Wildlife

Lions Mysteriously Fall Ill in Northern Uganda

Wildlife officials in Uganda are stumped by a mysterious illness among the lions of Kidepo Valley National Park that has left the big cats emaciated and “docile”.

Kampala’s The Observer newspaper reports that within the past month, the sickness has affected almost all of the park’s lions, located in the north of the country near the borders of South Sudan and Kenya.

Charles Tumwesigye, the deputy director in charge of conservation at the Uganda Wildlife Authority, says experts will examine samples taken from some of the sick lions.

“We have a feeling that it could be partly starvation because we don’t seem to have very many prey animals for the lions in Kidepo,” Tumwesigye told the daily.

He adds that the larger animals currently roaming the park, like buffaloes, are not easy for a lion to take down.

A regal male lion photographed earlier this year in Uganda's remote Kidepo Valley National Park, where the bigcats have mysteriously fallen ill.

Bats facing extinction on Western Ghats, India

Wildlife experts and conservationists have warned that bats are facing extinction in India's Western Ghats due to increasing human activities and destruction of forests. Several species of bats residing in India are finding it increasingly difficult to adjust with varying landscape resulting due to deforestation. They cites reasons including increased use of agricultural land and growing human population for the impact on bats. A team of experts from University of Leeds in Britain, Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore and National Centre for Biological Sciences conducted a survey of different bats species in the southern Western Ghats in order to study the impact of plantation and rainforest fragmentation on them.

The study showed that some bat species can adjust with coffee plantations. Experts said that the reaming part of the forest and wildlife friendly agriculture can help save the bats from extinction. Western Ghats is among the most biodiverse regions in the world and it is also densely populated. The modern development and land-use transformation have left just 6 per cent of the natural habitat. The experts used Geographic Information System (GIS) computer modelling to study association between different bat species.

Wildlife

Bat Populations Decimated Across North America

White-nose syndrome, a fungal disease possibly imported from Europe on the boots of spelunkers (cave explorers), hits bats at their winter hibernation roosts. It was first identified in North America in New York in 2006/2007 and has since spread to 22 states and five Canadian provinces. White Nose Syndrome has decimated bat populations with mortality rates reaching 100 percent at some sites. In the northeastern United States, bat numbers have plummeted by at least 80 percent, says the USGS, with ~6.7 million bats killed continent wide. The Centre for Biological Diversity reports that biologists consider this the worst wildlife disease outbreak ever in North America.

Bats are supremely important for farming and for food security. They eat thousands of tons of insects, including crop pests, every year.

Researchers estimate the economic value of bug-eating bats to American agriculture at $22 billion, maybe as much as $53 billion a year. Yet federal funding for White Nose Syndrome research and disease response coordination has been scarce the past several years and is likely to become even scarcer in the 2013 and 2014 federal budgets.

Disease

Global Alert Over Deadly Bat Virus

Experts on infectious diseases have warned people to stay away from bats worldwide after the recent death of an eight-year-old boy bitten in Australia.

The boy last month became the third person in the country to die of Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV), for which there is no effective treatment.

The boy was bitten during a family holiday to Queensland in December 2012, but did not tell his parents.

Three weeks later he began to suffer convulsions, abdominal pain and fever, followed by progressive brain problems.

Doctors frantically tried to establish what was wrong and on day 10 of his admission the lyssavirus was detected.

He fell into a coma and died on February 22.

The warning to avoid bats around the world was issued not just because of the danger posed by the animals themselves, but due to the risk, however remote, that the virus could be spread between humans.

Human to human transmission of lyssaviruses has not been well documented, but it is theoretically possible.

Novel Coronavirus Infection - Update

The Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia has informed the WHO of another new confirmed case of infection with the novel coronavirus (nCoV).