Memories of 21, 42, 63 ... the 84th meandering

aktbird57 and the wildclickers, you have saved 5.9 acres so far


Together we've saved 8,270.4 acres of rainforest.

Clicked and we need rain, Danon.

Group Advocates Geoengineering Solutions to Warming

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 4, 2009

The Copenhagen Consensus Center, a controversial Denmark-based think tank focused on the environment and international development, proposed Thursday that world leaders should focus on a geoengineered solution to climate change in the near term rather than mandating cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

The group, headed by statistician Bjorn Lomborg, issued a report by five economists that suggested it made more sense to spend money on marine cloud whitening research and green energy development than to protect forests, clean up diesel emissions or significantly raise the price of carbon.

"You need to find a short-term way -- meaning the next 50 to a hundred years -- to deal with climate change," Lomborg said, adding that making artificial clouds by spraying seawater into the atmosphere could address global warming at a cost of $9 billion. Theoretically, these clouds could reflect sunlight back into space and, therefore, curb global temperature rise. "If it's that simple, we would want to do it. We need to check out if it's that simple."

Several scientists questioned whether focusing on geoengineered solutions at the expense of major carbon reductions would adequately address the effects of climate change. Carnegie Institution senior scientist Ken Caldeira, a geoengineering expert, said such a strategy "misses the point."

"Geoengineering is not an alternative to carbon emissions reductions," he said. "If emissions keep going up and up, and you use geoengineering as a way to deal with it, it's pretty clear the endgame of that process is pretty ugly."

Brad Warren, who directs the ocean health program at the advocacy group Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, noted that even if marine cloud whitening worked, it would fail to address the fact that human-generated carbon emissions are making the seas more acidic and threatening marine life.

"I haven't seen anything in the area of geoengineering that protects the ocean from the chemical consequences of greenhouse gas emissions," Warren said.

The panel Lomborg commissioned to set the center's climate priorities had five economists, including three Nobel laureates. One of them, Finn Kydland of the University of California at Santa Barbara, joined Lomborg in a meeting Thursday with Joe Aldy, special assistant to the president for energy and the environment, to brief him on the report.

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt confirmed the meeting but did not comment on how administration officials viewed the center's findings. "Administration officials meet with individuals and organizations who hold a wide variety of views about energy and environmental policy to listen to their ideas," LaBolt said.

Lomborg's center first sparked controversy five years ago when it suggested that humanity would be better off spending billions fighting HIV/AIDS, micronutrient malnutrition and malaria as opposed to global warming.

Have fun, wildclickers. Safe traveling.



http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

ehBeth, the Wildclickers saved over 67 acres as of last July.

Keep those clicks a clickin.

Clicked, and I guess we are all wildclickers now.

It's Music to These Monkeys' Ears -- and Also Their Hearts

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 7, 2009

Whales have songs, and so do birds, of course. But does music lift the spirits of a swallow? Do humpbacks hum to make themselves mellow?

Although bird songs and many other animal vocalizations have been the subject of intense scientific study, the effect of music on the moods of creatures other than humans has remained mysterious. If anything, research has suggested that animals are indifferent to human music, whether it's a sonata, a ballad or a rocker.

But a provocative new study, spawned by an unusual partnership between a cellist with the National Symphony Orchestra and a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has provided some of the first evidence that humans are not the only species whose heartstrings are pulled by music.

"We've basically shown for the first time that the components of music that seem to be important in affecting us emotionally are also the same components that affect other species," said Charles T. Snowden, the Wisconsin psychologist who teamed up with David Teie of the National Symphony Orchestra.

Snowden has spent years studying a diminutive species of monkey known as the cotton-top tamarin. These tamarins live in the rainforests of Central and South America and are known for their highly complex and frequent vocalizations.

"They use a lot of sounds in their natural communications system," Snowden said. "They were a natural species to study something like this."

Teie, who also teaches music at the University of Maryland in College Park, contacted Snowden in the hopes of exploring his ideas about the emotional effects of music. He thinks music has roots in the most primitive, earliest sounds to reach our ears, such as a mother's heartbeat.

After studying Snowden's extensive catalogue of recordings of tamarin calls and spending a couple of days in Madison making his own recordings of the primates, Teie set out to compose music tailored to the tamarins.

"My idea was, there's no reason for Barber's 'Adagio for Strings' to bring tears to the eyes of a tamarin," Teie said. "So I made a special kind of music just for them."

Teie modeled his compositions on two types of calls -- one that the monkeys emit as alarms and another that they produce when they are safe and calm. He created two songs designed to be agitating like a heavy-metal song and two designed to be calming like a ballad, using the standard structures of human music but utilizing the rising or falling pitches and durations of sounds in the monkey calls.

After recording the songs with his cello, Teie speeded them up eightfold to match the tempo and frequency of monkey vocalizations.

"They are tiny little creatures, and everything moves very fast when they chirp to each other," Teie said. "So I sped it up eight times so it would make sense to them."

Snowden and his colleagues played the 30-second song snippets for seven pairs of tamarins and conducted detailed observations of how they behaved for the next five minutes. The scientists compared that behavior to how the animals acted after hearing two ballads -- the "Adagio for Strings" and a mellow song by Nine Inch Nails called "The Fragile," as well as two aggressive songs: "Of Wolf and Man," by Metallica and "The Grudge," by Tool.

As expected, the human songs had no apparent effect on the monkeys' behavior or emotions. In contrast, after hearing the tamarin compositions designed to elicit anxiety, the monkeys clearly displayed more signs of that emotion, such as looking around, sticking out their tongues and shaking their heads. Similarly, they showed clear signs of calming down -- slowing down their activities, eating, etc. -- after hearing the ballads Teie composed for them.

"The human music had virtually no effect on them," said Snowden, whose findings were published in the Sept. 1 issue of the journal Biology Letters. "But the tamarin songs had clear effects."

Teie said he was thrilled by the findings.

"I can pretty confidently say that before this, there were no controlled studies showing a response to music by an animal," he said. "So this is the first."

The findings indicate that the human proclivity for music has a long evolutionary history, Snowden said.

"The results are suggestive to us that the emotional parts of music may have a long evolutionary history," he said. "The emotional aspects of music may apply to many other species as well, and in order to find that out we need to consider each species' frequency range or structure or tempo."

Bird songs and whale songs are generally considered more like a system of communication than a way of affecting emotions, Snowden said.

"The function of the bird song is primarily in courtship and mate attraction. It's done only in one sex -- males -- and stops after an animal secures a female. It has structure and variability and complexity, but it's used in a different context. It's used to influence mate attraction, not to influence any emotional state," Snowden said.

Other researchers said the findings are intriguing.

"I think it is a very creative approach to a deeply interesting question: How does organized, complex sound affect the emotions of animals?" said W. Tecumseh Fitch, a professor of neurobiology and cognition at the University of Vienna. "The authors are correct that the proper way to study the question is to create stimuli suited to the species being tested, in pitch and tempo, rather than simply playing Mozart, Metallica or other human music to them."

But Fitch said the findings are hard to interpret.

"There are so many variables changing that it is difficult to know which ones are actually having an effect," he wrote in an e-mail. "It will take a lot of careful work with carefully controlled stimuli to know what, exactly, is causing the change in the monkey's behavior."

Teie has already tried the approach with cats. While those compositions have yet to be subjected to a stringent scientific test like Snowden's, informal feedback from a handful of cat owners has been intriguing, he said.

"Some people have said, 'My cat has never been so calm,' " Teie said.

He said he has been in touch with officials at the National Zoo, who have expressed interest in compositions designed for other primates.

"I'd like to start up a program to bring music to all captive mammals," Teie said. "It can be calming, but also exciting for animals in a cage with nothing to do. The enjoyment of music should be available to all mammalian species."

I know full well that my cats like classical music.

Biologists to resume search for, tagging of great white sharks

By James Vaznis, Globe Staff | September 7, 2009

State biologists plan to search again this morning for great white sharks off the shores of Chatham, where they believe several of the fish are lurking near the ocean floor - a discovery that has prompted swimming bans on the beaches there.

Greg Skomal, a state biologist leading the team, also issued a reminder yesterday to the public that great whites are a protected species under state and federal laws and cannot be fished.

“I don’t think it would be prudent to catch one,’’ Skomal said.

The great whites, one of the most powerful sharks in the world and inspiration for the movie “Jaws,’’ have been attracting the attention of onlookers since they were first spotted last week near Monomoy Island, off Chatham. Biologists believe the sharks are attracted to the region because the island is a prime seasonal resting spot for seals, one of the sharks’ staples.

Chatham officials have banned swimming indefinitely at four east-side beaches: Lighthouse, North, South, and Andrew Harding’s Lane.

Skomal’s team will depart by boat between 6 and 7 a.m. - if the weather is good - and continue with the mission it started Saturday of attaching electronic tracking devices to the sharks. The team has already tagged two great whites, and Skomal believes there are at least three more in the area.

The tracking devices will remain on the sharks until Jan. 15, when the tags are programmed to pop off, rise to the surface, and transmit the data that has been collected via satellite to Skomal. Until then, Skomal will not know whether the device is working properly.

“It’s a little bit of a nail biter,’’ he said yesterday. “Sometimes they don’t work. It’s a little disheartening.’’

The transmitted data should include the depth and temperature of water the shark has traveled in and offer clues into the migration patterns of the great whites. Skomal said he wanted the devices to detach in January so he could learn where the great whites spend the winter.

While it is not uncommon for great whites to be present off Chatham, their visibility is unusual because those sharks tend to stick near the ocean floor, but they are coming closer to the surface, presumably because of the seals.

Skomal said he did not know how long the great whites might stay.

“They are pretty mobile,’’ Skomal said. “It’s hard to tell if they will camp out in one area for a while or move on.’’

Good photos of man's impact on nature.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2009/08/28/GA2009082802134.html?hpid=smartliving

Can't say I enjoyed the pics. Sad what we do to the earth.

Interesting story about the music.

Glad that you enjoyed them, Danon. Here are a couple more. One about the evolution of flowers, the other about the earliest domestication of dogs.

September 8, 2009
In Taming Dogs, Humans May Have Sought a Meal
By NICHOLAS WADE

The dog has so many fine qualities it is hard to know which it was prized and bred for by the early people who first domesticated its noble ancestor, the wolf. Was it the dog’s valor in the hunt, perhaps, or its role as night watchman, or its strength in pulling a sled, or its companionable warmth on cold nights?

A new study of dogs worldwide, the largest of its kind, suggests a different answer, one that any dog owner is bound to find repulsive: wolves may have first been domesticated for their meat. That is the proposal of a team of geneticists led by Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Sampling the mitochondrial DNA of dogs worldwide, the team found that in every region of the world all dogs seem to belong to one lineage. That indicates a single domestication event. If wolves had been domesticated in many places, there would be more than one lineage, each leading back to a local population of wolves.

The single domestication event seems to have occurred in southern China, where the dogs have greater genetic diversity than those elsewhere. The region of highest diversity is usually the place of origin because a species tends to lose diversity as it spreads.

Dr. Savolainen sampled a part of the dog genome, the mitochondrial DNA, and was able to estimate the time of the domestication " probably around the period that hunter-gatherers first settled down in fixed communities in China, about 11,000 to 14,000 years ago. Those people would have had an organized culture that enabled them to make muzzles, and possibly cages, that would have been needed to handle wolves.

There is a long tradition of eating dogs in southern China, where dog bones with cut marks on them have been found at archaeological sites.

Dr. Savolainen said wolves probably domesticated themselves when they began scavenging around the garbage dumps at the first human settlements, a theory advocated by Ray Coppinger, a dog biologist at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. As the wolves became tamer, they would have been captured and bred. Given local traditions, Dr. Savolainen suggests, the wolves may have been bred for the table.

Thus, dogs may have thus insinuated themselves into human life by means of garbage and dog meat, but they quickly assumed less demeaning roles. Once domesticated, they rapidly spread west from the eastern end of the Eurasian continent.

Most people do not eat dogs, so they must have spread so quickly for other reasons, perhaps because of their use as guard dogs or in pulling sleds, Dr. Savolainen said.

His report was written with Jun-Feng Pang of the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China, who analyzed the DNA of the many Chinese dogs in the study. It was published last week in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

In 2002, Dr. Savolainen wrote that dogs had been domesticated from wolves in East Asia, a conclusion that was challenged last month by a team at Cornell University. The Cornell team said genetic diversity was as high in African village dogs as in those in China.

Dr. Savolainen disputed the Cornell calculation in his new report, contending that diversity was, in fact, higher in Chinese dogs.

Adam Boyko, a member of the Cornell team, said that Dr. Savolainen’s team had now built a plausible hypothesis from detailed genetic data but that other explanations might still be possible, including that dogs had been domesticated at a second site, outside China, and had spread everywhere but China.

Stephen O’Brien, an expert on the genetics of domestication at the National Cancer Institute, said Dr. Savolainen’s argument for a single domestication event in southern China was “a pretty good conclusion” but one that could be strengthened by a more thorough sampling of wolves throughout the world.

A team of American researchers is examining the genetics of dogs and wolves with a so-called dog chip, a device that is programmed to recognize thousands of different sites on the dog and wolf genome, not just the mitochondrial DNA studied by Dr. Savolainen. The data have not yet been published, but some of it “doesn’t agree completely” with an East Asian origin of dogs, Dr. O’Brien said.

The disputes about the origins of dogs arise because researchers are just cutting their teeth on what Dr. O’Brien called “genomic archaeology.”

“It’s a brand new field,” he said. “We’re just learning how to do it.”

Domestication of the dog and other animals is both of intrinsic interest and of relevance to the human past. “Domestication was really the lever by which civilization was able to organize into communities larger than those of foraging families,” Dr. O’Brien said.

Dogs were evidently so useful to early people that they spread like wildfire. On the basis of current evidence, they were the first species to be domesticated.

September 8, 2009
Where Did All the Flowers Come From?
By CARL ZIMMER

Throughout his life, Charles Darwin surrounded himself with flowers. When he was 10, he wrote down each time a peony bloomed in his father’s garden. When he bought a house to raise his own family, he turned the grounds into a botanical field station where he experimented on flowers until his death. But despite his intimate familiarity with flowers, Darwin once wrote that their evolution was “an abominable mystery.”

Darwin could see for himself how successful flowering plants had become. They make up the majority of living plant species, and they dominate many of the world’s ecosystems, from rain forests to grasslands. They also dominate our farms. Out of flowers come most of the calories humans consume, in the form of foods like corn, rice and wheat. Flowers are also impressive in their sheer diversity of forms and colors, from lush, full-bodied roses to spiderlike orchids to calla lilies shaped like urns.

The fossil record, however, offered Darwin little enlightenment about the early evolution of flowers. At the time, the oldest fossils of flowering plants came from rocks that had formed from 100 million to 66 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. Paleontologists found a diversity of forms, not a few primitive forerunners.

Long after Darwin’s death in 1882, the history of flowers continued to vex scientists. But talk to experts today, and there is a note of guarded optimism. “There’s an energy that I haven’t seen in my lifetime,” said William Friedman, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

The discovery of new fossils is one source of that new excitement. But scientists are also finding a wealth of clues in living flowers and their genes. They are teasing apart the recipes encoded in plant DNA for building different kinds of flowers. Their research indicates that flowers evolved into their marvelous diversity in much the same way as eyes and limbs have: through the recycling of old genes for new jobs.

Until recently, scientists were divided over how flowers were related to other plants. Thanks to studies on plant DNA, their kinship is clearer. “There was every kind of idea out there, and a lot of them have been refuted,” said James A. Doyle, a paleobotanist at the University of California, Davis.

It is now clear, for example, that the closest living relatives to flowers are flowerless species that produce seeds, a group that includes pine trees and gingkos. Unfortunately, the plants are all closely related to one another, and none is more closely related to flowers than any of the others.

The plants that might document the early stages in the emergence of the flower apparently became extinct millions of years ago. “The only way to find them is through the fossils,” Dr. Doyle said.

In the past few years scientists have pushed back the fossil record of flowers to about 136 million years ago. They have also found a number of fossils of mysterious extinct seed plants, some of which produce seeds in structures that look faintly like flowers. But the most intriguing fossils are also the most fragmentary, leaving paleobotanists deeply divided over which of them might be closely related to flowers. “There’s no consensus,” Dr. Doyle said.

But there is a consensus when it comes to the early evolution of flowers themselves. By studying the DNA of many flowering plants, scientists have found that a handful of species represent the oldest lineages alive today. The oldest branch of all is represented by just one species: a shrub called Amborella that is found only on the island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Water lilies and star anise represent the two next-oldest lineages alive today.

If you could travel back to 130 million years ago, you might not be impressed with the earliest flowers. “They didn’t look like they were going anywhere,” Dr. Doyle said.

Those early flowers were small and rare, living in the shadows of far more successful nonflowering plants. It took many millions of years for flowers to hit their stride. Around 120 million years ago, a new branch of flowers evolved that came to dominate many forests and explode in diversity. That lineage includes 99 percent of all species of flowering plants on Earth today, ranging from magnolias to dandelions to pumpkins. That explosion in diversity also produced the burst of flower fossils that so puzzled Darwin.

All flowers, from Amborella on, have the same basic anatomy. Just about all of them have petals or petal-like structures that surround male and female organs. The first flowers were probably small and simple, like modern Amborella flowers.

Later, in six lineages, flowers became more complicated. They evolved an inner ring of petals that became big and showy, and an outer ring of usually green, leaflike growths called sepals, which protect young flowers as they bud.

It would seem, based on this recent discovery, that a petal is not a petal is not a petal. The flowers of, say, the paw-paw tree grow petals that evolved independently from the petals on a rose. But the genes that build flowers hint that there is more to the story.

In the late 1980s, scientists discovered the first genes that guide the development of flowers. They were studying a small plant called Arabidopsis, a botanical lab rat, when they observed that mutations could set off grotesque changes. Some mutations caused petals to grow where there should have been stamens, the flower’s male organs. Other mutations transformed the inner circle of petals into sepals. And still other mutations turned sepals into leaves.

The discovery was a remarkable echo of ideas first put forward by the German poet Goethe, who not only wrote “Faust” but was also a careful observer of plants.

In 1790, Goethe wrote a visionary essay called “The Morphology of Plants,” in which he argued that all plant organs, including flowers, started out as leaves. “From first to last,” he wrote, “the plant is nothing but a leaf.”

Two centuries later, scientists discovered that mutations to genes could cause radical transformations like those Goethe envisioned. In the past two decades, scientists have investigated how the genes revealed through such mutations work in normal flowers. The genes encode proteins that can switch on other genes, which in turn can turn other genes on or off. Together, the genes can set off the development of a petal or any other part of an Arabidopsis flower.

Scientists are studying those genes to figure out how new flowers evolved. They have found versions of the genes that build Arabidopsis flowers in other species, including Amborella. In many cases, the genes have been accidentally duplicated in different lineages.

Finding those flower-building genes, however, does not automatically tell scientists what their function is in a growing flower. To answer that question, scientists need to tinker with plant genes. Unfortunately, no plant is as easy to tinker with as Arabidopsis, so answers are only beginning to emerge.

Vivian Irish, an evolutionary biologist at Yale, and her colleagues are learning how to manipulate poppies because, Dr. Irish points out, “poppies evolved petals independently.”

She and her colleagues have identified flower-building genes by shutting some of them down and producing monstrous flowers as a result.

The genes, it turns out, are related to the genes that build Arabidopsis flowers. In Arabidopsis, for example, a gene called AP3 is required to build petals and stamens. Poppies have two copies of a related version of the gene, called paleoAP3. But Dr. Irish and her colleagues found that the two genes produced different effects. Shutting down one gene transforms petals. The other transforms stamens.

The results, Dr. Irish said, show that early flowers evolved a basic tool kit of genes that marked off different regions of a stem. Those geography genes made proteins that could then switch on other genes involved in making different structures. Over time, the genes could switch control from one set of genes to another, giving rise to new flowers.

Thus, the petals on a poppy evolved independently from the petals on Arabidopsis, but both flowers use the same kinds of genes to control their growth.

If Dr. Irish is right, flowers have evolved in much the same way our own anatomy evolved. Our legs, for example, evolved independently from the legs of flies, but many of the same ancient appendage-building genes were enlisted to build those different limbs.

“I think it is pretty cool that animals and plants have used similar strategies,” Dr. Irish said, “albeit with different genes.”

Dr. Irish said, however, that her studies of petals were only part of the story. “Lots of things happened when the flower arose,” she said. Flowers evolved a new arrangement of sex organs, for example. “A pine tree has male cones and female cones,” she said, “but flowers have male and female organs on the same axis.”

Once the sex organs were gathered together, they underwent a change invisible to the naked eye that might have driven flowers to their dominant place in the plant world.

When a pollen grain fertilizes an egg, it provides two sets of DNA. While one set fertilizes the egg, the other is destined for the sac that surrounds the egg. The sac fills with endosperm, a starchy material that fuels the growth of an egg into a seed. It also fuels our own growth when we eat corn, rice or other grains.

In the first flowers, the endosperm ended up with one set of genes from the male parent and another set from the female parent. But after early lineages like Amborella and water lilies branched off, flowers bulked up their endosperm with two sets of genes from the mother and one from the father.

Dr. Friedman, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, has documented the transition and does not think it was a coincidence that flowering plants underwent an evolutionary explosion after gaining an extra set of genes in their endosperm. It is possible, for example, that with extra genes, the endosperm could make more proteins.

“It’s like having a bigger engine,” Dr. Friedman said.

Other experts agree that the transition took place, but they are not sure it is the secret to flowers’ success. “I don’t know why it should be so great,” Dr. Doyle said.

As Dr. Friedman has studied how the extra set of genes evolved in flowers, he has once again been drawn to Goethe’s vision of simple sources and complex results.

Flowers with a single set of female DNA in their endosperm, like water lilies, start out with a single nucleus at one end of the embryo sac. It divides, and one nucleus moves to the middle of the sac to become part of the endosperm.

Later, a variation evolved. In a rose or a poppy, a single nucleus starts out at one end of the sac. But when the nucleus divides, one nucleus makes its way to the other end of the sac. The two nuclei each divide, and then one of the nuclei from each end of the sac moves to the middle.

Duplication, a simple process, led to greater complexity and a major change in flowers.

“Nature just doesn’t invent things out of whole cloth,” Dr. Friedman said. “It creates novelty in very simple ways. They’re not radical or mysterious. Goethe already had this figured out.”

Video of Thai man sharing his house with thousands of scorpions.

http://gmy.news.yahoo.com/vid/15420094

If there's a shortage of bees in the foothills, i haven't seen the population decreasing. They're all having a party on or near the porch! The deer herds invented a new bee deflecftion dance.

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Lost World Discovered in Crater in New Guines



The Bosavi woolly rat had no fear of humans when it was discovered. Photograph: Jonny Keeling/BBC

A lost world populated by fanged frogs, grunting fish and tiny bear-like creatures has been discovered in a remote volcanic crater on the Pacific island of Papua New Guinea.
'A giant woolly rat never before seen by science' Link to this audio

A team of scientists from Britain, the United States and Papua New Guinea found more than 40 previously unidentified species when they climbed into the kilometre-deep crater of Mount Bosavi and explored a pristine jungle habitat teeming with life that has evolved in isolation since the volcano last erupted 200,000 years ago. In a remarkably rich haul from just five weeks of exploration, the biologists discovered 16 frogs which have never before been recorded by science, at least three new fish, a new bat and a giant rat, which may turn out to be the biggest in the world.

The discoveries are being seen as fresh evidence of the richness of the world's rainforests and the explorers hope their finds will add weight to calls for international action to prevent the demise of similar ecosystems. They said Papua New Guinea's rainforest is currently being destroyed at the rate of 3.5% a year.

"It was mind-blowing to be there and it is clearly time we pulled our finger out and decided these habitats are worth us saving," said Dr George McGavin who headed the expedition.

The team of biologists included experts from Oxford University, the London Zoo and the Smithsonian Institution and are believed to be the first scientists to enter the mountainous Bosavi crater. They were joined by members of the BBC Natural History Unit which filmed the expedition for a three-part documentary which starts tomorrow night.

They found the three-kilometre wide crater populated by spectacular birds of paradise and in the absence of big cats and monkeys, which are found in the remote jungles of the Amazon and Sumatra, the main predators are giant monitor lizards while kangaroos have evolved to live in trees. New species include a camouflaged gecko, a fanged frog and a fish called the Henamo grunter, named because it makes grunting noises from its swim bladder.

"These discoveries are really significant," said Steve Backshall, a climber and naturalist who became so friendly with the never-before seen Bosavi silky cuscus, a marsupial that lives up trees and feeds on fruits and leaves, that it sat on his shoulder.

"The world is getting an awful lot smaller and it is getting very hard to find places that are so far off the beaten track."

Good flower story.

I like the volcanic rat story........... They can't be as big as the rats in New York City according to David Letterman.........!!

In Australia, many years ago, there was discovered a cache of trees that had been thought to have been gone millions of years ago. Thankfully, the guys who found the site kept it quiet and no one (tourist) knows where it is. That's a good thing. Take for example the site sumac introduced - the fact that there were people visiting the site will eventually change the flowers. DNA floats around long after animals pass anything.

All clicked - and - Iz!! Still clickign a lot.....!!!

Off topic, but a wonder anyhooo

it's me, hoft, typing from an airport - am so very glad to see you stradee - how are kitties and other family? - and wanted to thank you for e-mails on animals. Oh, and very glad to see Danon, too. will call you if in california, which i may be soon. love to you and yours.

last by by no means least, thank you for your wonderful quote from a republican president: