links for 2010-09-07

"Dyer thinks ants could be having landscape-scale effects in other ecosystems too, including forests in the American tropics where some common plant species are defended by ants."

"Mearns sees reason for optimism. He says with Hazen's data and the rest of the data streaming in from elsewhere, scientists are now starting to think the oil will be gone much sooner than people thought before. "We're talking days to months.""

"Butler is no longer at Texas Tech, but several reports identified him as a current or former professor at Ross University in Dominica. He is listed in a 2009-2010 academic catalogue as a member of a university medical facility in the Bahamas."

Shifty fellow.

"In 2003, researchers figured out the culprit behind a massive die-off of Asian vultures first noticed in the late 1990s: the veterinary drug diclofenac—an antinflamatory painkiller given to cattle. Vultures ingested the drug by eating the carcasses of treated cattle, then died of kidney failure. The scope of the problem is huge. Populations of Asian vulture species are down more than 96% since the early 1990s."

Interesting story on what happened when vulture numbers went down.