Hidden Camera Focuses on Alaska Grizzlies
Hidden camera transmits life of burly grizzly bears of Alaska's McNeil River sanctuary to world

MARY PEMBERTON
Associated Press Writer

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Only a lucky few humans are allowed each summer to get up close and personal with the McNeil River bears, but thanks to the wilderness equivalent of the "Big Brother" show, the animals are available to the world.

A bear cam set up in their favorite spot of the 114,400-acre McNeil River State Game Sanctuary shows them brawling over salmon, cooling off in the falls, sunbathing on the rocks and fattening up for the long, Alaska winter.

The state holds a lottery for about 250 people each year to visit the sanctuary 250 miles southwest of Anchorage to view the bears. The bear cam allows the less lucky to get a look, too, said Mike O'Meara, project manager for the Pratt Museum in Homer across Cook Inlet from the sanctuary.

"The first thing they have to say is 'Oh, this is live.' That intrigues them. Then they really get wrapped up in watching the bears. A lot of them are struck in how the bears interact and communicate with each other," he said.

The bear cam is turned on from 5 a.m. until 11 p.m. and has eight presets to zoom in on where the animals are likely to be at any given hour. During the afternoon, an interpreter at the museum controls the solar-powered camera to get the best views.

O'Meara expects 20,000 museum visitors to use the bear cam this summer.

In the peak weeks in July, the falls draw more brown bears than anywhere else in the world. While numbers have been decreasing in recent years, the bears still put on a good show. The record was 72 observed at one time in 1999.

What makes McNeil truly extraordinary is how close visitors can get to the bears, which sometimes come to within 10 feet of a viewing platform as they use steps built into the hillside to get down to the falls. The camera is hidden in a fake boulder at the falls. The microwave signal travels from the camera to the museum through a series of repeater stations. From the museum, the video feed is relayed to servers in Seattle, and from there is published on the National Geographic's Web site, where viewers can access it online in real time.

Two grants from the National Park Service foundation totaling about $40,000 and a $20,000 grant from the Mead Foundation paid for installing the bear cam and setting up the high-quality video and audio stream to the museum. Alaska Conservation Foundation contributed $5,000. National Geographic is covering the costs of maintaining the Web site to bring the bears to an international audience, O'Meara said.

Real Networks of Seattle contributed digitizing computers that allow the audio and video to be streamed onto the Internet. The camera, which went online in early June, will likely be shut off for the season in late August, when most of the bears leave and prepare for winter.

O'Meara and Michael Yourkowski, general manager of SeeMore Wildlife Systems in Homer, which first set up the bear cam in 1999 and has improved on it since, said they hope it raises public awareness about the bears and how recent changes have made them more vulnerable to being hunted.
 
Last year, the Alaska Board of Game decided to allow brown bear hunting on state land just south and southeast of the sanctuary, beginning July 1, 2007. That decision places the McNeil bears at greater risk because they often roam outside the borders of the sanctuary. They also aren't as likely as other wild bears to run off when encountering humans, O'Meara and Yourkowski said.

"The bears that come to the falls are somewhat habituated to humans because the humans are sitting there and watching them all the time. That makes them not leery of hunters," Yourkowski said. O'Meara, a longtime Alaskan who likes to hunt, said there's no challenge in killing a McNeil River bear.

"It is a little like going to the stock yards and plugging a poor, old cow," he said.

National Geographic Wildcam Grizzlies
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The Kapuas mud snake Enhydris gyii, recently discovered in Kalimantan. Image: WWF-Germany/Mark Auliya

New chameleon-like snake discovered in the Heart of Borneo

World Wildlife Fund / greatnewswire.com

GLAND, Switzerland - A new snake with the ability to spontaneously change colour has been discovered in the forests of the Heart of Borneo, one of the most biologically diverse regions on Earth, possessing staggeringly high numbers of unique species across all groups of plants and animals. This ability of the snake to change colour is known from some reptiles, such as the chameleon, but scientists have seen it very rarely with snakes and have not yet understood this phenomenon.

The snake was discovered by a German researcher who described it with the collaboration of two American scientists.

"I put the reddish-brown snake in a dark bucket. When I retrieved it a few minutes later, it was almost entirely white," said Dr Mark Auliya, reptile expert at the Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig in Germany, and a consultant for WWF.

Dr Auliya collected two specimens of the half-metre long poisonous snake in the wetlands and swamped forests around the Kapuas river in the Betung Kerihun National Park, an area in Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of Borneo) where WWF supports conservation work. The scientists named it the Kapuas mud snake.

The genus Enhydris, to which the new snake belongs, is composed of 22 species, only two of which are widespread. All the others have a very restricted range. The scientists believe this newly discovered snake might only occur in the Kapuas River drainage system.

In the last ten years, 361 new animal and plants species have been discovered on the island of Borneo. This amounts to three new species a month in an area only a little more than twice the size of Germany.

"The discovery of the ‘chameleon" snake exposes one of nature's best kept secrets deep in the Heart of Borneo," said Stuart Chapman, WWF's international coordinator of the Heart of Borneo initiative.

"Its ability to change colour has kept it hidden from science until now. I guess it just picked the wrong colour that day."

However, WWF warns that the home of the new snake is threatened. Today, only half of Borneo's forest cover remains, down from 75 per cent in the mid-1980s.

But there is also hope that this trend could be halted as the three Bornean governments - Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia and Malaysia - recently launched the Heart of Borneo initiative, which aims to preserve approximately 220,000km2 of equatorial forests and numerous wildlife species. 

Source:World Wildlife Fund

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Marine census blows researchers out of the water

Tom Spears, CanWest News Service; Ottawa Citizen

OTTAWA - Mitchell Sogin went fishing for bacteria in the seas, casting into deep parts of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. What he found, in this census of the tiniest sea creatures, was an invisible new world of life.

Sogin's research team discovered 20,000 separate species of microbes per every litre of sea water during its study, which will be published today in the science journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The finding blows previous estimates out of the water, previously gauged at 1,000 to 3,000, and threatens to make scientists re-think the limits on how different forms of life can evolve and adapt together.

''From that small sample, we see much greater diversity than we ever imagined,'' said Sogin. ''The number of different kinds of bacteria in the oceans could eclipse five to 10 million.''

Sogin's findings, which were taken up to one kilometre underwater, are based on a new method of counting microscopic bugs: Instead of looking for whole microbes, he extracted RNA from them and analysed all the distinct types.

''It's like looking at licence plate numbers'' using genetic material, he said.

Most of these microbes would normally go unnoticed, Sogin said, because a relatively small number of species dominate each sample of water. However, the rest are lurking in small numbers ready to multiply if environmental conditions such as temperature or saltiness change, he said. Sogin calls these uncommon and previously unknown types ''a rare biosphere.''

Sogin's findings, in which some species were present in very low numbers in the water samples, also suggests species may be distributed unevenly, a hot topic of debate for marine biologists.

''There may be a whole world of different ecosystems or habitats (on the microbes' scale) waiting to be discovered,'' said Sogin.

He added it's possible that rare microbes may be biding their time. ''Perhaps, on very large time scales, they (will) play an important role,'' by preserving different genetic types that will take over if there's a drastic climate change.

''We're going through a radical change of environments now which might lead to those kinds of events, where the microbial populations changed,'' said Sogin, noting microbes likely make up 90 per cent or more of all living aquatic life.

Sogin heads a research centre within the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass. His work is part of an international project called the Census of Marine Life, which describes itself as ''a 10-year initiative to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life in the oceans past, present, and future.''

 Source:Canada.com