Source: National Geographic

Proposed new species in Brazil is thought to be highly endangered.

The proposed new species of river dolphin, the Araguaian boto (Inia araguaiaensis).

Photograph by Nicole Dutra

Brian Clark Howard

National Geographic

Published January 24, 2014

A suspected new river dolphin species has emerged in Brazil, and scientists warn that it is highly endangered.

River dolphins (also known as botos) are among the rarest, and most endangered, dolphins in the world. Three of the four known species are listed as "threatened" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The discovery of a wholly new species—the first such find in a century—is thus exciting news for biologists and conservation officials.

Scientists led by Tomas Hrbek of the Universidade Federal do Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil, announced the existence of the proposed new species of river dolphin in PLOS ONE on January 22. Discovered in the Araguaia River Basin in central Brazil, the animals were isolated from other botos (Inia geoffrensis and Inia boliviensis) in the adjacent Amazon Basin to the west by a series of rapids and a small canal. As a result, the scientists suggest calling the new species the Araguaian boto, or Inia araguaiaensis.

The study scientists "make a strong case based on the data," says Howard Rosenbaum, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Ocean Giants program in New York. The discovery, he says, is "amazing because we're starting to get insights into how these animals become distinct species."

DNA Testing

In the study, the Brazilian team concluded that the DNA of the Araguaian river dolphins is sufficiently different from that of other botos to warrant designation as a new species. The degree of difference suggests that the Araguaian boto most likely separated from other dolphin species more than two million years ago. Physical and genetic differences from other dolphins, they write, represent "strong evidence that individuals from the Araguaia River represent a distinct biological group." (See pictures of river dolphins.)

The newly proposed species marks the first new discovery of a true river dolphin since 1918, when researchers identified Lipotes vexillifer, the Yangtze river dolphin or baiji, in China. The baiji was declared "functionally extinct" in 2006 after scientists failed to find even one individual.

Rosenbaum told National Geographic that the team in Brazil "did an admirable job in collecting a good amount of data on a species that is difficult to study in the wild."

Rosenbaum, who specializes in genetic differentiation of dolphin and whale species, said the researchers had published "very robust data" showing genetic and physical differences between the Araguaian boto and other dolphins.

Unique Characteristics?

Rosenbaum said the scientists demonstrated some unique "diagnostic characters" in maternally inherited, or mitochondrial, DNA and other genes analyzed in their sample of river dolphins. Both lines of evidence, he says, "show that the Araguaian boto were separated from other boto for a long period of time."

He added that the scientists described "some compelling size differences in cranial features, and potentially in their number of teeth."

But Rosenbaum also saw reason for caution, because the scientists had only a few specimens in the study. Loath to kill living animals for study, the team relied on an animal that was found dead and a few samples that were already held in museums.

Next Steps

To bolster the case for naming a new species, "they will probably need to look at additional specimens," said Rosenbaum.

The next step for naming a species will be to appeal to the Society for Marine Mammalogy, asking for a formal species designation. That scientific group will likely seek additional data, though the PLOS ONE paper is a solid first step, said Rosenbaum.

Photograph by National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA)

The cranium and mandible of the new dolphin species, Inia araguaiaensis.

Threats to the River Dolphin

The scientists in Brazil observed about 120 of the Araguaian dolphins over 12 weeks. They estimate that as few as 600 of the animals could live in the entire river basin.

The scientists warn that all river dolphins face many threats, including dam construction, which can cut off the animals from others of their kind, limiting their reproduction opportunities. They are sometimes killed by local fishermen, who fear that they compete with them for fish, and they end up ensnared and killed by fishing gear.

"Since the 1960's the Araguaia River basin has been experiencing significant anthropogenic pressure via agricultural and ranching activities, and the construction of hydroelectric dams, all of which have had negative effects on many biotic and abiotic aspects of the functioning of the Araguaia River ecosystem," the study said.

Rosenbaum said more research needs to be done on precisely how these threats may impact the survival status of these animals.

He added, "As we address the tremendous threats these animals face, these amazing discoveries are so important because they will hopefully lead to better protecting them. It could start a domino effect for conservation."

The researchers wrote that the Araguaian boto should be classified as "vulnerable" by IUCN. They added, "This discovery highlights the immensity of the deficit in our knowledge of Neotropical biodiversity, as well as vulnerability of biodiversity to anthropogenic actions in an increasingly threatened landscape."

It probably started in the 1980s, with a few tropical fish hobbyists thinking they were doing the humane thing by dumping unwanted pets in the coastal waters of Florida. But introducing the lionfish, which is native to the Indo-Pacific, to the Atlantic Ocean has turned out to be one of the cruelest and most catastrophic tricks ever played on an ecosystem. Now, with the fate of numerous species hanging in the balance, a new paper in the journal Ecological Applications says that scientists have for the first time found a practical way to control the problem.

Lionfish are flamboyantly colorful fish, up to 18 inches in length, striped, and having long, fluttering venomous spines sticking out in all directions. They’re appealing to have in a fish tank. But since their release into the Atlantic, they have spread across an area of 1.5 million square miles, from Venezuela to North Carolina, with stray sightings as far north as southern New England.

In the Caribbean, according to one researcher, it’s common to see lionfish “hovering above the reefs throughout the day and gathering in groups of up to ten or more on a single coral head." She might just as well have said “hoovering,” because of the speed and thoroughness with which lionfish wipe out native fish populations. They typically flutter their fins to herd smaller fish into a group, and when they have cornered their prey, they pounce.

Because of their extraordinarily painful venom, lionfish have no natural predators. As with many other invasive species, eradication appears to be impossible. Lionfish can repopulate shallow reefs from deepwater populations lurking farther off the coast.

But the study suggests a cost-effective alternative. Getting rid of most—but not all—the lionfish on a given site appears to provide enough relief to allow for the rapid recovery of native species, including commercially important fish like Nassau grouper and yellowtail snapper.

Oregon State University researcher Stephanie Green and her coauthors started with a computer model to calculate a threshold for different habitat types—that is, how many lionfish a site could tolerate and still function normally. Then they tested the model in the field, at 24 coral reef sites near Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas.

The model didn’t make it easy on the field team. To get to the threshold, they had to remove 75 to 95 percent of the lionfish, with the help of nets and spears. On a typical reef site, which is about a third the size of a basketball court, it took about 60 minutes of dive time. Completely eradicating the lionfish would have taken 78 minutes, or 30 percent longer, and that is apparently the difference that makes the method practical.

The researchers then followed up at regular intervals for 18 months. On test sites where the lionfish population was below the threshold, native prey species quickly rebounded, with a 50 to 70 percent increase in total biomass. On sites where the lionfish remained above the threshold, native species decreased by about half.

As that suggests, leaving the lionfish alone is no longer an option, or rather, it’s an option that leaves some native species bound for extinction. But with limited funding for fisheries management across such a vast stretch of ocean, the question is where to apply the control method for the maximum benefit. Because marine reserves typically allow no taking of fish, they are in danger, the new study warns, of becoming “de facto reserves for lionfish.”

The good news is that there is now a remedy for what had seemed like an unstoppable invasion. But it won’t come cheap, and it should serve as yet another reminder that owning pets comes with grave responsibilities.

Introducing alien species to any habitat can quickly lead to catastrophe, both for wildlife and for us: Not even counting invertebrates, such as Asian long-horned beetles, that are killing off great swaths of forest, invasive species now cost the American public $120 billion every year.

The Strange and Wonderful History of Diving Suits, From 1715 to Today

Source: http://io9.com i09 We Come From The Future

from the January, 2011 issue of Undercurrent

Barracuda attacks on humans, including completely unprovoked ones, are more common than recognized. I learned that after an unprovoked barracuda attack amputated my left little finger and the side of my hand in Cozumel in 2004.

I was on a dive boat with my 13-year-old daughter, Marina, and we jumped into the water to snorkel and see the reef. We soon saw a large barracuda, 5-6 feet long, lying on the bottom. We stayed above it for 10 minutes, watching it. It never moved, but was certainly aware of us. After a while we headed on to see more of the reef.

My daughter had drifted about five feet away, and I started to swim toward her. At that point there was a stunning blow to my hand, but I never saw what hit me. I lifted my hand from the water and blood was pouring from it. My daughter said the barracuda had attacked. We began yelling, but the boat was a quarter of a mile away. Everybody was having lunch, and it took a long time before they noticed. I never saw my finger again, and imagine the barracuda ate it or spat it out when it turned out not to be fishy enough.

Marina said that the barracuda charged me with its mouth open and that we both disappeared in a cloud of bubbles. She saw the barracuda charge me two more times in rapid succession, but I am certain that it only bit me once. Barracudas often have a stereotypical triple strike behavior. People seeing barracudas attack fish often see the barracuda first bite right through the middle of large fish, then lunge twice more to gobble down the head and tail. So perhaps the three strikes Marina saw were pure instinct.

The Aftermath

It was only when I was on the boat that I realized that my little finger and the side of my hand were completely gone, and the bone stuck out of raw flesh. It barely hurt, perhaps because barracuda teeth are so sharp that they deliver clean cuts. The crew bandaged my hand. The dive boat, having a full load of paying customers for the next dive, arranged for me to be taken to shore by a small boat, then my daughter and I had to hitchhike to town. The dive shop gave me the directions to the DAN Center in Cozumel. In the emergency room they injected me with a local anesthetic, pulled off the bandage, cleaned the wound and sterilized it with hydrogen peroxide. I spent that night in the hospital on intravenous antibiotics, and by dawn the next morning DAN had sent a special plane with trained staff to evacuate me (and my daughter) to Miami for surgery. My little finger was gone and I had come within about a millimeter of losing the next finger as well, but the bite had just missed the tendon so I was able to move all remaining fingers as normally as possible. Cuts from the outer teeth (barracudas have a couple rows of teeth) ran the length of that finger; had it gotten me an inch or so further over I would have lost all my fingers. The nerve to that finger had been severed, so I had lost all feeling in that finger, but it gradually recovered as the nerves regrew. I now I have a patch of brown skin with hair on my palm, and my thigh skin is on my forearm, so I’m built upside down! But I have full use of the hand, and most people don’t even notice that I’m digitally impaired.

The barracuda that attacked me was well known to local divers, as it had frequented the same reefs for years menacing divers. One friend, a Cozumel dive operator, told me that he was diving with a customer and the same barracuda twice swam at her (she was lying still on the bottom composing macro shots) and butted her full force with his head, but luckily with his mouth closed, so he caused a bruise, not a cut.

I later learned that the local divers actually blamed Marine Park officials for my attack. It is against Mexican law to feed any animals in the marine parks. However, dive operators told me Marine Park management would take important visitors out in boats and throw meat to the same barracuda that attacked me, in order to impress their guests. This barracuda had been habituated to food handouts from the very people supposed to prevent that from happening. But the operators all said that if they were asked they would be forced to lie, because if they told the truth they would lose their licenses to operate.

Discussion

Every shark attack makes headline news around the world, but no barracuda attack ever does, largely because they are widely claimed never to happen. Mine did not even make the local newspapers in Cozumel.

I have swum with barracudas all my life (I’ve dived with tanks for 54 years). I have never been afraid of them, and until my own attack I had adamantly maintained that there were no known unprovoked barracuda attacks. I’ve also known that there could be no protection against them if they chose to attack you. When they go after a fish there are just a flash and a whirring noise because they move so fast you can’t actually see the attack, just the remnants of the fish head and tail floating afterwards and a barracuda gulping the center part down. What I always found amazing is that one could be swimming along on one side of me, then there would be a sudden flash, the barracuda would instantly vanish, and suddenly it was swimming on my other side. I respected them and never tried to menace or provoke them.

After my attack I received close to a hundred personal descriptions of unprovoked attacks and near attacks by barracudas. These do not include attacks on spearfishermen, who are hundreds of times more likely to be attacked by barracudas (or sharks) going after their catch . . . or people who spear barracudas and miss them or make a glancing blow, and it turns on them. One spearfisherman I know in Port Antonio, Jamaica, was bitten three times by barracudas in separate incidents, but he was holding a dying fish every time.

I have had many descriptions sent to me of people who were bitten around glittery necklaces, bracelets, finger rings, and mask reflections, or of barracudas that charged these objects and suddenly stopped just short of biting, sometimes only an inch away. However, I wore no jewelry except my watch, which was entirely black, with the scratched glass face pointing upward. I know two people, one a hotel employee in the Maldives, and the other a submarine engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who jumped in the water and were immediately bitten by barracudas. Perhaps it was the splash and light reflecting off the bubbles. The engineer jumped straight back into the boat with a tiny foot long barracuda hanging from his butt, and still has the hole to prove it, but is reluctant to show it! Clearly, attacks are far more frequent than realized. See our presentation at the 2005 Association of Marine Laboratories of the Caribbean Conference in Curacao:http://globalcoral.org/BARRACUDA ATTACK.pdf

There is no doubt that diver’s behavior can provoke attacks. An old friend from Jamaica, Phillip Motta, was once wiggling his fingers with his palm facing forward, and a barracuda got very excited and prepared to charge him until he realized it and stopped. Paul Herring was night diving in the Bay Islands of Honduras when a large barracuda seemed fascinated by the divemaster’s light shining on it, and started getting agitated, so the dive master switched it off. Immediately the barracuda attacked Paul’s mask face. It was unable to bite through the glass of the mask, but it knocked him unconscious and severed arteries in his nose and forehead. Though saved by his buddies, his face was pushed in by the impact and he needed many operations to recover.

The most horrifying barracuda attack story I’ve heard was told to me by a divemaster at the College of the Virgin Islands Marine Laboratory. During a DAN course on decompression chambers, the lecturers said there was not a single known case of an unprovoked barracuda attack, but a physician taking the course disagreed. He described an incident in which two divers who dived at the same location every week, would feed a large friendly barracuda that frequented the site. One day the barracuda was waiting for his handout, but they had brought no food. The first diver held his empty palms in front of him to indicate, “sorry big boy, no food for you today.” The barracuda bit both off both his hands. The second diver hugged his hands under his armpits to protect himself, and the barracuda bit and savaged both of his forearms so that they “looked like meat that had been through a grinder.” The doctor who told this story to the class ended by saying that “I was the physician who had treated them both.”.

Conclusions

What is the lesson from all of this? Don de Sylva’s advice 40 years ago, not to swim in murky water under poor light conditions and not to splash around while wearing flashy jewelry, seems the best we can do. A diver should not automatically assume that barracudas never attack without provocation, and treat them with respect. What makes an attack so unpredictable is the randomness of these incidents. People swim with barracudas all the time and are not attacked. I am the only person known to have been attacked in Cozumel, even though the waters are full of people splashing away at all hours, with shiny jewelry on their fingers, necks, wrists, toes, ankles, navels, and other body parts, and have never been attacked, while I, with none of those attractions, was……

So, it’s anyone’s guess. Stay aware.

The author, Thomas J. Goreau, Ph.D., is the president of the Global Coral Reef Alliance. This is a condensed version of a comprehensive piece which you can find on our website at www.undercurrent.org

At a little after two o’clock in the morning on Monday, January 19, 1942, an earthquake-like rumble tossed fifteen-year-old Gibb Gray from his bed. Furniture shook, glass and knickknacks rattled, and books fell from shelves as a thundering roar vibrated through the walls of the houses in Gibb’s Outer Banks village of Avon. Surprised and concerned, Gibb’s father rushed to the windows on the house’s east side and looked toward the ocean. “There’s a fire out there!” he shouted to his family. Clearly visible on the horizon, a great orange fireball had erupted. A towering column of black smoke blotted out the stars and further darkened the night sky.

Only seven miles away, a German U-boat had just torpedoed the 337-foot-long U.S. freighter, City of Atlanta, sinking the ship and killing all but three of the 47 men aboard. The same U-boat attacked two more ships just hours later. Less than six weeks after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the hostilities of the Second World War had arrived on America’s East Coast and North Carolina’s beaches. This was not the first time that German U-boats had come to United States waters. During World War I, three U-boats sank ten ships off the Tar Heel coast in what primarily was considered a demonstration of German naval power. But by 1942, U-boats had become bigger, faster, and more deadly. Their presence in American waters was not intended for “show” but to help win World War II for Germany.

The abbreviated name “U-boat” comes from the German word unterseeboot, meaning submarine or undersea boat. However, U-boats were not true submarines. They were warships that spent most of their time on the surface. They could submerge only for limited periods — mostly to attack or evade detection by enemy ships, and to avoid bad weather. U-boats could only travel about sixty miles underwater before having to surface for fresh air. They often attacked ships while on the surface using deck-mounted guns. Typically, about 50 men operated a U-boat. The boats carried fifteen torpedoes, or self-propelled “bombs,” which ranged up to twenty-two feet long and could travel thirty miles per hour. Experts have described German U-boats as among the most effective and seaworthy warships ever designed.

Within hours of the U-boat attack near Avon, debris and oil began washing up on the beaches. This scene seemed to be repeated constantly. For the next six months, along the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, at least sixty-five different German U-boats attacked American and British merchant ships carrying vital supplies to the Allies in Europe — cargos of oil, gasoline, raw vegetables and citrus products, lumber and steel, aluminum for aircraft construction, rubber for tires, and cotton for clothing. By July of 1942, 397 ships had been sunk or damaged. More than 5,000 people had been killed.

The greatest concentration of U-boat attacks happened off North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where dozens of ships passed daily. So many ships were attacked that, in time, the waters near Cape Hatteras earned a nickname: “Torpedo Junction.” U.S. military and government authorities didn’t want people to worry, so news reports of enemy U-boats near the coast were classified, or held back from the public for national security reasons. For many years, most people had no idea how bad things really were. But families living on the Outer Banks knew—they were practically in the war.

“We’d hear these explosions most any time of the day or night and it would shake the houses and sometimes crack the walls,” remembered Blanche Jolliff, of Ocracoke village. Even though ships were being torpedoed by enemy U-boats almost every day, just a few miles away, coastal residents had no choice but to live as normally as possible. “We sort of got used to hearing it,” Gibb Gray said. “The explosions were mostly in the distance, so we weren’t too scared. I remember we were walking to school one day, and the whole ground shook. We looked toward the ocean, just beyond the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, and there was another huge cloud of smoke. That was the oil tanker, Dixie Arrow.”

Some Outer Bankers came closer to the war than they would have preferred. Teenager Charles Stowe, of Hatteras, and his father were headed out to sea aboard their fishing boat one day when they nearly rammed a U-boat, which was rising to the surface directly in front of them. The elder Stowe’s eyesight was not very good. He told his son, who was steering their boat, to keep on going—he thought the vessel ahead was just another fishing boat. “I said, ‘Dad, that is a German submarine!’ And it sure was,” Stowe recalled. “He finally listened to me, and we turned around and got out of there just in time.”

The war cut back on one favorite summer pastime for Outer Banks young people. “That summer we had to almost give up swimming in the ocean — it was just full of oil, you’d get it all over you,” Mrs. Ormond Fuller recalled of the oil spilled by torpedoed tankers. Gibb Gray remembered the oil, too: “We’d step in it before we knew it, and we’d be five or six inches deep. We’d have to scrub our feet and legs with rags soaked in kerosene. It’s hard to get off, that oil.” It is estimated that 150 million gallons of oil spilled into the sea and on the beaches along the Outer Banks during 1942.

Some local residents thought Germans might try to sneak ashore. Others suspected strangers of being spies for the enemy. “We were frightened to death. We locked our doors at night for the first time ever,” said Ocracoke’s Blanche Styron. Calvin O’Neal remembered strangers with unusual accents who stayed at an Ocracoke hotel during the war: “The rumor was they were spies, and the hotel owner’s daughter and I decided to be counterspies, and we tried our best to follow them around, but we never caught them doing anything suspicious.”

At Buxton, Maude White was the village postmistress and a secret coast watcher for the U.S. Navy. She was responsible for observing unusual activities and reporting them to the local Coast Guard. In 1942 one couple with German accents attracted attention by drawing maps and taking notes about the island. White became suspicious, and so did her daughter, who would follow the pair from a distance — riding her beach pony. After being reported by White, the strangers were apprehended when they crossed Oregon Inlet on the ferry. Records fail to indicate whether or not the strangers really were spies, but White’s daughter became the inspiration for the heroine in author Nell Wise Wechter’s book Taffy of Torpedo Junction.

Slowly but surely, increased patrols by the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard, and planes of the Army Air Corps, began to prevent the U-boat attacks. Blimps from a station at Elizabeth City searched for U-boats from high above, while private yachts and sailboats with two-way radios were sent out into the ocean to patrol and harass German warships. The military set up top-secret submarine listening and tracking facilities at places like Ocracoke to detect passing U-boats.

Many people who lived along the coast during World War II remember having to turn off their house lights at night and having to put black tape over their car headlights, so that lights on shore would not help the Germans find their way in the darkness. Even so, the government did not order a general blackout until August 1942. By then, most of the attacks had ended.

On April 14, 1942, the first German U-boat fought by the American navy in U.S. waters was sunk sixteen miles southeast of Nags Head. Within the next couple of months, three more U-boats were sunk along the North Carolina coast: one by a U.S. Army Air Corps bomber, one by a U.S. Coast Guard patrol ship, and one by a U.S. Navy destroyer. North Carolina’s total of four sunken U-boats represents the most of any state. By that July, the commander of Germany’s U-boats became discouraged. He redirected his remaining warships to the northern Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Nevertheless, Germany considered its attacks against the United States a success, even if they failed to win the war. Gerhard Weinberg, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has since called the war zone off the U.S. coast in 1942 “the greatest single defeat ever suffered by American naval power.”

As the years have passed, most of the physical evidence of World War II U-boat encounters off North Carolina’s coast has vanished. Submerged off the state’s beaches are the remains of at least 60 ships and countless unexploded torpedoes, depth charges, and contact mines. Even today, small patches of blackened sand offer reminders of the massive oil spills of 1942. On Ocracoke Island and at Cape Hatteras, cemeteries contain the graves of six British sailors who perished in North Carolina’s waters. Many people living in the state don’t know about the time when war came so close. But older Tar Heels who lived on the coast back then remember. In fact, they would love to tell you about it.