River in tiny country of Andorra dyed bright green during investigation

Inhabitants of the microstate of Andorra on the mountainous Spanish-French borders spent much of Thursday perturbed as the color of one of their rivers turned emerald green.

The government of Andorra said in a statement that the Valira river had been stained on purpose with a harmless dye as part of an investigation into how the source of a regional spring was contaminated a year ago, leading to the closure of a bottling plant.

Source: EFE

New Zealand authorities fear hundreds of whale corpses could explode

The New Zealand authorities on Monday expressed fears that the bodies of about 300 pilot whales stranded on the South Island of the country could explode due to the gases inside the cetaceans.

A group of people working in Golden Bay, where part of the animals beached Thursday, are making holes as an escape valve on the lifeless remains of marine mammals in order to avoid the explosion of viscera, New Zealand's Department of Conservation spokesperson Andrew Lamason said.

Source: EFE

Your oldest ancestor was really weird and had a big mouth

Don't take this the wrong way, but your oldest ancestor was not exactly a beauty.

Scientists on Monday said a tiny marine creature from China that wriggled in the seabed mud about 540 million years ago may be the earliest-known animal in the lengthy evolutionary path that eventually led to humans. It was a weird-looking beastie with a bag-like body and, for its size, a really big mouth.

University of Cambridge paleontologist Simon Conway Morris noted that humans, who appeared a relatively recent 200,000 years ago, have a series of "evolutionarily deeper ancestors" than monkeys and apes. That point is exemplified by the unique-looking creature called Saccorhytus, whose name means wrinkled sack.

"And is not beauty in the eye of the beholder?" Conway Morris asked.

Saccorhytus, measuring about four-hundredths of an inch (1 millimeter), appears to be the most primitive member of the broad animal group called deuterostomes.

This group includes vertebrates - fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals including people - as well as animals called echinoderms including starfish and sea urchins and obscure creatures called hemichordates including acorn worms.

Saccorhytus lived during the Cambrian Period, a time of exceptional evolutionary experimentation. The primitive biological traits possessed by Saccorhytus helped pave the way for the various deuterostomes including vertebrates. Fish, the vanguard of the vertebrates, appeared roughly 10 to 15 million years after Saccorhytus.

"Saccorhytus now gives us remarkable insights into the very first stages of the evolution of a group that led to the fish, and ultimately, to us," paleontologist Degan Shu of China's Northwest University said in a statement provided by the University of Cambridge.

Fossils of about 40 Saccorhytus individuals, including a few superbly preserved specimens, were unearthed in Shaanxi Province in central China and look like miniscule black grains.

Saccorhytus probably lived between individual grains of sediment on the bottom of a shallow sea.

With its large mouth, it probably ate by simply engulfing food particles or smaller creatures whole. The researchers found no evidence that it had an anus, meaning that its waste material may have been expelled out of the mouth. Conway Morris said that process "from our perspective sounds rather unappealing."

It also boasted small conical structures on its body, which was covered with a thin, flexible skin. These structures may have allowed water it swallowed to escape, possibly the evolutionary forerunner of fish gills.

The research was published in the journal Nature.

Source: Reuters

World's oldest Panda in captivity dies in Hong Kong

The oldest giant panda living in captivity, 38-year-old Jia Jia, was euthanized in Hong Kong after rapidly deteriorating health over the past two weeks, her owners Ocean Park said on Sunday.

Jia Jia, whose name means "good", had been gifted to Hong Kong in 1999 along with another panda, to mark the second anniversary of the city's handover from former colonial ruler Britain.

In recent weeks Jia Jia's food consumption had sharply declined from over 10kg (22 pounds) to less than three kg (six pounds) per day and her average weight dropped from 71kg (156 pounds) to around 67kg (147 pounds).

"Over the past few days, she has been spending less time awake and showing no interest in food or fluids. Her condition became worse this morning. Jia Jia was not able to walk about without difficulties and spent the day laying down," Ocean Park said in a statement posted on its website.

"Her state became so debilitated that based on ethical reasons and in order to prevent suffering, veterinarians ... agreed to a humane euthanasia for Jia Jia."

Pandas are endangered because most of their natural habitat has been destroyed for timber, farming and construction, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

A Chinese government survey in 2014 estimated 1,864 pandas live in the wild, up 17 percent from 2003. They also have an exceptionally short breeding season, with females fertile for just 24 to 36 hours a year, says a nonprofit body, Pandas International.

Source: Reuters

Deepest aqueduct in South America growing crops in the desert

Two thousand meters under the Andean range, South America's deepest aqueduct carries water that will grow thousands of hectares of fruit and vegetables in one of Peru's most desertic and underdeveloped regions.

This new development project is set to grow exponentially as its first crops are exported to North America and Europe.

The aqueduct, one of the largest engineering works ever undertaken in Peru, travels 20 kilometers (12 miles) under the Andean mountains, diverting the waters of the Huancabamba river towards Peru's northern coast to irrigate 43,500 hectares of crops planted in the desert, as EFE witnessed during a field visit.

The Olmos irrigation project is located 900 km (560 mi) to the north of Lima and required a $600 million budget, the investment director of the project's concessionary company H20lmos Odebrecht Latinvest, Alfonso Pinillos, explained to EFE.

The tunnel, conceived some 90 years ago by British engineer Charles Sutton, was completed in 2012 to alleviate the hydric resources deficit in the Olmos dry valleys in the Lambayeque region, which sees an average annual rainfall of under 25 liters per square meter.

Pinillos explained that the tunnel perforation, with a 4.8-meter diameter borehole and a capacity of 42 cubic meters per second (1,483 cu.ft/s), was developed using a custom-made tunneler and assembled piece-by-piece inside the tunnel.

No women were involved in the boring phase as a sign of "respect" to an old Andean mining tradition so the Pachamama ("Mother Nature" in the Quechua language) "doesn't get jealous." Its progress had to deal with unexpected rock collapses that delayed work and increased costs.

Once completed, the water will flow from the Limon dam, a wall 330 m (1,082 ft) long and 43 m (141 ft) high built across the Huancabamba river to dam 30 million m3; the starting point of a 65-km (40-mi) route that will carry water to the crops.

After covering 20 km underground, the tunnel becomes a waterfall into the Lajas river, 30 km (18.6 mi) later it is collected by irrigation channels leading to another dam that then proceeds to distribute the water to the fields.

Lands once arid now boast 12,000 Ha of produce: Sugar cane, grapes, avocados, mangoes, asparagus and even cranberries, and now employs 4,000 workers, according to Odebrecht's irrigation concession development manager, Juan Carlos Urteaga.

Urteaga estimated the project will generate 30,000 direct and 100,000 indirect jobs once its 43,500 Ha are fully operational. This will also require building a nearby new city for 70,000 people.

The project covers 5,500 Ha of Valle Viejo de Olmos' farmlands and 38,000 Ha purchased by Peruvian, Chilean, US and European corporations with an estimated production of around $650 million.

Within the first group, a farming co-op (Asociación Agropecuaria La Juliana) told EFE they plan to ship their first 32.4-ton banana crop container to Holland, which is worth around $9,000.

Among the project's corporate partners, the Peruvian group Gloria has built a $300 million sugar refinery plant and Agro-Frusan, a US-Chilean joint-venture producing 2.5 tons (5,512 lbs) of cranberries daily for export to US and Canada.

This project will achieve full speed once the project's second phase is completed, increasing by four the Limon dam's capacity and doubling the irrigated surface to nearly 100,000 Ha.

Source: EFE

Moonlight sonata: fish's nocturnal 'singing' secrets revealed

In one of the marvels of nature, males of a fish species called the plainfin midshipman that dwells in Pacific coastal waters from Alaska to Baja California court females during breeding season using a nocturnal "love song" with an otherworldly sound.

Scientists have wondered what makes these fish sing only at night. A study published on Thursday provides the answer.

Laboratory experiments showed that the fish's vocalization, a low-frequency hum like a foghorn, is controlled by a light-driven internal clock and the hormone melatonin, known to govern sleep and wake cycles, researchers said.

"They are among the vocal champions of the marine environment along with whales and dolphins," said Cornell University professor of neurobiology and behavior Andrew Bass. "The production and hearing of vocal signals plays a central role in their social interactions and reproductive behavior."

The plainfin midshipman, up to 15 inches (38 cm) long, generally has an olive-brown color. Its name comes from rows of bioluminescent organs on its underside that reminded early observers of the buttons on a midshipman's uniform.

Males migrate during the late spring and summer from deep offshore sites into shallow intertidal waters, where they build nests beneath rocky shelters.

Throughout the night, they produce hums by vibrating a gas-filled bladder within their abdomen to attract females to their nests to spawn. One hum can last almost two hours. Neighboring males often hum together in a chorus.

Ni Feng, who led the study in Bass' lab at Cornell and now is a Yale University postdoctoral researcher, said the study, published in the journal Current Biology, involved wild-caught fish kept in rooms where lighting could be controlled.

In constant darkness, the fish hummed pretty much on schedule, thanks to their internal clock, or circadian rhythm.

In constant brightness, a condition that lowers melatonin production, humming was suppressed. When kept in constant light but given a melatonin-like substitute, they continued to hum, though at random times of the day.

Melatonin keeps day-active birds quiet at night and helps humans fall asleep but has the reverse effect in the midshipman fish.

People have not always known what to make of the midshipman's humming.

"In the early 1980s, a mysterious sound caused concern for houseboat residents of Sausalito Bay, California, who suspected the source might be the pumps of a nearby sewage plant, an underwater power line, some secret experiment by the Navy or maybe even extraterrestrials," Bass said.

"It turned out their houseboats were merely resonating with the 'love songs' of male midshipman fish."

Source: Reuters

A new colony to save African penguins

With their funny moves and elegant suit-like feather coats, African penguins are some of the most attractive sights for tourists on the South African coast.

But lack of food means this species is dying out, with only 25,000 pairs currently alive when 100 years ago there were over one million, an evironmental organization said Friday.

To avoid a continuous fall in numbers, conservationist organization Bird Life South Africa created an initiative to help foment colonies for the penguins on the continental coast, far away from the small islands that form their natural habitat.

"The African penguin only exists in South Africa and Namibia, so we have a global responsibility to protect it," said Christina Hagen, who works as a conservationist for Bird Life.

The initial phase of the project seeks to protect the little penguins from being devoured by leopards and gulls, a task which requires $5,400 in private donations for motion sensor cameras to detect the predators.

The cameras would also help collect information on the penguins' behavior and introduce mechanisms to distance them from carnivores.

"The reasons why the African penguin is in danger are all a consequence of human intervention, so I believe we have an ethical responsibility to fix the damage we've caused," said Hagen, adding that "most people don't even know they're endangered."

Every week, 23 African penguins die due to lack of food in the ocean, which many experts connect to climate change and over-fishing.

Source: EFE

Dancing dung beetles navigate with 'sky snapshot'

Scientists in Sweden found that the beetles capture the picture of the sky while dancing on a ball of manure.

As they roll away with their malodorous prize, the beetles compare the stored image with their current location.

The beetles' navigational skills could aid the development of driverless vehicles, the researchers suggest.

Previous studies have shown that dung beetles have an amazing ability to navigate by the light of the Milky Way.

This new research builds on that work and shows how the store and use the images of the sky inside their brains.

High rollers

There are many thousands of species of dung beetles all over the world, which thrive on steaming piles of animal waste.

Some of these creatures have evolved ways of grabbing and shaping dung into a ball and rapidly rolling it away from the scrum of competitors.

These beetles then bury the manure and use the balls as a food source and a nursery for their young.

Navigation, however, is critical to the whole enterprise and now scientists in Sweden have discovered new details about their extraordinary skills.

The researchers carried out their experiments in South Africa at a facility with an artificial sky where the team could control the amount of light and the location of celestial bodies.

They found that the beetles see many things that humans can't - including the spectral gradient of the sky and polarised light.

"Just using the Sun for example, if there's a cloud, the beetle would be lost," said Dr Basil El Jundi, from Lund University, who led the study.

"You need to add a lot of cues into the system to make it robust, and that is why they use as many celestial cues as possible."

According to the researchers, the beetle's dextrous dance on the smelly sphere is the key moment when the mental snapshot of the sky is taken.

"In that situation they scan the sky and take a mental image of what the sky looks like and when they start rolling they try to match the actual visual scenery of the sky with the mental image they have stored before. And that brings them away in a straight line," said Dr El Jundi.

Ants also store mental images when they navigate but only of their natural surroundings. The beetles, uniquely, use the sky.

Dr El Jundi says that what the team have learned about the way that dung beetles process information from the sky could have implications for the human development of self-driving vehicles.

"Based on these results you could create robots or algorithms that could be incorporated into autonomous vehicles that could navigate without cues that humans input into the system," he told BBC News.

Source: BBC

El Chichon eruption implicated in Mayan upheaval

A Dutch team has investigated ash fall deposits, finding the age of the materials to be a good match for the so-called Mayan "hiatus".

This was a time when the sophisticated central Americans experienced cultural upheaval and political instability.

They also abandoned many of their favoured lowland sites.

A sulphur spike in ice core records from the poles indicates there was a big eruption somewhere on Earth in AD 540 - right at the start of the multi-decade hiatus.

It must have been a major event to have left such a distinctive signature in the frozen layers, and very likely led to global climate impacts and severe environmental degradation in the region of the blast.
Previous research has offered up Ilopango in El Salvador as the culprit.

Radiocarbon dating of tree remains puts this volcano in the vicinity timewise - but not convincingly so, argues Kees Nooren from Utrecht University.

Instead, he is pointing the finger at El Chichon in southern Mexico, a case he has outlined here at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly.

His research centres on ash fall dispersed across what were the Mayan lowlands.

This tephra can be connected chemically to the 1,200m-high volcano. Samples have been collected from Lake Tuspan and the Usumacinta-Grijavala delta on the Mexican coast.

Using multiple techniques, not just radiocarbon, Mr Nooren tightly packs the ages of the ash fall around AD 540.

"We already had dates from proximal deposits near the volcano and now we have dates for distal deposits, and when you combine them you get a date of AD 546, plus or minus 16," he explained.
"So, we have a very narrow window, which means it is very likely there was a large eruption in 540."

El Chichon last let go in spectacular style in 1982, destroying local communities and killing 2,000 people.

It spewed vast quantities of sulphur dioxide and other particulates into the atmosphere.

The AD 540 eruption would have been much bigger, the Utrecht researcher said.

Whether El Chichon really is the source of the sulphur seen in the ice cores would require a chemical analysis that has yet to be done, commented Matthew Toohey from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany.

The best one can say at the moment is that the event was probably located in the tropics, he told BBC News.

Dr Toohey says there are actually two closely spaced signatures in the ice record, with the second occurring in AD 536. This event could be an eruption somewhere in North America, perhaps Alaska.

His interest is trying to model the climate disruption that stems from volcano blasts.

When he does this for the "double event" of AD 536 and 540, his simulations come out in good agreement with historical archives.

Tree ring data in northern Europe from this time indicates there was very strong cooling - something you might expect if large volumes of sulphate aerosols were dispersed across the globe.

Archaeological evidence and other information also speak to societal disruption, such as a run of poor harvests and outbreaks of plague.

Dr Toohey said his simulations suggested there was a reduction in average summer temperatures across Northern Europe of two degrees.

"We estimate that if you take these two eruptions together and look at their impact over a 10-year period, focusing on the Northern Hemisphere - then this double event would have been clearly the strongest volcanic forcer of climate of at least the last 1,200 years, probably more like 2,000 years."

Source: BBC

'Monster cattle-eating alligator' is shot in Florida

Professional hunter Lee Lightsey said the 15 ft (4.5m) beast was one of the biggest he had come across in 18 years and required a tractor to move it.

Mr Lightsey and hunting guide Blake Godwin discovered the alligator in cattle ponds while supervising a guided hunt on Saturday.

When the creature surfaced about 20ft (6m) away from them, they shot it.

"Although this animal is huge I was not that surprised it existed," Mr Lightsey said. "We have come across lots over the last 20 years that have been only a little smaller.

"But what really drew our attention to this animal was the fact that it seems to have been feasting on the cattle on my farm, because mutilated body parts were found in the water. It was a monster which needed to be removed."

Mr Lightsey's company arranges hunts for alligators, wild boar and turkey on the farm he owns for hunting trips.
The largest alligator previously killed was just over 13ft (4m) long.

He charges $10,000 (£7,060; €8,780) to kill an alligator larger than 13ft (4m) and $4,500 (£3,180; €3,955) to kill an alligator between 10ft and 12ft. The animals are mostly killed with a high-powered rifle.

"But always we kill them with the minimum of suffering without allowing them to be injured before they die," he said.

There are hundreds of alligators for hunters between 10ft and 13ft, he says, while animals longer than 13ft are only encountered about once a year.

Mr Lightsey has been commercially hunting alligators since he began "harvesting" them in 1988 and more than 5,000 alligators bigger than 1.5m have been killed since then.

American alligators inhabit the south-east of the US with Florida and Louisiana each reported to have a population of more than one million alligators each.

Southern Florida is reputed to be the only place in the world where both alligators and crocodiles live alongside each other in freshwater environments such as rivers, lakes and swamps.

Mr Lightsey says he plans to get the alligator stuffed while the meat will be donated to charity.

Source: BBC

Ash tree set for extinction in Europe

The trees are being killed off by the fungal disease ash-dieback along with an invasive beetle called the emerald ash borer.

According to the research, published in the Journal of Ecology, the British countryside will never look the same again.

The paper says that the ash will most likely be "eliminated" in Europe.

This could mirror the way Dutch elm disease largely wiped out the elm in the 1980s.

Ash trees are a key part of the treescape of Britain. You don't have to go to the countryside to see them. In and around towns and cities there are 2.2 million. In woodland, only the oak is more common.

However, according to a review led by Dr Peter Thomas of Keele University and published in the Journal of Ecology, "between the fungal disease ash dieback and a bright green beetle called the emerald ash borer, it is likely that almost all ash trees in Europe will be wiped out - just as the elm was largely eliminated by Dutch elm disease".

Ash dieback, also known as Chalara, is a disease that was first seen in Eastern Europe in 1992. It now affects more than 2 million sq km, from Scandinavia to Italy.

It was identified in England in 2012 in a consignment of imported infected trees. It has since spread from Norfolk and Suffolk to South Wales. Caused by the fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, it kills the leaves, then the branches, trunk and eventually the whole tree. It has the potential to destroy 95% of ash trees in the UK.

The emerald ash borer is a bright green beetle that, like ash dieback, is native to Asia. It's not yet in the UK but is spreading west from Moscow at a rate of 25 miles (41 km) a year and is thought to have reached Sweden.

The adult beetles feed on ash trees and cause little damage. However the larvae bore under the bark and in to the wood, killing the tree.

According to Dr Thomas: "Our European ash is very susceptible to the beetle. It is only a matter of time before it spreads across the rest of Europe - including Britain - and the beetle is set to become the biggest threat faced by ash in Europe, potentially far more serious than ash dieback."

This won't just change our landscape - it will have a severe impact on biodiversity. 1,000 species are associated with ash or ash woodland, including 12 types of bird, 55 mammals and 239 invertebrates.

Mr Thomas said, "Of these, over 100 species of lichens, fungi and insects are dependent upon the ash tree and are likely to decline or become extinct if the ash was gone.

"Some other trees such as alder, small-leaved lime and rowan can provide homes for some of these species... but if the ash went, the British countryside would never look the same again."

One small hope is that some cloned ash trees have shown resistance against the fungus. But that won't protect them against the beetle.

Source: BBC