Galapagos emergency over stranded ship

Ecuador has announced a state of emergency in the Galapagos Islands, a week after a cargo ship with hazardous materials ran aground there.

The Galapagos are home to unique animal species such as the giant tortoise

The Floreana - which ferries food and other supplies to the Unesco world heritage site - was also carrying 45,000 litres (10,000 gallons) of fuel.

Booms have been used to contain a fuel spill in the pristine waters.

The islands - famous for their unique flora and fauna - lie some 1,000km (600 miles) off Ecuador's Pacific coast.

The emergency "will allow authorities to have immediate [financial] means to deal with the situation", a Galapagos National Park spokesman told the AFP news agency.

The ship's hull was reportedly destroyed in the incident on 28 January.

Rescue teams are now trying to refloat and remove the vessel.

This is not the first such incident. Last year, another cargo ship ran aground.

And in 2001, an oil spill devastated marine iguana populations.

From BBC News

The world's most-trafficked mammal - and the scaliest

The gentle, solitary pangolin has a tongue as long as its body and curls into a ball when threatened. It is also the world's most trafficked mammal, and threatened with extinction.

In front of a drab government building near Vietnam's northern border with China, a young conservationist named Nguyen Van Thai prises open a flimsy wooden crate with a machete.

He lifts out four plastic sacks and places them on the ground. From each sack he pulls out a brownish-black ball with a scaly exterior, roughly the size and weight of an curling stone.

Gradually - and very, very cautiously - one of those balls begins to uncurl, revealing two blackcurrant eyes, a long snout, an even longer tail and a soft pink belly. It's a pangolin, one of the world's more remarkable creatures.

The pangolin is the only mammal wholly covered in scales, and it simply curls itself into an impregnable ball when threatened by predators.

It eats seven million ants and termites a year using a tongue that's almost as long as its body. It has no teeth, so it stores stones in its stomach to grind up its food.

The reason many of us have never heard of pangolins is because they seldom survive in captivity. Only six zoos in the world - and only one in Europe, Leipzig - have any.

Pangolins enjoy one other unfortunate distinction - they are the world's most trafficked mammal.

While the media focuses on the plight of the elephant and the rhinoceros, the celebrities of the natural world, roughly 100,000 pangolins a year are being snatched from the wild and sent to China and Vietnam.

In both those countries their meat is considered a delicacy, and their scales are deemed to have magical medicinal properties.

Already there are no pangolins left in great swathes of South East Asia, so Africa's pangolin populations are now being plundered. All eight species are threatened with extinction.

In both those countries their meat is considered a delicacy, and their scales are deemed to have magical medicinal properties.

Already there are no pangolins left in great swathes of South East Asia, so Africa's pangolin populations are now being plundered. All eight species are threatened with extinction.

They resemble artichokes on legs. They are gentle, solitary creatures with an almost comic rolling gait. They carry their young on their tails and curl round them to protect them. They use those prehensile tails to hang from branches, or to stretch out almost horizontally to reach ants' nests.

From BBC News-Magazine

READ MORE

Australian study says fences could halt cane toad menace

Special fences built around dams in arid parts of Australia could help eradicate the menace of cane toads, according to new research.

The toads, regarded as poisonous pests, are drawn to the dams by the need for water and die in large numbers if fences hold them back, scientists said.

The animals were brought to Australia in the 1930s to get rid of beetles.

They have since spread from Queensland into the Northern Territories, New South Wales and Western Australia.

Their numbers have grown because they have almost no natural predators and their toxins kill native animals that normally feed on frogs.

Various methods to eradicate the toads have been tried, including mass culls by teams of volunteers, but have only had limited success.

Now a study led by experts at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) says toad-proof fences around dams may stem their spread because most areas the toads will invade in future are semi-arid or arid.

The dams are built to provide water for livestock but are a magnet for the toads.

Some cane toads are fitted with tracking devices to plot their spread

Numbers "suppressed"

Researchers built small fences from shade cloth around three dams in the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory and maintained them for a year.

They found that the toads were unable to jump over them or burrow under.

"The toads were still attracted to the water but they died en masse while attempting to settle at the fenced dams," said the study's lead author, UNSW Associate Professor Mike Letnic.

"Their numbers remained suppressed for a further year. By comparison, there were 10 to 100 times more toads living at the unfenced dams that were used as controls in the study," he said.

The team has suggested that livestock farmers and wildlife agencies work together to fence out the toads or replace the dams with water tanks.

"If conducted strategically, excluding toads from man-made water sources could effectively control their populations across large areas of Australia," said Prof Letnic.

The research team included scientists from the University of Technology, Sydney, and the University of Melbourne.

Cane toads are native to South America but were introduced to Australia in 1935 to control beetles that infested sugar cane.

From BBC News-Sci/Environment

From: Brisbane Local food