Category: Wildlife

Marco Polo sheep

Marco Polo sheep

The Marco Polo sheep (Ovis amon polii) are mainly found on the highlands of the Eastern Pamirs

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(c) Beth Wald

 

The Marco Polo sheep is considered near threatened according to the red list of IUCN

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(c) Eric Dragesco

 

Reports concerning the Marco Polo sheep

Survey Eastern Pamirs – Dec. 2009 (complete report in english)

Survey Eastern Pamirs – Dec. 2009 (brief report in russian)

The Marco Polo sheep (in Zoo view)

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(c) Eric Dragesco

 

What can Wikipedia tell us about the Marco Polo sheep?

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo_Sheep (15.07.2010)

The Marco Polo sheep (Ovis ammon polii) is a subspecies of argali sheep, named after Marco Polo. Their habitat is the mountainous regions of Central Asia. Marco Polo sheep are distinguishable mostly by their large size and spiraling horns. Their conservation status is “near threatened” and efforts have been made to protect their numbers and keep them from commercial hunting. It has also been suggested that crossing them with domestic sheep could have agricultural benefits.

Naming

The binomial name of the species as a whole is Ovis ammon,[3] described by Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758,[1] and all members of the species are commonly called “argali”.[4] The Marco Polo subspecies Ovis ammon polii was first described scientifically by Indian zoologist Edward Blyth in 1841.[4] These sheep are also commonly called “Marco Polo’s Argali”[5] or the “Pamir Argali.”[6].

The sheep are named after the 13th century explorer Marco Polo because he described them in his book The Travels of Marco Polo.[7] The 1914 Historical and Political Gazetteer of Afghanistan: Badakhshan notes that in Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan the sheep are known locally as nakhjipar. [8]via Marco Polo sheep.

New hope for Russia’s rare plant reserve – Features – ABC Environment (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

IN 1929, RUSSIAN botanist Nikolai Vavilov travelled to Central Asia on one of the many seed-collecting expeditions that took him to five continents over more than two decades. In what is now present-day Kazakhstan, Vavilov – the father of modern seed banks – found forests of wild as well as cultivated varieties of fruit. Around the city of Alma Ata, he was astonished by the profusion of apple trees, writing in his journal that he believed he had “stumbled upon the centre of origin for the apple, where wild apples were difficult to even distinguish from those which were being cultivated”.

 

A glorious past

The station is undeniably dilapidated, and little plant breeding or research into plant genomes is now carried out there. A visit by American scientists from the US Department of Agriculture, as long ago as 1975, reported “the buildings are old and run down and poorly equipped… the laboratories are grossly inadequate by US standards”. Stripped of funds since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, parts of the station lie virtually abandoned. In other areas, staff do little more than maintain the collection of old varieties. Even so, the collection is unique and potentially of great value.

In recent years, nobody has crosschecked the station’s plants with other collections outside Russia. Nonetheless, international authorities say the collection probably contains many genes of potentially great value in developing new commercial varieties. Many of its varieties are unusually hardy in cold temperatures and are disease-resistant. “It is possible that some samples are being duplicated elsewhere, but the majority are not,” says the Director General of the Vavilov Institute, Nikolai Dzyubenko.

“It would be a major tragedy if the collection were lost,” says one of the world’s leading strawberry breeders, Jim Hancock of Michigan State University. Norman Looney, president of the International Society for Horticultural Science, says the station’s collection “represents work performed over more than 150 years and has survived both climatic and political catastrophe. It is the largest such collection in Europe and the only one at this far-north latitude.”

Vavilov began collecting plants across Asia in 1916, working first on wild and early cultivated varieties of wheat and other grain crops, before moving on to other crops and other continents and establishing the research stations that housed his collections. Through his travels in the Caucasus, Afghanistan, the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, Japan, China, Korea, the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America, Vavilov realised that cradles of botanical diversity were most often found in mountainous regions, where the many changes in topography and climate led to the evolution and development of highly diverse species.

The Pavlovsk experimental station, established in 1926, is one of 11 seed banks that Vavilov created across the former Soviet Union. In the 1930s he worked diligently to expand his collections, but as the decade wore on he ran afoul of Joseph Stalin for disputing the views of the quack scientist, Trofim Lysenko, a Stalin favourite who maintained that characteristics acquired through the environment could be inherited. Vavilov was arrested by Stalin’s secret police and thrown into the gulag, where he died of starvation in 1943. During the Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II, scientists at Vavilov’s institute protected its collections, with some succumbing to starvation rather than consuming the collection’s rice and other crops.

Vavilov’s successors continue his work to this day, particularly in Siberia and the Russian Far East, where wild berries remain an important part of the local diet. Sergey Alexanian, vice director of International Relations for the Vavilov Institute, says “there have been hundreds of explorations involving thousands of researchers.”

via New hope for Russia’s rare plant reserve – Features – ABC Environment (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

..::Biodiversity – Fossil Fauna and Flora::.. National Biodiversity and Biosafety Center

The stone history of the mountainous nature of Tajikistan is well-exposed and easily accessible to study. There are numerous deposits of fossil fauna and flora, tens of which are unique; however, none of these is protected by the state. Some of the easily accessible deposits of fossils are now under the threat of destruction due to human activity.

Identification of the logic of the origin, development and extinction of ancient biosystems allows to learn more about the present biodiversity, reasons for survival, vulnerability, fragility and instability, and to work out the best solutions on species conservation.

Precambrian (more than 570 m.y.) fossils are rare in Tajikistan; they are represented by the remnants of primitive algae and rare invertebrates.

The oldest precise age of fossils found in Tajikistan is Paleozoic (570-230 m.y. ago). The Paleozoic organic world of Tajikistan is rich in composition. The territory of Paleozoic Tajikistan was occupied by tropical sea. At the end of Paleozoic, the total area of the present Northern, Central, and, partly, Eastern Tajikistan was free of water. That was the age when spore-bearing and gymnosperm plants developed. All classes of cold-blooded vertebrates (agnathous, fish, amphibian, and reptiles) appeared in Paleozoic. The invertebrates of the Paleozoic were represented by conodonts, brachiopods, rugoses, and tabulates; the first half of Paleozoic – by trilobites, archaeocyathids, graptolites, tentaculites, nautiloids, and endoceratites; in the second half of Paleozoic, goniatites and foraminifers were common. Peaks of sea invertebrate biodiversity were in Late Cambrian, Middle Ordovician, Early Devonian, Early Carboniferous, and Early Permian. Paleozoic fossils are found in numerous deposits of Tien Shan and the Pamirs.

By the beginning of Mesozoic (230-67 m.y. ago), the northern, Northeastern, Central, and a part of Southern Tajikistan was occupied by land, with young mountains; the Southern Tajikistan was a sea bottom. In Mesozoic, gymnosperms and filices dominated here. In the second half of Cretaceous, higher angiosperms were dominating. Of vertebrates, reptiles were common. Warm-blooded animals – mammals and birds – also appeared in Mesozoic. Invertebrates of Tajikistan were widely represented by ammonoids, bivalves (oysters, rudists); in early Mesozoic – by conodonts, in late Mesozoic – by echinoids. Peaks of sea invertebrate biodiversity were reached in Late Triassic, Middle Jurassic, and Middle Cretaceous. The Mesozoic fossils of Tajikistan were defined from numerous deposits of Tien Shan and the Pamirs.

via ..::Biodiversity – Fossil Fauna and Flora::.. National Biodiversity and Biosafety Center.

Porcupine Meat To Cure TB? Tajiks Turn To Risky Folk Remedies

Porcupine Meat To Cure TB? Tajiks Turn To Risky Folk Remedies.

Husein Rahmonov, deputy head of the Dushanbe-based National Center for Heart Disease, agrees. Unconventional treatments are especially popular among patients suffering from depression, insomnia, infertility, and chronic pain, he says, “But sometimes patients with more acute health problems also turn to healers.”

The consequences can be dire, as in cases of treatable patients wasting valuable time and seeking the advice of a medical doctor only after it’s too late; or they can be less conspicuous, such as when populations of abundant local animals are affected.

Scientists snap rare photos of snow leopards in Tajikistan – Telegraph

The photographs of the five snow leopards over a two month period in former Soviet Tajikistan suggest that the scientists may have discovered a hotspot for the endangered cat.

Dr Alex Diment, a scientist with Cambridge-based conservationist group Fauna and Flora International, was the expedition manager on the team of 25 people.

via Scientists snap rare photos of snow leopards in Tajikistan – Telegraph.

Tajik Gran Escapes Wolf’s Jaws

January 20, 2012

NAVOBOD, Tajikistan — At least six people have been attacked by wolves in southeastern Tajikistan in the last several weeks, RFE/RL’s Tajik Service reports.

A survivor of one of the wolf attacks, Ozodamoh Saidnurulloeva, told RFE/RL that “before the wolves only attacked livestock; now they have started attacking humans.”

Saidnurulloeva, 89, said she walked into her yard early one morning this week to prepare for the Muslim morning prayer when a wolf attacked her, knocked her down, and dragged her for several meters.

She said she thought the wolf was the “angel of death.”

A neighbor who happened to be outside saw the attack and started screaming for help. The wolf then left Saidnurulloeva and ran away.

via Tajik Granny Escapes Wolf’s Jaws.

Read more in Tajik here

Danger waters: Top spots of potential conflict in the geo-energy era – and how Tajikistan is involved.

The Caspian Sea Basin

by Michael T. Klare on January 13, 2012

The Caspian Sea is an inland body of water bordered by Russia, Iran, and three former republics of the USSR: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. In the immediate area as well are the former Soviet lands of Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. All of these old SSRs are, to one degree or another, attempting to assert their autonomy from Moscow and establish independent ties with the United States, the European Union, Iran, Turkey, and, increasingly, China. All are wracked by internal schisms and/or involved in border disputes with their neighbors.  The region would be a hotbed of potential conflict even if the Caspian basin did not harbor some of the world’s largest undeveloped reserves of oil and natural gas, which could easily bring it to a boil.

This is not the first time that the Caspian has been viewed as a major source of oil, and so potential conflict. In the late nineteenth century, the region around the city of Baku — then part of the Russian empire, now in Azerbaijan — was a prolific source of petroleum and so a major strategic prize. Future Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin first gained notoriety there as a leader of militant oil workers, and Hitler sought to capture it during his ill-fated 1941 invasion of the USSR. After World War II, however, the region lost its importance as an oil producer when Baku’s onshore fields dried up. Now, fresh discoveries are being made in offshore areas of the Caspian itself and in previously undeveloped areas of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

According to energy giant BP, the Caspian area harbors as much as 48 billion barrels of oil (mostly buried in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan) and 449 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (with the largest supply in Turkmenistan). This puts the region ahead of North and South America in total gas reserves and Asia in oil reserves.  But producing all this energy and delivering it to foreign markets will be a monumental task. The region’s energy infrastructure is woefully inadequate and the Caspian itself provides no maritime outlet to other seas, so all that oil and gas must travel by pipeline or rail.

Russia, long the dominant power in the region, is pursuing control over the transportation routes by which Caspian oil and gas will reach markets.  It is upgrading Soviet-era pipelines that link the former SSRs to Russia or building new ones and, to achieve a near monopoly over the marketing of all this energy, bringing traditional diplomacy, strong-arm tactics, and outright bribery to bear on regional leaders (many of whom once served in the Soviet bureaucracy) to ship their energy via Russia.  As recounted in my book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, Washington sought to thwart these efforts by sponsoring the construction of alternative pipelines that avoid Russian territory, crossing Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey to the Mediterranean (notably the BTC, or Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline), while Beijing is building its own pipelines linking the Caspian area to western China.