Palm Beach County OKs animal control rules

Palm Beach County Commissioners on Tuesday passed a range of animal control rules, key among them a tougher dog leash law and a spay-
                                                     

and-release plan for cats that some wildlife groups will lead to even more deaths of birds and small animals.

The vote was 6-0; County Mayor Shelley Vana was absent.

At its May 19 meeting, the commission tentatively adopted several new rules for animal control as part of “Countdown 2 Zero,” an ambitious program to reduce euthanasia of adoptable animals by 2024.

Wildlife groups then wrote to say house and feral cats kill 8 billion to 26 billion birds and small mammals and “we should not respond to one tragedy by creating another.”

In the proposed rule, any roaming cat collected by county Animal Care and Control that appears to be cared for would be sterilized, microchipped, and vaccinated for rabies, and its left ear clipped for identification. And it would be set free back in its neighborhood.

Dianne Sauve, director of Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control, has told commissioners the alternate would be for thousands of acts in shelters to be euthanized.

Why This Strange-Looking Animal Has A Nose Like A Penguin's Foot

This weird-looking thing is a Sichuan takin. It’s what happens when you let a bunch of sheep loose on the mountain ranges of Tibet for a few thousand years. It has a huge schnoz for the same reason the penguin has a unique set of

                                               

feet. Find out what these unique animals have in common.

A takin weighs over six hundred pounds and has horns like butcher’s hooks. It would probably be a lot scarier if its nose didn’t look like it was wearing a bigger, plusher version of itself as a nose-cozy. These animals have giant schnozes, and when scientists looked into the matter they found that the noses have something in common with an animal as unlike the takin as it is possible to be.

Penguins spend their days placing their bare feet directly on ice, without those feet freezing off. Although there are fish that manufacture a kind of “anti-freeze” in their blood to keep from freezing solid, penguins don’t have the same internal chemistry. Instead both penguins and takins have internal plumbing. By constantly circulating blood through their feet, penguins can keep their feet a couple of degrees above freezing. The real problem is what happens when that blood comes back into the body. Heating it up again will drain the penguin of energy, and fast. So before the penguin’s blood rushes from their feet back into their body, it passes very close by the network of other blood vessels going out into the feet. These outgoing vessels are full of warm blood which cools down, and transfers its heat to the incoming blood. The cooled blood keeps the feet just-barely-warm-enough, while the incoming blood is warmed enough to not slowly drain the penguin of both heat and energy.

The takin, meanwhile, is insulated with hooves and hair. It doesn’t really have to circulate much of its blood in an area that’s exposed to the cold. However, it is vulnerable to the cold in a different area – its lungs. Taking in huge lungfuls of oxygen-poor, freezing-cold air could drain the takin of its energy or its body heat, or both. When scientists looked inside the takin’s giant nose, guess what they found? Again, there was a network of blood vessels. The blood in these vessels kept the takin’s nose at a tolerably warm temperature. More importantly, it heated the incoming lungfuls of air, keeping the takin as warm as possible.

Chinese tourism board criticised for animal cruelty after pushing pigs off bridge

A Chinese tourism board has made pigs fly.

                                     

The animals, each with a bright number painted on its side, were herded onto a ramshackle bridge overhanging Shiyan Lake in the popular tourist province of Changsha and pushed off.

Online users have been upset by the “cruel” stunt, organised by Shi Huang as part of local May Day celebrations, with many criticising the event after photos were published on state broadcaster CCTV’s Facebook page.

"They look like they were pushed not jumping through choice. Cruel,” wrote Hayley McDonough.

Another user, Kay Khine S L, wrote: “This is animal abuse!” Jo Metcalfe added: “This is beyond sick. What did these sentient beings do, to deserve such punishment”?

Organiser Mr Huang, who plans to make the event weekly despite reports that the local tourism board received complaints, claims the piglets are “carefully trained” to perform the “special stunt”.

He continued: “They get well rewarded with food and once they get over their nerves they clearly enjoyed it.

“Anybody who says it is cruel is clearly not well informed that pigs like water,” he told the Mail Online.

Out of plaice: popular UK fish at risk from rising temperatures

Some of the UK’s most popular fish may be driven from the North Sea, and the UK’s dinner plates, by rising temperatures, scientists warned on Monday.
Fishmonger favourites plaice, lemon sole and haddock are being pushed out of their traditional feeding grounds by rapidly warming sea temperatures. The waters of the North Sea have warmed by 1.3C in the past 30 years, four times faster than the global average. Since the 1980s landings of cold-adapted species have halved.
Flatfish, such as plaice and sole, live on the shallow, muddy bottom of the southern North Sea. As the sea warms some species are being driven further north. But the rockier, deeper seas to the north are unsuitable habitat for these bottom feeders. With North Sea temperatures set to increase another 1.8C in the next half century, a team of scientists from Exeter University believes the fishing industry for these species is likely to collapse.

“For flatfish there’s really not anywhere to go. They’re kind of squeezed off the edge of a cliff,” said study author Dr Steve Simpson who is a senior lecturer in marine biology. “In terms of being commercially viable, I doubt these fisheries can continue for much longer.”
For haddock, the North Sea is already its southern limit. Their fishery, and much of the UK’s supply, is increasingly coming from Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic waters.
The study assessed future distributions of 10 common North Sea fish species and predicted a general trend of decline. By including habitat requirements into its modelling, the new research confounds previous assertions that fish species will simply be able to shift northwards as the oceans warm.
Dr Peter Richardson, biodiversity programme manager at the UK’s Marine Conservation Society, said the study “rightly questions the assumption that species can simply head polewards as waters warm” and called for stronger catch limits to ensure the North Sea’s native species remained sustainable for as long as possible.
“Our fisheries are worth billions, providing an important and healthy source of protein, yet European governments (including the UK) consistently fail to follow scientific advice and set total allowable catches over and above the sustainable limits advised by their fisheries experts. We cannot continue to be so cavalier with such a valuable resource and expect it to be resilient to the impacts of climate change,” he said.
The Exeter team has previously found that sardine, anchovy, squid and cuttlefish are likely to become staples of the UK fishing industry.
Simpson said their study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, had confirmed the changing ecology of the North Sea.
“We will see a real changing of the guard in the next few decades. Our models predict cold water species will be squeezed out, with warmer water fish likely to take their place. For sustainable UK fisheries, we need to move on from haddock and chips and look to southern Europe for our gastronomic inspiration,” he said.
Separate research released last week found cod increased dramatically in recent years. Cod is an apex predator and a heavily-fished species. These interactions confounded modelling, said Simpson, and the study could not predict its future under a warming climate.
Angus Garrett from seafood industry body Seafish said the new research was valuable, but the future for many fisheries remained uncertain.
“Temperature change is clearly influencing fisheries and ought to be considered in fisheries management. How temperature is considered and the modelling of impacts is likely to be a continuing debate but we welcome this contribution to the evidence base,” he said.

WA shark policy allowing killing of great whites will not be reviewed

The Environmental Protection Authority will not review Western Australia’s policy of using drumlines to catch sharks that pose a “serious threat” because it is unlikely to have a significant effect on the environment, the authority’s chairman has said.
WA Greens MP Lynn MacLaren referred the policy to the EPA in January.
It grants fisheries officers an exemption to kill great white sharks, which are protected under federal laws, in the event of a shark attack or when a “high hazard” shark is reported to have a continuous presence near a popular beach.
The definition of a high hazard shark incident was broadened last year when the “imminent threat” policy, introduced in 2012, was rebadged as a “serious threat”.
Conservationists said the new policy could potentially kill more great white sharks than the now-defunct shark cull, which caught 172 sharks before the EPA declared it environmentally unacceptable and it was dumped.
But EPA chairman Paul Vogel disagreed, saying the policy was “a discrete and different proposal” to the shark cull, under which drumlines would have been strung across beaches along WA’s south-west coast every summer for three years.

Vogel told Guardian Australia MacLaren’s referral was not valid because the serious threat policy did not qualify as a “significant proposal” under the Environmental Protection Act.
Under the Act “significant” referred to environmental impact, not “the level of community or other interest”, Vogel said.
He said the policy was “not considered significant”, in part because it had been invoked to authorise the use of drumlines only 11 times in the past two years.
It has killed sharks only once, when drumlines deployed after Bunbury surfer Sean Pollard was attacked in Esperance in October resulted in the death of two juvenile great whites.
“The EPA also noted that deployment of capture gear in accordance with the policy has been undertaken for a limited duration; and further, its implementation is responsive and temporary in nature,” Vogel said.
“Therefore, based on the existing level of impact and implementation under both the 2012 guidelines and the 2014 guidelines … the EPA considers the policy, implemented in accordance with the 2014 guidelines, is unlikely to have a significant effect on the environment.”
MacLaren’s office received the response, dated 23 March, on Thursday, more than 60 days after submitting the referral. The process was paused for 10 days while the WA Department of Premier and Cabinet provided the EPA with more information.
MacLaren said she disagreed with the rejection and would seek a meeting with Vogel.
“I’m no more confident, in spite of this two-page letter, about the environmental impact of this policy or whether the EPA has assessed it,” she said.
“The new policy, I would have thought, would suffer the same rejection by the federal authorities that the previous one did.”
MacLaren said it was concerning that the EPA had sought information only from the department, rather than any scientific sources, in determining the impact of the proposal. She also questioned why her referral was not opened up for the usual seven-day public comment period.
She said there were significant differences between the 2012 policy and the 2014 policy and it was not appropriate to assess the impact of the latter based on the implementation of the former.
One change was that the 2014 policy removed a clause that specifically recommended against the destruction of scientifically tagged sharks.
That clause was used in December, when the WA government authorised the culling of a tagged great white shark at Warnbro Sound, about an hour south of Perth, after it was repeatedly detected on acoustic receivers in the area. The government denied it had targeted the tagged shark.
Both the shark cull and the imminent threat policy were introduced as a public safety measure in response to a spike in shark attacks. There have been 14 fatal shark attacks in WA waters since 2000.
The serious threat policy has not been invoked since 31 December, when drumlines were deployed for three days following a fatal shark attack near Albany.
Natalie Banks, from No Shark Cull WA, said it was disappointing that the EPA had rejected the referral and urged WA to follow the lead of re-elected NSW premier Mike Baird, who has promised to investigate non-lethal shark hazard mitigation methods.
“It is a shame that we can’t get the same forward-thinking vision in Western Australia,” Banks said. “We clearly need non-lethal alternatives before we wipe out the white sharks completely.”
Vogel said the EPA was investigating “non-lethal alternatives”.

Rare leatherback sea turtle rescued off South Carolina coastal beach

A rare leatherback sea turtle, nicknamed Yawkey and weighing an estimated 500 lbs, was being treated at the South Carolina Aquarium on Monday after being rescued on a remote coastal beach – the first leatherback known to have been stranded alive in South Carolina.
The turtle was spotted on Saturday on a beach on the Yawkey-South Island Reserve in Georgetown County and brought to the aquarium.
Leatherbacks, an endangered species, are the largest sea turtles and one of the world’s largest reptiles. Adults generally can weigh 800 to 1,000 lbs although some have been reported as large as 2,000 lbs .
They get their name because, instead of a shell, their backs are covered with leathery, oily tissue.
It’s the first leatherback to be treated at the aquarium, said Kelly Thorvalson, program manager for the aquarium sea turtle rescue program. During the past 15 years the aquarium has treated and released more than 150 sea turtles.
Thorvalson said Yawkey’s weight is just an estimate because the aquarium scale was not large enough to weigh it.
The turtle has low blood sugar and is being treated with fluids and antibiotics.
Thorvalson said it’s possible Yawkey may have eaten marine debris such as plastic which can appear to a turtle to be jellyfish, their favorite food. Eating plastic could cause a buildup of gas in the digestive tract, making the turtle buoyant and washing it to shore.
The aquarium hopes to release the turtle as soon as possible because leatherbacks don’t do well in captivity. Since they live in the deep ocean they don’t sense boundaries so they tend to swim into the sides of tanks and bruise.
Leatherbacks migrate offshore of South Carolina
“We have seen them stranded and dead,” Thorvalson said. “It’s not that they never wash up. It’s just that we have never had one wash up alive.”
She expects Yawkey to be able to get back to the ocean quickly.
“Sea turtles are tough. They are really tough animals,” she said. “This turtle is in good enough condition that we can give it a good head start and release it. I do feel good about its prognosis.”