New Person of Interest in Secoriea Turner Murder; Reward Increased: up to $50,000

Mining Awareness +

The reward has been increased and is now up to $50,000. [Update: The suspect, Julian Conley, has turned himself in, but claims that he is innocent.]
“Police have new person of interest in Secoriea Turner case” (3 min) https://youtu.be/P8arDTB2aqI

(Click to enlarge)

8 year old Secoriea Turner was killed riding in a vehicle that tried to turn near the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was killed and road blocks had been set up by armed individuals. Her very distraught mother said that they didn’t have anything to do with [the killing of] Rayshard Brooks: “We’re innocent“, she said. Secoriea’s father said “They say black lives matter, you killed your own this time. You killed a child. She didn’t do nothing to nobody.” See: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/new-video-released-shooting-death-8-year-old-atlanta-girl/AOPZCORUXFALBNXLEYDF43U234/

It appears that armed street gangs had taken control of the area near the former Wendy’s on University Ave. in Atlanta…

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Why Do Whales Get So Big? Science May Have an Answer.

nationalgeographic.com

Land mammals can get plenty big, but to find the planet’s true giants, you’ll have to take to the seas.

In a new study, scientists show why that is. Marine mammals “have to find a happy medium between getting enough food and producing enough body heat,” says study leader William Gearty, an ecologist at Stanford University. (Read about a bus-size whale that’s still a mystery to scientists.)

Previously, researchers believed that marine mammals could be so large because the buoyancy of water frees them from the constraints of gravity. Although this freedom may still be a factor, Gearty says that his results show that marine mammals need their heft to keep themselves warm in the often chilly oceans.

“These animals are big for very specific reasons. It’s not that they could be big, it’s that they must be big,” he says.

 

Bigger is Better?

When Gearty and colleagues created a series of computer models analyzing factors that influence size, they found two that converged to determine body size in aquatic mammals.

The first is that these mammals need to be large to trap enough body heat. Larger mammals also lose less of this heat to the surrounding water, which gives them a major advantage over their smaller counterparts, according to the models, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But larger animals need more food to support their bulk, which created the second factor in Gearty’s model. Big mammals may trap heat better, but if they can’t get enough food to fuel their metabolism, then it doesn’t matter. (See National Geographic’s amazing whale pictures.)

Body size is one of the most important traits to study in animals, according to Chris Venditti, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in England who wasn’t involved in the new study.

 

“If you’re going to measure one thing in an animal, it should be body size because that one thing is related to so many others,” Venditti says. “If you know how big an animal is, you probably know something about how it moves and its metabolic rate.”

Testing Gravity

In the last five years, scientists have uncovered evidence showing that, over time, families of mammals have tended to evolve larger body sizes. Bulkier animals can better fight off rivals for mating, food, and other resources, as well as access a wider variety of foods.

Land mammals, however, are hemmed in by gravity: They need massive bones and blood vessels to support their bulk while maintaining mobility—no easy feat when you tip the scales at several tons, like an elephant. (Read how blue whales are mostly “left-handed.”)

Initially, when Gearty started studying the factors that affected body size in marine mammals, he thought that he would simply see the elimination of gravity as a constraint.

Instead, his data told him that the minimum size of aquatic mammals was a thousand times larger than the smallest terrestrial mammals. The maximum size, however, was only 25 times larger, which meant that something must be forcing marine mammals to get large.

 

Scientists still haven’t entirely cracked the mystery of what determines body size in animals, Venditti says, but that hasn’t stopped life from evolving an array of shapes and sizes to fill every niche.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/whales-size-animals-ocean-marine-mammals/

North Atlantic Right Whales Now Listed as ‘Critically Endangered’

smithsonianmag.com

SmartNews Keeping you current

Just about 400 of the whales survive in the wild, and they continue to die at an alarming rate

A North Atlantic right whale off the coast of Cape Cod in 2015 (Photo by David L. Ryan / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

smithsonianmag.com

By Nora McGreevy
July 16, 2020

North Atlantic right whales are facing a crisis. Just 409 survive in the world, according to data from the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, and the whales continue to die at an alarming rate.

Last week, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) moved the species from “Endangered” to “Critically Endangered” on their “red list” of threatened and endangered species, Jamey Keaten and James Brooks report for the Associated Press.

Most right whale deaths in the last three years have been linked to interactions with vessels and fishing operations along the coast of the United States and Canada, per the IUCN. Right whales swim with their mouths open to catch copepods, tiny zooplanktons, and other small sea creatures that make up the majority of their diet.

As they swim with mouths agape, they can easily become entangled in the fishing lines that connect lobster and crab traps to the ocean’s surface, as Tom Cheney reported for Smithsonian magazine in 2018. Ships can also strike and kill the whales, who often feed close to the surface. Entanglement and deadly collisions can cause massive, devastating injuries to the animals.

Many scientists believe that climate change is partly to blame for the uptick in right whale deaths. The whales typically migrate in the summer from their calving grounds in Georgia and Florida to the Gulf of Maine and Bay of Fundy. As the ocean warms, however, copepod populations have shifted north, causing the whales to follow their food source further north to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, reports Lisa Friedman for the New York Times.

Estimates in 2018 showed that without a substantial turn for the better, the whales could be “functionally extinct” in 20 years, reported Cheney at the time.

“It’s devastating,” Regina Asmutis-Silvia, the executive director of Whale and Dolphin Conservation North America, told the Atlantic’s Ed Yong in June 2019. “There’s now more people working on right whales than there are right whales left.”

Scientists suspect that an average of 17 calves per year need to be born for the population to grow, as Brigit Katz reported for Smithsonian magazine last year. However, studies show that birth rates for female right whales have declined dramatically over the last few years. Fewer than 250 sexually mature right whales were estimated to exist in the wild in 2018, according to the IUCN.

In 2017, the NOAA Fisheries declared an “Unusual Mortality Event” as right whale deaths ticked up to even higher numbers. In the last three years, 31 right whales off the coast of the U.S. and Canada have died and 10 have been seriously injured, nearly all the result of crashing into vessels or entanglement in fishing gear.

On June 25 this year, the carcass of a six-month-old calf—the first observed earlier this breeding season—was discovered floating off the coast of Elberon, New Jersey. He had likely been hit by two separate vessels, NOAA Fisheries said in a statement.

Recently, President Donald Trump vowed to defend the U.S. lobster industry, which means the administration will likely not advocate for measures to protect the whales at the expense of fisheries in the area, reports Friedman.

Right whales were severely threatened by hunting in the 19th and 20th centuries—at one point, their numbers dropped to an estimated 60 mature individuals, reports Cheney. The whales even got their names from hunters: slow and easy to kill, they were known as the “right” marks because they would float to the surface after dying. At the turn of the 21st century, right whale numbers were estimated at about 500, due in part to serious protection measures against hunting. Now, the population is once again on the decline.

“For nearly a century, North Atlantic right whales have been protected from the commercial whaling that pushed them to the brink of extinction, but they continue to be killed by human activities,” says Jane Davenport, the senior attorney for conservation nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, in a statement. “…This status change is a call to arms: unless we act decisively to turn the tide, the next time the right whale’s Red List status changes it will be to ‘extinct.’”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/right-whales-now-listed-critically-endangered-180975315/

One of only known white Whales. First spotted in 1991

Two Norwegian Forest Cats

 

Norwegian Forest cat is a breed of domestic cat originating in northern Europe. This natural breed is adapted to a very cold climate, with a top coat of glossy, long, water shedding hair and a wooly undercoat for insulation.