Caption by Rebecca Lindsey In addition to their battering of human habitats—cities and residential neighborhoods—hurricanes cut a destructive swath through migratory bird habitat. A recent study that combined field surveys of birds with before-and-after satellite images of forests concluded that migratory bird species located as far as 60 miles (100 kilometers) from a hurricane’s path […]
Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister, has promised to review shipping rules after a Chinese coal ship ran aground as a result of taking an “outrageous” short cut through the environmentally sensitive Great Barrier Reef. By Bonnie Malkin in SydneyPublished: 12:33PM BST 06 Apr 2010 Mr Rudd, who on Tuesday flew over Douglas Shoals where […]
SAFFRON HOWDEN, TOM ARUP AND BEN CUBBYApril 6, 2010 A PLUG made of compressed coral and held in place by water pressure is likely to be the only thing stopping more than 900 tonnes of oil gushing from a grounded bulk coal carrier onto the Great Barrier Reef. Salvage experts – some from the team […]
In this photo taken on Friday, March 19, 2010, a farmer works in a poppy field in Marjah, Afghanistan. When U.S., Afghan and NATO forces stormed Marjah in February, they were instructed to seize large opium stashes but leave farmers’ poppy fields alone. (AP Photo / Dusan Vranic) The Big Picture: Afghanistan, March, 2010 Technorati […]
By John Platt Traditional Ayurvedic medicine could face an uncertain future as 93 percent of the wild plants used in the practice are threatened with extinction due to overexploitation, the Times of India reports. The Botanical Survey of India recently prioritized 359 wild medicinal plant species and conducted an assessment throughout the country to determine […]
The government of Norway announced on April 1st, perhaps hoping the unseemly news would be lost amid the fictitious headlines of the day, that the country’s whale hunting quota would be raised to the highest level in 25 years: 1286 whales can be killed this season. The announcement has some animal protection groups scratching their […]
Editing by Jerry NortonSYDNEYMon Apr 5, 2010 3:56am EDT SYDNEY (Reuters) – A stranded Chinese coal ship leaking oil onto Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is an environmental time bomb with the potential to devastate large protected areas of the reef, activists said on Monday. The ship was a “ticking environmental time bomb,” Gilly Llewellyn, director […]
The decline of the central California breeding population cannot be attributed solely to any single threat listed below, but instead is the result of a combination of multiple threats. In some cases, exposure to one threat may make the animals more susceptible to the others (e.g., high level of contaminants may make an animal more […]
By Ambika Ahuja, Editing by Alan Raybould and Ron PopeskiHUA HIN, ThailandMon Apr 5, 2010 8:41am EDT (Reuters) – China on Monday denied that its dams were reducing water levels on the Mekong River and blamed problems along the river on unusually dry weather, but it also offered to share more data with its neighbors. […]
ScienceDaily (Apr. 5, 2010) — Researchers at Umeå University and the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have discovered that traces of many medicines can be found in fish that have been swimming in treated waste water. One such medicine, the hormone levonorgestrel, was found in higher concentrations in the blood of […]
