• Bull Bison Killed for Leaving Yellowstone
  
• U.S. Barge Traffic Slows
  
• Future Bleak for Caribbean Reefs
  
• Forests Benefit From Forgetful Squirrels
  
• A Safer Way to Study Great White Sharks
  
• Bubbles May Cause Volcanic Eruptions
  
• Canoes Drive Loons Crazy
  
• Snowy Holidays Less Likely Across Much of the U.S.
  

Bull Bison Killed for Leaving Yellowstone

The policy has drawn sharp criticism from conservationists and some members of Congress who believe the Yellowstone herd should be allowed to roam, but supporters say it is justified because of the possibility the wild bison could transmit brucellosis to cattle.

Last winter, some 280 bison were slaughtered under the plan for leaving the boundaries of the park.

The lone bull shot Tuesday had repeatedly left the park and was not responsive to hazing aimed to either capture the animal or force it back into Yellowstone, according to the Montana Department of Livestock.

But the Buffalo Field Campaign - vocal critics of the policy and the only group in the field monitoring the plight of the Yellowstone bison - says the bull was less than 50 yards from the park boundary and headed back into Yellowstone when Department of Livestock officials shot the animal.

"It took five shots to finally kill him and you could see him writhing in pain the whole time," said Chris Mays of the campaign.

Critics of the Yellowstone buffalo management plan say it does not reflect the real threat of bison spreading brucellosis not does it respect the unique status of the Yellowstone herd.

The herd is descended from 23 wild bison that survived the mass eradication of the 19th century and is the largest remaining single population of genetically pure bison.

"The bison is the very symbol of the National Park Service, and it is outrageous that our agencies can slaughter Yellowstone buffalo with impunity despite the complete lack of sound science," said Michael Markarian, president of The Fund for Animals.

There is no known case of bison transferring brucellosis to domestic livestock and several studies done on captured and slaughtered Yellowstone bison indicate that less than 20 percent were infected.

In addition, bulls are at low risk of transmitting the disease - it is transferred by the consumption of afterbirth from a mothering animal that is infected.

A bipartisan bill introduced earlier this month in the House of Representatives would force federal and state agencies to abandon the current management plan.

U.S. Barge Traffic Slows

Monthly tonnage indicators compiled by the Army Corps through October 2003 continue a slide in barge traffic levels that started in the summer of 2000.

This downward trend in barge traffic comes on the heels of a leveling off of the demand for barge transportation throughout the decade of the 1990s, PEER reports.

The watchdog group says the statistics - along with the stagnant economic growth of the barge industry - undermine an Army Corps proposal to undertake a massive new expansion of the lock system on the Upper Mississippi River and Illinois Waterway.

Top Bush administration officials are now reviewing a controversial multi billion dollar Corps plan to expand capacity on these systems, with a decision expected next month.

"The only way the Corps can justify this boondoggle is by deliberately ignoring economic realities," said PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch.

Ruch notes that the new traffic figures confirm the barge industry's own latest traffic projections but are at odds with rosy Corps forecasts of continued steady growth.

And the statistics come in light of comments by the nation's largest barge company predicting continuing slow growth and acknowledging that the river infrastructure now in place generally exceeds traffic needs.

Further consolidation and efficiencies are needed to preserve the industry's profitabiltity, according to the top official with the nation's largest barge carrier Ingram Marine Group. PEER says that in a presentation to other transportation industry professionals in late September, Craig E. Philip, Ingram president and CEO of I made such comments and focused not on infrastructure expansion, but rather logistics management and improved traffic tracking.

PEER represents Corps economists who revealed that the agency had "cooked the books" in a previous study and PEER has filed a challenge against the current Corps study for relying on bad economic models.

"We schedule planes, trains and buses but not barges because the Corps has no fiscal incentive to promote efficient transportation but has every fiscal incentive to pour tons more concrete into our rivers, " Ruch said.

Future Bleak for Caribbean Reefs

Results of field experiments they conducted off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula suggested that chemical nutrients washed and dumped into the sea can increase the severity of coral diseases.

A report on the findings appears in the December issue of the journal "Ecology Letters."

"Caribbean coral reefs have declined dramatically over the past 20 years or so as disease epidemics have swept through them," said study coauthor Dr. John Bruno, assistant professor of marine sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"In less than a year, the two most common species that covered 60 to 70 percent of the bottom were just wiped out, becoming functionally extinct and changing possibly forever the structure of those marine communities," Bruno said. "It was analogous to losing all the pine trees in the Carolinas down into Georgia."

The researchers manipulated and boosted nutrient levels in the water above corals and found that even modest rises could "increase mortality of the three important Caribbean corals by facilitating the spread of disease," Bruno said.

Bruno and his colleagues looked at the fungi Aspergillus, which kills gorgonian sea fans through a disease known as aspergillosis and two species of the reef building corals Montastraea, that are susceptible to yellow band disease.

By increasing nutrient concentrations between two- and five fold, the marine biologists recorded almost a doubling of tissue loss among the Monastraea from yellow band disease. A separate experiment showed nutrient enrichment significantly increased two measures of the severity of sea fan aspergillosis.

"What we did was relatively minor enrichment so we were not doing it to the extent you might find in the Chesapeake Bay or the coastal Carolinas near a pig farm or something," Bruno said. "We did what we thought would be comparable to what is happening in the Caribbean."

Reefs rarely if ever recover and in death often become covered with algae and other microorganisms.

"We do not think nutrients played the primary role in causing this Caribbean wide shift from coral to algae dominated communities, but we do think their role could be important," Bruno said. "There are much more insidious things going on that likely are more important such as rising global temperatures and over fishing."

Forests Benefit From Forgetful Squirrels

"This is the first study I am aware of that has explicitly looked at how two different species and their behavioral characteristics could influence forest regeneration," said study coauthor Rob Swihart, professor of wildlife ecology at Purdue University.

The study examined differences in the hoarding behavior of red squirrels and gray squirrels in west central Indiana. The researchers used that information to develop a model that predicts how these differences may influence germination, or sprouting, of black walnut trees, a major component of the central hardwoods forest and the food of choice for both species.

In the study, Swihart and his colleague Jake Goheen, a former Purdue student now at the University of New Mexico, predicted that seven times as many walnuts germinate when gathered by gray squirrels compared to those hoarded by red squirrels.

"If our results are widely applicable, the processes by which trees propagate will be significantly altered as more red squirrels move into the landscape," Goheen said.

And this could well happen. Unlike gray squirrels, red squirrels are not native to Indiana and only began to spread throughout the state within about the past century. At the same time, the number of gray squirrels in forests began to decline as more forest habitat was converted for agriculture.

Less gray squirrels could be bad for the forests because the animals use what is described as "scatter hoarding," in which they bury single nuts, such as acorns and walnuts, in numerous locations.

"Scatter hoarding by gray squirrels is important to the germination success of these nuts," Swihart said. "They are buried, so they do not dry out, and they're placed in a location suitable for germination, so they are able to sprout and grow."

Red squirrels, by contrast, practice what scientists call "larder hoarding."

The big piles of nuts gathered by red squirrels are "basically death traps for seeds," Swihart said.

"Unlike gray squirrels, it is very unlikely that red squirrels will aid in the dispersal and germination success of the tree species that we have here in the central hardwoods region," Swihart said. "Red squirrels just are not wired that way."

The study authors believe changes in the state's landscape over the past century have helped red squirrels gain a foothold.

"The red squirrel is a symptom of an environmental problem more than a cause," Goheen said. "Red squirrels have only been able to invade here because of widespread fragmentation of forested land cleared for agriculture."

The study, published in the September issue of the "Canadian Journal of Zoology," was funded through the American Society of Mammalogists, the American Wildlife Research Foundation, the Indiana Academy of Sciences, Purdue University and Sigma Xi.

A Safer Way to Study Great White Sharks

A group of scientists from the New York based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), working with the Marine and Coastal Management Branch of South Africa, have devised a hands on method to study great white sharks, where these fearsome predators are gently hauled into research vessels to receive high-tech satellite tags.

The sharks are baited with a hook and line, and quickly hoisted into a specially constructed cradle.

At that point, a team of two veterinarians inserts a hose with oxygen rich water into the shark's mouth to keep them breathing while monitoring their condition.

Meanwhile, a group of scientists attach the tag to the dorsal fin to record the fish's movements. Before the shark is released, it is given a dose of medicine to ensure rapid recovery.

The scientists say the sharks spend only three to seven minutes out of the water. The practice results in a minimum of trauma, evidenced by the tagging results showing that all sharks continued to move about after the procedure.

One shark traveled all the way to Mozambique and back again, a total of more than 2,000 miles. Six months after first being tagged, the shark continues to transmit data.

"We have gone to incredible lengths to make sure that our sharks are treated with the most rigorous standards of safety and ethics," said WCS researcher Dr. Ramón Bonfil. "Our sharks behave like tamed kittens once in the cradle, hardly ever moving or noticing that we are working on them like the pit crew of a F1 racing car. Then they swim away strongly upon release."

So far, seven sharks ranging up to eleven and a half feet long and more than 800 pounds have been tagged using this technique off the coast of South Africa, one of the world's hot spots for great whites.

Bubbles May Cause Volcanic Eruptions

The conventional explanation for explosive eruptions holds that rising magma breaks or fragments as it approaches the surface, releasing bubbles that blow the magma out like champagne from an uncorked bottle.

But University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) researcher Michael Manga and colleagues are challenging this explanation, proposing instead that fragmentation occurs in most if not all volcanic eruptions, though non-explosively.

The hypothesis is reported in the November 27 issue of the journal "Nature."

Manga explains that in an explosive eruption, the magma rises fast, allowing a build up of gas pressure within the gas bubbles that leads to rapid bubble growth, abrupt fragmentation, and explosive release of gas pressure.

In effusive eruptions, he and his colleagues contend, continuous, repeated fragmentation during the magma's rise to the surface would break gas bubbles and allow the release of significant amounts of gas before the magma reaches the surface, leaving little for an explosion.

The theory predicts volcanoes explode only when the release of gas by continuous and repeated non explosive fragmentation during the magma's rise to the surface cannot keep up with the growth of bubbles.

"This non explosive fragmentation should decrease the chance of an explosive eruption," Manga said. "In some cases, this should let the gas out of the volcano and leave nothing to drive an explosive eruption. The detection of non-explosive fragmentation could therefore have important implications for hazard assessment of volcanic eruptions."

In the past, people have thought that "the defining characteristic of explosive eruptions is fragmentation," added UC-Berkeley graduate student Helge M. Gonnermann, who collaborated on the study.

"While that is true, we are saying fragmentation also plays an important role in non explosive eruptions," Gonnermann said. "We have shown that it is quite feasible that you will get non explosive fragmentation under a wide range of observed eruptive conditions."

Canoes Drive Loons Crazy

The 850 square mile island is the nation's least visited national park and this absence of human activity may make loons more vulnerable to human disturbance, explains Michigan Technological University forestry researcher Joseph Kaplan, who has been observing loons at Isle Royale for 10 years.

"Isle Royale's inland lakes are wilderness lakes and have nonmotorized use only," Kaplan said. "Use levels are not high. But the loons may not get used to people's patterns, so when people do show up, the loons overreact."

This overreaction takes the form of abandoning their nests and any eggs therein. Often enough, the parents never return, and the eggs never hatch.

Kaplan says it does not "take much to spook a loon" - many pairs leave their nests when they notice people as far as 150 meters away.

It is the aquatic nature of the species that may make the birds so vulnerable to canoes. Loons, unlike ducks and geese, can not walk on dry land. Their nests must be on the water's edge, putting near canoe routes and portages.

In conducting his research, Kaplan relied in part on 12 years' worth of data collected by the National Park Service on the number of loon chicks hatched on the island. He compared that data with information on the number of back country canoe and kayak permits issued since 1991.

There is some evidence, Kaplan says, that when people are kept away, the loons rebound quickly.

Last year, the National Park Service moved a portage in Isle Royale National Park away from a loon nest site, and the pair stayed on their nest.

"That is exactly what you want to see," Kaplan said. "In the absence of canoe use, we predict about 70 percent of nests will be successful."

Snowy Holidays Less Likely Across Much of the U.S.

Looking at states that typically get snow, 197 of 260 weather stations have reported fewer days with snowfall since 1948, according to statistics analyzed by Dale Kaiser, a meteorologist in the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The survey looked at the 30 day period from November 25 to December 24 from 1948 to 2001.

The decrease in the number of snow days has been especially pronounced east of the Mississippi River, where 117 of 125 stations reported an average of five fewer days with snowfall.

"Five fewer days of snowfall over a 30 day period may not seem all that significant until you consider that, in many regions, snow days occur relatively infrequently," Kaiser said.

But there is at least one region in the United States that has been more wintery between the holidays. The number of days with snow has increased significantly in the region that extends from the Central Rocky Mountain states - Utah, Colorado and Wyoming - eastward into the Central Plains, which is mostly Nebraska.

"[It] is the one part of the country that is bucking the trend, with a few stations in Utah and Colorado seeing nearly 10 more days with snowfall," Kaiser said.

Nationwide, taking into account only what scientists define as "statistically significant" data, 197 stations experienced declines in the number of days with snowfall while 63 stations had increasing trends. The researchers explain that there is a 95 percent probability that this trend did not occur by chance.

Stations in the East that showed significant decreases in snow days had an overall warming trend of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

Batavia, New York registered the highest change with 12.5 fewer days.

Other U.S. cities with fewer days of snowfall are Columbus, Ohio with 7.8 fewer days, Minneapolis, Minnesota with six fewer days and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with 5.2 fewer days.

In the West, stations reporting trends of more snowfall days during the 30 day period were led by Provo, Utah, with 9.8 more snow days

Kaiser cautioned against reading too much into the survey and said it should not be used to "draw conclusions about changes in weather over the entire winter, nor do these findings necessarily relate to the broader issue of global warming."