Ecos articles from July 2000

Ecos archives from July 2000

Banksia for Ecos.
July 1, 2000... IN JUNE this year, Ecos received the Banksia Environmental Foundation Award for Communication. The award recognised the magazine's coverage of `a wide range of isses in a rational, in-depth and accurate manner.' CSIRO entomology...

Olive branch for saline land?(olive plants to control salinity)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... I HAVE followed your articles on dryland salinity in Australia with interest. As I understand it, the clearing of natural scrub has disturbed the water balance in much of inland Australia. Annual crops and pastures that have replaced the scrub...

Cephalopods tell their secrets.(Review)
July 1, 2000... EVEN if you plan never to comb a beach, let alone meet a squid, cuttlefish or octopus, the new book, A guide to squid, cuttlefish and octopuses of Australasia, is bound to catch your eye. The book describes in words and pictures the amazing...

Scouring process yields the fertiliser that grew on sheep.
July 1, 2000... Australian and overseas wool mills are set to benefit from a new processing technology that turns wool scouring waste into valuable byproducts. The `Sirolan SWIMS' (Scour Waste Integrated Management System) technology, developed by CSIRO...

Songs of isolation?(bowerbirds communication)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... The songs of upland bowerbirds vary uniquely from place to place and are as culturally distinct from one another as regional dialects or languages are to humans. In the cool rainforests of Queensland's tropical north, an evolution in...

hairy harbingers.(spider research)
July 1, 2000... Wendy Pyper discover what spiders and grasshoppers can tell us about the health of Australia's savannas. The sight of a fat, hairy spider scuttling, dangling or lurking nearby, is enough to send most people into spasms of fright. But for Dr...

Sampling the road to nowhere.(Australian invertebrate research)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... THE drive down the North Australian Tropical Transect from Darwin to Kalkarindji just south of Katherine, is long and hard. But twice a year, research assistant Gus Wanganeen and a posse of scientists make the trip in the name of invertebrate...

Consulting the grasshoppers.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... Pioneering research into the grasshopper fauna of northern Australia has shown the insects could be used as indicators of environmental health. According to insect ecologist, Dr Alan Andersen, from the CSIRO Tropical Ecosystems Research...

GRASSHOPPER country: The abundant orthopteroid insects of Australia.(Review)
July 1, 2000... A book born in childhood DR DAVID RENTZ, curator of Orthopteroid Insects at CSIRO Entomology's Australian National Insect Collection in Canberra, has been studying grasshoppers since the age of six. Fifty years on, his life's work has...

A cultured life.(Australian prawn farms)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... AUSTRALIAN prawn farms have the potential to be world leaders in production, disease management and environmental sustainability, thanks to research efforts by science and industry. On the production front, CSIRO Marine Research, the...

Making a splash on the market.(shrimping research)
July 1, 2000... It's been a long wait, but prawn farming is finally being rescued from the whims of nature. Wendy Pyper outlines the rewards of collaboration. It's 9 pm and the shed is humming to the sound of heavy machinery, running water, and workers...

Taming the recalcitrant tiger.(tiger prawn research)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... CSIRO Marine Research is now applying the domestication and selection technology developed for the Kuruma prawn, to the giant tiger prawn. The giant tiger is the dominant prawn species farmed in Asia and Australia, but progress in producing...

Two weeks of transformation.(giant tiger prawn)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... THE GIANT tiger prawn has many stages in its life cycle. Eggs are broadcast in one or two major spawning seasons (September-December and March-June) and hatch within 24 hours. In their two-week planktonic life, the larvae undergo some 11...

Precision farming, from pond to plate.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... AT ROCKY Point Prawn farm on the Logan River near Brisbane, the Zipf family has been farming prawns for 15 years. The farm has 20 ponds, ranging in size from 0.4 to 1.2 hectares, from which about 55 tonnes of Kuruma prawns are produced...

Neighbourhood watch.(diseases in shrimp)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... IN ASIA, scientists and farmers face an uphill battle in their attempts to domesticate prawns in an environment where yellow-head virus and white-spot syndrome virus are endemic. Dr Peter Walker and his team are taking Australian technology...

Viral profiling: our first line of defence.(shrimp and prawn industries)
July 1, 2000... A growing understanding of prawn viruses is helping to protect and improve Australia's low-disease status and to rescue the Asian industry from viral demise. Viral disease presents a serious threat to the sustainability of the prawn...

Reproductive switch.(shrimp)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... TO PRODUCE commercial supplies of larval prawns for farms, breeding stocks are induced to spawn through a process called `eye-stalk ablation' (where the eye-stalk and therefore the eye, are removed). This removes the source of a reproduction...

Tigers in their tanks.(breeding tiger shrimp)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... As any farmer of terrestrial livestock will tell you, the path to premium prices lies in delivering quality products when demand is high. Successful producers employ advanced techniques for selective breeding and controlled reproduction, and...

Shrimp map to guide genetic selection.(marine research)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... AUSTRALIAN scientists are working with colleagues in Thailand, Hong Kong, France and the United States to construct a genetic linkage map of the tiger prawn genome. This map will flag the position of `anonymous' DNA markers (random pieces...

Discharging responsibly.(shrimp industry waste water management research)
July 1, 2000... Australia's prawn farmers are keen to avoid making the same environmental blunders as their overseas counterparts. Louise Ralph describes the outcomes of industry-funded environmental investigations. A three-year study of pond and...

Stocking the gulf with tigers.(stock enhancement study that focuses on the brown tiger prawn (Penaeus esculentus) in Western Australia's Exmouth Gulf)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... CSIRO Marine Research, the Kailis Group of Companies and Fisheries Western Australia are collaborating in a stock enhancement study that focuses on the brown tiger prawn (Penaeus esculentus) in Western Australia's Exmouth Gulf. The study,...

Domesticus interruptus.(researchers using knowledge of immunology to develop mouse contraceptive)
July 1, 2000... Researchers are applying their knowledge of immunology to develop a novel mouse contraceptive. When the introduced house mouse `goes bush' it becomes a formidable pest, despite its small size and meek nature. The trouble is the species has...

Gnawing away at species richness.(research on mice)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... RODENTS can have a dramatic impact on ecosystems. Perhaps the classic illustration of this is the industrious engineering activity of the beaver in North America. Beavers gnaw down trees to build up to 16 dams per kilometre of stream, radically...

sharing the limelight.(Shirley Jeffrey wins Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal and elected as foreign associate of United States National Academy of Sciences)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... May was an extraordinary month for CSIRO marine scientist Dr Shirley Jeffrey. At a ceremony in Washington DC, she received the Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal for excellence in marine or freshwater research, and was later elected as a foreign...

Can quolls be our companions?(quolls as pets)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... KEEPING native animals as pets is a contentious issue, but for some animals it may be a good way to conserve them and boost their public image. Quolls for example, were once abundant in the Australian bush, but their carnivorous nature saw...

Why do some spiders decorate their webs?(research on St. Andrew's Cross Spider)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... ORB-WEB spiders employ some intriguing tactics in a bid to catch more prey. They choose web sites where food is more plentiful (such as near lights at night), they can increase the size of their webs when hungry, and are even known to adjust...

Speed kills animals too.(protection of eastern quolls and Tasmanian devils)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... THE ROAD safety slogan `Speed Kills' doesn't just apply to humans. Wildlife can also be adversely affected. In some situations road mortality can even cause local extinctions. While studying dasyurid carnivores in south-east Tasmania, Meena...

Life and death at the forest's edge.(effects of rainforest roads on wildlife)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... ROADS built through tropical rainforests do more than just remove a long strip of forest. The composition of small mammal communities living alongside the roads can also be affected. Zoologist Miriam Goosem has demonstrated how community...

Bad news for the predators of pilchards.(marine research)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
July 1, 2000... IN OCTOBER 1998, mass mortality of Australian pilchards began in South Australia and spread across the species range over a period of seven months. Many beaches were carpeted with fresh and decaying fish bodies. How many pilchards died during...

Dingoes, roos... and a long, long fence.(kangaroo conservation research)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... AUSTRALIA'S dingo fence was erected to protect sheep flocks from the depredations of dingoes. Scientists, Tony Pople, Gordon Grigg, Stuart Cairns, Lyn Beard and Peter Alexander, were interested in the factors determining population size in red...

Tracking the complex nose of pollution.(The Air Pollution Model)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
July 1, 2000... Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once spent a week on his hands and knees. He was testing his theory that dogs smell things better than humans because they are closer to the ground, where smells congregate and travel easily. After...