On dolphins at RWS

17 February 2010
Will there be dolphins at Resorts World Sentosa? Part 2
Eighteen wild dolphins in the Philippines have yet to be sent to Resorts Worlds Sentosa, reports Today.
Dolphins still depicted on the Resorts World Sentosa website.

The delay is because "the facilities to house them in Singapore are not finished". The Resorts World Sentosa spokesman Robin Goh said "construction of the Marine Life Park is on schedule and is slated for an opening after 2010".

These dolphins from the Solomon Islands were sent to Subic Bay Marine Exploratorium in the Philippines for training in late 2008. The dolphins were supposed to be sent to Singapore by end 2009, but are now still at Subic Bay.

The Singapore Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) has posted the Philippine newspaper report on its Facebook page. Deirdre Moss of the SPCA said the society "objects to the keeping of dolphins in captivity, as they are usually caught/kept for the purpose of training to entertain/amuse the public" and in doing so, they are "also forced to adapt to an alternative lifestyle in a man-made structure".

Mr Goh said animals acquired for its Marine Life Park are in accordance with the Cites agreement. "In the meantime, the dolphins are in good hands and being looked after according to international standards," he added.

In Jun 09, there was a Solomon Star report that "The Philippines-owned CITES science team has just sent a letter to the government of Philippines that the import of the dolphins from Solomons earlier this year is NOT legal under Philippine law."

Many Singaporeans were shocked by the film "The Cove" on dolphin hunting in Japan for meat and the captive dolphin trade. As Salina Ibrahim, a newspaper reader, writes "Singapore is indirectly guilty of contributing to the entertainment market that demands the capture of dolphins in the first place".

Mr Ric O'Barry, in an interview about "The Cove", shares how Singaporeans can make a difference: avoid live dolphin shows. He notes that Singapore has them and that more are in the pipeline. 'Consumers have all the power. Don't buy a ticket,' he says.

Mr Ric O'Barry is a former dolphin trainer who caught and trained the creatures that appeared in the iconic 1960s TV show Flipper. Now an animal-rights activist, he had a change of heart after he realised how miserable the intelligent, emotional animals were in captivity. Today, he works to undo the craze for live dolphin shows he helped spawn decades ago.

taken from from http://wildshores.blogspot.com/2010/02/will-there-be-dolphins-at-resorts-world.html

Do speedy elephants walk or run?

High-speed cameras filmed the elephants as they ran across the hi-tech track

With their awkward, lumbering gait, elephants moving at high speed are not the most graceful of animals - but are they walking or running?

Now scientists believe they have an answer: new research confirms that they do both - at the same time.

By observing elephants moving across a hi-tech track, the team found the hefty creatures run with their front legs but walk with their back legs.

The research is published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Earlier research had suggested that elephants perform a strange, part-walk/part-run while travelling at speed.

Elephants have a strange gait when they move quickly

But a team from Belgium, Italy and Thailand was able to investigate this further by using a specially built track that was able to precisely measure the forces exerted with each weighty elephant step.

Professor Norman Heglund, an author of the paper from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, told BBC News: "We had to build the plates - you just can't go down to your local hardware shop and pick up an elephant-sized force plate."

Armed with these, the researchers headed to the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre to study the big beasts, which ranged from an 870kg baby to a four tonne adult.

Energetic exchanges

The Asian elephants were encouraged to move across the track, at speed, by their keepers - or mahouts - who rode on their backs (in the conservation centre, the elephants, which were rescued from the forest industry, are paired with their mahouts for life).

The fastest elephant reached 18km per hour (11mph).

They were also filmed using high-speed cameras.

The force plates were able to withstand an elephant's bulk

By comparing the measurements from the sensitive force-measuring platform with each frame of the footage, the scientists were able to look at every tiny movement that the elephants were making.

This enabled them to calculate the amounts of potential energy (stored energy) and kinetic energy (the energy that is associated movement), that the creatures were using.

Measuring the relationship between potential and kinetic energy is the key to defining whether something is walking or running.

For example, when walking, as an animal raises its foot from the ground and moves it forwards, it is converting the stored energy in its muscles and tendons - the potential energy - into kinetic energy.

As its foot lands, the kinetic energy converts back into potential energy, and then back into kinetic energy as the foot is once again raised, and so on. All the time the creature is walking, the energy is transferred back and forth between potential and kinetic energy.

Scientists looked at the elephant's kinetic and potential energy

But while running, the potential energy and kinetic energy fluctuates simultaneously.

Professor Heglund explains: "The running gait, in most animals, is a bouncing mechanism.

"In this case, the potential and kinetic energy are in phase, they both hit a maximum at the same time and a minimum at the same time, so they cannot be transferred back and forth."

However, the researchers found that fast-moving elephants seem to both run and walk at the same time.

Professor Heglund said: "When an elephant goes at higher and higher speeds, the kinetic and potential energy shift and start to become more in phase.

"But when we looked in detail, we see that the animal appears to be running - bouncing - with the front legs, and walking with the back legs.

"It is as if he is getting up to a transition speed where he wants to transition from a walk to a run, but he cant quite do it. It's like he can't quite get up into second gear."

The team said the elephant's front legs "ran", but its back legs "walked"

As well as confirming high-speed movements, the team also used the pressure plates to find out that elephants were also extremely economical with their movements, especially compared with smaller animals.

The scientists now plan to look at other large animals, such as hippos and rhinos, to find out if they run or walk.

This latest study confirms the findings of other research, published in the journal Nature and the Journal of Experimental Biology, that have previously shown that elephants perform a run-walk hybrid.

However, there are some differences - while this latest paper suggests the front legs run and the back legs walk, the other studies suggested the opposite.

Docents' outing!

Hey CC family and fellow docents!

Details of our first outing is now out! It will be on 7th Feb, this Sunday. We're meeting at 4.30pm at Mind Cafe @ Prinsep Street for some mind-boggling, awesome board games and quality time of bonding! As for dinner, we're heading down to TIMBRE@substation for some really gastronomic pizza (they're famous for this!) and spend a night of great food and great music with some great company!!!

This event is by invitation only (=

cheers,
Angel

ESCONDIDO: Animal park researcher decoding African elephants' 'secret language'

By ANDREA MOSS - amoss@nctimes.com | Posted: January 31, 2010 6:20 pm |

Researchers at the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park are studying African elephants' calls to each other. The adult females are particularly vocal, making certain types of calls to their "sisters" in the herd while they're pregnant, then a different set of calls to their calves once they're born. (Photo by Jamie Scott Lytle - Staff Photographer)

Watch the video HERE

Loading…

Elephant communication research

The San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park researchers are studying African elephant at the park where they have begun recording the calls and building the first database of pachyderm "speak" in hopes of figuring out what the elephants are "saying" to each other.

They're huge, they walk on four legs, and they stuff food into their mouths with their trunks. Like humans, though, they like to hang out together and "talk."

Someone is watching and listening when they do.

And it didn't take that someone long to discover that female African elephants in a herd at the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park talk a heck of a lot more than anyone realized.

Dr. Matt Anderson, the park's acting director of behavioral biology, has been recording eight of the elephants' vocalizations for one 24-hour period per week for about 10 weeks, then overlaying the sounds with information about their movements and behavior.

He said last week that the project is already producing big surprises: Female elephants tend to be chatterboxes and their ranking in the herd plays a role in how vocal and active they are.

He said he also discovered that a low rumbling call ---- which researchers thought females used only to tell faraway males they were ready to mate ---- is also used among themselves.

And although it was well known that females form a protective circle around a pregnant mother giving birth, Anderson said no one realized the mother actually tells the group when the baby is coming ---- knowledge that could help keepers prepare for the births of calves.

"It's essentially a secret language," he said, adding that the study has also revealed specific types of calls from the mothers to their calves. "It falls very low in the sound spectrum. ... And we're now able to capture it."

Because African elephants are more likely to breed successfully when they are in a natural habitat and stress-free, Anderson said, the information may help researchers understand how environment affects pachyderm hormones and communication, leading to more breeding success.

Natural opportunity

The ability of animals to communicate with one another is well known and, in some cases, well-documented. Cheetahs, gibbon apes and koalas are among the more familiar animals researchers have studied both in the wild and in zoos.

Some elephant "talk" has also been recorded. And Anderson, who has been at the park for nearly six years, has another project going in Botswana, where he is using GPS devices to track the movements of pachyderms in the wild.

He said this is the first time, however, that anyone has recorded the animals over a 24-hour period and correlated the results with information about the elephants' behavior and movements.

The park's natural setting and "wonderful" herd of African elephants present the perfect opportunity for studying their movements and sounds, he said.

Run by the Zoological Society of San Diego, the park is spread over 1,800 acres in the hills east of Escondido. The park was designed to be an endangered animal breeding and research center for the world-renowned San Diego Zoo, which the society also runs. But strong public interest prompted zoo officials to open the park to guests upon its completion in 1972.

Park inhabitants roam large enclosures modeled after the native habitats of the large variety of animals.

Most of the park's African elephants are part of a herd the Zoological Society helped bring to the United States from a Swaziland nature preserve in 2003. Several calves born since then have increased the herd's size to 13.

Potential breeding aid

Anderson and park research coordinator Dr. Lance Miller teamed up for the recording project, which is being paid for with money from several grants, donations and the Zoological Society's research budget.

Miller focused on developing special $2,500 leather collars equipped with a chin microphone, a GPS tracking system and a recording device. Anderson said that although everyone involved expected the animals to be wary of the collars at first, they were more curious than afraid and accepted their new accessories relatively quickly after keepers introduced them.

Before his experiment, Anderson said, it was well known that elephants used a handful of calls and other sounds ---- including the rumble and what he calls "the 'Jungle Book' trumpet call" ---- to communicate.

Many animals also make high- and low-frequency sounds inaudible to the human ear.

Specialized computer software that speeds up the recordings and graphs the vocalizations revealed just how much communication was going on within the elephant herd, Anderson said.

He said he combined the information with the GPS data and detailed observations of the elephants' behavior during the recording sessions to put the sounds into context.

"That tells you what they're saying," Anderson said. "It's very exciting. We thought that they had a certain vocabulary, but we're finding it's much larger than anyone realized."

He said he is cataloging the results in a growing audio "dictionary" of elephant sounds.

Dr. Allison Alberts, chief conservation officer for the San Diego Zoo, said officials there and at similar facilities welcome the new data that the project is producing.

"We are very excited about this intriguing research and its potential to help us better care for elephants in zoos and conserve them in the wild," she said. "It provides important insights into elephant behavior that we otherwise would not be able to gather."

Call staff writer Andrea Moss at 760-739-6654.