Dilip Simeon's blog

Salps are jelly-like sea creatures, so humble that few people even know they exist. But there are countless numbers of them swimming in the world’s oceans and they help fight climate change. Salps cruise around the sea surface at night, sucking up and digesting phytoplankton, microscopic plant-like organisms that absorb CO2 for their photosynthesis. During the day, the salps sink deeper in the sea, possibly to avoid predators, and squirt out unusually heavy droppings rich in carbon left over from their phytoplankton meals. The pellets sink rapidly, up to 1,000 metres deep in a day, and faster than the pellets of most other sea creatures. And when the salp dies, its body also sinks rapidly, sending even more carbon to the ocean depths.  According to  a study  published last year, salps,  jellyfish  and other gelatinous creatures such as comb jellies remove up to an estimated 6.8bn tonnes of carbon each year from seas around the world. Of that, some 2bn tonne...

A microscopic multi-celled organism has returned to life after being frozen for 24,000 years in Siberia, according to new research. Scientists dug up the animal known as a bdelloid rotifer from the Alayeza River in the Russian Arctic. Once thawed, it was able to reproduce asexually, after spending millennia in a state of frozen animation known as crytobiosis. Previous research said they could survive frozen for up to 10 years. But the new study,  published in Current Biology on Monday , suggested they could last for thousands of years, if not indefinitely. "The takeaway is that a multicellular organism can be frozen and stored as such for thousands of years and then return back to life - a dream of many fiction writers," Stas Malavin, of Russia's Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science, told the Press Association... https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57386706

COVID-19 is not a random event. It is a symptom of a global economic system that is destroying the living planet and killing off our magnificent wildlife. COVID-19 might be the first pandemic many of us have experienced. But unless we change course, it will almost certainly not be the last. So before we spend billions of dollars reinstating the status quo, perhaps it’s time for a rethink. In order to prevent future pandemics and tackle ecological and climate breakdown, governments must take a different path. What would this look like? It means investing to decarbonise the global economy as fast as possible, and shrinking our environmental footprint. It means bringing an end to destructive activities like deforestation and intensive mining. And it means ending our addiction to economic growth and putting the needs of people and the planet first.  After the financial crisis in 2008, we bailed out the banks. In 2021, we need to bail out the planet... https://www.opendemocracy.net/en...

Polar bears and narwhals are using up to four times as much energy to survive because of major ice loss in the  Arctic , according to scientists. Once perfectly evolved for polar life, apex predators are struggling as their habitats shrink and unique adaptations become less suited to an increasingly ice-free Arctic, researchers say. The mammals are physiologically designed to use as little energy as possible. Polar bears are primarily “sit and wait” hunters, adapted to catching seals by breathing holes, and narwhals have evolved to dive very deep for prey without making fast movements. Now, however, they are having to work much harder to stay alive,  according to a review article  published in Journal of Experimental Biology…. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/24/arctic-ice-loss-forces-polar-bears-to-use-four-times-as-much-energy-to-survive-study Greenhouse gas emissions transforming the Arctic into 'an entirely different climate' Aseem Shrivastava: An Age go...

Thousands of  rock art pictures  depicting huge Ice Age creatures such as mastodons have been revealed by researchers in the  Amazon rainforest . The paintings were probably made around 11,800 to 12,600 years ago, according to a press release from researchers at Britain's University of Exeter. The paintings are set over three different rock shelters, with the largest, known as Cerro Azul, home to 12 panels and thousands of individual pictographs. Rock art across Africa is dying, say experts Located in the Serranía La Lindosa in modern-day Colombia, the rock art shows how the earliest human inhabitants of the area would have coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with pictures showing what appear to be giant sloths, mastodons, camelids, horses and three-toed ungulates with trunks. "These really are incredible images, produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia," said Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter…. https://edition.cnn.com/style/...

Eleven Tasmanian devils have been reintroduced to mainland Australia, more than 3,000 years after they died out there. The carnivorous marsupials have been released into a 400-hectare (988-acre) wildlife sanctuary north of Sydney, New South Wales, Australian NGO Aussie Ark said in a statement. "In 100 years, we are going to be looking back at this day as the day that set in motion the ecological restoration of an entire country," said Tim Faulkner, president of Aussie Ark. "Not only is this the reintroduction of one of Australia's beloved animals, but of an animal that will engineer the entire environment around it, restoring and rebalancing our forest ecology after centuries of devastation from introduced foxes and cats and other invasive predators.... https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/05/australia/tasmanian-devils-mainland-australia-scli-intl-scn/index.html South Africa: Elephants made a journey to pay their last respects JOSH DZIEZA - Save the Honeybee, Sterilize ...

Seasoned Indian journalist Arvind Kala speaks his mind on current issues -  BANDARR HAMARE BAAP  -  SADAK KE KUTTE, RABIES, ROZE 50 INDIANS KI MAUT  - SUSHANT SINGH RAJPUT CASE KI FAALTU BAATEIN  - MERE KHAYAL HINDU DHARAM PER   - I LIKE HINDUISM, I AM AN ATHEIST  - - Coomi Kapoor: A bizarre and unscientific policy is behind the menace of stray dogs all over India

Experts estimate that barely 10 per cent of India’s dogs have been sterilised and immunised out of a possible 60 million.... Being locked in during a  pandemic  has made me more conscious of the hazards of my environment, most notably the menacing stray dogs. A month back, I was mauled by a rabid dog in a park. The canine also bit a three-year-old child, two pet dogs and three security guards. On my neighbourhood WhatsApp group, there are several horror stories of elderly persons and children being bitten by stray dogs, apparently unusually frisky because their usual biscuit feeders were absent during the lockdown. But in the eyes of the Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI), the victims are really the dogs. An AWBI circular actually comments that a person getting in the way of a dog “can be perceived as an example of provocation”. A dog which bites human beings repeatedly cannot necessarily be termed a nuisance and a vet is liable to be sued if he puts the biting dog to s...

On the Pacific fringes of Chile lies a biological haven. Along the Patagonian coast, surrounded by majestic snow-capped mountains, corals live among some of the deepest fjords in the world. New species are being discovered here; there are still areas waiting to be documented. But even as the reefs' secrets reveal themselves, there is trouble in paradise. Chilean-German biologist Vreni Haussermann arrived in Chilean Patagonia in the late 1990s to explore what she calls "one of the last wildernesses on Earth." Haussermann was a student at the University of Munich when an exchange program gave her the chance to study for a year in the city of Concepcion, central Chile. For her thesis, she set out on a six-month drive along the country's long coastline with research partner Gunter Forsterra, who is now her husband. They dived frequently along the way, and Haussermann was intrigued by the possibilities of Patagonia. "It was the most beautiful, least known region,...

Remembering Wildlife, the groundbreaking charity picture book series, has announced the 10 winners of its photography competition to appear in its forthcoming book, Remembering Cheetahs , which will help to protect the world’s most endangered big cat. There are only around 7,100 cheetahs left in the wild. The book will be published on Monday 12 October and the winning images will be printed alongside stunning images donated by many of the world’s leading wildlife photographers Robert L Keyser III: taken in the Maasai Mara, Kenya See more photographs:  Remembering Cheetahs   South Africa: Elephants made a journey to pay their last respects JOSH DZIEZA - Save the Honeybee, Sterilize the Earth South Georgia: The lost whaling station at the end of the world

NB : This is an object lesson in corporate tyranny. It controls  political  parties that are  poisoning the life-sustaining properties of the entire planet in order to maintain corporate profitability. Young people today have to recognise this, and use what remains of their democratic rights to stop the steam-roller before it destroys their future.  The report below concerns Australia, but if you examine the ecologically-related decisions of so-called 'nation-loving' governments from Modi to Trump to Bolsanaro, their contempt for environmental protection will emerge as the common feature. DS The federal government has stopped listing major threats to species under national environment laws, and plans to address listed threats are often years out of date or have not been done at all.  Environment department documents released under freedom of information laws show the government has stopped assessing what are known as “key threatening processes”, which are m...

“Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species have created a ‘perfect storm’ for the spillover of diseases.”  The coronavirus pandemic is likely to be followed by even more deadly and destructive disease outbreaks unless their root cause – the rampant destruction of the natural world – is rapidly halted, the world’s leading biodiversity experts have warned. “There is a single species responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic – us,” they said. “Recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity, particularly our global financial and economic systems that prize economic growth at any cost. We have a small window of opportunity, in overcoming the challenges of the current crisis, to avoid sowing the seeds of future ones.” Professors Josef Settele, Sandra Díaz and Eduardo Brondizio led the  most comprehensive planetary health check  ever un...

The vast illegal wildlife trade and humanity’s excessive intrusion into nature is to blame for the coronavirus pandemic, according to a leading US scientist who says “this is not nature’s revenge, we did it to ourselves”. Scientists are discovering two to four new viruses are created every year as a result of human infringement on the natural world, and any one of those could turn into a pandemic, according to Thomas Lovejoy, who coined the term “biological diversity” in 1980 and is often referred to as the godfather of biodiversity. “This pandemic is the consequence of our persistent and excessive intrusion in nature and the vast illegal wildlife trade, and in particular, the wildlife markets, the wet markets, of south Asia and bush meat markets of Africa… It’s pretty obvious, it was just a matter of time before something like this was going to happen,” said Lovejoy, a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation and professor of environment science at George Mason University...

The life - and this week’s sudden death - of the legendary wolf shone a light on the often-strained bond between humans and wild animals. Tayaka was a rare species of canine known as the coastal or sea wolf. These predators thrive in marine environments and have become adept at living off a diet of salmon, shellfish and seals instead of deer. Fifty years ago, there were few coastal wolves in the region, victims of overhunting and habitat degradation. Today an estimated 250 of them roam the 12,000 sq miles of Vancouver Island, a remarkable turnaround for the embattled predators Takaya on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Photo: Cheryl Alexander/Wild Awake Images When Doug Paton burst from his trailer on a warm spring afternoon, he expected to confront yet another stray dog agitating the livestock on his sister’s farm outside Victoria, a city on Canada’s west coast. Instead, standing barefoot in the grass, he found himself face to face with a wolf. “It stopped dead in its tracks and...

It’s going to be exploited to bail out industries that are at the heart of most extreme crises we face like the climate crisis:  airlines ,  the  gas and oil industry , the  cruise industry .. Scientists have fingered bats and pangolins as potential sources of the virus, but the real blame lies with human assaults on the environment  It could have been a  pangolin . Or a  bat . Or, as one now-debunked theory that made the rounds suggested, a  snake . The race to finger the animal source of COVID-19, the coronavirus currently ensnaring more than 150 million people in quarantines and  cordons sanitaires  in China and elsewhere, is on. The virus’s animal origin is a critical mystery to solve. But speculation about which wild creature originally harbored the virus obscures a more fundamental source of our growing vulnerability to pandemics: the accelerating pace of habitat loss. Since 1940, hundreds of microbial pathogens have eithe...

It’s our everyday way of going about business on the planet that seems to be driving this... I would say we are the cause of almost all emerging diseases — Peter Daszak NB : Comment by a friend who read this article:  Excellent interview which very rightly points to the propensity of present-day organised human systems to indiscriminately invade and destabilise the earth’s myriad ecosystems. What it also needed to talk about was the equally, if not more, important propensity of interfering with, and reconfiguring, ecosystems. For instance, to take just one example, industrialising cattle domestication. There are today over 1.5 billion industrially bred and raised cows to produce milk and meat — that also fart around 250 litres of methane  each   every day , which, while it accounts for "only" 15% of greenhouse gases globally, is almost 30 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2 (the quantitatively most important greenhouse gas). And let’s not ...

The world must eradicate pesticide use, prioritise nature-based farming methods and urgently reduce water, light and noise pollution to save plummeting insect populations, according to a new “roadmap to insect recovery” compiled by experts. The call to action by more than 70 scientists from across the planet advocates immediate action on human stress factors to insects which include habitat loss and fragmentation, the climate crisis, pollution, over-harvesting and invasive species. Photograph: Rebecca Cole/The Guardian Phasing out synthetic pesticides and fertilisers used in industrial farming and aggressive greenhouse gas emission reductions are among a series of urgent “no-regret” solutions to reverse what conservationists have called the  “unnoticed insect apocalypse” . Alongside these measures, scientists must urgently establish which herbivores, detritivores, parasitoids, predators and pollinators are priority species for conservation, according to a new  paper pu...

Scores of homes have been lost to the fires, which have razed over 5.25 million hectares (13 million acres) of land since they began in November.  Emotions were running high among firefighters who feel powerless to stop the raging fires. One firefighter who lost his home was filmed refusing to shake Mr Morrison’s hand on Friday when the prime minister visited Cobargo, NSW, where a father and son were killed by fires earlier in the week.  On Twitter, author Matthew Battles  said a firefighter friend wrote to him : “Fighting the fires has been very upsetting… I have never had a shift go less than 16 hours and once we went for 21 hours without a break.  “My emotions are always only millimetres from the surface. I cry at the drop of a hat. I keep crying, because we cannot save all of the houses and people. “People beg us to save their horses, their cows, their dogs. There are burned animals piled against the remnants of the barbed wire fences. The cattle dogs wi...

The Red List of Threatened Species had already classified the koala as vulnerable, but the species is being threatened even more by devastating bushfires that have already burned more than 2.5 million acres of Australia’s east coast. But one recent act of bravery has given the country hope in fighting the blaze. After spotting a koala crossing a road amongst the flames in New South Wales, a local woman named Toni rushed to the animal’s aid, wrapping it in her shirt and pouring water over it. The hero said she was planning to take the injured koala to the nearby Port Macquarie Koala Hospital, a facility that is taking care of up to 15 affected koalas.... https://www.boredpanda.com/woman-saves-koala-bushfire-new-south-wales/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic https://nypost.com/2019/11/20/woman-literally-gives-shirt-off-her-back-to-save-burning-koala-in-australia/

An arctic fox has walked more than 3,500km (2,000 miles) from Norway to Canada in just 76 days, astonishing researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute. The animal, known as a coastal or blue fox, was fitted with a tracking device in July 2017. It left Spitsbergen in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago on 26 March 2018. After 21 days and 1,512 km out on the sea ice, it landed in Greenland on 16 April 2018. Its journey continued to Ellesmere Island in Canada, where it arrived on 1 July. Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images “We first did not believe it was true,” said researcher Eva Fuglei, who tracked the female fox. The institute said in a research paper titled “One female’s long run across sea ice” that the Arctic fox’s journey was among the longest ever recorded. It was so long, in fact, that researchers initially questioned whether the fox’s collar could have been removed and taken on board a boat. “But no, there are no boats that go so far up in the ice. So we just had t...