Sealion

It seems that sea lions have once again pulled the wool over the eyes of researchers. We all know it’s a rough world, and no less is true of those poor orphaned sea lion pups. However, decades of painstaking research has proven that the sea lion females shun any sea lion pups which aren’t there own.. Or do they?

A new bit of genetic research of the populations of Californian sea lions, published this past Monday in the online journal PloS ONE, now sheds some new light on the subject, and states that sea lions are not as cold as they are made out to be.

Up to seventeen percent of the females in the California sea lions populations off of Mexico’s coast will actually take on an orphaned pup as one of their own offspring, according to the new research. What is even more amazing, is that the researchers were able to watch the females care for these pups year after year.
“Females are incredibly aggressive toward pups that aren’t theirs. They’ll bare teeth and bark, sometimes grab and toss pups that aren’t their own away,” explains a marine biologist at Arizona State University who made the discovery through an unrelated research effort, Ramona Flatz. “That they adopt at all really surprised us. We didn’t think it happened.”

So, while the chances are not that high that an orphaned pup can find an adoptive mother, the chance still exists, so like people, there are some decent sea lions out there…

Albino Seal

Now here’s something you don’t hear about everyday. An almost impossible to find albino seal has just been given admittance to the Seal Rehabilitation and Research Center Lenie’ t Hart (SRRC) in Holland following coming down with a rather nasty infection in its lungs. The SRRC is a veterinary hospital in the Netherlands, which takes in, treats, and then releases seals back into the wild after having befallen some illness or injury. In some cases they also euthanize the poor animals if they cannot be helped any other way.

The SRRC has reportedly taken in and helped 6 albino seals over the past four decades, and does everything in their power to save them.
The last albino seal to make an appearance on the scene at the SRRC was a decade ago. Which makes this little guy all the more important.

The SRRC is not only a seal treatment center, but it also acts as an educational venue for tourists from all around the globe. Seals are not specifically bred or trained for human entertainment at the center, helping them out costs money after all, and the tourist dollars go to a good cause. The seals are let go once they are fit enough to make it on their own. There are roughly 200 animals which make their way to the center on a yearly basis.

This particular albino seal will be put into quarantine and then treated at the center for the next little while. After it is well enough, it will be taken back to the North Sea, where it belongs.

The European River Otter (Lutra lutra) which was once almost eradicated from British waters is beginning to make a come-back thanks to improved environmental care and the reintroduction of captive-bred specimens.

Now, anglers and fishing clubs are calling for more research, governmentally funded fences, and – in some cases – even the right to cull otters. Some fishing clubs have already closed down after having their stocks devoured by otters, while others have been forced to lower their fees since they have less fish to offer than before. Clubs are also spending thousands of pounds on restocking their ponds.

Until the 1970s, otters were hunted in the kingdom using special otter hounds, and the population also suffered greatly from the consequences of habitat destruction and pollution. The use of pesticides proved especially fatal and in the 1970s the population was almost completely gone. Thanks to pollution control, habitat restoration, and a ban on otter hunting, the UK has however once again became a favourable country for this aquatic predator and the reintroduction of captive-bred have proven highly successful. Otters are now living even in urban rivers.

Dr Tony Mitchell-Jones, a mammal specialist from Natural England, said that otters had been released into the wild at the rate of more than seven a year between 1983 and 1999, but that no captive-bred otters had been released since then.

When the last large-scale survey was carried out in 2003, the European river otter was found in more than five times as many areas as in 1979.

On June 9, a meeting will take place in Hemel Hempstead were representatives of the Angling Trust, the Environment Agency, Natural England, and the Countryside Council for Wales will discuss the issue of otters competing with anglers for fish. The Angling Trust has announced that they will exact government support for special otter fences in an effort to quieten calls for a cull.

Mark Lloyd, the chief executive, said: “What we need is public funding for fencing because fisheries are important economic units that provide people with their livelihoods. What has to be stressed is that anglers are not anti-otter. If I see one when I’m fishing on a river it makes my day.”

Nick Pottle, secretary of the Lakeside angling club, near Lowestoft, said: “Our lake is now all but empty of fish, we have two families of otters that have cleared the fish out. The Environment Agency say we must put up a fence to stop the otters at our expense as we would not qualify for a grant. That is the end of our club.”

The Angling Times, a journal for sport fishers, are calling for more research into otter predation. Richard Lee, its editor, said: “The slaughter of these animals has been driven underground. It is already going on. If you watch £20,000 worth of stock disappear in just a few days – what are the owners going to do? We are desperate for research so the issue is fully understood. We don’t want random culling. But we want to stop fisheries’ owners taking the law into their own hands. We need some proper research with all the options on the table.”

One of the reasons behind the belligerent situation may be another man-made environmental problem: the disappearance of the eels. During recent years, the number of eels has fallen dramatically in British waters. Eels are the otter’s staple diet and as long as there are plenty of eels the risk of otters attacking trout, salmon, pike, and similar species is low. However, as the eel population wanes the otters are forced to look elsewhere for food – causing confrontations between them and fishermen who do not like to see vast amounts of highly prized fish species ending up in the belly of an otter.

Many anglers refuse to publicly discuss otter hunting, fearing that public opinion will turn against them if they openly call for culling. On of few anglers openly arguing in favour of culling is Ian Chillcott, one of the country’s leading coarse anglers and a fishing writer. “Fisheries are being absolutely destroyed by these cuddly, little murdering blighters”, Chillcott said. “Livelihoods are being ruined but everyone is afraid to use the word ‘culling’. No one wants widespread mass slaughter, but there is a need for very targeted culling. It has to be done in a controlled way and not indiscriminate. No one wants to get rid of them, just for them to be better managed.”

Mitchell-Jones does not think that licensed killing of otters will take place anytime soon.

“Things are looking much better for the otter but it is not yet back everywhere it should be. Control of otter populations is likely to be discussed at the meeting tomorrow. I’m not going to prejudge the situation but there is a presumption against the licensing of killing of protected species unless there are extremely good reasons for doing so. For culling, you would have to show that the control would contribute to the solution of a problem.”

In the mean time, there are indications of some landowners and fishermen taking the law into their own hands. Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act it is an offence to kill an otter, punishable by a £5,000 fine or six months in prison. Otters can only be hunted with a special licence and not a single one of these licenses has been issued. Despite this, some anglers have told reporters of otter hunting taking place in the British countryside.

Just like dolphins, sharks can be trained to roll over to be cuddled by humans. In experiments carried out in the United States, several species of shark allowed themselves to be picked up from the water and cuddled by their trainers.

The U.S. trainers used coloured boards and sounds to train their sharks to respond to commands. No one had attempted to train sharks in this way before and the results are truly ground breaking. Shark keepers now hope that the new technique will give sharks a higher quality of life in captivity. When sharks ned to be moved, the normal practise is to chase them around, but a trained shark could instead be thought to just gently swim to a certain spot.

“The US team has shown that many varieties of sharks can quickly learn to respond to a combination of audible and visual signals”, says Carey Duckhouse of UK’s Sea Life Centres.

Keepers at the UK’s Sea Life Centres are planning to use the methods developed in the U.S. to train sharks kept in British facilities. Colour boards and sounds will be used to show each shark when it is his or her turn to receive food. If everything goes according to plan, the fastest learners in the shark tanks will grasp the idea within three months.

When a shark have learned to associate particular colours and sounds with food, the signals will make it approach its keeper who will be holding a “target stick” against which the shark will rub its nose in hope of getting a tasty treat.

”Some species, such as zebra sharks, will even roll over to have their tummies scratched or allow themselves to be lifted from the water without any kind of struggle,” says Dickhouse.

As reported earlier , the European Union has decided to ban the import of seal skin and other seal products hailing from commercial seal hunting.

This has upset Canadian seal hunters since Italy and Denmark, both members of the European Union, are two major importers of seal products. Italy imports most of their seal skins from Russia, but Denmark has always been an important trade partner for North American seal hunters, partly due to Denmark’s traditional connection to Greenland.

According to a statement from Canadian Trade Minister Stockwell Day, the federal government is now getting ready to move in with an appeal against the ban, which they see as a clear breach of WTO regulation.

“We’ll go to the WTO because it’s clear in WTO regulations that if one country wants to ban the products of another, it has to have clear scientific, medically acceptable reasons for doing so, and this EU ban is not based on hard science,” Day said.

The Canadin government believes that Canada deserves an exemption from the import ban since it follows internationally accepted guidelines regarding seal hunting, e.g. by prohibiting the clubbing of baby seals while they still have their white coats.

Day claims that the European ban is based on “people’s feelings” rather than hard facts, and says that the trade action will proceed unless the European Union Parliament exempts Canada and other countries that he said practise humane and sustainable seal hunting. According to Day, seal hunt proponents erroneously portray seal hunting as it was 40 years ago.

The suggested seal import ban must still be approved by individual European governments before becoming law but can, if passed, come into effect as early as next year. If the is approved, it will cause an annual 2 million USD loss for the Canadian industry.

Canadian Fisheries Minister Gail Shea agrees supports the government’s planned trade action.

“When you live in small coastal communities, sometimes there’s not many opportunities to make some additional money,” she said. “We have a number of families who make up to 35% of their annual income from the seal hunt. So yes, I do think it’s very important.”

As reported earlier, the proposed European seal import ban will contain some exemptions and seal products resulting from hunts traditionally conducted by Inuit and other indigenous communities can still be imported to and marketed in European Union countries even if the ban is approved. Products that result from hunting conducted for the purpose of sustainable management of marine resources on a non-profit basis will also be allowed, and individual travellers will be permitted to bring seal products to the European Union as long as the import is of an occasional nature and consists exclusively of goods for the personal use of the traveller.

This might not be news for some of you, but for those of you that has missed it: a new species of manatee might have been encountered by Dr Marc van Roosmalen in the Brazilian Amazon! Not only is this believed to be an entirely new species of manatee; it is also the smallest living member of the order Sirenia, measuring no more than 130 cm as an adult.

All Picture by: Marc van Roosmalen

In September 2002, wildlife-researcher Dr Marc van Roosmalen collected a complete skull from a recently killed specimen, but it would take an additional two years before he could finally photograph, film and examine a live specimen in its natural environment. As per usual when a new mammal is “discovered”, the species is only new to the scientific community, not to the locals of the area, and the skull of the specimen collected by van Roosmalen came from a manatee that had been killed and eaten by the locals.

Van Roosmalen has proposed that the so called Dwarf manatee should be considered a separate species of manatee and has given it the name Trichechus bernhardi, but others have suggested that this peculiarly small manatee is actually an immature Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis). Both animals are very closely related and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) comparisons have failed to reveal any difference between the two.

According to van Roosmalen’s scientific description of the dwarf manatee, it lives in one of the tributaries of Rio Aripuanã where it inhabits shallow, fast running water. This distinguishes it from the Amazonian manatee which is known to prefer deep and slow moving waters and is found throughout a much larger part of South America. There is also a difference in diet; both animals feed on aquatic plants but on different species. In addition to this, there is a significant disparity in both proportions and colour. The dwarf manatee weighs about 60 kg as an adult and has a dark, almost black, body adorned with a white patch on the abdomen. The Amazonian manatee is much larger than the Dwarf manatee and can weigh over 500 kg. This difference has been used by both sides; those who believe that it is a separate species and those who believe it to be an immature Amazonian manatee.

Regardless of whether this is truly is new species or merely an immature version of the Amazonian manatee, I certainly agree with Christopher Collinson’s comments on the Tetrapod Zoology blog: “On a side note, why the heck are those dwarf manatees so friggen adorable? They have way more cutesy factor than any one animal should be allowed to posess, its at least like a million times more than regular old plain Jane manatees.”

Picture courtesy of: Marc van Roosmalen