This October 2019 video is the documentary film Cocos Island – The mysterious island in the Pacific.
This 2013 video is called bush dog, Speothos venaticus.
From the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the USA:
Ecologists find bush dog, native of South America, in remote central Costa Rica
Trail cam documents unexpected, most northerly sighting of pack-hunting canids
May 23, 2019
Wildlife ecologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who are studying different conservation practices in the forests of Costa Rica recently made a startling discovery on a wildlife camera trap — wild bush dogs documented farther north than ever before and at the highest elevation.
Doctoral student Carolina Saenz-Bolaños is in Costa Rica comparing land use, management techniques, their effects on species presence and abundance, and human attitudes in four different areas in the rugged Talamanca Mountains: a national park, an adjacent forest reserve, an indigenous territory and nearby unprotected areas.
She and her advisor, professor of environmental conservation Todd Fuller at UMass Amherst, with others, report in an article today in Tropical Conservation Science the new, repeated sightings of bush dogs (Speothos venaticus) on trailcams well outside the limit of their previously known range on the Costa Rica-Panama border. The dogs are native to South America but are considered rare and are very seldom seen even there, the two ecologists point out.
Fuller says, “They aren’t supposed to be there, but Carolina’s work shows they really are, and they seem to be doing well. Not only is this wild dog rare wherever it is found, but this mountain range is very remote, with very little access. They could have been there before and we wouldn’t know it. So we’re documenting them with this report.”
Saenz-Bolaños says that because the roadless area is so huge, she and colleagues are not sure if the dogs are expanding their range, returning to a former range, or if they’ve been there all along but eluded detection. She works with Victor Montalvo, a fellow UMass Amherst doctoral student, and Eduardo Carrillo of the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica and UMass Amherst adjunct professor of environmental conservation.
Once the dogs were spotted on camera, the researchers contacted Michael Mooring of San Diego’s Point Loma Nazarene University who, with Junior Porras of Costa Rica’s National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC), also had obtained new bush dog photos from southern Costa Rica.
Saenz-Bolaños, who has been operating trap cameras in the area since 2012, says, “I know most of the things that live here, so when I saw them on the camera I said ‘Wow, what is that — bush dogs here?’ I was very excited and thrilled to see them.” She adds, “The native people have a name for these dogs and their oral tradition says the dogs have been there in the past, but people living there now have never seen one.”
Bush dogs have been spotted north of the Panama Canal near the Costa Rica border in the past 10 years, she adds, but they are completely unexpected in the northern parts of the Talamanca Mountains.
Fuller says that bush dogs have lived in South America for thousands of years, and no one knows why they have not moved farther north into Central America, where the habitat is similar, but they are so rare that studying them is quite difficult. “There are still definitely interesting things to find out about them, especially if they’re expanding their range,” he says.
Curious about what it would take to collect more sightings of bush dogs in Costa Rica, he and Saenz-Bolaños worked with Paul Sievert of the U.S. Geological Survey and UMass Amherst to calculate how many camera-trap hours it might take to have even a 50-50 chance of seeing the animals again in an area of roughly 2,000 square miles (5,000 sq. km). Fuller says they estimate that it would require at least 25 camera traps set out for 100 nights, a difficult task in such remote, mountainous and tropical terrain.
The ecologists hope that their report will spark the imaginations of other wildlife ecologists, park managers and rangers in the region, who might set up their own camera traps in promising areas. Saenz-Bolaños plans to continue monitoring her study area and plans to try to talk to more local people about the dogs. Fuller adds, “At this point the mountain range looks like good bush dog habitat, but we just don’t know if they are getting started there or are already at home.”
The Stone Zoo in Stoneham, Mass., part of Zoo New England, has a family of bush dogs on exhibit where visitors can see these small wild dogs. The zoo participates in species survival planning for the bush dog to manage and conserve threatened or endangered animals.
The truth about a true frog: Unknown Costa Rican frog hidden amongst a widespread species
April 11, 2019
Known to science since 1857, a common species of true frog (a “true frog” is one assigned to the family Ranidae), found from north-eastern Honduras, through Nicaragua and Costa Rica to central Panama, turns out to have been keeping its “multiple identities” a secret all along.
According to British and Costa Rican herpetologists, who recently used DNA barcoding to study the species in question, what we currently call Warszewitsch’s frog is in fact a group of “cryptic” species. The study, conducted in the Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), Costa Rica, by James Cryer, Dr Robert Puschendorf, Dr Felicity Wynne from the University of Plymouth, and Dr Stephen Price, UCL, is published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.
In their paper, the authors suggest that the well-known Central American frog species, commonly known as the Warszewitsch’s frog, may in fact consist of multiple different “cryptic” species. This phenomenon is well documented among tropical amphibian fauna, where high levels of genetic variation within populations of a single species surpass levels found between different, classified species.
By utilizing a technique known as DNA barcoding, which compares short snippets of DNA sequences between individuals sampled, the scientists analysed specimens from three different geographic areas within Costa Rica and Panama. In this case, the researchers used sequences derived from mitochondria, the energy-producing “power houses” found in animal cells. Their results indicated there was enough genetic variation to suggest cryptic species are indeed present.
The team chose this particular species because cryptic species were previously identified at two Panamanian sites. Now, the samples from Costa Rica broaden the study area, suggesting that there could be multiple species going by the name Warszewitsch’s frog all across its known distribution.
Conservation biologist and lead author James Cryer says:
“The next step will be to gather more samples throughout the full range of the species. Additionally, if we are to fully discern one species variant from another, further studies that compare the physical, behavioural and ecological characteristics of the frogs, alongside more genetic testing is needed.”
Overall, findings like these are important to help improve our understanding of amphibian biodiversity and, thus, work towards its conservation.
“If indeed there are multiple species, it may be that they have different ecological requirements, and therefore different approaches to their conservation are needed.” Cryer says. “This study further reinforces the power of DNA barcoding for rapid, preliminary species identification. Especially in the tropics, where habitat loss, climate change and infectious disease continually threaten many undescribed amphibian species.”
Japanese scientists have identified the molecular mechanism that gives the skin secretions of a species of frog effective antimicrobial properties. Unraveling the molecular mechanism that facilitates antimicrobial activity of these peptides can help us better understand how the defense system of the frog has evolved, and how this can be used to fight microbial infections of medical importance: here.
This 31 March 2019 video says about itself:
Get ready, you’re about to meet a rare frog that leaps back!
Breaking Trail leaves the map behind and follows adventurer and animal expert Coyote Peterson and his crew as they encounter a variety of wildlife in the most amazing environments on the planet!
This 2013 video says about itself:
Singing Mouse Serenades The Sky. Really.
Study of singing mice suggests how mammalian brain achieves conversation
Research may lead to future solutions to speech problems
February 28, 2019
By studying the songs of mice from the cloud forests of Costa Rica, researchers have discovered a brain circuit that may enable the high-speed back and forth of conversation.
Males of the study species, Alston’s singing mouse (Scotinomys teguina), produce songs with nearly a hundred audible notes. They challenge competitors by singing in turns, alternating like talking humans, say the study authors. In contrast, standard laboratory mice produce ultrasonic sounds without evident exchanges.
Thus, the new study, led by researchers at NYU School of Medicine, launches a new field by employing a novel mammalian model to examine brain mechanisms behind the sub-second precision of vocal turn-taking.
“Our work directly demonstrates that a brain region called the motor cortex is needed for both these mice and for humans to vocally interact,” says senior study author Michael Long, PhD, an associate professor of neuroscience at NYU School of Medicine.
“We need to understand how our brains generate verbal replies instantly using nearly a hundred muscles if we are to design new treatments for the many Americans for whom this process has failed, often because of diseases such as autism or traumatic events, like stroke,” says Long.
Published online as the cover story of Science on March 1, the study found that, along with brain areas that tell muscles to create notes, separate circuits in the motor cortex enable the fast starts and stops that form a conversation between vocal partners.
“By segregating sound production and control circuits, evolution has equipped the brains of singing mice with the tight vocal control also seen in cricket exchanges, bird duets, and possibly, human discussion,” adds study co-first author Arkarup Banerjee, PhD, a post-doctoral scholar in Long’s lab.
Despite the ubiquity of vocal exchanges in the natural world, he says, there are no suitable mammalian models in neuroscience for their study. Before the new report, the leading model for studying this back-and-forth was the marmoset, a primate whose conversational turns are considerably slower than human speech, and unlikely to result from the fast muscle response to sensory cues (e.g. motor cortical circuitry).
Social Songs Different
The research team found that S. teguina songs — series of notes that evolve predictably as the song goes on — changed in social situations as the mice had to “bend and break the songs” to converse. The tight connection between song patterns and readings taken by electromyography, which captures electrical signals as the brain generates muscle contractions, enabled the team to determine the relationships between brain centers and song musculature while two mice coordinated their responses.
In contrast to the findings of past studies, the researchers found that a functional “hotspot” located at the front of the motor cortex to one side — the orofacial motor cortex or OMC — regulated song timing.
To study the contributions of these specialized brain circuits to social singing, the team interfered with cortical regions in the mice using a number of techniques, including devices that cooled the OMC during songs. Long has helped to pioneer the cooling technique in the study of human brain circuits related to speech.
Called focal cooling, it is a safe way to slow the pace of vocalizations without changing the pitch, tone, or duration of individual notes, say the study authors. They argue that the observed, functional separation in the brain between sound generation and timing functions, this hierarchy, is what makes socially relevant exchanges possible.
Moving forward, the researchers are already using their mouse model to guide related exploration of speech circuits in human brains. By understanding the activity that helps to engage two brains in conversation, they can look for the processes that go awry when disease interferes with communication, potentially spurring the development of new treatments for many disorders.
Along with Long, study authors from the NYU Neuroscience Institute and Department of Otolaryngology at NYU School of Medicine were co-first authors Arkarup Banerjee and Daniel Okobi Jr, as well as Andrew Matheson. The work was done in collaboration with Steven Phelps, PhD, director of the Center for Brain, Behavior and Evolution at the University of Texas at Austin, whose lab pioneered the study of the singing mouse in the lab and field. Some of the authors are also members of the Center for Neural Science at New York University.
This research was supported by the New York Stem Cell Foundation, the Simons Foundation Society of Fellows, and the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain.