Adopt a Puma to Save the Species

Adopt a Puma to save the species

This World Wild Foundation Puma Programme acts to financially compensate ranchers for cattle and sheep that are killed for food by the Southern Puma. This way the Southern Puma will not be shot or poisoned by the ranchers and the ranchers do not lose financially.

You can help by adopting a Puma cub or making a donation here

The following pictures are copyrighted Albert J Valentino.

BUY A PUMA A DINNER.

World Wild Foundation has a programme to launch which will help to stop ranchers from shooting Pumas.

The organization will pay compensation to ranchers for all sheep & cattle that Pumas kill for food. To a large extent it will be on the “Honour” system and we take ranchers word for the kill and the compensation. History tells us that ranchers want to help but not if they suffer losses. We need to have the ranchers on our side, so we take their word for a loss and pay them compensation for their lost livestock. The ranchers then agree not to shoot Pumas and they tell us of Puma movements and log Puma livestock kills. This enables us to track Puma population numbers and their movements.

Buy a Puma his dinner?

The typical cost to pay the rancher in Argentina & Chile is..

A Sheep costs US$48……………….. please donate.

A steer costs US$210……………….. please donate.

Also generous sponsors may have a 1,000 acre range named after themselves by paying for our land purchase programme that will acquire lands for the Puma home ranges for all time.

A 1,000 acre range costs US$500,000 [a typical 20,000 acre home range will cost us in the region of US$10 Million & we need many of these if we are to succeed in our programme].

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Don’t Treat our Soils like Dirt

Climate Change Means Soil Change.

Worms, bacteria and beetles living below ground are part of the largest and least known treasure-trove of life on earth that could have spin-offs from farming to pharmaceuticals, the UN said.

Climate change is provoking changes in the insect population & in the types of insect that populate the various regions of the World. These changes must be closely & continuously monitored for the changes to soil will impact on the productivity of the soil & what may grow there for the benefit of humanity & wildlife.

“We know little of what is living below our feet…yet it is vital to sustaining life on earth,” said the Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

French 19th century chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur was right to say that “the role of the very small is large”, the UN told Reuters.

Experiments in promoting natural organisms in soils – shifting from use of artificial pesticides and fertilisers – had helped improve crop yields in some studies in Brazil, Ivory Coast, Indonesia, India, Kenya, Mexico and Uganda.

Now, insect migrations & changes in insect population densities around the globe may undo much of this work.

Experts in the project believed that soil-dwellers such as earthworms, fungi, termites, ants and bacteria were part of “biggest source of untapped and unknown life on earth”, a UN statement said.

The life forms could help farming and were “a potential source of new…pharmaceutical and industrial products,” it said.

Most bids to chart life on earth focus on exotic rain forests, coral reefs or mangroves – overlooking humble mud.

In India, for instance, re-introduction of local earthworms had improved tea harvests at some plantations by almost 300 per cent, the UN report stated.

In the Los Tuxtlas reserve in northern Mexico, bean yields had risen more than 40 per cent after farmers started using a type of nitrogen-fixing microbe found in local forest soils as a “bio-fertiliser”.

Soil-burrowers such as termites – often dismissed as pests – can help aerate soil and ensure that it can absorb water.

The report said the benefits of diverse soils went beyond farming – the Los Tuxtlas reserve was a rain forest where 40,000 hectares were lost in the past 40 years.

“Boosting yields using naturally occurring soil organisms may reduce the need to clear more forest for agriculture, thus helping to conserve the forest and its diversity both above and below ground,” it said.

And soils were often richer in life in forests and fallow land than on farms.

A study in Indonesia showed that “the richness and abundance of ants, beetles and termites decreased with increasing land intensification,” it said.

Researchers in the project, launched in 2002 and coordinated by the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute in Nairobi, had also added 15,000 specimens, ranging from worms to fungi, to national collections. Many were believed to be new to science.

The UN talks in Curitiba, Brazil, are seeking ways to achieve a UN goal, set by world leaders in 2002, of slowing the rate of loss of the diversity of life on earth by 2010.

Studies in the Southern Cone of South America [Argentina, Chile, Uruguay & Paraguay} are first on our soil studies list. These four countries are, together, great producers of food for humanity & host a great & varied wildlife. The changes occurring need to be noted, studied & verified as being either cyclical or permanent.

Make a donation for an ongoing land programme. Contact the World Wild Foundation for more information and how you can help.

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Yapok- the Only Aquatic Marsupial

The name “yapok” is derived from the Oyapock River in northern South America. Yapoks are found in Central and South America, from southern Mexico and Belize through all of Central America, and into Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Brazil, and Northern Argentina. But in fact, the yapok is what you may know as water opossum.

Image source: BBC

Females are polyestrous, meaning that they come into heat and become receptive to mating more than once a year. A breeding pair stays together for several days, the male following and circling the female until actual mating. A typical litter contains one to five young.

Yapok young have the fastest rate of development among all the Didelphidae species. After about forty days in the pouch, the young have grown body fur, pigmentation and the various markings, and opened their eyes. At about fifty days, the young begin to let go of the nipples and leave the pouch, but continue to suckle and stay with the mother, sometimes riding on her back.

Individual water opossums are solitary and hostile toward others of their species, except during mating times. An individual hunts and forages in freshwater streams, between rest periods, throughout the night. During the day, the animal rests in a temporary ground nest that it constructs from leaves and grass in a shady area. Close by is a more permanent underground burrow, which the yapok excavates in the stream bank, with its entrance a few inches above the water line. The entrance tunnel is about 2 feet (0.6 meters) long, and leads to a den lined with leaves or grasses. Individuals use their prehensile tails to carry nesting materials.

A yapok fishes and forages underwater, propelling itself with alternate strokes of its powerful hind legs and webbed feet. The animal shuts its eyes and ears and depends partly on its whiskers to detect motion, while its fingers, acutely sensitive to touch, are used to contact, check the texture of, and grasp prey.

The longest known lifespan for a captive yapok is three years.

Water opossums, confined to forests and riversides by their specialized lifestyles, are no threat or bother to humanity. Humans hunt them for their waterproof pelts, to be made into garments and accessories.

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Atlantic’s Weird Creature

August 22, 2007—With a fearsome grin fit for a movie monster, this viperfish is a real-life predator that lurks in one of the world’s most remote locations.

An international team of 31 researchers found this and other strange animals while exploring the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an underwater mountain range that runs from Iceland to the Azores islands west of Portugal (see Europe map).

Over the course of five weeks, the team cataloged a host of exotic worms, colorful corals, unusual sea cucumbers, and weird fish. Clearly, viperfish has plenty to eat.

Many of the species found on the ridge are rare and had only been discovered in recent years, scientists said. At least one species found during the survey—a tiny crustacean called a seed shrimp—is thought to be new to science.

“It was like going to a new country,” said expedition leader Monty Priede of Britain’s University of Aberdeen.

The survey was coordinated by the Norway-based MAR-ECO project and the Census of Marine Life program.

via National Geographic News

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Dragons Alive

Using state-of-the-art camera techniques, the three films (Ruling Reptiles, Smart Reptiles and Future Reptiles)explore what it’s like to live in the world of reptiles and reveal that far from being creatures of the past, these cousins of the dinosaurs are assured a definite place in the future.

Today’s reptiles are as deadly as dinosaurs, as beautiful as birds, and as caring as mammals. Their image as ancient, unchanging creatures couldn’t be further from the truth – they are in fact some of the most adaptable and successful animals on earth. Dragons Alive brings reptiles out of the shadow of dinosaurs – and into the limelight.

Evolved from ancestors that watched grazing herds of dinosaurs, today’s reptiles are the ultimate success story. To hunt, they use chemical warfare, strength and stealth. To attract mates they put on shows of astonishing colour, movement and display. They have the skills of a superhero as they fly, hang upside down, spit poison, use x-ray vision and walk on water.

From the bite of the Komodo dragon, to the calculated intelligence of the crocodile, today’s reptiles still have the power to shock and surprise us.

via ABC Shop

Ruling Reptiles
The extinction of the dinosaurs left a power vacuum. Enter the dragons: powerful modern reptiles which still dominate large areas of our planet. Ruling Reptiles goes in search of the modern reptiles that have inherited the dominant role.

Smart Reptiles
The second programme focuses on the amazing natural technology that makes reptiles such a successful group. Are reptiles the bio-technology wizards of the animal world? If you count sprinting on water, shooting blood from the eyes, spitting poison at their enemies, navigating by magnetic fields, converting ribs into a hang-glider, or communicating emotions in colour then, yes, they are!

Future Reptiles
Alligators on golf courses, geckos in hotels, chameleons in the garden and pampered pet pythons – reptiles are invading our space! So what will the future role for these living cousins of the dinosaurs be? Will reptiles give us better biotechnology and medicines? Or a ‘Jurassic Park’?

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The Gay Animal Kingdom

Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection—she’s no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can’t explain the homosexuality that’s been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexuality—long disparaged as a quirk of human culture—is a normal, and probably necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says, Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality.

Male big horn sheep live in what are often called “homosexual societies.” They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males “effeminate.”

Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in “penis fencing,” which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.

As this list of activities suggests, having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there’s a vertebrate out there that does it. Nevertheless, most biologists continue to regard homosexuality as a sexual outlier. According to evolutionary theory, being gay is little more than a maladaptive behavior.

Joan Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford University, wants to change that perception. After cataloging the wealth of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom two years ago in her controversial book Evolution’s Rainbow—and weathering critiques that, she says, stemmed largely from her being transgendered—Roughgarden has set about replacing Darwinian sexual selection with a new explanation of sex. For too long, she says, biology has neglected evidence that mating isn’t only about multiplying. Sometimes, as in the case of all those gay sheep, dolphins and primates, animals have sex just for fun or to cement their social bonds. Homosexuality, Roughgarden says, is an essential part of biology, and can no longer be dismissed. By using the queer to untangle the straight, Roughgarden’s theories have the potential to usher in a scientific sexual revolution.

further reading : Seed Magazine

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Bakyard Wildlife: Living with a Skunk

Skunks are members of the weasel family (Mustelidae). There are four species of skunk in North America: striped skunks (Mephitis mephitis), hooded skunks (M. macroura), spotted skunks (Spilogale putorius), and scarce hognosed skunks (Conepatus mesoleucus).

Characteristics:
The striped skunk is easily identified by the white stripe that runs from its head to its tail. Its stripes start with a triangle at the head and break into two stripes down its back. The stripes usually meet again and form one stripe at the base of their tail. Their tails are usually a mixture of white and black fur. Each striped skunk has a unique stripe pattern.

The striped skunk is about the same size as a house cat. It has a small triangular head and little ears. Its legs are short with webbed toes and claws the striped skunk uses for digging and looking for food.

Life Cycle:
Striped skunks mate from mid-February to mid-March. The babies are born about two months later. An average skunk litter has five to six babies. Skunk babies are blind and deaf when they are born. They will nurse in the den for about a month and a half. After they leave the den they may stay with their mother for up to a year.

Behavior:
With their short, stubby legs, it isn’t easy for a skunk to outrun a predator. The striped skunk has developed a unique defense system. When a skunk is threatened, it first tries to run away from the predator. If that doesn’t work, it tries to frighten the predator by arching its back, raising its tail and turning its back on the predator. It may also stomp its feet. If this doesn’t work, as a last resort, the skunk will spray the animal with a strong-smelling fluid. The fluid really stinks and it can also sting the eyes of the predator. This gives the skunk time to get away! A skunk can spray as far as twelve feet!

The skunk is primarily nocturnal. It sleeps in its burrow during the day and hunts at night. It usually doesn’t dig its own burrow. It looks for an abandoned burrow or finds a natural hollow under a tree or building.

TIPS:
1. Do not feed the skunks. They can easily become dependent on human food sources.
2. Never leave pet food outside.
3. Never discard edible garbage where skunks can get to it.
4. Secure garbage containers and eliminate their odors. Use a small amount of ammonia or cayenne pepper in the garbage to discourage scavenging.
5. A persistent, faint skunk odor around a hole leading under a foundation or deck indicates a skunk may be present. To find out, cover the hole with loose dirt; if a skunk is in residence, it will dig out during the night. Allow three days for this test; if dirt remains undisturbed, then close the opening with masonry, boards, or hardware cloth.
6. Install one-way doors on entrances to skunk dens, allowing the skunk to leave at night but barring it from re-entering. Watch for any new holes. Do not use one-way doors during May through August, when babies may be in the den. If the mother cannot return, the babies will starve. This is inhumane and can also cause odor problems.
7. Place mothball-filled socks and/or sprinkle cayenne pepper around your yard to discourage digging.
8. Start a nontoxic insect- control program (especially for grubs) to discourage digging.
9. Fences are effective as long as they are buried at least 1 1/2 feet in the ground.
10. If a skunk strays into your garage, leave a door to the outside open and let the skunk exit on its own.

11. Securely enclose poultry, especially at night. Repair all openings in coop or fencing. Fencing should extend 6 to 8 inches underground to prevent skunks and other animals from digging under.
12. Debris and brush piles should be removed or stacked neatly to eliminate suitable cavities.
13. Blow-up or plastic great horned owls may be strategically placed and periodically moved to deter skunks.
14. Lighting up of denning sites and a portable radio may cause the skunk to seek a more suitable habitat.
15. Keep pet doors closed at night to prevent illegal entry by a skunk.
16. Keep fruit trees picked and don’t leave rotted fruit on the ground.
17. Restrict use of birdseed. Skunks are attracted to it and to the birds and rodents that use the feeder.
18. If possible, eliminate outdoor sources of water.
19. Battery operated flashing lights, tape recorded human noises, scattered moth balls and ammonia-soaked rags strategically placed may deter skunks from entering your yard.
20. Trapping and relocation of skunks is not a recommended or viable alternative. Wild animals are territorial and like species will simply take over the area vacated by the relocated or dead animal.

Further reading:
Project wildlife
Nature Works

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