QUOTE (iowanic @ Aug 5 2009, 04:38 PM)
Any theories why no wildlife experts have stepped forward and pubically stated releasing domestcated mink into the wild is good for the mink?
Here's one theory which says it could be bad. But let's back up for a moment. How about we stop breeding domestic mink for fur. Then we'd have no worries, eh? Makes sense to me. Also would keep AR's out of jail. And those mink farmers? They could do something more reputable. Tomatoes.
Fewer wild minks: Birds do it, bees do it, and minks really, really do it. That's why it's a bad idea for animal rights activists to free horny domestic animals from mink farms.
The result could be rampant cross-breeding between domestic and wild mink, genetically weakening the wild population, as has happened already with farmed salmon escaping into the ocean.
Sure enough, biologists from Sudbury's Laurentian University found that two out of three mink running wild in some southern Ontario locations were actually either domestic mink or domestic-wild hybrids.
The locations, in Essex County and the municipality of Niagara, have been home to mink ranches for two decades, so there was a good chance of mink escaping and crossbreeding
To test the hypothesis, biology researcher Anne Kidd applied a sophisticated genetics ancestry test to 50-plus mink live-trapped there. In one area, only one in five was actually wild, while in the other, barely more than half were.
In the current issue of the journal Molecular Ecology, Kidd and her colleagues warn that such hybridization can lessen survival chances of the wild population by introducing inbred genes from the domestic population. As well, farmed mink are prone to Aleutian disease, an often-fatal virus, which could spread to the wild.
A Bigger Bang: It's not just the fingers of guitarists like the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood that are synchronized – their brainwaves are as well, according to researchers in Germany.
EEG readings from eight pairs of guitarists wired up to an electroencephalograph revealed that patterns of electrical activity in their brains became more and more closely yoked as they repeated a jazz-fusion melody dozens of times.
But the researchers couldn't say whether the brain synchronization occurs first and shapes the co-ordinated strumming or vice-versa, whether watching the other performer and listening helps pull the brainwaves into sync.
The strongest synchronization patterns were measured in the frontal and central regions of the brain, says the report in a forthcoming issue of the journal BMC Neuroscience.
Sun and sweat: When the Clyde Beatty Circus set up in the open fields at Islington Ave. and Rexdale Blvd. in July 1955, the posters advertised "Big Otto – Blood Sweating Hippopotamus from the River Nile."
It wasn't really blood; it was hippo sweat, a red granular secretion that shields the wallowing animals from the equatorial sun's ultraviolet rays.
Now a group of U.S. researchers has worked out how this nature-made protection works. University of California engineering professor Christopher Vinney says the outcome could be a four-in-one manufactured product, combining hippo sweat properties of sunscreen, sunblock, antiseptic and insect repellent.
After analyzing hippo sweat collected at a Fresno zoo, Vinney and colleagues found that the oily secretion is composed of two types of liquid crystalline structures.
One combines sun-screening and sun-blocking properties. The other makes the sweat less viscous so it spreads easily and evenly over the hippo's huge hide.
The findings are published in the current issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/606242
