In April of this year, it was reported that aspring outbreak of highly pathogenicavian influenza(HPAI), an H5N1 strain, occurred in wild and domestic birds across Canada and USA. The outbreak began in Alberta in early April 2022.
Fortunately, as we reach the end of May, Dr. Margo Pybus, Provincial Wildlife Disease Specialist with Fish and Wildlife in Alberta saysthe avian flu numbers in Alberta are now dropping. Pybus says, “The outbreak started in Alberta in early April and reached its peak, probably about the end of April, beginning of May, and we have noticed that that the outbreak appears to be declining, and that’s based on fewer public calls reporting dead birds in their area.”
The other encouraging sign is that the white Snow geese, not to be confused with the brown Canada geese, have moved out of…
A Jamesport man is in custody on Grundy County charges of felony unlawful use of a weapon after shooting at a person.
Bond for 22-year-old Allen Detweiler is $25,000 cash or 10% surety. He’s held at the Grundy County Law Enforcement Center pending an appearance in court.
According to the Grundy County Sheriff’s Department, Detweiler and his brother were turkey hunting in southwest Grundy County on Saturday when the tom turkey they were seeking ended up on another individual’s property. Detweiler and the brother then trespassed onto the adjoining property where they subsequently shot and killed the turkey.
As Allen Detweiler and his brother Alvin Detweiler, were collecting the breast meat from their illegally harvestedturkey, they were confronted by two lawful hunters from that property. The sheriff stated…
Across the Arctic, there are lakes where the water appears to boil. Where “drunk” forests crash into the water. Where huge sinkholes appear following mammoth explosions—one witness to such an event said it was “like the Earth was breathing.”
The cause of these natural phenomena is methane, a potent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential around 30 times higher than carbon dioxide over 100 years. Methane is created via an array of natural and anthropogenic processes. Farming is a major contributor, as are landfills and coal mines. For natural sources, it comes from both land…
Strains of a “superpower” bacteria that could cause the world’s next deadly pandemic have been discovered by scientists in Antarctica.
Researchers found that the bacteria have a built-in resistance to antibiotics that could make current treatments useless.
The Chilean researchers made the discovery during research into how climate change could affect the spread of bacteria that had been frozen in ice for thousands of years.
They warned that climate change means the bacteria will have the potential to spread beyond polar regions, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Researcher Andres Marcoleta of the University of Chile headed the study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment in March.
He said mobile DNA fragments contain “superpowers” that evolved to resist extreme conditions and can easily be transferred to other bacteria.
Marcoleta said: “We know that the soils of the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the polar areas most impacted by melting ice, host a great diversity of bacteria, and that some of them constitute a potential source of ancestral genes that confer resistance to antibiotics.”
University researchers collected a number of samples from the Antarctic Peninsula between 2017 and 2019.
They were astonished to find that many of the bacteria were practically indestructible.
Samples had surprising adaptations and capabilities that included being highly resistant to the effect of multiple classes of antibiotics and other toxic substances.
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The researchers found that Pseudomonas bacteria – one of the predominant groups of bacteria in the peninsula – are not pathogenic but can be a source of “resistance genes,” which are not stopped by common disinfectants like copper, chlorine or quaternary ammonium.
They also found that Polaromonas bacteria – also predominant in polar environments – have the “potential to inactivate beta-lactam type antibiotics, which are essential for the treatment of different infections,” according to Marcoleta.
The researcher said: “It is worth asking whether climate change could have an impact on the occurrence of infectious diseases.
“In a possible scenario, these genes could leave this reservoir and promote the emergence and proliferation of infectious diseases.”
Marcoleta warned: “The idea that these genes could eventually reach bacteria that cause infections in humans or other animals, giving them greater resistance capabilities, does not seem unreasonable.”
He said that the findings should urge the scientific world to anticipate the emergence of possible new resistance mechanisms in infectious diseases and guide the design of new antibiotics.
He added, however, that some properties of these bacteria could also have other important biotechnological applications.
The researcher said that the COVID-19 pandemic “has taught us that microorganisms, and in particular pathogens, can cause effects with global reach. In this sense, it is worth asking if climate change could have an impact on the occurrence of infectious diseases.”
The melting of the North and South Poles is one of the most well-known immediate consequences of climate change.
The research will continue and may be taken much further in a new larger-scale research project named “Anillo mBioClim.”
This story was provided to Newsweek by Zenger News.
A Woodland Caribou (rangifer tarandus) seen along Alaska Highway at Stone Mountain Provincial Park, B.C. in this undated photograph. (Jukka Jantunen/Shutterstock)
B.C. has made sweeping changes to moose and caribou hunts in the Peace Region, a move that has the support of some local First Nations while hunting groups are firmly opposed.
A sign in an international airport in Jakarta, Indonesia warns passengers about identifying monkeypox, endemic to parts of Central and Western Africa but now spreading worldwide.
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In the past few weeks,more than 350 cases of monkeypox— a viral disease that’s a much milder cousin of smallpox — have been reported inmore than 20 countriesworldwide. That’s a surprise, and an unpleasant one. Monkeypox has surfaced periodically in the Congo Basin and in West Africa sinceits discovery in the 1950s,but past outbreaks haven’t involved cases in…
Emily Caffee, a physical therapist and lifelong athlete, cut her primary care provider slack for suggesting an antidepressant when she complained of fatigue, body aches and brain fog in the months after she became sick with Covid-19 in March 2020.
“She did a very thorough medical workup, and a lot of the lab values came back ‘normal’,” said Caffee, a 36-year-old Chicago resident. “We didn’t have very much to go off of in those early days. I think now we have so much more information” about long Covid, which was doctors’ eventual diagnosis for Caffee.
Cotton grasses on the banks of the Lower Ilerney, Russia. Credit: Alfred-Wegener-Institut / Stefan Kruse
Due to global warming, temperatures in the Arctic are climbing rapidly. As a result, the treeline for Siberian larch forests is steadily advancing to the north, gradually supplanting the broad expanses of tundra which are home to a unique mix of flora and fauna. Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute have now prepared a computer simulation of how these woods could spread in the future, at the tundra’s expense. Their conclusion: only consistent climate protection measures will allow roughly 30 percent of the Siberian tundra to survive to mid-millennium. In all other, less favorable scenarios, the unique habitat is projected to disappear entirely. The study was just released in the journal eLife.
The climate crisis can be felt especially seriously in the Arctic: in the High North, the average air temperature has risen by more than two degrees Celsius over the past 50 years—far more than anywhere else. And this trend will only continue. If ambitious greenhouse-gas reduction measures (Emissions Scenario RCP 2.6) are taken, the further warming of the Arctic through the end of the century could be limited to just below two degrees. According to model-based forecasts, if the emissions remain high (Scenario RCP 8.5), we could see a dramatic rise in the average summer temperatures in the Arctic—by up to 14 degrees Celsius over today’s norm by 2100.
“For the Arctic Ocean and the sea ice, the current and future warming will have serious consequences,” says Prof Ulrike Herzschuh, Head of the Polar Terrestrial Environmental Systems Division at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). “But the environment on land will also change drastically. The broad expanses of tundra in Siberia and North America will be massively reduced, as the treeline, which is already slowly changing, rapidly advances northward in the near future. In the worst-case scenario, there will be virtually no tundra left by the middle of the millennium. In the course of our study, we simulated this process for the tundra in northeast Russia. The central question that concerned us was: which emissions path does humanity have to follow in order to preserve the tundra as a refuge for flora and fauna, as well its role for the cultures of indigenous peoples and their traditional ties to the environment?”
The tundra is home to a unique community of plants, roughly five percent of which are endemic, i.e., can only be found in the Arctic. Typical species include the mountain avens, Arctic poppy and prostrate shrubs like willows and birches, all of which have adapted to the harsh local conditions: brief summers and long, arduous winters. It also offers a home for rare species like reindeer, lemmings and insects like the Arctic bumblebee.
For their simulation, Ulrike Herzschuh and AWI modeler Dr. Stefan Kruse employed the AWI vegetation model LAVESI. “What sets LAVESI apart is that it allows us to display the entire treeline at the level of individual trees,” Kruse explains. “The model portrays the entire lifecycle of Siberian larches in the transition zone to the tundra—from seed production and distribution, to germination, to fully grown trees. In this way, we can very realistically depict the advancing treeline in a warming climate.”
The findings speak for themselves: the larch forests could spread northward at a rate of up to 30 kilometers per decade. The tundra expanses, which can’t shift to colder regions due to the adjacent Arctic Ocean, would increasingly dwindle. Since trees aren’t mobile and each one’s seeds can only reach a limited distribution radius, initially the vegetation would significantly lag behind the warming, but then catch up to it again. In the majority of scenarios, by mid-millennium less than six percent of today’s tundra would remain; saving roughly 30 percent would only be possible with the aid of ambitious greenhouse-gas reduction measures. Otherwise, Siberia’s once 4,000-kilometer-long, unbroken tundra belt would shrink to two patches, 2,500 kilometers apart, on the Taimyr Peninsula to the west and Chukotka Peninsula to the east. Interestingly, even if the atmosphere cooled again in the course of the millennium, the forests would not completely release the former tundra areas.
“At this point, it’s a matter of life and death for the Siberian tundra,” says Eva Klebelsberg, Project Manager Protected Areas and Climate Change / Russian Arctic at the WWF Germany, with regard to the study. “Larger areas can only be saved with very ambitious climate protection targets. And even then, in the best case there will ultimately be two discrete refuges, with smaller flora and fauna populations that are highly vulnerable to disrupting influences. That’s why it’s important that we intensify and expand protective measures and protected areas in these regions, so as to preserve refuges for the tundra’s unparalleled biodiversity,” adds Klebelsberg, who, in collaboration with the Alfred Wegener Institute, is an advocate for the establishment of protected areas. “After all, one thing is clear: if we continue with business as usual, this ecosystem will gradually disappear.”
EVERETT, Wash. —State agriculture officials said a confirmed case of avian flu was found Friday in a flock of birds in Snohomish County, raising fears that the highly infectious virus could end up threatening birds in other Western Washington counties.
In a written statement, the Washington State Department of Agriculture said it confirmed the case of avian influenza in a backyard flock but authorities did not disclose any other details about case, including if the infected birds were wild or belonged to an owner.
Before the Friday announcement, there had been 11 confirmed flocks that had tested positive for the virus since May 5 in eight different Washington state counties.
State investigators have said all of the previous cases have been backyard flocks with substantial exposure to wild waterfowl.
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