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The Blue Marble: Indian Crocodiles Guard Dwindling Forests

Byoliveridley

This is an interesting and good side effect of releasing captive bred crocodiles back into the wild.

The Blue Marble: Indian Crocodiles Guard Dwindling Forests

Dozens of crocodiles bred in captivity in eastern India are protecting their endangered counterparts. Newly released into the wild, these giants are scaring away poachers bent on illegal fishing and timber harvesting in mangrove forests in the states of Orissa and West Bengal, reports Reuters. The disappearing mangroves have led to a steep decline in wild croc numbers, from several thousand a century ago to less than 100 in the early 1970s. But the same species has bred well in captivity and is now being used to solve its own problem. “The swelling number of released crocodiles in the wild is working as a deterrent and keeping people away from the mangrove as villagers are more cautious before venturing into the forests,” said Rathin Banerjee, a senior wildlife official. “Unlike guard dogs, crocodiles cannot be tamed and are ferocious and can attack anyone in the swamps.” .

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  • Terrorists boated in from Pakistan

    Byoliveridley

    MUMBAI: Maharashtra Police investigators say they have evidence that operatives of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out the fidayeen-squad attacks in Mumbai — a charge which, if proven, could have far-reaching consequences for India-Pakistan relations.

    Police sources said an injured terrorist captured during the fighting at the Taj Mahal hotel was tentatively identified as Ajmal Amir Kamal, a resident of Faridkot, near Multan, in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

    Highly-placed police sources said two other Pakistani nationals had also been held in the course of intense fighting on Thursday.

    All three, the sources said, identified themselves as members of a Lashkar fidayeen squad.Based on the interrogation of the suspects, the investigators believe that one or more groups of Lashkar operatives left Karachi in a merchant ship early on Wednesday. Late that night, an estimated 12 fidayeen left the ship in a small boat and rowed some 10 nautical miles to Mumbai’s Gateway of India area.

    The investigators say the fidayeen unit of which Mr. Kamal was a part then split up into at least six groups, each focussing on a separate target: Mumbai’s Nariman House, which is home to a large number of Israeli families and a Jewish prayer house; the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus rail station; the Cama hospital; the Girgaum seafront; and the Taj and Trident Oberoi hotels.

    via The Hindu : Front Page : Three Lashkar fidayeen captured

    Well, so it goes, this gives the government and all politicians free license to start bashing Pakistan all over again, while failing to take care of all the changes that need to happen in order to avoid an attack of such brazenness and sophistication. There is no intelligence gathering, no infrastructure to coordinate intelligence, no disaster preparedness, insufficient patrolling of the coasts, gang influences that run deep in the police and the politicians, an inability to run effective investigations, the list is endless.

    All that being said, how does one deal with the lawlessness in Pakistan? If we assume that the Pakistani establishment did not have anything to do with this, we are still left with the conclusion that terror groups can function with impunity and in broad daylight in Pakistan’s major cities and just sneak across the border to attack, either in Afghanistan or in India.

    The US is bombing the crap out of the Pak-Afghan border, but the terrorists are in the cities and towns, can’t really bomb away. India needs to seriously tighten its borders, and cannot rely on Pakistan’s situation improving any time soon.

  • 20 killed as 5 bomb explosions rock Delhi

    Byoliveridley

    Twenty people were killed and about 100 injured in a series of five bomb explosions that rocked busy marketplaces in the Capital on Saturday.The first explosion took place at Karol Bagh at 6.10 p.m.; two bombs were triggered at Connaught Place; and two more in the bustling M-Block market of Greater Kailash.

    The Hindu : Front Page : 20 killed as 5 bomb explosions rock Delhi

    What is India going to do about this problem? The terrorists know exactly what they are doing. They want to polarize the Indian population and start a scorched earth Hindu-Muslim conflict. I don’t see that happening as of yet, but a country can only take so much. The current government does not have enough intelligence to stop the attacks. They react by arresting a person or two, but I think there are many more cells in the country. The inability of the central govrernment to make any major breakthroughs is only going to lead to more deaths.

    The BJP is saying that it warned the Central government recently that SIMI was planning attacks in Delhi. I guess I could have warned the Central government that terrorists are going to strike every major city in the country on an ongoing basis. The BJP of course claims that the congress is “soft on terror” (sounds familiar). They have not said what they would do differently, except have more draconian preventive arrests, which given the lack of intelligence would be mostly pointless.

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    Arsenic in the News

    Byoliveridley

    Professor wins $1M for arsenic filter – Yahoo! News

    The National Academy of Engineering announced Thursday that the 2007 Grainger Challenge Prize for Sustainability would go to Abul Hussam, a chemistry professor at George Mason University in Fairfax. Hussam’s invention is already in use today, preventing serious health problems in residents of the professor’s native Bangladesh.

    This British Geological Survey website provides a good primer to the problem. Some key points:

    1. Arsenic is very toxic
    2. Arsenic is naturally occurring in the shallow groundwater aquifers of Bengal and Bangladesh at a toxic level
    3. The surface water is contaminated with bacteria and was responsible for high infant mortality, so aid agencies in the ’70s encouraged the use of tube wells and other groundwater pumps. While this contributed to a decline in infant mortality from gastrointestinal infections, it also dosed unsuspecting people with disease causing levels of arsenic
    4. The technology for removal of arsenic is very well known. But most solutions require electricity/periodic maintenance/technical skills and are thus not universal or sustainable.
    5. Simplicity is the key. You can’t tell the people to not drink the water, it is the only clean water available. You can’t install water treatment plants, there is no running water, you can’t rely on solutions that are centralized.

    So with all that in mind, here’s what Prof. Hussam did:

    The Gold Award-winning SONO filter is a point-of-use method for removing arsenic from drinking water.  A top bucket is filled with locally available coarse river sand and a composite iron matrix (CIM).  The sand filters coarse particles and imparts mechanical stability, while the CIM removes inorganic arsenic.  The water then flows into a second bucket where it again filters through coarse river sand, then wood charcoal to remove organics, and finally through fine river sand and wet brick chips to remove fine particles and stabilize water flow.  The SONO filter is now manufactured and used in Bangladesh. That’s great, and easy!

    That’s pretty much freshman chemistry right there, further proof that most innovation does not need new science, only people willing to spend some time on problems that don’t necessarily get looked at.

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    Tuesdays with Turtles – Right Flipperedness Edition

    Byoliveridley

    Across a population studied by scientists, more turtles preferred to use their right rear flipper rather than their left when laying eggs.The result, published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research, is the first time a species of turtle has found to prefer one limb over another.The discovery adds to growing evidence that even lower vertebrates prefer to use one side of the body more often.Such preference is known by scientists as a “lateralised functional behaviour”, and it usually indicates that an animal's brain function is also lateralised, with one side of the brain dominating control of certain tasks.

    via BBC – Earth News – Turtles are ‘right-flippered’.

    Ha, just when you thought Tuesdays with Turtles was gone, it is Tuesday (here in Canada) and a sea turtle post. Turns out, leatherbacks, the biggest of ths sea turtles and critically endangered tend to be right flippered while on land and laying eggs. A slight predilection to right sidedness runs all the way down to reptiles. It is 54%-46%, which does not seem like much, but the report indicates that among humans, it is the same once you control for a cultural right hand bias!

    Anyway, got to love those sexy beasts, even if they’re right flippered, right Ned?

  • | |

    Responsible Death Rites

    Byoliveridley

    Can cremation be used as an offset under the Kyoto Protocol? Read on..

    Seed: New Green Pyre Promoted in India

    UN figures show close to 10 million people die a year in India, where 85 percent of the billion-plus population are Hindus who practice cremation. That leads to the felling of an estimated 50 million trees, leaves behind half a million tonnes of ash and produces eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, according to research by Agarwals Mokshda environmental group.

    The solution is to design a much more efficient wood burning stove hence satisfying religious sentiments (have to use wood to burn your body) and save lots of wood.

    Agarwal built his first pyre, a raised human-sized brazier under a roof with slats that could be lowered to maintain heat. The elevation allowed air to circulate and feed the fire.

    It gets even better…

    Mokshda hopes its projects will eventually be registered under the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism, which encourages green projects in developing countries.

    It allows industrialised countries that have committed to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to count reductions achieved through investments in projects in developing countries towards their undertakings.

    Really, we can get carbon credits by improving cremation practices?? That’s creative! Going all electric on the crematorium would obviously be the best thing, but Hindu religious sentiment being what it is, this is an improvement.

    If you want environmentally friendly, this has nothing on the Parsis (or Zoroastrians):

    The interior of the Tower of Silence is built in three concentric circles, one each for men, women, and children. The corpses are exposed there naked. The vultures do not take long—an hour or two at the most—to strip the flesh off the bones, and these, dried by the sun, are later swept into the central well

    Yes, that’s right, the vultures! Now, that’s energy efficient! Unfortunately, due the use of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory in livestock, vulture populations in India have declined to the point that this ancient ritual is now in serious jeopardy.

  • Worst decline in Indian tiger population since 1973?? Or is it?

    Byoliveridley

    If you want to see a tiger in the wild, I would not wait another 20 years. OTH, there are doubts about the counting methodology employed, read on…

    Worst decline in tiger population since 1973: census- Hindustan Times

    Tiger census estimates from Central India indicate a fall of tiger population by over 50 per cent, worst decline since first government census in 1973.

    Tiger number appears to have fallen by 61 per cent in Madhya Pradesh, 57 per cent in Rajasthan and 40 per cent in Rajasthan, according to the estimates released by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) on Wednesday.

    Initial estimate of 16 of the 28 tigers reserves show that there are only 464 tigers in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra as compared to 1,006 in 2002. Final census is expected by end of 2007.

    India has 29 tiger reserves. Apparently, most of the population losses are outside the reserves where there is mush more tiger-human interaction.

    Dr YV Jhala, institute’s chief scientist, said, “In general, the situation is not good. I cannot stress more the importance of removal of anthropogenic (people) influence on tiger population. Tigers and people cannot co-exist”.

    I like that, “Tigers and people cannot co-exist”, probably true, if simplistic, they’re both super top level predators. Habitat pressure in India is probably the single largest issue with development pressure and a burgeoning population.

    One important thing to note.

    The institute disbanded the pugmark identification methodology for tiger census and adopted more scientific approach of camera capturing, scent and pugmark analysis and tracking movement of tigers using satellite tracking.

    When you change counting methodologies, it is hard to compare population estimates. This note and this Science article (sell kidney to read) indicate that pugmark identification was notorious for over counting tigers, even missing entire population collapses, so who knows whether we are seeing a decline, or finally, a more accurate count? Either way, the numbers are depressing, and do not bode well for the tiger.