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Hunter Cutting

Snake populations declining up to 70-90% in Europe - 0 views

www.thestar.com/...cale-implications-for-humanity

Europe climate change impact species snakes

shared by Hunter Cutting on 14 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The first documented evidence of the baffling disappearance of up to 90 per cent of snake colonies in five disparate spots on the globe has “large-scale implications” for humanity, a Canadian expert says.
  • And the “most obvious cause, intuitively, would be climate change,” biologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto, told the Star.
  • A recently published study in the journal Biology Letters involving painstaking research in England, Nigeria, Australia, Italy and France discovered eight species in 17 snake populations in those widely different climates that had “declined drastically,” said Dr. Christopher Reading, lead researcher for the study. “In some of the populations, the decline was 70 to 90 per cent,” Reading of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Wallingford, England, told the Star. “This is the first documented evidence that some snake populations have declined. And the fact that it happened at all of the same time, irrespective of geography, indicates there is something at a higher level behind it.”
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  • In all, 11 species were followed from as far back as the 1980s through 2005. In the late 1990s, certain species started vanishing. In particular, the “fairly sedentary” snakes that use an “ambush foraging technique” disappeared in greater numbers compared with the “wide-ranging, active foragers,” said Reading. And those most sedentary snakes tended to be the venomous ones. “The scale and precision of this study” impressed Head. And while researchers were careful not to pin the mysterious decline on any one cause, the vastly different geologies of the regions, from tropical to temperate, suggested “one ultimate driving mechanism,” with climate change the clearest culprit, he said. “It’s alarming, to be honest,” Head said. “This is a compelling analysis that is certainly going to get a lot of people looking at the diversity of the species.”
  • “It’s possible what we have found is an aberration. But I suspect it is much more widespread.” Reading makes it clear the discovery is only the first stage. “The whole reason for this paper was to say, ‘Look, this is what we’ve found. We are quite alarmed by it. We don’t know what the causes are, but we are flagging it so that herpetologists around the world will look at it.”
  • SOME DECLINING SNAKE POPULATIONS Smooth snake (Coronella austriaca) in the U.K. Asp viper (Vipera aspis) in France and Italy Orsini's viper (Vipera ursinii) in Italy Gaboon viper (Bitis gabonica) in Nigeria Rhinoceros viper (Bitis nasicornis) in Nigeria Royal or ball python (Python regius) in Nigeria Western whip snake (Hierophis viridiflavus) in France Aesculapian snake (Zamenis longissimus) in France
Hunter Cutting

Jellyfish swarm into warm waters off Ireland - 0 views

www.irishtimes.com/...1224273558296.html

jellyfish climate change impact oceans Ireland

shared by Hunter Cutting on 29 Jun 10 - Cached
  • SIGHTINGS OF exotic snake pipefish, swarms of jellyfish and an “unprecedented” rise in sea surface temperatures indicate climate change is having a significant effect on Ireland’s marine ecosystems, according to a new report.Swarms of jellyfish, increased wave heights off the southwest coast and a greater variety of warm-water species in Irish waters have also been recorded by the authors of the report published today by the Marine Institute.
  • The authors noted that increases of sea surface temperature – at a rate of 0.6 degrees a decade – have been recorded since 1994. This is “unprecedented” in the past 150 years, the Marine Institute says.This temperature rise has been linked to an increase in microscopic plants and animals, along with species of jellyfish. The institute says increased numbers of most warm-water fish species have been observed in Irish waters.
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