Postiert: 24 September 2009 um 8:47am | IP Logged

The Amphibian Survival Alliance will bring together existing projects and organisations, improving co-ordination, scientific research and fund-raising.

About a third of amphibian species are threatened with extinctions.

A two-day summit held last week in London identified the two main threats as destruction of habitat and the fungal disease£¨Õæ¾ú²¡£© chytridiomycosis.

"The world's amphibians£¨Á½ÆÜÀࣩ are facing an uphill battle£¨¼èÄѵĶ·Õù£© for survival," said James Collins, co-chair of the Amphibian Specialist Group (ASG) co-ordinated by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

"By far the worst threats are infectious disease and habitat destruction, so the Alliance will focus on these issues first."

Last week's meeting, held at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), declared that research into possible treatments for the chytrid£¨ºø¾ú£© fungus should be a top priority.
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Identified only a decade ago, the fungus now infects amphibians in the Americas, Australia, Europe, Asia and Africa.

How it originated and how it kills are matters of ongoing research.

But in practical terms, finding something that can stop it in open country rather than the laboratory is the big challenge.

Researchers have found that some amphibian species carry chemicals on their skin that provide a natural defence.

The idea is to see whether these chemicals can be turned into something that can attack the fungus in the wild, providing a defence for species that currently have none.
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The new Amphibian Survival Alliance (ASA) sees this line of research as an urgent priority.

More difficult to tackle£¨´¦Àí£¬×¥×¡£© will be the ongoing destruction of habitat that is a concern in most continents, but especially in parts of Asia that are seeing rapid expansion of cities, industry and infrastructure.

"If we want to stop the amphibian extinction crisis, we have to protect the areas where amphibians are threatened by habitat destruction," said Claude Gascon, the Amphibian Specialist Group's other co-chair.
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"One of the reasons amphibians are in such dire£¨¿Éŵģ¬±¯²ÒµÄ£© straits£¨À§ÄÑ£¬¾½¾³£© is because many species are only found in single sites and are therefore much more susceptible to£¨¶Ô¡­¡­Ãô¸ÐµÄ£© habitat loss."

As a group, amphibians are considerably more threatened than birds, mammals, fish or reptiles£¨ÅÀÐж¯Î.

Apart from habitat loss and chytrid, issues of concern are:
unsustainable hunting for food, medicine and the pet trade
chemical pollution
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climatic change
introduced species
other infectious diseases

The formation of the ASA was proposed in 2006 but adequate financial and institutional backing did not materialise.

At that stage scientists were divided over how money and resources should be split between conservation in the wild and captive breeding.
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Now there is general agreement that both strategies are necessary.

Initial backing emerged at the ZSL meeting in the form of a $200,000 pledge that will fund the ASA co-ordinator's post for two years.

Postiert: 10 November 2009 um 3:52am | IP Logged

I'm the Only One

She was my sister and she was sleeping late. She's a lot older than me and at the time she was about to break into films, directing them, so everybody was indulging her. She was the only girl, too. If something didn't wk out in her life and she had to come home f a while, it was a big deal. It mattered me than if I f**ked up in one way  another. When Kelly was at home you had to creep around the house and keep your voice down even if it was in the middle of the afternoon. Our mother's Canadian - I don't know why I say that, except maybe it helps explain her opinion about Kel: Smarts Needs Special. It was this crappy little phrase that she had made up and it meant that clever people.wow power leveling, People with special talents, need special treatment. Like they have a disease. You have to meet the Canadian side of our family to understand how cute she thinks that phrase is. I remember thinking that it was bullsh*t when I was fourteen and it still smells bad now. But to my mother, Kelly was this asteroid that had landed in our lives and no one knew how she got there  what size hole she was going to leave. I've never been very good at school, and Pete, our older brother, is the same. Then along comes Kelly. So my mother has us all pussy-footing around like a family mime troupe, waving our hands, taking our shoes off.replica rolex,

I'm thinking of a particular mning, I was creeping around trying to make a silent breakfast, opening cupboards quietly, acting like I didn't exist. I'd been doing it f a couple of weeks since Kelly got back. It felt like I'd been doing it my whole life. The situation came about because earlier in the year Kelly had moved in with this guy called Aidan. They bought furniture, the whole wks. Then she cheated on him and he left her. Apart from Kelly being back in our house, it was also a shame because Aidan was the only man she ever went out with, befe  since, whom I've had any time f whatsoever. Aidan was a top, replica rolex,man, a good guy. The thing I like about him was that he was smart, but he didn't need much of this special treatment. He was Irish, from Dublin, and he could be funny, he could talk football and he liked to see other people's mouths open and close besides his own. It was good knowing someone like him. I needed it; what with dad not being around, Pete married and gone; and me in a house full of women. That was the year I was praying f a few me inches on my height and shaving the bare space under my nose hoping that something might turn up. So it was good to know Aidan, six foot three and hairy as a bear. He was hairy back and front and Kelly would tease him about it, and he would laugh her off  tell her she could do with losing a few pounds which, between you and me, was nothing but the truth. She was a fat little thing back then. And he went and told her, straight-up; didn't care that she was almost, st of, famous. He told it how it was. That was the way he loved her. She never appreciated it, replica rolex,though, and then she had this fling with some pretty boy in the film industry. But you could see she realised what she'd lost when he left her because she slunk back home and holed herself up in Pete's old room that I'd been using f weights. She took it over and lay in there all day in the dark curled up in a stinking duvet watching old black-and-white films. I remember asking her, 'Why can't you use your own bedroom?' She had a small bedroom upstairs that used to be covered wall to wall in her school friends' graffiti until she went off to university and mum whitewashed the whole thing. I asked her again, 'Why can't you use your own bedroom, that's what it's there f.' She said, 'I can't sleep and wk in the same room. I need a study.' She said it as if a study is one of those things you can't do without, like clean water. I said, 'But I need to exercise.' She said, 'You're fourteen. Your body isn't even developed. The only thing you need to do is stop beating the bishop befe you go blind.' This was classic Kelly. She always knew how to make you feel four inches long in every direction.
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So she came back, and I had to move out all my weights and spread them around the house wherever there was space. I put the bench press in my room along with the free weights. I put the Abdominizer in the lounge. I stuck the chin-up bar at the top of the stairs which lead down to the front do. And even though I was pissed off with Kelly f taking the spare room, having the weights all over the place did make it me like circuit training and doing circuits made me feel like I was Rocky. It's what they do in the middle of Rocky movies; a two-minute sequence to show that over a number of months he got fit and pumped up. You pray f that kind of speedy, magic-time when you're wking out, the same way you wish your adolescence would pass like it does in a TV serial: a school scene, a sex scene and graduation. It's slower and faster than that. And some events become still and solid, and turn into a thing in your life, an object like a lampshade  an ironing board. They hang around; you could reach out and touch them. This day I'm trying to tell you about is like that.
So: my exercise. I'd start in my room, and do about four sets of twenty. Then I'd run downstairs and start on the Abdominizer. If you've never seen one, they're like half of something fun, half a bike
replica rolex,  half a swing. You lie down in them and you do sit-ups. You spend good money trying to make sit-ups something else. In the end, a sit-up is a sit-up. But I'm a big a mug as anyone and I'd try and do two hundred sit-ups in that thing in sets of fifty. The pain was very bad. So I'd think of something that pissed me off, usually Kelly, and the anger would help me push out the last fifty. I wanted to show her that I could develop if I wanted to. Because there was always this thing between her and me that we were both kind of overweight, and always telling the other one that they were obsessed with it.So if Kelly didn't eat lunch,
I'm the Only One