Shark attack survivors urge U.N. to protect sharks

UNITED NATIONS — They have the scars and missing limbs that make it hard to forgive, but these victims are tougher than most. And now they want to save their attackers. They are shark attack survivors, a band of nine thrown together in an unlikely and ironic mission to conserve the very creatures that ripped their flesh, tore off their limbs and nearly took their lives.

They want nations to adopt a resolution that would require them to greatly improve how fish are managed, including shark species, of which nearly a third are threatened with extinction or on the verge of being threatened.

"We do not have scientific management plans for how many sharks can be caught," Matt Rand, director of Global Shark Conservation for the Pew Environment Group, told reporters at the United Nations on Monday. "There are no limits."

Speaking with the attack survivors at a news conference held to draw attention to the world's dwindling shark population, Rand said the U.N. and its member nations must do more to resolve the problem.

"If a group like us can see the value in saving sharks, can't everyone?" asked Florida shark bite victim Debbie Salamone, 44, whose Achilles tendon was severed in a 2004 attack.

Russian circus cuts fish-swallowing, regurgitating act on tour of Australia after complaints

SYDNEY — A Russian circus touring Australia has dropped an act in which a performer swallows a live fish, then regurgitates it, after complaints that it was in poor taste and inhumane.

Great Moscow Circus general manager Greg Hall said Wednesday that the fish-gobbling part of the show was removed on Monday after the New South Wales state government informed it that the act breached animal protection laws.

The act was brought to the attention of authorities by some circus patrons who lodged official complaints about animal cruelty.

Hall said similar acts were performed in circuses around the world, but that the circus would revamp the act following the complaints and not use live fish for the Australian shows.

The New South Wales industry and investment department said it had received a complaint and ordered the circus to discontinue the act.

"Circuses operating in New South Wales must comply with prescribed standards for the welfare of animals," the department said in a statement.

Rescuers work to save animals affected by southern Michigan oil spill

MARSHALL, Mich. — Volunteers and government officers scrambled on Friday to save geese and other wildlife damaged by an oil spill in a southern Michigan river as the Canadian company that owns the ruptured pipeline said the crude had been contained.

Enbridge Inc. said its focus was shifting to cleaning up the spilled oil in the Kalamazoo River, which it estimates at 820,000 gallons. The Environmental Protection Agency puts the total at more than 1 million gallons.

Biologists fear the worst may be yet to come for fish in the river. Jay Wesley, a fish biologist with the state of Michigan, said the oil spill had killed fish in "very limited numbers" along the affected stretch of the river from Marshall westward into Battle Creek.

The bigger problems for fish may come within a week or so, if the oil spill results in decreased water oxygen levels. Wesley said insects, algae, frogs and turtles along the river have been killed in high numbers -- which could hurt the fish food supply.

"The effects are probably going to be more long-term," Wesley said. "We probably won't know the full effects for weeks or months or years."

What is a stonefish? In short, a creature you don't want to step on

What's both venomous and extremely adept at the art of camouflage?

What if we told you this creature lives underwater and possesses a series of dorsal spines that can pack a neurotoxin-filled wallop that's enough to kill an adult human?

This potentially hazardous animal, friends, is the stonefish -- five species that make up the genus Synanceia -- and woe to him (or her) who steps on it, innocently believing it to be a plain old rock. The stonefish doesn't use its venomous spines to catch prey; they're for defensive purposes only. But that doesn't make us any more inclined to want to get up close! Egypt Today writer Richard Hoath recently recalled an encounter with the nowhere-near-as-innocuous-as-it-looks creature:

I have only seen the stonefish once. This was on Jackson Reef in the Gulf of Aqaba. [Toward] the end of the dive, our dive guide pointed out a rock lying in the sandy base of a small ravine that cut into the reef. The guide seemed to be getting very excited by said rock, pointing and gesturing. I moved in closer and it seemed a rather unspectacular rock, rather rough, algae-ridden and certainly not worth a postcard home. And then the rock shot off and disappeared into a labyrinth of reef crevices and crevasses.

Thanks, but no thanks, stonefish. We consider ourselves fortunate that the closest we've ever gotten to you is the National Geographic channel. We're keeping our feet off the Australian ocean floor, if it's all the same to you.

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Hairy, yellow spider is named for David Bowie

-- Lindsay Barnett

Video: A stonefish eats. Credit: diver321 via YouTube

Alteration of water spill over Montana's Libby Dam may help endangered Kootenai River white sturgeon

SPOKANE, Wash. — The latest effort to save North America's largest freshwater fish from extinction begins this week when water is spilled over Montana's Libby Dam to encourage the ancient fish to spawn for the first time in more than three decades.

The wild Kootenai River white sturgeon, a toothless beast from the days of dinosaurs, has a large head, armor-like scales, can reach 19 feet long and top 1,000 pounds. It takes 20 or 30 years for white sturgeon to mature and reproduce.

An isolated population of the bottom-feeding behemoths lives along a stretch of the Kootenai that passes through Montana, Idaho and British Columbia, Canada. The construction of Libby Dam in 1974 stopped the river from flooding Bonners Ferry, Idaho, but also prevented the high-water flows that triggered the sturgeon to move upriver and spawn.

Before the dam, there were an estimated 10,000 Kootenai sturgeon. Fewer than 500 mature adults of spawning age remain.

The effort this week will spill up to 10,000 cubic feet of water per second over the dam in a huge waterfall for up to seven days, in what scientists hope will push the sturgeon to more productive spawning grounds in Idaho. The water will spill from Koocanusa Reservoir into the Kootenai River, where scientists hope the sturgeon will swim to the Bonners Ferry area.

Long Beach's Aquarium of the Pacific unveils state-of-the-art new veterinary facility, sea otter exhibit

LONG BEACH, Calif. — They don't cry, cough or run a fever, so how can you tell when a fish is sick?

You watch them, because you have to find them before you can fix them, explained Aquarium of the Pacific veterinarian Lance Adams, who is also known as a "wet vet" or "aqua doc."

Adams heads a team of about 50 aviculturists, mammalogists and aquarists who care for 11,000 fish, birds, mammals and reptiles at the aquarium, located about 25 miles south of Los Angeles.

The smallest of the animals, like baby sea horses, can weigh less than a gram, while the largest, like the California sea lion, can weigh more than 550 pounds.

The Molina Animal Care Center, a $5.5-million expansion that gives the aquarium a 14,000-square-foot hospital, opened Friday and gives the staff new space, new technology and a new audience.

The center will be one of only a few aquarium hospitals in the country where visitors can watch as animals are examined and treated, and it may be the only one that allows people to watch surgeries as they are performed, said Steve Feldman, a spokesman for the Assn. of Zoos and Aquariums, based in Maryland.

Elsewhere in The Times: Petco donates fur for Gulf Coast oil spill cleanup; India's cow-smuggling secret; Disneyland is home to goat kids and cats; and more!

-- We told you last week about a unique way dogs and cats are helping to combat the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill -- with their fur! Pet fur, wool, horse hair, feathers and, yes, human hair can all be used by a San Francisco organization called Matter of Trust to fashion mats and booms that helps to contain oil. The Times' environment blog, Greenspace, reports that the list of pet-grooming parlors sending shipments of fur to Matter of Trust is growing. One prominent new addition: Nearly 1,000 Petco stores are donating fur that would normally be discarded for use in the Gulf Coast area. The company says it intends to ship about a ton of fur daily and expected to accumulate 5 million pounds over Mother's Day weekend alone. Richard Ambrose, a UCLA professor of environmental health science, told Greenspace that he'd never heard of hair being put to this use, but provided that "it's cost effective and it works well, then it seems great." 

-- One might think that India would be an earthly paradise for cows, but Times reporter Mark Magnier recently reported on what he calls a "dirty little secret that most Indian politicians don't discuss" -- the thriving cow-smuggling trade between India and neighboring Bangladesh, where beef is consumed by many citizens. Estimates suggest somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5 million cows, some stolen from their Indian caretakers, are smuggled from India to Bangladeshi slaughterhouses each year. "Delhi is biased against cow killing, but beef is very delicious," Haripada Biswas, a state assemblyman from India's Jagadal district, told Magnier. "And many of the illegal cows arrive from cow-loving states. Those guys act all principled, and quickly blame us, but don't seem above making a tidy profit." The local government in India's Murshidabad district even attempted to stem the smuggling tide by issuing photo ID cards to cows, but the measure has been largely ineffective, according to residents.

Whisker-snouted sturgeon, a prehistoric holdover, flourishes in Wisconsin

SHAWANO, Wis. — It's been a tough fight for the whisker-snouted sturgeon.

The fish survived whatever killed the dinosaurs and have struggled against habitat destruction and overfishing. Now many of its 25 species are endangered, but a small pocket in upper Wisconsin boasts of having one of the world's largest concentrations of the fish.

The success is because of the state's strict spearing limits, poaching laws, restocking efforts and the popular -- and well-protected -- spring spawning, which mostly finished last week.

"If we can restore the sturgeon population in the Great Lakes and manage the current population effectively, then we know we are doing a pretty good job of managing the other aspects of the aquatic community," said state sturgeon expert Ron Bruch.

In Lake Winnebago there are now around 40,000 lake sturgeons, likely where the population was in the 1800s, Bruch said. In the 1950s, it was 10,000. Whereas in the Great Lakes system, there are now about 156,750, less than 1% of what it was in early 1800s, said Rob Elliott, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist.

Environmentalists fume over CITES' failure to protect marine life

DOHA, Qatar — Aggressive lobbying from Asian nations led by Japan killed all efforts to protect marine species at a U.N. meeting, leaving environmentalists fuming Thursday that efforts to conserve bluefin tuna and sharks were undermined by commercial interests.

The bid to regulate the trade was also hampered by concerns from poor nations that such measures would devastate their fishing economies at a time when many were just emerging from recession.

"This conference has been a disaster for conservation," said Oliver Knowles of Greenpeace. "Country after country has come out at this meeting arguing for business as usual and continued trade in wildlife species that are already devastated by human activity."

The 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, opened two weeks ago with calls from the United States and Europeans to give a lifeline to overfished oceans. But the meeting ended Thursday with little to show for their efforts.

A bid to ban the international export of Atlantic bluefin tuna, which is a key ingredient in sushi, was killed along with regulations on the pink and red coral trade. Six species of sharks failed to get protection despite studies showing their numbers had fallen by as much as 85 percent due to the booming fin trade in China and other parts of Asia.

Protection for hammerhead and oceanic whitetip sharks rejected at CITES meeting

DOHA, Qatar — Japan and China on Tuesday torpedoed proposals to protect hammerhead and oceanic whitetip sharks -- heavily sought for their prized fins -- in the latest victory of fishing interests over global conservation efforts.

The defeat of the U.S.-backed measures was part of an aggressive campaign by the Asian nations to oppose all marine proposals at the 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. They also defeated an export ban on Atlantic bluefin tuna, a proposal to regulate the coral trade and a separate shark conservation plan.

Critics accused the countries of putting business and politics ahead of efforts to protect the sharks, which are often fished only for their fins, with their carcasses discarded.

The issue has taken on more urgency due to an increasing demand for shark fin soup as increasing numbers of Chinese middle-class families become wealthier. The soup has long played a central part in traditional Chinese culture, often served at weddings and banquets.