Thursday, September 10, 2009

Lost and found...

Hello, hello. I know I've been MIA for the last few days, and I apologise. A visit with the parents meant very little time (thankfully) for the Internet. But I'm back at work now and digging myself out from under my cascading inbox.

The articles I found this morning have theme of reclamation attached to them. In two cases species have been reclaimed from extinction and in the third, certain death. Cheery, eh?

Yahoo! News posted a story on the breeding of species of ladybugs found by amateur scientists in Colorado and Oregon. Entomologist John Losey launched The Ladybug Project last year to find out why once-plentiful native species of ladybug had all but disappeared. He recruited people all over the country, including a lot of children, to go out and look for nine-spotted, two-spotted and transverse ladybugs. The entomologists-in-training were instructed to take photos of these creatures and send the pics, along with where they were taken, back to Losey. He and his colleagues traveled to Colorado and Oregon to collect the ladybugs for breeding. Happily for fans of this particular insect (myself included), the ladybugs are thriving in captivity, and Losey hopes to conduct studies to sort out why they declined.

The AP, hosted on Google News, reported on the unexpected discovery of a specie of turtles thought to be extinct. Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society who braved torrential rain, leeches and the dictatorial government of Burma/Myanmar to examine the Rakine Yoma Elephant Sanctuary discovered five turtles from a breed declared extinct over 100 years ago due to extreme over-hunting. One of the scientific names for this specie is Arakan, but the way-more-fun name is Pyant Cheezar - a local moniker that translates to "turtle who eats rhinoceros feces."

Peachygreen.com posted on the bobcat and fawn who became fast friends after each was rescued from the Jesusita fire in Santa Barbara, Calif. The bobcat kitten, starved and very dehydrated, was found first and placed with the fawn only after the rescuers realized they didn't have a large enough cage for the little deer. Apparently the bob-kitten went straight over to the fawn, and the pair snuggled under a desk for hours. The photos on this post are flat-out ADORABLE.

(Photo courtesy of examiner.com)

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