Presumed Extinct Javan Elephants May Have Been Found Again - In Borneo

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080416223340.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 18, 2008) — The Borneo pygmy elephant may not be native to Borneo after all. Instead, the population could be the last survivors of the Javan elephant race – accidentally saved from extinction by the Sultan of Sulu centuries ago, a new publication suggests.
The origins of the pygmy elephants, found in a range extending from the north-east of the island into the Heart of Borneo, have long been shrouded in mystery. Their looks and behaviour differ from other Asian elephants and scientists have questioned why they never dispersed to other parts of the island.
But a new paper published supports a long-held local belief that the elephants were brought to Borneo centuries ago by the Sultan of Sulu, now in the Philippines, and later abandoned in the jungle. The Sulu elephants, in turn, are thought to have originated in Java.
Javan elephants became extinct some time in the period after Europeans arrived in South-East Asia. Elephants on Sulu, never considered native to the island, were hunted out in the 1800s.
“Elephants were shipped from place to place across Asia many hundreds of years ago, usually as gifts between rulers,” said Mr Shim Phyau Soon, a retired Malaysian forester whose ideas on the origins of the elephants partly inspired the current research. “It’s exciting to consider that the forest-dwelling Borneo elephants may be the last vestiges of a subspecies that went extinct on its native Java Island, in Indonesia, centuries ago.”
If the Borneo pygmy elephants are in fact elephants from Java, an island more than 1,200 km (800 miles) south of their current range, it could be the first known elephant translocation in history that has survived to modern times, providing scientists with critical data from a centuries-long experiment.
Scientists solved part of the mystery in 2003, when DNA testing by Columbia University and WWF ruled out the possibility that the Borneo elephants were from Sumatra or mainland Asia, where the other Asian subspecies are found, leaving either Borneo or Java as the most probable source.
The new paper, “Origins of the Elephants Elephas Maximus L. of Borneo,” published in this month’s Sarawak Museum Journal shows that there is no archaeological evidence of a long-term elephant presence on Borneo.
“Just one fertile female and one fertile male elephant, if left undisturbed in enough good habitat, could in theory end up as a population of 2,000 elephants within less than 300 years,” said Junaidi Payne of WWF, one of the paper’s co-authors. “And that may be what happened in practice here.”
There are perhaps just 1,000 of the elephants in the wild, mostly in the Malaysian state of Sabah. WWF satellite tracking has shown they prefer the same lowland habitat that is being increasingly cleared for timber rubber and palm oil plantations. Their possible origins in Java make them even more a conservation priority.
“If they came from Java, this fascinating story demonstrates the value of efforts to save even small populations of certain species, often thought to be doomed,” said Dr Christy Williams, coordinator of WWF’s Asian elephant and rhino programme. “It gives us the courage to propose such undertakings with the small remaining populations of critically endangered Sumatran rhinos and Javan rhinos, by translocating a few to better habitats to increase their numbers. It has worked for Africa’s southern white rhinos and Indian rhinos, and now we have seen it may have worked for the Javan elephant, too.”
Adapted from materials provided by World Wildlife Fund.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

World's Oldest Living Tree -- 9550 years old -- Discovered In Sweden

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080416104320.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2008) — The world's oldest recorded tree is a 9,550 year old spruce in the Dalarna province of Sweden. The spruce tree has shown to be a tenacious survivor that has endured by growing between erect trees and smaller bushes in pace with the dramatic climate changes over time.

For many years the spruce tree has been regarded as a relative newcomer in the Swedish mountain region. "Our results have shown the complete opposite, that the spruce is one of the oldest known trees in the mountain range," says Leif Kullman, Professor of Physical Geography at Umeå University.
A fascinating discovery was made under the crown of a spruce in Fulu Mountain in Dalarna. Scientists found four "generations" of spruce remains in the form of cones and wood produced from the highest grounds.
The discovery showed trees of 375, 5,660, 9,000 and 9,550 years old and everything displayed clear signs that they have the same genetic makeup as the trees above them. Since spruce trees can multiply with root penetrating braches, they can produce exact copies, or clones.
The tree now growing above the finding place and the wood pieces dating 9,550 years have the same genetic material. The actual has been tested by carbon-14 dating at a laboratory in Miami, Florida, USA.
Previously, pine trees in North America have been cited as the oldest at 4,000 to 5,000 years old.
In the Swedish mountains, from Lapland in the North to Dalarna in the South, scientists have found a cluster of around 20 spruces that are over 8,000 years old.
Although summers have been colder over the past 10,000 years, these trees have survived harsh weather conditions due to their ability to push out another trunk as the other one died. "The average increase in temperature during the summers over the past hundred years has risen one degree in the mountain areas," explains Leif Kullman.
Therefore, we can now see that these spruces have begun to straighten themselves out. There is also evidence that spruces are the species that can best give us insight about climate change.
The ability of spruces to survive harsh conditions also presents other questions for researchers.
Have the spruces actually migrated here during the Ice Age as seeds from the east 1,000 kilometres over the inland ice that that then covered Scandinavia? Do they really originate from the east, as taught in schools? "My research indicates that spruces have spent winters in places west or southwest of Norway where the climate was not as harsh in order to later quickly spread northerly along the ice-free coastal strip," says Leif Kullman.
"In some way they have also successfully found their way to the Swedish mountains."
The study has been carried out in cooperation with the County Administrative Boards in Jämtland and Dalarna.
Adapted from materials provided by Umeå University.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

Bikini Corals Recover From Atomic Blast, Although Some Species Missing

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080415101021.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2008) — Half a century after the last earth-shattering atomic blast shook the Pacific atoll of Bikini, the corals are flourishing again. Some coral species, however, appear to be locally extinct.

These are the findings of a remarkable investigation by an international team of scientists from Australia, Germany, Italy, Hawaii and the Marshall Islands. The expedition examined the diversity and abundance of marine life in the atoll.
One of the most interesting aspects is that the team dived into the vast Bravo Crater left in 1954 by the most powerful American atom bomb ever exploded (15 megatonnes - a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb). The Bravo bomb vapourised three islands, raised water temperatures to 55,000 degrees, shook islands 200 kilometers away and left a crater 2km wide and 73m deep.
After diving into the crater, Zoe Richards of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University says, “I didn’t know what to expect – some kind of moonscape perhaps. But it was incredible, huge matrices of branching Porites coral (up to 8 meters high) had established, creating thriving coral reef habitat. Throughout other parts of the lagoon it was awesome to see coral cover as high as 80 per cent and large tree-like branching coral formations with trunks 30cm thick. It was fascinating – I’ve never seen corals growing like trees outside of the Marshall Islands.
“The healthy condition of the coral at Bikini atoll today is proof of their resilience and ability to bounce back from massive disturbances, that is, if the reef is left undisturbed and there are healthy nearby reefs to source the recovery.”
However the research has also revealed a disturbingly high level of loss of coral species from the atoll. Compared with a famous study made before the atomic tests were carried out, the team established that 42 species were missing compared to the early 1950s. At least 28 of these species losses appear to be genuine local extinctions probably due to the 23 bombs that were exploded there from 1946-58, or the resulting radioactivity, increased nutrient levels and smothering from fine sediments.
“The missing corals are fragile lagoonal specialists – slender branching or leafy forms that you only find in the sheltered waters of a lagoon,” Zoe explains. While corals in general have shown resilience, Zoe adds that the coral biodiversity at Bikini Atoll has proven only partially resilient to the disturbances that have occurred there.
Maria Beger from the Commonwealth Research Facility for Applied Environmental Decision Analysis at The University of Queensland took a Geiger counter with her on the expedition.
“The ambient gamma radiation the residential island of Bikini atoll was fairly low – pretty much like the background radiation in an Australian city. However when I put the Geiger counter near a coconut, which accumulates radioactive material from the soil, it went berserk,” Maria remembers.
Extensive decontamination works have been carried out at Bikini atoll making it safe to visit, however local produce is unsafe to eat, and it is unlikely the Bikinian people will return to live on Bikini Atoll in the near future.
The coral survey was carried out at the request of the atoll’s local government.
For comparison the team also dived on neighbouring Rongelap Atoll, where no atomic tests were carried out directly although the atoll was contaminated by radioactive ash from the Bravo Bomb and local inhabitants were also evacuated and for the most part, have not returned. The marine environment at this Atoll was found to be in a pristine condition.
The team thinks that Rongelap Atoll is potentially seeding Bikini’s recovery, because it is the second largest atoll in the world with a huge amount of coral reef diversity and biomass and lies upstream from Bikini.
Zoe says that ironically, thanks to the bombs, Bikini Atoll represents a priceless laboratory showing how in the absence of ongoing stress, some corals have the capacity to recover from vast upheavals, which may contain valuable lessons for the management of reefs in other parts of the world including Australia.
“Apart from occasional forays of illegal shark, tuna and Napoleon Wrasse fishing, the reef is almost completely undisturbed to this day. There are very few local inhabitants and the divers who visit dive on shipwrecks, like the USS Saratoga, and not on the reef” says Maria.”
Because of its incredible history and current undisturbed character Bikini Atoll is now part of a larger project to have northern Marshall Island Atolls World Heritage listed. The expedition served to illustrate the tragic history of the Bikinian people is not entirely reflected below the surface because the reefs of Bikini are recovering to present themselves as havens of abundance to the marine life of the Northern Pacific Ocean.
The team’s report on Bikini corals surviving atom bombs appears in Elsevier’s Marine Pollution Bulletin No. 56, March 2008 page 5-3-1-515.
Adapted from materials provided by ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

Ancient Komodo Dragon Has Space-age Skull

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080414091357.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2008) — The fearsome Komodo dragon is the world's largest living lizard and can take very large animal prey: now a new international study has revealed how it can be such an efficient killing machine despite having a wimpy bite and a featherweight skull.

A member of the goanna family with ancestors dating back more than 100 million years, the dragon (Varanus komodoensis) uses a combination of 60 razor-sharp serrated teeth, powerful neck muscles and what researchers are calling a "space-frame" skull to butcher prey with awesome efficiency, the study found.
They note that the dragon -- inhabiting the central Indonesian islands of Komodo, Rinca, Flores, Gili Motang and Gili Dasami -- shares the feeding and dental characteristics of extinct dinosaurs, sharks and sabre-toothed cats. Scientists Karen Moreno and Stephen Wroe from the University of New South Wales have used a computer-based technique called Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to test the bite force and feeding mechanics of the predator. Their findings are to be published in the latest issue of the Journal of Anatomy.
Normally used in the analysis of trains, planes and cars, the technique allowed the team to "reverse engineer" nature's design to assess the mechanical forces that a Komodo skull can handle. "The Komodo has a featherweight, space-frame skull and bites like a wimp," according to Wroe, "but a combination of very clever engineering, and wickedly sharp teeth, allow it to do serious damage to even buffalo-sized prey.
"The Komodo displays a unique hold and pull-feeding technique," says Dr Wroe. "Its delicate skull differs greatly from most living terrestrial large prey specialists, but it's a precision instrument, beautifully optimised to make the most of its natural cranial and dental properties.
"Unlike most modern predators, Varanus komodoensis applies minimal input from the jaw muscles when killing and butchering prey. But it compensates using a series of actions controlled by its postcranial muscles. A particularly interesting feature of the skull's performance is that it reveals considerably lower overall stress when these additional forces driven by the neck are added to those of the jaw-closing muscles.
"This remarkable reduction in stress in response to additional force is facilitated partly by the shape of the bones, but also by the way bone of different strengths are arranged within the skull."
The Komodo dragon grows to an average length of two to three metres and weighing around 70 kilograms. The reptile's unusual size is attributed to island gigantism, since there are no other carnivorous mammals to fill the niche on the islands where they live. As a result of their size, these lizards are apex predators, dominating the ecosystems in which they live. Although Komodo dragons eat mostly carrion, they will also hunt and ambush prey including invertebrates, birds, and mammals.
Its saliva is frequently blood-tinged, because its teeth are almost completely covered by gingival tissue that is naturally lacerated during feeding. Discovered by Western scientists in 1910, the Komodo dragon's large size and fearsome reputation makes it a popular zoo exhibit. In the wild its total population is estimated at 4,000-5,000: its range has contracted due to human activities and it is listed as vulnerable by the IUCN.
Adapted from materials provided by University of New South Wales, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

Insects Evolved Radically Different Strategy To Smell

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080413161035.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2008) — Darwin's tree of life represents the path and estimates the time evolution took to get to the current diversity of life. Now, new findings suggest that this tree, an icon of evolution, may need to be redrawn. In research to be published in the April 13 advance online issue of Nature, researchers at Rockefeller University and the University of Tokyo have joined forces to reveal that insects have adopted a strategy to detect odors that is radically different from those of other organisms -- an unexpected and controversial finding that may dissolve a dominant ideology in the field.

Since 1991, researchers assumed that all vertebrates and invertebrates smell odors by using a complicated biological apparatus much like a Rube Goldberg device. For instance, someone pushing a doorbell would set off a series of elaborate, somewhat wacky, steps that culminate in the rather simple task of opening the door.
In the case of an insect's ability to smell, researchers believed that when molecules wafting in the air travel up the insect's nose, they latch onto a large protein (called a G-protein coupled odorant receptor) on the surface of the cell and set off a chain of similarly elaborate steps to open a molecular gate nearby, signaling the brain that an odor is present.
"It's that way in the nematode, it's that way in mammals, it's that way in every known vertebrate," says study co-author Leslie Vosshall, head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at Rockefeller University. "So it's actually unreasonable to think that insects use a different strategy to detect odors. But here, we show that insects have gotten rid of all this stuff in the middle and activate the 'gate' directly."
The gate, a doughnut-shaped protein called an ion channel, provides a safe pathway for ions to flow into a cell. When molecules bind to the odor-sensitive ion channel, the protein changes its shape much like a gate or door changes its conformation as it is opened and closed. Opened, it allows millions of ions to surge into the cell. Closed, it prohibits the activity of the ions from sending a signal to the brain that an odor is present.
At the University of Tokyo, Vosshall's colleague Kazushige Touhara and his lab members puffed molecules onto cells engineered to make insect olfactory receptors. They then measured how long it took for the ion channel to open and recorded their electrical movement as they surged inside the cell via the channel. The rush of electrical activity occurred too fast for a series of steps to be involved, says Vosshall. In addition, poisoning several proteins involved in the G-protein pathway didn't affect the ions or the ion channel, suggesting that G-protein signaling isn't primarily involved in insect smell.
Experiment after experiment, "the most consistent interpretation is that these are ion channels directly gated by odors," says Vosshall. "But the dominant thinking in the field may have reflected an experimental bias that aimed at proving a more elaborate scheme."
The ion channels don't resemble any known ion channel on Earth, says Vosshall. They are composed of two proteins that work in tandem with one another: an olfactory receptor and its coreceptor, Or83b. While the coreceptor is common to every ion channel, the olfactory receptor is unique. Together, they form the olfactory receptor complex. Vosshall and Touhara specifically show that this complex forms nonselective cation channels, meaning that they allow any ion to pass through the gate as long as it has a positive charge.
Touhara and Vosshall developed their ion channel hypothesis in parallel with Vosshall's work on DEET, a widely used chemical in bug spray that jams the receptor complex. This research, which was published in Science last month, also showed that DEET jams other proteins that have nothing to do with smell, including several different types of ion channels that play important roles in the human nervous system. What these radically different proteins have in common, though, is that they all specifically inhibit the influx of positively charged ions into the cell. "Now the curious result in the DEET paper showing that this insect repellent blocks insect olfactory receptors and unrelated ion channels makes sense," says Vosshall. "I am optimistic that we can come up with blockers specific for this very strange family of insect olfactory ion channels."
This research was supported in part by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health through the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative, the National Institutes of Health's U.S.-Japan Brain Research Collaborative Program and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science's Japan-U.S. Cooperative Science Program.
Adapted from materials provided by Rockefeller University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

First Lungless Frog Discovered

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080407123824.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 8, 2008) — Researchers have confirmed the first case of complete lunglessness in a frog, according to a report in the April 8th issue of Current Biology. The aquatic frog Barbourula kalimantanensis apparently gets all the oxygen it needs through its skin.
Previously known from only two specimens, two new populations of the aquatic frog were found by the team during a recent expedition to Indonesian Borneo.
"We knew that we would have to be very lucky just to find the frog," said David Bickford of the National University of Singapore. "People have been trying for 30 years. But when we did and I was doing the initial dissections -- right there in the field -- I have to say that I was very skeptical at first [that they would in fact lack lungs]. It just did not seem possible. We were all shocked when it turned out to be true for all the specimens we had from Kalimantan, Indonesia.
"The thing that struck me most then and now is that there are still major firsts (e.g., first lungless frog!) to be found out in the field," he added. "All you have to do is go a little ways beyond what people have done before, and -- voila!"
Of all tetrapods (animals with four limbs), lunglessness is only known to occur in amphibians. There are many lungless salamanders and a single species of caecilian, a limbless amphibian resembling an earthworm, known to science. Nevertheless, Bickford said, the complete loss of lungs is a particularly rare evolutionary event that has probably only occurred three times.
The discovery of lunglessness in a secretive Bornean frog supports the idea that lungs are a malleable trait in amphibians, which represent the evolutionary sister group to all other tetrapods, according to the researchers. Barboroula kalimantanensis lives in cold, fast-flowing water, they noted, so loss of lungs might be an adaptation to a combination of factors: a higher oxygen environment, the species's presumed low metabolic rate, severe flattening of their bodies that increases the surface area of their skin, and selection for negative buoyancy--meaning that the frogs would rather sink than float.
The researchers said that further studies of this remarkable frog may be hampered by the species' rarity and endangerment. They therefore strongly encourage conservation of the frogs' remaining habitats.
"This is an endangered frog -- that we know practically nothing about -- with an amazing ability to breathe entirely through its skin, whose future is being destroyed by illegal gold mining by people who are marginalized and have no other means of supporting themselves," Bickford said. "There are no simple answers to this problem."
The researchers include David Bickford, National University of Singapore, Singapore; Djoko Iskandar and Anggraini Barlian, of Institut Teknologi Bandung, Java, Indonesia.
Adapted from materials provided by Cell Press, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Fausto Intilla
www.oloscience.com

Photo-monitoring Whale Sharks: Largest Fish In The Sea Appear To Thrive Under Regulated Ecotourism

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071226003604.htm

ScienceDaily (Dec. 29, 2007) — Up to 20 meters long and weighing as much as 20 tons, its enormous size gives the whale shark (Rhincodon typus) its name. Known as the 'gentle giant' for its non-predatory behavior, this fish, with its broad, flattened head and minute teeth, eats tiny zooplankton, sieving them through a fine mesh of gill-rakers. Listed as a rare species, relatively little is known about whale sharks, which live in tropical and warm seas, including the western Atlantic and southern Pacific.

However, a new study combines computer-assisted photographic identification with ecotourism to study the rare species and suggests whale shark populations in Ningaloo, Western Australia are healthy. The study appears in the Ecological Society of America's January issue of Ecological Applications.
West Australian marine scientist Brad Norman (ECOCEAN/Murdoch University) began the study in 1995. Photographs were taken while swimming alongside each whale shark and photographing or video-taping the white lines and spots along the flanks of the animal. Norman teamed up with U.S. computer programmer Jason Holmberg (ECOCEAN, Portland, Oregon) and astronomer Zaven Arzoumanian (USRA/NASA, Greenbelt, Maryland) who adapted software originally used with the Hubble space telescope. The pattern-recognition software developed by Holmberg and Arzoumanian allowed the group to positively identify individual whale sharks. Like a human fingerprint, the speckles and stripes pattern on the skins of whale sharks are believed to be unique to each individual.
Ningaloo Reef, in Western Australia, is one of the best locations to find whale sharks, especially between April and June. The authors found that more whale sharks are returning to the northern area of Ningaloo Marine Park from season to season, suggesting the population is growing. In addition, they found that about two-thirds of the sharks were repeat visitors while one-third were sighted only once during the study period.
The authors say their study suggests that the management guidelines for whale shark ecotourism at Ningaloo appear to be on target.
"Applying these guidelines to other locations along whale shark migration routes may offer a viable alternative to hunting these fish, one that yields both economic and conservation benefits," says Norman.
As a rare and highly migratory fish, whale sharks are a big draw for Ningaloo's ecotourism industry, where tourists pay to get close views and even swim with the sharks. In spite of their gargantuan size, whale sharks are fairly docile; the main risk comes from getting in the way of their very large and powerful tails.
Based on 5100 underwater images contributed by hundreds of researchers, divers, and ecotourists, the authors obtained almost ten times more data than any previous study.
"To study whale sharks in a meaningful way, we really had to rethink how we collect data and how we analyze it," says Holmberg. "The results surpassed our expectations, allowing hundreds of individuals to contribute and providing the necessary data to obtain a closer look at the population's health."
Norman and colleagues note that while their study is encouraging for the Ningaloo whale shark populations, global concern over their future is justified, especially in areas where the sharks continue to be hunted for their fins and meat. The researchers hope others will apply their techniques to other whale shark populations, as well as to other species.
Adapted from materials provided by Ecological Society of America.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com