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...Dolphin deaths increase to 160 in VirginiaVIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - The number of mysterious dolphin deaths has increased to more than 160.
Media outlets report additional dolphins were found along Virginia's coast on Monday. That put the deaths in August at more than 70 -- more than the annual average...'Read more: [ link to www.myfoxdc.com] Quoting: Sol Neman
The high death toll, covering an area that stretches from New York to Virginia, has been labeled an "unusual mortality event," and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has experts scrambling to figure out what's going on.
Based on the rapid increase in dead bodies washing ashore, and the broad geographic reach, "an infectious pathogen is at the top of the list of potential causes," according to NOAA's website.
"We realize that people are very concerned and anxious to learn what we know about the dolphin deaths that have been occurring along the mid-Atlantic coast over the past few weeks," Maggie Mooney-Seus, a spokesperson for NOAA Fisheries, told National Geographic by email.
Experts have collected quite a bit of information from various animals' blood and tissue samples, which they're testing for a variety of toxins, biotoxins, bacteria, fungi, and viruses, she said.
Several of the dead dolphins have tested positive for morbillivirus, a measles-like, airborne virus that's often fatal in dolphins. A morbillivirus epidemic hit East Coast bottlenose dolphins in 1987 and 1988, wiping out at least 900 animals and striking a major blow to that population of migratory mammals. However, there's no definitive cause yet, and some of the tests take weeks to complete, Mooney-Seus noted.
"We share the public's desire to get answers to what is causing this and are working as quickly as we can to get those answers."' [ link to news.nationalgeographic.com]
No definitive conclusions have been reached, but many suspect the morbilli virus. The naturally occurring virus was ultimately blamed for the last major dolphin die-off, in 1987, when 740 dolphins died.
Marine biologist Kim Durham told CBS News that this type of virus resembles measles.
“When we were doing examinations, we would find they were very skinny animals,” Durham said. “They were compromised animals. Some of them had skin lesions — they were just very sick individuals.”
Durham added that the dolphins could be spreading the virus among themselves because of skin contact.
This year, several of the dolphins that washed ashore in New Jersey have tested positive for the virus.
The waves of dead dolphins started appearing in New Jersey in early July, and it hasn’t let up. Wednesday morning, the stranding center got a call about a dead dolphin that washed ashore in Sea Bright, the 62nd in New Jersey this year. But it was too badly decomposed and chewed up by sharks to warrant taking it for a necropsy at a veterinary center near Kennett Square, Pa., a four-hour round trip that’s exhausting volunteers.
Two hours later, another dead dolphin, No. 63, washed up in Spring Lake...' [ link to washington.cbslocal.com] Experts sound global alert over deadly bat virus"AFP - Experts on infectious diseases Thursday 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..." [ link to www.france24.com] Quoting: Anonymous Coward 25983508 [ link to www.naturalnews.com]
The disease was first diagnosed in a Saudi Arabian man last September. Since then, 99 people have gotten sick from the virus and 48 of them died. Scientists know that the coronavirus that causes the disease is related to the one that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and to viruses carried by bats. But they haven’t figured out how the virus got into humans. None of the sick people had any known contact with bats...' [ link to www.sciencenews.org]
The scientists investigated the genomic basis for echolocation, one of the most well-known examples of convergent evolution to examine the frequency of the process at a genomic level.
Echolocation is a complex physical trait that involves the production, reception and auditory processing of ultrasonic pulses for detecting unseen obstacles or tracking down prey, and has evolved separately in different groups of bats and cetaceans (including dolphins).
The scientists carried out one of the largest genome-wide surveys of its type to discover the extent to which convergent evolution of a physical feature involves the same genes.
They compared genomic sequences of 22 mammals, including the genomes of bats and dolphins, which independently evolved echolocation, and found genetic signatures consistent with convergence in nearly 200 different genomic regions concentrated in several 'hearing genes'....' [ link to www.sciencedaily.com] [ link to www.sciencenews.org]
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