The Chinese government has made clear that it will remain a strategic ally of Russia despite President Vladimir Putin being viewed globally as the aggressor in the war.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin enter a hall for talks in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia in 2019. | Alexander Zemlianichenko, Pool, File/AP Photo
As the war between Russia and Ukraine intensifies, China is betting that it comes out the winner. In the past week, Beijing has carefully calibrated its position, opening in neutral then going all-in behind Moscow.
The Chinese government has demonstrated its alignment with Putin in recent days by blaming the U.S. for Russia’s assault on Ukraine, parroting Russia’s Orwellian description of the invasion as a “special military operation” and rationalizing that aggression as an expression of the Kremlin’s “legitimate” perceptions of regional insecurity.
Lionel de Lange flew to Ukraine on Monday as part of a relocation project for a bear. Image: SUPPLIED
Gqeberha wildlife rescuer Lionel de Lange, who flew to Ukraine on Monday as part of a relocation project for a bear named Masha, finds himself amid the country’s tense conflict with Russia and with his rescue plans temporarily placed on hold.
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Despite the volatile situation, De Lange committed to a project in partnership with Free the Wild, and opted to take the risk and left his Ukrainian wife, Anya, at the Gqeberha-based Simbonga Game Reserve near Thornhill.
He is staying at Anya’s parents’ house in the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine.
In That Weekend Feeling with Daron Mann this week, De Lange describes what is unfolding in the country — his home for 11 years — and his exit plan.
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Roughly a decade ago, a team of biologists glued audio recording devices onto the backs of a handful of elephant seals on the California coast. They wanted to know if the seals — identified as males by their cartoonish faces with trunk-like noses — make noises as they swim out to sea in search of food.
The recordings they brought back caught the researchers by surprise. There was no evidence of seals vocalizing while foraging, but the devices did pick up something else: the eerie, clicking calls of sperm whales, which sound like someone walking up a creaky staircase. Some of the calls also seemed to get louder, leading the researchers to believe that the seals were swimming toward the whales, and maybe even eavesdropping on them to find food.
Nothing much came of that discovery, but it has inspired marine biologists to use seals as a tool to eavesdrop on other marine life. Elephant seals spend about nine months each year at sea and travel across far reaches of the Pacific that would otherwise be difficult for scientists to survey. And like migratory birds, the seals return to the same spot year after year, so researchers can equip them with recording devices and retrieve them relatively easily.
As soon as next week, marine biologists at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) will test out this slippery technique. They’ll attach acoustic monitors to a few northern elephant seals before the animals depart for a little over two months.
If all goes as planned, it will be the first time scientists use animals — rather than a network of underwater microphones — to spy on marine life in the deep ocean for longer than a few days. What they overhear could help scientists unlock the mysteries of elusive marine mammals, such as beaked whales, and understand how poorly known ecosystems are changing as the planet warms.
Why seals make such good spies
Scientists have used audio recording devices to monitor marine life for decades. It’s a common way to survey species like the rare vaquita porpoise. What makes this project unique, however, is that these devices won’t be fixed in place or dangling from a boat — they’re attached to living, breathing, moving animals.
Elephant seals might look clumsy on land, but they’re agile underwater creatures that make ideal marine sentinels. They spend months at a time foraging far offshore, not even returning home to sleep. The animals likely take naps while drifting a few hundred meters underwater, said Roxanne Beltran, an assistant professor at UCSC who’s co-leading the project.
Elephant seals descend as much as a mile underwater when hunting for small fish, squid, and even sharks, and that brings them within earshot of whales and other marine mammals. Conveniently enough, seals themselves don’t make much noise. “They’re not contaminating the data,” said Holger Klinck, an expert in bioacoustics at Cornell University who’s co-leading the project with Beltran. “They’re really only measuring what’s going on in their surroundings.”
Perhaps most importantly, the seals return to the same beach each year, which reduces the risk of losing equipment. For the project at UCSC, each recording device is roughly the size of an old cellphone and costs about $5,000. It isn’t capable of beaming acoustic data back to shore, Beltran said, so if you lose the device, you lose everything.
A mother and baby elephant seal at Año Nuevo, a beach in Northern California.Elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Park in California.
Using an epoxy adhesive, Beltran and Allison Payne, a doctoral researcher at UCSC, will glue recording devices onto three female seals at Año Nuevo Reserve in Northern California. (Females have a much higher survival rate and reliably head out to sea right after weaning their pups.) Beltran is building on research led by UCSC’s Dan Costa, who heads a project to monitor local seals that dates back to the 1960s.
Then they’ll wait. The seals will make it about a quarter of the way to Japan before turning back, in a trip that takes roughly 75 days. The device will record about 40 days of audio before the batteries run out, while other tags measure things like location, depth, and water temperature, leaving the scientists with lots of clues to what’s happening in a largely unknown stretch of ocean.
Uncovering mysteries of the deep
When the animals return, scientists will meet them on the beach and retrieve the devices before sending the seals on their way. (The devices don’t harm the seals or change their behavior, Beltran said.) Then they’ll run the audio through computer algorithms that separate out the unique sounds made by each species. A humpback whale can sound a bit like a whining puppy crossed with Chewbacca, for example, while orcas often sound like a metal detector gone haywire.
Payne will be listening closely for the echolocating clicks of beaked whales. This group of toothy marine animals, often gray or black and white, have eluded scientists for decades. “We know almost nothing about them,” she told Vox.
Beaked whales make up more than a quarter of living cetaceans (a group that includes dolphins, porpoises, and whales), but scientists don’t know where they go in the ocean or what they do, she said. They spend most of their time deep underwater and rarely surface for air, Payne added. There are more than 20 species of beaked whales, and much of what we know about them comes from carcasses that occasionally wash up on shore.
A Cuvier’s beaked whale in the Bay of Biscay, in the northeast Atlantic Ocean.
It’s hard to protect a species you don’t understand, Payne said. For example, researchers thinkthatnoise from shipping traffic harms beaked whales, but scientists can’t say for sure — because they simply don’t know what these animals are doing.
Researchers also hope to build an auditory archive of the ocean over years to understand how marine communities are changing, especially as the planet heats up. How, for example, is the giant patch of warm water in the Pacific Ocean, dubbed “the blob,” affecting marine communities? “The elephant seals can help us collect information where we have little to no data,” Klinck told Vox.
For now, Beltran and her team are just trying to prove that it can work. If it does, she hopes to scale it up and start collecting sounds in all kinds of marine environments — not just far offshore, but near the coast and even under Arctic ice. Perhaps in the future, legions of elephant seals will unwittingly survey the ocean in the name of science.
KALAMAZOO, Mich. — A strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza has been detected in Michigan in a non-commercial backyard flock of birds in Kalamazoo County, federal authorities said Thursday.
Samples from the flock were tested at Michigan State University’s Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and confirmed by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service laboratories in Ames, Iowa.
State officials have quarantined the Kalamazoo County site and birds at that property “will be depopulated to prevent the spread of disease,” the USDA said in a statement, noting that birds from that flock will not enter the food system.
The virus strain is potentially deadly to commercial poultry.
The bird flu cases are among the latest in the U.S. that have put farms that raise turkeys and chickens for meat and eggs on high alert, fearing a repeat of a 2015 bird flu outbreak that killed 50 million birds across 15 states and cost the federal government nearly $1 billion.
Bird flu has also been detected at commercial turkey farms in southern Indiana, a flock of commercial broiler chickens in Kentucky, a commercial poultry flock in Delaware, a backyard flock of mixed species birds in northern Virginia, and in New York and Maine, both at a single non-commercial backyard flock.
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says the recent bird flu detections do not present an immediate public health concern. No human cases of these viruses have been detected in the U.S.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Bassing, University of Washington
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) invites the public to submit written comment from Feb. 22 to April 11 on a proposed rule change and a new rule to address wolf-livestock conflict deterrence.
In September 2020, Governor Jay Inslee directed WDFW to initiate rule making with the goal of instituting practices that would reduce the number of livestock killed or injured by wolves as well as the number of wolves lethally removed as a result of depredations of domestic animals.
The proposed rule change, if adopted, would amend the language of Washington Administrative Code (WAC) 220-440-080 to require that, to authorize lethal removal of wolves, the WDFW director (or WDFW staff designee) would need to confirm an owner of domestic animals has proactively implemented appropriate non-lethal conflict deterrence measures.
The proposal, if adopted, would also create a new rule (WAC 220-440-260) that directs WDFW staff, in consultation with willing, affected livestock producers, as well as affected federal, state and tribal agencies, to author conflict mitigation plans that would establish area-specific criteria for the use of non-lethal and lethal measures to mitigate wolf-livestock conflict in areas of chronic conflict.
“If adopted, the proposed change to WAC 220-440-080 would align the code with the agency’s long-standing commitment to non-lethal conflict mitigation strategies,” said Wolf Policy Lead Julia Smith.
“The proposal creating WAC 220-440-260 aims to address areas that have experienced significant levels of livestock depredation and subsequent wolf removals year after year, an especially difficult scenario for all communities concerned about wolf conservation and management. This proposal focuses limited time and resources to areas where the most livestock and wolf loss has occurred in the state.”
In addition, a Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (DSEIS) that analyzes the environmental impacts of four alternative rule making options and a Small Business Economic Impact Statement (SBEIS) that evaluates the potential costs to businesses in the livestock industry resulting from the proposed rule and rule change were developed as part of the rule making process. During this public comment period, WDFW is looking for input on the draft proposed language for both WACs, as well as feedback on the DSEIS.
Written comments can also be submitted via email to WolfConflictDeterrence102@PublicInput.com, or members of the public can call (855) 925-2801 (enter project code 3861) to record their input.
A public hearing is scheduled for April 8 at 8 a.m. The meeting will take place by webinar. The public may participate in the meeting. Registration is required to testify at the public hearing. Registration deadlines and registration forms are available on the Commission Meetings page or you may contact the commission office at (360) 902-2267.
The final SEIS is planned to be issued in May and the Fish and Wildlife Commission will consider the proposal in May of 2022. The rule and/or rule changes that may result from this process are proposed to be effective in January 2023.
A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world.Sign up here.
(CNN)AsRussian missiles flewthrough the Ukrainian sky Thursday and world leaders decriedan invasionspreading across the country, China refused to condemn Russia’s move outright, while appearing to levy blame on the United States and its allies.
Beijing finds itself in a complex position as Russia’s invasion of its neighbor intensifies, needing to balance a close strategic partnership with Moscow with its seemingly contradictory policy of supporting state sovereignty.
A Chinese government official Thursday sidestepped questions over whether it would condemn Russia’s actions or consider it an “invasion.”
Instead, China’s Assistant Foreign Minister Hua Chunying — who repeated staid…
This is CNBC’s live blog tracking Friday’s developments in Russia’s attack on Ukraine. See below for the latest updates.
Russian forces are closing in on Kyiv as Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine continues.
Kyiv officials warned residents in the capital’s northern Obolon district not to go outside on Friday due to “the approach of active hostilities.” Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense urged people in the area to either take shelter or make petrol bombs to “neutralize the occupier.”
It came as Ukrainian officials blew up bridges leading into Kyiv to prevent Russian troops infiltrating the capital.
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Experts at the state nuclear agency said in a statement that the change was due to the movement of a large number of heavy military machinery lifting the top layer of soil into the air.
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Russian forces captured control of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant on Thursday, prompting an advisor to the presidential office to warn it was now “impossible” to consider the shuttered reactor safe.
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