Leatherback sea turtles

A turtle has set a new record for the longest recorded migration journey through the ocean.
The tagged female leatherback turtle crossed the Pacific from west to east and then part of the way back again.
It was tracked by satellite for 647 days and covered at least 12,774 miles before the signal was lost, according to Telegraph.co.uk.
The turtle’s epic journey took it from Jamursba-Medi beach in Papua, Indonesia where it was first recorded nesting, to Oregon on the Pacific northwest coast of America.
Of vertebrates that travel through the ocean, the leatherback’s journey was the longest ever recorded.
The leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) is the most widely distributed marine reptile on the planet and is found in warm open seas across the world including the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans.
But they have also been seen in freezing waters off Argentina, southern Chile, and Tasmania as well as the subarctic northern latitudes off Alaska, Nova Scotia, and the North Sea.
They are massive creatures and can span nine feet from the tip of one front flipper to the tip of the other and can weigh 1,200lbs.
Adults migrate from their temperate feeding and foraging areas to tropical breeding grounds and tagging is gradually unlocking some of the secrets of their migration paths.
Work by the US National Marine Fisheries Service, at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, with international partners in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands has revealed that leatherðbacks living in the North Pacific, including waters near the US west coast, are part of the western Pacific breeding population.
Details of the turtle’s odyssey were given in the State of the World’s Sea Turtles (SWOT) magazine at the 28th Annual Symposium on Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation, being held in Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico.
Scott Benson, one of the scientists involved in the research, said: “Understanding sea turtles’ and other marine animals’ movements in this way is critical to ensuring their protection.
Ocean-going animals often pass through multiple nations’ territories and international waters as they migrate, making their survival the responsibility of not just one nation but many.“
Roderic B Mast, chief editor of SWOT, said: “SWOT report is all about providing a global perspective of sea turtles to encourage international protection of these ancient, endangered animals.“
He added, “This one leatherback’s migration provides a perfect example of how marine conservation strategies must be as global as the ocean life we are trying to safeguard.“

Reputation of Japan’s paper industry lay in tatters after the market leader, Oji Paper, admitted it had lied for more than a decade about the amount of recycled paper it used.
The revelation comes days after the country’s second-biggest paper company, Nippon Paper Group, admitted it had made similarly false claims, the Guardian reported.
Oji Paper said the amount of recycled paper in its copy and printing paper was as high as 50 percent when the real figure was between 5 and 10 percent. The firm’s envelopes contained, at most, 30 percent of recycled paper, although consumers had been led to believe it was as high as 70 percent. Some products contained no recycled material at all.
“We had let the ratio of recycled paper fall amid rising shipments while the amount of recycled paper did not grow,“ Oji Paper’s president, Kazuhisa Shinoda, told reporters in Tokyo.
Shinoda said he would not resign over the scandal but apologized for misleading consumers. The fabrication, he said, had “betrayed public trust and we apologize to our clients and customers“.
Nippon Paper’s president, Masatomo Nakamura, said he would take responsibility for the scandal and resign.
Oji Paper and Nippon Paper are among five firms accused of misleading customers about the recycled-paper content of product lines, including millions of new year’s greetings cards.
The scandal dragged down shares in paper companies on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Nippon Paper’s shares plummeted 10 percent to 267,000 yen (£1,269) after Fuji Xerox and other firms said they would stop selling its products. Shares in Oji Paper dived 4.7 percent.
Japan’s fair trade commission is expected to decide soon whether the companies can be prosecuted under mislabeling laws.

Olm (left) a blind salamander and Chinese giant salamander (right) that can grow up to 1.8m in length.

They could all merit a place in a gallery of Nature’s strangest creatures. But apart from their strange looks and shapes they have one thing in common--they are all in danger of extinction.
Amphibians as a rule are not cute and cuddly which puts them way down the pecking order of species that need to be saved, Telegraph.co.uk reported.
But they are a key indicator species and if they start to decline it is a clear warning that the environment is in trouble.
The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has drawn up a list of some of the world’s most extraordinary creatures threatened with extinction.
They found 85 percent of the top 100 of the ’world’s weirdest and most endangered creatures’ are receiving little conservation attention and will disappear if no action is taken.
They include exotically-named species such as the Lungless salamander and the Betic midwife toad.
All amphibian species were assessed according to how Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered they are and as a result ZSL has launched an amphibians conservation and fundraising initiative which it has called EDGE.
The amphibians are those with few close relatives and are highly distinct genetically.
They are also critically endangered and desperately in need of immediate action to save them.
By mathematically combining a measure of each species’ unique evolutionary history with its threat of extinction, the scientists were able to give species an EDGE value and rank them accordingly.
ZSL has identified and is starting work to protect 10 of the most unusual and threatened EDGE amphibian species this year. They include:

-Chinese giant salamander (salamander that can grow up to 1.8m in length and evolved independently from all other amphibians over 100m years before Tyrannosaurus rex)

-Sagalla caecilian (limbless amphibian with sensory tentacles on the sides of its head)

-Purple frog (purple-pigmented frog that was only discovered in 2003 because it spends most of the year buried up to 4m underground)

-Ghost frogs of South Africa (one species is found only in the traditional human burial grounds of Skeleton Gorge in Table Mountain, South Africa)

-Olm (blind salamander with transparent skin that lives underground, hunts for its prey by smell and electrosensitivity and can survive without food for 10 years)
-Lungless salamanders of Mexico (highly endangered salamanders that do not have lungs but instead breathe through their skin and mouth lining)

-Malagasy rainbow frog (highly-decorated frog that inflates itself when under threat and can climb vertical rock surfaces)

-Chile Darwin’s frog (a frog where fathers protect the young in their mouths. This species has not been officially seen since around 1980 and may now be extinct)

-Betic midwife toad (toads that evolved from all others over 150m years ago--the males carry the fertilized eggs wrapped around their hind legs)

British scientists reported, a powerful volcano erupted under the Icesheet of West Antarctica around 2,000 years ago and it might still be active today, a finding that prompts questions about ice loss from the white continent.
The explosive event--rated “severe“ to “cataclysmic“ on an international scale of volcanic force--punched a massive breach in the icesheet and spat out a plume some 12,000 meters (eight miles) into the sky, they calculate, AFP reported.
Most of Antarctica is seismically stable. But its western part lies on a rift in Earth’s crust that gives rise to occasional volcanism and geothermal heat, occurring on the Antarctic coastal margins.
This is the first evidence for an eruption under the ice sheet itself--the slab of frozen water, hundreds of meters (feet) thick in places, that holds most of the world’s stock of fresh water.
Reporting in the journal Nature Geoscience, the investigators from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) describe the finding as “unique“.
It extends the range of known volcanism in Antarctica by some 500 kilometers (300 miles) and raises the question whether this or other sub-glacial volcanoes may have melted so much ice that global sea levels were affected, they say.
The volcano, located in the Hudson Mountains, blew around 207 BC, plus or minus 240 years, according to their paper.

Sparrows on a snow covered tree in Tehran.

A river bed is exposed as water levels fall along the Yangtze River near Wuhan, central China's Hubei province.

Waters of the Yangtze have fallen to their lowest levels since 1866, disrupting drinking water supplies, stranding ships and posing a threat to some of the world’s most endangered species.
Asia’s longest river is losing volume as a result of a prolonged dry spell, the state media warned, predicting hefty economic losses and a possible plague of rats on nearby farmland, the Guardian said.
News of the drought--which is likely to worsen pollution in the river--comes amid dire reports about the impact of rapid economic growth on China’s environment.
The government also revealed that the country’s most prosperous province, Guangdong, has just had its worst year of smog since the Communist party took power in 1949, while 56,000 square miles of coastline waters failed to meet environmental standards.
But the immediate concern is the Yangtze, which supplies water to hundreds of millions of people and thousands of factories in a delta that accounts for more than 40 percent of China’s economic output. According to the Chinese media, precipitation and water levels are at or near record lows in its middle and upper stretches.
The scale of the problem was revealed by the Yangtze water resources commission in a report.
It said that the Hankou hydrological center near Wuhan city found the river’s depth had fallen to its lowest level in 142 years.
The measurement confirmed fears raised in recent weeks by the appearance of islands and mud flats not normally seen at this time of year. Local farmers reported far more ships than usual being trapped in unavoidable shallow waters.
“Before 1996, we were short of water for three months of the year, but now there are only three months when we can use water as normal,“ Wu Chunping, the vice-manager of Jianli county’s water utility, was quoted as saying. “I heard that the water level will drop further in February.“

Endangered heathland species in England could become extinct because of the poor condition of their habitat, conservationists have warned.
Natural England says wildlife, such as the stone curlew, nightjar and sand lizard, could disappear if lowland heathland is not protected.
It found all of the 104 sites surveyed were in poor condition, even those which were in conservation schemes, said BBC.
Heathland is currently a priority for the UK Biodiversity Action Plan.
Until about 100 years ago, heathland was a valuable resource for local communities.
Trees were felled for fuel, animals grazed the land and the wildlife that favored such open areas flourished.

Sierra Leone will ban timber exports until at least March to help the West African country halt damage to its tropical forests and climate, President Ernest Bai Koroma said.
Sierra Leone suspended the export of wood in a surprise move, saying indiscriminate destruction by Chinese loggers in the country’s north was wreaking havoc by triggering soil erosion that has displaced wildlife and local people, Reuters said.
“It was not the Chinese alone but we had a lot of logging activities which were uncontrolled,“ said Bai Koroma, who won a September election on promises to tackle corruption.
“We are losing what is left of our environment and it is affecting our climate and other things,“ he said in an interview.
A 1991-2002 civil war, which displaced a third of Sierra Leone’s population, had prevented the country from formulating a comprehensive forestry plan earlier.
But Koroma has taken several environmental measures, including the creation of a 75,000-hectare national park in the Gola Forest, a former logging area near the Liberian border.
The national park--only the country’s second--is home to leopards, chimpanzees and forest elephants.
More than 90 percent of the primary rainforests of the former British colony have been destroyed, but ecologists are keen to ward off desertification by protecting new forests.
As it rebuilds its economy, Sierra Leone hopes to benefit from enticing visitors to its tropical beaches, tree-carpeted mountain ranges and lush savannahs.
Koroma aims to establish more parks to attract eco-tourism.