Thread: The Endangered Species Act & Agenda 21

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMVeymYFFJk"]The Endangered Species Act & Agenda 21 - YouTube[/ame]

Comment: Through tricks and lies they move Agenda 21 forward, saying its good while its total evil. They say they want to save the animals but not you. Heck they aren't even worried about the animals but know you care, so lie and laugh about it.

Thats a nice video morphcity did.

bump do the bump

Sometimes Uncle Ferd sings like a drunk monkey when he's had a snootful...

Gibbons can sing like opera artists
Fri, Aug 24, 2012 - Gibbons are jungle divas. The small apes use the same technique to project their songs through the forests of Southeast Asia like top sopranos at the New York Metropolitan Opera or La Scala in Milan.

That was the conclusion of research by Japanese scientists who tested the effect of helium gas on gibbon calls to see how their singing changed when their voices sounded abnormally high-pitched. Just like professional singers, the experiment found the animals were able to amplify the higher sounds by adjusting the shape of their vocal tract, including the mouth and tongue. It is a skill only mastered by a few humans, yet gibbons are able to do it with minimal effort, according to Takeshi Nishimura from the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University.

Singing is particularly important to gibbons, which use loud calls and songs to communicate across the dense jungle. Their exchanges, described by primatologists as “duets,” can carry as far as 2km. “Our data indicate that acoustic and physiological mechanisms used in gibbon singing are analogous to human soprano singing, a professional operatic technique,” Nishimura and colleagues wrote in a study in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology yesterday. Professional sopranos’ ability to fine-tune their vocal tract resonances allows them to maintain their volume when they hit the high notes. The fact that gibbons can do the same thing suggests the complexity of human speech may not have needed specific modifications in our vocal anatomy.

Making gibbons sing on helium may sound eccentric but Nishimura said it was a logical way to test how the animals controlled vocalization when the resonance frequencies in the vocal tract were shifted upwards. “Using the helium environment, we can easily see how the resonance works and how the gibbon makes its loud pure-tone calls,” he said in an interview. His team used a captive white-handed gibbon to record 20 calls in normal air and 37 calls in a helium-enriched atmosphere to show how the animals could consciously manipulate their vocal cords and tract. They worked out the gibbon’s vocal tract had been adjusted by analyzing the sounds it produced. Helium causes its distinctive effect because sound travels much faster through the gas than through air.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worl.../24/2003541091

See also:

Helium-huffing gibbons 'sing with soprano technique'
23 August 2012 - The gibbons were tested using an atmosphere containing 50% helium with oxygen and nitrogen

Researchers in Japan have discovered that lar gibbons use the same techniques as human soprano singers to make their melodic but piercing calls. When the apes made calls while in an atmosphere rich in helium, the team analysed the calls' frequencies. As the team report in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, the apes were able to control the natural frequencies of their "vocal tracts". Such control, exemplified by sopranos, was thought to be unique to humans. We share a great deal of the biological equipment of sound production with apes. That includes first of all the "source" - the vocal folds that humans and many animals share. There is also the "vocal tract" - the upper oesophagus and trachea and the mouth, which are well known in humans to shape sung notes and subtle vowel sounds.

In humans the vocal tract acts as a filter on the sound from the source, and the "source-filter theory" held that the separate, fine control of the vocal tract to be the product of a long evolution in the development of the subtleties of speech. Singing too has evolved, and soprano singers reach their piercing high notes by precisely controlling the shape of their vocal tract to match its natural, resonant frequency with multiples of the one being produced by their vocal folds. Now Takeshi Nishimura of Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute and his colleagues have tested whether lar gibbons (also known as white-handed gibbons, Hylobates lar) have this same separate control - by using helium.

As anyone who has breathed helium knows, its presence raises the pitch of the voice. It increases the natural resonant frequency in the vocal tract because the speed of sound in helium is very different from that in air. That shift allowed the team to record calls in helium and examine separately the sounds of gibbons' "pure-tone" vocalisations from the vocal folds as well as how they were modified in the vocal tract. Detailed analyses of the frequencies produced showed that the gibbons modified their vocal tracts to match multiples of the vocal folds' frequencies - just like soprano singers.

Dr Nishimura told BBC News the findings were significant - not only that the "source-filter theory" was not the preserve of human physiology, but also that the gibbons had mastered techniques that in humans were only found in professional singers. He explained that it upended a long history of research suggesting the control humans enjoy is the product of a long line of physiological and anatomical changes under the influence of evolution. "The present study challenges that concept and throws new insight into the studies on biological foundations producing the diversifications in primate vocalisations, including human speech," he said. "It is hoped that this study will encourage researchers in various research fields to conduct further investigations of primate vocalisations and that such empirical evidence will lead to a deeper understanding of the evolution of speech and language."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19348123

Endangered species on brink of extinction...

Twenty-five primates on brink of extinction: report
Tue, Oct 16, 2012 - Twenty-five species of monkeys, langurs, lemurs and gorillas are on the brink of extinction and need global action to protect them from increasing deforestation and illegal trafficking, researchers said yesterday.

Six of the severely threatened species live on the island nation of Madagascar, off southeast Africa. Five more from mainland Africa, five from South America and nine species in Asia are among those listed as most threatened. The report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature was released at a biodiversity conference being held in Hyderabad, India. Primates, mankind’s closest living relatives, contribute to the ecosystem by dispersing seeds and maintaining forest diversity.

Conservation efforts have helped several species of primates, which are no longer listed as endangered, said the report, prepared every two years by some of the world’s leading primate experts. The report said that Madagascar’s lemurs are severely threatened by habitat destruction and illegal hunting, which has accelerated dramatically since the change of power in the country in 2009.

Among the most severely hit was the northern sportive lemur with only 19 known individuals left in the wild in Madagascar. “Lemurs are now one of the world’s most endangered groups of mammals, after more than three years of political crisis and a lack of effective enforcement in their home country, Madagascar,” said Christoph Schwitzer of the Bristol Conservation and Science Foundation, one of the groups involved in the study. “A similar crisis is happening in Southeast Asia, where trade in wildlife is bringing many primates very close to extinction,” Schwitzer said.

More than half of the world’s 633 types of primates are in danger of becoming extinct because of human activity, such as the burning and clearing of tropical forests, the hunting of primates for food and the illegal wildlife trade.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worl.../16/2003545340

Poachers beware...

Operation Succeeds at Cracking Down on Illegal Wildlife Trade
February 18, 2013 — An international crackdown on wildlife crimes involving countries in Asia, Africa and the United States is claiming a significant victory. Chinese authorities say they took the lead in a broad effort to curb wildlife poaching.

A cross-border crackdown on wildlife crimes has resulted in hundreds of arrests and seizures of banned wildlife specimens, marking the first international effort led by China to reduce illicit trade in endangered species. Between January 6 and February 5, the United States and countries in Africa and Asia cooperated in the operation code-named COBRA that specifically tried to dismantle wildlife crime syndicates. Steven Galster is director of the Bangkok-based Freeland Foundation, an anti-trafficking organization that supported operation Cobra with research and information on wildlife crime it had collected over several years. “China came out and actually was the government that proposed a joint operation,” he noted.

During the operation officials seized some 6,500 kilograms of elephant ivory, 2,600 live snakes, 22 rhino horns, and 1,500 kilograms of shatoosh, made from the down hair of an estimated 10,000 Tibetan antelopes. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei spoke about the success of the operation in a briefing with reporters Monday. He said the Chinese government is paying great attention to the protection of wildlife, including elephants. Hong Lei said while some people turn a blind eye to China’s efforts, the operation yielded significant results.


Kenya Wildlife Service says poaching activities have increased to the highest ever recorded loss in a single year in 2012, as price, demand of ivory in South-East Asian countries increase.

Demand from China has resulted in a huge increase in illegal wildlife poaching of endangered species in Africa. In 2011 an estimated 44 tons of illegal ivory was seized world wide, representing the deaths of thousands of elephants. Earlier this month the country of Gabon announced that poachers had killed 11,000 elephants there since 2004. Similarly, African wild rhinos used to number in the hundreds of thousands; there are less than 30,000 alive today. Asian and African governments have been making efforts to link police, customs and wildlife officers from around the world to better combat smuggling and poaching networks. The latest operation involved law enforcement personnel from Africa’s Lusaka Agreement Task Force, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and China.

While Operation Cobra targeted poachers, Steven Galster says China’s government is also trying to reduce demand from Chinese buyers. “They’re targeting folks that are going overseas, naturally those that are going to go work in Africa,” he said. The illegal wildlife trade totals $8 billion to $10 billion annually, drawing poachers and smugglers to profit from the killing of endangered species. With Chinese investment and trade with Africa soaring, sustaining the impact of Operation Cobra will be the next challenge for Asian and African nations.

Source

The sooner all the animals are extinct the sooner we will find out where their money is hidden.