The Fossil Record

It's a boy!

The San Diego Zoo has a new baby!  One of their Giant Pandas, Bai Yun, gave birth back on August 5th to a healthy male.  As of September 17th, the new panda weighs almost six pounds and is opening his little eyes and ears.  The baby doesn't have a name yet,  but he will get one when he is a hundred days old.  That's the Chinese tradition!

The new baby is Bai Yun's fifth cub.  She recently celebrated her eighteenth birthday, complete with bamboo ice birthday cakes, and has successfully raised three other cubs at the Zoo.  Two of her grown cubs live in China. One of them is a female who is now having cubs of her own.  

Giant Pandas are critically endangered, so the birth of every cub is a triumph.  The panda bear's habitat is at risk from deforestation and human encroachment.  The efforts of zoos around the world to increase the  species numbers are critical for the mammal's survival.

In a video on this page, you can hear Bai Yun's tiny cub squawking for his mom as she goes out of the den to get some fresh air.  On the Zoo's Giant Panda Blog, you can track the cub's progress and read about how the vets care for him.

It's seven o'clock in the morning on the west coast right now, so as I turn on the Live Panda Cam, all I can see is a ball of black and white fir sleeping cozily.  But in a few hours, I'll bet  the bears will be up and ready to have a snack.  I'm going to keep my eye on them, and I'll be sure to thank the people at the Zoo for all the fine work they do to try and add to the world's population of these fantastic animals.

(photo from the San Diego Zoo)

Happy Earth Day 2009

Big cats hunt for Easter eggs!

Earth Hour!

Devastation in Australia

Hope is that thing  with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.

--Emily Dickinson

The world should thank the rescue and rehabilitation crews who have worked so hard to help save all the people and animals they could during Australia's devastating bush fires.  The fires wiped out over 40,000 hectares (or nearly 100,000 acres) of land.

 Australia's creatures are often unique to that continent--koalas, wombats, wallabies, echidnas, dingoes, Tasmanian Devils and kangaroos to name a few--and their populations have suffered devastating losses.  A great number of the surviving animals have lost their habitats.  They will need plenty of help moving into new homes.  

Many animals who survived the deadly fires have been badly burned.  Animal rescuers even found a turtle--still alive--whose shell had melted and fused to her body from the fire's intense heat.  

"We've got a wallaby joey at the moment that has crispy fried ears because he stuck his head out of his mum's pouch and lost all his whiskers and cooked up his nose," Wildlife Victoria President Jon Rowdon told the Associated Press news agency in a February 11th article.  

Now, zoos and animal shelters in Australia are overwhelmed with injured and recovering animals.  Many volunteers are working around the clock to help save them. The video below shows one of  many firefighters, who had been out in the brush, performing a famous koala rescue.  Koalas are dangerous wild animals who normally do not let humans get near them, but this little gal was so thirsty that she put aside her fear and let the kind fireman give her some water.  Rescuers named her "Sam," and she became a symbol of optimism for her entire nation. We wish Sam and all the animals and people of Australia a safe and speedy recovery from this terrible disaster.

 

Polar Bear friend gone

This summer, a month after I visited the Seneca Park Zoo and took this photo of him there, Yukon the polar bear died. 

He came to the Seneca Park Zoo about 16 years ago from Cincinnati.  He had fathered five cubs since then.  

You can see from this photo that he was very playful and outgoing, and the camera loved him. 

So did we.

Rest in peace, Yukon.   ♥

 

A sad seal story

When Columbus came to the New World, legend is the first animal he discovered was a Caribbean monk seal on the coast of Santa Domingo. In fact, Columbus and his men hunted the small but plentiful seals, who once populated the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, for food. The docile creatures were easy prey for the explorers and for the multitude of European settlers who followed in their footsteps.  

The seals were hunted so much for food and for their oil that by the 1880's, they were already rare.  But up until the 1950's, visitors to the Florida Keys could still see monk seals swimming in the area's warm waters.

There hasn't been an official sighting of a Caribbean monk seal in more than fifty years.

Now, just this past week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has officially declared the Monachus tropicalis species extinct--the first extinction to be officially blamed on humans.

Scientists warn that Hawaiian and Mediterranean monk seals could be the next pinnipeds to vanish from the planet.  They say there are about 1,200 Hawaiian and 500 Mediterranean seals remaining.

"We hope we've learned from the extinction of Caribbean monk seals, and can provide stronger protection for their Hawaiian and Mediterranean relatives," says Kyle Barker,  an NOAA Fisheries Service biologist.

U.S. National Museum illustration

Sea turtle gets another chance

Allison is a three-year-old green sea turtle who was found one day back in 2005 by some tourists on South Padre Island.  She was brought to Sea Turtle, Inc., a hospital for the endangered animals,  because she only had one fin. Allison's other three fins had been bitten off, probably by a shark.  The prospects for her survival looked pretty grim, but the staff at Sea Turtle, Inc. nursed her back to health by giving her antibiotics and feeding her a diet of squid.  

Now, Allison's doctors are working with the University of Texas Dental branch to create a prosthetic fin for her out of silicone.  A mold of the stump that's left from her injury will be used to fashion her new flipper, which will be the first of its kind.  The flipper will be attached to her body with straps, and may have to be replaced every five or ten years as she grows. She currently weighs only about eight pounds,  but adult green sea turtles can grow to be about 450 pounds and live to  be nearly 100!

Once she gets her new flipper, Allison will stay at Sea Turtle, Inc. since she would be too vulnerable to predators.  If she had three flippers, though, she could be returned to the wild.  That is why the work being done to help Allison will be important in helping to save other green sea turtles with injuries in the future. Green sea turtles nest at night in the Gulf of Mexico--but only every three or four years.  The rare sea turtle babies need all the help they can get in their difficult quest for survival.  

"Allison is near and dear to everyone's heart here at Sea Turtle, Inc.," says Jeff George, a curator there.  "She will make a great ambassador here since she is an endangered animal."

Learn more about green sea turtles here.

(Photo from Sea Turtle, Inc.)

Harvesting the sun

Can you say Solana? Sounds like the name of a space ship, but it's actually Spanish for "sunny place." It's also the name of what will be one of the world's largest solar energy farms, to be built near not-so-shady Phoenix, Arizona by the year 2011.

The plant will cover about 1,900 acres of land (about three square miles) with what are called parabolic trough reflectors, which look a lot like giant square-shaped satellite dishes.

The thick glass mirrors in the troughs will collect sunlight and reflect it like huge magnifying glasses into a receiver, where it heats a synthetic type of energy-carrying oil. The sunlight heats the oil to a blazing temperature of about 725 degrees Fahrenheit. The oil then travels through pipes to heat exchangers which convert the energy first to high-pressure steam, which powers a turbine that creates electricity.

When operating at full power, Solana will be able to provide clean electrical power to about 70,000 homes.

Now that's hot!

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(Solana farm illustration from APS)

Happy Earth Day!

Let's keep it clean.

Remember to reuse, recycle, reduce--turn off the lights when you leave a room (and the video games when you're done playing), shut off the water while you're brushing your teeth, don't waste paper, plant a tree, don't litter--and spread the word about conservation to all your friends!

It's so easy being green!