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| Wilderness, Wildlife & Ecology |
| The Wilderness, Wildlife & Ecology Forum :: Ask us a Question! |
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Wilderness, Wildlife & Ecology :: Is birding your passion? Love to hike, camp, hunt or fish? Concerned about the environment, and the fate of endangered animals? The Wilderness, Wildlife and Ecology Forum is the place to examine those issues relevant to the "great outdoors".
Here members may brag about their latest birding "find", and compare life lists. Questions and discussions around binoculars, camping, fishing and hunting gear, best camping sites, and a myriad of other issues may be explored. Concerns around civilization's impact on the environment
are appropriate topics for discussion here. Experienced birders, campers, and fisherman will be available to give their expert advice.
So if you love the outdoors, want to learn more, and/or share what you already know, check out the Wilderness, Wildlife and Ecology Forum. Ask us a Question!
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| Morchella esculenta (yellow morel) |
Posted by cjhsa on May, 16. :: 4 Comments
Found a nice bunch of them last night. The largest was as big as a dollar bill. Unreal. If you don't look, you won't find!
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| Crazy Ants Are For Real - New Species in Houston |
Posted by edgarblythe on May, 14. :: 18 Comments
In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers.
The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as "crazy rasberry ants" — crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and "rasberry" after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on.
"They're itty-bitty things about the size of fleas, and they're just running everywhere," said Patsy Morphew of Pearland, who is constantly sweeping them off her patio and scooping them out of her pool by the cupful. "There's just thousands and thousands of them. If you've seen a car racing, that's how they are. They're going fast, fast, fast. They're crazy."
The ants — formally known as "paratrenicha species near pubens" — have spread to five Houston-area counties since they were first spotted in Texas in 2002.
The newly recognized species is believed to have arrived in a cargo shipment through the port of Houston. Scientists are not sure exactly where the ants came from, but their cousins, commonly called crazy ants, are found in the Southeast and the Caribbean.
"At this point, it would be nearly impossible to eradicate the ant because it is so widely dispersed," said Roger Gold, a Texas A&M University entomologist.
The good news? They eat fire ants, the stinging red terrors of Texas summers.
But the ants also like to suck the sweet juices from plants, feed on such beneficial insects as ladybugs, and eat the hatchlings of a small, endangered type of grouse known as the Attwater prairie chicken.
They also bite humans, though not with a stinger like fire ants.
Worse, they, like some other species of ants, are attracted to electrical equipment, for reasons that are not well understood by scientists.
They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner's gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA's Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven't caused any major problems there yet.
Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasing because the ants — which are starting to emerge by the billions with the onset of the warm, humid season — appear to be resistant to over-the-counter ant killers.
"The population built up so high that typical ant controls simply did no good," said Jason Meyers, an A&M doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on the one-eighth-inch-long ant.
It's not enough just to kill the queen. Experts say each colony has multiple queens that have to be taken out.
At the same time, the ants aren't taking the bait usually left out in traps, according to exterminators, who want the Environmental Protection Agency to loosen restrictions on the use of more powerful pesticides.
And when you do kill these ants, the survivors turn it to their advantage: They pile up the dead, sometimes using them as a bridge to cross safely over surfaces treated with pesticide.
"It looked like someone had come along and poured coffee granules all around the perimeter of the rooms," said Lisa Calhoun, who paid exterminators $1,200 to treat an infestation of her parents' home in the Houston suburb of Pearland.
The Texas Department of Agriculture is working with A&M researchers and the EPA on how to stop the ants.
"This one seems to be like lava flowing and filling an entire area, getting bigger and bigger," said Ron Harrison, director of training for the big pest-control company Orkin Inc.
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| What do Petoskey Stones have to do with "Global Warming" |
Posted by cjhsa on May, 14. :: 38 Comments
Fist off, I doubt most of you know what a Petoskey stone is. It's Michigan's state stone, found primarily around Little Traverse Bay and the city of Petoskey, thus its name. But it can be found in any rocky area in the north part of the Great Lakes.
Petoskey stones are really fossilized corral, that grew in a sea that covered Michigan 360 million years ago. 360 million.....
Those seas eventually became the glaciers that carved out what are now the Great Lakes during the last great ice age. Those glaciers too receded during a period of "global warming" or Lake Michigan would just be a hole under 5000 feet of ice.
Anyway, I just thought you might like a little historical perspective. Go form your own opinions, but mine will always be that Al Gore is a dumbf**k.
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| Californian bans on plastic bags hit a snag |
Posted by dadpad on May, 09. :: 7 Comments
Local communities in California may find it more difficult to ban plastic bags after a judge granted an injunction against a ban in Oakland because the city failed to conduct an environmental review. Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch said there was substantial evidence to support an argument that paper bags are more environmentally damaging than plastic bags in a ruling on 17 April.
The decision was in response to a plastics industry lawsuit that the city did not comply with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which requires local governments to document the environmental impacts of their decisions. The coalition argued that paper bags take more energy to produce, create more greenhouse gas emissions, and cause 50 times more water pollution to manufacture than plastic bags.
But a sponsor of the Oakland ordinance said that litter caused by plastic bags is the main reason for the ban and why it improves the environment. Oakland must now decide whether it wants to appeal the decision of the ban or undertake a full environmental review of the ordinance. The ban went into effect Jan. 15, but has not been enforced.
The plastic bag ban in San Francisco is working and most consumers and large retailers are making the switch from plastic to paper or reusable bags, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. A new front on the public backlash against plastic packaging has been bans on polystyrene (PS) take-out food packaging. Source: RISI
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