World's Endangered Animals details.

Posted by Farhan Rao.

Endangered Animals

Greater Horseshoe Bat: Rhinolophus ferrumequinum

IUCN Status: least concern

Population trend: decreasing

There are eighteen species of bat in Britain and all of them are endangered - though globally they are listed as 'Least concern' as numbers in other countries remain higher - though the IUCN's Red List has marked their population as 'declining'.  

The greater horseshoe bat is one of the rarest in Britain.  One reason for their decline is the destruction of suitable roosting sites, such as old buildings and hollow trees.  Changing land use from woodland and small fields to large scale agriculture has also had an effect.  They have also suffered from the use of insecticides (poisonous chemicals sprayed on to crops to kill harmful insects) which have deprived the bats of their insect food.  Due to conservation efforts its population in the UK has stabilized at about 5000.

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Siberian (Amur) Tiger           

Panthera tigris ssp. altaica

IUCN status:  Endangered

Population trend: stable

Cold, snowy Siberia, Russia, is home to the largest of all the tigers, the Siberian tiger.

Population: It is highly endangered although its numbers have increased from an all time low of 20 in the 1930s.  There are now an estimated 360 Amur tigers in the wild, according to the IUCN. Hunting and loss of habitat have reduced their numbers and there is little genetic diversity in the remaining population, increasing their vulnerability  There is also a tiny population remaining in China of around 20 individuals.

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Loggerhead Turtle

Caretta caretta

IUCN Status: Endangered

This threatened reptile lives in the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the Black Sea and Atlantic Ocean. In the past its main dangers were hunting for its shell and meat. Now it is being disturbed by tourists populating the sandy beaches where it lays its eggs. In Turkey, hotels have been built right on its breeding sites. Out at sea, the turtles sometimes become entangled in fishing nets and drown.  A possible new threat to them may be the increase in sand temperatures which determines the sex of the turtle.  Warmer temperatures could result in an excess of females!

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Northern Bald Ibis

Geronticus eremita

IUCN Status: Critically endangered

Population trend: decreasing

Population: Morocco is home to 95% of the truly wild colonies of the ibis where populations are increasing and now number over 500 birds.  Syria also has a small and declining population with only 5 mature birds (IUCN; 2006).  Parts of North Africa and the Middle East are visited by these migrating birds.  Turkey also have a healthy semi-wild population of reintroduced birds, numbering 91 in 2006 (IUCN).  However, the use of pesticides on the marshes and grasslands where it lives is reducing the numbers.

Part of the ibis' decline is due to natural causes. It nests high above the ground and its eggs are so round that some of them roll out of the nest and break. However disturbance of nesting sites and feeding grounds is a more significant factor.  The Ancient Egyptians used to depict this bird in their heiroglyphic writing, but it no longer lives in Egypt.

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White Tailed Eagle
Haliaeetus albicilla

IUCN Status: Least concern

Population trend:  increasing.

Population: 5,000 - 6,000 breeding pairs in Europe.  An estimated global population of 20,300 - 39,600. (IUCN).

Before humans began polluting wetland habitats with pesticides, this spectacular bird of prey was much more numerous than it is today. In the Middle East, its population is now very small. The bird travels long distances in search of fish, and eating a number of poisoned fish causes the bird to lay infertile or thin-shelled eggs which are easily broken.  Modern forestry methods result in a loss of suitable nesting places.  They became extinct in Britain in the early 1900s due to persecution but are now breeding in Scotland since they were reintroduced in 1975.

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Lion-Tailed Macaque
Macaca silenus

IUCN Status: Endangered

Population trend: decreasing.

Population: Less than 4,000.

This small monkey is only found in south-west India's tropical rainforests. Many of these forests have been cleared and replaced with tea and coffee plantations. Unlike some other animals, the lion-tailed macaque has not been able to adapt to these new habitats. Poachers have also captured baby macaques, often killing their parents in the process, for illegal export to collectors.

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Mandarin Duck
Aix galericulata

IUCN Status: Least concern

Population trend: decreasing.
The mandarin duck (the brightly coloured male is illustrated) may often be seen on ponds and lakes in Britain, but its native home is across eastern Asia, in Russia, China, Korea and Japan. It may be found on water which is near forests, but the forests are being felled and the water drained, making the duck more and more endangered.

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Mountain Gorilla
Gorilla beringei subspecies beringei.

IUCN Status: Endangered

Population trend: unknown

Population: 300

The Virunga volcanoes region in eastern Zaire, Rwanda and Uganda is the only home of the highly endangered mountain gorilla. It depends on dense forests for survival and these are steadily being cut down to make way for crop growing and livestock grazing as well as mining. The gorilla is protected by law, but despite this, some of its so-called sanctuaries have been cleared, and hunters kill them for food and trophies, especially in the war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. 

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Jackass Penguin
Spheniscus demersus

IUCN Status: Endangered

Population trend: declining

Population: 52,000 mature individuals

The jackass penguin is the only penguin to be found in Africa, and it was once the country's most common sea-bird. It lives off the coast of Namibia and South Africa, and the waters here have been over-fished by humans, depriving the birds of their food supply. Oil pollution also threatens them, as does the taking of their eggs for food.

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Blue Whale
Balaenoptera musculus

IUCN Status: Endangered

Population trend: increasing

Population: An estimated 10,000 - 25,000 (3-11% of the 1911 population). (IUCN)

The largest animal ever to have lived on our planet, the blue whale, lives mainly in the cold waters of the Arctic and Antarctic, where it finds enough plankton to sustain it. It migrates to tropical seas to breed. The blue whale has been a protected species since 1966, but thousands were killed up until then. During the whaling season of 1930 to 1931 alone, 30,000 blue whales were killed by Antarctic whalers.  It will take more than one hundred years of protection before we can be sure that it will not become extinct.

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Numbat
Myrmecobius fasciatus

IUCN Status: Endangered

Population trend: declining

Population: under 1000

Sometimes called the banded anteater, the numbat was once common in the bush and forest of north-eastern and southern Australia. It is now only found in the most western part of eastern Australia. When man introduced predatory animals such as cats, dogs and foxes, these animals ate many numbats. Their numbers are still declining for the same reasons and also because their habitat is being cleared for farming and mining.  Frequent fires destroy the logs which the animals use to shelter.

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Komodo Dragon
Varanus komodoensis

IUCN Status: Vulnerable

Population trend: stable (National Geographic)

Population: 3,000 - 5,000 (National Geographic)

The Komodo dragon is the largest lizard in the world and lives on a few small Indonesian islands. It is a powerful predator and can measure as much as 3 metres in length. There are about 3,000 Komodo dragons in total, but they seem to be slowly declining. They live mainly on uninhabited islands, so are in no great danger from humans. Scientists think that natural causes are to blame. There are more males than females alive, and also the natural plant life seems to be changing and the lizards are not adapting well to their new environment.

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Golden Lion Tamarin
Leontopithecus rosalia

IUCN Status: Endangered

Population Trend: stable

Population: Over 1000.

This tiny monkey is one of the most endangered of all animals in South America. The few that are left, are restricted to the only remaining coastal rainforest, southwest of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Forest destruction is the main reason for the tamarin's decline, but it is also in danger of being captured alive and sold as a pet - a strictly illegal practice which still goes on in secret. At their worst, numbers declined to as low as 250 but due to a captive breeding and reintroduction programme they have increased to a healthy 1000 and live in a protected area of forest.  The problem they face now is that they do not have room to expand due to the fragmention of their habitat.  Fires started by cattle farmers are a continued threat.

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Spectacled Bear
Tremarctos ornatus

IUCN Status: Vulnerable

Population trend: decreasing

Population: no sufficient data; estimates of fewer than 3,000 (National Geographic)

This bear gets its name from a yellowish mask which makes it appear to be wearing a pair of spectacles! It lives in the forest-covered mountains of several South American countries. As the forests are cleared for farming, the bear's numbers fall. Even though it is protected by law, the spectacled bear is still killed by poachers for its fur, meat and fat.

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Californian Condor
Gymnogyps californianus

IUCN Status: Critically endangered

Population trend: increasing

Population: 104 adults, but currently only 44 are producing offspring.

During the nineteenth century this large bird of prey lived in the mountains of many areas of North America. It started to decline last century when it was killed by gold diggers who collected its long black feathers. Disturbance of its habitat by tourists, pesticides and low-flying aircraft also contributed to its downfall.  In 1987 the last remaining wild Californian condors were taken into captivity.  They have since been reintroduced to the wild with some success, but they are still at great risk.

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Black-Footed Ferret

Mustela nigripes

IUCN Status: Endangered

Population trend: increasing

Population: 500 (breeding adults).

The black-footed ferret is America's rarest mammal. It was considered extinct in the wild in 1987 but through a captive breeding programme its numbers have risen.  Its decline has been due to the decline of its primary prey.  This ferret hunts prairie dogs on open grassland, and as this habitat has been turned into farmland, farmers have tried to eliminate the prairie dogs, viewed as a pest, by putting poison down their burrows. The black-footed ferret has also been poisoned by accident.

Knowledge Full information about Forests.

9 facts you need to know about forests and trees.

Posted by Farhan Rao.

World of Biologyhttp://worldofbiologyformembers.blogspot.com/2016/03/20-weird-facts-of-biology.html?spref=fb

All rights reserved. Credit: Farhan Rao

Trees are incredible. They can live for thousands of years and grow hundreds of metres tall. There is not a species on the planet that doesn’t owe its existence to them. So here are some amazing facts about trees and forests for International Day of Forests.

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1. The Boreal forest (aka Taiga) is the largest land habitat on the planet
It runs across northern USA and Canada, southern Iceland, across Norway, Finland, Sweden, through Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and northern Japan. This region is one of the most threatened by climate change and has experienced some of the most dramatic temperature increases anywhere on Earth. Not to mention the threat from clearcutting for toilet paper, timber logging and, in Canada, tar sands oil extraction which now covers an area larger than England.

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2. More species of plant and animal live in the rainforest than any other land habitat
The Indonesian rainforest alone is home to one fifth of all plant and animal life yet it is disappearing at a faster rate than at any other time. There are now fewer than 400 Sumatran tigers left in the wild as their habitat is destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations.

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3. Not all rainforests are tropical
The Great Bear rainforest in western Canada is home to the extremely rare Kermode “spirit” bear. A subspecies of black bears, their white coat is caused by a recessive gene, but it makes them expert fishers as they are harder to see. Whilst most of the Great Bear rainforest is protected, parts of it are still under threat from logging for timber. The sitka spruce that grows there is particularly prized for making guitars, violins and mandolins.

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4. More than 25% of the medicines we use originate in rainforest plants
Yet only 1% of rainforest plants have been studied for medicinal properties. Every second an area of rainforest the size of a football pitch is cut down meaning every day we might lose a potential cure.

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5. The forests are the lungs of our planet
They play a crucial role in stabilising global climate by converting CO2 into oxygen. As we pump more and more CO2 into the atmosphere the forest’s ability to regulate the global climate is increasingly diminished.

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6. Orangutans are the largest tree-dwelling mammal
Unlike most other primates, they spend more time in the trees than on the ground. Their tools use is incredibly advanced; they build tree nests to sleep in, use sticks to probe logs for honey and one was even observed trying to spear fish after observing locals doing the same. Their rainforest home is being cut down to make paper and to create space for palm oil plantations.

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7. The tallest tree in the world is called Hyperion
It's a coast redwood from California that measures an incredible 115.61m tall. The largest tree in the world by volume is a giant sequoia called General Sherman which has a trunk 10m round and contains an estimated 1486 cubic metres of wood.

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8. The world’s oldest non-clonal tree is a recently-discovered and as yet unnamed Great Basin bristlecone pine tree from the White Mountains in California
It's still living at an incredible 5063 years old. Old Tjikko is the oldest single-clonal tree (meaning a new trunk is grown from original roots) at an astonishing 9,550 years old. But if you thought it ended there, then you’ve never heard of Pando…

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9. Pando, also know as The Trembling Giant, is a colony of quaking aspen trees
Testing has shown this group of trees to be a single organism and is assumed to be connected by a single massive roots system. So here it is, the age: Pando is thought to be around 80,000 years old making it the oldest living organism on the planet (except the immortal jellyfish which technically never dies of old age).

Trees are amongst the most incredible organisms on the planet. Despite the vital role they play every day in the life of every living thing on the planet, they are under constant threat. But together we can stand up to protect the forests. Join us.

20 weird facts of Biology.

SOME FACTS OF BIOLOGY
1. APPENDIX TO LIFE

 Body appendix Photograph: 

The appendix gets a bad press. It is usually treated as a body part that lost its function millions of years ago. All it seems to do is occasionally get infected and cause appendicitis. Yet recently it has been discovered that the appendix is very useful to the bacteria that help your digestive system function. They use it to get respite from the strain of the frenzied activity of the gut, somewhere to breed and help keep the gut's bacterial inhabitants topped up. So treat your appendix with respect.

2 SUPERSIZED MOLECULES

Practically everything we experience is made up of molecules. These vary in size from simple pairs of atoms, like an oxygen molecule, to complex organic structures. But the biggest molecule in nature resides in your body. It is chromosome 1. A normal human cell has 23 pairs of chromosomes in its nucleus, each a single, very long, molecule of DNA. Chromosome 1 is the biggest, containing around 10bn atoms, to pack in the amount of information that is encoded in the molecule.

3 ATOM COUNT

It is hard to grasp just how small the atoms that make up your body are until you take a look at the sheer number of them. An adult is made up of around 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.

4 FUR LOSS

 Body chimp Photograph:

It might seem hard to believe, but we have about the same number of hairs on our bodies as a chimpanzee, it's just that our hairs are useless, so fine they are almost invisible. We aren't sure quite why we lost our protective fur. It has been suggested that it may have been to help early humans sweat more easily, or to make life harder for parasites such as lice and ticks, or even because our ancestors were partly aquatic.

But perhaps the most attractive idea is that early humans needed to co-operate more when they moved out of the trees into the savanna. When animals are bred for co-operation, as we once did with wolves to produce dogs, they become more like their infants. In a fascinating 40-year experiment starting in the 1950s, Russian foxes were bred for docility. Over the period, adult foxes become more and more like large cubs, spending more time playing, and developing drooping ears, floppy tails and patterned coats. Humans similarly have some characteristics of infantile apes – large heads, small mouths and, significantly here, finer body hair.

5 GOOSEBUMP EVOLUTION

 Body goosebumps Photograph: 

Goosepimples are a remnant of our evolutionary predecessors. They occur when tiny muscles around the base of each hair tense, pulling the hair more erect. With a decent covering of fur, this would fluff up the coat, getting more air into it, making it a better insulator. But with a human's thin body hair, it just makes our skin look strange.

Similarly we get the bristling feeling of our hair standing on end when we are scared or experience an emotive memory. Many mammals fluff up their fur when threatened, to look bigger and so more dangerous. Humans used to have a similar defensive fluffing up of their body hairs, but once again, the effect is now ruined. We still feel the sensation of hairs standing on end, but gain no visual bulk.

6 SPACE TRAUMA

 Body astronaut Photograph: 

If sci-fi movies were to be believed, terrible things would happen if your body were pushed from a spaceship without a suit. But it's mostly fiction. There would be some discomfort as the air inside the body expanded, but nothing like the exploding body parts Hollywood loves. Although liquids do boil in a vacuum, your blood is kept under pressure by your circulatory system and would be just fine. And although space is very cold, you would not lose heat particularly quickly. As Thermos flasks demonstrate, a vacuum is a great insulator.

In practice, the thing that will kill you in space is simply the lack of air. In 1965 a test subject's suit sprang a leak in a Nasa vacuum chamber. The victim, who survived, remained conscious for around 14 seconds. The exact survival limit isn't known, but would probably be one to two minutes.

7 ATOMIC COLLAPSE

The atoms that make up your body are mostly empty space, so despite there being so many of them, without that space you would compress into a tiny volume. The nucleus that makes up the vast bulk of the matter in an atom is so much smaller than the whole structure that it is comparable to the size of a fly in a cathedral. If you lost all your empty atomic space, your body would fit into a cube less than 1/500th of a centimetre on each side. Neutron stars are made up of matter that has undergone exactly this kind of compression. In a single cubic centimetre of neutron star material there are around 100m tons of matter. An entire neutron star, heavier than our sun, occupies a sphere that is roughly the size across of the Isle of Wight.

8 ELECTROMAGNETIC REPULSION

The atoms that make up matter never touch each other. The closer they get, the more repulsion there is between the electrical charges on their component parts. It's like trying to bring two intensely powerful magnets together, north pole to north pole. This even applies when objects appear to be in contact. When you sit on a chair, you don't touch it. You float a tiny distance above, suspended by the repulsion between atoms. This electromagnetic force is vastly stronger than the force of gravity – around a billion billion billion billion times stronger. You can demonstrate the relative strength by holding a fridge magnet near a fridge and letting go. The electromagnetic force from the tiny magnet overwhelms the gravitational attraction of the whole Earth.

9 STARDUST TO STARDUST

 Body atoms Photograph: 

Every atom in your body is billions of years old. Hydrogen, the most common element in the universe and a major feature of your body, was produced in the big bang 13.7bn years ago. Heavier atoms such as carbon and oxygen were forged in stars between 7bn and 12bn years ago, and blasted across space when the stars exploded. Some of these explosions were so powerful that they also produced the elements heavier than iron, which stars can't construct. This means that the components of your body are truly ancient: you are stardust.

10 THE QUANTUM BODY

One of the mysteries of science is how something as apparently solid and straightforward as your body can be made of strangely behaving quantum particles such as atoms and their constituents. If you ask most people to draw a picture of one of the atoms in their bodies, they will produce something like a miniature solar system, with a nucleus as the sun and electrons whizzing round like planets. This was, indeed, an early model of the atom, but it was realised that such atoms would collapse in an instant. This is because electrons have an electrical charge and accelerating a charged particle, which is necessary to keep it in orbit, would make it give off energy in the form of light, leaving the electron spiralling into the nucleus.

In reality, electrons are confined to specific orbits, as if they ran on rails. They can't exist anywhere between these orbits but have to make a "quantum leap" from one to another. What's more, as quantum particles, electrons exist as a collection of probabilities rather than at specific locations, so a better picture is to show the electrons as a set of fuzzy shells around the nucleus.

11 RED BLOODED

 Body Blood cells Photograph: 

When you see blood oozing from a cut in your finger, you might assume that it is red because of the iron in it, rather as rust has a reddish hue. But the presence of the iron is a coincidence. The red colour arises because the iron is bound in a ring of atoms in haemoglobin called porphyrin and it's the shape of this structure that produces the colour. Just how red your haemoglobin is depends on whether there is oxygen bound to it. When there is oxygen present, it changes the shape of the porphyrin, giving the red blood cells a more vivid shade.

12 GOING VIRAL

 Body DNA Photograph: 

Surprisingly, not all the useful DNA in your chromosomes comes from your evolutionary ancestors – some of it was borrowed from elsewhere. Your DNA includes the genes from at least eight retroviruses. These are a kind of virus that makes use of the cell's mechanisms for coding DNA to take over a cell. At some point in human history, these genes became incorporated into human DNA. These viral genes in DNA now perform important functions in human reproduction, yet they are entirely alien to our genetic ancestry.

13 OTHER LIFE

On sheer count of cells, there is more bacterial life inside you than human. There are around 10tn of your own cells, but 10 times more bacteria. Many of the bacteria that call you home are friendly in the sense that they don't do any harm. Some are beneficial.

In the 1920s, an American engineer investigated whether animals could live without bacteria, hoping that a bacteria-free world would be a healthier one. James "Art" Reyniers made it his life's work to produce environments where animals could be raised bacteria-free. The result was clear. It was possible. But many of Reyniers's animals died and those that survived had to be fed on special food. This is because bacteria in the gut help with digestion. You could exist with no bacteria, but without the help of the enzymes in your gut that bacteria produce, you would need to eat food that is more loaded with nutrients than a typical diet.

14 EYELASH INVADERS

 Body mite.

Depending on how old you are, it's pretty likely that you have eyelash mites. These tiny creatures live on old skin cells and the natural oil (sebum) produced by human hair follicles. They are usually harmless, though they can cause an allergic reaction in a minority of people. Eyelash mites typically grow to a third of a millimetre and are near-transparent, so you are unlikely to see them with the naked eye. Put an eyelash hair or eyebrow hair under the microscope, though, and you may find them, as they spend most of their time right at the base of the hair where it meets the skin. Around half the population have them, a proportion that rises as we get older.

15 PHOTON DETECTORS

 Body eye Photograph:

Your eyes are very sensitive, able to detect just a few photons of light. If you take a look on a very clear night at the constellation of Andromeda, a little fuzzy patch of light is just visible with the naked eye. If you can make out that tiny blob, you are seeing as far as is humanly possible without technology. Andromeda is the nearest large galaxy to our own Milky Way. But "near" is a relative term in intergalactic space – the Andromeda galaxy is 2.5m light years away. When the photons of light that hit your eye began their journey, there were no human beings. We were yet to evolve. You are seeing an almost inconceivable distance and looking back in time through 2.5m years.

16 SENSORY TALLY

Despite what you've probably been told, you have more than five senses. Here's a simple example. Put your hand a few centimetres away from a hot iron. None of your five senses can tell you the iron will burn you. Yet you can feel that the iron is hot from a distance and won't touch it. This is thanks to an extra sense – the heat sensors in your skin. Similarly we can detect pain or tell if we are upside down.

Another quick test. Close your eyes and touch your nose. You aren't using the big five to find it, but instead proprioception. This is the sense that detects where the parts of your body are with respect to each other. It's a meta-sense, combining your brain's knowledge of what your muscles are doing with a feel for the size and shape of your body. Without using your basic five senses, you can still guide a hand unerringly to touch your nose.

17 REAL AGE

 Body ovum Photograph: 

Just like a chicken, your life started off with an egg. Not a chunky thing in a shell, but an egg nonetheless. However, there is a significant difference between a human egg and a chicken egg that has a surprising effect on your age. Human eggs are tiny. They are, after all, just a single cell and are typically around 0.2mm across – about the size of a printed full stop. Your egg was formed in your mother – but the surprising thing is that it was formed when she was an embryo. The formation of your egg, and the half of your DNA that came from your mother, could be considered as the very first moment of your existence. And it happened before your mother was born. Say your mother was 30 when she had you, then on your 18th birthday you were arguably over 48 years old.

18 EPIGENETIC INFLUENCE

We are used to thinking of genes as being the controlling factor that determines what each of us is like physically, but genes are only a tiny part of our DNA. The other 97% was thought to be junk until recently, but we now realise that epigenetics – the processes that go on outside the genes – also have a major influence on our development. Some parts act to control "switches" that turn genes on and off, or program the production of other key compounds. For a long time it was a puzzle how around 20,000 genes (far fewer than some breeds of rice) were enough to specify exactly what we were like. The realisation now is that the other 97% of our DNA is equally important.

19 CONSCIOUS ACTION

 Body M R I Photograph:

If you are like most people, you will locate your conscious mind roughly behind your eyes, as if there were a little person sitting there, steering the much larger automaton that is your body. You know there isn't really a tiny figure in there, pulling the levers, but your consciousness seems to have an independent existence, telling the rest of your body what to do.

In reality, much of the control comes from your unconscious. Some tasks become automatic with practice, so that we no longer need to think about the basic actions. When this happens the process is handled by one of the most primitive parts of the brain, close to the brain stem. However even a clearly conscious action such as picking up an object seems to have some unconscious precursors, with the brain firing up before you make the decision to act. There is considerable argument over when the conscious mind plays its part, but there is no doubt that we owe a lot more to our unconscious than we often allow.

20 OPTICAL DELUSION

The picture of the world we "see" is artificial. Our brains don't produce an image the way a video camera works. Instead, the brain constructs a model of the world from the information provided by modules that measure light and shade, edges, curvature and so on. This makes it simple for the brain to paint out the blind spot, the area of your retina where the optic nerve joins, which has no sensors. It also compensates for the rapid jerky movements of our eyes called saccades, giving a false picture of steady vision.

But the downside of this process is that it makes our eyes easy to fool. TV, films and optical illusions work by misleading the brain about what the eye is seeing. This is also why the moon appears much larger than it is and seems to vary in size: the true optical size of the moon is similar to a hole created by a hole punch held at arm's length.