AP: Feds Collect Giant Rats in Florida
Associated Press (Posted by theledger.com)
29 Nov 2006
Margaret Ebrahim
Photo courtesy of Douglas C. Pizac
As the rising sun danced across Florida's coastal waters, government workers in shorts and T-shirts knelt in a grassy island field and plucked wriggling rats from traps laid the night before. These weren't just any rats. They were 3-pound, 35-inch-long African behemoths. They squirmed as the workers, wearing protective gloves, removed green radio collars that had been tracking the rodents' movements. All 18 of the animals were carted away for research.
Darin Carroll kept a watchful eye on that dawn mission at Florida's Grassy Key Island. Carroll is no ordinary G-man. He's a disease hunter determined to stop the next outbreak. Carroll works for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and for three years he has painstakingly tracked the journey of Gambian rats from their African homeland, through the exotic pet trade, and to U.S. homes.
Residents Seek Help With Deer
The Fairfax County Times
29 Nov 2006
Layla Wilder
Centreville resident Sally Pakarik was recovering from heart surgery Monday while her husband, Elmer Pakarik, was telling county officials that her heart problems were indirectly caused by too many deer in their community.
Pakarik said that his wife got Lyme disease from a deer tick bite and that it eventually attacked her heart. "She got so nailed by it," Pakarik said. Caused by bites of ticks that cling to deer hide, the disease is on the rise in Northern Virginia. The disease is directly related to an overabundance of deer and is a "very real threat," according to Earl Hodnett, a Fairfax County wildlife biologist.
Pakarick and almost 100 other people met for an impassioned meeting with county staff and Sully Supervisor Michael Frey (R) at Deer Park Elementary School on Nov. 27 to talk about the problems deer are causing Centreville's Cub Run stream valley. Residents complained of automobile accidents, Lyme disease and property destruction and listened to county officials offer information about Fairfax County's deer boom. Too many deer, too many problems. Hodnett, who leads the county's deer management program, said the problem is regionwide. Contrary to what many think, deer are thriving on the lush vegetation of suburban Northern Virginia because there are fewer hunters, fewer predators and more vegetation, Hodnett said.
St. Petersburg Times (Posted by theledger.com)
29 Nov 2006
Curtis Krueger
The remarkable reptiles known as loggerhead turtles may be in trouble. These sea turtles live 60 years or longer and can swim across the Atlantic Ocean and back. Females return to the precise Florida beaches where they hatched - including some in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties - so they can crawl onto shore and lay eggs in the sand. Usually.
But during the past half-dozen years, loggerhead turtle nesting in Florida has dropped sharply. Fewer loggerheads are laying eggs in Florida, even though other Florida sea turtles, such as greens and leatherbacks, actually are nesting more. David Godfrey, executive director of the Caribbean Conservation Corp., said the dropoff in loggerhead nesting "really represents a drastic decline in the Western Hemisphere population." He worries that a species that has survived since the time of the dinosaurs "could get to a point where extinction is not beyond the realm of possibility within our lifetimes."
Henipavirus and Tioman Virus in Pteropodid Bats, Madagascar
CDC - Emerging Infectious Diseases
C Lehle et al.
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