Ending the three-day elephant survey, the Department of Wildlife Conservation is getting ready to prepare the final statistical analysis of the survey. According to Director General, Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC) H.D. Ratnayake, it will take around two weeks to prepare the final analysis.

The National Elephant Survey was conducted through more than 1,500 observation points across the country. Officers were stationed at these spots by August 11 and the count began on August 12. Wildlife and Agrarian Services Minister S.M. Chandrasena told the media last week that the data collected by the survey will be utilised to form an efficient and scientific plan for elephant conservation while bringing a sustainable solution to the human-elephant conflict.

According to Minister Chandrasena, the survey will give a good understanding of Sri Lanka's elephants as one unit. Knowing the number of elephants living outside protected areas will be one of the supportive ...

A well-known environmentalist and senior tourism industry personnel, Srilal Miththapala last week claimed that a government big wig had shot his mouth that 200 elephants would be translocated in Hambantota and this could cause severe repercussions where there could be a strong international lobby against granting Sri Lanka the hosting of the 2018 Commonwealth Games.
Miththapala, who was speaking on ‘Nature Based Tourism’ under the topic, ‘Nature Based Tourism,’ at a workshop on ‘Sustainable Bio-diversity & Economic development,’ said, “A big wig had shouted his mouth about the 200 elephants in Hambantota. This could cause irreparable damage to our Commonwealth Games bid because the international lobby is so powerful that they could make a strong case to the Commonwealth Games Committee against granting Sri Lanka the hosting of the 2018 Games in view of the fact that some 200 elephants are to be translocated in Hambantota which is earmarked as the games village. It will be big tim...

A rare blue whale  washed ashore on the beach front of the Mannar coast earlier yesterday and  authorities were making arrangements to examine the dead mammal.

According to reports the whale is believed to have died some time ago before strong currents brought it to the shores in Mannar.

A wound on the highly decomposed body on one side of the mammal suggests that it would have been hit a rudder of a ship, somewhere in the deep seas.
Sunday Times

A number of development programmes will commence today connected with the Wilpattu National Park, to coincide with the inauguration of the Deyata Kirula exhibition in Anuradhapura.

Agrarian Services and Wildlife Minister S M Chandrasena will lay the foundation stone for constructing a new entrance to the Wilpattu National Park from the Southern side of the park. Action has also been taken to undertake restoration of twenty tanks.

In addition, seven tourist homes and fifteen tourist camp grounds will be constructed by the park managements. An electric fence for the Eastern side of the park, is also to be constructed within a length of 100 metres.

With the opening of the new entrance, sightseers arriving from ares such as Jaffna and Vavuniya will be in a position to enjoy easier entrance to the park.

 Daily News

Documenting new seabird-colony Important Bird Areas, finding previously undocumented colonies and colonies thought to be extirpated: these are just some of the exciting discoveries reported within Environmental Protection in the Caribbean’s (EPIC’s) ground-breaking Seabird Breeding Atlas of the Lesser Antilles.
Stretching in an arc from Anguilla to Grenada, the Lesser Antilles are the final frontier between the Caribbean Sea and the vast expanses of the Atlantic Ocean. A full seabird census had previously never been undertaken in the region – our knowledge often being based on anecdotal notes from the early 19th century.

Over an 11-month study period (2009 – 2010), EPIC’s partners Katharine and David Lowrie, sailed 3,162 nautical miles, surveying by land and/or sea 200 islands capable of supporting seabirds, with each island surveyed in the winter breeding season and again during the summer.

David Wege, Senior Caribbean Program Manager, BirdLife...

Tropical birds are moving to higher elevations because of climate change, but they may not be moving fast enough to keep up, according to a new study by Duke University researchers.

The study, recently published in the peer-reviewed online journal PLoS ONE, finds that the birds aren't migrating as rapidly as scientists previously anticipated based on recorded temperature increases.

The animals instead may be tracking changes in vegetation, which can only move slowly via seed dispersal.
"This is the first study to evaluate the effects of warming on the elevation ranges of tropical birds," says Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and a co-author of the study. "It provides new evidence of their response to warming, but also shows there is a delay in their response."
Evidence from temperate areas, such as North America and Europe, shows that many animal and plant species are adapting to clima...

ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2012) — A Malagasy-German research team has discovered a new primate species in the Sahafina Forest in eastern Madagascar, a forest that has not been studied before. The name of the new species is Gerp's mouse lemur (Microcebus gerpi), chosen to honour the Malagasy research group GERP (Groupe d'Étude et de Recherche sur les Primates de Madagascar). Several researchers of GERP have visited the Sahafina Forest in 2008 and 2009 to create an inventory the local lemurs.

They captured several mouse lemurs, measured them, took photos and small biopsies for genetic studies, and released them again. Prof. Ute Radespiel, Institute of Zoology of the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, analysed the samples and the morphological dataset, and confirmed that the animals from the Sahafina Forest belong to an undescribed species of the small nocturnal mouse lemurs.

„We were quite surprised by these findings. The Sahafina Forest is only 50km away from ...

ScienceDaily (Dec. 8, 2011) — A study of South American songbirds completed by the Department of Biology at Queen's University and the Argentine Museum of Natural History, has discovered these birds differ dramatically in colour and song yet show very little genetic differences, indicating they are on the road to becoming a new species.

"One of Darwin's accomplishments was to show that species could change, that they were not the unaltered, immutable products of creation," says Leonardo Campagna, a Ph.-D biology student at the Argentine Museum of Natural History in Buenos Aires, who studied at Queen's as part of his thesis. "However it is only now, some 150 years after the publication of his most important work, On the Origin of Species, that we have the tools to begin to truly understand all of the stages that might lead to speciation which is the process by which an ancestral species divides into two or more new species."
For decades scientists have struggled to under...

It’s one of nature’s greatest miracles: millions of birds leave Africa each spring and head north to nest in the UK and other parts of Europe, only to return to Africa each autumn. However this multi-million-winged migration is under threat.

In the UK, for example, according to the 2010 Breeding Bird Survey of the 10 UK birds which have declined the most since 1995, eight are summer migrants, including the Common Cuckoo, European Turtle-dove, Yellow Wagtail and Common Nightingale. Similar rates of loss have been noted across Europe.

The decline of these birds is so devastatingly fast that it’s rapidly being dubbed one of the greatest crises in modern conservation.

Between 1995 and 2010, according to the 2010 Breeding Bird Survey the UK has lost more than seven out of every ten turtle-doves (74%) and nearly half of its cuckoos (48%). Over the same period: nightingale and Wood Warbler numbers have more than halved (63% and 60%, respectively); Whinchat...