New species of carnivorous mammal found in Madagascar

A mongoose-like creature has been discovered in Madagascar, BBC reports to http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9080000/9080783.stm

Leicester Geographers forensically tap pee ancient deposits to learn about desert area’s climatic changes

According to the media release, issued by the University of Leicester Press Office,

Scientists at the University of Leicester are using an unusual resource to investigate ancient climates– prehistoric animal urine.

The animal in question is the rock hyrax, a common species in countries such as Namibia and Botswana. They look like large guinea pigs but are actually related to the elephant. Hyraxes use specific locations as communal toilets, some of which have been used by generations of animals for thousands of years. The urine crystallises and builds up in stratified accumulations known as ‘middens’, providing a previously untapped resource for studying long-term climate change.

“Palaeoenvironmental records in this area were fragmentary,” says a researcher. “The middens are providing unique terrestrial records to compare against nearby deep ocean-core records, allowing us to think in much more detail about what drives African climate change.

“This is a very dynamic environment, and it appears that that the region’s climate changed in a complex manner during and after the last global Ice Age (around 20,000 years ago). The next step, which is part of Dr Chase’s new research project, will be to compare the midden data against simulations of past climates generated by GCMs [computer-based general circulation models that are used to simulate both past and future climates] to evaluate their performance and explore why climates have changed the way they have.”

Brazil’s Amazon forest to be auctioned off

According to Reuters, “Brazil will auction large swaths of the Amazon forest to be managed by private timber companies and cooperatives to help reduce demand for illegal logging…The government will grant private companies logging concessions for nearly 1 million hectares (2.47 million) by year-end and, within 4 to 5 years, nearly 11 million hectares (27 million acres), the size of the U.S. state of Virginia.“

The earth’s biodiversity probably still increasing

Hélène Morlon, Matthew D. Potts, and Joshua B. Plotkin from the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley write in the excitingly titled paper, “Inferring the Dynamics of Diversification: A Coalescent Approach,”

We have developed a novel approach to infer diversification dynamics from the phylogenies of present-day species. Applying our approach to a diverse set of empirical phylogenies, we demonstrate that speciation rates have decayed over time, suggesting ecological constraints to diversification. Nonetheless, we find that diversity is still expanding at present, suggesting either that these ecological constraints do not impose an upper limit to diversity or that this upper limit has not yet been reached. [emphasis added]

200 new species found in Papua New Guinea

Last week we noted that 6,000 new species had been found in the earth’s oceans, this week it’s 200 new species in PNG. “Scientists Wednesday unveiled a spectacular array of more than
200 new species discovered in the Pacific islands of Papua New Guinea, including a white-tailed mouse and a tiny, long-snouted frog.” Said researcher Steve Richards, “To find a completely new genus of mammal in this day and age is pretty cool.”

US Interior Secretary lifts gulf drilling moratorium

According to a story in Marketwatch,

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar on Tuesday said the deepwater drilling moratorium has been lifted ahead of the Nov. 30 expiration, saying progress has been made on making deepwater drilling safer. The moratorium was imposed after a BP well in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, leading to the worst oil spill in U.S. history. “There will always be risks associated with deepwater drilling, but we have now reached the point where we have, in my view, reduced those risks,” Salazar said.

ABC News notes that despite the Obama Administration’s lifting the moratorium six weeks ahead of schedule, “[A] combination of bureaucratic and technological hurdles means it will be months before most of the two dozen rigs idled by the moratorium resume drilling

“They [the oil industry and congressional allies] miss the point: The issue isn’t about a slowdown but a startup,” Los Angeles Times quotes Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington research group that has advocated lifting the moratorium. “Interior, with a lot of input from the oil industry, has set up new regulations. Standing up that new architecture is a first step for government and industry, and it will take some time.”

Forest Service estimates US forests locking up 190+ million tons of carbon annually

The USDA Forest Service released new estimates of the total carbon storage of U.S. forests, highlighting the important role America’s forests play in the fight against climate change. According to the new data, 41.4 billion metric tons of carbon is currently stored in the nation’s forests, and due to both increases in the total area of forest land and increases in the carbon stored per acre, an additional 192 million metric tons of carbon are sequestered each year. The additional carbon sequestered annually offsets roughly 11 percent of the country’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of removing almost 135 million passenger vehicles from the nation’s highways. (Read more)