Fish and Amphibians

Published Saturday, Aug. 29, 2020, 7:14 pm Front Page » Local/State News » Collaboration with U.S. Air Force helps restore, protect endangered salamander Join AFP's 100,000+ followers on Facebook Purchase a subscription to AFP | Subscribe to AFP podcasts on iTunes News, press releases, letters to the editor: augustafreepress2@gmail.com Advertising inquiries: freepress@ntelos.net Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Reddit Tumblr Email By David Fleming In April of this year, young salamanders emerged from two northwestern Florida wetlands where they hadn’t been seen in over a decade. Their presence is the result of a long-term collaborative recovery effort between Virginia Tech and  Eglin Air Force Base . The project has led to an increase in the numbers and distribution of federally endangered reticulated flatwoods salamanders in the Florida panhandle and offers potential new avenues for conservationists to successfully bring back endangered amphibians. “Milita

What do you get when you paint a pair of eyes on a cow’s butt? The answer: a cost-effective approach to scaring predators away. The promise of this simple trick, called the “i-cow” solution , has been highlighted in a recent paper using 2,061 cows on farms in northern Botswana’s Okavango delta region. The study compared how predators reacted to cows that sported eyes on their rear end, ones that had “x’s,” and some with bare backsides. The “i-cow” method involves applying acrylic paint on the bums of cattle with foam stencils that look like a sketch of an eye. The eyes trick certain predators, such as lions and leopards, that try to sneak up on livestock, into thinking the animals can see them.  Researchers tracked herds over a four-year period and found that 15 out of the 835 unpainted cows were killed by predators, four of the 543 cattle with “x’s” died, but every single one of the 683 animals with eye doodles were still alive.  Neil Jordan, a conservation biologist and lectu

Christopher DeVargas UNLV paleontologist Stephen Rowland poses for a portrait at the Richard A. Ditton Learning Lab inside the Las Vegas Natural History Museum, Tuesday Aug. 25, 2020. By Sara MacNeil ( contact ) Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2020 | 2 a.m. Fossilized animal tracks discovered in the Grand Canyon were likely left by a reptile some 313 million years ago, among the oldest found on Earth, a UNLV professor said. “There are no reptilian-like tracks much older than these tracks,” said UNLV geology professor Stephen Rowland, who has been studying the prints for several years. Rowland, whose findings were published this month in the scientific journal PLOS One, said the animal that left the tracks was probably similar to the common chuckwalla lizard found in the Mojave Desert. It is a stocky, four-legged lizard with a thick pointed tail. The tracks, found in 2016 by Norwegian geologist Allan Krill, provide more insight into a major evolutionary development, Rowland said. They co

C onsider the tamandua.  A semiarboreal anteater native to South America, the gentle tamandua spends its hours and days foraging for bugs. Micah, a tamandua at the Los Angeles Zoo, is one of the park’s “ambassador animals,” so his typical day might also include roaming the zoo’s expansive grounds, conducting impromptu meet-and-greets with the hundreds of thousands of humans who make their way through the park every year. Today, however, thanks to the pandemic, Micah is roaming and foraging near the flamingo exhibit with nary a person in sight. Does he miss the crowds, I wonder? His keeper, Madison Quintanar, gently laughs at the question, before telling me that, well, Micah still gets to hang out with keepers and staffers, and given that tamanduas are really more interested in eating (“food motivated,” she calls it) than socializing, no, not really. Over at the Campo Gorilla Reserve, it’s a different story. A group of keepers and I are watching a cluster of western lowland gorillas—mo

What do you get when you paint a pair of eyes on a cow’s butt? The answer: a cost-effective approach to scaring predators away. The promise of this simple trick, called the “i-cow” solution , has been highlighted in a recent paper using 2,061 cows on farms in northern Botswana’s Okavango delta region. The study compared how predators reacted to cows that sported eyes on their rear end, ones that had “x’s,” and some with bare backsides. The “i-cow” method involves applying acrylic paint on the bums of cattle with foam stencils that look like a sketch of an eye. The eyes trick certain predators, such as lions and leopards, that try to sneak up on livestock, into thinking the animals can see them.  Researchers tracked herds over a four-year period and found that 15 out of the 835 unpainted cows were killed by predators, four of the 543 cattle with “x’s” died, but every single one of the 683 animals with eye doodles were still alive.  Neil Jordan, a conservation biologist and lectu

C onsider the tamandua.  A semiarboreal anteater native to South America, the gentle tamandua spends its hours and days foraging for bugs. Micah, a tamandua at the Los Angeles Zoo, is one of the park’s “ambassador animals,” so his typical day might also include roaming the zoo’s expansive grounds, conducting impromptu meet-and-greets with the hundreds of thousands of humans who make their way through the park every year. Today, however, thanks to the pandemic, Micah is roaming and foraging near the flamingo exhibit with nary a person in sight. Does he miss the crowds, I wonder? His keeper, Madison Quintanar, gently laughs at the question, before telling me that, well, Micah still gets to hang out with keepers and staffers, and given that tamanduas are really more interested in eating (“food motivated,” she calls it) than socializing, no, not really. Over at the Campo Gorilla Reserve, it’s a different story. A group of keepers and I are watching a cluster of western lowland gorillas—mo

BROOKLINE MA— The Muddy River is about to get spruced up. The second part of a joint project between Boston and Brookline to manage flooding along the river is getting underway. The good news is that it is part of an effort to restore the river's flow, manage invasive species, and protect habitat and wetland. The bad news is that it will mean some pathways will be shut down. The effort is expected to take three years. Crews will be working on the part of the river that stretches from Olmsted Park to the Back Bay's Fens and will remove more than 90,000 cubic yards of sediment from the river. The first part of the project was finished in 2016 and included the stretch of the Muddy River between the Riverway and Avenue Louis Pasteur. There, crews removed the river from underground culverts, dredged the parts of the river that were above ground of sediment, removed invasive plant species and built new riverbanks and added landscape plantings. The entire project has been in