purposeforporpoise

If you thought a high-pitched growl would come only from a tiny dog, you could be in for a nasty surprise. Researchers have shown that it isn’t the fundamental frequency, or pitch, of a growl that humans use to gauge a dog’s size — it’s another acoustic property related to the length of the vocal tract.

It was known that within species, the formant — a property of a sound wave related to the length of the vocal tract — is used by animals to assess the size of other animals. But it had never been shown to happen between species. Anna Taylor, a doctoral student at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, set out to show that the formant is used between species as a cue for size by seeing how humans respond to growls from different-sized dogs. Her results are published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America .1

Taylor visited the homes of more than 100 dogs, armed with nothing but a microphone, a steely stare, and the dog owners' consent. Taylor made the dogs growl defensively by invading the dog's space and staring it in the eyes. She recorded these snarly responses, 30 of which she went to on to manipulate for her experiment.

That might sound like an unwise experiment for anyone who values their personal safety. But Taylor says that, as an experienced animal behaviourist, she managed to diffuse any encounters before they turned violent.
Size is important

Taylor looked at the formants, and the fundamental frequency of the different growls. Examples of the biggest and smallest formants, and highest and lowest frequencies, can be heard in these sound clips.

A formant is a basic acoustic property, and can be thought of as a resonant frequency of a sound wave in a vocal tract. Dogs have between five and seven formants when they make a noise. In humans, changes in formant come across as different vowel sounds. Different length vocal tracts produce different resonant frequencies, and so the formants take on different values. “Larger vocal tracts belonging to larger animals produce lower formants,” says Taylor.

The fundamental frequency is the pitch of a sound. It is a “common fallacy” that pitch can be used to determine size, Taylor says. Pitch is related to the size of the fleshy vocal chords, which can grow to different sizes. The formant, on the other hand, is pretty much fixed.

To test human perception of dog size, Taylor separated out the formant and the fundamental frequency of each dog growl with computer-based acoustic software. She then resynthesised each growl in two ways: first by making five new versions of each growl each with different formants corresponding to a range of vocal tract lengths from the tiniest dog to the largest; and then making five new versions of each growl by altering the pitch to fit within a range of five frequencies – low to high pitch.

These new growls were played to human subjects in two separate experiments where they heard growls in random order and were asked to assess the size of the dog.

Where the formants were changed but not the pitch, the growls that had been manipulated to indicate a longer vocal tract were rated by the testers as coming from big dogs. When pitch was changed but not formant, the testers estimated dog size more accurately. When asked to say what they thought they were listening for, the testers all thought they were listening for changes in pitch, Taylor says.

The work has sparked interest in the acoustic community. “This step to analyse the vocal repertoire of dogs, especially the subunits of growling, is totally new,” says Dorit Feddersen-Petersen, who studies dog behaviour at the University of Kiel, Germany.

“People are using the same acoustic parameters that they use to assess body size from human voices as they use to assess body size from dog growls,” says David Feinberg, who studies voices at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. This is probably because all mammals have similar anatomy for producing sound, he says.
More than co-evolution?

Taylor thinks that this link between formant and size perception might be more widely applicable than just dogs and humans “Attribution of size based on formant is something we can do for all animals, and possibly all animals can do for each other,” she says.

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That people use these cues to assess the size of dogs may be linked to the idea that humans and dogs have been co-evolving for the last 15,000 years, says Feinberg. Feddersen-Petersen suggests the same thing: “This interspecific form of signalling ... must be linked to the close evolutionary history between dogs and humans,” she says.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

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This co-evolution could make it particularly important for humans to pay attention to the size of dogs suggests Feinberg. “While dog may be man's best friend, it may also bite the hand that feeds,” he says.

The word hormone is derived from Greek and means 'set in motion.' They are naturally produced within plants, and very similar chemicals are produced by fungi and bacteria which also can influence plant growth. A large number of related chemical compounds also have been synthesized by humans that function as hormones too, which are called plant growth regulators, or PGRs for short. At the beginning of the study of plant hormones, "phytohormone" was the commonly-used term, but its use is less widely applied now. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

Plant hormones are not nutrients but chemicals, that in very small amounts promote and influence the development and differentiation of cells and tissues. Plant hormones affect gene expression and transcription levels, cellular division and growth.

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Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 

 

Feeding the Birds to follow 

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 

Man makes a damaging impact on the natural environment of birds through farming, forestry and building works. There are many casualties: in Britain ornithologists have noted the decline of many once-common birds like the song thrush and the skylark, because of intensivive farming regimes. The British government now publishes an annual index containing certain key bird species; it has accepted the tenet that a fall in bird numbers damages the citizen's "quality of life."

Sometimes birds destroy their own habitat. La Perouse Bay on the Hudson Bay in the Canadian Arctic is a traditional breeding ground for the lesser snow goose.

After reserves were created to protect the birds, the population grew to such an extent that the birds actually ate themselves out of their own food. La Perouse Bay today is a saline desert - the geese have eaten and destroyed all the natural grasses that used to grow here. But such self destruction is the exception.

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  .  Every ecosystem has a cast of characters playing similar roles. The bison, moose and elk of North America do much the same thing as antelope and wildebeest do on the African savannah. Jackals and hyenas are the scavengers of the land whereas vultures are the undisputed scavengers of the air. The same is even true of carnivores. Crocodiles, cheetahs, great white sharks and peregrine falcons all come at their prey with great speed, using a combination of momentum and strength to stun and kill. Now research has put up a surprising candidate to join this high-speed predatory club: the short-finned pilot whale.

Whales, like all mammals, have lungs and must rise to the surface once in a while to breathe. The problem for many whale species is that their sources of food are usually at depth, forcing them to hold their breath as they descend to feed. Researchers have long assumed that deep-diving whales conserve their oxygen supply by moving slowly, not more than 2 metres per second, during their long descents. But that is not the way of the short-finned pilot whale.

Natacha Aguilar of La Laguna University on the Spanish Canary Islands and her colleagues fitted special suction-cupped electronic tags to 23 short-finned pilot whales near Tenerife. The tags were designed by Mark Johnson of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to record whale sounds while monitoring both their depth and position. The aim of the study, which will appear in a forthcoming edition of Animal Ecology, was to understand the foraging strategies that the whales used in deep-water.

The tags revealed that the maximum depth and time of the whales' dives was 1,018 metres and 21 minutes, which was in line with expectations. However, during most dives below 540 metres during the day, the whales broke into a sprint of up to 9 metres per second, which in deep water is the cetacean equivalent of a world record.

During these sprints the tags also picked up sonar buzzes and clicks from the whales which are known to be associated with the capture of prey. So the whales were chasing something at high speed, like a cheetah would on land. The researchers are not sure what is being hunted, but they suspect that it is large and worth the exertion in terms of the number of calories it could provide. One possibility is that the prey are giant squid: a chase of Titanic proportions.

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 

 

 

Popular misconceptions about penguins

Penguins live anywhere it’s cold.

False. All penguins live in the Southern Hemisphere. They do not live at the North Pole, Alaska, Canada, or other northern places. Despite what you may have seen on TV or in the movies, no penguin has ever been chased by a polar bear or lived with Santa Claus.

All penguins live in Antarctica.

False. In fact, of the 17 species of penguins, only 5 live on Antarctica itself. Some live on nearby islands. Some live on the southern edges of Africa, Australia and South America. And one species of penguin actually lives on the Galapagos islands at the equator! (A cold current from Antarctica keeps the water cool for them.)

Penguins have fur to keep warm.

False. Penguins are birds. Like all birds, they have feathers. Penguin feathers are very short, very dense, and packed so tightly together they often looks like smooth skin.

Baby penguins are covered in fuzzy down to keep them warm. It may look like fur, but those are feathers.

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Louis J Sheehan

The traditional theory of cetacean evolution was that whales were related to the mesonychids, an extinct order of carnivorous ungulates (hoofed animals), which looked rather like wolves with hooves and were a sister group of artiodactyls. These animals possessed unusual triangular teeth that are similar to those of whales. For this reason, scientists had long believed that whales evolved from a form of mesonychid.

However, since the early 1990s analysis of a wide variety of protein and DNA sequence data consistently indicated that whales should be included among artiodactyls. Most probably they are a sister group of hippopotamids, deeply buried within artiodactyls.^[1] The strong evidence for a clade combining cetaceans and artiodactyls is further discussed under the entry Cetartiodactyla.

The recent discovery of Pakicetus, the earliest proto-whale (see below) supports the molecular data. The skeletons of Pakicetus demonstrate that whales did not derive directly from mesonychids. Instead, they are a form of artiodactyl (another type of ungulate) that began to take to the water after the artiodactyl family split from the mesonychids. In other words, the proto-whales were early artiodactyls that retained aspects of their mesonychid ancestry (such as the triangular teeth) which modern artiodactyls have since lost. An interesting implication is that the earliest ancestors of all hoofed mammals were probably at least partly carnivorous or scavengers, today's artiodactyls and perissodactyls having switched to a plant diet later in their evolution. Whales, due to the readier availability of animal prey and their need for higher caloric content to live as marine endotherms, naturally retained their carnivorous diet, as did mesonychids, who were however out-competed by better-adapted animals like the Carnivora later on (mesonychids became specialized carnivores when the overall availability of large animal prey was still low; thus their adaptation was likely at a disadvantage when new forms had filled the gaps left by the dinosaurs).

At a time when the world’s top climate experts agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down global warming, Italy’s major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest fuel on earth.

Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent.

And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.

In the United States, fewer new coal plants are likely to begin operations, in part because it is becoming harder to get regulatory permits and in part because nuclear power remains an alternative. Of 151 proposals in early 2007, more than 60 had been dropped by the year’s end, many blocked by state governments. Dozens of other are stuck in court challenges.

The fast-expanding developing economies of India and China, where coal remains a major fuel source for more than two billion people, have long been regarded as among the biggest challenges to reducing carbon emissions. But the return now to coal even in eco-conscious Europe is sowing real alarm among environmentalists who warn that it is setting the world on a disastrous trajectory that will make controlling global warming impossible.

They are aghast at the renaissance of coal, a fuel more commonly associated with the sooty factories of Dickens novels, and one that was on its way out just a decade ago.

There have been protests here in Civitavecchia, at a new coal plant in Germany, and at one in the Czech Republic, as well as at the Kingsnorth power station in Kent, which is slated to become Britain’s first new coal-fired plant in more than a decade.

Europe’s power station owners emphasize that they are making the new coal plants as clean as possible. But critics say that “clean coal” is a pipe dream, an oxymoron in terms of the carbon emissions that count most toward climate change. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx

They call the building spurt shortsighted.

“Building new coal-fired power plants is ill conceived,” said James E. Hansen, a leading climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Given our knowledge about what needs to be done to stabilize climate, this plan is like barging into a war without having a plan for how it should be conducted, even though information is available.

“We need a moratorium on coal now,” he added, “with phase-out of existing plants over the next two decades.”


Enel and many other electricity companies say they have little choice but to build coal plants to replace aging infrastructure, particularly in countries like Italy and Germany that have banned the building of nuclear power plants. Fuel costs have risen 151 percent since 1996, and Italians pay the highest electricity costs in Europe.

In terms of cost and energy security, coal has all the advantages, its proponents argue. Coal reserves will last for 200 years, rather than 50 years for gas and oil. Coal is relatively cheap compared with oil and natural gas, although coal prices have tripled in the past few years. More important, dozens of countries export coal — there is not a coal cartel — so there is more room to negotiate prices.

“In order to get over oil, which is getting more and more expensive, our plan is to convert all oil plants to coal using clean-coal technologies,” said Gianfilippo Mancini, Enel’s chief of generation and energy management. “This will be the cleanest coal plant in Europe. We are hoping to prove that it will be possible to make sustainable and environmentally friendly use of coal.”

“Clean coal” is a term coined by the industry decades ago, referring to its efforts to reduce local pollution. Using new technology, clean coal plants sharply reduced the number of sooty particles spewed into the air, as well as gases like sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide. The technology has minimal effect on carbon emissions.

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In fact, the technology that the industry is counting on to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that add to global warning — carbon capture and storage — is not now commercially available. No one knows if it is feasible on a large, cost-effective scale.


The task — in which carbon emissions are pumped into underground reservoirs rather than released — is challenging for any fuel source, but particularly so for coal, which produces more carbon dioxide than oil or natural gas.

Under optimal current conditions, coal produces more than twice as much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity as natural gas, the second most common fuel used for electricity generation, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. In the developing world, where even new coal plants use lower grade coal and less efficient machinery, the equation is even worse.

Without carbon capture and storage, coal cannot be green. But solving that problem will take global coordination and billions of dollars in investment, which no one country or company seems inclined to spend, said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

“Figuring out carbon capture is really critical — it may not work in the end — and if it is not viable, the situation, with respect to climate change, is far more dire,” Mr. Sachs said.

There are a few dozen small demonstration projects in Europe and in the United States, most in the early stages. But progress has not been promising.

At the end of January, the Bush administration canceled what was previously by far the United States’ biggest carbon-capture demonstration project, at a coal-fired plant in Illinois, because of huge cost overruns. The costs of the project, undertaken in 2003 with a budget of $950 million, had spiraled to $1.5 billion this year, and it was far from complete.

The European Union had pledged to develop 12 pilot carbon-capture projects for Europe, but says that is not enough.

Many have likened carbon capture’s road from the demonstration lab to a safe, cheap, available reality as a challenge equivalent to putting a man on the moon. Norway, which is investing heavily to test the technology, calls carbon capture its “moon landing.”

It may be even harder than that. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx It is a moon landing that must be replicated daily at thousands of coal plants in hundreds of countries — many of them poor. There is a new coal-fired plant going up in India or China almost every week, and most of those are not constructed in a way that is amenable to carbon capture, even if it were developed.

Plants that could someday be adapted to carbon capture cost 10 to 20 percent more to build, and only a handful exist today. For most coal power plants the costs of converting would be “phenomenal,” concluded a report by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Then there is the problem of storing the carbon dioxide, which is at some level an inherently local issue. Geologists have to determine if there is a suitable underground site, calculate how much carbon dioxide it can hold and then equip it in a way that prevents leaks and ensures safety. A large leak of underground carbon dioxide could be as dangerous as a leak of nuclear fuel, critics say.

As for its plant here, Enel says it will start experimenting with carbon-capture technology in 2015, in the hopes of “a solution” by 2020.

“That’s too late,” Mr. Sachs said.

In the meantime, it and other new coal plants will be spewing more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere than ever before, meaning that current climate predictions — dire as they are — may still be “too optimistic,” Mr. Sachs said. “They assume the old energy mix, even though coal will be a larger and larger part.”

On many other fronts, the new Enel plant is a model of efficiency and recycling. The nitrous oxide is chemically altered to generate ammonia, which is then sold. The resulting coal ash and gypsum are sold to the cement industry.

An on-site desalination plant means that the operation generates its own water for cooling. Even the heated water that comes out of the plant is not wasted: it heats a fish farm, one of Italy’s largest.

But Enel’s plan to deal with the new plant’s carbon emissions consists mostly of a map of Italy with several huge white ovals superimposed — subterranean cavities where carbon dioxide potentially could be stored.

The sites have not been fully studied by geologists as yet to make sure they are safe storage sites and well sealed. There is no infrastructure or equipment that could move carbon into them.

The new Enel plant here opens its first boiler in two months. It will immediately produce fewer carbon emissions than the ancient oil boiler it replaces, but only because it will produce less electricity, officials here admit. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com/



In the towns surrounding Civitavecchia, the impending arrival of a huge coal plant, with its three silvery domes, is being greeted with a hefty dose of dread.

“They call it clean coal because they use some filters, but it is really nonsense,” said Marza Marzioli of the No Coal citizens group in the nearby ancient Etruscan town of Tarquinia. “If you compare it to old plants, yes it’s better, but it’s not ‘clean’ in any way.”

The group says that Enel has won approval for a dangerous new coal plant by buying machines for a local hospital and by carrying out a public relations campaign. Enel advertisements for the project show a young girl erasing a plant’s smokestack.

Most people who took part in a 2007 local referendum voted no, but the plant went ahead anyway, the group said.

The European Union, through its emissions trading scheme, has tried to make power plants consider the costs of carbon, forcing them to buy “permits” for emissions. But with the price of oil so high, coal is far cheaper, even with the cost of permits to pollute factored in, Enel has calculated.

Stephan Singer, who runs the European energy and climate office of WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, in Brussels, said that math was shortsighted: the cost of coal and permits will almost certainly rise over the next decade.

“If they want coal to be part of the energy solution, they have to show us that carbon capture can be done now, that they can really reduce emissions” to an acceptable level, Mr. Singer said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:





“They wouldn’t have given you a plugged nickel eight years ago that there would ever be a high-rise residential building in downtown Las Vegas,” Mr. Goodman said with a laugh. “It was unheard of.”

And Union Park is now desirable enough to be a bargaining chip. Next month, the City Council is expected to finalize a plan in which a developer will build a new $150 million City Hall in the older downtown area in exchange for a parcel in Union Park where a casino-hotel can be built.

Still, the enduring down-at-the-heels reputation of the old downtown was a factor in Mr. Palmer’s decision to build in Union Park instead of the old downtown. “I call it the new Las Vegas,” said Richard Femenella, chief financial officer of the Charlie Palmer Group. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/

 “They say they’re revitalizing downtown, but truthfully, everything west of the railroad tracks is all brand new. It was dirt.”

Whether the old downtown is left behind is a concern of Linda Lera-Randle El, an activist for homeless people, who said that none of the residential units in Union Park were designated as affordable housing and that she worried that homeless people who squat on the vacant land would be displaced.

Not all of the mayor’s dreams have come to fruition. Several attempts to get a developer to build a sports arena, first at Union Park and then elsewhere, appear to have stalled. Mr. Goodman aggressively courted the Cleveland Clinic to take up residence, only to have the respected hospital pass. But the results of Union Park nonetheless stand to rewrite the national impression of Mr. Goodman as a Vegas caricature given to outlandish acts like suggesting that graffiti artists be de-thumbed or running a seminar on making martinis.

“I don’t always agree with Oscar, but I do think that Union Park is going to make it,” said a councilwoman, Lois Tarkanian, one of Mr. Goodman’s most vocal detractors.

“Even if you disagree with him on this or that,” Ms. Tarkanian said, “you have to give him credit for the part of his personality that can get this done.”


Joe Zealberg, a psychiatrist in Charleston, S.C., prescribed generic dOne day last week, David Jacobs took out two measuring cups, put a pot on the stove at his home here and demonstrated how he used to turn raw powder into steroids.

For more than a year, Jacobs operated a makeshift pharmaceutical lab out of his kitchen in his one-story suburban home. Each month, he said, he sold about a thousand of his own bottles of steroids and another thousand kits of human growth hormone smuggled from China to dealers across the United States. Among the dealers he supplied were two N.F.L. players, Jacobs said, who would then supply a handful of other N.F.L. players with the banned substances.

Jacobs’s business as one of the largest steroid producers in Texas came to a halt in April 2007 when federal agents raided his home and confiscated thousands of units of steroids. Later, as part of Operation Raw Deal, a nationwide investigation of the importation and distribution of performance-enhancing drugs, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute anabolic steroids. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
On Thursday in Sherman, Tex., Jacobs was sentenced to three years of probation.

Jacobs, a former body builder, said he advised about 10 N.F.L. players on how to exploit loopholes in the league’s drug-testing program. One way, he said, was to have team doctors write them prescriptions for drugs that would mask steroid use.

Jacobs’s case received national attention because a Web site for his supplements store boasted of providing counseling to several players on the Dallas Cowboys and the Atlanta Falcons.

The New York Times reported last month that information from the government’s investigation of Jacobs had led federal prosecutors to investigate Matt Lehr, an offensive lineman for the New Orleans Saints, on the suspicion he distributed performance-enhancing drugs. In recent years, investigators have focused largely on the distributors of drugs, not athletes or other users.

Lehr’s lawyer has denied that his client ever sold steroids or H.G.H. and said Jacobs fabricated information about Lehr after he refused to pay Jacobs’s legal fees. Jacobs said he never asked Lehr to give him money for legal expenses.

In interviews here last week, Jacobs said he sold hundreds of bottles of steroids and H.G.H. to Lehr and another N.F.L. player. Those players, Jacobs said, sold the substances to other players in 2006 and 2007.

“I thought the fewer the people I was selling to, the safer it would be,” Jacobs said. “There were many players who wanted drugs, but I didn’t want to have direct transactions with a bunch of people.”

Lehr tested positive and was suspended for four games in 2006 for testing positive for steroids, but he has not been charged in this case.

Jacobs said he advised players, including Lehr, to ask their team doctors to write them prescriptions for finasteride, a drug used to treat balding in young men. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
Jacobs said a Falcons team doctor wrote Lehr a prescription for the substance. He said a bottle of finasteride labeled as prescribed for Lehr was seized from his own house in April 2007.

“The excuse they did it under was that the players were losing their hair because they were taking their helmets on and off,” Jacobs said, echoing similar statements that were published Sunday in The Dallas Morning News.

The N.F.L. does not test for the substance, and it is not on its list of banned substances.

“We do not comment on any medical procedures or information about any of our players,” Reggie Roberts, a spokesman for the Falcons, said in a telephone interview.

Greg Aiello, a spokesman for the N.F.L., said the league’s independent scientific and medical advisers reviewed finasteride before and after it was banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency in 2005, but recommended that it not be banned.

Don Catlin, the head of the independent organization Anti-Doping Research, said in a telephone interview that finasteride could mask the use of some substances normally detected through urine testing.

Jacobs, who said he stopped using steroids in April 2007, said he also advised players to use steroids only in the off-season.

“The players know the testing is tougher in-season, so they use human growth hormone year round and only use steroids in the off-season,” he said.

The N.F.L. tests its players year round for steroids but does not test players for H.G.H. Of the 12,000 tests the league performs, 4,000 are in the off-season.

Jacobs said he suggested that players say they were out of town or on vacation with their wives when they received phone calls about pending drug tests.

He also said he would then provide the player with an herbal supplement intended to cleanse the system of steroids without being detected.

“A week later, they would be tested and they would pass,” Jacobs said.

Under the World Anti-Doping Agency rules, which apply to Olympic athletes, three missed tests by one athlete within 18 months can result in a suspension for the athlete.

Aiello said players had to provide the league’s drug tester with their off-season locations and a number where they could be reached at all times.

“The program’s independent adviser has the full authority to determine if a player is evading testing in violation of the program and makes a determination on a case-by-case basis,” Aiello said.
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After his sentencing Thursday, Jacobs said he was willing to cooperate with N.F.L. officials, who had reached out to him several months ago to learn more about his dealings with league players.
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“I plan to travel to New York in the next month to meet with them and tell them about the loopholes in their program,” Jacobs said.

As for whether he intends to share names with the league, Jacobs said, “Only if the N.F.L. guarantees their lives won’t be destroyed like mine.” http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx

Some people want a little more out of their vacation than a fruity drink served poolside. Diving with sharks in South Africa, for example. Or living among penguins for five days in Antarctica. Or paddling in a canoe down a crocodile- and hippopotamus-infested river in Zambia.

For those people, the travel company Abercrombie & Kent has created a series called Extreme Adventures. Starting next fall, 15 adventure packages will be available in countries that range from Norway to Kenya to Nepal, featuring activities that include hiking, dog sledding, bungee jumping and cross-country skiing. Louis J Sheehan Esquire

The first trip is scheduled for Sept. 28 through Oct. 6 and will take participants on foot through the Selous Game Reserve, a nature sanctuary and Unesco World Heritage site in Tanzania with elephants, black rhinoceroses, cheetahs and giraffes (from $9,830 a person, including airfare).

Looks like a frog. Swims like a frog. But doesn't croak. A flattened, brown, aquatic species from Borneo has just become the only frog shown to have no lungs.

The species, Barbourula kalimantanensis, is so rare that until last year only two specimens were known to science and no herpetologist had seen it alive, says David Bickford of the National University of Singapore. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com/
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SKIN BREATHER. The Barbourula kalimantanensis frog of Borneo lives in fast, cold water and doesn't bother with lungs.
Bickford

"It's one of the most famous frogs in Borneo," says Bickford. No one wanted to slice the frogs up for dissection, so no one had noticed the absence of lungs.

But last year herpetologists on an expedition to a remote section of Borneo managed to collect more of the frogs. Bickford and the man who first named the species&mdashjoko Iskandar, now at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia—led the trek.

After traveling to waters near Nanga Pinoh where the original collector had first discovered the frog, and finding the area "completely trashed by all the illegal gold mining," Bickford, Iskandar and the others traveled through difficult country in search of unspoiled waters.

In a fast mountain river, a 45-minute frog search turned Bickford's lips blue and chilled the dexterity out of his hands. "I was getting hypothermia in the tropics," he says. "The water is moving so fast it takes the heat out of your body."

This water, it turns out, is ideal for a lungless frog. "They weren't incredibly hard to catch, but they were incredibly slippery," Bickford says.

The cold-water home holds more dissolved oxygen than warm water does, says Bickford. And the water current rushing along at 2 to 5 meters per second steadily renews the oxygen supply.

The frogs have flattened bodies, shaped more like a cookie than an apple, with plenty of surface area for gas exchange. So they probably get all the oxygen they need through their skin, the researchers will report online April 17 in Current Biology.

Bickford and Iskandar dissected several frogs on the spot and found no lungs. Iskandar immediately realized that they could be the first normally lungless frog. The researchers brought the specimens back to their labs for further research.

The Borneo frog's closest living kin, evolutionarily, lives in the Philippines and does have lungs. That sister species' conventional breathing apparatus supports the idea that the Borneo frog evolved from ancestors with lungs that were later lost them in the highly aerated water, Bickford says. Lungs could even be a disadvantage in white water, making a frog more buoyant and easier for the current to sweep away.

Amphibian evolution exhibits more flexibility in breathing than seen in the histories of mammals, birds and reptiles. Those three groups all breathe with some form of lung, but amphibians have lost their lungs at least two other times in evolutionary history. Lungless salamanders show up in two families, including some 320 skin-breather species in the Plethodontid family widespread across the Americas. One South American species of caecilian, a wormy-looking amphibian, also lacks lungs.

Herpetologist Robert F. Inger of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago says he heard about the find soon after the expedition returned from Borneo. "I was astonished," he says.

He has studied Borneo's frogs for some 50 years, and he had examined the original specimen of the frog in the 1970s, when Iskandar shipped it to him on loan for consultation about how to classify it. http://louis0j0sheehan.blogspot.com/
http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/

The island is full of surprises, Inger says. This is far from the only frog in Borneo described from just a few specimens.

Seeing the destruction caused by the mining in the frog's original habitat fueled Bickford's concerns for Borneo's amphibian diversity. The lungless frog, with its small known range, is listed as endangered by IUCN conservation monitors. Small-time gold-mining operations are turning previously fast, cold, frog-friendly rivers into wide, slow, muddy soup. Yet the people who run the operations have few other economic options. "It's a classic problem you find in conservation," Bickford says.