Robot being used to Kill Queen of Thorns Starfish on Great Barrier Reef

On Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the Crown-of-thorns starfish destroys large swathes of coral
and threatens the overall health of the reef. This starfish is proving difficult to find and eradicate with conventional methods.

Queensland University of Technology researchers have created a hunter-killer robot – the COTSbot – that's designed to automatically search out and destroy these aquatic pests.

the COTSbot is fitted with stereoscopic cameras to provide it with depth perception, along with
five individual stability thrusters, GPS navigation, pitch-and-roll sensors, and the weapon that gives it its killer status: A pneumatic injection arm is used to give a COTS  a lethal dose of bile salts.

If the robot is unsure that something is actually a COTS, it takes a photo of the object to be
later verified by a human, and that human feedback is incorporated into the robot's memory bank.

The robot has been trained to think for itself over a period of six months.

New Horizons spacecraft survives encounter with Pluto

A signal received from the New Horizons spacecraft shows that it survived its historic
encounter with Pluto.

Data in its first call home since Tuesday's flyby suggest the spacecraft experienced no upsets
as it hurtled past the icy world at 14km/s (31,000mph).

The signal came through a giant dish in Madrid, Spain - part of a Nasa network of
communications antennas.

The message took four hours 25 minutes to traverse 4.7 billion km of space.

Pluto has mountains made of ice that are as high as those in the Rockies, images from the New Horizons probe reveal.They also show signs of geological activity on Pluto and its moon Charon

Mission scientist John Spencer told journalists that the first close-up image of Pluto's surface showed a terrain that had been resurfaced by some geological process - such as volcanism - within the last 100 million years.

"We have not found a single impact crater on this image. This means it must be a very young surface," he said.


A true explorer - now set to wander the Galaxy for a long time to come.

Pine Martens back in England

The first confirmed sighting of a wild pine marten in England for over a century has been
recorded in a Shropshire woodland.

An amateur photographer spotted the mammal, thought to be extinct, in early July, and passed
photos to the Shropshire Wildlife Trust.

There have been numerous reports in the county, but trust mammal expert Stuart Edmunds was able
to verify the image.

He said the animals may have been living in the area for years.

Great news. Lets hope they spread.

Insect farming in Democratic Republic of Congo

Experts hope that the love of edible insects in the Democratic Republic of Congo may hold the key to tackling widespread hunger among its approximately 65 million people by scaling up a millennia-old consumption habit.

Six and a half million people live in food insecurity in the country. Edible insects have always been popular in the  Congo. Often served as bar food or on special occasions, they are grilled and commonly served with hot pepper, lemon and onions.

“This is the main food of the Congolese,” said Marie-Colette Bena, who sells clothing at the market. “I’m proud to eat that food.”

The average household in the capital, Kinshasa, consumes about 300g of caterpillars a week, but the supplies are seasonal and expensive. In Kinshasa, a kilogramme of crickets costs more than twice the price of beef.

Congo’s environment ministry and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) are introducing a new programme to promote insect cultivation; in the hope that prices will come down.

The project, due to begin in October, will train two hundred people – most of them women – in western Congo to cultivate caterpillars and crickets. Laurent Kikeba, who oversees the project for the FAO, said it would be the first of its kind in the world. Insects are easily raised in confined spaces and need little capital investment.

“For the fight against malnutrition, this is an ideal food,” said Paul Monzambe, a professor of agronomy at the National Pedagogic University (UPN) in Kinshasa, who is collaborating on the project. “The crisis is such that we must think now of all possible approaches.”

In a 2013 report, the FAO hailed insect cultivation as a practical and environmentally-friendly tool to boost food production as supply struggles to keep pace with global population growth.

The report notes insects are bountiful, widely consumed and contain high levels of protein, fat, vitamins, fibre and minerals. They tend to require less feed and yield more meat per kilogram than traditional protein sources.

- See more at: http://africageographic.com/blog/insect-farming-combat-malnutrition-help-women-drc/#sthash.mfBsayPT.dpuf

Rhinos being airlifted to safety in Botswana

The largest airlift of rhinos ever undertaken has begun. As on the 28th April, the first group of rhinos, caught in South Africa, were released into Botswana.

Because of the long and porous border between the Kruger National Park in South Africa and Mozambique, it is proving impossible to protect the rhino population in the park and elesewhere from the constant stream of poachers from villages just inside Mozambique who are hell bent on killing them for their horns.

 Horns are now valued at over $65000 per kilogram and are more valuable than gold, platinum or even cocaine. Mostly they are sold in Se Asia, particularly in Vietnam where they are thought to cure a variety of ills from a hangover to cancer.

These rhinos will form part of a seed population that will have a chance to expand in number and gene diversity, whilst being protected by the latest technology and a specialised anti-poaching unit.

At least 100 rhinos are being moved to Botswana as part of the Rhinos Without Borders initiative in partnership with andBeyond.

They will soon be able to get the next group to safety.

- See more at: http://africageographic.com/blog/record-number-rhinos-airlifted/#sthash.ATCUNMAc.dpuf

Baby turtles dont just drift

A tracking study  in the Gulf of Mexico has shown that young sea turtles make a concerted effort to swim in particular directions, instead of drifting with ocean currents, as was previuosly thought..

There are seven species of sea turtle and all of them are endangered or threatened.

Baby turtles disappear at sea for up to a decade and it was once assumed that they spent these "lost years" drifting. US researchers used solar powered satellite tags to track 44 wild turtles, aged between six months and two years, in the Gulf of Mexico and compared their movement with that of floating buoys. Each time a baby turtle was caught it was released with two "drifters" - to see how the movements varied. The drifters and turtles diverged quickly and had very different movement properties.

Different species of turtles showed different movement patterns as well. The green turtles, for instance, were really set on going east a lot of the time. And the Kemp's ridley turtles, were convinced that they should be swimming north.

There is still a lot more to learned, especially about hatchling turtles who are too small to have a tracking device attached to them.

Stockholm Water prize awarded to man in India

The award, also known as the "Nobel Prize for water" was won by Rajendra Singh, who is often called "the water man of India" for his work in making water much more accessible and available to people in around 1000 villages.

The water table had dropped as groundwater was sucked dry by farmers in many areas. Consequently crops failed, forests died off and wildlife disappeared.

Mr Singh uses a modern version of the ancient Indian technique of rainwater harvesting. His method of helping villages was to improve year round water management by building low level banks of earth to hold back the flow of water in the rainy season, so that it had more time to seep into the ground and replenish supplies before the dry season set in.

It is a cheap and simple technique, and judges of the competition for the prize at the Stockholm International Water Institute believe it could be applied worldwide. Further benefits of his technique were that floods were prevented, soil and rivers were restored, and wildlife was able to return.

They also said that his lessons were essential as climate change alters weather patterns round the World.

Eclipse of the Sun in UK

There was a partial Eclipse of the Sun in the UK this morning. It started at about 08:40 where I am in the Midlands and reached it's peak at 09:30.. About 85% of the sun was obscured.

The weather was hazy sunshine, but I still needed a couple of Neutral Density filters on my camera to get the shots. The filters imparted a mysterious purple tint to the blue grey sky.

All in all a lovely experience.

Lion seen in a part of Gabon where it was thought to be extinct

New footage out of southeastern Gabon has captured a male lion on camera in a region where the species was believed by scientists to be “locally extinct.” Two camera trap videos taken in the same fortnight captured a single male lion roaming along an elephant path in the Gabonese region of the Batéké Plateau – a savannah landscape extending across southeast Gabon and into Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where the lion last roamed in any great number in the 1950s.

The last survey was in 2003 when a team found almost no wildlife in the region, and camera traps set during the surveys produced more photos of Congolese poachers than of animals.

The videos demonstrate that the efforts of the Gabonese authorities to protect this landscape, starting with the designation of the Batéké Plateau as a National Park in 2002


I think the President of  Gabon, Ali Bongo Ondimba, is one of the most  environmentally and wildlife commited men in Africa - a real Star

Numbers of wild Pandas are increasing

The good news is that a new survey estimates 1,864 pandas live in the wild. That’s a 16.8% increase since the last survey released in 2003.

The first survey (1974-77) estimated there were 2,459 giant pandas in the wild. The second (1985-88) estimated 1,114. The third survey, published in 2004, estimated there were 1,596.

The latest rise in the estimate is particularly encouraging, as the 2004 increase was in large partly down to researchers using better techniques and surveying a wider area. The new figures show that the hard work of the Chinese government, local communities, nature reserve staff and WWF is paying off.