Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
Want to find out what whales eat? There's no need to cut them open, just wait until they relieve themselves.
One of the reasons given by the Japanese government for its "scientific" whaling programme is to learn more about the animals' diet. Now Stacy DeRuiter at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and her team have developed a way of investigating diet by identifying mitochondrial DNA from the remains of the prey in a whale's faeces.
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Monday, December 3rd, 2007
Global warming is starting to sting - literally. Last week millions of baby mauve stinger jellyfish, in a swarm 26 square kilometres in area and 10 metres deep, drifted into a salmon farm in the Irish Sea, killing all 100,000 fish.
More swarms have been spotted along British coastlines as far north as Shetland. The mauve stinger, a Mediterranean species, has been increasingly turning up in UK waters in recent years, but this autumn's numbers are unprecedented. What's more, this isn't supposed to be the season for babies.
It is now. Warmer seawater is boosting mauve stinger numbers in the Med by increasing winter survival.
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