New rare orangutan find in Borneo

A hitherto unknown population of orangutans numbering perhaps 1-2,000 has been found on the island of Borneo, conservation researchers say.

Members of the reclusive endangered species were found by scientists acting on tip-offs from local people.

Much of the orangutan’s tropical forest habitat in Indonesia and Malaysia has been cut down for timber extraction and to create palm oil plantations.

About 50,000 orangutans are thought to remain in the wild.

“The reclusive red-haired primates were found in a rugged, largely inaccessible mountainous region,” Erik Meijaard, of Nature Conservancy Indonesia, said.

The journey to the region took 10 hours by car, another five by boat and then a couple more hours hiking.

The team found more than 200 nests crammed into just a few kilometers and spotted three wild orangutans in the canopy above them – a mother and her baby, and a large male who broke off branches to throw at them.

It is even possible, the researchers say, that this could be a kind of orangutan refugee camp – with several groups moving into the same area following widespread forest fires.

The team of scientists is now working with local groups to try to protect the area.

Ninja suit helps one-flipper turtle swim

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas (AP) — Turtle rescuers have demonstrated the first fin suit designed to allow a green sea turtle that lost three of its flippers to finally swim a straight line.

Workers at Sea Turtle Inc. strapped Allison, a five-year-old rescued turtle, on Wednesday into a neoprene “ninja” suit that holds a carbon-fiber fin in place on her back. The fin acts as a rudder, allowing her to propel herself forward with her sole fin. The success follows failed attempts last year to fit her with a prosthetic rear flipper.

Before today, Allison could only swim in tight circles with her one good flipper.

Mayor scales ladder to ‘rescue’ sunbathing dog

BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A South Texas mayor was so concerned about reports of a Great Dane being stuck on a second-story balcony that he alerted emergency workers, went to the location himself, scaled a fire department ladder and entered the apartment to help the dog.

The problem was, the dog wasn’t in distress. The bigger problem came when the surprised dog owner found Mayor Pat Ahumada standing in his kitchen Tuesday.

“He broke into my house,” the owner, who asked not to be identified, told the Brownsville Herald. “My dog is very well taken care of. He (the mayor) shouldn’t have done that.”

Ahumada, a dog lover whose zeal for the animals has caused problems before, said a local TV station called him to say a dog was stuck.

“He looked to be stuck on the balcony,” Ahumada said. “I didn’t know the condition of the dog or if the building was abandoned. … The animal’s paws were hanging out from the railing and he was struggling to get up.”

The dog’s owner explained that the 14-year-old dog has little mobility, and one of its greatest pleasures is passing the day on the balcony where it can watch the passing traffic.

In 2007, the city informed Ahumada that his six dogs were double the city’s legal limit for one home. That same year, Ahumada picked up a dog thinking it was stray and gave it to a family. When the original owner asked for the dog back and the family refused, the issue ended up in court.

Two years earlier, before he was elected mayor, Ahumada was charged with theft after taking a dog from the Brownsville Animal Shelter. He claimed the dog was not being properly cared for, and the charge was dismissed.

Psychedelic fish discovered in Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia — A funky, psychedelic fish that bounces on the ocean floor like a rubber ball has been classified as a new species, a scientific journal reported.

The frogfish — which has a swirl of tan and peach zebra stripes that extend from its aqua eyes to its tail — was initially discovered by scuba diving instructors working for a tour operator a year ago in shallow waters off Ambon island in eastern Indonesia.

The operator contacted Ted Pietsch, lead author of a paper published in this month’s edition of Copeia, the journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, who submitted DNA work identifying it as a new species.

The fish — which the University of Washington professor has named “psychedelica” — is a member of the antennariid genus, Histiophryne, and like other frogfish, has fins on both sides of its body that have evolved to be leg-like.

But it has several behavioral traits not previously known to the others, Pietsch wrote.

Each time the fish strike the seabed, for instance, they push off with their fins and expel water from tiny gill openings to jet themselves forward. That, and an off-centered tail, causes them to bounce around in a bizarre, chaotic manner.

Mark Erdman, a senior adviser to the Conservation International’s marine program, said Thursday it was an exciting discovery.

“I think people thought frogfishes were relatively well known and to get a new one like this is really quiet spectacular. … It’s a stunning animal,” he said, adding that the fish’s stripes were probably intended to mimic coral.

“It also speaks to the tremendous diversity in this region and to fact that there are still a lot of unknowns here — in Indonesia and in the Coral Triangle in general.”

The fish, which has a gelatinous fist-sized body covered with thick folds of skin that protect it from sharp-edged corals, also has a flat face with eyes directed forward, like humans, and a huge, yawning mouth.

Shark attacks decline during recession

While an economic recession brings with it plenty of bad things at least shark attacks are down.

Yes that’s right, researchers believe the recession is responsible for a current slump in the number of shark attacks, their lowest level in five years.

George Burgess of the University of Florida says fewer are people making trips to the beach or going on holiday, meaning they are less possible shark attack victims.

“I can’t help but think that contributing to that reduction may have been the reticence of some people to take holidays and go to the beach for economic reasons,” he said.

According to the latest statistics, the total number of shark attacks declined from 71 in 2007 to 59 in 2008, the fewest since 2003 said Burgess, who works at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the University of Florida campus.

“We noticed similar declines during the recession that followed the events of 2001, despite the fact that human populations continued to rise,” he added.

Cache of Ice Age fossils found in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES — Scientists are studying a huge cache of Ice Age fossil deposits recovered near the famous La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of the nation’s second-largest city.

Among the finds is a near-intact mammoth skeleton, a skull of an American lion and bones of saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, bison, horses, ground sloths and other mammals.

Researchers discovered 16 fossil deposits under an old parking lot next to the tar pits in 2006 and began sifting through them last summer. The mammoth remains, including 10-foot-long tusks, were in an ancient riverbed near the fossil cache.

Officials of the Page Museum at the tar pits plan to formally announce their findings on Wednesday. The discoveries could double the museum’s Ice Age collection.

Such a rich find usually takes years to excavate. But with a deadline looming to build an underground parking garage for the next-door art museum, researchers boxed up the deposits and lifted them out of the ground using a massive crane.

The research dubbed “Project 23″ — because it took 23 boxes to house the deposits — uncovered fossilized mammals as well as smaller critters including turtles, snails and insects. Separately, scientists found a well-preserved Columbian mammoth that they nicknamed Zed.

New deal to rescue Borneo orangutans in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Conservationists said they were planning a big push to protect Borneo’s orangutans, pygmy elephants and other endangered wildlife by purchasing land from palm oil producers to create a forest sanctuary.

The deal is meant to help stave off the demise of orangutans, whose numbers have dwindled amid illegal logging and the rapid spread of palm oil plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, the only two countries where orangutans are found in the wild.

The Malaysian-based LEAP Conservancy group is in talks to buy 222 acres of tropical jungle land in Malaysia’s Sabah state on Borneo island from palm oil operators, said Cynthia Ong, LEAP’s executive director.

The territory is needed to link two sections of a wildlife reserve that is home to an estimated 600 orangutans, 150 Borneo pygmy elephants and a vast array of other animals including proboscis monkeys, hornbills and river otters.

The funds are being raised through public and private donations, Ong said. The British-based World Land Trust, which is working with LEAP on the initiative, said on its website that 343,000 pounds ($533,000) was needed to acquire the land.

This was the first time that nongovernment activists were trying to acquire land in Malaysian Borneo for environmental protection with the help of government officials, Ong said.

It was not immediately clear when the purchase might be finalized, but Ong said the land has not been cleared for plantations so far because of a lack of access roads.

“There is a desperate need for this purchase,” Ong told The Associated Press. “We have no other avenue to avoid a potential conflict between humans and wildlife.”

Environmental groups estimate the number of orangutans in Malaysia and Indonesia has fallen by half in the past 20 years to less than 60,000, largely due to human encroachment on forests. Researchers say more than 5,000 of the primates have been lost every year since 2004.

Borneo is also home to some 1,000 pygmy elephants, which are genetically distinct from other subspecies of Asian pachyderms because they have babyish faces, large ears and longer tails. They are also more rotund and less aggressive.

Tadpoles may hold cancer clue

Tadpoles could hold the key to developing effective skin cancer drugs according to researchers at the University of East Anglia.

The scientists have identified a compound which blocks the movement of the pigment cells that give the tadpoles their distinctive markings.

It is the uncontrolled movement of pigment cells that causes skin cancer in both humans and frogs.

The next step, the researchers say, is to test the compound in other animals.

The man-made compound, NSC 84093, was chosen out of a list of 3,000 which were screened to see if they affected the pigment cells.

It produced a distinct change in the color markings on the tadpoles at very low concentrations.

The continuous stripe along the back of a wild tadpole was replaced by a pattern of individual blocks of color.

The study is published in the journal, Chemistry & Biology.

Grant Wheeler, a developmental biologist and lead researcher at the University of East Anglia, said:

“Forty of the compounds gave us an interesting difference which we wanted to follow up.”

“The reason we were able to look at so many compounds was because it’s very easy to look at the embryos and see the color change.”

“The pigment cells are interesting for a number of reasons.

“The first is that the place where they develop is not where they end up – they move through the embryo in a process called cell migration.”

It is when melanoma cells migrate through the body to the organs and cause secondary tumors that the disease becomes deadly.

Melanomas are one of the most dangerous forms of skin cancer because they are highly invasive and resistant to treatment.

Scientists hope that if they can block this process they can halt the cancer.

The compound in this study works by inhibiting matrix metaloproteinases (MMP) which are expressed by melanoma tumors in both humans and frogs.

MMPs are zinc-dependant enzymes and the researchers observed varying changes to the patterning on the tadpoles according to the strength of dose they were receiving.

Mr Wheeler added: “It’s a long shot. We are quite far away from a cure for melanoma.”

Ed Yong, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said:

“There is still a lot of work to do before these interesting but preliminary results can be used to benefit people affected by cancer.

“But it just goes to show that studying animals like tadpoles, which may seem unusual, could lead to potential cancer drugs in the future.”

Bevis Man from the British Skin Foundation said: “This is certainly an interesting discovery and is worth keeping an eye on, but is unlikely to get a breakthrough in terms of treatment within the next ten years.”

New Zealand reptile becomes dad at 111 years old

By RAY LILLEY, Associated Press Writer Ray Lilley, Associated Press Writer – Mon Jan 26, 7:18 am ET

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – A captive reptile in New Zealand has unexpectedly become a father at the ripe old age of 111 after receiving treatment for a cancer that made him hostile toward prospective mates.

The centenarian tuatara, named Henry, was thought well past the mating game until he was caught canoodling with a female named Mildred last March — a consummation that resulted in 11 babies being hatched on Monday.

Tuatara are indigenous New Zealand creatures that resemble lizards but descend from a distinct lineage of reptile that walked the earth with the dinosaurs 225 million years ago, zoologists say.

An endangered species, the hatchlings born at the Southland Museum and Art Gallery will provide a badly needed boost to the tuatara’s genetic diversity, said the gallery’s tuatara curator, Lindsay Hazley.

Henry was at least 70 years old when he arrived at the museum, “a grumpy old man” who attacked other reptiles, including females, until a cancerous tumor was removed from his genitals in 2002, said Hazley.

“I went off the idea he was good for breeding,” Hazley told The Associated Press, but once the tumor was removed, “he was no longer aggressive.”

The museum now has 72 of the reptiles after 42 hatchings in the past two years.

Hazley hopes to use Henry regularly in the breeding program that is helping expand tuatara numbers after they had been savaged by predators.

Tuatara are estimated to number about 50,000, most of them living in predator-free sanctuaries, including offshore islands.

A male Tuatara takes 70 years to fully mature but reaches sexual maturity about age 20.

While there’s no scientific data on the life span of the ancient reptiles, “they go beyond 100 well and truly,” Hazley said. “They can be around for 150 to 250 years.”

Rare ‘dinky’ bird migrates to US for first time

CHOKE CANYON, Texas (AP) — Birders with binoculars and cameras are flocking to a remote state park in search of a small yellow-chested bird that apparently crossed the U.S. border for the first time from its high-mountain habitat in Mexico in Guatemala.

At 5 inches (13 centimeters) with beige and yellow markings, the pine flycatcher doesn’t look like much, but its unprecedented migration from Mexico and Guatemala is exciting birders all over the country.

“It’s not a thrilling bird visually. It’s thrilling because it’s a first U.S. record,” said Wes Biggs, who flew to Choke Canyon State Park from Orlando, Florida, to catch a glimpse.

The bird, which appears to be alone, was first spotted last month and as recently as Friday. The sightings have been confirmed by photographs and recordings of its chirping. The bird, with a solitary nature, usually stays at high elevations but made its winter home in the low Texas scrubland about 200 miles north of its usual habitat.

For the bird to be added to the official checklists of American birders, it will first have to be accepted by the Texas Bird Records Committee, then the American Birding Association. But expert birders are convinced the bird drawing the masses is a pine flycatcher.