Image from ARKive.org media library

Image courtesy of ARKive.org media library

Species: Giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis)

Status: Endangered (EN)

Interesting Fact: The giant otter is also known as the ‘river wolf’.

The giant otter is one of South America’s top carnivores, and is the largest of the otter species. The giant otter generally lives in family groups of three to ten individuals, composed of a monogamous, breeding pair and their offspring born during previous years. These groups rest, play, travel, fish and sleep together. When cubs are born, they are cared for in a den by both the adult pair, and the older siblings. At two to three weeks of age, the cubs are taken to the water by the female, and at three to four months the cubs begin hunting and travelling with the family. The patch of cream coloured fur on the throat and chin is unique to each individual from birth. The diet of the giant otter is composed almost exclusively of fish, but it is also known to eat caimans, anacondas, other snakes and even the occasional turtle!

Up until the late 1970s the giant otter was excessively hunted for its valuable fur, with its naturally curious disposition making it a particularly easy target. Today, however, habitat destruction is the major threat to this species, with the areas in which the giant otter lives being destroyed and degraded by mining, logging, and damming.

For more information on the giant otter, visit the IUCN Otter Specialist Group.

View images and footage of the giant otter on ARKive.

Becky Moran, ARKive Species Text Author

U.S. Navy photo by Patrick Nichols/Released (source: U.S. Coast Guard)

There has been a huge amount of writing on the Gulf oil spill in recent days; from business analyses to stories highlighting the natural catastrophes caused by the massive leak – to rationalizations, political opinions, updates on BP’s efforts to staunch the flow and even the odd bit of weird news – or weird bit of odd news as the case may be.

Here are just a few examples of the variety of coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.

The New York Times Environment section has a decent selection of articles on the spill.

Here is a quote from the New York Times news analysis ‘Gulf Oil Spill Is Bad, but How Bad?‘ to give a bit of perspective on the amount of oil we are talking about:

The ruptured well, currently pouring an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the gulf, could flow for years and still not begin to approach the 36 billion gallons of oil spilled by retreating Iraqi forces when they left Kuwait in 1991. It is not yet close to the magnitude of the Ixtoc I blowout in the Bay of Campeche in Mexico in 1979, which spilled an estimated 140 million gallons of crude before the gusher could be stopped.

So it’s horrible, but feel free to breathe a sigh of relief – humans have already done worse and survived. Or another way to look at it is oh my god, we’ve done even worse?!

The Telegraph offers a convenient summary of events for those of us who – pardon the pun – don’t wish to wade through the mess of news about the spill or need a summary or catch-up with their Gulf of Mexico oil spill: timeline, which provides a focus on the financial aspect of the spill.

And here is a pair of articles detailing the ecological disaster side of things:

The London Times reports that the ‘Worst ever’ oil spill leaves ecosystem in peril, while the Independent bemoans the fate of the Gulf of Mexico’s wildlife in a piece entitled ‘They wait for oil but the sea brings death instead‘.

Fitting well into the category of weird news, here is a CNN video report on how hair is being used to clean up the oil spill – at least it’s a renewable resource:

Hair being used in oil cleanup

Any way you slice it, the Gulf spill is calling attention to offshore oil drilling’s nasty side effects. So much so that even conservatives are distancing themselves from their formerly gleeful chants of ‘drill baby, drill’, as this New York Times article explores. That would seem in particularly bad taste even for them, especially with all those obvious ‘spill baby, spill’ parodies clogging the headlines. I thought of it back on April 2nd. Ahem.

by Graham Land

Additional resources:

Deepwater Horizon oil spill: Obama attempts to limit political fallout

London Times: BP says stemming oil flow will take three months

Image Source: Screen capture from Megacryometeors.com.

Last week, I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel. It basically talked of a number of strange phenomena or news accounts and one segment in particular caught my attention. That particular segment was about megacryometeors.

Megacryometeors are large chunks of ice that randomly fall out of the sky. It is not known where they come from (for certain) or why they fall at random. What is known is that they can fall anywhere at any time and cause a considerable amount of damage. Even more strange is the fact that they tend to fall from clear skies, rather than during stormy weather.

A megacryometeor can also range greatly in size. Some weigh a mere 6 pounds. Others have tipped the scales at over 400 pounds. They have crashed through homes, totaled cars, and even left small craters in the ground. Some people have even been hit in the head by these random, falling chunks of sky ice, but surprisingly, the impact didn’t kill any of them (that I know of).

Originally, it was theorized that these ice chunks were nothing more than waste water or leakage from an aircraft; however, the fact that airplane waste water tends to be blue and the megacryometeors are white or transparent quickly ruled out that theory. The idea that they may also be giant hailstones has also been ruled out. The one theory that does seem to hold some weight, though, is that these megacryometeors may be forming from fluctuations in the tropopause (the atmospheric boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere). It should also be noted that the number of megacryometeor events has drastically increased since 1950. Over 100 cases have been accounted for around the world.

I wouldn’t say the world needs to panic yet, but this random event may be cause for concern and definitely needs to be studied further. A falling megacryometeor is, at this point, completely unpredictable. We also don’t know what other impact or effect it might have on the environment, or perhaps, what the environment is doing to create these in the first place. If you want to know more, check out these links:

Megacryometeors
Wikipedia: Megacryometeors
Damn Interesting: The Peculiar Phenomenon of Megacryometeors

By Heidi Marshall