Environment

A team of Australian, American and French coral reef scientists has achieved a world breakthrough in tracking fish that could revolutionize the sustainable management of coral reefs and help restore threatened fisheries. Working on coral reefs in a marine protected area in Papua New Guinea, the team has pioneered a new way to study fish populations by "tagging" adult fish with a minute trace of a harmless isotope, which they pass on to their offspring. In the process, they have established that Nemo – the lovable orange, black and white clownfish of movie fame – really does come home, with…

Save the World Air Inc. makes Zero Emission Fuel Saver (ZEFS) technology that is intended to reduce tailpipe pollutants and increase fuel efficiency in gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles. RAND Corporation has been conducted independent tests and cannot confirm the benefits. "RAND's analysis of laboratory testing data provided by Save the World Air that deals with the performance of the ZEFS device installed in vehicles found at best mixed results from the tests and therefore could not confirm the effectiveness of the technology in actual use," said Michael Toman, director of the…

A new study shows that although loss of tropical dry forests occurs in southern Madagascar, there are also large areas of forests regenerating. The return of forest cover was found to be substantial in the study area, with an overall net increase of 4 % during the period 1993-2000. These dry forests have the highest level of plant endemism (species found only in a particular region) in all of Madagascar and are listed as one of the 200 most important "ecoregions" of the world. The study also shows that the relationship between human population density and deforestation is much more complex…

One of the most serious and least understood threats to the world's ecosystems is the problem of invasive species-exotic plants, animals and other organisms that are brought into habitats and subsequently spread at a rapid rate, often replacing native species and reducing biodiversity. Invaders thrive best in regions where there is an abundance of materials for growth, such as water, nutrients and light. Biologists have long assumed that alien species pose less of a threat in resource-poor environments because they are less able to compete with indigenous plants, which have adapted to their…

Climate – and not modern humans – was the cause of the Neanderthal extinction in the Iberian Peninsula. Such is the conclusion of the University of Granada research group RNM 179 - Mineralogy and Geochemistry of sedimentary and metamorphic environments, headed by professor Miguel Ortega Huertas and whose members Francisco José Jiménez Espejo, Francisca Martínez Ruiz and David Gallego Torres work jointly at the department of Mineralogy and Petrology of the University of Granada and the Andalusian Regional Institute of Earth Sciences (CSIC-UGR). Together with other scientists from the…

Among flagship species for conservation, Lonesome George is perhaps the most renowned. Long thought to be the sole survivor of a species of giant Galápagos tortoise (Geochelone abingdoni), this conservation icon may not be alone for much longer. Researchers headed by investigators at Yale University report these findings in work published online on April 30th in the journal Current Biology. Lonesome George originates from Pinta, an isolated, northerly island of Galápagos visited only occasionally by scientists and fishermen. In the late 1960s, it was noted that the tortoise population on…

US and Mexican conservation efforts may have boosted the number of marine turtles visiting UK waters, according to University of Exeter biologists. New research by the University of Exeter and Marine Environmental Monitoring, published this week in Marine Biology (3 May 2007), analyses 100 years of data. It shows an increase in the number of loggerhead and Kemp’s ridley turtles in UK and French waters in the last twenty years. The research team believes this is most likely the result of protective measures put in place in the United States and Mexico. ‘The data tells the story of the…

A study in Nature suggested that terrestrial plants may be a global source of the potent greenhouse gas methane, making plants substantial contributors to the annual global methane budget. This controversial finding and the resulting commotion triggered a consortium (scientists from Plant Research International, IsoLife and Plant Dynamics in Wageningen, Utrecht University, and the Radboud University in Nijmegen) of Dutch scientists to re-examine this in an independent study. Reporting in New Phytologist, Tom Dueck and colleagues present their results and conclude that methane emissions from…

The most recent census of mountain gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park—one of only two places in the world where the rare gorillas exist—has found that the population has increased by 6 percent since the last census in 2002, according to the Uganda Wildlife Authority, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Max Planck Institute of Anthropology and other groups that participated in the effort. “This is great news for all of the organizations that have worked to protect Bwindi and its gorilla population,” said Wildlife Conservation Society researcher Dr. Alastair McNeilage,…

Contrary to popular belief, lemmings do not commit mass suicide by leaping off of cliffs into the sea. In fact, they are quite fond of staying alive. A bigger threat to the rodents is climate change, which could deprive them of the snow they need for homes and lock up their food in ice, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, which is launching a study to examine how these tiny but important players in the ecological health of the far North will fare in the age of global warming. "We need to know how climate change will affect a variety of resident and migratory predators that rely…