Dead dolphin washes up on Surf Beach, Australia

Beachgoers found the striped dolphin on the beach on Saturday, and the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) was called.

A NPWS spokeswoman said, because the dolphin was not a rare breed, they didn’t take the carcass for further examination.

“Based on our reports, there was no reason for us to act,” she said.

She said the dolphin there had no marks or scratches that would suggest that it was killed by “human intervention”.

However, she said there was a large population of marine animals at the moment and stranding incidents were on the increase.

According to the spokeswoman, disposing of the dead dolphin was Eurobodalla Shire Council’s responsibility because it washed up on a council beach.

Heatwave kills 200 elephants in Zimbabwe

Updated: 07:45, Friday November 25, 2011

Approximately 200 elephants have died of thirst in Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park due to searing heat and chronic water shortages, a local conservationist says.

Zimbabwe, which, as a southern hemisphere nation, is currently in summer, has been experiencing record-high temperatures since October.

'There have been 200 elephants that have died so far, and they are dying every day,' Johnny Rodrigues of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force said on Thursday.

He said other game in the park, the largest reserve in the country, were also dying for lack of water. Adding to the troubles caused by the heatwave, pumps used to fill artificial watering holes have also broken down.

To protect the few remaining watering holes, some of the elephants are now aggressively driving away other game, who are stranded with no means to quench their thirst, Rodrigues said in a telephone interview.

The park is located in western Zimbabwe, close to the Kalahari desert, a very dry region with little water or vegetation.

The death toll of 200 elephants marks a rapid increase from the official figure released last week, which said 100 of the giant land mammals had died from the heat.

National Parks Director General Vitalis Chadenga announced that rangers were trying to 'actively manage' the situation by pumping water from underground boreholes into surface-level watering holes.

Chadenga said there were too many elephants in the park, claiming there were an estimated 40,000 animals in a reserve that can only sustain around 25,000.

But Rodrigues insisted the crisis in not being caused by overpopulation. He places the blame instead on a lack of maintenance and mismanagement of the facilities.

SAN DIEGO — A few hundred spectators gathered at Fiesta Island’s shoreline on Wednesday afternoon for the arrival of a bloated fin whale, and to watch scientists gather data about what killed the 67-foot creature.

The research team will get even more information than they initially thought thanks to an announcement by Richard Branson’s Virgin Oceanic organization that it would pay for towing the whale to sea so researchers can observe the slow decomposition process created by a “whale fall.”

It took more than six hours to tow the carcass from Point Loma, where it was discovered Saturday, to the calm water of Mission Bay for the equivalent of an autopsy. After about an hour of tugging by three tractors chained together, city crews were unable to move the whale above the waterline as project managers had planned.

So, roughly two dozen researchers and assistants in yellow waders and rubber boots flocked to the water’s edge and started removing large chunks of skin and blubber. They exposed enough bone to determine that whale was hit by a ship, a common cause of death for the second-largest species of marine mammals.

“There was fracturing on about four meters of the whale’s vertebral column,” said Siri Hakala, a biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Her colleagues gathered numerous tissue and organ samples in what counts as a windfall for marine biologists interested in whale DNA, hormones and numerous other measurements they rarely get to take.

Scientists only had a few hours of daylight for the smelly and physically demanding job — less than optimal. But they were buoyed by Virgin Oceanic’s plans for disposing of the body.

“The most ecologically responsible thing we want to do is put the whale back in the ocean,” said Eddie Kisfaludy, operations manager for Virgin Oceanic in San Diego. “We’ll tie onto it, drag it off La Jolla — about five miles offshore — and add about four tons of steel to it that will hopefully sink it in 2,500 feet of water.”

As the carcass decomposes, it should attract all kinds of sea life and become a sort of living laboratory populated by various fish, shrimp and bacteria. Of course, the process happens all the time in the ocean but rarely do scientists know exactly where to watch it unfold.

“All of those things are very interesting to science because we know very little about the deep sea,” Kisfaludy said. “Taking advantage of an opportunistic situation is what we are doing.”

He said the move comes at “significant cost” for Virgin but he won’t know what that is until the operation is over. Kisfaludy said the effort is part of a much larger vision by Branson to “get the world excited about exploring” the ocean depths.

Until Virgin stepped in, city officials had planned to cut the whale up and dump it in a landfill. Some residents found the idea unnatural but federal marine biologists said it was best to prevent the whale from washing up somewhere else.http://www.signonsandiego.com

FISH farmers in Kinango district within Kwale county are counting losses after unknown people poisoned their ponds killing thousands of fingerlings.

The farmers, according to Kinango District Fisheries Officer Leonard Cheruyot, in Mackinon road location within Samburu division woke up to the shock of floating fingerlings.