Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Hi Stradee! Interesting info you posted. Are you still in Pacific NW, and if so do you know if Boomerang identified her trees?! See posts on previous page.

HS, good seeing your postings here as well!

I looked for the tree, but couldn't find anything on line remotely resembling such a beautiful plant from the Oregon area! You might ask Bernie or Jane who live in the state.

I'm still in the Sierra's surrounded by pines and an array decorative trees ie: maples, lily, and my fav pine the Deodora (sp) lol however, nothing like the tree living near Boomerangs home. Wondering if the tree was grown to be decorative. I have three types of maple trees and all look very different except for the leafs. Identifying the leaf system may be a good way of finding the name of Boomerangs tree. Taking just the leaf to a local nursery may solve the mystery.

Well, Hello Stradee and HS ----- I had thought the site was dead of boredom... Welcome back!!!!!!!
Stradee I heard something about bees on the Nat'l news just this morning. They are beginning to do better since the Winter is so un-naturally warm this year. Also have been following info re the glaciers - it seems the heavy weight of the ice is what creates the water at the bottom and causes the movement. Interesting articles. Thanks.
HS - I have looked and looked and find no tree that resembles the one pictured. We would need much more info re the yard trees history and better pics of the leaves and bark. I still think the tree was groomed from when it was tiny to look the way it does. Maybe I'm wrong - but that would not be the first time..... Thanks for looking in.
I still do my daily clicks to save a tree.
Thanks all who do.

Good to see you too, Danon. Stradee and I and a few others here look in often even though we rarely post. You don't follow politics closely, so you probably missed the latest Libertarian craze: floating islands in the high seas (you can almost believe in predestination at this point ) far from the taxman:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/seasteading-the-great-escape/

Estimated price for an apartment (when one of these islands gets built) will be less than for an apt in Manhattan. I don't know what trees will get planted there, but will let you know the moment I find out - and it will be something of a novelty to stop worrying about taxes and start worrying about pirates!

Captain Sparrow's paradise

Dan, i've been saying all along that bees are affected by what fields are sprayed with PLUS what corporations feed the animals!

We have seen a number of brown Sierra bees returning to the area in full force, due to the fact that most if not all Sierra homeowners do not use harmful pesticides...and many have garden sanctuaries for bees and butterflies. If nothing else, people are waking up to the fact that companies such as Monsanto should be outlawed.

Anyhooo, it's been a rather sad day for animal advocates who've fought for years for horses, wolves, and all wildlife. Here we are again attempting to stop horseslaughter in the United States.

Oh, and in Stanislaus County there's a number of illegal horse races taking place where the horses are injected with meth before races. Sanislaus County officials were not aware of the races (they say) until Channel 3's report.

HS, it is getting increasingly unsafe for Americas horses, again. People are abandoning the animals or gathering them up for illegal purposes. Quite upset over the prospect of horseslaughter happening again in the U.S...and the cruelty of the poor animals shipped to Canada and Mexico.

When will people learn? Probably never.

Hey, that's a good idea - if only we didn't have trash to get rid of. And, I agree about the pirates, the whole outer walls will have to be made like medieval castles with gun ports and places to pour HOT water on invaders. Probably have to have floating bouys for cell phones - and hydrogen converters to get power for electricity........... Oh well, it looks good anyway. The Japanese already did something like it with their new airport. Or, was it Chinese ?? I forget a lot at my age. Thanks.

There's a dim light of hope on the horizon.......... I think young individuals are quickly becoming aware of the things we older folks have done to the earth and are willing to make changes. Hope so.
Also hoping the horses do well.

Yeah well Dan, we were the youngins not to many years ago and fighting for trees, wildlands, as well as wildlife.

Now we're back to square one...horses, wolves, wildlands, wildlife...all the work and laws enacted don't mean squat. Each generation of Governors has a new view of what their states future should be. Unfortunately, they're visions are wrought with how much profit they can amass. Hunters dollars are more important than the preservation of some predator species such as wolves. The Horses? They don't carry American Express either.

At the federal level, spending cuts directly affect our National Parks leaving them open to poachers and god knows what else. Dismal

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity with an inset of an instrument located at the end of it's robotic arm. An artist's representation of RHESSI. Flying up above Earth's radiation-blocking atmosphere, the spacecraft can observe X-rays and gamma rays from the sun to study solar flares. (Credit: NASA/Goddard/Conceptual Image Lab)

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120209101327.htm

Thanks for the link and info, Stradee. I'd heard lots about it years ago and think that it will give us fair warning this year on the 21st of December. Grin....................

LOL

that and how solar storms affect weather patterns....i find the technology fascinating.

Now we need a laser to obliterate all the space junk orbiting the planet...and hoping to hell they aim away from Earth. Just sayin'

Hi Danon, Stradee and HS. I have been offline since just before Christmas but hope to be more constant soon. Good to read all the posts here.

Hi back, Sumac - glad to see you and hope you'll stick around now. I just gave up on the political threads after discovering the best geopolitical analysis is published in The Onion: http://www.theonion.com/articles/iran-worried-us-might-be-building-8500th-nuclear-w,27325/

You can't make that stuff up

An ancient global warming event shrunk the earliest horses down to the size of housecats, according to new research that could have implications for what mammals might look like in a future warming world.

During what's known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, about 56 million years ago, a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere and oceans boosted average global temperatures by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 degrees Celsius) over 175,000 years. Mammals responded to this climate change by shrinking, with about one-third of species getting smaller.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46514619/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.T0gANfES0uc

Hi ya Sumac

HS, the Onion is my all time favorite news gathering site.

Scientists Create Lab-Grown Meat

http://www.theonion.com/articles/scientists-create-labgrown-meat,27464/

Hi everyone --- I've been lazy lately. Thanks for the news and all very interesting sites to visit.

Must be planetary

We've got weather!!! Snow n rain! Thanking the rain gods.

I think it has more to do with the String Theory. Energy levels ya know.

Although it looks like we are getting a lot of rain down here in NE TX - we are not. Got a sprinkle a few days ago.

Thanks all for saving trees.........................

It appears that the discussion has faltered.


Investigating Mysteries of Polar Bears’ Ancestry With a DNA Lens
By JAMES GORMAN
Polar bears, long thought to have branched off relatively recently from brown bears, developing their white coats, webbed paws and other adaptations over the last 150,000 years or so to cope with life on Arctic Sea ice, are not descended from brown bears, scientists report.

Instead, according to a research team that looked at DNA samples from the two species and from black bears, the brown bear and polar bear ancestral lines have a common ancestor and split about 600,000 years ago.

The report, published online on Thursday in the journal Science, is the latest attempt to understand the surprisingly murky origins of one of the most familiar animals on earth, and a potent environmental symbol because it is losing the sea ice it depends on to a warming climate. Because of climate change, and threats from shipping, hunting and pollution, the polar bear is listed as “vulnerable,” one level below endangered, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The report comes to no conclusion about how sensitive the bears are to the current loss of the sea ice that they live on, and the evolutionary tale it presents can be read in different ways.

The findings challenge the idea that the bears adapted very quickly, but confirm that they have made it through warming periods and loss of sea ice before. It may have been touch and go for the bears, however, because the authors find evidence of evolutionary bottlenecks, probably during warm periods, when only small populations survived, even though warming was occurring much more slowly than it is now.

The researchers, including Axel Janke and Frank Hailer of the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt, compared DNA samples from 19 polar bears, 18 brown bears and 7 black bears.

What they found, Dr. Hailer said, was that polar bears “are older and much more genetically unique” than had been thought. Other studies in the past few years suggested that the species was “a very recent offshoot from brown bears,” he said, dating from about 150,000 years ago.

That calculation was based on DNA outside the cell nucleus known as mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on only through females, and so gives an incomplete picture of evolution.

Dr. Hailer and colleagues looked at 14 stretches of nuclear DNA. This is the genetic material that comes from both parents and combines at conception to form a blueprint for a new individual.

Charlotte Lindqvist, at the University at Buffalo, who was not involved in the study, was the lead author of a paper in 2010 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at mitochondrial DNA and homed in on the 150,000-year time frame for polar bear origin, with the species splitting off from brown bears.

She said in an e-mail that the new study “demonstrates that the two species do indeed represent separate lineages.” But she questioned whether the evidence was sufficient to provide a firm date for polar bear origins. Comparisons of the full genome in both species are needed, she said, to nail down the timing of polar bear evolution.

For animals so well known, polar bears have been something of a puzzle in terms of their origins. Part of the reason is that they live mostly on sea ice, so fossils preserved on land are rare.

So some questions have had to wait for modern techniques for reading genetic material that have made the DNA of living species as useful as any fossil bed for tracing evolution.

But mysteries remain, some more puzzling than ever. Why does the mitochondrial DNA suggest a much more recent origin for polar bears? Dr. Hailer suggests that it is evidence not of the origin of the bears, but of interbreeding between polar and brown bears long after they evolved, perhaps when the polar bears were driven to land because of sea ice loss.

Another researcher, Beth Shapiro of Pennsylvania State University, suggested in a recent paper that interbreeding might have occurred in periods of environmental stress. In the journal Current Biology in 2011, Dr. Shapiro and a team of scientists reported that polar bears and extinct Irish brown bears interbred about 130,000 years ago, and that the brown bear mitochondrial DNA from that mating has spread to all polar bears over time. Dr. Hailer said that ice loss now could be far more threatening to polar bears than in the past because it is happening faster than ever before, and because the bears also face hunting and pollution.

May 14, 2012
In City Where Dogs Outnumber Children, Finding a Way for Coyotes to Coexist
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
SAN FRANCISCO — Almost all creatures, great and small, are welcome in the city of St. Francis, patron saint of animals, whose spirit imbues this place with a love and regard for our nonhuman friends. Take just one example gleaned from census and city data: Dogs outnumber children here, making already assertive dog owners an even more formidable political force.

But the emergence in recent years of coyotes in the city’s parks, and sometimes in its expensive backyards and picturesque streets, has raised doubts about whether that founding legacy can survive. Will the two animal worlds — the domesticated and the wild — be able to coexist? Might they even, as many in this liberal city hope, ultimately complement each other?

Taking no chances, city officials recently cordoned off trails and barricaded a restroom in an area of Golden Gate Park where reports of coyotes following dog owners and approaching unleashed dogs have been rising. The coyotes are believed to be protecting their den and newborns during the pup-rearing season, which lasts from April through August.

“Coyote alert” signboards and posters, as well as those warning dog owners to keep their pets on leash, have been put up in Golden Gate Park and other pockets where coyotes have been sighted.

Reports of coyotes killing dogs have come in, though none have been substantiated this season.

“Some of it, we don’t know how real it is and how much of it is people raising the hysteria level,” said Rebecca Katz, director of the city’s Animal Care and Control.

The other day, Ms. Katz said, someone called in a coyote attack on a pet pig. “We went out there. There was no pig, no coyote. So yeah.”

The barricades had also upset some people. “So it becomes more and more escalated that way,” she said.

Last week, Animal Care and Control sent out a stern written statement warning that “San Franciscans do not seem to be getting the message about how to coexist peacefully with local wildlife” because many dog owners were ignoring the law and letting their pets run loose. Animal Care posted a video on YouTube of an off-leash Rottweiler, filmed by his owner, harassing two coyotes apparently protecting a den.

Some dog lovers were left unconvinced by the city’s plea for coexistence.

“I’m not fond of wildlife. This is as wild as I want it to get,” said David Powers, who was walking Honda, a mix between a Rottweiler and German shepherd, near the barricaded restroom one recent afternoon. “This is a city. They belong in the country.”

“I’ve never seen any — thank God,” he said, about half an hour before a lone coyote appeared at that spot and lingered more than long enough to satisfy joggers who stopped to take pictures with their iPhones.

In San Francisco, a city of 805,000, there are 108,000 children, according to the 2010 census. And there are 180,000 dogs, and 10 coyotes, according to city estimates. The coyote population has grown nationwide, with an increasing number making forays into suburban and urban areas.

Coyotes arrived relatively late here, with the first sightings in 2004. Around that time, a coyote was videotaped crossing the Golden Gate Bridge into the city at night. Genetic tests later confirmed that the city’s coyotes share ties to those found to the north, on the other side of the bridge.

In 2007, the city had to call federal authorities to shoot two coyotes that had attacked a pair of dogs in Golden Gate Park. Since then, the city has emphasized coexistence.

“Usually, the knee-jerk response is, “Problem: wildlife. Let’s trap and kill,” said Camilla Fox, executive director of Project Coyote, a private organization based in Marin County that has worked with several cities, including San Francisco, to educate people about coyotes. “San Francisco has been very proactive.”

Though some dog owners accepted the coyotes’ presence grudgingly, others embraced it.

In Glen Canyon Park, Matt Orrick said he walked his mutt, Lazlo, at least twice a day and regularly spotted coyotes at dusk. He had never experienced an encounter, though he kept Lazlo off leash.

“They’re doing their own thing,” he said. “It’s pretty cool. This is a big city, and there are wild animals.”