Four new butterfly varieties seen in Salem forest division

Senthil Kumaran | TN ..

SALEM: Four new varieties of butterflies and a new bird species were spotted in the Salem forest division during the three-day census that was carried out jointly by the forest department and Salem Nature Society (SNS) recently. 

In total, they have recorded 214 varieties of birds and 136 species of butterflies in the forest division. V Gokul, president, SNS, said, “The bird and butterfly survey was carried out by 135 specialists from various states for three days from Friday to Sunday (February 14-16).” The survey covered all the nine forest ranges in the Salem forest division. According to N Murugesan, secretary, SNS, three of the four new butterfly varieties - common tinsel, pale four-line blue and transparent sixline blue - were spotted in the Yercaud forest range and the remaining one - chocolate albatross - in the Danishpet forest range. 

They were spotted by butterfly experts A Pavendhan, S Soundararaj, T Nagaraj, R Krishnamoorthy and K K Nilesh. Pointing out that common tinsel was usually seen only in the Western Ghats and Northeast India, he said this was probably the first time the butterfly variety was seen in Eastern Ghats of Tamil Nadu. The butterfly is small in size and comes with silver edged bands, grey-brown lower body and blue upper body. 

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Marmots need not worry about being an 'older mum'

FEBRUARY 18, 2020

by Laura Graham, University of Aberdeen

Having an older mother works out better for future generations of marmot daughters.

New research led by the University of Aberdeen has shown that female marmots born to older mothers are more successful in the reproductive stakes further down the line.

Scientists were keen to find out if the age at which a marmot mother gives birth would influence the number of offspring her own daughters would produce.

The team, led by Svenja Kroeger while at the University of Aberdeen's School of Biological Sciences, used one of the oldest long-term studies of mammals living in the wild to carry out their research, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Because female marmots typically remain in their home colonies for their entire life, around 30 generations of the creatures living in the Colorado Rocky Mountains have been studied since 1962. This made it possible to look at how a female's number of offspring differed at different ages, but also, at how the reproduction of their daughters then differed depending on how old their mother was at the time of birth.

Dr. Kroeger said: "We were interested to see whether having babies at an older age would have long-lasting negative impacts on future generations by affecting a daughter's reproduction further down the line.

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Hundreds of thousands of mussels cooked to death on New Zealand beach in heatwave

Northland residents describe ‘heartbreaking’ find as experts warn climate crisis could make it a more frequent sight

Hundreds of thousands of mussels have been cooked to death on a beach in New Zealand’s North Island, with experts saying more will die as the effects of the climate crisis accelerate.

The mass die-off in Northland was sparked by “an exceptional period of warm weather” combined with low tides in the middle of the day, which had exposed the shellfish, said Dr Andrew Jeffs, a marine scientist from the University of Auckland.

He said more marine life would soon be affected by climate change, and there was little that that could be done to protect the vulnerable shellfish, other than manual protection measures such as shadecloth, which were impractical and “unrealistic”.

Northland is experiencing drought conditions, with many parts of the region not seeing rain for a record-breaking 40 plus days. The effects of the drought have been severe, with Kiwi birds perishing as they search for water, and tankers of freshwater urgently trucked in to fill rainwater tanks in remote communities.

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Hive heists: why the next threat to bees is organized crime

Pollination has become big business, and thieves are now targeting hives with growing sophistication in the US

Oliver Milman in Modesto, California

Tue 18 Feb 2020 09.00 GMTLast modified on Tue 18 Feb 2020 09.03 GMT

Mike Potts was aware he was at risk of being a victim of crime, he just didn’t think it would happen to him. But Potts is an owner of an increasingly valuable commodity that thieves are targeting with growing sophistication in the US: bees.

A booming demand for honeybees for pollination drew Potts, owner of Pottsy’s Pollination in Oregon, to load 400 hives of his bees on trucks and drive them down to California’s agricultural heartland last month. He unloaded them to a holding area just outside Yuba City and returned just a few days later to find 92 hives had been whisked away by thieves.

“I pulled in the yard and noticed that there was some stuff missing,” said Potts, who estimated the theft cost him $44,000. Police subsequently pulled over three suspicious beekeepers traveling late at night, to no avail. “I’ve heard that there had been some stealing but didn’t think it would happen to me. It’s frustrating because it’s getting harder and harder to keep bees alive. And then you transport them down and they just get taken.”

The theft is the latest in a string of beehive heists, often undertaken at the dead of night using forklifts and trucks. Hives are regularly split open or dismantled, interventions that can kill tens of thousands of the kidnapped bees. The problem has become severe enough in California that certain police officers now specialize in hive crime.

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The last woolly mammoths on Earth had disastrous DNA

By Laura Geggel - Associate Editor 6 days ago

They were the last mammoths alive, but they weren't that healthy.

Dwarf woolly mammoths that lived on Siberia's Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago were plagued by genetic problems, carrying DNA that increased their risk of diabetes, developmental defects and low sperm count, a new study finds.

These mammoths couldn't even smell flowers, the researchers reported. 

"I have never been to Wrangel Island, but I am told by people who have that in the springtime, it's just basically covered in flowers," study lead researcher Vincent Lynch, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo in New York, told Live Science. "[The mammoths] probably couldn't smell any of that."

Wrangel Island is a peculiarity. The vast majority of woolly mammoths died out at the end of the last ice age, about 10,500 years ago. But because of rising sea levels, a population of woolly mammoths became trapped on Wrangel Island and continued living there until their demise about 3,700 years ago. This population was so isolated and so small that it didn't have much genetic diversity, the researchers wrote in the new study.

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