The research team, writing in the science journal PLoS One, said they repeatedly observed a female dolphin herding cuttlefish out of algal weed and onto a clear, sandy patch of seafloor.

The dolphin, then pinned the cuttlefish with its snout while standing on its head, before killing it instantly with a rapid downward thrust and "loud click" audible to divers as the hard cuttlebone broke.

The dolphin then lifted the body up and beat it with her nose to drain the toxic black ink that cuttlefish squirt into the water to defend themselves when attacked.

Next the prey was taken back to the seafloor, where the dolphin scraped it along the sand to strip out the cuttlebone, making the cuttlefish soft for eating.

"It's a sign of how well their brains are developed. It's a pretty clever way to get pure calamari without all the horrible bits," Mark Norman, the curator of molluscs at Museum Victoria.

A separate 2005 study provided the first sign dolphins may be capable of group learning and using tools, with a mother seen teaching her daughters to break off sea sponges and wear them as protection while scouring the seafloor in Western Australia.

Related:
Just How Smart Are Dolphins?.

New Caledonian Crows Find Two Tools Better Than One.

In 1996, when the langurs were highly endangered, Dr. Pan Wenshi, China's premier panda biologist, came to study them in Chongzuo at what was then an abandoned military base. This was at a time when hunters were taking the canary-yellow young langurs from their cliff-face strongholds, and villagers were leveling the forest for firewood.

Pan quickly hired wardens to protect the remaining animals but then went a step further, taking on the larger social and economic factors jeopardizing the species. Pan also believed that alleviating the region's continuing poverty was essential for their long-term survival.

In the 24-square-kilometer nature reserve where he has focused his studies, the langur population increased to more than 500 today from 96 in 1996.

"It's a model of what can be done in hot-spot areas that have been devastated by development," said Dr. Russell Mittermeier, the president of Conservation International. "Pan has combined all the elements — protection, research, ecotourism, good relations with the local community; he's really turned the langur into a flagship for the region."

Historically, local farmers had occasionally killed langurs for food, but then teams of outside hunters began taking a serious toll on the population.

"In the 1990s, the Chinese economy started booming, and those with money — governors, factory owners, businessmen — all wanted to eat the wildlife to show how powerful they were," said Pan, 71.

A breakthrough in protecting the species came in 1997 when he helped local villagers build a pipeline to secure clean drinking water. Shortly thereafter, a farmer from the village freed a trapped langur and brought it to Pan.

"When you help the villagers, they would like to help you back," he said.

As self-appointed local advocate, Pan raised money for a new school in another village, oversaw the construction of health clinics in two neighboring towns and organized physicals for women throughout the area.

"Now, when outsiders try to trap langurs," Pan said, "the locals stop them from coming in."

In 2000, he received a $12,500 environmental award from Ford Motor Company. He used the money to build biogas digesters — concrete-lined pits that capture methane gas from animal waste — to provide cooking fuel for roughly 1,000 people.

Based on the project's success, the federal government financed a sevenfold increase in construction of tanks to hold biogas. Today, 95 percent of the population living just outside the reserve burn biogas in their homes.

As a result, the park's number and diversity of trees — the langurs' primary habitat and sole food source — has increased significantly.

In 2001, the county government built a research center in the reserve with accommodations for Pan and his students, a guesthouse and a yet-to-be completed education center to showcase the region's biodiversity.

In 2002, when Pan inaugurated the Chongzuo Eco-Park, a small part of the Nongguan Nature Reserve that is open to the public, he had a quote from the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius carved into stone at the front gate. The phrase, "In an ideal society, everyone should work for the well being of others," was a subtle reminder to local officials that the park should not be misused for their own financial gain. But the quote also reminds those looking to protect the langurs that they must consider the area's human community.

Yet his greatest achievement may well be what he has passed on to the next generation. In 1991, he founded Peking University's department of conservation biology — now the Center for Nature and Society — one of the first institutions in China dedicated to studying and protecting endangered species.

Currently staffed by 10 of Pan's former students, the department conducts fieldwork on everything from dolphins in the South China Sea to snow leopards on the Tibetan Plateau.

Pan became interested in langurs in the early '90s after reading "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis," a groundbreaking book by Dr. Edward Wilson, the Harvard biologist, environmentalist and writer. It suggested that certain social behaviors were evolutionarily advantageous. Pan wanted to test Wilson's ideas in the field, but needed a more gregarious species than the panda, which lives primarily in solitude.

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Related:

China’s First National Park - Pudacuo.

Palm oil puts squeeze on Asia’s endangered orangutan.

Yangtze River Dolphin now Extinct.

I created a new walking workout with autolap set to route based. Once the application starts tracking, it will record the path, location, time and number of steps I took. The workout data can be uploaded to Sports Tracker online using Upload to Service.

From the Sports Tracker website, we can download the route as KML file and import it to Google Map. (For details, refer to How To: Embed Sports Tracker Data to Your Blog and Make Position Art Like Stavros)

View Larger Map

The walking workout summary: (You can also click on the yellow route on the above Google map to view the summary data)

Jul 12: I walk through Bukit Timah nature reserve, along the South view path, then catchment path, (tracking stops, the green route on Google map) then on the open ground, turn right and walk until I am back at the rifle range rd.

If you view Google map using satellite view, the open ground can be seen clearly. (along blue line)

Related:

Amur Leopard Near Extinction.

A camera is attached to an elephant's trunk to capture those amazing jungle views.

Downer said he came up with the idea three years ago when his team started filming the tigers.

He noticed how gently the forest elephants carried firewood to their camp and wondered if they'd be as delicate with a camera.

"And they were," he enthused. "Elephants do not see tigers as a threat, and tigers are comfortable with elephants. So we had the perfect team."

Along the way, images of other animals were captured by chance - or when the otherwise camera-shy creatures investigated the equipment.

Somewhat related:

New Caledonian Crows Find Two Tools Better Than One (Comment: Tiny “Crow-Cams” Capture Tool Use in Wild Birds).

Throughout the tropics, ants and Acacia trees live together in intricate interdependent relationships that have long fascinated scientists.

Now researchers are reporting that in Africa, this plant-insect teamwork depends on the very antagonist it is intended to ward off: Africa's big browsing mammals.

Researchers report that elephants, giraffes and other large plant-eaters spur Acacias to "hire" and support ants as bodyguards -- and without the mammals, the trees slash their investment in ants, opening both to other attackers.

Acacias are mostly shrubby trees common across the tropics and sub-Saharan African savannah. They have swollen thorns that serve as nests for three species of biting ants. Healthy trees have hundreds of the thorns, often containing more than 100,000 ants per tree. Both the ants and the trees benefit from their close cohabitation. The ants get the thorny shelters, as well as nectar they collect from the bases of Acacia leaves. Because the ants swarm in defense against anything that molests the trees, the trees get protection from their chief ostensible nemeses, browsing animals.

That's when the mutualism is working well. But the research got its start when Palmer noticed that certain Acacias at his research site in central Kenya, which had been fenced off from wild herbivores, looked sickly compared with their unfenced counterparts. That was the opposite of what might be expected, because the browsers feed voraciously on the trees.

Without mammals around to eat the trees, sheltering fewer, less aggressive ants would not present a cost to the trees.

But the research revealed that the fewer colonies of weakened ants become less able to defend their territory from another species of ant that, unlike the others, does not have a mutually beneficial relationship with Acacias. Instead, this fourth ant species feeds away from the tree and does not protect it from attackers -- in fact, it actually encourages a destructive, wood-boring beetle whose cavities then serve as this ant's home.

The result appears to be that the trees untouched by browsing mammals are infested with more of the beetles, which is part of the reason that they fare poorly.

One irony of the findings is that the trees have developed their mutualistic relationship with the ants to protect themselves against plant-eating mammals -- and yet because of that relationship, the trees wind up actually needing the mammals.

"If you get rid of the large mammals, it shifts the balance of power, because the trees default on their end of the bargain," Palmer said. "When the trees opt out, their hard-working employees starve and grow weak, which causes them to lose out. So, ironically, getting rid of the mammals causes individual trees to grow more slowly and die younger."

The research has important implications for conservation.

Neither British colonists nor Christian missionaries nor government entities could tamp down conflicts among tribes in this remote South Pacific island nation. But when turtles started disappearing, the local people finally started talking.

The Solomon Islands, a remote Pacific archipelago strung southeast of Papua New Guinea, are probably best known as the site of the World War II Battle of Guadalcanal. But they also contain some of the world’s most important nesting grounds for hawksbills. On these beaches, the turtles haul their 150-pound bodies out of the surf and bury hundreds of thousands of eggs in the crushed-coral sand. For the hatchlings that survive, this becomes their hard-wired home, the place to which they’ll return to lay their own eggs.

The Arnavons Community Marine Conservation Area—encompassing 40,000 acres, three small uninhabited islands, flourishing reefs, fish-filled lagoons and beaches that are home to thousands of egg-bearing turtles—is run by an improbable cast of characters. A band of reformed arsonists, poachers and unreformed turtle eaters has teamed up with the Solomon Islands government and The Nature Conservancy to reimagine conservation around their own worldview. At the heart of the project are three communities on Choi-seul, Santa Isabel and Waghena islands—a mix of tribes and cultures who argued over the use of the neighboring Arnavon Islands until agreeing on no use.

This is the first community-run marine protected area in the South Pacific. Now going on 12 years, the project is showing that well-managed protected areas promote healthy communities of turtles and other marine life and also improve the lives of human communities. And a recent anonymous gift to the Conservancy has completed an endowment that will provide sustainable financing for the project—a first for a marine protected area. Says Zama, “It’s up to the three of us [communities] now.”

To fully appreciate the significance of this peaceful arrangement, it helps to understand the violent history that serves as its backdrop.

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“Nowadays we only eat turtles for feasts,” Bako says. “It is our kastom.” Such customary feasts are long-standing traditions in Pacific island nations. A turtle on the table for an important birth, death or religious holiday in the Solomons is the equivalent of a Thanksgiving turkey. And in a country where 85 percent of the population depends entirely on natural resources, turtles—even endangered ones—remain an important part of the subsistence diet.

The British colonial government in 1963 resettled the people of the Gilbert (now Kiribati) Islands to the Solomons. The Gilbertese built a village on Waghena, which put the newcomers closer to the Arnavons—and the islands’ abundant marine resources—than either indigenous community on Choiseul or Isabel. Inter-island resentment intensified, and the communities again were in conflict—this time arguing over claims to the Arnavons. The Gilbertese were being blamed for the depletion of resources.

“Some people, when they harvest, they don’t have a controlled harvest,” says Bako. “It’s like a sport: Who will be the champion?”

Edward mayer and Susan Brown are like marriage counselors for conservation. They help partners hash out differences, build trust and collaboration, and cultivate common interests. In 1993, when the Conservancy first entered the picture in the Arnavons, its goal was to get stakeholders talking.

And it took lots of talking before the landowners on Choiseul and Isabel were willing to welcome Waghena residents as a full project partner. Yet it was “the Gilbertese who had the most to lose from the formation of the conservation area,” says the Conservancy’s Thomas. “It is to their credit that they came to the party.” Once they did, the group set up a management committee for the Arnavons Community Marine Conservation Area. The committee was made up of two representatives from each community, three government representatives and Mayer, who tried not to say much. “A lot of the dynamic,” he says, “had to do with how open we were to listening.” Mayer emphasizes the value of consensus among the communities.

As for the three communities on Choiseul, Isabel and Waghena, disputes over the Arnavons may never be fully resolved. But leaders of all three communities seem willing to look beyond those differences for the good of the whole.

Most Marine protected areas (MPAs) are designed to contain zones with different uses that preserve and enhance recreational, commercial, scientific, cultural and conservation goals. Often, their main purpose is to reduce or eliminate harmful extractive activities, such as overfishing.

Scientific evidence shows that MPAs can help preserve and increase the overall diversity and abundance of marine species. By creating networks of MPAs, the Conservancy aims to ensure that ocean and coastal habitats have a better chance of surviving catastrophic events, such as warming waters that bleach corals.

Photographer Jeff Yonover shot these jaw-dropping underwater images (slideshow) in many of the places The Nature Conservancy works — Kimbe Bay and New Britain Island of Papua New Guinea as well as the Solomon Islands. (Natural Light Photos)