Tigon is a hybrid cross between a female lion and a male tiger.

In a rare event, three tigon cubs were born in Mashhad Zoo in Khorasan Razavi province.
Prior to this, a tigon, which is a hybrid cross between a female lion and a male tiger, was born in the US and China, however it is for the first time that they were born through natural breeding, the Persian daily “Iran“ reported.
Head of the Mashahd Zoo stated that the three new-born tigons are in good condition.
“Breeding between tigers and lions is not something that happens in the wild,“ Mahdi Rostami noted, adding that artificial breeding has failed in many cases.“
The first tigon born in the US 15 years ago and then China succeeded in producing some other ones.
Tigons can exhibit characteristics of both parents: they can have both spots from the mother (lions carry genes for spots--lion cubs are spotted) and stripes from the father.
It is anticipated that the tigons can live longer than their parents.
Male tigons are sterile while the females are generally fertile. Because only female tigons are fertile, tigons cannot reproduce with each other.
There are many rare animals in Mashhad Zoo including white oryx, llama and the Indonesian tiger.

Buzzing chain saws and heavy machinery hauling logs through the Amazon jungle look at first like reckless destruction. But a forestry project on the Jari River in northern Brazil is being hailed as a model for preserving the world’s largest rain forest.
Evidence in January that the pace of Amazon deforestation has increased after falling for nearly three years renewed a fierce public debate over saving the forest.
According to Reuters, it also opened a rift in President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government.
Loggers illegally clear vast swathes of forest for timber and farmland every year, wreaking environmental havoc while creating little long-term income.
But a handful of forest management projects have emerged as conservation models, extracting resources with little impact.
“Selling certified timber harvested in a sustainable way is the only solution for the Amazon,“ said Augusto Praxedes Neto, a manager at Brazilian pulp and paper company Grupo ORSA.
For five years ORSA has managed the world’s largest private tropical forest, located on either side of the Jari River in the northeastern Amazon region.
It harvests only 30 cubic meters (12,713 board feet) of timber per hectare (2.47 acres) every 30 years, just under the natural regeneration rate.
Trees are felled and transported so as to cause minimal impact on the forest and are recorded in a computerized inventory.
“I can tell a customer in Europe which tree his table is made of,“ said operations manager Euclides Reckziegel as blue and yellow macaws flew over a solid forest canopy that echoed with the growls of howler monkeys.
“Illegal loggers kill 30 trees to get one. These projects protect far more trees than they extract,“ said Ana Yang of the Stewardship Forestry Council (FSC) in Brazil.
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the international industry watchdog, certifies and inspects the Jari project every six months. Harvesting began in 2003.
Other conservation areas such as national parks or Indian reserves often lack resources for protection against illegal loggers and generate little income for local populations.
ORSA’s security guards and forest dwellers, who receive company health care, help prevent intrusions, Neto said.
Communities still lack proper education and basic sanitation facilities but many residents say they are better off because of the project, which created 400 jobs.

Snake charmers in Jemaa El Fna Square in Marrakech.

Men working in Marrakech’s Djemma el Fna Square may be able to charm the snakes and tourists, but their magic fails to work with the animal rights activists pushing to have the practice banned as cruel.
Long one of the city’s main attractions, the charmers say they take care of their snakes “like their children“.
But a French animal rights group is calling on tourists to boycott the snake charmers, who they say are mistreating the reptiles, AFP said.
The Study and Observation Group to Protect Wild Animals (GEOS) urges visitors to “shun the indecent spectacles that mistreat the animals, or better yet express your indignation“ to the authorities.
The boycott appeal received 200 signatures in the first few days after its launch, according to its initiator Michel Aymerich.
The 49-year-old Moroccan-born French political scientist admits he is a fan of “nature’s most unloved“: snakes, scorpions and spiders.
“You have to know that the snakes are deaf and respond only to gestures. The cobras rise up to the flute not because of the music, but because they feel threatened and instinctively adopt a defensive position, rise up and give that spectacular display of its hood,“ said Aymerich.
“Moreover, for the most part they remove their poisonous fangs or glands, which causes abscesses and a slow and painful death.“
Defanged or not, Aymerich says the snakes are under terrible stress and die after just several weeks of performing. Their normal life span would have been 12 to 15 years.
“These people are completely ignorant of our profession,“ the doyen of Marrakesh snake charmers, 80-year-old Lhoussine Hajjaj said.
“These reptiles are like our children. We look after their education, diet and health because they are our money earner.“
The snakes are fed eggs, birds and even sheep hearts.
“When one of the snakes is tired we ask a veterinarian to prescribe it medication,“ he said.
He strongly denied as “false rumors“ that the charmers remove the fangs and poison glands of the snakes.
“If that is true why are there casualties among us?“
Hajjaj also disputed claims that the cobras died after only several months.
“That’s false because there is a cobra that has been on Djemma el Fna for more than 10 years,“ he said.

Europe’s fisheries chief pledged on Monday to crack down on illegal fishing by tightening inspections and raising penalties for lawbreakers in a bid to preserve the EU’s severely overexploited species of fish.
Speaking after an informal meeting of EU ministers, European Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg said existing controls were weak, inadequate and jeopardized the entire EU fisheries policy.
His remarks came just a couple of months after the EU’s financial watchdog issued a report saying the European Union had no idea how many fish its fleets caught each year and was also failing to clamp down on vessels exceeding national quotas, reported Reuters.
“There is no doubt there is an urgent need to bring about necessary reforms. If we do not do this, the entire basis of the Common Fisheries Policy will be put into question,“ he said.
“The current control system is so inefficient ... the weaknesses are manifest,“ he told a news conference. “And the level of sanctions is far too low to be a deterrent to would-be lawbreakers. We do not have a level playing-field in place.“
Referring to a need to “foster a culture of compliance“ across Europe’s fisheries sector, Borg said EU had unreliable data on fish catches despite spending 400 million euros ($585 million) on controls a year, half going on seaborne inspections.
In early October, Borg will propose legal changes to fisheries policy that would focus on catch reporting, markets and rules for imports, a key area where he wants to fight illegal fishing since the EU is a particularly lucrative market for a trade that is worth around 8 billion euros a year.
For many species, especially mainstays like cod, haddock and hake, EU stocks have been hard hit by years of chronic exploitation and, in some cases, have come close to collapse.
The watchdog report, published in early December by the European Court of Auditors, criticized both EU governments and the Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, for not doing enough to enforce the rules and stop the overfishing: a phenomenon that international scientists have warned the EU about for years.
For more than 20 years, EU ministers have agreed annual fishing quotas by species, fishing area and country.

Sunset in IranÕs southern Qeshm Island, Hormuzgan provinvce. ( Photo by Ali Hassanpour).

A Beelzebufo facing off against the largest known living Malagasy frog, Mantydactylus.

A frog the size of a bowling ball, with heavy armor and teeth, lived among dinosaurs millions of years ago--intimidating enough that scientists who unearthed its fossils dubbed the beast Beelzebufo, or Devil Toad.
But its size--10 pounds and 16 inches long--isn’t the only curiosity. Researchers discovered the creature’s bones in Madagascar. Yet it seems to be a close relative of normal-sized frogs who today live half a world away in South America, challenging assumptions about ancient geography, AP said.
The discovery, led by paleontologist David Krause at New York’s Stony Brook University, was published Monday by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This frog, if it has the same habits as its living relatives in South America, was quite voracious,“ Krause said. “It’s even conceivable that it could have taken down some hatchling dinosaurs.“
Krause began finding fragments of abnormally large frog bones in Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, in 1993. They dated back to the late Cretaceous period, roughly 70 million years ago, in an area where Krause also was finding dinosaur and crocodile fossils. But only recently did Krause’s team assemble enough frog bones to piece together what the creature would have looked like, and weighed.

A woman pushes a bicycle on a bridge near a power plant in Tianjin municipality, January 23, 2008.

China plans to launch an insurance system to cover environmental disasters, aiming to ensure that the victims of major pollution incidents receive due compensation.
Xinhua quoted Pan Yue, deputy head of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), as saying that the system would start out as a pilot project but would be intended to cover all industries with a high risk of pollution incidents by 2015.
SEPA and the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) would initially require firms dealing with high-risk chemical products to join the insurance scheme, along with petrochemical companies and those involved in hazardous waste disposal, Pan said.
“Enterprises and industries that caused serious pollution accidents in recent years will be specially targeted,“ Pan added.
Xinhua said the program aimed to prevent firms involved in big pollution incidents from going bankrupt because of clean-up and compensation costs, thereby cutting down on the need for government bailouts to pay victims.
“It, however, doesn’t mean polluting companies can rest assured to pollute, as the insurance premium is in proportion to a company’s pollution risks,“ Pan said.
China is fighting widespread pollution and environmental destruction, including a rash of major pollution incidents in recent years that have soiled the land, water and air.
In 2005, millions of residents of Harbin in the northeast of the country had their water taps shut off for weeks after an explosion at an industrial plant sent toxic chemicals flowing into the Songhua River.
Last week, a tanker truck carrying more than 30 tons of sulfuric acid crashed in the southwest of the country, spilling its load into a river. At the weekend, an oil pollution scare in the south cut off drinking water to 100,000 people.

A record number of rare large blue butterflies were counted at a key breeding site during 2007.
A survey at Collard Hill, Somerset, counted 354 adults during 2007, beating the previous record of 300 in 2003, BBC reported.
Experts believe a warm spring helped the caterpillars at the National Trust-owned site develop quickly before the arrival of a very wet summer.
Efforts to re-introduce the species began in 1983 after it disappeared from the UK in the late 1970s.
“Despite the poor summer, 2007 was a remarkable year for the large blue at Collard Hill,“ explained Matthew Oates, nature conservation adviser for the National Trust.