Crafty Pitcher Plants Prove No Brains Are Better than One

It could be called the art of war — there’s no good reason to kill a simple scout when you can lure an entire army into an ambush.

New research shows that carnivorous pitcher plants in Borneo have a mechanism that allows them to switch off the slippery texture of the lips when individual ants are sent out to scout the areas for potential food. “The plant’s key trapping surface is extremely slippery when wet but not when dry,” said Ulrike Bauer from Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences and the lead author of a paper released today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Read more at The Wildlife Society

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Parasite Treatment in Buffalo Could Help Spread of TB

A helicopter flew close to the ground in Krueger National Park, South Africa, executing a series of aerial acrobatics in order to steer the herd of African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) towards a good area for a park veterinarian to start shooting tranquilizer rounds.

Meanwhile, Vanessa Ezenwa, associate professor of ecology and infectious diseases at the University of Georgia, and a group of other researchers waited in a 4X4 on the ground nearby for the right moment to go in and tag the buffalo with satellite tracking devices.

Read more at The Wildlife Society

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Amazon and Google Change Places on Going Green

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

One technology giant on the forefront of renewable energy implementation has come out on why it rolled back its research and development while another, which has been largely inactive on the sustainability front, has just announced a new goal of achieving 100 percent renewable energy use.

While Google Inc. engineers have finally spoken up this week in an article in IEEE Spectrum about the reasons the company has cut funding for the research and development of renewable energy, Amazon.com Inc.’s Web services division just announced “a long-term commitment” to achieving full reliability on renewable energy for its “global infrastructure footprint.”

Read more at Scientific American

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Legal mess hampers understanding of a major CO2 sequestration test

Second of a two-part series. Click here for the first part.

The second phase of what is believed to be the world’s largest ocean-based geoengineering experiment started out with an early morning knock on the door of the Vancouver offices of the aboriginal corporation in British Columbia that had conducted it.

A team from Canada’s equivalent of U.S. EPA, Environment Canada, came with a search warrant on the Haida Salmon Restoration Council (HSRC) that allowed it to probe the results of the controversial project that the tribe had conducted with Russ George, a California businessman, in the summer of 2012.

Tons of iron sulphate had been dumped into the ocean off the coast of British Columbia in an effort to stimulate salmon fishing and to earn money in a projected carbon offset market.

Read more at ClimateWire

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Are record salmon runs in the Northwest the result of a controversial CO2 reduction scheme?

For the past 100 years, the Haida First Nations tribe in Canada has watched the salmon runs that provided its main food source decline. Both the quantity and quality of its members’ catch in the group of islands they call home, off the coast of British Columbia, continued to drop.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, they became determined to do something about it. They built a hatchery, fixed watersheds damaged by past logging practices and sent more fish into the ocean for their multiyear migrations.

But the larger influx of fish that went out didn’t return, and the search for better solutions for the small village of Old Massett on the north end of Graham Island in British Columbia eventually led the Haida down a path that culminated in the largest ocean fertilization project of its kind ever attempted.

Read more at ClimateWire

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Tornado clusters appearing more often, as seen through the lens of a ‘tornado chaser’

Greg Johnson was in a souped-up pickup truck tearing down the highway alongside Pilger, Neb., shooting a video of a tornado that was about to rip the town apart.

He’d already seen the storm tear through the nearby Stanton area, and his team was hot on its trail. They watched as it hit Pilger (population 352), sending debris, rooftops and even whole houses spinning upward.

“We literally witnessed the entire town going into the air. The debris was unbelievable,” Johnson said in a phone interview. They approached within 100 to 200 yards of the town, but emergency personnel had already blocked off the road.

Read more at ClimateWire

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To clean up Inner Harbor, Baltimore turns to a water wheel

BALTIMORE — Jones Falls, one of the main streams feeding into the Inner Harbor here, is seemingly swallowed by the city somewhere near Pennsylvania Station, traveling through viaducts and sweeping up trash before being spit unceremoniously out next to the National Aquarium and some of the city’s greatest tourist attractions.

Likewise, chemicals and agricultural runoff have poured into the waters — and made their way to the Chesapeake Bay — as the city’s industries have churned along over the decades. Ships moving in and out of the harbor have only exacerbated the pollution problem.

Read more at Greenwire

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Old fur trade records show predator has ripple effect on ecosystems

What does the fox say? Bring on the wolves.

A study released today unearthed historical fur trade records to find that having more wolves in an area controls coyote numbers and bolsters the number of red foxes. It could have implications for disputes over coyote control as well as the reintroduction of wild gray wolves into different states.

“It’s another piece to the puzzle that should be considered that wolves work as a natural controlling measure over coyotes,” William Ripple, a professor of ecology at Oregon State University and one of the authors of the study released today in the Journal of Animal Ecology, said in a phone interview.

Read more at E&ENews PM

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Ancient corals could be ‘Noah’s Ark’ that protects fish species — study

Certain coral reefs that have protected the oceans’ fish for millions of years could be the “Noah’s Ark” that continues to preserve their biodiversity, researchers say.

A study published today in the journal Science said protecting those reefs could play a large part in ensuring future fish diversity in all ocean waters. Stable reefs like those in the Coral Triangle region in and around Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and Australia have cradled the world’s most diverse group of fish through ice ages and periods of extreme warmth, the study found.

Read more at E&ENews PM

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Researcher hatches ‘crazy’ idea to save Galapagos birds using cotton

Conservationists racing to save an endangered bird on the Galapagos Islands from a ravenous parasite that preys on their chicks have come across a novel solution: Let the cotton-picking birds help themselves.

For a study released today, researchers soaked cotton in insecticide and left it in special dispensers for four species of Darwin’s finches to find. They discovered that the birds would incorporate the cotton into their nests, greatly decreasing or nearly eliminating the spread of an invasive fly whose parasitic larvae attack newly hatched finch nestlings.

Read more at Greenwire

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