Category: Environment & Weather

Early warning system

From Wired News:

Wild animals seem to have escaped the Indian Ocean tsunami, adding weight to notions they possess a sixth sense for disasters, experts said Thursday.

Sri Lankan wildlife officials have said the giant waves that killed over 24,000 people along the Indian Ocean island’s coast seemingly missed wild beasts, with no dead animals found.

“No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit,” said H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of Sri Lanka’s Wildlife Department. “I think animals can sense disaster. They have a sixth sense. They know when things are happening.”

The waves washed floodwaters up to two miles inland at Yala National Park in the ravaged southeast, Sri Lanka’s biggest wildlife reserve and home to hundreds of wild elephants and several leopards.

Disasters

Excerpts from the U.S. Geological Survey page on the past century’s worst natural disasters:

The planet’s deadliest earthquake of the century, by far, was a magnitude 8.0 that struck Tianjin (formerly Tangshan), China, on July 27, 1976. The official casualty figure issued by the Chinese government was 255,000, but unofficial estimates of the death toll were as high as 655,000.

Bangladesh lost 300,000 people in November 1970 and more than 130,000 in April 1991, from cyclone-induced flooding, and the massive flooding of the Yangtze River in China in 1931 caused more than 3 million deaths from flooding and starvation.

You Can Call It a “Warning,” But Some People Are Still Going To Hear “Invitation”

NewMexiKen believes FunctionalAmbivalent is right.

The calls for a more comprehensive worldwide tsunami warning system call to mind the time, a few years ago, when we lived in California. There was a large subsea earthquake off the Aleutian Islands. The quite-well-developed American tsunami warning system kicked into gear, alerting people up and down the American west coast of the possibility of deadly tsunami.

In Los Angeles, where people sometimes view the world as if it were only as real as something on TV, thousands of people headed for the coast to watch the tsunami come in. Restaurants with decks overhanging the sand were packed. You couldn’t find a place to park at the beach as the throngs standing on the sand awaited, apparently, the excitement of their own horrifying death. Action news crews, broadcasting live from the potential devastation, reported that those who had gathered to experience the predicted killer wave were disappointed that it did not materialize.

Perhaps giving people a lot of notice of impending tsunami is not really what we need to do, at least in California.

Mountain Lions Move East

From The Washington Post:

The presence of the mountain lions, many of which have been found with freshly killed deer in their stomachs, is a startling signal that modern suburban and exurban America — without intending to do so — has transformed itself into superb wildlife habitat. With deer nearly everywhere, the big cats, it seems, are finding haute cuisine in the land of big-box stores.

Last year, one ran through downtown Omaha. Last month, one was shot in the suburbs of Sioux City. This month, a radio-collared mountain lion was spotted in the outskirts of Grand Forks, N.D. One was photographed in mid-October on a farm near Marshalltown in central Iowa, a confirmed sighting that deeply disturbed people at the recent meeting here.
…

First, there are probably more mountain lions in the continental United States now than before European settlement (more than 31,000, by one recent estimate). The resurgence began in the 1960s, when several western states, where mountain lion populations had been reduced but never wiped out, changed the legal status of the cats from varmint to big game, with limited or no hunting.

Where do we go from here?
Taking the West Forward

High Country News takes a look at the large issues facing the west.

The beginning of a presidential term presents Westerners with an opportunity to identify the problems that most threaten the future of our region, and to begin talking about how we might take them on. In this edition of High Country News, we focus on 10 issues in desperate need of action. These are challenges that we believe are nonpartisan, and that will remain significant far beyond the next four years. They can — and should — unite the West.

Here kitty, kitty

From the Arizona Daily Star:

Automated cameras have filmed at least two jaguars creeping across Southern Arizona since late August, offering fresh evidence that the endangered cats at least visit here from Mexico.

Jaguar.jpgThe jaguars’ full bodies and unmistakable spotted coats are visible in all four of the nighttime shots, taken near the border, south of Tucson, in oak woodlands. It’s still unclear if the secretive species is residing permanently in the United States.

Commonly associated with the tropics, jaguars were regularly shot by hunters in the American Southwest in the 20th century. Biologists say a colony of 70 to 100 jaguars persists about 135 miles south of Douglas.

Hurrah for the Detroit Zoo

From the Detroit Free Press (dated May 20, 2004; this came to NewMexiKen’s attention only recently):

The Detroit Zoo will become the nation’s first major animal facility to give away its elephants solely on ethical grounds.

Winky and Wanda, the latest in an 81-year-old tradition of pachyderms at the zoo, will be sent to one of two U.S. refuges this summer or early fall.

The decision to send them away comes amid a nationwide push to provide better care for elephants, widely considered to be among the Earth’s most intelligent creatures. They form strong social bonds and have a powerful need for physical and intellectual stimulation.

In the wild, female Asian elephants like Winky and Wanda typically roam 30 miles a day, form lifelong and unique friendships with members of their herds and mourn for their dead.

In captivity, they live in unnatural climates, develop physical problems such as chronic arthritis and exhibit psychological problems related to boredom and stress.

Drought update

Five years of record-breaking drought in the Colorado River basin have drained Lake Powell of more than 60% of its water. Flows on the Colorado are among the lowest in 500 years.

Downriver, Lake Mead, the biggest reservoir in North America and supplier of water to Southern California, Arizona and Las Vegas, is little more than half full. At Mead’s northern end, the foundations of St. Thomas, a little town demolished in the 1930s to make way for the reservoir, have reemerged.

From the Los Angeles Times.

Sneaky snake

Dad, official father of NewMexiKen, reports on wildlife happenings in the Tucson foothills.

We are plagued with pack rats or more properly know as wood rats. Now pack rats are pretty low on the food chain and one can expect Good old Mother Nature will send in her method of control.

Steve, our professional yard man, and I have been trying to destroy a pack rat nest in the compound. A large male had tunneled down under a large prickly pear cactus. We had filled the holes and tamped the dirt with the rat in them. A week had gone by and Steve discovered the rat had dug back out. While the rat was looking at Steve the diamond back was looking at the rat and got him.

Steve came over to tell me and I went to see the snake. Now I don’t like pack rats and was happy the snake got him, but I am not crazy about full grown or for that matter any rattlesnakes.

We do have a number of pets, children and some old folks living here, some over 80. Answer: 9-1-1. Within minutes the firemen arrived and captured the snake. They will release it somewhere, unharmed.

They crash quickly and often unexpectedly

Article from Christopher Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times on the dangers of dehydration —

It’s nearly noon, and the morning’s hikers scramble out of the baking inner canyon, wheezing and dripping. In a room a few hundred yards from the South Rim, supervising ranger Marc Yeston touches a green pen to a wall map and traces a long, wriggling path. Then he makes a triangle.

Here, he says, is the spot where they found Margaret Bradley, a 24-year-old University of Chicago medical student and marathoner.

Just three months before, the 115-pound Bradley had finished the Boston Marathon in a few ticks over three hours, a solid performance in temperatures well over 80.

“I focused on keeping myself hydrated,” she told the magazine Chicago Athlete afterward, “and not letting the adrenaline from the crowd make me do something stupid.”

But last month, when she and a companion decided to try a 27-mile trail run in a single day, that caution was missing. A cascading series of miscalculations, say rangers, turned this scholar-athlete into the Grand Canyon’s first dehydration fatality in four years.

The article details what happened.

Talk about your teenager eating you out of house and home

From John Noble Wilford in The New York Times:

Paleontologists now think they have the answer: a teenage growth surge in which a T. rex normally put on an average of 4.6 pounds a day over four years.

A new study of tyrannosaur bones, scientists reported yesterday, has determined that from about 14 to 18 years of age, a meat-eating T. rex with a humongous appetite gained about 6,600 pounds to reach its full adult weight of more than 11,000 pounds, length of 42 feet and height of about 14 feet at the hips.

These dinosaurs were at least 15 times the size of the polar bear, today’s largest living terrestrial carnivore, and were about the same weight as an African bull elephant.

Tonight, tonight
Won’t be just any night

From Space.com:

A fine display of shooting stars is underway and peaks overnight Wednesday into early Thursday morning. Astronomers expect the 2004 Perseid meteor shower to be one of the best versions of the annual event in several years.

Watching meteors requires no special gear — telescopes and binoculars are of no use. So anyone in the Northern Hemisphere with clear skies could see some “shooting stars.”

Showers predicted

Meteor showers that is — Wednesday night and Thursday morning in North America. From NASA:

The best time to look for these “traditional Perseids” is during the hours before dawn on Thursday, August 12th. Set your alarm for 2 o’clock in the morning; go outside; lie down on a sleeping bag with your toes pointed northeast. You’ll soon see meteors racing along the Milky Way.

Can’t wake up at 2 a.m.?

Try looking around 9 or 10 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 11th when Perseus is hanging low in the eastern sky. You won’t see many meteors then, but the ones you do see could be memorable. Shooting stars that emerge from the horizon and streak horizontally through the atmosphere are called “Earthgrazers.” Slow and colorful Earthgrazers are a good target for city dwellers, because they are so bright.

Bear with me

From the Casper Star-Tribune:

While residents often grumble that the billionaires are running the millionaires out of scenic northwestern Wyoming, the animal kingdom has a similar scenario taking shape in the area:

The grizzlies are pushing the black bears out of the wild — and closer to humans.

At least, that is the theory of two wildlife biologists who were asked to explain the recent rise in human-black bear conflicts in that part of the state.

Steve Cain, wildlife biologist with Grand Teton National Park, and Eric Shorma, bear management officer with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, said the expanding grizzly bear population may be causing black bears to seek different turf to call their own.

“It could be the changes in bear populations themselves are forcing others into more developed areas,” Cain said Friday. “We have had several good years of good grizzly bear cub production. It makes sense that as grizzlies expand, some black bears may be looking for new places to live. Often, those places become the less desirable ones to live, like roadsides and developed places.”

The article continues.

It’s Prozac time

From BBC News:

Traces of the antidepressant Prozac can be found in the nation’s [Britain’s] drinking water, it has been revealed.

Apparently the English are thinking about doing something about it but no one is getting very worked up.

NewMexiKen is thinking this might be a good time to start a new product — The Queen’s Water, direct from England. Maybe we could get an endorsement from Norah Jones.