An odd-looking sea creature locally christened the “bubble
shark” is breathing new life into a campaign to preserve a vital marine corridor straddling five provinces in the
Southern Tagalog region. The bubble shark also described as an “inflatable
shark” and is a new species of swell
shark being observed in waters off Batangas and Mindoro Island. It is so named
because of its defense mechanism to puff up
to twice its size in the face of danger. This discovery of the weird shark
adds a new meaning to efforts to save
the Verde Island Passage Marine Corridor (VIPMC), a bustling sea-lane renowned
for having some of the highest concentrations of shore-fish and underwater life
in the world. The presence of the bubble shark was discovered last year by a
group of researchers, who found a treasure trove of previously unknown terrestrial and marine wildlife
during the year 2011 on Philippine Wildlife Expedition spearheaded by the California
Academy of the Sciences. The shark found in the VIPMC “possesses a very
distinctive camouflaged color pattern,” the report said. Other swell sharks
feature dark round spots, but the species found in the Philippines, based on
pictures, have white or lighter spots instead. The deep water Oarfish is
estimated to be 50 feet in length. The Oarfish is the longest fish in the oceans.
The Sumatran Orangutan is threatened due to poaching and
habitat destruction of the
rain forests in Indonesia. Only about 6,500 remain in the wild, and their great
ape species become extinct.
The Bactrian camel is critically endangered due to habitat
loss and drought. There are approximately only 950 Bactrian camels left in the
wild, struggling to survive in their
native desert habitat in northwest China and Mongolia being used as a Chinese nuclear test range. These animals are
also hunted for sport and because of
missing food and water resources.
The polar bears swimming and drowning between melting
patches of ice in their dwindling habitat have become synonymous with the
global warming. Currently, 20-25,000
polar bears still roam the wild, but if climate change trends continue, the polar
bears will be extinct within the next 100
years.
Forest clearing and
degradation are main contributing factors
to the Mountain Gorilla’s pending extinction,
and only 720 animals of this species remain on the planet.
The last captive Quagga, a mare, died on 12 August 1883.The Quagga
was hunted until extinction.
Pigeon meat was commercialized and recognized as cheap food, especially for slaves and the poor
people, which led to a hunting campaign on a massive scale.
In the 1980s, a photograph of the Bondegezou was sent to
Australian research scientist Tim Flannery. In May, 1994, Flannery conducted a
wildlife survey of the area and discovered that the animal in the picture was new to science. Named Dingiso
(Dendrolagus mbaiso), this forest-dwelling marsupial has a bold coloration and spends
most of its time on the ground.
Central African tribes
and ancient Egyptians described and depicted a bizarre creature for
centuries, colloquially dubbed the “African
unicorn” by Europeans. It is also known as the Atti, or the O’api,
resembling a cross between a zebra, a donkey and a giraffe. Despite explorers,
Western science rejected the existence of such a creature, viewing it as
nothing more than a fantastical chimera.
In 1901, Sir Harry Johnston, the British governor of Uganda,
obtained pieces of striped skin and even a skull of the legendary beast. Through
this evidence and the capture of a live specimen, the animal now known as the okapi (okapia johnstoni) was recognized
by mainstream science. The okapi is no less unusual today: it is the only
living relative of the giraffe, sharing a similar body structure and its
characteristic long blue tongue.
In 1926, an expedition
approved by the American Museum of Natural History confirmed that the tales
of a giant lizard were true. W. Douglas Burden, the leader of the expedition,
returned with twelve preserved specimens and two live ones. The world was introduced to the Komodo dragon, a massive monitor lizard that grows up to ten feet,
making it the largest lizard in the world. Komodo Dragons possess massive claws
and fangs with which they can kill almost any creature on the island, including
humans and water buffaloes. One particularly bizarre attribute of these
creatures is their venomous bite, which has been attributed to bacteria-laden
saliva or venom glands in the mouth.
A venomous, egg-laying mammal having a duck bill, a beaver
tail, and pelt, is known as the platypus, one of only five extant egg-laying
mammals. While formerly recognized by science, it is no less unique today: this
semi-aquatic creature, native to
eastern Australia, swims with webbed feet, uses electric location to hunt, and
possesses an ankle spur that, in males, can deliver a powerful injection of
venom non-lethal to humans.
Hybrid animals are crossbreeds between animals of similar
genetics. They mostly exist in captivity and are the result of human intervention.
Liger is a crossbred between a male lion and a female tiger,
while Tigon is a crossbred between a male tiger and a female lion. Ligers are
the world’s largest cats. Tigons, on the other hand, are prone towards dwarfism
.Male Ligers/Tigons are sterile, while their females are often fertile.
For a dog wolf hybrid, it is not known when it displays a
wolf behavior, a dog behavior or something in between.
A zorse is the result of the crossbreeding between a horse
and a zebra. A zonkey is the result of the crossbreeding between a donkey and a
zebra. The Zony is the result of the crossbreeding between a pony and a zebra.
All these three are called zebroids.
A grolar/pizzly hybrid is the product of a grizzly bear and
a polar bear. Although the two bears are genetically similar, they tend to
avoid each other in the wild environment.
A Leopon is the result of the breeding between a male
leopard and a female lion.
A fluffy creature looks like a science experiment. It’s just
a rabbit, however. They were exceptionally popular in the 17th and 18th
centuries among European nobility as lap pets, and many different hybrids were
bred to suit changing tastes of different
royalty. The Angora rabbit is still popular to this day.
The Pelochelys cantorii, or Cantor’s Giant Soft Shelled
Turtle, is one of the most unusual
looking animals on the earth .Yet; few people have seen it or know about
it. It’s not a sea turtle – the Cantor prefers to inhabit inland, close to
streams and wetlands. It grows very large, with adult shells often spanning
more than six feet. They are native to Cambodia, but they are very rare.
Pangolins are toothless
and they have no external ears, though their hearing is very good. Since
they have no teeth, they have a gizzard like stomach and swallow small stones
and sand to help the digestive process. Pangolins have very long tongues - up
to 16 inches in length - which are used to slurp up their favorite foods -
termites and ants.
They have a good sense of smell and a poor sense of sight.
Their scales, made out of keratin, (same material that makes up human
fingernails) make up 20% of their total body weight.
''Involution is the process of self-limitation, of
densification, by which the Absolute veils itself by
a stage until it assumes the appearance in the cosmos, the
universe we know of. It wishes to create
the universe to objectify itself and its spiritual
properties in infinite possibilities, for the purpose of
delight of discovery which it will achieve thereafter. The evolution is the movement forward by
which the created universe evolves from its initial state of divided, ignorant
forms, emerges as Life and Mind, and in that process rediscovers its Source. The
evolution occurs after the involution. It is the development and progressive
movement of all in the cosmos, including humans, to attain its fulfillment,
including rediscovery in delight of the spiritual aspect, that
Consciousness-Force, that was the source of the creation. Generally, evolution
is any process of change over time. In the context of life science,
evolution is a change in the traits of living organisms over
generations, including the emergence of new species. Since the development of modern genetics in the
1940s, evolution has been defined more specifically as a change in the
frequency of alleles in a population from one generation to the next.''
'' The theory of "devolution" or backward
evolution is the proposition that a species may evolve into
less primitive forms after having “evolved” over millions of
years into a higher form. The Theory of
evolution as a forward progression and devolution as a
regression is a reflection of the 19th century
ideas of Lamarckism and orthogenesis. Scientifically,
devolution does not exist. More recently the
genetically-based biological evolution theory proposes that
evolution occurs by mechanisms such as
natural selection, genetic drift, and mutation, and is
therefore not directional, forward or backward
in time; and consequently "devolution" cannot a
valid concept.''-
Involution, Evolution and Conscious Creation by Author Suzanne
Tabor
The paleontologists declared that ''a mass-extinction took
place between the Paleozoic and the Mesozoic.''
The extinction was triggered by the volcanism, oxygen deficiency,
salinity oscillation, temperature rise and fall, marine acidity and pollution
constituting a ‘‘gigantic ‘catastrophe group’, which led finally to a great
event, mass-extinction.''The extinction depends on the evolution, adaptability,
feeding habit and the mode of reproduction, as a research group noted in Yang
Zunyi.
''In May 2002, the world’s governments gathered in The
Hague, Netherlands, to address the planet’s biodiversity crisis. They declared
that by 2010, they would significantly slow the rate of biodiversity loss. But
subsequent reviews presented a gloomy outlook.
In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a $24 million,
United Nations–supported research program that focused on past ecosystem
changes and made projections about the future, released the results of its
first four-year study. Societies, it said, were responsible for the widespread
crippling of the world’s ecosystems. About 60 percent of global ecosystem
services—the goods and benefits people get from biological communities and
their environment—had been damaged. The assessment projected that things could
get even worse in the next 50 years.
Three years later, the United Nations Environment Programme,
with financial support from the European Commission, Germany, the United
Kingdom, Sweden, Japan, the Netherlands and Norway, issued an interim report on
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity study. The idea for the study grew
out of a 2007 meeting of environment ministers from the G8 countries (plus the
five major newly industrializing countries) in Potsdam, Germany. TEEB
highlighted the cost of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation and its
impact on human well-being. For example, in clearing forests for fuel or to
make room for growing urban areas, grazing cattle or agricultural crops,
enormous amounts of “natural capital” were being thrown away. According to
TEEB, $2 trillion to $4.5 trillion is lost every year from deforestation alone.
By the time the Convention on Biological Diversity released
the Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 in May 2010, it was clear that the brakes had
failed. The planet was losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. '', Hannah
Hoag, a freelance journalist in Montreal noted.
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