Choked on the milk of feline kindness

If zoos are meant to aid conservation, this is certainly NOT how they should go about it. Kindness and compassion are one thing, but wholly different (though not exclusive) from scientific approaches. Consider this dilemma: If you had all but one motherless baby red panda in the world with a few hours to live, where would you look for a surrogate mother? In China, they found a cat that was willing to take up the job. Is cat's milk the closest in nutritional composition to Red Panda's milk? Did the zoo's caretakers know anything about Red Panda's milk at all? Did they prepare for such an exigency by having the right formula ready? After all, the mother was still alive. No one has discussed this story as a failure of conservation methods. It's no use crying over spilt milk. Really. Newsweek has more

Baby Red Panda Adopted and Nursed by House Cat Dies

via Truemors by acbert on 7/18/08

If your Friday has already kicked off in a Debbie Downer kind of mood, you may want to skip the latest update in Amsterdam's panda and cat saga. The baby red panda rejected by its mother and subsequently adopted by a zookeeper's cat has died after choking on milk. The grey and black tabby cat had recently given birth to kittens when the panda faced abandonment, offering the tiny animal an extra teat to share with her four kittens. Zookeepers hoped the panda would nurse from the cat for three months until it could begin consuming a diet of bamboo and fruit.

Blame it on Rio - a graveyard for baby penguins

Chanced upon this very disturbing and heartbreaking story via Truemors. It's published in MSNBC and is available at this link Both pollution and global warming are being blamed.

No Happy Feet on the Beaches of Rio

via Truemors by Colby on 7/19/08

Penguins washing ashore in Brazil from Antarctica is a fairly common occurrence, apparently, but the last two months have seen more than 400 beachings, many of them young, dead birds. Reasons range from offshore drilling pollution to overfishing to increasingly hostile weather due to global warming. Young birds are particularly vulnerable to changes in the environment since they might not be able to battle the stronger currents where they are being forced to search for food. Pollution and warming may also be producing weaker penguins according to Erli Costa of Rio de Janeiro's Federal University. Birds who do survive are taken to the local zoo, then airlifted back home.

Talking dolphins with Amitav Ghosh

Could the 'porpoises' that cruise operators show off in Goa's Mandovi and Zuari estuaries be Irrawaddy River Dolphins? Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh thinks so. His argument is compelling...

The author Amitav Ghosh in conversation with me, then short-haired and propah. Photo © Rediff.com - All rights reserved. 

I met Amitav Ghosh for a rediff interview last month in Mumbai. While the interview was about his new novel Sea of Poppies, our conversation wandered to many subjects. I have always been curious to learn how Ghosh, who is known to conduct painstaking research for his books, knew so much about the Gangetic Dolphin that he writes about in The Hungry Tide. I popped the question, and his reply was both illumining and awe-inspiring.

The Hungry Tide is set in the Sunderbans and one of its protagonists is an Indian-American scientist named Piyali Roy who arrives in the region to study the Gangetic River Dolphin. When Ghosh went about his research for the book, he wrote to a number of dolphin researchers. Only one responded - Prof. Helene Marsh of the James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. She pointed him to her student who was researching Irrawaddy river dolphins in Cambodia. With this scientist, Ghosh traveled up the Mekong and "saw the research absolutely at firsthand".


"The Irrawaddy Dolphin," Ghosh told me, "is a coastal species. "What’s special about it is that some branches of it live in freshwater, some live in brackish and some live in coastal regions. Dolphins are incredibly adaptable."


And then he asked me, "Have you seen the dolphins in Goa?"


Somewhat ignorantly, I said yes and no.


Yes, because I have seen dolphins off the coast of Kapu (formerly Kaup), near Udupi in coastal Karnataka. And no, because those weren't river dolphins as far as I knew.


Kapu is a beach of incredible beauty, with conical spires of rock rising straight out of the sea and a lighthouse atop one of them. Usually, the rocks are clear out of the water and you can climb all the way up to their summits. In August 1998, I went to Kapu just when the monsoon had taken a breather. The tide was full, though, and the cones were cut off by a sizable tidepool that I, a swimmer skilled only in drowning, had no intention of testing. It was the first time I had seen the beach like that, with deep water all the way up to the lip of the shore, and its beauty was forbidding and fascinating at the same time.


We heard a group of tourists exclaim and point to the water beneath one of the rocks. Small humps of bluish grey broke out of the waves. It was a pod of about six dolphins. They were large - each about eight feet long - and they bobbed in and out of the water with smooth, sinuous movements. I remember being amazed that these dolphins swam so close to the beach, and that they approached people without fear. Later, I learned that both these traits were part of the dolphin's personality.


Reading Nature's Spokesman, a set of published columns by the late naturalist, photographer and writer (also illustrator and poet) M. Krishnan edited by Ramachandra Guha, I came across a piece (Five Encounters) in which Krishnan recounts a strange meeting with dolphins in Point Calimere on the Coromandel Coast. Wading out to sea, Krishnan is suddenly accosted by a school of these small whales - small only in comparison to orcas and humpbacks, for he remembers them as being strong, muscular and eight feet long. He also remembers, as he is standing there in shoulder-high water with his camera raised high above his head, that dolphins have razor-sharp teeth and a bite that could snip his hand off (well, we know that dolphins can kill sharks).


Back to Amitav Ghosh. After I mumbled my noncommittal reply about dolphins in Goa, he went on to tell me about the popular dolphin cruises in the Mandovi estuary. "The sort of dolphin I wrote about in The Hungry Tide – the Irrawaddy Dolphin – is actually the dolphin that they show tourists in Goa, where at the mouth of the Mandovi river they have a breeding pod. People don’t know what kind of dolphin it is so they say it’s a porpoise!"

Distribution of Orcaella brevirostris: warm coastal waters and rivers from the Bay of Bengal to Northern Australia (maps - copyright IUCN)

This is a very compelling argument but whether it is true I do not know. No marine biologist I have asked has confirmed this to me yet. I know from my reading that the Irrawaddy River Dolphin has a wide distribution and is known to be very adaptive. Its bumped head is a lot like the Beluga's and therefore the confusion with porpoises (also contributed by the fallacy that all dolphins are bottle-nosed). I have come across several Internet conversations where tourists who have been to Goa have dissed the Goa dolphins as porpoises. "Nothing like Flipper," says one blogger.

There are river dolphins in the large river mouths of India - the Indus and the Gangetic River Dolphins are believed to be the same species by some cetologists and have been observed in the relatively unpolluted waters of the Chambal. Whether they have been studied in the Mandovi and the Zuari and the great estuaries of the south Indian rivers I do not know.


But something tells me Amitav Ghosh may be right.


UPDATE - June 27, 2011:
I met Amitav Ghosh again in Mumbai in connection with the second book of his Ibis trilogy, River of Smoke, and reminded him of this conversation that we had in 2008. The great author graciously published a link to this post on his blog. 

Strictly not for the birds

I posted this on another blog in 2002: In 1999, as an intern training at the editorial office of The Week in Kochi, I came to be known as the Birdman thanks to a feature on Kashmir’s Dal Lake that I had to rewrite. I peppered the piece with pintails, garganey and shovellers, adding colour and cackle to what arrived on the desk as a pretty drab report. It never occurred to me that the news of my skills would be tom-tommed all the way to the sacred cabins of the top brass. One day a senior editor came up to my workstation, and bent down sheepishly for a seemingly conspiratorial exchange. “Do ducks have pricks?” he hissed. “No,” I said, inadvertently mimicking his whisper, and pretending to conceal my shock. “Then how do they do it?” he asked incredulously. “Birds belong to Class Aves, they have no external genitalia,” I said, trying in vain not to sound professorial. “Both sexes have a cloacal aperture, which is differentiated internally. Often the male may have cloacal spurs to secure the moment of contact.” “Which means…” “Which means ‘sex’ between birds is merely cloacal contact,” I said, shrugging. “Oh…” he said, his face betraying great dismay. “Yes, sir,” I empathized. “The joys of intercourse, more specifically intromission, are strictly not for the birds.” UPDATE: The beloved bird scientist Gopi Sundar updates me thus: Ducks are among the few aves who have semi-pricks

swans have slightly bigger ones

:)

Calamity Jaan, is that you at the door?

I don't need some weatherman or futurist or god-man/-woman/-child/-dog/-goat to tell me this - the world's becoming a stormier, waterlogged, windswept, cyclone-battered, quake-shaken, tsunami-marooned place. My grandmom's been saying it for decades. This, after all, is the age of Kali - the oft-quoted, always underestimated Kalyug. Where floods are just a leaking tap away, and an earthquake can cleave the earth in the middle of an Aerosmith concert.

So, let's stop cribbing and go out and enjoy the suffering.

Sorry, that's just me being perniciously cynical.

The reason? Here, read this

Dehydrating the Ganga?

The July 19 issue of Tehelka carries a piece on the damming activity in the upper reaches of the Ganga. An excerpt: India has 4,500 large dams. Until recently, the pristine stretch between Uttarkashi and Gangotri boasted of only one: Maneri Bhali Phase I. But a series of consecutive hydro-electric projects are now in different stages of construction on this 125-kilometre stretch. Five major ones threaten the normal existence of the Bhagirathi, as the majestic Ganga here is called. If they go through as planned, it is feared the Ganga may completely disappear from large stretches, leaving the riverbed limp and dry. More here

And when the power is away..

...the towers will play!

via an Internet forward (source unknown)

In Denmark, an island turns to wind

Just when the worst was being said about biofuels, here's a form of energy that will turn heads. And maybe more. Consider this excerpt from The New Yorker story: For the past decade or so, Samsø has been the site of an unlikely social movement. When it began, in the late nineteen-nineties, the island’s forty-three hundred inhabitants had what might be described as a conventional attitude toward energy: as long as it continued to arrive, they weren’t much interested in it. Most Samsingers heated their houses with oil, which was brought in on tankers. They used electricity imported from the mainland via cable, much of which was generated by burning coal. As a result, each Samsinger put into the atmosphere, on average, nearly eleven tons of carbon dioxide annually. Then, quite deliberately, the residents of the island set about changing this. They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using. More here