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Scientists Marvel at Deep Sea Discoveries
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP
WASHINGTON (Dec. 10) -- Peering deep into the sea, scientists are finding creatures more mysterious than many could have imagined. At one site, nearly 2 miles deep in the Atlantic, shrimp were living around a vent that was releasing water heated to 765 degrees Fahrenheit. Water surrounding the site was a chilly 36 degrees.
An underwater peak in the Coral Sea was home to a type of shrimp thought to have gone extinct 50 million years ago.
More than 3 miles beneath the Sargasso Sea, in the Atlantic, researchers collected a dozen new species eating each other or living on organic material that drifts down from above.
"Animals seem to have found a way to make a living just about everywhere," said Jesse Ausubel of the Sloan Foundation, discussing the findings of year six of the census of marine life.
Added Ron O'Dor, a senior scientist with the census: "We can't find anyplace where we can't find anything new."
This year's update, released Sunday, is part of a study of life in the oceans that is scheduled for final publication in 2010. The census is an international effort supported by governments, divisions of the United Nations and private conservation organizations. About 2,000 researchers from 80 countries are participating.
Ausubel said there are nearly 16,000 known species of marine fish and 70,000 kinds of marine mammals. A couple of thousand have been discovered during the census.
The researchers conducted 19 ocean expeditions this year; a 20th continues in the Antarctic. In addition, they operated 128 nearshore sampling sites and, using satellites, followed more than 20 tagged species including sharks, squid, sea lions and albatross.
Highlights of the 2006 research included some truly unique discoveries.
-- Shrimp, clams and mussels living near the super-hot thermal vent in the Atlantic, where they face pulses of water that is near-boiling despite shooting into the frigid sea.
-- In the sea surrounding the Antarctic, a community of marine life shrouded in darkness beneath more than 1,600 feet of ice. Sampling of this remote ocean yielded more new species than familiar ones.
-- Off the coast of New Jersey, 20 million fish swarming in a school the size of Manhattan.
-- Finding alive and well, in the Coral Sea, the type of shrimp called Neoglyphea neocaledonica, thought to have disappeared millions of years ago. Researchers nicknamed it the Jurassic shrimp.
-- Satellite tracking of tagged sooty shearwaters, small birds, that mapped the birds' 43,500-mile search for food in a giant figure eight over the Pacific Ocean, from New Zealand via Polynesia to foraging grounds in Japan, Alaska and California and then back. The birds averaged a surprising 217 miles daily. In some cases, a breeding pair made the entire journey together.
-- A new find, a 4-pound rock lobster discovered off Madagascar.
-- A single-cell creature big enough to see, in the Nazare Canyon off Portugal. The fragile new species was found 14,000 feet deep. It is enclosed within a plate-like shell, four-tenths of an inch in diameter, composed of mineral grains.
-- A new type of crab with a furry appearance, near Easter Island. It was so unusual it warranted a whole new family designation, Kiwaidae, named for Kiwa, the Polynesian goddess of shellfish. Its furry appearance justified its species name, hirsuta, meaning hairy.
Chilean Ex-Dictator Augusto Pinochet Dies at 91
Former Leader Suffered Heart Attack a Week Ago
By EDUARDO GALLARDO, AP
SANTIAGO, Chile (Dec. 10) - Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who terrorized his opponents for 17 years after taking power in a bloody coup, died Sunday, putting an end to a decade of intensifying efforts to bring him to trial for human rights abuses blamed on his regime. He was 91
Supporters saw Pinochet as a Cold War hero for overthrowing democratically elected President Salvador Allende at a time when the U.S. was working to destabilize his Marxist government and keep Chile from exporting communism in Latin America.
But the world soon reacted in horror as Santiago's main soccer stadium filled with political prisoners to be tortured, shot, disappeared or forced into exile.
Pinochet's dictatorship laid the groundwork for South America's most stable economy, but his crackdown on dissent left a lasting legacy: His name has become a byword for the state terror, in many cases secretly supported by the United States, that retarded democratic change across the hemisphere.
Pinochet died with his family at his side at the Santiago Military Hospital on Sunday, a week after suffering a heart attack.
"This criminal has departed without ever being sentenced for all the acts he was responsible for during his dictatorship," lamented Hugo Gutierrez, a human rights lawyer involved in several lawsuits against Pinochet.
Thousands of Pinochet supporters gathered outside the hospital and elsewhere, weeping and trading insults with people in passing cars. Some shouted "Long Live Pinochet!" and sang Chile's national anthem.
Updated: 06:41 PM EST
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Chilean Ex-Dictator Augusto Pinochet Dies at 91
Former Leader Suffered Heart Attack a Week Ago
By EDUARDO GALLARDO, AP
SANTIAGO, Chile (Dec. 10) - Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who terrorized his opponents for 17 years after taking power in a bloody coup, died Sunday, putting an end to a decade of intensifying efforts to bring him to trial for human rights abuses blamed on his regime. He was 91.
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Supporters saw Pinochet as a Cold War hero for overthrowing democratically elected President Salvador Allende at a time when the U.S. was working to destabilize his Marxist government and keep Chile from exporting communism in Latin America.
But the world soon reacted in horror as Santiago's main soccer stadium filled with political prisoners to be tortured, shot, disappeared or forced into exile.
Pinochet's dictatorship laid the groundwork for South America's most stable economy, but his crackdown on dissent left a lasting legacy: His name has become a byword for the state terror, in many cases secretly supported by the United States, that retarded democratic change across the hemisphere.
Pinochet died with his family at his side at the Santiago Military Hospital on Sunday, a week after suffering a heart attack.
"This criminal has departed without ever being sentenced for all the acts he was responsible for during his dictatorship," lamented Hugo Gutierrez, a human rights lawyer involved in several lawsuits against Pinochet.
Thousands of Pinochet supporters gathered outside the hospital and elsewhere, weeping and trading insults with people in passing cars. Some shouted "Long Live Pinochet!" and sang Chile's national anthem.
Many other Chileans saw his death as reason for celebration. Hundreds of cheering, flag-waving people crowded a major plaza in the capital, drinking champagne and tossing confetti.
"Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile represented one of most difficult periods in that nation's history," said Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman. "Our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families."
Chile's government says at least 3,197 people were killed for political reasons during Pinochet's rule, but courts allowed the aging general to escape hundreds of criminal complaints as his health declined.
The mustachioed Pinochet left no doubt about who was in charge after the Sept. 11, 1973 coup, when warplanes bombed the presidential palace and Allende committed suicide with a submachine gun Fidel Castro had given him.
"Not a leaf moves in this country if I'm not moving it," Pinochet said.
But he refused for years to take responsibility his regime's abuses, blaming subordinates for killings or tortures.
Only on his 91st birthday last month did he take "full political responsibility for everything that happened" during his long rule. But the statement made no reference to the rights abuses, and said he had to act to prevent Chile's economic and political disintegration.
Born Nov. 25, 1915, the son of a customs official in the port of Valparaiso, Pinochet was appointed army commander just 19 days before the coup by Allende, who mistakenly thought Pinochet would defend constitutional rule.
The CIA had worked for months to destabilize the Allende government, including financing a truckers strike that paralyzed the delivery of goods across Chile, but Washington denied having anything to do with the coup itself.
Soon after Pinochet's seizure of power, soldiers carried out mass arrests of leftists. Tanks rumbled through the streets of the capital, and many detainees were herded into the National Stadium, which became a torture and detention center. Other leftists were rounded up by death squads, and the "Caravan of Death" to Chile's forbidding Atacama desert left victims buried in unmarked mass graves.
Pinochet disbanded Congress, banned political activity and crushed dissent. In addition to the dead, more than 1,000 victims remain unaccounted for. Thousands more were arrested, tortured and forced into exile.
Pinochet defended his authoritarian rule as a crusade to build a society free of communism. He even claimed partial credit for the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
"I see myself as a good angel," he told a Miami Spanish-language television station in 2004.
He showed no mercy to his perceived enemies. When investigators uncovered coffins that had been stuffed with two bodies each in the aftermath of the coup, he dismissed it as a "a good cemetery space-saving measure."
Pinochet seized power at a time when Chile's economy was in near ruins, partly due to the CIA's covert destabilization efforts and partly to Allende's mismanagement.
He launched a radical free-market program that at first triggered a financial collapse and unprecedented joblessness. But it laid the basis for South America's healthiest economy, which has grown by 5 percent to 7 percent a year since 1984.
Pinochet lost an October 1988 referendum to extend his rule and was forced to call an election. He lost to Patricio Alywin, whose center-left coalition has ruled Chile since 1990.
Pinochet avoided prosecution for years after his presidency. He remained army commander for eight more years and then was a senator-for-life, a position guaranteed under the constitution his regime wrote.
It took a Spanish judge to remove Pinochet's cloak of invincibility, and inspire Chileans to make their own efforts to hold him to account. He was in London for back surgery in 1998 when the judge asked Britain to extradite him to Spain for human rights violations. British authorities ruled he was too ill to be tried, and sent him back to Chile, where ghosts of the past were coming forward.
More than 200 criminal complaints were filed against him and he was under house arrest at the time of his death, but courts repeatedly ruled he could not face trial because of poor physical and mental health.
Even longstanding Pinochet allies abandoned him in 2004, when a U.S. Senate investigative committee found Pinochet kept multimillion-dollar secret accounts at the Riggs Bank in Washington. Investigators said he had up to $17 million in foreign accounts, and owed $9.8 million in back taxes. He, his wife and several of his children were indicted on tax evasion charges.
During his final years, Pinochet lived in seclusion at heavily guarded Santiago mansion and his countryside residence.
He is survived by his wife, Lucia, two sons and three daughters.
The army said Pinochet will lay in state Monday and Tuesday at the Military Academy in Santiago. The government of President Michelle Bachelet _ whose father died in Pinochet's prisons _ said he would not receive the state funeral usually due former presidents.
His body was to be cremated. Pinochet's son Marco Antonio said his father feared a tomb would be desecrated by his enemies.
Ebola Has Killed 5,000 Gorillas, Study Suggests
By Maggie Fox, Reuters
WASHINGTON (Dec. cool -- The Ebola virus may have killed more than 5,000 gorillas in West Africa -- enough to send them into extinction if people continue to hunt them, too, researchers said on Thursday.
The virus is spreading from one group of the already endangered animals to another, the international team of experts report in this week's issue of the journal Science. And it appears to be spreading faster than it is among humans.
"The Zaire strain of Ebola virus killed about 5,000 gorillas in our study area alone," primatologist Magdalena Bermejo of the University of Barcelona in Spain and at the Programme for Conservation and Rational Utilization of Forest Ecosystems in Central Africa and colleagues wrote.
Ebola hemorrhagic fever is one of the most virulent viruses ever seen, killing between 50 percent and 90 percent of victims. The World Health Organization says that it killed 1,200 people infected between its discovery in 1976 and 2004.
The virus is transmitted by direct contact with blood, organs or other bodily fluids. There is no cure or good treatment, although several groups are working on vaccines.
Several experts have noted that chimpanzees and gorillas are also killed by the virus, and suspect that people may have caught it from infected apes -- perhaps when hunting them.
But it was not clear whether the gorillas were infecting one another, or being repeatedly infected and re-infected by another species of animal, perhaps a bat.
Bermejo's team had been studying a group of western gorillas in the Lossi Sanctuary in northwest Republic of Congo. "By 2002 we had identified 10 social groups with 143 individuals," they wrote.
In 2001 and 2002, several outbreaks of Ebola had begun killing people along the Gabon-Congo border. That led researchers to another discovery.
By October 2002, they had found 32 dead gorillas, and of the 12 they tested for Ebola, nine were positive.
"She knew these animals individually, and in the course of three months they all died," said Peter Walsh, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who worked on the study.
Eventually the researchers counted 221 dead gorillas. Based on what they and other experts knew, Walsh extrapolated what the total impact must be to come up with the estimate of 5,500 gorillas killed by Ebola in that area.
He said no one knows precisely how many gorillas are in the world and how many have died.
"But I know what's the typical mortality rate in those areas that are affected. It's an educated guess. A quarter of the gorillas in the world have died from Ebola in the last 12 years. It's huge," Walsh said in a telephone interview.
"Add commercial hunting to the mix, and we have a recipe for rapid ecological extinction," the researchers wrote.
Their report supports a study published in July that showed gorillas were spreading the virus within their social groups.
"Our work is complementary to that -- we have shown it is spreading between groups," Walsh said.
Walsh said gorilla groups share territories, often eating fruit from the same tree, although at different times. Feces from a sick gorilla could easily infect other gorillas.
Gorillas and chimpanzees also touch and handle the bodies of other apes when they find them -- something known to transmit Ebola between humans.
"The issue here is that there is a certain amount of work that needs to be done to take these vaccines that already exist and put them into gorillas," Walsh said.
"The price tag on that is a couple of million bucks." He hopes a rich donor will take up the cause.
 Azalin · Mon Dec 11, 2006 @ 02:05am · 2 Comments |
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