Fish and Amphibians

[unable to retrieve full-text content] Ax-wielding man enters New York Times building in Manhattan, demands to meet with politics staff    Oil City Derrick

A range of family entertainment is available to current and former members of the U.S. military in honor of Veterans Day. These offers require vald military identification or proof of service, and some of them require advance reservations online. Check the details before you go. Aquarium of the Pacific: Veterans and active military are invited to visit the Long Beach attraction for free on Friday, Nov. 11. Advance reservations are required, and capacity is limited. Regular admission is $36.95 for adults and $26.95 for children 3-11. The aquarium is at 100 Aquarium Way, Long Beach. Hours are 9 a.m.-6 p.m. aquariumofpacific.org Blake Shelton, "Salute to Our Heroes": The country star headlines a Nov. 11 concert with Granger Smith and Mackenzie Porter. The arena is at 46605 Dillon Road, Coachella. Doors open at 5 p.m., and the show starts at 6:30 p.m. Active duty and military veterans are offered at 25% discount on tickets purchased at Spotlight 29 and Tortois...

MARTINSVILLE - For as long as he can remember, Christopher Hunt has been intrigued by turtles. His affection for the slow-moving reptiles grew and he learned as much as he could about them. This fascination soon turned into a passion for conservation, leading Hunt to California where he developed an extensive knowledge of various turtle and tortoise species while volunteering at Turtle Conservancy, one of the largest turtle conservation organizations in the country. "I got to work with 700 tortoises, believe it or not, all within the top 40 of the most endangered, so I gained a lot of experience out there," Hunt said. Although the Martinsville native left southern Indiana in 2013 to pursue an acting career in California, that did not stop him from rescuing turtles and wanting to always be around them. Lawrence County news: Council votes 3-3 against raising employee wages in 2023 budget Education and conservation After moving back to Martinsville a year ago, Hunt decided to st...

Abstract Amphibians have undergone important evolutionary transitions in reproductive modes and life-cycles. We compare large-scale macroevolutionary patterns in these transitions across the three major amphibian clades: frogs, salamanders, and caecilians. We analyse matching reproductive and phylogenetic data for 4025 species. We find that having aquatic larvae is ancestral for all three groups and is retained by many extant species (33–44%). The most frequent transitions in each group are to relatively uncommon states: live-bearing in caecilians, paedomorphosis in salamanders, and semi-terrestriality in frogs. All three groups show transitions to more terrestrial reproductive modes, but only in caecilians have these evolved sequentially from most-to-least aquatic. Diversification rates are largely independent of reproductive modes. However, in salamanders direct development accelerates diversification whereas paedomorphosis decreases it. Overall, we find a widespread retention of anc...

Two American zoos have helped to save an African amphibian from extinction. The Kihansi spray toad ( Nectophrynoides asperginis ) was declared extinct in the wild in 2009 after its only habitat, the waterfalls of Kihansi Gorge in Tanzania, dried up following the establishment of a nearby hydroelectric dam. But this month 2,000 toads returned to Kihansi, courtesy of scientists at the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Bronx Zoo and at the Toledo Zoo. The achievement marks the first time that an extinct-in-the-wild amphibian has been returned to its native habitat. The tiny yellow toads—which reach a length of 2.9 centimeters at their largest—were first described by scientists in 1999, the year before the Kihansi Dam went online. The hydroelectric facility now generates nearly a quarter of Tanzania's electric supply, but it also reduced the flow of water going over the Kihansi Gorge waterfalls by 90 percent. Before that happened, the waterfalls produced a mist zone tha...

Discovering a new species is always exciting, but so is finding one alive that everyone assumed had been lost to the passage of time. A small clam, previously known only from fossils, has recently been found living at Naples Point, just up the coast from UC Santa Barbara. The discovery appears in the journal Zookeys. "It's not all that common to find alive a species first known from the fossil record, especially in a region as well-studied as Southern California," said co-author Jeff Goddard, a research associate at UC Santa Barbara's Marine Science Institute. "Ours doesn't go back anywhere near as far as the famous Coelacanth or the deep-water mollusk Neopilina galatheae -- representing an entire class of animals thought to have disappeared 400 million years ago -- but it does go back to the time of all those wondrous animals captured by the La Brea Tar Pits." On an afternoon low tide in November 2018, Goddard was turning over rocks searching for ...

By Kathryn Miles From our December 2022 issue The line at Red's Eats, in Wiscasset, snaked around the corner on a warm Saturday afternoon this fall. Many of the customers had queued up even before the iconic stand had opened, and all were eager enough for one of its famous lobster rolls that they were prepared to wait an hour or more. No one confessed to knowing that, just a few weeks before, the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch, an agenda-setting program for sustainability-minded seafood buyers and chefs, had shocked the industry by placing Gulf of Maine lobster on its "red list" of species to avoid. Not Dodie Neo, an Ohioan retiree who'd been in line for 45 minutes when I approached her. Knowing about the red-listing, however, wouldn't have stopped her from ordering. "The aquarium has a right to put lobster on whatever list it wants," she told me. "And I have a right to eat it." Way down the road, at Highroller Lobster Co., in ...