Endangered sea turtles hatch on Brazil's deserted beaches

Coronavirus keeps crowds that usually greet hatching of hawksbill turtles away

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro

Published onSun 29 Mar 2020 16.49 BST

Nearly 100 critically endangered sea turtles have hatched on a deserted beach in Brazil, their first steps going almost unnoticed because of coronavirus restrictions that prohibit people from gathering on the region’s sands.

The 97 hawksbill sea turtles, or tartarugas-de-pente as they are known in Brazil, hatched last Sunday in Paulista, a town in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco.

Photographs taken by government workers, the only people to witness the event, showed the tiny creatures making their way down the beach and into the Atlantic waves.

Locals have been forbidden from gathering on Pernambuco’s spectacular shoreline since last weekend, when the state governor, Paulo Câmara, ordered a partial shutdown and urged residents to stay indoors to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Speaking to the Guardian last week, Câmara said such measures – which the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has actively undermined – were vital if Brazil were to avoid a crisis similar to the one that has taken hold in Europe. “Only isolation will stop the curve growing at the speed it is growing in other places,” he said.

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Birth of wild tapir offers hope for Brazil's endangered ecosystem

Researchers believe the calf was born in January and a second may be on its way

Jonathan Watts Global environment editor

Wed 18 Mar 2020 06.00 GMTLast modified on Wed 18 Mar 2020 06.03 GMT

Hopes for a recovery of Brazil’s most endangered ecosystem have been given a boost by the first birth of a wild tapir in Rio de Janeiro’s Atlantic Forest for more than a century.

Scientists said video clips of the baby tapir proved the initial success of a re-introduction strategy for the threatened mammal, which is often described as “a forest gardener” because it plays a vital role in the dispersal of seeds.

The images of the pig-like calf with a characteristic prehensile snout were captured by a camera trap in the Guapiaçu Ecological Reserve and released in Brazilian media outlets.

Researchers believed the calf was born in January and a second may be on its way because another adult female appears to be pregnant.

Maron Galliez, a professor of biology at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio de Janeiro, said this was a milestone for the reintroduction project, which has been eight years in planning and implementation.

Since 2017, four captive-bred males and three females have been put into the forest by the Refauna programme, which Galliez leads.

“The whole team is very happy,” he said “We now know the project is moving in the right direction.”

As with wolves in Yellowstone and beavers in the UK, the tapir reintroduction programme aims to accelerate restoration of a degraded natural habitat.

The Atlantic Forest, which once covered more than a million square kilometres along the eastern coast of Brazil and Argentina, has been steadily sliced and diced by loggers, plantation owners and economic development.

Trees now cover just 7% to 15% of the forest’s former area, mostly in shrinking fragments between expanding cities. But it remains a globally important ecosystem due to its role in carbon sequestration, water management and habitat provision to a wide range of species including capybara, armadillos, toucans and capuchins.

Tapirs were eradicated in Rio de Janeiro state in 2014, and biologists say their return is more than symbolic.

Growing to 2.5 metres in length and weighing more than 300kg, they are the largest terrestrial mammals in Brazil and play an important role in the dispersal of large seeds that can provide the pillars of the canopy. They also prune branches and leaves.

A study last year indicated tapirs could make reforestation quicker and cheaper because they tend to graze in degraded areas and their dung is packed with tree seeds.

“The birth of a tapir in nature indicates the formation of a population in the state,” Galliez said. “This is essential to restoring the proper functioning of this ecosystem.

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New monkey species discovered in the Amazon's 'arc of deforestation'

AUGUST 8, 2019

by Nathan Williams, Fauna & Flora International

A new species of marmoset has been discovered in the southwest of Pará State in Brazil, a discovery that, while thrilling, already has conservationists worrying about its long-term prospects.

This is because the marmoset was discovered in an area of the Amazon known as the "arc of deforestation" that has suffered extensive illegal logging and agricultural expansion. Researchers say the threats in this area are intensifying, and infrastructure development, including roads and hydro-electric power plants, are also encroaching into the new marmoset's habitat.

Based on its discovery location, the researchers say the monkey is endemic to an area of approximately 55,000 square kilometres in the southwest of Pará State, Brazil.

The new species has been named Mico munduruku after the Munduruku Amerindians that inhabit the area.

Source

Researchers identify genes linked to sex differentiation in giant Amazon fish

JUNE 25, 2019

by FAPESP

Brazilian and German scientists have completed a collaborative project to sequence and analyze the whole genome of Arapaima gigas, a giant freshwater fish known in Brazil as pirarucu and elsewhere as arapaima or paiche. Its growth rate is the fastest among known freshwater fish species. Its natural distribution covers most of the Amazon River basin in Peru and Brazil.

The research led to discoveries that help determine sex at an early stage, facilitating the separation of female and male fry for sex-specific breeding and sale. It also paves the way for further studies relating to genetic improvement of the species.

The findings of the research, which was supported by FAPESP, are published in Scientific Reports.

The collaboration began in 2015, when Manfred Schartl, a geneticist at the University of Würzburg in Germany, was contacted by biologist Rafael Henrique Nóbrega and his then Ph.D. student Marcos Antonio de Oliveira. Oliveira has since earned his doctorate from São Paulo State University's Aquaculture Center in Botucatu, Brazil.

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Mysterious river dolphin helps crack the code of marine mammal communication

Date:  April 19, 2019

Source:  University of Vermont

The Araguaian river dolphin of Brazil is something of a mystery. It was thought to be quite solitary, with little social structure that would require communication. But Laura May Collado, a biologist at the University of Vermont, and her colleagues have discovered that the dolphins can actually make hundreds of different sounds to communicate, a finding that could help uncover how communication evolved in marine mammals.

"We found that they do interact socially and are making more sounds than previously thought," she says. "Their vocal repertoire is very diverse."

The findings of May Collado are her colleagues were published in the journal PeerJ on April 18.

The Araguaian dolphins, also called botos, are a difficult animal to study. They are hard to find in the first place, and while the waters of the Araguaia and Tocatins rivers are clear, it is challenging to identify individuals because the dolphins are skittish and hard to approach.

Luckily, Gabriel Melo-Santos, a biologist from the University of St Andrews in Scotland and leader of the project, found a fish market in the Brazilian town of Mocajuba where the botos regularly visit to be fed by people shopping there. The clear water and regular dolphin visits provided a unique opportunity to get a close look at how the animals behave and interact, and to identify and keep track of various individuals.

The team used underwater cameras and microphones to record sounds and interactions between the dolphins at the market, and took some genetic samples. They identified 237 different types of sounds the dolphins make, but even with 20 hours of recordings the researchers don't believe they captured the animals' entire acoustic repertoire. The most common sounds were short, two-part calls that baby dolphins made when they were approaching their mothers.

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Fluorescence discovered in tiny Brazilian frogs

MARCH 29, 2019

by New York University

An international team of researchers led by NYU Abu Dhabi Postdoctoral Associate Sandra Goutte was studying the acoustic communications of these miniature frogs. When they discovered that Brachycephalus ephippium could not hear its own mating calls, they searched for alternative visual signals the frogs could use to communicate instead. Unexpectedly, when they shone an ultra-violet (UV) lamp on the frogs, their backs and heads glowed intensely.

"The fluorescent patterns are only visible to the human eye under a UV lamp. In nature, if they were visible to other animals, they could be used as intra-specific communication signals or as reinforcement of their aposematic coloration, warning potential predators of their toxicity," says Sandra Goutte.

Pumpkin toadlets (also called Brachycephalus ephippium) are tiny, brightly-colored, and poisonous frogs that can be found in the Brazilian Atlantic forest. During the mating season, they can be seen by day walking around the forest and producing soft buzzing calls in search of a mate.

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Uninhabited 'Snake Island' is home to 4,000 vipers with flesh-eating venom – via Herp Digest

The island near Sao Paulo in Brazil is home to 4,000 golden lancehead snakes - among the most venomous in the world

By Milo Boyd, 3/25/19 WWW.Mirrror.UK

This is the so-called 'Snake Island' where thousands of serpents filled with flesh-melting venom roam free.

Located off the southeastern coast of Brazil  near Sao Paulo, Ilha da Queimada Grande - or Snake Island as it is affectionately known - is home to around 4,000 slithering reptiles.

These are no harmless grass snakes, however.

The island its known for its large population of golden lanceheads, a critically endangered species considered one of the world's most deadly.

With venom potent enough to kill large birds and the ability to pluck them straight out of the air, the golden lanceheads are formidable predators.

Fortunately, the snakes only live in an area uninhabited by humans, meaning there has never been an official report of anyone being bitten.

Authorities allow only a small handful of scientists to visit each year, but 9 News reporter Tara Brown was given unprecedented access for 60 Minutes and was accompanied by a medical team on the island.

Speaking to news.com.au she said: "When we're speaking to local fisherman, they told us, 'That's not a good idea, you don't want to go there’.

"There are legends about a whole family being killed there, and of pirates burying treasure on the island and the snakes being put there to protect the treasure.

"The fishermen said they never went there, or they would die."

The snakes are five times more deadly than their mainland cousins.

One bite from them can kill a human in an hour, with effects including swelling, vomiting, blood blisters, bruising, intestinal bleeding, kidney failure and hemorrhage in the brain.

The lanceheads have hemotoxic venom, which eats away at the flesh and tissue of prey so they are easier to eat.

Brown explained: "They're different to their mainland cousins in that they're five times more venomous and they are among the top 10 most poisonous snakes in the world.

"They hunt and eat birds. Not the local birds, who have become too smart for them, but larger migratory birds, boobies, who come by on their migration.

"And the snakes' venom has become more potent because their prey is bigger.

"It's an incredibly interesting evolutionary experiment for scientists to observe. This is a laboratory in the wild, if you like. You see evolution at play."

Tons of dead fish wash up in Rio de Janeiro lagoon

December 21, 2018

Dead fish float in the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Friday, Dec. 21, 2018. About 21 tons of fish died in the Rio de Janeiro lagoon, while city authorities and biologists argue about the cause of the die-off. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

Residents of a high-end neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro woke up to the unpleasant smell of 13 tons of rotting dead fish floating in the city's Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon.

Biologists believe that the extreme heat caused by El Nino killed the fish overnight and caused them to wash ashore Friday.

The lagoon played host to several events during the 2016 Olympic games and is a tourist attraction.

Rio's environment ministry released a statement saying that it has been on alert since Thursday morning when oxygen levels in the body of water began to fall sharply.

Biologist and ecosystem specialist Mario Moscatelli says that he inspects the lagoon every year and is convinced that climate change is causing temperature increases.

Read more at: 

4,000-year-old termite mounds found in Brazil are visible from space

November 19, 2018, Cell Press

Researchers reporting in Current Biology on November 19 have found that a vast array of regularly spaced, still-inhabited termite mounds in northeastern Brazil—covering an area the size of Great Britain—are up to about 4,000 years old.

The mounds, which are easily visible on Google Earth, are not nests. Rather, they are the result of the insects' slow and steady excavation of a network of interconnected underground tunnels. The termites' activities over thousands of years has resulted in huge quantities of soil deposited in approximately 200 million cone-shaped mounds, each about 2.5 meters tall and 9 meters across.

"These mounds were formed by a single termite species that excavated a massive network of tunnels to allow them to access dead leaves to eat safely and directly from the forest floor," says Stephen Martin of the University of Salford in the UK. "The amount of soil excavated is over 10 cubic kilometers, equivalent to 4,000 great pyramids of Giza, and represents one of the biggest structures built by a single insect species."

"This is apparently the world's most extensive bioengineering effort by a single insect species," adds Roy Funch of Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana in Brazil. "Perhaps most exciting of all—the mounds are extremely old—up to 4,000 years, similar to the ages of the pyramids."

The mounds are largely hidden from view in the fully deciduous, semiarid, thorny-scrub caatinga forests unique to northeastern Brazil. They'd only really come into view by "outsiders," including scientists, when some of the lands were cleared for pasture in recent decades.

Soil samples collected from the centers of 11 mounds and dated indicated that the mounds were filled 690 to 3,820 years ago. That makes them about as old as the world's oldest known termite mounds in Africa.

The researchers investigated whether the strangely regular spatial pattern of the mounds was driven by competition amongst termites in neighboring mounds. Their behavioral tests found little aggression at the mound level. That's compared to obvious aggression amongst termites collected at greater distances from one another.

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Playing both ends: Amphibian adapted to varied evolutionary pressures

Date:  February 23, 2018

Source:  Utah State University

Summary:

Caecilian, Siphonops annulatus, a limbless amphibian found throughout Brazil, has a concentration of enlarged mucous glands in its head region and a concentration of enlarged poison glands in its posterior region. These concentration appear to have evolved from different selective pressures: the ability to tunnel into the ground and to defend oneself from predators.

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New Jaguar Frog Discovered on Abandoned Highway – via Herp Digest

The spotted amphibian may already be at risk of extinction, a new study says. Go to http://bit.ly/2A4SFcs, scan to bottom of page for video.

Researcher discovered the jaguar-snouted tree frog on a former highway in Brazil. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY RAFAEL DE FRAGA

By Elaina Zachoa, National Geographic, 11/23/17

Scientists have discovered a new species of tree frog in an unusual place—a stretch of abandoned highway in Brazil.

When herpetologists first heard male frogs calling in the Amazon rain forest, they suspected the unknown sound came from a species completely new to science. Rafael de Fraga, a herpetologist at the National Institute of Research of the Amazon, and colleagues later confirmed it via genetic analysis.

The team named the species Scinax onca, or the jaguar snouted tree frog, due to its spotted skin and the prevalence of big cats they found in the area.

"During the sampling expeditions we were also lucky enough to spot several jaguars," says de Fraga, who noted the sightings unnerved some of his team.

But, he noted, "the highway is definitely more dangerous than jaguars [because] many people have died there by car crash or fallen bridges.”

The newfound frog is the 27th species of Scinax—the snouted genus of tree frogs—known from the Amazon Basin. There are more than 800 species of tree frogs worldwide. (Read about three warty toad species found in Brazil.

The confluence of the Purus and Madeira Rivers where the frog lives is "very special from a biological point of view," de Fraga says. That's because it is home to a diverse array of species, including the closely related Scinax iquitorum tree frog.

A Fleeting Find?

So far, not much is known about the newly identified creature, described in a recent study in the journal Zookeys.

The orange-eyed frog measures less than two inches and has a white groin with black spots. It's also sexually dimorphic, meaning female frogs are larger than males.

De Fraga says the amphibian's scratchy call sounds like a woodsaw, and the male's mating trill lasts a little over 100 milliseconds. (See more tree frog pictures.)

"[The discovery is] not a huge surprise, but it's indicative of kind of a push within Brazil to understand the environment," says Darrel Frost, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, who wasn't involved in the study.

Although about one new species discovered in the Amazon every other day, species are dying out before they're even identified. Amphibians in particular are disappearing at alarming rates, due to factors such as the deadly chytrid fungus and deforestation.

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De Fraga suspects the frog is endangered, and is further imperiled by plans to recover the derelict highway, which will likely lead to habitat destruction for several species.

"We are not totally opposed to the highway recovering, because many local people live completely isolated from basic resources such as hospitals," de Fraga says.

"But it is rather disturbing to watch the region being converted into urban areas without any concern for the biodiversity that is being lost."

Seven new spider species from Brazil named after seven famous fictional spider characters

Date:  January 10, 2018

Source:  Pensoft Publishers

Summary:

Several literary classics from the fantasy genre are further immortalized and linked together thanks to a Brazilian research team who named seven new spiders after them.

Several literary classics from the fantasy genre are further immortalised and linked together thanks to a Brazilian research team who named seven new spiders after them.

Spider characters from A Song of Ice and Fire, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, H. P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu and the children's favourite Charlotte's Web and Little Miss Spider each gave a name to a new small cave-dwelling six-eyed spider inhabiting northern Brazil.

Discovered in iron caves across the state of Pará, northern Brazil, the new species belong to the same Neotropical genus Ochyrocera. They are described in a new research article published in the open access journal ZooKeys by Dr Antonio Brescovit, Dr Igor Cizauskas and Leandro Mota -- all affiliated with Instituto Butantan, Sao Paulo.

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Scientists discover unique Brazilian frogs deaf to their own mating calls

Pumpkin toadlet frogs are only known case of an animal that continues to make a communication signal even after the target audience has lost the ability to hear it

Patrick Barkham

Friday 22 September 2017 12.15 BSTFirst published on Thursday 21 September 2017 10.07 BST

Humans trying to chat each other up in a noisy nightclub may find verbal communication futile. But it appears even more pointless for pumpkin toadletsafter scientists discovered that females have lost the ability to hear the sound of male mating calls.

An international team from Brazil, Denmark and the UK has discovered that the males of two species of tiny orange frogs continue to make high-pitched calls despite neither females nor males being able to hear them.

It is believed to be the first case in the animal kingdom of a communication signal enduring even after its target audience has lost the ability to detect it.

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Yellow fever killing thousands of monkeys in Brazil

Date: March 22, 2017

Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison

In a vulnerable forest in southeastern Brazil, where the air was once thick with the guttural chatter of brown howler monkeys, there now exists silence.

Yellow fever, a virus carried by mosquitoes and endemic to Africa and South America, has robbed the private, federally-protected reserve of its brown howlers in an unprecedented wave of death that has swept through the region since late 2016, killing thousands of monkeys.

Karen Strier, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of anthropology, has studied the monkeys of this forest since 1983. She visited the reserve -- her long-term study site near the city of Caratinga -- in the state of Minas Gerais, in January of 2017. "It was just silence, a sense of emptiness," she says. "It was like the energy was sucked out of the universe."

Using what in some cases are decades of historical data, Strier and a team of Brazilian scientists focused on studying primates in Brazil's patchwork Atlantic Forest are poised to help understand and manage what happens next. They have never seen monkeys perish in such numbers, so quickly, from disease.

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