Hanging on: In search of the bat that returned from the dead

11 May 2017

By Oliver Wearn

In the pitch dark, the beam of a head torch illuminates hundreds of bats encircling a silhouetted figure in front of us. It’s Jose, telling us he’s spotted the species we have travelled thousands of miles to a remote underground cave in western Cuba to find – the Cuban greater funnel-eared bat.

We move deeper into the cave, treading carefully. Dozens of Cuban boas – some of them 3 meters long – lie strewn across the lunar-like floor. Giant crabs, centipedes and tarantulas scuttle back into their burrows. The wildlife down here is well fed – some of it feasting on guano and unfortunate newborn bats that lose their grip.

There are 13 species of bat in this cave – but the greater funnel-eared bat (Natalus primus) is special. Seen only as fossils, the species was thought to be extinct. In 1992, it came back from the dead.

Two Cuban scientists stumbled on an apparently sizeable population of the species in a remote cave in western Cuba, nicknamed Cueva la Barca (“the boat cave”). The cave is a crucial habitat as it provides the humid and hot conditions – 40°C in the deepest chamber – that some bat species seem to require for breeding. It might just be the most important cave for bat conservation in the Caribbean.

Our hearts race as we spot our first N. primus. Several dozen individuals fly up and down the sinuous cave walls. Its leisurely, aerobatic flight pattern suggests the species makes its living in a very different way from the other bats in this cave. It may be adapted to forage in the dense, tangled understorey of the surrounding forest.

N. primus is evolutionarily unique. The species is a top priority species for ZSL’s EDGE of Existence programme. The Natalid family of bats have been evolving in isolation from other bats for around 50 million years, so they represent a disproportionately large share of mammalian evolutionary history.



continued

Predatory lizard enters Brazil clandestinely-Anolis porcatus, a species native to Cuba, has been identified in several areas near the Port of Santos on the São Paulo coast - Herp Digest

Date: March 24, 2017

Source: Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo

It all began with a photograph of a lizard posted on Facebook in August 2015 by the Brazilian Herpetology group. It was a strange lizard that had been observed in a residential area near the Port of Santos, São Paulo State, by Ricardo Samelo, a biology student at the Santos Coast campus of the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP).

"Everyone in the group was excited about that photograph. It was different from any other lizard ever seen in Brazil," recalled herpetologist Ivan Prates, currently studying for a PhD at the City University of New York (CUNY), with Ana Carolina Carnaval, a professor at the same university, as his supervisor.

They immediately began trying to identify the species. The strongest candidate was Anolis carolinensis. The genus Anolis comprises 391 species, almost all of which live in the Caribbean and in Central and South America. A single species, A. carolinensis, is endemic to North America.

 

"I commented on the photograph to my supervisor, Prof. Carnaval, and we decided to find out what species it was," Prates said. "I contacted Ricardo Samelo and took the opportunity while attending a conference in Brazil to go into the field with him in Santos to try to solve the riddle.”

The researchers could hardly imagine they were about to identify the first occurrence in South America of a species endemic to Cuba, A. porcatus, which is invasive, predatory and potentially harmful to Brazilian fauna.

 

The identification was published in the South American Journal of Herpetology. The study was supported by FAPESP and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) via the research project "Dimensions US-BIOTA São Paulo: a multidisciplinary framework for biodiversity prediction in the Brazilian Atlantic forest hotspot.”

When they arrived at the place where Samelo had seen the lizard that caused a stir in their social network, the two biologists observed a large number of lizards.

"At that time, we still thought it was A. carolinensis and found dozens of the strange lizards," Prates said. "We decided to ask people living nearby if they were familiar with the lizards. They all said they were. The same thing happened when we went to investigate in Guarujá and São Vicente, where these lizards are also abundant. We expect the same thing to happen in Cubatão. We've found males, females and hatchlings, showing the invasive species is procreating and well established on the São Paulo coast.”

Back in New York, Prates recruited biology student Leyla Hernandez to help study the DNA from samples collected from the lizards to determine whether they were really the US-native species A. carolinensis. They were not. The DNA belonged to the Cuban species A. porcatus.

"The genus Anolis is a complicated research subject," Prates said. "There are hundreds of species, many of which are very similar. Furthermore, they can hybridize by interbreeding, which makes identification particularly hard.”

Invasive species are undesirable because they compete with native species for the available resources. Nevertheless, some invaders are worse than others. That may be the case on the São Paulo coast.

"A. carolinensis is sold as a pet in the US," Prates said. "Therefore, that was our first hypothesis to explain the introduction of a new species in the Santos area. Someone who had it as a pet must have released it. Alternatively, it might have escaped or been lost.”

However, A. porcatus is not widely sold as a pet. "It's an exotic species and relatively large at about 15 cm in length," Prates said. "These lizards are generalist predators. They mainly eat arthropods, but they can also prey on small mammals, such as mice, and even on other lizards."

This species has been sighted in the Dominican Republic, he added, where it is also invasive and competes with native lizards. This suggests its introduction into the Santos area may threaten the survival of local lizard populations. Worse, it could take up residence in neighboring areas.

1. porcatus has also invaded Florida, which is near its original Cuban habitat. "In the US case, a few specimens might have gotten there by sea, as they're capable of surviving on branches or other pieces of floating plant debris, such as tree trunk fragments or palm leaves," said Brazilian-born Carnaval, a professor in CUNY's Biology Department.

B. The floating invasion hypothesis does not apply to the Brazilian case. The distance between Cuba and Santos is 6,100 km. "Our best hypothesis is that A. porcatus arrived in Brazil by ship, possibly in a container or in the cargo hold of a merchant vessel. This idea is reinforced by the fact that everywhere we've found communities of A. porcatus, they're close to a container yard in the Port of Santos," Carnaval said.

"Our DNA study suggests these lizards could have come here from Florida, where they're also exotic, rather than directly from Cuba," Prates added.

According to Carnaval, the identification of A. porcatus in the Baixada Santista area was a one-off study for her laboratory. "Like most of the team at my lab, Ivan Prates researches the demographic history of other species of Anolis that live in the Amazon and Atlantic Rainforest biomes in Brazil and their responses to climate change," she said.

"Our project is a very large undertaking that involves biologists who are working on biodiversity systematics and documentation, population genetics and physiology with geologists, geographers, climatologists and environmental engineers.”

The aim of this research is to understand the past in order to predict the future. "We document general patterns of species diversity and endemism including genetic lineages throughout the Atlantic Rainforest in order to understand how these patterns have emerged and changed in the last 120,000 years," Carnaval explained. "We strongly emphasize the responses of species in the Atlantic Rainforest to climate change in the past as a basis for more realistic predictions of potential responses to future climate change."

Story Source:

Materials provided by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

/story_source

Cuban species have already landed in Florida - via Herp Digest

By Allison Griner Sat, Aug 22, 2015, Jacksonville.com

The brown anole has overrun Florida. Sometimes called Cuban anoles, they have become the most abundant vertebrate on Florida land.

Has Cuba impacted our environment? Here are three species that have made the leap.

BROWN ANOLES

This little lizard has an aggressive streak.

Swiftly, quietly, the brown anole has overrun Florida. Sometimes called the Cuban anoles, they have become the most abundant vertebrate on Florida land, with recorded populations exceeding 10,000 per hectare.

But really, this is a tale of two lizards. When the brown anole first started to colonize the Florida mainland in the 1940s, it came across another lizard, small and slender just like itself.

The bright green Carolina anole had been the only anole lizard native to Florida, and it had prospered across the Southeast United States. But, suddenly, it found itself in a turf battle with the invading brown anole.

They were both color-changing lizards, between 5 to 8 inches in length, competing for the same territory and the same food. But the brown anole had the upper hand. Back in Cuba, it shared an island with over 60 other anole lizards. It had to bulk up to face its rivals.

“In some sense, it’s better evolved, better adapted to competing with other anoles, so when it gets to Florida, it’s more aggressive and a little bit heavier,” said Yoel Stuart, a post-doctoral researcher in integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin.

He told the Times-Union that he has heard many native-born Floridians lament the disappearance of the green Carolina anole in recent years, as the brown ones took over.

But all is not lost for the Carolina anole.

Stuart led a study of Carolina and Cuban anoles, and he found that the little green lizards were evolving rapidly to face down the invading force.

For their study, Stuart and his colleagues “battled weather and salt water and malfunctioning motors and leaky boats,” to reach isolated islands on Florida’s Atlantic coast.

They arrived armed with what Stuart describes as “a little extendable fishing pole with a little lasso at the end of it.” And when they spotted a lizard, they tried to slip the lasso around its neck, to collect measurements.

The Cuban anoles had, as expected, settled all but five of the 30 islands they visited. But how quickly the Carolina anoles were reacting surprised the researchers. They had fled to the canopy where, in the course of just 15 years, they had sprouted vastly bigger feet with stickier scales.

“If human height were evolving as fast as these lizards’ toes, the height of an average American man would increase from about 5-foot-9 inches today to about 6-foot-4 inches within 20 generations,” Stuart said in a news release. That would make the average American the same size as a NBA shooting guard.

That rapid evolution will likely allow the Carolina anole to coexist with the brown anole.

“It’s not going to go anywhere,” Stuart said. “It’s just going to be a little less abundant, a little bit higher up in the trees.”

But Stuart sees the brown anole’s rampant success as a warning, especially as other exotic lizards try to make Florida their home. He points out that South Florida is under siege by tegu and monitor lizards.

“People should realize if they buy a pet and can’t keep it, they shouldn’t just release it,” he said. “You never know which one is going to take off and start breeding in the wild.”

CUBAN BROWN SNAIL

The Cuban brown snail may have crawled into Florida with the help of one man, Charles Torrey Simpson.

Simpson was a naturalist by trade, at a time when Florida was still largely frontier. When Simpson arrived in South Florida during the late 1800s, settlements like Miami were sparsely populated, and the wilderness teemed with unknown species.

Simpson cataloged many of Florida’s flora and fauna, and his work earned him nicknames like the “Sage of Biscayne Bay” and “the John Muir of the Everglades.” But his specialty was shells. He had a reputation for being able to identify 10,000 different shells by sight, by their Latin names no less.

During a trip to Cuba, Simpson picked up some snail specimens to bring home to Little River, Fla. There he liberated them among Florida’s tropical hammocks.

“I have introduced a number of other snails from Cuba and Bimini,” Simpson wrote to a colleague, G.H. Clapp, in 1918. “I simply introduced the things for ‘company’ and not for any ‘scientific results.’ ”

Nearly a century later, professor John Capinera follows in Simpson’s footsteps, studying Florida’s snails and slugs at the University of Florida. It’s a field that “had gone neglected for a long time,” Capinera said. The Cuban brown snail was once “virtually unstudied.”

Being one of the few people to conduct research on the snails, Capinera finds himself on the phone nearly every day with worried gardeners. On the day Capinera spoke to the Times-Union, he had already fielded two phone calls.

These snails grow to be about an inch wide, with a round, spiraling shell atop their backs. They are common in South Florida but, according to Capinera, they have “spread up the coast.” He speculates climate change might have allowed them to inch northward, or perhaps it was simply a matter of time.

Capinera considers the Cuban brown snail to be simply a “nuisance,” since it preys on the ornamental plants that gardeners and nurseries keep.

“The impact is mostly cosmetic. It doesn’t threaten the food supply,” he said.

Rather than poisoning the snails, Capinera recommends removing them by hand when possible. The damage done by misapplying pesticides far outweighs the snail’s ravaging appetites, he explained.

“The more poisons we put in the environment, the more difficult it is for us to preserve the nature of our environment and to protect the organisms that are at risk,” he said.

CUBAN TREE FROG

Elizabeth Roznik’s truck was rumbling north to Gainesville, when she noticed something startling in her rearview mirror.

Plastered on the glass between the truck’s cab and its covered bed was a huge Cuban tree frog, identifiable by its bulging eyes and fat toe pads. The species is invasive to Florida, where it has crept farther and farther up the peninsula, all the way to Jacksonville.

Roznik, who has researched the Cuban tree frog in her studies of amphibians, had heard about the species hopping aboard cars and traveling northward.

“I was like, case in point. That’s exactly what happens,” she said.

The species is the largest tree frog in North America, but it was never meant to be here. It was introduced to the Florida Keys in the 1920s, likely as a stowaway brought stateside in shipping crates.

As a post-doctoral fellow in integrative biology at the University of South Florida, Roznik works firsthand with Cuban tree frogs.

“They’re voracious eaters. If you’re feeding them crickets in the lab, they get pretty excited,” she said. “They’ll try to bite everything in sight, including your fingers if they’re in the way.”

That same, voracious appetite is what makes the Cuban tree frog so harmful to the Florida ecosystem, researchers say. They prey on insects, lizards, snakes and at least five different species of native frogs. When all else fails, they even cannibalize other Cuban tree frogs.

But the Cuban tree frog does more than just devastate Florida’s ecology.

Suzanne Simpson, a conservation lands biologist at the Bayou Land Conservancy in Texas, has seen them turn into a nuisance for humans as well.

“They are large enough — believe it or not — to cause power outages by getting into utility boxes,” she said. “Also, you get reports of someone who says they have a cat in their walls. Whenever Cuban tree frogs feel threatened, they will emit this sound that’s almost like a screeching cat.”

While Cuban tree frogs have yet to expand beyond Florida, Simpson believes that they might spread across the Gulf Coast in the future.

“They can actually, at least in the short term, survive much lower temperatures than they would ever experience in their native habitat in Cuba,” Simpson said. “That implies that their temperature niche is wider than one might think of a tropical species.”

With temperatures projected to increase in the coming decades, cold snaps and short freezes might not stop Cuban tree frogs from colonizing more territory, Simpson said. Americans may soon find the Cuban tree frog well beyond the confines of Florida, threatening an even larger swath of American biodiversity.

Cow Quadruplets Born On Cuba Farm

PICADURA, Cuba -- Holy Cow! A Cuban dairy farmer says one of his cows has given birth to four healthy calves, a highly rare occurrence.

Veterinarian Andres Rodriguez runs state-owned dairy No. 128 in Picadura, about 44 miles (70 kilometers) east of Havana.

He says he was shocked when he went to a help a 3-year-old cow named Aleli give birth Aug. 29. She'd already had one calf when he got to her. Then another was born. And another, and another.

Three are male, and one a hermaphrodite.

According to U.S. and European experts, the odds of delivering live quadruplet calves are one in 11 million births. If all are the same gender, the odds rise to one in 179 million. No numbers could be found for a quad birth including a hermaphrodite.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/cow-quadruplets-born-cuba-farm_n_3963761.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-news

Namibia to export elephants, rhinos, lions, leopards and cheetah amongst many others to a Cuban zoo

Why take animals from the wild?

August 2013. Some 150 animals, including elephant, large carnivores, small predators, antelope and vultures will form part of a huge consignment of wildlife being donated to the Cuban government as part of an agreement between the two countries. The South Africa National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NSPCA) has expressed its disgust at the Namibian government's decision to capture animals from the wild for transportation to Cuba.

This action will be particularly distressing for animals that live in close knot families, especially elephants, whose family ties can be very close. Wildlife Extra questions why, when there are surplus zoo animals all over the world, so many need to be removed from the wild for this venture?

Plans are to relocate the first animals to Cuba by air by October 2012

The NSPCA expresses concern that these wild-caught animals are to endure a long and stressful flight to their new destination and also raises questions as to whether or not any animal welfare organisation has checked the facilities and standards of care at their end destination. It is understood that the animals will be kept in a national zoo-type park, where some animals will be semi-free but still confined.

It is saddening to note that these animals will be taken out of their natural habitats and sent to a strange land where they will be deprived of freedom and be totally dependent on humans for their daily needs. Considering the inhumane culling of seals taking place in Namibia at the moment and the world-wide outcry, this latest action by the Namibian government and its Ministry of Environment and Tourism raises serious concerns regarding this country's stance on animal welfare. Perhaps something for animal lovers to consider when considering Namibia as a holiday destination.

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/namibia-export.html

Mysterious giant pink blob off Cuba identified

Rebecca Helm received an email a week ago asking about a mysterious giant pink blob that was found off the coast of Cuba. What is this bizarre-looking sea creature?

Since Helm is a Ph.D. student at Brown University and studies the evolutionary development biology of jellyfish, the email sender figured she was the person who might know.

But Helm was puzzled, as she was when she first saw a photo of the alien-like mass.

“Truthfully, this is a mystery that has haunted me for years,” she told GrindTV Outdoor in an email. “I first saw a pink blob photograph a few years ago, and despite searching all over, wasn’t able to identify it. When I received an email about another sighting off Cuba, I decided it was time once and for all to figure this out.”

Helm put on her detective hat and started searching for answers. At first, she thought it might be a pryosome, a jet-powered colonial animal that can get very large. But she dismissed it because the pink blob was more mushy. The tiny dots in the jelly mass reminded her of frog eggs.

“Could this be an egg mass?” Helm wondered. “I started looking in this direction.”

As she wrote for Deep Sea News and told us, Helm scoured “roughly” 247 aquarium forums, journal articles, blogs and “poorly translated Japanese websites” until discovering the Tree of Life website. It was an ah-ha! moment.

Read on

Butterflies Reveal Biodiversity at Guantanamo

Researchers from the Florida Museum of Natural History have documented 51 different butterfly species at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, showing that the area is an inadvertent wildlife refuge and biodiversity hotspot.

The base, which covers about 45 square miles (120 square kilometers) in the southeast corner of Cuba, was leased to the United States in 1903 and much of it remains undeveloped.

"Because it is a military base — and this is true for many military bases, which typically have large areas of land — people are not trampling, bulldozing or developing the land," Roger Portell, the Florida Museum's invertebrate paleontology collections manager, said in a statement. "So there is a large area of land in the southeast corner of the island that has basically been untouched for 100 years."


Read more:  http://www.livescience.com/22995-butterflies-reveal-biodiversity-at-guantanamo.html

Cuba-US Swimmer Quits After Jellyfish Stings

Grandmother Diana Nyad has given up on her fourth attempt to swim from Cuba to the US after being circled by sharks and stung repeatedly by jellyfish.

Pictures show a huge amount of swelling on her face after she was stung by box jellyfish nine times on Monday night alone, as divers tried to drive away sharks stalking her in the black water.

She was hoping to become the first person to swim the 103-mile stretch between Havana and Florida without a shark cage.

But, as a thunderstorm raged and tossed her five support boats around, her team plucked her to safety after nearly 42 hours in the water.

She had set off on Saturday from Havana and hoped to make the Florida Keys on Tuesday, a day ahead of her 63rd birthday.

But it would have taken her another 28 to 40 hours to complete the crossing when she was thwarted by storms, hypothermia and swollen lips.

In a blog posting, crew member Candace Hogan wrote that Ms Nyad angrily shook her head after being pulled from the water and planned to finish the swim after the winds calmed.

"When can I get back in?" she quoted the swimmer as saying. "I want full transparency that I was out. But I have plenty left in me and I want to go on."

"However, the storm went on, too. In a long discussion with her core team, she realised that the obstacles against this swim were too great and agreed at dawn to return to Key West by boat, for the sake of the safety of her team and herself."

She said the winds were so strong they were tossing her support vessel "up and down on the waves like a paper cup".

Ms Nyad had previously said this would be her last attempt, although she made the same promise the last time she attempted the "bear of a swim".

Australian Susie Maroney successfully swam the Florida Straits in 1997, but she used a shark cage.

In June, another Australian, Penny Palfrey, made it 79 miles towards Florida without a cage before strong currents forced her to quit.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/cuba-us-swimmer-quits-jellyfish-stings-201353877.html;_ylt=AoTaa9b_jdzWETwRWougWaTZEe1_;_ylu=X3oDMTRlMW5oMWdpBG1pdANlZGl0b3Igc2VsZWN0ZWQgY2Fyb3VzZWwEcGtnAzZiMDg0ZDg0LWEyODgtMzkyZi1hZmI5LTEwOTk3ZDFkNTQ4OARwb3MDNARzZWMDTWVkaWFGZWF0dXJlZENhcm91c2VsBHZlcgNiN2Y5ZTVhMS1lZDA2LTExZTEtYWJmZi1mMjRiM2YwNmI2ODk-;_ylg=X3oDMTM5ZjBuNjF2BGludGwDZ2IEbGFuZwNlbi1nYgRwc3RhaWQDZTlmZmNmNDQtYjk1MC0zOGZkLTk3YzQtZmI5YmFjMTlmZTllBHBzdGNhdAN5LXJlcG9ydGVyfGFzc2lnbm1lbnRzBHB0A3N0b3J5cGFnZQ--;_ylv=3

Introducing Alternatives to Sea Turtle Fishing in Cuba – via Herp Digest

June 21, 2012 in Eco-Tourism, Marine, Rivers and Watersheds, Species Preservation

BY FERNANDO BRETOS (2011 Kinship Fellow)

By engaging fishing towns at the community level, Fernando and his colleagues are replacing short-term payoffs with more permanent social and economic benefits.

In a recent PBS/Nature documentary, Cuba was coined an “accidental Eden.” Its large size relative to low population, isolation, and a series of progressive environmental legislation passed by the Cuban government in the 1990s has spared many of its coastal resources the same ecological fate as in neighboring Caribbean countries. I have worked in Cuba since 1998, from where my parents departed in 1961. The island country has been close to my heart and the basis for much of my work in conservation. Collaborating with the University of Havana, I have studied and worked to protect Cuba’s sea turtle populations.

Cuba’s 3,000km of coastline provides ample habitat for many species of sea turtles, particularly green, loggerhead, and hawksbill turtles. Sea turtles are enigmatic creatures. Migratory, shy and confined to an oceanic habitat for most of their lives, it is difficult to estimate their true conservation status. Based on historical accounts, including Christopher Columbus’ 15^th century voyages to the Americas, hundreds of millions of turtles once nested on Caribbean beaches. Turtle populations have dropped precipitously in the Caribbean as a result of direct poaching of eggs and meat, bycatch, and habitat loss. Cuba’s hawksbill turtles, until recently were the target of government mandated fisheries at two different fishing villages, Cocodrilo on Cuba’s isolated Isle of Youth and Nuevitas on Cuba’s north central coast. Over five hundred animals a year were harvested at these towns since the 1960s, for meat and shell products.

After relenting to constant pressure from the international conservation community, the Cuban government agreed to a full moratorium on this hawksbill harvest in 2008. By shifting from viewing turtles as a marine resource to be exploited for meat and shell alone to one that can serve longer term economic needs such as tourism, the future of sea turtles in the region is bright.

While successful in increasing local hawksbill populations, the elimination of the fishery at Cocodrilo left many Cocodrilo fishermen facing an uncertain future. Founded in 1904, Cocodrilo is an isolated fishing community of 311 residents. Until recently it was known as Jacksonville, in honor of its founder William Hawkins Jackson, a turtle fishermen from the Cayman Islands. Since its founding, generations of English speaking Cocodrilo fishermen made their living hunting sea turtles with the backing of the Cuban government who paid them for their catch. The moratorium on the sea turtle harvest left many fishermen without a livelihood and facing a turning point. How do they preserve their culture and continue their livelihoods while protecting these animals?

In 2009, I reached out to Grupo Tortuguero (GT), a community activism group in Mexico’s Baja California peninsula that developed a successful model to engage similar fishermen. Mexico shares a similar relationship with sea turtles. Until the Mexican government banned the fishing and poaching of sea turtles in 1990, many fishing villages in Baja depended on sea turtles for protein. As with Cocodrilo, these fishermen faced the difficult dilemma of how to feed their families once the Mexican ban was implemented. A group of conservationists, biologists, and fishermen formed GT as a community model to engage fishermen in alternatives to turtle fishing such as eco-tourism, research, and conservation. GT’s flagship outreach programs are festivals during which fishing towns that once targeted sea turtles hold their own community-wide celebrations to honor their relationship to these sentinel creatures.

My Mexican colleagues and I convened the first-ever Cuba-US-Mexico fisherman’s exchange on the Isle of Youth in April 2009 which provided a unique forum for Mexican and Cuban fishermen to discuss ways to reduce sea turtle mortality through their fishing activity.  The successful sea turtle exchange and workshop created considerable momentum within Cuba to provide alternatives for fishermen.

One of the proposed measures announced during the 2009 workshop was to provide continued outreach that engages all facets of the community, including fishermen, women, and children in understanding the ecological and financial benefits of protecting turtles. This would take the form of a sea turtle festival in Crocodrilo featuring music, lectures, workshops, and children’s activities that revolve around the conservation of natural resources. Fishermen would learn how eco-tourism based on turtle encounters, such as when they nest on beaches, could provide an attractive alternative to hunting these charismatic creatures.

The first festival took place from November 18-19, 2011 in Cocodrilo. The event featured educational workshops for adults and children, a forum for local fishermen to express their inherent points of view about harvesting sea turtle, and music and poetry about marine conservation by local artists. The entire community of Cocodrilo, led by its mayor, Evelio Lavadie Montpelier have taken full ownership in hosting subsequent events. The Ocean Foundation and GT recently completed the Second Annual Cocodrilo Sea Turtle festival from May 18-21, 2012. One of the concepts discussed at this festival was the need to encourage sustainable tourism to this rustic fishing community. This new type of tourism would provide alternative income to the community, particularly those who do not rely on fishing for their income such as women and elders. Ideas include trips to the nearby reef at Punta Frances aboard artisanal fishing boats, the establishment of bed and breakfasts and visits to a nearby loggerhead turtle nesting beach called El Guanal.

By engaging fishing towns at the community level, my colleagues and I in Mexico and Cuba are creating permanent social and economic alternatives to those with a short term payoff.

Rome bids farewell to 'pope's crocodile'

ROME — Pope Benedict XVI only knew him for a short time, but the brief encounter was enough to earn a special papal farewell as the esteemed guest prepared to return home — to a swamp in Cuba.

Which would be odd, if the guest in question weren’t a baby crocodile that had a special audience with the pope in January.

A top Vatican cleric presided over a ceremony in Rome’s zoo Wednesday to bid farewell to the baby crocodile, dubbed Il Coccodrillo del Papa (“The Pope’s Crocodile”).

The reptile is being returned to its natural habitat in Cuba later this month — a journey coinciding with the pontiff’s own visit to the island nation scheduled for March 26.

The initiative symbolizes “respect for nature and friendship between nations,” Vatican Substitute for General Affairs Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu said during the ceremony, which also was attended by Cuba’s ambassador to the Holy See, Eduardo Delgado.

Read more: http://www.heraldextra.com/lifestyles/faith-and-values/rome-bids-farewell-to-pope-s-crocodile/article_17294bf4-6f14-11e1-8856-0019bb2963f4.html#ixzz1sfgTZUwh