Avian influenza Diseases Health & disease

Trade bans from key buyers follow outbreak on commercial farm

27 May 2025

2 minute read

 By: Global Ag Media

 South America

Chicken meat exports from Brazil have fallen slightly year-on-year in May, trade data from the government showed on Monday, after the country logged a case of bird flu on a commercial farm, reported Reuters. 

Brazil, the world’s largest chicken exporter, said on May 16 it had identified a bird flu outbreak on a commercial farm in the southern city of Montenegro, triggering nationwide or regional trade bans from dozens of countries.

The list includes China, the largest buyer of Brazil’s chicken in 2024, as well as top clients South Africa, the Philippines, the European Union and Mexico.

Exports of “fresh, chilled and frozen poultry meat and edible offal”, a category mostly made of chicken meat, had been up 0.2% year-over-year in the first three weeks of the month, before most of the trade bans started to kick in.

But for the first four weeks of the month, that trend reversed, falling 1.5% to an average of about 19,900 metric tons per day, data showed.

Brazilian authorities hope that a 28-day observation period, which started last Thursday, will show its chicken farms are free of the disease.

Itau BBA analysts wrote in a note to clients that negotiations between Brazil and the countries which banned the purchase of Brazilian chicken will dictate the extent of the negative impacts on the trade.

“The situation tends to worsen if new cases emerge, but even if it is restricted to just this one, we believe that exports will decline at least in the next month,” the analysts wrote.

KJZZ | By Kathy Ritchie

Published May 26, 2025 at 12:10 PM MST

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Poultry on a commercial farm in Maricopa County have tested positive for avian influenza.

Samples were collected on May 15 after poultry began showing signs of bird flu. Four days later, the National Veterinary Services Laboratory confirmed the presence of the virus.

State officials say no eggs produced after the onset of the illness have entered the food supply, and no human infections have been reported. The affected farm has been placed under quarantine, and efforts are underway to contain and eliminate the virus.

The name of the farm has not yet been released.

This isn’t the first time bird flu has been detected in Maricopa County this year. In February, the virus was found in milk from a dairy herd.

By Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary AnthropologyMay 25, 20259 Comments5 Mins Read

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Share https://scitechdaily.com/new-research-reveals-that-chimpanzees-are-capable-of-complex-communication-and-were-finally-listening/

Wild chimpanzees change the meaning of individual calls by combining them in different ways, a behavior that reflects how humans use language to create meaning through combining words.

Humans are the only species known to use full language, which involves combining sounds into words and words into structured sentences that convey infinite meanings. This process follows linguistic rules that determine how meaning changes with context.

For example, the word “ape” can be used in compositional ways to add meaning—such as “the ape eats” or “big ape”—or in non-compositional idioms like “go ape,” which takes on a new meaning entirely. Syntax, the rule system that governs word order, is essential to this process. For instance, “go ape” and “ape goes” use the same words but convey different meanings due to their order.

One of the central questions in science is understanding the origin of this exceptional linguistic ability. Researchers often compare human language with the vocal behavior of other animals, especially primates, to explore how language evolved. Most non-human primates rely on individual call types and have only a few known call combinations, usually to warn about predators.

This has led to the belief that their vocal systems are too limited to be considered precursors of human language. However, we may be underestimating the communicative abilities of our closest relatives. New findings suggest that chimpanzees may use call combinations in more complex and meaningful ways than previously recognized.

Studying the meaning of chimpanzee vocalizations

Researchers from the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and from the Cognitive Neuroscience Center Marc Jeannerod (CNRS/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) and Neuroscience Research Center (CNRS/Inserm/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) in Lyon, France recorded thousands of vocalizations from three groups of wild chimpanzees in the Taï National Park in Ivory Coast.

They examined how the meanings of 12 different chimpanzee calls changed when they were combined into two-call combinations.

“Generating new or combined meanings by combining words is a hallmark of human language, and it is crucial to investigate whether a similar capacity exists in our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, in order to decipher the origins of human language,” says Catherine Crockford, senior author of the study.

“Recording chimpanzee vocalizations over several years in their natural environment is essential in order to document their full communicative capabilities, a task that is becoming increasingly challenging due to growing human threats to wild chimpanzee populations,” says Roman Wittig, co-author of the study and director of the Taï Chimpanzee Project.

Chimpanzees’ complex communication system

The study reveals four ways in which chimpanzees alter meanings when combining single calls into 16 different two-call combinations, analogous to the key linguistic principles in human language. Chimpanzees used compositional combinations that added meaning (e.g., A = feeding, B = resting, AB = feeding + resting) and clarified meaning (e.g., A = feeding or travelling, B = aggression, AB = travelling).

They also used non-compositional idiomatic combinations that created entirely new meanings (e.g., A = resting, B = affiliation, AB = nesting). Crucially, unlike previous studies which have mostly reported call combinations in limited situations such as predator encounters, the chimpanzees in this study expanded their meanings through the versatile combination of most of their single calls into a large diversity of call combinations used in a wide range of contexts.

“Our findings suggest a highly generative vocal communication system, unprecedented in the animal kingdom, which echoes recent findings in bonobos suggesting that complex combinatorial capacities were already present in the common ancestor of humans and these two great ape species,” says Cédric Girard-Buttoz, first author on the study.

He adds: “This changes the views of the last century which considered communication in the great apes to be fixed and linked to emotional states, and therefore unable to tell us anything about the evolution of language. Instead, we see clear indications here that most call types in the repertoire can shift or combine their meaning when combined with other call types. The complexity of this system suggests either that there is indeed something special about hominid communication – that complex communication was already emerging in our last common ancestor, shared with our closest living relatives – or that we have underestimated the complexity of communication in other animals as well, which requires further study.”

Reference: “Versatile use of chimpanzee call combinations promotes meaning expansion” by Cédric Girard-Buttoz, Christof Neumann, Tatiana Bortolato, Emiliano Zaccarella, Angela D. Friederici, Roman M. Wittig and Catherine Crockford, 9 May 2025, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adq2879

Funding: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, H2020 European Research Council, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Lost fishing gear makes up an estimated 70 to 90 per cent of plastic waste polluting the world’s oceans.

The Times Colonistabout 11 hours ago

• https://www.timescolonist.com/islander/one-old-gillnet-piles-of-bones-bc-group-targets-dangers-of-marine-ghost-gear-10686247

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1 / 3 DFO works to free to humpback whales tangled in fishing gear near Quadra Island. STRAITWATCH

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Commercial diver and part-time conservationist Bourton Scott has made a passion project out of searching out and cleaning up the unseen threat posed by “ghost gear,” the commercial nets and traps lost or abandoned off B.C.’s coast over the decades.

Lost overboard in bad weather, caught up on reefs and rocks or with the nets of other fishermen during frantic openings for fishing, the equipment doesn’t disappear but keeps wreaking havoc by continually trapping fish, seals, birds and even whales.

Such ghost gear in open water poses a bigger threat to marine ecosystems than the single-use plastic straws, cups and bags that show up in urban shoreline cleanup efforts, according to conservation groups and the Fisheries Department.

The group Scott co-founded, the Emerald Sea Protection Society, is among those trying to build awareness and public support for cleaning up the problem.

Gillnets, made from clear monofilament fishing line with openings just wide enough to catch target fish behind their gills, “are probably the most harmful,” he said.

“They’re the hardest to see in the water, they’re often suspended in the water column, which makes them a much more dangerous hazard for those animals living in those areas,” said Scott, who lives in Ladysmith.

“Under every gillnet that I’ve found, there’s always a bone pile, so evidence of its ‘ghost fishing’ for however long it’s been in the water.”

Scott said he found one gillnet with 15 live crabs caught up in its strands, along with the skull of a sea otter and the skeletons of several sea birds, during a cleanup of ghost gear at Alert Bay off the north Island last fall. “And I think we removed something like 15 [gillnets] from that area.”

The Emerald Sea crew embarked on that cleanup with the support of the ’Namgis Nation and backing from the NGO Ocean Conservancy’s global ghost gear initiative cleanup effort.

“Nobody wants to lose their gear,” said Joel Baziuk, associate director of the Ocean Conservancy’s ghost gear initiative.

However, it’s often too dangerous to recover gear in bad weather or tough currents, so “this is an unfortunate side-effect of that type of thing,” Baziuk said.

Baziuk’s conservation group says studies estimate that ghost gear makes up 70 per cent to 90 per cent of floating plastic in the gyres of garbage that collect on the open ocean.

Canada is one of the countries taking the problem seriously, with an active “ghost gear action plan” that has been in place since 2019, making it “one of the top two or three in the world leading on this issue,” Baziuk said.

The federal Fisheries Department did not make anyone available for an interview, citing the transition period following the federal election. On its website, however, the DFO said it spent $58 million on 143 projects to clean up ghost gear between 2020 and 2024.

DFO regulations require commercial fishermen to report lost gear. Between 2020 and 2024, the DFO received 288 lost-gear reports on the West Coast.

The objective of the DFO’s ghost gear program is to develop a “prevention focused strategy” to meet the government’s commitment to achieve “zero plastic waste by 2027,” according to the department’s website.

However, it’s difficult to tell how much of the problem is being fixed because “it is impossible to know how much ghost gear is in the ocean,” said researcher and educator Jackie Hildering, co-founder of the Marine Education and Research Society.

Hildering said researchers have observed that half of the humpback whales off B.C.’s coast have scars showing they’ve been caught in some kind of gear, though she added that researchers don’t know how many entanglements are with ghost gear and how many are with shellfish traps being actively fished.

Scott noted that trying to survey the extent of the lost-gear problem is a mammoth task on B.C.’s 20,000-kilometre coastline.