| Science briefs 04/09/2001 Pandas in peril
The Wolong Nature Reserve in China, set up to protect endangered giant pandas, has failed to provide a good home for them, a new study shows.
Panda habitat has disappeared more quickly inside the reserve than outside since its establishment in 1975, reports a team led by Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University.
In the current issue of Science, Dr. Liu and colleagues describe how forests inside Wolong have fragmented as the local human population exploded. In 1975, 2,560 people lived inside the reserve; in 1995, their families had grown so that residents numbered 4,260. Their farming and other activities have destroyed panda habitat, Dr. Liu's team wrote.
If the well-funded Wolong reserve – home to 10 percent of all wild giant pandas – cannot succeed, then other conservation efforts may fare even worse, the scientists added.
Alexandra Witze
Disease on the move
A disease may have hitchhiked across the New World in the bodies of humans as long as 10,000 years ago.
New research suggests that the fungus that causes valley fever spread from Texas to South America as humans migrated there, says an international team of scientists led by John Taylor of the University of California, Berkeley.
The fungus, Coccidioides immitis, thrives in arid soils of the U.S. Southwest. Breathing fungus-laden dust can make people sick with flulike symptoms or pneumonia. The disease can be fatal.
New genetic studies, reported in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, discovered that among a variety of fungus samples, those from Texas and South America were most similar to each other. Because earlier work had shown that the fungus originated in North America, it must have migrated southward from Texas, the researchers wrote.
Alexandra Witze
Disappearing toads
Researchers studying the decline of western toads in Oregon's Cascade Range have linked a series of seemingly unrelated events: warm weather patterns over the South Pacific, less rainfall in the Pacific Northwest, ultraviolet radiation and a funguslike pathogen.
The team found that unusually dry winters caused by El Niño weather patterns meant that ponds in which toad embryos mature had less water, making them more vulnerable to both radiation and the destructive pathogen. The study appears in last week's Nature.
The scientists "have identified, for the first time, a complete chain of events whereby large-scale climate change leads to high mortality in a declining population," said ecologist J. Alan Pounds at the Golden Toad Laboratory for Conservation in Costa Rica.
Los Angeles Times
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