The species descriptions were published in Zootaxa, the world’s foremost journal for taxonomic zoology.

“After the spectacular discovery of several new monitor lizards from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi three years ago, our results now illustrate that the diversity of water monitor lizards in the Philippines has also been largely underestimated” says André Koch, who will soon complete his doctoral thesis at the University of Bonn. Southeast Asian monitor lizards are one main focus of his dissertation, which he writes at the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig (ZFMK).

Prof Böhme, vice-director of the ZFMK and head of the herpetology section, has investigated monitor lizards since more than 20 years, and adds: “It’s amazing that these largest living lizards of the world have been neglected for so long and that new species come up time and again. It shows that even with large vertebrates not all species of our planet are recognized and named. There are too few experts in the world, the education level at universities is declining and the essential knowledge about the global biodiversity stands to get lost!”

Co-author Dr Maren Gaulke (GeoBio-Center LMU, Munich), an expert for Philippine reptiles, particularly monitor lizards, has been studying the biology of these impressive giant reptiles for 25 years: “Monitor lizards are fantastic creatures. They are agile, powerful, and the most intelligent lizards of the world.”

The three new Philippine monitors were identified based on examination of numerous preserved voucher specimens in various major European natural history museums, in combination with long-term studies in the field. This impressively demonstrates the immense importance of such museum collections as the archives of the global biodiversity. Unfortunately, in times of limited public funding, the necessary curatorial positions are often not reoccupied, when a scientist is retired. This disastrously affects not only the corresponding collections but also the related field of knowledge!

Thus, one of the new monitor species, which is known from only two specimens in the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen, was named after the late Jens B. Rasmussen, former herpetologist of the museum collections there, whose position was not reopened again. Thereby, the authors want also to call attention to the global taxonomy crisis.

Story Source:
Adapted from materials provided by University of Bonn, via AlphaGalileo.Posted byJon Downesat11:25

The study is described by Mayte Ruiz, Zachary M. Beals, and Emilia P. Martins in the June 2010 issue of Herpetologica.

For the study, the three researchers collected 13 male and 26 female sagebrush lizards from the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California and housed them in terraria at Indiana University, Bloomington. During a two-week test period, half of the female lizards were assigned at random to a low-courtship treatment group that received one visit from a robotic male lizard every other day, while the other female lizards were placed in a high-courtship group that saw the robotic male lizard four times daily.

The researchers wanted to see whether the amount of female courtship experience influences male sagebrush lizards’ behavior. “Repeated male courtship may be beneficial to males if increasing female exposure to courtship displays advances reproductive state,” the researchers write. This also may help female lizards produce more fertilized eggs and breed earlier and more often.

After the two weeks of robotic lizard visits, a live male lizard was place in each female lizard’s terrarium for 30 minutes. The researchers paired each male sequentially with two females — one from the low-courtship group and one from the high-courtship group.

“In our study, male lizards distinguished between females that had received more previous courtship and those that had received less, directing more tongue-flicks and moving more often toward females that had greater courtship experience than when placed with females that received few displays,” the researchers write. “Although females did not differ in behavioral response due to display treatment, males may detect differences in physiological state of the female and respond accordingly.”

They note that additional research is needed to determine physiological differences between females with varied courtship experience. The researchers also note that their study “used a robotic lizard to create differences between females that were not detectable to human observers, and an assay of male behavior to detect those differences.” This shows how robotic stimuli can help manipulate animals in a controlled way for research purposes, they write.

Story Source:
Adapted from materials provided by Allen Press Publishing Services, via Newswise.Posted byJon Downesat11:26

PADRE ISLAND NATIONAL SEASHORE, Tex. – It is nesting season here, and just offshore, Kemp’s ridley sea turtle No. 15 circles in the water before dragging herself onto the sand to lay another clutch of eggs.

The sea turtle, affectionately nicknamed Thelma by a National Park Service employee, has already beaten some terrible odds. Still in the egg, she was airlifted here from Mexico in after the 1979 blowout of the Ixtoc 1 rig, which spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and covered the turtles’ primary nesting place.

Now Thelma and others of her species are being monitored closely by worried scientists as another major oil disaster threatens their habitat. Federal officials said Tuesday that since April 30, 10 days after the accident on the Deepwater Horizon, they have recorded 156 sea turtle deaths; most of the turtles were Kemp’s ridleys. And though they cannot say for sure that the oil was responsible, the number is far higher than usual for this time of year, the officials said.

The Deepwater Horizon spill menaces a wide variety of marine life, from dolphins to blue crabs. On Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expanded a fishing ban in the gulf because of the spreading oil. But of the endangered marine species that frequent gulf waters, only the Kemp’s ridley relies on the region as its sole breeding ground.

Since the Ixtoc 1 spill, the turtles, whose numbers fell to several hundred in the 1980s, have made a fragile comeback, and there are now at least 8,000 adults, scientists say. But the oil gushing from the well could change that.

The turtles may be more vulnerable than any other large marine animals to the oil spreading through the gulf. An ancient creature driven by instinct, it forages for food along the coast from Louisiana to Florida, in the path of the slick.

“It lives its entire life cycle in the gulf, which is why we are so critically concerned,” said Dr. Pat Burchfield, a scientist at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Tex., who has studied the turtle for 38 years.

The nesting season for the sea turtles runs until mid-July, and for most of that time the mothers will remain off Padre Island and the beaches of Mexico, where there is currently no oil. But then things become more chancy, as new sea turtle babies go off to sea, floating on currents in the gulf or on seaweed patches that could be covered by crude. Hungry after egg-laying, adult females are known to go to the mouth of the Mississippi, a particularly rich feeding ground, to replenish themselves.

Juvenile turtles, who stay off the shore, have made up most of the turtle deaths in the gulf so far.

André M. Landry Jr. of the Sea Turtle and Fisheries Ecology Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University, Galveston, said satellite radios had been attached to several sea turtles, including Thelma, for research. He hopes these will offer clues about what is happening offshore.

“If she is beached, it is going to be constantly sending out a signal as opposed to the random signals they send out when they randomly come up to breathe,” Dr. Landry said.

Barbara Schroeder, national turtle coordinator for NOAA fisheries, the government agency charged with assessing damage to offshore life, said that the agency was investigating the sea turtle deaths intensively, but did not have many answers yet.

She said that so far full necropsies had been performed on 50 turtles and partial necropsies on another 17. Internal inspections of the animals, she said, did not reveal oil. But she added that scientists still had to test tissue samples taken from some of the turtles for evidence of oil.

She cautioned that it might be hard to determine conclusively how the turtles died or even how the spill was affecting the species more generally.

“People think this is like television, where the mystery is solved in one hour,” she said. “It is very complex. Most of the impacts occurring to turtles are out of sight. Most turtles never wash ashore.”

The Kemp’s ridley is millions of years old; its ancestors once swam with dinosaurs. Sandy olive in color, Kemp’s ridleys are the smallest of the sea turtles, only about two feet across. Although the turtles have been spotted along the Atlantic Seaboard, they return to the warm waters of the gulf to breed.

As recently as the 1940s, they were abundant in the Mexican gulf waters. Tens of thousands at a time would come ashore on the same day at Rancho Nuevo, a remote Mexican beach in Tamaulipas State, to lay their eggs in the synchronized pattern unique to their breed. But pollution, the collection of eggs for food and aphrodisiacs and the nets of shrimp trawlers depleted their numbers.

Then came the blowout on the Ixtoc 1. The deepwater well dumped three million barrels of crude into the gulf, covering the beach at Rancho Nuevo. Nine thousand hatchlings had to be airlifted to nearby beaches. Although the role of the oil in killing the turtles was never confirmed, by 1985, there were fewer than 1,000 Kemp’s ridleys left.

To prevent a single environmental catastrophe from sending the turtles into extinction, eggs from remaining turtles, including an egg that became sea turtle No. 15, were brought here to Padre Island to begin a new colony. She came in 1986.

At birth, the babies were set free in the surf down the road from the ranger station to allow them to imprint the beach on their memories, then captured again and protected until they were nine months old and less susceptible to becoming prey.

“We called it head start, after the school program,” said Donna J. Shaver, chief of sea turtle science and recovery for the National Park Service at Padre Island, who has worked with the sea turtles there since 1980.

No. 15 has returned to the island six times to lay clutches of eggs, burying her most recent round of 92 eggs in the sand by an enormous rusted, beached buoy only one and a half miles from where she was first put into the surf 24 years ago.

“Their precision is really amazing,” Dr. Shaver said. Scientists will be watching the radio blips from the tagged turtles closely, but the tracking devices are not infallible.

The transmitters might stop functioning because of dead batteries. And even if a turtle is known to have beached, the carcass might never be found or might be found only after serious decomposition, and the cause of death might never be known.

Still, Dr. Shaver prefers to think positively until more results come in. “When I got here, there were many who thought the species might not survive at all,” she said. “We’ve come so far.”Posted byJon Downesat11:28

The primitive Archey’s frog (Leiopelma archeyi) and Hochstetter’s frog (Leiopelma hochstetteri) are two of the species that inhabit the area of ‘high conservation value’ on New Zealand’s North Island where the mining is planned to take place.

Archey’s frog is currently ranked top of the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) EDGE of Existence amphibian list, making it the most evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered amphibian on the planet. Described as a “living fossil,” Archey’s frog is almost indistinguishable from the fossilised remains of frogs that walked amongst the dinosaurs 150 million years ago.

“In the year when reducing biodiversity loss is high on the political agenda, it is inconceivable to think that we’d put the nail in the coffin of some of our rarest and most extraordinary frog species,” say Helen Meredith, EDGE of Existence amphibian conservation projects coordinator at ZSL.

She adds: “We will be faced with these kinds of decisions again and again in the future. Now is the time to start recognising the long-term value of our natural world over any short-term economic gains.”

The frog populations have been intensively monitored for over 40 years, representing the best data set on frog populations in the world. The proposed mining will cut through the heart of these monitoring sites.

Dr Phil Bishop, leader of the University of Otago’s frog research says: “Only four species of frog survive in New Zealand, and this proposed mining activity could cause the extinction of one of New Zealand’s native amphibians, and a severe decline in another — a devastating blow to global amphibian conservation.”

7,000 hectares of land in the West Coast’s Paparoa National Park, Great Barrier Island and the Coromandel Peninsula has been proposed to be considered for mining of coal, gold, iron ore and other rare minerals.

The North Island brown kiwi, long-tailed bats, striped geckos and Helm’s butterfly are some of the other rare and endangered species found in these protected areas.

The New Zealand government is now holding a public consultation on whether the conservation status of the area should be downgraded to allow mining to take place. The closing date for submissions is May 26, 2010 (http://www.med.govt.nz/Schedule4).

ZSL conservationists are now calling for UK residents to support the protection of New Zealand’s unique flora and fauna by submitting to the public consultation process.

Story Source:
Adapted from materials provided by Zoological Society of London.Posted byJon Downesat11:29

Buenos Aires–The ethical significance of the discovery that tadpoles scream when threatened may take some time to occur to scientists, ethicists, and animal advocates. A breakthrough in scientific recognition of animal sentience, the finding took more
than three years just to win widespread notice after formal publication in a leading journal.

Tadpoles might have been audibly screaming when threatened for more than 200 million years before Guillermo Natale, Ph.D. of the National University of La Plata in Buenos Aires, Argentina heard the multi-note metallic sound emitted by tadpoles of the horned frog Ceratophrys ornata.

Natale published a brief article about it in 2007 in Acta Zoologica, produced since 1920 by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences & Letters. Then three years passed before Matt Walker, editor of the BBC publication Earth News, noticed Natale’s article
and shared the news of the screaming tadpoles with the world on April 3 2010.

Within a month Walker’s write-up was amplified by more than 6,200 other broadcast, print, and web media. Yet few if any of tens of thousands of online commentators
appeared to consider the ethical implications of a finding mostly reported as news of the weird.

“The discovery could have far-reaching implications for our understanding of the behaviour and ecology of amphibians,” wrote Walker. But that was as far as discussion of the meaning of Natale’s finding appeared to go.

“That tadpoles communicate somehow is simply amazing,” said Natale. “They possess the structures to do so within three days of life,” Natale told Walker. “It is the first time any vertebrate larva has been found to use sound to communicate underwater,” Walker wrote. “The discovery that frog tadpoles can make sounds raises the possibility that a host of aquatic larvae communicate in a similar way.”

The finding demonstrates sentience in vertebrates at an earlier stage than has ever before been scientifically established.

The tadpole scream is usually not a response to a direct physical stimulus, Natale found. Most often it is anticipatory, meaning that the tadpole must recognize a threat and perceive an advantage in communicating, rather than just trying to escape, evade notice, or fight.

The discovery of the tadpole scream may challenge the idea, sometimes advanced as part of a “reduction, refinement, replacement” strategy, that animal experiments might be made less inhumane by using animals at earlier stages of development.

“We have definitely underestimated their abilities,” said Natale.Natale was originally studying the mating calls of adult Ceratophrys ornata. Native to Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, Ceratophrys ornata are sometimes sold in pet shops as the so-called
Pacman frog.

Ceratophrys ornata “is now endangered as it gains popularity among pet owners,” according to University of Ottawa biologist Vance Trudeau. Seeking a way to breed Ceratophrys ornata in captivity,

Natale netted a Ceratophrys ornata tadpole and “heard a brief, clear, very audible metallic sound,” he told the BBC.

Successful captive breeding enabled Natale to study Ceratophrys ornata in his lab. Natale discovered that Ceratophrys ornata tadpoles are “naturally aggressive and carnivorous, often eating the tadpoles of other frog species,” Walker recounted.Yet, “Much to our astonishment, they do not eat each other,”

Natale said, “Producing distress calls is likely to help prevent the tadpoles from cannibalising each other,” summarized Walker. “They continue to emit distress calls underwater both as tadpoles and after they have begun metamorphosis, when they become froglets.

The tadpoles also produce the sounds when removed from the water.” Some insect larvae are known to communicate with sounds, but many insects spend most of their lives in a larval stage. Vertebrates by contrast tend to evolve rapidly out of the larval stage, undergoing most of their development later.

Merritt Clifton is editor of Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE/P.O. Box 960
Clinton, WA 98236/Telephone: 360-579-2505/Cell: 360-969-0450
Fax: 360-579-2575/E-mail: anmlpepl

“This is just want we don’t want to find,” said the educator director for Audubon North Carolina as he hauled the cage-like wire trap out of the shallow water and onto the bow of the researchers’ small skiff. “We’ve got at least three dead terrapins in here.”
Actually there had been four – along with four mature and still living blue crabs – Woods found after examining the shell fragments that had fallen to the bottom of the mud-splattered pot.

The discovery underscored a worrisome trend for one of North Carolina’s most distinctive coastal residents, the diamondback terrapin.

Considered a gourmet treat a century ago, the terrapins were rapidly depleted in much of their range along the country’s East and Gulf coasts.

But the smallish turtle, which is unique in being the only turtle species in North America that lives in brackish waters, is now threatened by man’s attraction to another coastal delicacy, the blue crab.

Diamondback terrapins are identified as a “species of special concern” in North Carolina, which means populations are declining at a rate that may require conservation efforts in the future.

Data from neighboring states along with some research taking place in Southeastern North Carolina show that a few “ghost pots” coupled with the terrapin’s propensity to stay close to home can be a deadly combination.

“There’s compelling data in other states, including South Carolina, that crab pots are a significant problem,” said Amanda Southwood, a biologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Fishermen have always found “bycatch” in their crab pots. But the problem today, Woods said, is that vinyl coatings used on the pots slow their breakdown and allow them to keep catching and killing critters for years after they’re lost or abandoned.
An estimated 15 percent of the more than 1 million pots soaking in state waters every year are lost.

Working toward a solution that balances the needs of the turtles with those of the fishermen, a trio of Audubon researchers found themselves scouting the shallow waters of the Intracoastal Waterway just south of the Surf City swing bridge for derelict pots on a sunny, but blustery, Monday morning.

One option could be to require crab pots to have turtle-excluder devices, basically a small plastic rectangle with an opening too small for mature terrapins to get through while still allowing crabs access.

Another idea, borrowed from other coastal states, could be to declare any pots not removed after the crabbing season to be litter and allowed to be removed.
Southwood said research into the life cycle of the terrapins also shows that they don’t venture too far from shore, possibly making a requirement that pots not be placed in shallow waters in known turtle “pockets” a simple solution for everyone involved.

But you can’t approach regulators or legislators asking for a change without data showing the extent of the problem, and hunting for lost pots isn’t as easy as it might sound.

To help with the search, the Audubon team uses side-scan sonar to map the bottom of the waterway.

But recognizing a pot’s echo among the blips and other shadows on the screen and then actually recovering it from deep water are two different things.
“We’ve spent 40 minutes trying to get a pot,” Wood said. “It’s right there, and we still couldn’t find it.”

The team is also very careful to avoid interfering with active pots.

“We don’t touch a pot with a buoy,” Wood said, eager to calm any fears commercial crabbers might have.

But, he added, derelict pots are a significant threat to fishermen since they catch crabs that could go into active pots or at least help support the local population.

“We just want to get these derelict pots out of the water,” Woods said. “That’s all.”

Using a small grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Audubon team is in its second field season surveying the waterway and back channels between Topsail Island and up and around the Cape Fear River. Other researchers are scouting other areas of the state’s coastline.

The findings have been stark and eye-opening.

“In some areas we’ve found five derelict pots for every one active one,” Wood said.
And turtles?

“We had one behind Masonboro Island that had 28 turtles in it, all dead,” Wood said.

He added that no one was interested in putting a dent in the state’s most lucrative fishery.

“But we know we can do better,” Wood said as he waded out to recover yet another wayward pot marooned in the muck, its crumpled and weathered upper half visible at low tide.Posted byJon Downesat11:30