April 22, 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.
Authorities said a dead humpback whale washed up near the east end of Fire Island.
A spokeswoman for the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research & Preservation told Newsday that the organization was making plans to do an on-scene necropsy.
The whale was discovered Tuesday afternoon in an area not easily accessible. She said the necropsy has to be done on the scene at low tide.
Heavy equipment will be needed to pull the whale away from the surf on Wednesday, the spokeswoman said. A thunderstorm is expected Wednesday afternoon.
Humpbacks are endangered. - 7 Online.
Delays were caused on a busy stretch of the M74 motorway after reports of a dog "taking control of a tractor".
The incident - highlighted on Twitter by Traffic Scotland - took place at J13 at Abington, South Lanarkshire.
It later emerged that a sheepdog called Don, owned by farmer Tom Hamilton, had leaned on the controls of his utility vehicle, taking it on to the road.
Police and Mr Hamilton later recovered Don, who was unhurt, and the vehicle, from the central reservation.
Mr Hamilton told BBC Scotland that he was out on his off road pick up checking lambs in a field above the M74 near Abington.
Farmer relieved
As always he was accompanied by his Collie sheepdog Don, who was sitting beside him in the passenger seat. Don escaped with little more than a fright
While Mr Hamilton was examining a lamb he turned round to see the Gator utility vehicle crashing through the fence and heading down an embankment on to the northbound lane of the M74 with Don still sitting in it.
The vehicle stopped after hitting the central barrier, smashing the windscreen.
Mr Hamilton said he feared that he had not pulled the handbrake properly and was extremely relieved that no drivers were hurt.
The farmer was also relieved that Don escaped with little more than a fright.
The episode caused a stir on social media when it was reported by Traffic Scotland at about 08:45 on Wednesday.
Dog puns
The transport body tweeted: "M74 (N) J13-RTC due to dog taking control of tractor... nope, not joking. Farmer and police at scene, vehicle in central res."
Shortly afterwards Traffic Scotland provided the update: "M74 (N) at J13 - Route is clear from earlier incident and dog is fine. Has to be the weirdest thing we have ever reported! No delays in area."
Police said the vehicle had gone through a fence near the motorway at about 08:15.
The incident led to plenty of dog puns as people responded to Traffic Scotland's tweets.
Tony T wrote: "Police investigating, so far no leads," while Beverley Friend added: "This is barking."
Michelle Muirhead asked: "Will the dog have points on his licence? Was he breathalysed? Did police arrest him?" - BBC.
Brussels residents got the shock of their lives when they looked out of their windows earlier today after three zebras escaped from their pen in Koningslo near Vilvoorde. The zebras caused considerable disruption on the roads, as you can imagine, but fortunately the animals were swiftly recaptured, first one, and then the other two.
The zebras escaped from Koningslo, south-west of Vilvoorde and immediately made for Schaarbeek before arriving at the City of Brussels.
In an impressive effort, police, fire services and animal welfare officers were mobilised to ensure the animals could be caught, but this turned out to be more difficult than initially thought. Police actually had to chase the animals in a police van for several kilometres, as these proved quite fast.
WATCH: Zebras On the Loose Galloped Through Brussels!
Story comes to an end in Vilvoorde City
Having headed south towards Brussels initially, the animals changed their minds and returned to Vilvoorde. One of them was caught at the Schaarbeeklei, while the other two enjoyed their liberty just a bit longer, until they got stuck in a private parking lot that could be closed with a gate. This was in the centre of Vilvoorde in Cyriel Buysse Street, named after the famous Flemish writer. A vet was called to the scene to calm down the animals.
Originally, four zebras had escaped, but one could be caught very quickly in a nearby park. The owner said that he installed two fences around his zebra farm (called Ranch Ste Ann), but one fence was not ready yet after renovation works. The animals managed to squeeze through a hole in the first fence. - Deredactie.
If there were a manual for transporting wolverines, Rule No. 1 would probably go something like this: Make sure the wolverine cannot get out of the cage.
At Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday, it became clear that this precaution had not been taken.
A 40-pound male wolverine named Kasper was being shipped from a zoo in Norway to a conservation park in Alaska. At around 3:30 p.m., he arrived in Newark to change planes and go through United States Customs.
It was there that the animal's handler, Sarah Howard, noticed there was a hole in Kasper's cage.
"His head was sticking out," said Ms. Howard, a curator for the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, the wolverine's intended new home. She had flown to Newark to meet him.
The cage was made of metal, said Joseph Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport. "It's believed he chewed a hole in it."
Wolverines, which look kind of like small bears but are actually the largest members of the weasel family, are legendarily vicious. With long, sharp teeth, they have been known to kill animals many times their size, including caribou and white-tailed deer.
Kasper remained in his cage, but Ms. Howard was alarmed.
"She said it was growling and stuff like that, but maybe they do that all the time, walk around and make noise," Mike Miller, executive director of the conservation center, said.
A wildlife officer and a Port Authority police officer were summoned to Terminal C.
The cage was carefully placed in a transport van, Mr. Pentangelo said, "just to add another level of security, so that the wolverine wasn't a threat to himself or the public."
A new, uncompromised cage was procured from the Bronx Zoo, as was a wild animal veterinarian. The cages were put face to face and Kasper was encouraged to walk into the new one.
"He balked," Mr. Pentangelo said. "He did not want to go. He made it very clear."
The veterinarian administered a shot of ketamine, a tranquilizer. Kasper dropped off to sleep. The cage transfer was accomplished. And after an overnight stay at Terminal C, Kasper resumed his journey.
Kristiansand Zoo in Norway, which had sent Kasper, was closed on Wednesday evening when a reporter called, and no one there could be reached.
A decent life awaits Kasper in Alaska, where the conservation center sits on a 170-acre spread in the mountains about an hour southeast of Anchorage, in Portage.
He will get three acres, at least. That is not a lot by wolverine standards — they can range over 200 square miles — but it is enough to roam around.
And if all goes well, Mr. Miller said, he will have a mate.
"There's another facility, in Sweden, that is sending us a female," he said. - New York Times.
A baby girl has been badly disfigured in a dog attack at home after her parents left her by herself while they worked in nearby fields.
Ten-week-old Qingqing is currently in a critical condition in hospital in eastern China, following emergency surgery to repair her mauled face.
Her mother told the People's Daily Online: 'We left after our baby girl fell asleep. Who knew this would happen?'
The woman, named only as Ms Li, said that on the day of the attack, she and her husband fed their daughter then went to work near their house in Haimen City, eastern China.
But Ms Li could not stop thinking about her daughter so returned home after just ten minutes.
When she arrived, a white dog with blood around its mouth came running towards her, she said.
She dashed to the bedroom where she had left Qingqing - and discovered that the little girl had been dragged from her bed by the dog, which is believed to be a stray.
Ms Li said: 'I nearly fainted. My baby girl was lying face flat on the floor, with blood all over.'
The right side of Qingqing's face had been shredded and her eyelid torn off. She was carried to a local clinic by her mother but her injuries were too severe to be treated there.
She was then transferred to the larger Nantong City No.3 People's Hospital, where she was operated on. She is recovering from the surgery but is suffering from a fever that is concerning her doctors.
Her plastic surgeon, Dr Sun Jiyie, said: 'This is the youngest child with the most severe injuries we have seen from a dog bite.
'If she could safely power through the critical period, we will be planning more plastic surgery. But she is so young and the injuries are so severe, the operations will no doubt be very difficult.'
Mrs Li, who is keeping a vigil at her daughter's bedside, said she and her husband only recently moved to Haimen after working at a greenhouse farm in another province for three years.
Last night Dr Zhao Xianzhong, the director of the hospital's burns and plastic surgery department, reminded all parents never to leave their babies and children alone.
He also issued a general warning about dogs - saying attacks in China are more common in spring and summer.
The hospital currently treats around 20 people a day for dog bites but the figure is expected to increase in the coming weeks as temperatures rise.
'When summer arrives, people wear less fabric, and dogs are only interested in exposed skin,' explained Dr Zhao. 'Girls should be more aware when they are wearing short skirts and shorts.' - Daily Mail.
At first light on June 4, 2013, Steve Fradkin, a National Park Service ecologist, led a small team down a gravel strand called Beach 4 on Washington's Olympic coast. The group's destination was a rocky bench known—fatefully, it would turn out—as Starfish Point. There it would carry out an annual count of intertidal life forms as part of a long-term survey of the Pacific shore. Conditions were perfect, the sea calm beneath a blue sky dotted with cotton-ball clouds.
The day's beauty ended at Starfish Point. "It was a horror show," Fradkin told me. Instead of the usual spangling of purple, orange, and brick-red on the rocks, many of the starfish, which are known to biologists as sea stars, were contorted, marked with white lesions, or seemingly melting into goo. "They were missing arms," Fradkin said, "and there were even instances of arms walking around by themselves."
The team's observations are considered the first official record of an ongoing outbreak of a sea-star wasting disease that has killed millions of starfish from Baja California to southern Alaska, typically wiping out more than ninety per cent of each population it strikes. It's the greatest wildlife mass-mortality event, or "die-off," of the present day.
Mass-mortality events are sudden, unusual crashes in a population. On the spectrum of death—mortality's rainbow, if you will—they fill the space between the cool regularity of background death rates and the hot flare of species burning out into extinction. If you think that you are hearing about them more often these days, you're probably right. (Elizabeth Kolbert described frog and bat die-offs in a 2009 article; her subsequent book won a Pulitzer Prize this week.) Even mass-mortality experts struggle to parse whether we're witnessing a genuine epidemic (more properly, an epizootic) of these events. They have also raised another possibility: that we are in the throes of what one researcher called an "epidemic of awareness" of spooky wildlife deaths.
Die-off reports are fertile ground for latter-day anxieties. The events they describe tend to elude explanation, encouraging the notion that our private theories about why they happen are as legitimate as those of the baffled scientists. Of course, mass death also looks like seriously bad news. While we are bombarded with stories of environmental doom and gloom, many of the problems are effectively invisible. It's mainly mathematical models, for example, that tell us an extinction crisis is underway, mostly involving little-known species in little-known places. In an atmosphere of pervasive human guilt, if not eco-grief, it is easy to assume that wildlife mass-mortality events are cinematically graphic manifestations—melting starfish, birds falling from the sky—of the powerful foundational forces that drive more abstract challenges such as climate change.
The Internet has offered a wellspring of speculation about mass wildlife deaths. A case in point: more than four thousand red-winged blackbirds are found dead on New Year's Day, 2011, in Beebe, Arkansas. As the story spreads, news of other die-offs is reported from around the world. Dead jackdaws in Sweden. Dead velvet swimming crabs in the U.K. More dead blackbirds in Louisiana. Dead snapper in New Zealand ("many with their eyes missing"). Five days after the initial event, a Washington Post blogger dubs it "the Aflockalypse." The name sticks, and so does the implication. The Web is soon abuzz with commentators linking these occurrences to end-is-near prophecies, secret government experiments, and the threat of ecological collapse. The National Wildlife Health Center ultimately diagnoses the probable cause of the die-off as avian panic, most likely triggered by loud noises—possibly fireworks—too close to the birds' nighttime roost. Of course, nobody can say for sure.
Wildlife die-offs are an ancient phenomenon. One fossil site in Chile revealed recurring mass marine-mammal deaths, most likely from toxic algae blooms, dating back at least nine million years. Aristotle, in his "Historia Animalium," in the fourth century B.C., remarked on mass dolphin strandings as simply something that the animals were known to do "at times." The earliest written record in American history, from 1542, by the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, appears to indicate that Native Americans on Tampa Bay, in Florida, understood fish die-offs—which still occur in the area today—as typical of certain seasons.
At least in some quarters, the sudden death of large numbers of wild animals has been read as a dire message to humanity: scientists have pointed out that the first biblical plague of Egypt, a fish die-off in a blood-red Nile, is an apt description of the effects of the acidification of the river's water. Yet the widespread interpretation of such events as signs, whether ecological or divine, that humankind's abuse of the planet has gone too far appears to be relatively new.
Even oddball mortalities of the type that trigger apocalyptic anxiety today don't appear to cause much stir in the historical record. In 1884, hundreds of tons of dead fish bellied up in the lakes that surround Madison, Wisconsin, requiring daily burials by a crew of up to thirty-eight men with horse teams. During the "great bird shower" of 1904 in Minnesota and Iowa, millions of sparrow-like Lapland longspurs fell from the night sky, most of them dead but some hitting the ground as snowballs that then "hatched" live birds in the morning sun. Detailed reports of both events exist; they document public curiosity and conjecture, but very little sense that these die-offs represented any judgment on society.
Even thirty years ago, the public response to an unusually extreme mass-mortality event wasn't particularly fraught. In 1983, long-spined sea urchins, then a common Caribbean species, began to waste away; their bony casings soon littered shorelines from Panama to Florida. The species had been abundant for a long time, possibly hundreds of thousands of years, but within thirteen months its population had declined by ninety-eight per cent. Even today, the urchins number not much more than ten per cent of their former plenitude. Haris Lessios, a senior staff scientist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, in Panama, studied the urchin crash from the outset. He recalls little news coverage—indeed, the New York Times reported on the die-off only once, a year after it began—and no public interest beyond local residents, who were happy not to contend any longer with the urchins' painful sting. "I don't think anyone was particularly worried," Lessios told me. "I wasn't. I thought that within a few years things would be back to normal."
Like the urchin die-off, the 2013 sea-star-wasting-disease outbreak had a terrible impact over an enormous geographic range. By contrast, however, references to melting starfish and their detached zombie limbs appeared everywhere from National Geographic to Fox News to the End Times Prophecy. Starfish are a beloved ocean icon, and the public reaction was twofold: expressions of sadness, often accompanied by offers of help (observations by "citizen scientists" contributed to what is probably the largest data set ever assembled about a marine-animal disease outbreak), and generalized concern that human beings must be responsible—and might be next.
Pete Raimondi, a University of California, Santa Cruz, marine biologist who is the principal investigator with a research group studying the event, said that, after the news broke, he responded to hundreds of reporters and "volumes and volumes" of calls, e-mails, blog posts, and personal contacts from citizens. "That's the highest level of anxiety I've ever seen," Raimondi said. "People were not only worried about the environment, they were worried about themselves." Online, speculation about the cause of the die-off soon focussed on radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant, which had been badly damaged by the tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. Raimondi recalled a phone call in which a fearful soon-to-be father asked whether he should immediately move his family away from the West Coast. It was one of many similarly heartfelt calls. Researchers have found no evidence of a link between the ongoing Fukushima disaster and the starfish die-off, Raimondi said—"very massive sampling" indicates that the outbreak began before waterborne radiation reached the coast. Many members of the public remain unconvinced.
Broadly speaking, however, the gap between the public perception of die-offs and the scientific interpretation is not so wide. Until recently, most biologists tended to look at mass-mortality events as isolated incidents with case-specific causes. As a result, it has been the convention among major media sources to present die-offs as at once mysterious and alarming, but also ordinary and even natural. The pattern is not unlike telling ghost stories to children while scolding them for being afraid. Several disquieting tales have already made the 2015 news cycle, most notably hundreds of dying sea-lion pups that began turning up on California beaches in January, and two thousand snow geese that dropped out of the sky to die in Idaho in March. Such phenomena really are relatively commonplace.
At the time of this writing, the National Wildlife Health Center had recorded fifty-six mass-mortality events in the U.S. so far this year, among them the sudden deaths of fifty black vultures in Ascension Parish, Louisiana; thirteen hundred waterfowl in Humboldt County, California; and two thousand bats in Pierce County, Wisconsin.
Yet recent research suggests that the perception of wildlife die-offs as more frequent and alarming than ever might have some basis in fact. In January, the first study ever to attempt to track trends in mass-mortality events was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; the authors found that die-offs appear to be increasing in both number and magnitude, even after attempting to correct statistically for the fact that mass deaths are more likely to be documented today than they were in the past. Bird die-offs, for example, have historically been among the best represented in the scientific literature. The study's authors had expected that an increase in the reporting of such events would add a larger number of less dramatic cases—in which fewer birds die—to the over-all data set, bringing down the average number of deaths per occurrence. Instead, they found the opposite. The typical number of bird deaths per reported die-off has risen, from about a hundred in the nineteen-forties to some ten thousand today. The over-all number of bird die-offs also seems to have increased. "That paper supports a lot of what many of us have been suspecting," Jonathan Sleeman, a wildlife epidemiologist who heads the National Wildlife Health Center, said. "I do think we're seeing more catastrophic events."
Every biologist I spoke with who is researching mass-mortality events said that many wildlife die-offs today really could be signals of serious problems with the ecological fundamentals of the planet. Last year, a team of scientists found that sea-star wasting disease is caused by a virus-size organism (and therefore probably a virus). Given that similar, though lesser, outbreaks have occurred in the past, the current epizootic could be perfectly natural, nothing more than a particularly dangerous strain of a virus. Yet sea stars are known to be maritime canaries-in-the-coal-mine: "They're always the first ones to go," Raimondi said. Radiation from Japan may have been ruled out as the epizootic's catalyst, but a long list of other big-picture environmental stressors are under investigation for possibly having made the sea stars more susceptible to disease, among them temperature spikes (which may be related to climate change), ocean acidification, pollution, or some combination of the above or other pressures. It's not crazy to think that mass deaths of wildlife are telling us something about the state of the world, Raimondi said, but it remains important to let the evidence speak case by case. "If they're going to be stressed, then they should be stressed about things that are real," he said.
If the starfish die-off proves to have been exacerbated by human causes, could it be a warning of an imminent ecological catastrophe? The answer may depend on your definition of catastrophe. "You're not going to go from these really healthy, stable ecosystems to collapse," Raimondi said. "That's not to say that things aren't going to change."
When the long-spined sea urchin crashed in the Caribbean in 1983, it led to what scientists call a "phase shift" in the marine environment. The urchins were important grazers of seaweed. With the urchins gone, seaweed surged, overgrowing coral reefs. Caribbean reefs had already been under duress from overfishing, pollution, and other factors, but the urchin die-off appears to have been a tipping point. The most visually spectacular shallow-water reefs in the Caribbean today are less impressive than even an average reef of thirty years ago.
Oddly, what Raimondi called the "worst-case scenario" for the sea-star die-off is the opposite of what happened in the Caribbean. On the Pacific coast, the big, habitat-forming structures are not coral reefs but underwater "forests" of seaweed. Starfish eat sea urchins; without them, urchins may mow down the kelp forests. That in turn can call up a roster of changes that range from more frequent eagle attacks on seabirds to higher waves striking the shore: not the end of the world, but a different world—and, ecologically speaking, a poorer one.
It might not happen that way, of course. Nature is full of surprises. Observers on the West Coast this spring are reporting more baby starfish, many no bigger than a fingernail, at more sites than at any time in the past fifteen years. The best current explanation for this supernova of cuteness is that the onset of wasting disease triggered starfish to reproduce intensively before dying. "If they survive, it means recovery may be underway," Raimondi said of the tiny sea stars. "If they grow up and start wasting away, well, that's a different story." These days, this may qualify as hope. - The New Yorker.
The chances of being attacked by a bear are extremely slim. It's even less likely it would happen twice. But the victim of an attack last week also came face-to-face with an aggressive bear four years ago. And both times, it was a fight for his life.
"Multiple attacks on my shoulders, he bit me on my head, my arms, my hand," said Bob, who asked us not to use his last name.
Bob describes receiving more than 40 bites, severe claw swipes and deep bruises in a black bear attack last week.
"It would whip around, do this 180 and go for my leg, my shoulders, my head, and just come in and bite me again, and I would just try to nail it when it came in," he said.
Bob says he was running on a well-used trail in the woods surrounding Joint Base Lewis McChord when his dog Abby spooked the bear. As it charged in his direction, Bob grabbed a four foot long tree branch and readied himself for a fight.
It was a rare scenario. But remarkably, not for Bob.
WATCH: Bear attack in Washington.
"It was just running straight for me. The dog went running by me, and I just had this deja vu," he said.
Four years ago - running on the same trail, with the same dog - Bob was attacked by a bear.
"It sort of jumped at me, grabbed my by my belly and my rear end and took me down, bit me and mauled me a couple times," he said of the 2011 attack. "I just rolled up in a ball and stayed still."
Eventually the bear left, but Bob still has scars from all the bites and scratches.
Even seasoned Wildlife Officers are stunned.
"The odds of being attacked once are very slim," said Sgt. Ted Jackson of WDFW. "The odds of being attacked twice, I would say it's impossible, last week. But it happened. I just can't even calculate the odds of being attacked once, let alone twice."
Wildlife officers never found that first bear. For six straight days, a team of agents has been pushing through the woods, determined not to let this one slip away. They wanted to match the DNA before killing the bear. But when some hounds got the bear's scent, it turned on them. They couldn't get the bear cornered to safely tranquilize it and decided they needed to shoot to kill.
They successfully took down the 300-pound bear. Agents will run tests, but they're confident it's the right one. Bob wonders if it could even be the same bear attacked him four years ago. Either way, he is relieved this is over.
"He was definitely after my head. So I was trying to protect everything up here and I was holding onto that stick and that was about the only thing that saved me," he said. "I still say it. My friends are still saying it. "Why me?"
There's no answer. There also won't be a third time.
"I love it up there," Bob said of the woods around JBLM. "But no. I'm just getting too old to fight 'em anymore, to tell you the truth." - KOMO News.
A 50-year-old woman was mauled by a sloth bear near Dhanpur taluka in Dahod district on Sunday morning. Rauli Baria was rushed to SSG Hospital with severe injuries to her face and skull.
Rauli and her husband Varsan Baria are farmers and residents of Jojgam village. The incident occurred when the couple had gone to their fields to collect mahua flowers. The bear was hiding behind the thicket fencing and it attacked Rauli, who was close by. A scared Varsan fled from the spot.
The bear tore into her skull damaging a major part of her brain. Sources in the hospital said Rauli's eyes and nose has been irreversibly damaged. She has also suffered wounds on her neck, back and abdomen. She was admitted in a critical condition and is still in danger. Her husband suffered minor abrasions and was discharged after first aid.
The farm where they were attacked is near Ratanmahal Sloth Bear Sanctuary. District forest officials said that while two bear attacks in the area were registered in March, this is the first severe attack of the year.
- The Times of India.
A bird flu that’s deadly to poultry was confirmed to have been found in a northern Chippewa County farm Tuesday, county officials said.
The latest outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N2 strain has been identified at an undisclosed turkey farm housing 60,000 birds. All of the remaining birds will be killed to prevent any spread of the disease.
Authorities have stressed there has been no risk to public health and no danger to the food supply from the Avian flu outbreak.
Jen Rombalski, director-health officer for the Chippewa County Department of Public Health, said the department was notified Tuesday by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection about the bird flu being on the farm when test results came back from the lab.
She said in cases such as this, all bird farms within a 10-mile radius will also be quarantined. She said that amounts to two other farms, both of which are in Chippewa County.
“This is a sad situation for the farm owner, and a concern for many people,” she said, noting however that "this particular strain has not crossed over into humans.”
She said the DATCP classifies it as “a very low risk to the general public,” but it is not termed no risk. Rombalski said the individuals at the farm will be closely monitored, and they have been working closely with the public health department. As a precaution, they will be taking medication to prevent them from becoming sick.
State agriculture officials this month detected the virus for the first time in Wisconsin. It has been found in three flocks affecting tens of thousands of chickens and turkeys.
This past week the outbreak was discovered at a farm with 126,000 turkeys in Barron County, at a farm that belongs to Jennie-O Turkey Store.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed the Barron County case was the same H5N2 strain that has cost Midwest and Ontario, Canada producers more than 2 million birds since early March.
“We aren’t really sure how this farm became contaminated. It’s not near the one in Barron County,” Rombalski said.
She said that if someone were to see any sick or dying birds, they are asked to report it by calling 800-572-8981.
Chippewa County Administrator Frank Pascarella said the county’s Public Health Department, Land Management along with a state agency have been informed about the outbreak. He said the departments will follow a protocol in destroying animals infected with the Avian flu, which he said the departments will monitor.
On Monday, Gov. Scott Walker declared a state of emergency, authorizing the Wisconsin National Guard to assist authorities responding to the bird flu in Jefferson, Juneau and Barron counties. That includes helping with the response and clean up once the infected birds are killed.
Walker says the state must act “quickly and efficiently to contain the outbreak and protect domestic poultry.” - Lacrosse Tribune.
Dead humpback whale found on Fire Island, New York
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| A dead humpback whale washed up Tuesday afternoon, April 21, 2015 near the east end of Fire Island, according to Fire Island National Seashore. © Fire Island National Seashore |
Authorities said a dead humpback whale washed up near the east end of Fire Island.
A spokeswoman for the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research & Preservation told Newsday that the organization was making plans to do an on-scene necropsy.
The whale was discovered Tuesday afternoon in an area not easily accessible. She said the necropsy has to be done on the scene at low tide.
Heavy equipment will be needed to pull the whale away from the surf on Wednesday, the spokeswoman said. A thunderstorm is expected Wednesday afternoon.
Humpbacks are endangered. - 7 Online.
Delays on M74 after dog 'drives' on to carriageway
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| Don escaped with little more than a fright |
The incident - highlighted on Twitter by Traffic Scotland - took place at J13 at Abington, South Lanarkshire.
It later emerged that a sheepdog called Don, owned by farmer Tom Hamilton, had leaned on the controls of his utility vehicle, taking it on to the road.
Police and Mr Hamilton later recovered Don, who was unhurt, and the vehicle, from the central reservation.
Mr Hamilton told BBC Scotland that he was out on his off road pick up checking lambs in a field above the M74 near Abington.
Farmer relieved
As always he was accompanied by his Collie sheepdog Don, who was sitting beside him in the passenger seat. Don escaped with little more than a fright
While Mr Hamilton was examining a lamb he turned round to see the Gator utility vehicle crashing through the fence and heading down an embankment on to the northbound lane of the M74 with Don still sitting in it.
The vehicle stopped after hitting the central barrier, smashing the windscreen.
Mr Hamilton said he feared that he had not pulled the handbrake properly and was extremely relieved that no drivers were hurt.
The farmer was also relieved that Don escaped with little more than a fright.
The episode caused a stir on social media when it was reported by Traffic Scotland at about 08:45 on Wednesday.
Dog puns
The transport body tweeted: "M74 (N) J13-RTC due to dog taking control of tractor... nope, not joking. Farmer and police at scene, vehicle in central res."
Shortly afterwards Traffic Scotland provided the update: "M74 (N) at J13 - Route is clear from earlier incident and dog is fine. Has to be the weirdest thing we have ever reported! No delays in area."
Police said the vehicle had gone through a fence near the motorway at about 08:15.
The incident led to plenty of dog puns as people responded to Traffic Scotland's tweets.
Tony T wrote: "Police investigating, so far no leads," while Beverley Friend added: "This is barking."
Michelle Muirhead asked: "Will the dog have points on his licence? Was he breathalysed? Did police arrest him?" - BBC.
Zebras escape pen to run loose in Brussels, Belgium
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| The zebras also passed Neder-over-Heembeek on their way to Brussels. © Twitter/@ludovicbytebier |
Brussels residents got the shock of their lives when they looked out of their windows earlier today after three zebras escaped from their pen in Koningslo near Vilvoorde. The zebras caused considerable disruption on the roads, as you can imagine, but fortunately the animals were swiftly recaptured, first one, and then the other two.
The zebras escaped from Koningslo, south-west of Vilvoorde and immediately made for Schaarbeek before arriving at the City of Brussels.
In an impressive effort, police, fire services and animal welfare officers were mobilised to ensure the animals could be caught, but this turned out to be more difficult than initially thought. Police actually had to chase the animals in a police van for several kilometres, as these proved quite fast.
WATCH: Zebras On the Loose Galloped Through Brussels!
Story comes to an end in Vilvoorde City
Having headed south towards Brussels initially, the animals changed their minds and returned to Vilvoorde. One of them was caught at the Schaarbeeklei, while the other two enjoyed their liberty just a bit longer, until they got stuck in a private parking lot that could be closed with a gate. This was in the centre of Vilvoorde in Cyriel Buysse Street, named after the famous Flemish writer. A vet was called to the scene to calm down the animals.
Originally, four zebras had escaped, but one could be caught very quickly in a nearby park. The owner said that he installed two fences around his zebra farm (called Ranch Ste Ann), but one fence was not ready yet after renovation works. The animals managed to squeeze through a hole in the first fence. - Deredactie.
Take this cage and shove it: Wolverine at Newark Airport is an unwilling rider
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| Kasper the wolverine: You can keep your steenkin' cage. © Ole Martin Buene/Kristiansand Zoo |
If there were a manual for transporting wolverines, Rule No. 1 would probably go something like this: Make sure the wolverine cannot get out of the cage.
At Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday, it became clear that this precaution had not been taken.
A 40-pound male wolverine named Kasper was being shipped from a zoo in Norway to a conservation park in Alaska. At around 3:30 p.m., he arrived in Newark to change planes and go through United States Customs.
It was there that the animal's handler, Sarah Howard, noticed there was a hole in Kasper's cage.
"His head was sticking out," said Ms. Howard, a curator for the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, the wolverine's intended new home. She had flown to Newark to meet him.
The cage was made of metal, said Joseph Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport. "It's believed he chewed a hole in it."
Wolverines, which look kind of like small bears but are actually the largest members of the weasel family, are legendarily vicious. With long, sharp teeth, they have been known to kill animals many times their size, including caribou and white-tailed deer.
Kasper remained in his cage, but Ms. Howard was alarmed.
"She said it was growling and stuff like that, but maybe they do that all the time, walk around and make noise," Mike Miller, executive director of the conservation center, said.
A wildlife officer and a Port Authority police officer were summoned to Terminal C.
The cage was carefully placed in a transport van, Mr. Pentangelo said, "just to add another level of security, so that the wolverine wasn't a threat to himself or the public."
A new, uncompromised cage was procured from the Bronx Zoo, as was a wild animal veterinarian. The cages were put face to face and Kasper was encouraged to walk into the new one.
"He balked," Mr. Pentangelo said. "He did not want to go. He made it very clear."
The veterinarian administered a shot of ketamine, a tranquilizer. Kasper dropped off to sleep. The cage transfer was accomplished. And after an overnight stay at Terminal C, Kasper resumed his journey.
Kristiansand Zoo in Norway, which had sent Kasper, was closed on Wednesday evening when a reporter called, and no one there could be reached.
A decent life awaits Kasper in Alaska, where the conservation center sits on a 170-acre spread in the mountains about an hour southeast of Anchorage, in Portage.
He will get three acres, at least. That is not a lot by wolverine standards — they can range over 200 square miles — but it is enough to roam around.
And if all goes well, Mr. Miller said, he will have a mate.
"There's another facility, in Sweden, that is sending us a female," he said. - New York Times.
Baby loses half her face as stray dog enters house and attacks in Haimen, China
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| Recovering from surgery: Little Qingqing, who is just ten weeks old, has bandages around her damaged face |
A baby girl has been badly disfigured in a dog attack at home after her parents left her by herself while they worked in nearby fields.
Ten-week-old Qingqing is currently in a critical condition in hospital in eastern China, following emergency surgery to repair her mauled face.
Her mother told the People's Daily Online: 'We left after our baby girl fell asleep. Who knew this would happen?'
The woman, named only as Ms Li, said that on the day of the attack, she and her husband fed their daughter then went to work near their house in Haimen City, eastern China.
But Ms Li could not stop thinking about her daughter so returned home after just ten minutes.
When she arrived, a white dog with blood around its mouth came running towards her, she said.
She dashed to the bedroom where she had left Qingqing - and discovered that the little girl had been dragged from her bed by the dog, which is believed to be a stray.
Ms Li said: 'I nearly fainted. My baby girl was lying face flat on the floor, with blood all over.'
The right side of Qingqing's face had been shredded and her eyelid torn off. She was carried to a local clinic by her mother but her injuries were too severe to be treated there.
She was then transferred to the larger Nantong City No.3 People's Hospital, where she was operated on. She is recovering from the surgery but is suffering from a fever that is concerning her doctors.
Her plastic surgeon, Dr Sun Jiyie, said: 'This is the youngest child with the most severe injuries we have seen from a dog bite.
'If she could safely power through the critical period, we will be planning more plastic surgery. But she is so young and the injuries are so severe, the operations will no doubt be very difficult.'
Mrs Li, who is keeping a vigil at her daughter's bedside, said she and her husband only recently moved to Haimen after working at a greenhouse farm in another province for three years.
Last night Dr Zhao Xianzhong, the director of the hospital's burns and plastic surgery department, reminded all parents never to leave their babies and children alone.
He also issued a general warning about dogs - saying attacks in China are more common in spring and summer.
The hospital currently treats around 20 people a day for dog bites but the figure is expected to increase in the coming weeks as temperatures rise.
'When summer arrives, people wear less fabric, and dogs are only interested in exposed skin,' explained Dr Zhao. 'Girls should be more aware when they are wearing short skirts and shorts.' - Daily Mail.
On mass animal deaths and human anxieties
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| Dead starfish line the shore of the German island of Sylt. Mass wildlife die-offs have been interpreted as omens of an impending environmental collapse. © Daniel Friederichs/Picture-aliance/DPA/AP |
At first light on June 4, 2013, Steve Fradkin, a National Park Service ecologist, led a small team down a gravel strand called Beach 4 on Washington's Olympic coast. The group's destination was a rocky bench known—fatefully, it would turn out—as Starfish Point. There it would carry out an annual count of intertidal life forms as part of a long-term survey of the Pacific shore. Conditions were perfect, the sea calm beneath a blue sky dotted with cotton-ball clouds.
The day's beauty ended at Starfish Point. "It was a horror show," Fradkin told me. Instead of the usual spangling of purple, orange, and brick-red on the rocks, many of the starfish, which are known to biologists as sea stars, were contorted, marked with white lesions, or seemingly melting into goo. "They were missing arms," Fradkin said, "and there were even instances of arms walking around by themselves."
The team's observations are considered the first official record of an ongoing outbreak of a sea-star wasting disease that has killed millions of starfish from Baja California to southern Alaska, typically wiping out more than ninety per cent of each population it strikes. It's the greatest wildlife mass-mortality event, or "die-off," of the present day.
Mass-mortality events are sudden, unusual crashes in a population. On the spectrum of death—mortality's rainbow, if you will—they fill the space between the cool regularity of background death rates and the hot flare of species burning out into extinction. If you think that you are hearing about them more often these days, you're probably right. (Elizabeth Kolbert described frog and bat die-offs in a 2009 article; her subsequent book won a Pulitzer Prize this week.) Even mass-mortality experts struggle to parse whether we're witnessing a genuine epidemic (more properly, an epizootic) of these events. They have also raised another possibility: that we are in the throes of what one researcher called an "epidemic of awareness" of spooky wildlife deaths.
Die-off reports are fertile ground for latter-day anxieties. The events they describe tend to elude explanation, encouraging the notion that our private theories about why they happen are as legitimate as those of the baffled scientists. Of course, mass death also looks like seriously bad news. While we are bombarded with stories of environmental doom and gloom, many of the problems are effectively invisible. It's mainly mathematical models, for example, that tell us an extinction crisis is underway, mostly involving little-known species in little-known places. In an atmosphere of pervasive human guilt, if not eco-grief, it is easy to assume that wildlife mass-mortality events are cinematically graphic manifestations—melting starfish, birds falling from the sky—of the powerful foundational forces that drive more abstract challenges such as climate change.
The Internet has offered a wellspring of speculation about mass wildlife deaths. A case in point: more than four thousand red-winged blackbirds are found dead on New Year's Day, 2011, in Beebe, Arkansas. As the story spreads, news of other die-offs is reported from around the world. Dead jackdaws in Sweden. Dead velvet swimming crabs in the U.K. More dead blackbirds in Louisiana. Dead snapper in New Zealand ("many with their eyes missing"). Five days after the initial event, a Washington Post blogger dubs it "the Aflockalypse." The name sticks, and so does the implication. The Web is soon abuzz with commentators linking these occurrences to end-is-near prophecies, secret government experiments, and the threat of ecological collapse. The National Wildlife Health Center ultimately diagnoses the probable cause of the die-off as avian panic, most likely triggered by loud noises—possibly fireworks—too close to the birds' nighttime roost. Of course, nobody can say for sure.
Wildlife die-offs are an ancient phenomenon. One fossil site in Chile revealed recurring mass marine-mammal deaths, most likely from toxic algae blooms, dating back at least nine million years. Aristotle, in his "Historia Animalium," in the fourth century B.C., remarked on mass dolphin strandings as simply something that the animals were known to do "at times." The earliest written record in American history, from 1542, by the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, appears to indicate that Native Americans on Tampa Bay, in Florida, understood fish die-offs—which still occur in the area today—as typical of certain seasons.
At least in some quarters, the sudden death of large numbers of wild animals has been read as a dire message to humanity: scientists have pointed out that the first biblical plague of Egypt, a fish die-off in a blood-red Nile, is an apt description of the effects of the acidification of the river's water. Yet the widespread interpretation of such events as signs, whether ecological or divine, that humankind's abuse of the planet has gone too far appears to be relatively new.
Even oddball mortalities of the type that trigger apocalyptic anxiety today don't appear to cause much stir in the historical record. In 1884, hundreds of tons of dead fish bellied up in the lakes that surround Madison, Wisconsin, requiring daily burials by a crew of up to thirty-eight men with horse teams. During the "great bird shower" of 1904 in Minnesota and Iowa, millions of sparrow-like Lapland longspurs fell from the night sky, most of them dead but some hitting the ground as snowballs that then "hatched" live birds in the morning sun. Detailed reports of both events exist; they document public curiosity and conjecture, but very little sense that these die-offs represented any judgment on society.
Even thirty years ago, the public response to an unusually extreme mass-mortality event wasn't particularly fraught. In 1983, long-spined sea urchins, then a common Caribbean species, began to waste away; their bony casings soon littered shorelines from Panama to Florida. The species had been abundant for a long time, possibly hundreds of thousands of years, but within thirteen months its population had declined by ninety-eight per cent. Even today, the urchins number not much more than ten per cent of their former plenitude. Haris Lessios, a senior staff scientist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, in Panama, studied the urchin crash from the outset. He recalls little news coverage—indeed, the New York Times reported on the die-off only once, a year after it began—and no public interest beyond local residents, who were happy not to contend any longer with the urchins' painful sting. "I don't think anyone was particularly worried," Lessios told me. "I wasn't. I thought that within a few years things would be back to normal."
Like the urchin die-off, the 2013 sea-star-wasting-disease outbreak had a terrible impact over an enormous geographic range. By contrast, however, references to melting starfish and their detached zombie limbs appeared everywhere from National Geographic to Fox News to the End Times Prophecy. Starfish are a beloved ocean icon, and the public reaction was twofold: expressions of sadness, often accompanied by offers of help (observations by "citizen scientists" contributed to what is probably the largest data set ever assembled about a marine-animal disease outbreak), and generalized concern that human beings must be responsible—and might be next.
Pete Raimondi, a University of California, Santa Cruz, marine biologist who is the principal investigator with a research group studying the event, said that, after the news broke, he responded to hundreds of reporters and "volumes and volumes" of calls, e-mails, blog posts, and personal contacts from citizens. "That's the highest level of anxiety I've ever seen," Raimondi said. "People were not only worried about the environment, they were worried about themselves." Online, speculation about the cause of the die-off soon focussed on radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant, which had been badly damaged by the tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. Raimondi recalled a phone call in which a fearful soon-to-be father asked whether he should immediately move his family away from the West Coast. It was one of many similarly heartfelt calls. Researchers have found no evidence of a link between the ongoing Fukushima disaster and the starfish die-off, Raimondi said—"very massive sampling" indicates that the outbreak began before waterborne radiation reached the coast. Many members of the public remain unconvinced.
Broadly speaking, however, the gap between the public perception of die-offs and the scientific interpretation is not so wide. Until recently, most biologists tended to look at mass-mortality events as isolated incidents with case-specific causes. As a result, it has been the convention among major media sources to present die-offs as at once mysterious and alarming, but also ordinary and even natural. The pattern is not unlike telling ghost stories to children while scolding them for being afraid. Several disquieting tales have already made the 2015 news cycle, most notably hundreds of dying sea-lion pups that began turning up on California beaches in January, and two thousand snow geese that dropped out of the sky to die in Idaho in March. Such phenomena really are relatively commonplace.
At the time of this writing, the National Wildlife Health Center had recorded fifty-six mass-mortality events in the U.S. so far this year, among them the sudden deaths of fifty black vultures in Ascension Parish, Louisiana; thirteen hundred waterfowl in Humboldt County, California; and two thousand bats in Pierce County, Wisconsin.
Yet recent research suggests that the perception of wildlife die-offs as more frequent and alarming than ever might have some basis in fact. In January, the first study ever to attempt to track trends in mass-mortality events was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; the authors found that die-offs appear to be increasing in both number and magnitude, even after attempting to correct statistically for the fact that mass deaths are more likely to be documented today than they were in the past. Bird die-offs, for example, have historically been among the best represented in the scientific literature. The study's authors had expected that an increase in the reporting of such events would add a larger number of less dramatic cases—in which fewer birds die—to the over-all data set, bringing down the average number of deaths per occurrence. Instead, they found the opposite. The typical number of bird deaths per reported die-off has risen, from about a hundred in the nineteen-forties to some ten thousand today. The over-all number of bird die-offs also seems to have increased. "That paper supports a lot of what many of us have been suspecting," Jonathan Sleeman, a wildlife epidemiologist who heads the National Wildlife Health Center, said. "I do think we're seeing more catastrophic events."
Every biologist I spoke with who is researching mass-mortality events said that many wildlife die-offs today really could be signals of serious problems with the ecological fundamentals of the planet. Last year, a team of scientists found that sea-star wasting disease is caused by a virus-size organism (and therefore probably a virus). Given that similar, though lesser, outbreaks have occurred in the past, the current epizootic could be perfectly natural, nothing more than a particularly dangerous strain of a virus. Yet sea stars are known to be maritime canaries-in-the-coal-mine: "They're always the first ones to go," Raimondi said. Radiation from Japan may have been ruled out as the epizootic's catalyst, but a long list of other big-picture environmental stressors are under investigation for possibly having made the sea stars more susceptible to disease, among them temperature spikes (which may be related to climate change), ocean acidification, pollution, or some combination of the above or other pressures. It's not crazy to think that mass deaths of wildlife are telling us something about the state of the world, Raimondi said, but it remains important to let the evidence speak case by case. "If they're going to be stressed, then they should be stressed about things that are real," he said.
If the starfish die-off proves to have been exacerbated by human causes, could it be a warning of an imminent ecological catastrophe? The answer may depend on your definition of catastrophe. "You're not going to go from these really healthy, stable ecosystems to collapse," Raimondi said. "That's not to say that things aren't going to change."
When the long-spined sea urchin crashed in the Caribbean in 1983, it led to what scientists call a "phase shift" in the marine environment. The urchins were important grazers of seaweed. With the urchins gone, seaweed surged, overgrowing coral reefs. Caribbean reefs had already been under duress from overfishing, pollution, and other factors, but the urchin die-off appears to have been a tipping point. The most visually spectacular shallow-water reefs in the Caribbean today are less impressive than even an average reef of thirty years ago.
Oddly, what Raimondi called the "worst-case scenario" for the sea-star die-off is the opposite of what happened in the Caribbean. On the Pacific coast, the big, habitat-forming structures are not coral reefs but underwater "forests" of seaweed. Starfish eat sea urchins; without them, urchins may mow down the kelp forests. That in turn can call up a roster of changes that range from more frequent eagle attacks on seabirds to higher waves striking the shore: not the end of the world, but a different world—and, ecologically speaking, a poorer one.
It might not happen that way, of course. Nature is full of surprises. Observers on the West Coast this spring are reporting more baby starfish, many no bigger than a fingernail, at more sites than at any time in the past fifteen years. The best current explanation for this supernova of cuteness is that the onset of wasting disease triggered starfish to reproduce intensively before dying. "If they survive, it means recovery may be underway," Raimondi said of the tiny sea stars. "If they grow up and start wasting away, well, that's a different story." These days, this may qualify as hope. - The New Yorker.
Man survives second bear attack in 4 years at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington: 'I just had this deja vu'
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| Dead bear |
The chances of being attacked by a bear are extremely slim. It's even less likely it would happen twice. But the victim of an attack last week also came face-to-face with an aggressive bear four years ago. And both times, it was a fight for his life.
"Multiple attacks on my shoulders, he bit me on my head, my arms, my hand," said Bob, who asked us not to use his last name.
Bob describes receiving more than 40 bites, severe claw swipes and deep bruises in a black bear attack last week.
"It would whip around, do this 180 and go for my leg, my shoulders, my head, and just come in and bite me again, and I would just try to nail it when it came in," he said.
Bob says he was running on a well-used trail in the woods surrounding Joint Base Lewis McChord when his dog Abby spooked the bear. As it charged in his direction, Bob grabbed a four foot long tree branch and readied himself for a fight.
It was a rare scenario. But remarkably, not for Bob.
WATCH: Bear attack in Washington.
"It was just running straight for me. The dog went running by me, and I just had this deja vu," he said.
Four years ago - running on the same trail, with the same dog - Bob was attacked by a bear.
"It sort of jumped at me, grabbed my by my belly and my rear end and took me down, bit me and mauled me a couple times," he said of the 2011 attack. "I just rolled up in a ball and stayed still."
Eventually the bear left, but Bob still has scars from all the bites and scratches.
Even seasoned Wildlife Officers are stunned.
"The odds of being attacked once are very slim," said Sgt. Ted Jackson of WDFW. "The odds of being attacked twice, I would say it's impossible, last week. But it happened. I just can't even calculate the odds of being attacked once, let alone twice."
Wildlife officers never found that first bear. For six straight days, a team of agents has been pushing through the woods, determined not to let this one slip away. They wanted to match the DNA before killing the bear. But when some hounds got the bear's scent, it turned on them. They couldn't get the bear cornered to safely tranquilize it and decided they needed to shoot to kill.
They successfully took down the 300-pound bear. Agents will run tests, but they're confident it's the right one. Bob wonders if it could even be the same bear attacked him four years ago. Either way, he is relieved this is over.
"He was definitely after my head. So I was trying to protect everything up here and I was holding onto that stick and that was about the only thing that saved me," he said. "I still say it. My friends are still saying it. "Why me?"
There's no answer. There also won't be a third time.
"I love it up there," Bob said of the woods around JBLM. "But no. I'm just getting too old to fight 'em anymore, to tell you the truth." - KOMO News.
Sloth bear severely mauls 50-year-old woman in Dahod, India
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| Sloth bear |
A 50-year-old woman was mauled by a sloth bear near Dhanpur taluka in Dahod district on Sunday morning. Rauli Baria was rushed to SSG Hospital with severe injuries to her face and skull.
Rauli and her husband Varsan Baria are farmers and residents of Jojgam village. The incident occurred when the couple had gone to their fields to collect mahua flowers. The bear was hiding behind the thicket fencing and it attacked Rauli, who was close by. A scared Varsan fled from the spot.
The bear tore into her skull damaging a major part of her brain. Sources in the hospital said Rauli's eyes and nose has been irreversibly damaged. She has also suffered wounds on her neck, back and abdomen. She was admitted in a critical condition and is still in danger. Her husband suffered minor abrasions and was discharged after first aid.
The farm where they were attacked is near Ratanmahal Sloth Bear Sanctuary. District forest officials said that while two bear attacks in the area were registered in March, this is the first severe attack of the year.
- The Times of India.
60,000 birds to be killed due to new outbreak of avian flu in Wisconsin, United States
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| In this Nov. 2, 2005 file photo, turkeys are pictured at a turkey farm near Sauk Centre, Minn. AP |
A bird flu that’s deadly to poultry was confirmed to have been found in a northern Chippewa County farm Tuesday, county officials said.
The latest outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N2 strain has been identified at an undisclosed turkey farm housing 60,000 birds. All of the remaining birds will be killed to prevent any spread of the disease.
Authorities have stressed there has been no risk to public health and no danger to the food supply from the Avian flu outbreak.
Jen Rombalski, director-health officer for the Chippewa County Department of Public Health, said the department was notified Tuesday by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection about the bird flu being on the farm when test results came back from the lab.
She said in cases such as this, all bird farms within a 10-mile radius will also be quarantined. She said that amounts to two other farms, both of which are in Chippewa County.
“This is a sad situation for the farm owner, and a concern for many people,” she said, noting however that "this particular strain has not crossed over into humans.”
She said the DATCP classifies it as “a very low risk to the general public,” but it is not termed no risk. Rombalski said the individuals at the farm will be closely monitored, and they have been working closely with the public health department. As a precaution, they will be taking medication to prevent them from becoming sick.
State agriculture officials this month detected the virus for the first time in Wisconsin. It has been found in three flocks affecting tens of thousands of chickens and turkeys.
This past week the outbreak was discovered at a farm with 126,000 turkeys in Barron County, at a farm that belongs to Jennie-O Turkey Store.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed the Barron County case was the same H5N2 strain that has cost Midwest and Ontario, Canada producers more than 2 million birds since early March.
“We aren’t really sure how this farm became contaminated. It’s not near the one in Barron County,” Rombalski said.
She said that if someone were to see any sick or dying birds, they are asked to report it by calling 800-572-8981.
Chippewa County Administrator Frank Pascarella said the county’s Public Health Department, Land Management along with a state agency have been informed about the outbreak. He said the departments will follow a protocol in destroying animals infected with the Avian flu, which he said the departments will monitor.
On Monday, Gov. Scott Walker declared a state of emergency, authorizing the Wisconsin National Guard to assist authorities responding to the bird flu in Jefferson, Juneau and Barron counties. That includes helping with the response and clean up once the infected birds are killed.
Walker says the state must act “quickly and efficiently to contain the outbreak and protect domestic poultry.” - Lacrosse Tribune.
Large amount of dead fish washing ashore on Lake Champlain in Vermont, United States
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| The seasonal die-off of alewives usually happens after the melting of ice at Lake Champlain. Alewives may be ill-equipped to handle the instabilities in the lake's temperatures. (Photo : Ken Lund | Flickr) |
This is not the first time that a great number of small alewives are floating up dead or washing on the shorelines of Lake Champlain in northwest Vermont. This will not be the last as well.
These seasonal die-offs of alewives on the shores usually happen after the melting of ice at Lake Champlain.
"I think it's kind of disgusting," commented Vanessa Fleming, a regular visitor from Milton, Vermont who likes to spend time on Lake Champlain. "It makes you feel discouraged coming down here and seeing dead fish everywhere."
Shawn Good, a fisheries biologist at the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, noted that neither the water nor any form of pollutant is the culprint. The biology of the alewife itself is the cause of its death.
Good explained that alewives are not native to Lake Champlain. One theory as to how the fish colonized the lake is through human intervention. Someone must have utilized alewives as bait years ago, and now the population has become uncontrollably abundant.
Alewives may be ill-equipped to handle the instabilities in Lake Champlain's temperatures, particularly in the colder months, Good said. When this invasive species die, it creates "a void in the fish community in terms of other fish having something to eat."
Good sees the die-offs of alewives from previous years as a "warning sign" and an obvious reminder that the public should never illegally transport fresh fish from its natural environment into a different body of water just to create fishing opportunities. Additionally, the human-aided migration of living fish can have major impacts on natural ecosystems.
The trout and salmon in Lake Champlain have become dependent on these small invaders as an important source of diet. Recreational fishing can be deeply affected if the salmon and trout cannot hunt the alewives for food any longer because of the die-offs.
"We haven't seen that here," Good told New England Cable News. "It's just something we have witnessed in the Great Lakes, and we hope it doesn't happen here."
On Tuesday, fish and wildlife officials were in Milton supplying Lake Champlain with fresh salmon, as part of an ongoing scheme to restore the fish populace in the freshwater lake. - Tech Times.
Hundreds of dead fish washing ashore in the waters of Hulan, China
Recently, the Harbin Hulan area fish farmers to the local environmental protection departments, which are connected with the Hulan River waters suddenly turned black stinking of fish ponds, cause of massive fish kills in ponds. 20th, the local environmental protection department water quality sampling inspections of polluted waters, and said it would investigate the sources of these pollutants.
"Now, a nets caught nearly all dead fish, where muddy waters and closed nearby fish pond water quality in great contrast. As soon as this situation continues, the consequences would be unthinkable, near waters but also suffered many fish-eating animals may disappear. "As far as Mr fish huxiao introduces, this referring to the Hulan River in fish ponds, many years production has been very good, half a month ago, he found that the water becomes more and more cloudy, then there are a lot of fish were killed, in recent days the water color and darker, and loud smell dead fish attracts many water birds to Peck. According to Hulan EPA staff told, they followed raised fish households came to near Hulan old of Hulan two River bridge sections, distance a at tens of thousands of square meters of ponds also has a distance, will can smell to water distributed out of stench flavor, arrived in Waterside Shi, found this should clear of water has into black, in Waterside and water Shang has many died fish, these fish maximum of has half meters more.
Hulan District Environmental Protection Bureau said that water quality sampling in this Council in the last quarter area found no problems as regards the sources of these contaminants, nails will be determined after collecting water samples for testing, and investigating pollutant sources, together with relevant departments, the polluters are punished accordingly. - Ifeng. [Translated]
