Ageing whales: Scars reveal social secrets

By Victoria GillScience reporter, BBC News

Scientists studying one of the ocean's most mysterious whale species have found they form long-term alliances.

Researchers studied the whales in the cold waters off the remote Commander Islands, eastern Russia

Baird's beaked whales, sometimes called giant bottlenose whales, seem to prefer the company of specific individuals.

Researchers who identified the whales by scars on their bodies, are calling for hunting of the species to be halted while more information is gathered about their complex social structure.

Currently, they are hunted by whalers off northern Japan.

The new findings have been published in the journal Marine Mammal Science.

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Bear attacks leave at least three people dead in Siberia and far-east Russia

Experts suggest extreme weather could be disrupting biorhythms and food supply, and fishing nets cutting off access to salmon

Alec Luhn in Moscow

theguardian.com, Friday 1 August 2014 13.47 BST

A rash of bear attacks in Russia have left at least three people dead and many more injured in recent weeks as record high temperatures, freak snow, hailstorms and flooding hit Siberia and the country's far east.

Human activity may be behind some of the attacks. Experts cited by the news agency Interfax said nets and obstacles have prevented salmon from swimming up rivers to spawn, leaving bears without a regular food supply.

Extreme weather can also disrupt the predators' biorhythms and food supply, said Vladimir Krever, director of the biodiversity programme at WWF Russia.

Recent attacks include one at 2am on Wednesday at a meteorological station in the forests of Sakha Republic. A bear broke down the door of a residential trailer and bit the arm of the woman inside, only to be scared away by her loud screaming.

Three days earlier another bear ambushed a boy on Iturup island as he was walking home from his grandmother's house. The bear had dragged the 14-year-old to the shore by the time police arrived and shot it dead. The boy had 170 stitches and remains in critical condition.

Read on

White killer whale adult spotted for first time in wild

By Richard BlackEnvironment correspondent, BBC News

Scientists have made what they believe to be the first sighting of an adult white orca, or killer whale.

The adult male, which they have nicknamed Iceberg, was spotted off the coast of Kamchatka in eastern Russia.

It appears to be healthy and leading a normal life in its pod.

White whales of various species are occasionally seen; but the only known white orcas have been young, including one with a rare genetic condition that died in a Canadian aquarium in 1972.

The sightings were made during a research cruise off Kamchatka by a group of Russian scientists and students, co-led by Erich Hoyt, the long-time orca scientist, conservationist and author who is now a senior research fellow with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS).

Read on:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17783603