Gator Mom vs. the World

Watch
how this protective alligator mother uses her "jaws of love" to protect
her newborns from the dangers that lurk in the Florida Everglades.

Link: https://youtu.be/IPTs2Nz3eA0

05/10/15 02:12 PM 

By Summer Ash

 

 

Since today is Mother’s Day, here’s a look at the spectrum of
mother and offspring relationships on our planet. While humans are fond
of baby wraps, backpacks and strollers, other species have their own creative ways of transporting their young.

• American alligator mothers often help their babies move around
  by letting them ride on their heads or sometimes even giving them a lift
  in their mouths.
• Wolf spiders actually carry their egg sacs around with them and when
  the baby spiders hatch, they climb onto their mother’s abdomen for the
  first few days before heading off to live on their own. One Australian discovered this the hard way. [VIDEO]
• This species of toad in South America embeds her fertilized eggs into her back. When they hatch, the tadpoles literally come out of her skin. [VIDEO]
• Everyone’s favorite baby transporter, the kangaroo, has its famous stomach pouch, but I bet you didn’t know that baby kangaroos blindly crawl along their mother’s body from her uterus to the pouch right after birth. [VIDEO]

If that’s not enough of an animal fix for you, here’s a photo album from National Geographic of mothers and babies from across the animal kingdom.

And now for the rest of the week’s geek:

• What does climate change actually sound like? Listen to the temperature changes in the Northern Hemisphere as played by a string quartet. [VIDEO]
• What do fish feel when they swim? SCIENCE can answer that.
• This invasive species of fire ant is essentially an expert at excavation.
• Fossils for brain regions of different species can tell us how and when heads first evolved.
• Speaking of brains, this MIT student filmed his own brain surgery.
• Geoscientists have found a way to study the health of forest canopies by detecting the fluorescence of photosynthesis byproducts from space.
• Those of you in the snow belt might be familiar with using snow to clean your car mirrors. Turns out NASA does it too!…sort of.
• The Sun got a little too into the Cinco de Mayo spirit with a powerful solar flare. [VIDEO]
• Emergency responders in Nepal located and saved four individuals with a portable radar unit from NASA that detected their heartbeats in the rubble.
• Astronomers in Australia interested in fast radio bursts got some signal interference from an unlikely source: their eating habits.
• Setting up a settlement on Mars just got a little trickier with the prevalence of perchlorate in the Martian soil.

@Summer_Ash, In-house Astrophysicist

Source: http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/week-geek-special-mothers-day-edition

Hunters are killing huge Gators

Energy and Environment

Alabama hunters are killing huge gators off the Gulf Coast. 

Is that a good thing?

 

By Darryl Fears August 25, 2015

 

Scott Evans (left), Jeff Gregg (center), and Justin Gregg (right) after their big catch on Lake Eufaula in Alabama on Aug. 14, 2015
. Jeff Gregg said that catching the 920-pound, 13’6″-long alligator was a dream. (Family photo)

 

He was a whopper.

It took six men to pull a 13-foot, 9-inch alligator from Lake Eufaula in Alabama. The animal weighed in at 920 pounds at a local lumber yard in mid-August, but its girth is only now raising eyebrows and drawing gasps; it was weighed last week but started to draw national attention Tuesday.

The giant male gator is one of several monsters that were hauled out of waters during regulated hunts in Alabama, Texas and Florida in recent years, and some biologists question whether that’s a good thing

 

Big dominant males manage the habitat where they reside, keeping smaller, more aggressive males away.

“You move one animal and four or five or six smaller gators come in and fight for territory,” said Kent Vliet, an alligator biologist at the University of Florida.

. “It is a bit destabilizing in that sense.”
 

Vliet said alligator hunters should be encouraged to snag younger males to manage populations and leave the behemoths alone.

“In my mind, because so few alligators that hatch reach adult size, and even fewer reach full bull status, I think of those animals as being very valuable,” said Vliet, coordinator of the university’s laboratory in the biology department. “A lot of ecological resources have gone into making that animal. To me that’s sort of a waste.”

Humans don’t hunt that way.

[New study shows just what vicious predators humans really are]

They want the big game, the big trophy, a place in the record books. Scott Evans, of Center Point, and his friends, brothers Jeff and Justin Gregg, achieved that in some regard, capturing the biggest gator ever in that particular lake.

But as gators go, this beast was no state or national record. 

 

The largest alligator ever caught in the wild was a 15-foot, 9-inch giant wrangled last year in a tributary to the Alabama River.

More than likely, the world record 1,011-pound male would have dominated the more recent catch in Lake Eufaula. He probably wouldn’t have allowed him in his territory, and in the unlikely event that he did, he definitely wouldn’t have allowed him to approach females during the April to May breeding season, Vliet said.

An alligator is seen in the water as Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell visits the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in the Everglades. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The second largest catch, a 14-foot, 8-inch gator roped and drowned by Thomas Bass of Trinity, Tex., held the record until Mandy Stokes and a group of helpers made news with their catch last year. Bass caught his gator eight years ago, but wasn’t entered into the record kept by Safari Club International until last year.

Robert “Tres” Ammerman, a licensed practical nurse from Apopka, caught a skinny 14-foot, 3-inch male that weighed 654 pounds, in Lake Washington in 2010. It was the longest documented gator caught in Florida, according to the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Florida is renowned for alligators, which serve as the mascot for the state’s largest university, but the animals range the entire length of the Gulf Coast. They are also found in the Carolinas.

The American alligator is classified as threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a listing that provides federal protection, But state approved management and control efforts are allowed under the designation.

Louisiana and Florida have the largest habitats, but the populations are rapidly growing in Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, Vliet said. With smaller habitats in the latter three states, population management programs were slower to start. 

[Frog, toad and amphibian populations are plummeting]

“Because they delayed the annual harvest for so long, they’ve had some very big animals,” Vliet said.
Removing them makes headlines, but the news is not always good, especially when no human has been harmed. “These are unusual animals. They have survived a long time. They tend to be wary animals. They may be older animals. It is likely that they do dominate an area, subordinate smaller males, mate with multiple females,” Vliet said.

“In a lot of ways they control the alligator population in that area. There’s no doubt in my mind that when you move an animal of this size, it has an impact on the population.”


Read more:
Global warming worsened the California drought, scientists say
Bad parenting? Baby zebra finch look for better role models
Drought: The big fish story no one is talking about
This invasive giant snail is spreading in Florida

Darryl Fears has worked at The Washington Post for more than a decade, mostly as a reporter on the National staff. He currently covers the environment, focusing on the Chesapeake Bay and issues affecting wildlife.



 Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/08/25/hunters-are-killing-huge-gators-on-the-gulf-coast-is-that-a-good-thing/