We know that in rural zones of our country, and probably worldwide, young men have sexual experiences with domestic animals," he said. Most of the subjects reported that they stopped having sex with animals when they began having sex with people.

Men who have sex with animals in developing countries are usually poor and illiterate, with little or no access to hygiene, health care or the Internet, Zequi said. The opposite is true in developed countries such as the U.S., where SWA seems to occur in the educated population.

A study published in in the Archives of Sexual behavior in 2003 examined the demographics of 114 self-defined zoophiles in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Europe. An online survey revealed that 36 percent lived in large cities and 83 percent were either college graduates or had completed some college. Forty-five percent of the respondents worked in informatics or technology, and some of them earned high incomes.

"SWA is not a sexual behavior limited only for poor rural populations," Zequi said. "It is actually a growing health concern today. Just give a few clicks on the search sites on the Internet and you'll come across numerous 'zoo' sites or virtual communities focused on bestiality, many of which are pornographic and sometimes with degrading images." Zequi wants men (and women) who have sex with animals to know that the practice could be hazardous to their health, and he wants clinicians to spread the word to at-risk populations.

Köhler agreed, saying, "From a penile cancer prevention point of view, SWA should be discouraged based on the results of this study." He recommended standard safety precautions with any type of high-risk sexual intercourse: Wear a condom.

The new study was published online Oct. 24 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

--
REFERENCE
Zequi SC, Guimarães GC, da Fonseca FP, Ferreira U, de Matheus WE, Reis LO, Aita GA, Glina S, Fanni VSS, Perez MDC, Guidoni LRM, Ortiz V, Nogueira L, Rocha LCA, Cuck G, da Costa WH, Moniz RR, Dantas Jr. JH, Soares FA, and Lopes A. Sex with animals (SWA): Behavioral characteristics and possible association with penile cancer. A multicenter study. The Journal of Sexual Medicine DOI: 10.1111/j.1743-6109.2011.02512.x

ABSTRACT
Introduction.  Zoophilia has been known for a long time but, underreported in the medical literature, is likely a risk factor for human urological diseases.

Aim.  To investigate the behavioral characteristics of sex with animals (SWA) and its associations with penile cancer (PC) in a case-control study.

Methods.  A questionnaire about personal and sexual habits was completed in interviews of 118 PC patients and 374 controls (healthy men) recruited between 2009 and 2010 from 16 urology and oncology centers.

Main Outcome Measures.  SWA rates, geographic distribution, duration, frequency, animals involved, and behavioral habits were investigated and used to estimate the odds of SWA as a PC risk factor.

Results.  SWA was reported by 171 (34.8%) subjects, 44.9% of PC patients and 31.6% of controls (P < 0.008). The mean ages at first and last SWA episode were 13.5 years (standard deviation [SD] 4.4 years) and 17.1 years (SD 5.3 years), respectively. Subjects who reported SWA also reported more venereal diseases (P < 0.001) and sex with prostitutes (P < 0.001), and were more likely to have had more than 10 lifetime sexual partners (P < 0.001) than those who did not report SWA. SWA with a group of men was reported by 29.8% of subjects and SWA alone was reported by 70.2%. Several animals were used by 62% of subjects, and 38% always used the same animal. The frequency of SWA included single (14%), weekly or more (39.5%), and monthly episodes (15%). Univariate analysis identified phimosis, penile premalignancies, smoking, nonwhite race, sex with prostitutes, and SWA as PC risk factors. Phimosis, premalignant lesions, smoking, and SWA remained as risk factors in multivariate analysis. However, SWA did not impact the clinicopathological outcomes of PC.

Conclusion.  SWA is a risk factor for PC and may be associated with venereal diseases. New studies are required in other populations to test other possible nosological links with SWA.

Swede shocked by backyard elk 'threesome'

the best part of this article is how its written in a scandalous tone....Thanks to Alberto A for the link - MA

From the local.se

A man in western Sweden was greeted by an unusual sight on Wednesday morning when he saw three elk engaged in what appeared to be group sex in his backyard.

“I had just gone out on the balcony to get some fresh air,” Peter Lundgren, a 43-year-old marketing manager from Lindome, south of Gothenburg, told The Local.

“They were eating apples and then suddenly they assumed the position.”

Lundgren quickly grabbed his camera to document the young male elk mounting an older female elk which in turn appeared to be sniffing or licking the rear end of another young male elk.

He explained that elk are a common sight in his neighbourhood, as the large beasts frequently roam from nearby wooded areas through people's yards.

While he's used to seeing elk get tipsy from eating fermented apples, Lundgren said he was wholly unprepared to have a front row seat at an elk sex show taking place in his backyard.

“I'd never seen anything like it. Not with elk, at least,” he said.

Pär Grängstedt, a researcher at the Grimsö research station in central Sweden, confirmed that it's “extremely rare” to see elk exhibit mating behaviour in a residential area.

“As elk live in the woods, they usually mate in the woods,” he said.

The attempted elk intercourse witnessed by Lundgren is all the more unusual, according to Grängstedt, because the elk mating season ended in early October.

He added, however, that it's not unusual for elk to have sex while others look on.

“Usually there are several males in the area competing to be with the in-heat female. The strongest one usually wins, and the others are left to watch,” he said.

“It's quite normal behaviour.”

While Lundgren explained that it didn't appear the frisky young male elk was able to fully consummate his mating attempt with the older female, Grängstedt said there can be little doubt about his intentions.

“Elk don't mount one another just for the heck of it like some other animals,” he said.

Grängstedt theorized that the young male may have been rebuffed due to a lack of experience, choosing both the wrong time and place to fulfill his lustful desires.

“An older bull would never try to mount a cow in a wide-open residential backyard at this time of year,” he said.

How Do Giant Pandas Survive on Bamboo?

Panda poop held clues to how bears break down plant fibers, study says.
From National Geographic
by RACHEL KAUFMAN

A new analysis of panda poop has finally answered an age-old question: How do giant pandas survive on a diet that's 99 percent bamboo when they have the guts of carnivores?

Plant-eating animals tend to have longer intestines to aid in digesting fibrous material, a trait the black-and-white bears lack.

What's more, when the giant panda's genome was sequenced in 2009, scientists found that the creature lacks the genes for any known enzymes that would help break down cellulose, the plant fibers found in bamboo and other grasses.

This led researchers to speculate that panda intestines must have cellulose-munching bacteria that play a role in digestion. But previous attempts to find such bacteria in panda guts had failed.

The new study looked at gene sequences in the droppings from seven wild and eight captive giant pandas—a much bigger sample than what was used in previous panda-poop studies, said study leader Fuwen Wei, of the Chinese Academy of Science's Institute of Zoology in Beijing.

Wei and colleagues found that pandas' digestive tracts do in fact contain bacteria similar to those in the intestines of herbivores.

Thirteen of the bacteria species that the team identified are from a family known to break down cellulose, but seven of those species are unique to pandas.

"We think this may be caused by different diet, the unique inner habitat of the gut, or the unique phylogenetic position of their host," since pandas are on a different branch of the tree of life than most herbivores, Wei said.

Humans Drove Pandas to Bamboo?
Even with help from gut bugs, pandas don't derive much nutrition from bamboo—a panda digests just 17 percent of the 20 to 30 pounds (9 to 14 kilograms) of dry food it eats each day. This explains why pandas also evolved a sluggish, energy-conserving lifestyle.

So how and why did pandas became plant-eaters in the first place?

Some scientists theorize that, as the ancient human population increased, pandas were pushed into higher altitudes. The animals then adopted a bamboo diet so they wouldn't compete for prey with other meat-eaters, such as Asiatic black bears, in their new homes, said Nicole MacCorkle, a panda keeper at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

Pandas will eat meat if it's offered to them, MacCorkle added, but they won't actively hunt for it.

Human Sex is Boring

from Roxy Drew


for more go to Roxy Drew

Roa's work - large scale animal-themed street art

Go here and make sure to check out all the pages of photos - thanks to Caro D for the link!

Friday morning LOL - Cat and Seagull