Perennial Arctic Ice Cover Diminishing, Officials Say The amount of long-lasting sea ice in the Arctic -- thick enough to survive for as much as a decade -- declined sharply in the past year, even though the region had a cold winter and the thinner one-year ice cover grew substantially, federal officials said yesterday. Using new data from NASA's ICESat satellite, researchers over the past year detected the steepest yearly decline in "perennial" ice on record. As a result of melting and the southward movement of the thicker ice, the percentage of the Arctic Ocean with this stable ice cover has decreased from more than 50 percent in the mid-1980s to less than 30 percent as of last month. "Because we had a cold winter, the public might think things have gotten better," said Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "In fact, the loss of the perennial ice makes clear that they're not getting better at all." The surprising drop in perennial ice makes the fast-changing region more unstable, because the thinner seasonal ice melts readily in summer....
A Bid to Lure Wolves With a Digital Call of the Wild The long, lonely howl of a wolf shatters the early morning stillness. But is it real? Beginning this June, it might be hard to tell, even for the wolves. One of the most famous sounds in nature is going digital. Under a research project at the University of Montana in Missoula, scientists are betting that the famous call-and-response among wolves can be used to count and keep track of the animals. Tricked by technology, scientists say, wolves will answer what amounts to a roll call triggered by a remotely placed speaker-recorder system called Howlbox. Howlbox howls, and the wolves howl back. Spectrogram technology then allows analysis that the human ear could never achieve — how many wolves have responded, and which wolves they are. “With audio software, we’ll be able to identify each wolf on a different frequency, so we can count wolves individually, kind of like a fingerprint,” said David Ausband, a research associate at the University of Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, where Howlbox was developed. The devices, using off-the-shelf technology, cost about $1,300, including $300 for a solar panel. Audio recordings in the wild are nothing new, of course. Bird and amphibian researchers, in particular, have long used recordings to find or flush out critters. Howlbox’s innovations are the tools of digital analysis and programmed instructions that tell Howlbox when to howl, when to sleep because the wolves are sleeping, and how to store each day’s file on a disk....
Big rattlers vex rural business Most afternoons at four o'clock, Stoney Harris and Eddie Lowrance stop their regular occupations to go diamondback rattlesnake hunting. They don't do it for fun but to decrease the danger. Harris, owner of Bulldog Steel Buildings at 4008 N. County Road 1241 some 10 miles west-northwest of Midland, discovered the dilemma diamondbacks present upon building his home and business three years ago. The rattlers crawl from an abandoned 1950s vintage Colorado River Municipal Water District sub-station that has become a prototypical den. With pipes and culverts covered by a concrete slab, there is no telling how many live there, the men say. "These snakes are so big, they feed on blue quail that come up to the hole," said Harris. "I have caught 100 with a snake catcher with a loop. "When they rattle, they're saying, 'You're too big to swallow, but I can still hurt you.' My wife stepped on a five-footer when we were unloading groceries at 10:30 one night last August. I was a few feet away and it sounded like a machine-gun." "I don't want to kill these big snakes," Harris said Tuesday. "They live to be 15-18 years old. If we lift that slab, there could be 80 or 800. My dogs have been bitten numerous times and it is getting to the point where somebody's kid will step on one. It's unbelievable what a snake that size can do to a child."....