May 19, 2015 - EARTH - The following constitutes the latest reports of unusual and symbolic animal behavior, mass die-offs, beaching and stranding of mammals, and the appearance of rare creatures.
Mystery over 1,300 birds found dead on Chilean beach
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| Workers put dead birds into plastic bags on the beach in Concepcion, Chile on May 18, 2015. © AFP |
Chilean authorities said Monday they are investigating what killed
some 1,300 seabirds that mysteriously turned up dead on a beach.
The birds, which belong to the Procellariidae family, may have drowned after getting trapped in fishing nets or died from a disease such as bird flu, which is not endemic to Chile, said the country's Agriculture and Livestock Service (SAG).
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| Image: Daniel Oses (RBB) |
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| Image: Daniel Oses (RBB) |
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| Image: Daniel Oses (RBB) |
They were found Sunday afternoon by visitors to a small black-sand beach in the southern town of Lenga, a cove with several hundred inhabitants who live mainly on fishing and tourism.
SAG said it was analyzing samples taken from the birds to try to determine the cause of death.
Hundreds of birds were found dead in the same area in 2010. Authorities determined they had been caught in fishing nets. -
France 24.
Mass death of seabirds in Western U.S. is ‘unprecedented’ – unexplained changes within ocean to blame
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Blue-footed diving seabirds called cassin's auklets, including this one, have been washing up dead by the thousands on beaches
from San Francisco to central British Columbia.Photograph by C. Moses, COASST |
In the storm debris littering a Washington State shoreline, Bonnie Wood saw something grisly: the mangled bodies of dozens of scraggly young seabirds. In the storm debris littering a Washington State shoreline, Bonnie Wood saw something grisly: the mangled bodies of dozens of scraggly young seabirds. Walking half a mile along the beach at Twin Harbors State Park on Wednesday, Wood spotted more than 130 carcasses of juvenile Cassin’s auklets—the blue-footed, palm-size victims of what is becoming one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded. “It was so distressing,” recalled Wood, a volunteer who patrols Pacific Northwest beaches looking for dead or stranded birds. “They were just everywhere. Every ten yards we’d find another ten bodies of these sweet little things.”
Cassin’s auklets are tiny diving seabirds that look like puffballs. They feed on animal plankton and build their nests by burrowing in the dirt on offshore islands. Their total population, from the Baja Peninsula to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, is estimated at somewhere between 1 million and 3.5 million. Last year, beginning about Halloween, thousands of juvenile auklets started washing ashore dead from California’s Farallon Islands to Haida Gwaii (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) off central British Columbia. Since then the deaths haven’t stopped. Researchers are wondering if the die-off might spread to other birds or even fish.
“This is just massive, massive, unprecedented,” said Julia Parrish, a University of Washington seabird ecologist who oversees the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a program that has tracked West Coast seabird deaths for almost 20 years. “We may be talking about 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. So far.” Although there doesn’t appear to be a link to the virus that killed tens of millions of sea stars along the same shores from California to Alaska over the past 18 months, some scientists suspect a factor in both cases may be uncharacteristically warm waters. The U.S. Geological Survey and others have performed animal autopsies, called necropsies, on several of the emaciated Cassin’s auklets.
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Volunteers have been counting and tagging emaciated juvenile Cassin's auklets like these, which washed ashore near Pacific City, Oregon.
Photograph by J. Forsythe, COASST |
They’ve found no evidence of disease or trauma—no viruses or bacteria, no feathers coated with spilled oil. The birds appear simply to have starved to death. “There’s very little evidence of food in their GI [gastrointestinal] tracts or stomachs,” said Anne Ballmann, with USGS’s National Wildlife Health Center. At first scientists weren’t too surprised by the carcasses washing ashore. When young auklets fledge in late summer, they all enter the water at the same time and start competing for food—shrimp-like krill and tiny crustaceans called copepods. For various reasons, last summer’s birth class of Cassin’s auklets was gigantic. Researchers expected a higher death toll, too. But they now are perplexed by the sheer numbers of dead birds and the spreading geographic extent of the die-off. “Death at this level and over this much real estate has to be from more than just that,” Parrish said.
By comparison, not one of the five largest U.S. bird mortality events tracked by USGS since 1980 is estimated to have topped 11,000 deaths. In Europe, according to the U.K.-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the worst die-off on record occurred in 1983, when 57,000 guillemots, razorbills, puffins, and other seabirds perished in the North Sea and washed up on the British coast. “You get some of this with seabirds every year,” said David Nuzum, with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. “You get so many juveniles out there, and they’ve got this steep learning curve for feeding after being separated from their parents, so you always get a die-off in winter. But I’ve never seen anything like this, ever, and I’ve been here since 1985. -
National Geographic.
Herd of elephants trample man to death in Bengal, India
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| Soren was gored to death by the elephants |
With shrinking forests owing to increasing human pressure, the
man-animal conflict is on the rise. The latest in this regards is the
killing of a man by a wild elephant in the forests of Bankura district
of West Bengal on Monday.
This unfortunate incident occurred in Gokul Mathura village under
Barjora Forest Range in the district when a herd of elephants gored a
man to death in Bankura district, said a forest official.
He said that an old man whose name was Biswanath Soren and was around 65
years old, was sleeping under bamboo thickets on the edge of forest
when a herd of at least a dozen elephants while passing through the area
attacked him.
Soren was gored to death by the elephants, said Divisional Forest Officer of Bankura (North).
Earlier in April, a forest guard was killed in tusker attack in Onda under Panchet Forest Division in Bankura district.
Prior to the present incident, a forest official was attacked and
injured by an elephant in Jalpaiguri district on Sunday (May 10).
Referring to the Sunday's incident, a forest official said that a herd
of elephants had entered the Bhandiguri tea estate. While efforts were
on by forest staff to drive them away, range officer Sanjay Dutta was
attacked by one of the elephants. He sustained minor injuries on his
hand, said a forest official of the Jalpaiguri forest division. -
Indie Leak.
A tidal wave of starving sea lion pups has washed up on the shores of California
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One of over 430 sea lions that the Marine
Mammal Care Center in San Pedro has taken in since January 1. His shaved
marking happens to spell out “LA.”
Photo by Caroline Anderson
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[An unusually large number of sea lions stranding in 2013 was a red flag] there was a food availability problem even before the ocean got warm.” Johnson: This has never happened before…
It’s incredible. It’s so unusual, and there’s no really good explanation for it. There’s also a good chance that the problem will continue, said a NOAA research scientist in climatology, Nate Mantua.
Experts blame a lack of food due to unusually warm ocean waters. NOAA declared an El Nino, the weather pattern that warms the Pacific, a few weeks ago.
The water is three and a half to six degrees warmer than the average, according to Mantua, because of a lack of north wind on the West Coast. Ordinarily, the north wind drives the current, creating upwelling that brings forth the nutrients that feed the sardines, anchovies and other fish that adult sea lions feed on. -
ERN.
The ocean off the coast of California is “turning into a desert” – marine ecosystem crash is unprecedented
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A cart of deceased malnourished and dehydrated sea lions that had been stranded along the northern California coast, await their turn for necropsy.
Photograph: Peter Dasilva/EPA |
The waters of the Pacific off the coast of California are a clear, shimmering blue today, so transparent it’s possible to see the sandy bottom below. Viewing the ocean from the state’s famous craggy headlands, it’s impossible to know that the ocean’s unusual clarity is hiding a cruel beauty: clear water is a sign that the ocean is turning into a desert, and the chain reaction that causes that bitter clarity is perhaps most obvious on the beaches of the Golden State, where thousands of emaciated sea lion pups are stranded.
Sea lions are a ubiquitous part of the Californian landscape – they’re up and down beaches, piers and wharfs, with an overall population estimated at around 300,000. They have the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 to thank for their existence, passed by Congress in response to concerns about dwindling populations of marine mammals, including sea lions.
Now, the familiar creatures have become victims of their own success, with some arguing that their population may have reached natural capacity, and others blaming it on changing environmental conditions in California. Over the last three years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has noticed a growing number of strandings on the beaches of California and up into the Pacific north-west.
In 2013, 1,171 sea lions were stranded, and 2,700 have already stranded in 2015 – a sign that something is seriously wrong, as pups don’t normally wind up on their own until later in the spring and early summer. The problem, explains Justin Viezbicke of NOAA, is those crystal-clear waters. “The main contributing factor that we’re looking at right now and talking about with the biologists and climatologists on the Channel Islands [a major sea lion rookery] is the lack of upwelling. We haven’t had the strong north winds that drive the currents that create it, and because it hasn’t materialized – it’s moved the prey further and deeper from the moms that are foraging.” -
Guardian.
Dead pygmy sperm whale found near Melbourne Beach, Florida
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| A pgymy sperm whale beached Monday morning at Spessard Holland Park. © Tim Shortt/Florida Today |
Biologists suspect severe heart disease, coupled with 10 feet of rope
and piece of a plastic bag in its stomach, caused a 10-foot pygmy sperm
whale to beach itself Monday at Spessard Holland Park.
"It's really, really sick," Megan Stolen, a research scientist with the
Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, said shortly before the whale was
euthanized. "It's very, very skinny."
The whale showed signs of severe heart disease, Stolen said.
But biologists plan to examine the whale's remains to test for the
so-called morbillivirus. They'll test whether that measles-like virus,
which killed more than 1,600 dolphins since July 2013, also contributed
to the pygmy sperm whale's death.
The virus has been killing bottlenose dolphins along the Atlantic Coast
for more than two years in the worst outbreak of the virus in almost
three decades.
The virus claimed 740 dolphins from New Jersey to Florida in 1987.
Monday's was one of three recent whale to beach themselves in the region
in the past few weeks, but the deaths are not considered related.
On May 7, Hubbs researchers received a report from Canaveral National
Seashore staff that the whale had stranded alive on the beach within the
national park.
The whale washed out for a while but then washed back onto the beach at Kennedy Space Center.
Hubbs staff euthanized that whale, too. Whales rarely survive beaching.
But NOAA Fisheries also mandates all whales and dolphins that beach
during a morbillivirus outbreak must be euthanized to prevent spread of
the virus.
The dolphins infected with the virus wash up with lesions on their skin, mouth, joints, or lungs.
Since July 2013, the virus has killed more than 1,660 bottlenose
dolphins, from New Jersey to Brevard, more than 300 of them in the
Florida, according to NOAA Fisheries.
Stolen said about 30 dead bottlenose dolphins in the Indian River Lagoon
region have tested positive for the virus. But as many as 100 in the
region may have died from the virus, the Hubbs researchers suspect.
If tests continue to show no morbillivirus infections, NOAA Fisheries
may soon consider declaring a formal end to the unusual die-off, Hubbs
officials said earlier this month. That would also end the mandatory
euthanizing of the stranded dolphins and whales. -
Florida Today.
Mass die off of fish washes ashore in Canakkale, Turkey
Canakkale
's bell township Büyükpaş hit the village at the edge of the shore
after the mass fish deaths occurred in the hundreds of fish started to
smell Kocabas tea with the effect of heat.
Bell township Büyükpaş village on the edge of passing Karabiga the sea
spilled Kocabas tea return to red in color with the waste in mass fish
deaths occurred in previous days, pike, carp and yellowfin species of
fish are still hitting the shore along the 15 kilometers of tea from
Etili Katrandere.
Kocabas remaining plugged in Büyükpaş village bridge protection set on
the tea 1 meter in the dead pike Agriculture Tayhan of the villagers
said the smell began, "In 2007, the waters of the Kocabas tea was dead
blue, turning the fish.
We could not open our windows the smell of dead
fish for a month. 5 days Today before continuing to shoot dead fish
ashore in flowing red color Kocabas tea. Dead fish began to smell the
warm weather, "he said. -
Milliyet. [Translated]
