Environmental Conservationist Targetted, Slain, in Toronto

The Toronto Police Department are seeking clues in the shooting death of an ecological conservation philanthropist.

Glen Davis was shot just after 2 p.m. on Friday, in the underground parking garage of the building where the World Wildlife Fund has its main Canadian offices. The building is located at 245 Eglinton Ave. East, near Mount Pleasant Road. He had just finished having lunch with a WWF associate.

A major wildlife conservation philanthropist, Davis donated millions of dollars to habitat and wildlife conservation causes, including a donation of $2 million dollars to World Wildlife Fund Canada which he and his family made in 2000. Davis and his family also donated to the Sierra Club of Canada, the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation and the Canadian National women's rowing team.

Toronto Police say Davis was deliberately targeted and have opened a homicide investigation.


Security cameras captured these pictures of the man, below, who was in the parking garage around the time of the shooting - the police are calling him a "person of interest' which means he could be either a witness or a suspect. They want to speak with him and are asking the public for help finding him and for any other information or tips that might be useful in solving the case.

This 'person of interest is described by police as being:
* White;
* Between 25 and 30 years old; and
* About 5-foot-8;
* Wearing a black baseball cap, a blue sweater, a waist-length dark jacket
with a hood, dark pants, and white running shoes and a dark-coloured backpack.

If you have information please contact the Toronto Homicide Squad at 416-808-7418, or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 416-222-TIPS (8477). You can also submit information online.

Off and Running Like A Herd of Turtles: 3rd prize!

Woo-hoo! Champiro made a last minute surprise dash to get the bronze - she cam in 3rd! Go team Chelonia! :)

Get This Widget!Great Turtle Race

It's another day in the Great Turtle Race. And I found some links to the group that tagged the turtles with their satellite backpacks. They are called TOPP, which is short for Tagging of Pacific Pelagics. TOPP also runs a census of sea creatures.

As you can see, the show has picked a turtle named Champiro to win the race. Why her? Because she is doing her best to preserve the leatherback turtle species: she's laid more eggs over her lifetime than the others have. She has come up from 7th to 4th place in about as many days. Information on her place in the race, the depth she is swimming at, and how far she is from hitting the finish line, is on the little graphic, in the top corner of this post. Champiro also has her own blog, with this alarming entry! Playa Grande beach, the last Pacific nesting site for the turtles is in trouble - people want to build condos on it! :-(

TOPP says the Great Turtle Race was conceived of as a way to protect and conserve the "critter highway" in the ocean that runs between the Galapagos and Central America, that is needed to preserve wildlife. Animals use transport corridors just like we do, to get from breeding and mating zones to nesting places, etc. etc. They use resources just like we do. And they need all of these things to raise their families - just like we do.

TOPP has a blog which they call On TOPP of the World. :)

Racing Leather Clad Females of the Pacific

The sun, the sea... the sands of Playa Grande.



Wait a minute! This is a science blog. What's with *that* title - it sounds like a cheesy badly written grindhouse flick. But it isn't. There isn't a film - this is real time. And they are female. They are swimming in the Pacific (or at least hanging out in the surf after having been on the tropical beaches of Playa Grande in Costa Rica). And they really are clad in leather, at least on their backs, sort of. And they really are 'racing' to their island getaway.

But they are almost certainly the wrong species for you - they are herptiles. Which means they have scaly skin, among other things. But hey, this is a race. Who cares if they are the wrong species?

What are they? Turtles. leatherback turtles to be specific. There are less than 100 of them left in the wild in some places! Marine turtles need all the help they can get.

In order to raise awareness of the need for sea turtle conservation, and the precarious existence of the leatherback sea turtle conservation agencies and several businesses have organized something they're calling the Great Turtle Race.

It features 11 sea turtles 'racing' as they migrate from their nesting sites in Costa Rica across the pacific just over about 500 miles to the Galapagos Islands (a place of which you may have heard, because Charles Darwin and how he came to his theories).

The turtles are wearing gear that allows a satellite to pick up their position, speed and other things like depths, in REAL TIME folks - and then this is beamed back to a computer where the data is updated every 10 minutes. So you can see how the turtles are doing! Plus you can pick a turtle to cheer on. It's actually kind of fun - you can sign up for updates.

The Great Turtle Race started this Monday and goes to the 29th of April.

Check out Dr. Turtle, based at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Also, at least one of the turtles has a blog. But Drexelina, as she is called, doesn't seem to be moving off the ebach very fast!

You can pick a turtle and cheer it on, and donate to help save the critically endangered and very cool leatherback sea turtles so there will be some around for your kids or grand kids or grandkids grandkids.

Which would be a good thing.

Spider Silk, Return of a Locally Extinct Species...

The October 18th show was part 2 of the show before that and featured a study on tarantulas producing silk from their feet and not just their spinnarets. It is not known (yet) if other spiders do this; if it turns out that they do, then which came first - the spinnaret silk or the foot silk?- will have implications for the evolutionary biology of spiders.


Meanwhile in Britain, the Large Blue Butterfly which was extirpated in the UK has been successfully reintroduced, by putting habitats back to the way they used to be - able to support the Myrmica sabuletti, a special species of red ant whose nests play host to the butterfly's caterpillars. The caterpillars feed on the ant larvae and pupas. The large Blue can't survive without this other insect, which requires a certain sort of habitat.