movetheboat
Well-Known Angler
Republicans call for raising the retirement age: Some GOP back plan to make 'future generations' work longer to stop Social Security and Medicare funds running out
Republicans call for raising the retirement age
the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread
- Thread starter wader
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Republicans call for raising the retirement age
wader
Well-Known Angler
Sold: Yacht With a Waterfall. Price: $19 Million. Broker: George Santos.
A $19 million luxury yacht deal brokered by Rep. George Santos between two of his wealthy donors has captured the attention of federal and state authorities investigating the congressman’s campaign finances and personal business dealings. The sale, which has not been previously reported, is one...
Sold: Yacht With a Waterfall. Price: $19 Million. Broker: George Santos.
Teen and 2 horses dead after vehicle crashes into group riding stolen horses, police say - NewsBreak
A 14-year-old died and two other teens were injured in Dallas after a vehicle crashed into them as they were riding stolen horses, police said. The...
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Ah, the web we weave...
Wellesley College proudly proclaims itself as a place for “women who will make a difference in the world.” It boasts a long line of celebrated alumnae, including Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Nora Ephron.
On Tuesday, its students will vote on a referendum that has divided the campus and goes straight to the issue of Wellesley’s identity as a women’s college.
The referendum, which is nonbinding, calls for opening admission to all nonbinary and transgender applicants, including trans men. Currently, the college allows admission to anyone who lives and consistently identifies as a woman.
The referendum also calls for the college’s communications to be more gender inclusive — for example, using the word “students” or “alumni” instead of “women.”
The vote is in some ways definitional: What is the mission of a women’s college?
At Wellesley College, a Fight Over Whether to Admit Trans Men
Students will vote Tuesday on a nonbinding referendum that considers opening admission to all nonbinary and transgender applicants. Opponents say the school’s mission is to educate women.Wellesley College proudly proclaims itself as a place for “women who will make a difference in the world.” It boasts a long line of celebrated alumnae, including Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Nora Ephron.
On Tuesday, its students will vote on a referendum that has divided the campus and goes straight to the issue of Wellesley’s identity as a women’s college.
The referendum, which is nonbinding, calls for opening admission to all nonbinary and transgender applicants, including trans men. Currently, the college allows admission to anyone who lives and consistently identifies as a woman.
The referendum also calls for the college’s communications to be more gender inclusive — for example, using the word “students” or “alumni” instead of “women.”
The vote is in some ways definitional: What is the mission of a women’s college?
wader
Well-Known Angler
Anglers thought they hooked a tiger shark. It was something much bigger, video shows
The Florida locals were fishing from an Alabama beach when their fishing line caught something big.
video at the link
Man carjacks woman at gunpoint in Suffolk driveway, then rams cop car, flees onto LIRR tracks - NewsBreak
A homeless man carjacked a woman at gunpoint in a Suffolk County driveway Tuesday night before ramming the stolen vehicle into a police cruiser and fleeing on foot down LIRR tracks, police said Wednesday.
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Red tide, hurricanes, alligators, falling iguanas and now pythons. Ah yes, the Sunshine State, but how can one have a restful morning dump when either a python or iguana can pop up of their toilet???
Time to get John Cleese and Eric Idle, along with Daniel Radcliffe involved??
MIAMI — So much for all the efforts to slow the proliferation of Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades over the last two decades, including with paid contractors, trained volunteers and an annual hunt that has drawn participants from as far as Latvia: The giant snakes have been making their way north, reaching West Palm Beach and Fort Myers and threatening ever-larger stretches of the ecosystem.
That was one of the few definitive conclusions in a comprehensive review of python science published last month by the U.S. Geological Survey, which underscored the difficulty of containing the giant snakes since they were first documented as an established population in the state in 2000.
Little is known about how long Burmese pythons live in the wild in Florida, how often they reproduce and especially how large the state’s python population has grown, according to the review, which called the state’s python problem “one of the most intractable invasive-species management issues across the globe.”
Nor is it known how exactly they travel. The review theorized that South Florida’s extensive network of canals and levees “may facilitate long-distance movement by pythons,” though it suggested that slithering and swimming to points north may take awhile.
“One python transited continuously for 58.5 hours and traveled 2.43 kilometers in a single day,” the review said of a snake followed with radio tracking.
More research should be conducted to develop and evaluate new tools to eradicate pythons and to refine existing ones, the study found, adding that controlling the species’ spread is critical to protecting the Everglades. Earlier studies found that Burmese pythons, which are nonnative apex predators originally from South Asia, had decimated native species, including wading birds, marsh rabbits and white-tailed deer.
Pythons found in Florida have measured longer than 15 feet and weighed more than 200 pounds, the review found; even hatchlings can be more than two feet long.
The pythons’ voracious spread is all the more alarming given the billions of dollars that the state and the federal government have spent on restoring the Everglades, the review noted, calling invasive species “one of the greatest threats to restoration success.”
Florida, with its subtropical climate, numerous entry ports and prolific live animal trade, has at least 139 established invasive species, meaning that they are reproducing in the wild, according to the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. More than 500 nonnative species have been reported in the state over time.
Pythons, like invasive iguanas, have been known to emerge from the occasional South Florida toilet bowl; the review notes that while Burmese pythons have mostly been spotted in and around Everglades National Park and other swamplands, many have also been found in Naples and the western outskirts of Miami.
Once a year, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission holds a python hunt open to the public, challenging people to find and remove as many snakes as they can. Participants must take a training course online or in person about humanely killing pythons using either preferred mechanical methods, like a stun gun, or manual ones, like hunting knives, since the hunt does not allow the use of firearms. Last year’s winner took home $10,000 for hunting down 28 pythons.
Dustin Crum, who has been hunting pythons for a decade, took home $1,500 for capturing the longest snake in the competition, an 11-footer. He won in the same category in 2021 after catching a 15-footer.
“We started out doing this stuff as a hobby and just couldn’t believe we could catch giant constrictors like that in the wild,” said Mr. Crum, 42, who now hunts pythons full time. The state pays hunters $50 per foot for the first four feet of snake and $25 for each subsequent foot, he said, as well as an hourly rate. Outside of the state-sponsored competition for the public, Mr. Crum does use guns to kill the snakes.
“I’ll say a little prayer: ‘Hey, it’s not your fault,’” he said.
Sometimes, scientists ask to get the pythons alive so that they can be tracked. Hunters like Mr. Crum deposit them in designated drop boxes during night hunts and email researchers to come get them in the morning.
Pythons became popular exotic pets in the United States in the 1970s. Some eventually grew so large that their owners released them into the wild. By 2000, scientists had documented multiple generations of pythons living across a relatively large geographic area in the Everglades and Florida’s southern tip.
The realization that pythons were prodigiously reproducing and nearly wiping out native species helped lead to regulations restricting python importation and ownership. But by then, it was too late to stop their spread.
Detecting pythons, which like to hide in marshes and thrive in remote habitats, is so challenging that experts do not know how many exist in Florida, though they estimate that there are at least tens of thousands. More than 18,000 have been removed since 2000, including 2,500 in 2022, according to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Melissa Miller of the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida is helping lead a large-scale python removal project that also hopes to get a better sense of the snakes’ abundance by putting trackers on more of them and measuring the reproductive output of more females. (She is also part of a team of experts at the university, known as the “Croc Docs,” that researches wildlife in South Florida and the Caribbean.) Another part of the project will use drones to track many tagged pythons at once. Someday, a genetic biocontrol tool might emerge to help suppress the population, she said.
“We don’t really have a reliable estimate of how many are out there,” Dr. Miller said. “They’re kind of a cautionary tale to not to release pets, to make sure you report invasive species immediately.”
Florida makes it easy with a hotline: 888-IVE-GOT1.
Pythons are so large that they are not easily kept in enclosures to study them. The U.S.G.S. review suggested building a research center to conduct captive and small-scale trials.
In late 2021, a team from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida found likely the largest Burmese python ever recorded in the state: a 215-pound female with 122 eggs inside her.
“It helps you visualize what it ate, in pounds of native wildlife, to get to that,” said Ian Bartoszek, the environmental science project manager for the group.
If there is any good news in the U.S.G.S. review, it is that there have been no reports of humans in Florida being killed by wild pythons, which squeeze their prey to death before swallowing it; captive pythons are responsible for the few recorded fatalities.
Python breeding season generally extends from November to March or April, Mr. Bartoszek said. The team at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida uses tagged male pythons as “scouts” to lead researchers to females. This season, a V.I.P. — “that’s Very Important Python,” Mr. Bartoszek said — named Jesse led the team to two large females within two weeks.
“We’ve had to do a lot of kayaking out to some of them this season,” he said. Female pythons in the area that the group studies have been smaller lately, he added, a sign that tracking and hunting them might be making a dent in the number that survive long enough to get big: “It’s getting very hard for those animals to find us females,” he said.
Hurricane Ian, the powerful Category 4 storm that crashed into Southwest Florida last September, did not have much effect on the pythons his team tracks, he added. Prolonged cold snaps have killed off some snakes in the past, the U.S.G.S. review noted, but such weather has become increasingly rare in southern Florida.
Mr. Bartoszek said pythons had adapted over time to Florida, with those closer to the coast behaving slightly differently than those inland. But native species have adapted, too, and python hatchlings now have a few predators: snakes, alligators and at least one bobcat that was caught on camera preying on a clutch of python eggs.
“The Everglades,” Mr. Bartoszek said, “is fighting back.”
Time to get John Cleese and Eric Idle, along with Daniel Radcliffe involved??
Pythons, Invasive and Hungry, Are Making Their Way North in Florida
A study from the U.S. Geological Survey called the state’s python problem “one of the most intractable invasive-species management issues across the globe.”MIAMI — So much for all the efforts to slow the proliferation of Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades over the last two decades, including with paid contractors, trained volunteers and an annual hunt that has drawn participants from as far as Latvia: The giant snakes have been making their way north, reaching West Palm Beach and Fort Myers and threatening ever-larger stretches of the ecosystem.
That was one of the few definitive conclusions in a comprehensive review of python science published last month by the U.S. Geological Survey, which underscored the difficulty of containing the giant snakes since they were first documented as an established population in the state in 2000.
Little is known about how long Burmese pythons live in the wild in Florida, how often they reproduce and especially how large the state’s python population has grown, according to the review, which called the state’s python problem “one of the most intractable invasive-species management issues across the globe.”
Nor is it known how exactly they travel. The review theorized that South Florida’s extensive network of canals and levees “may facilitate long-distance movement by pythons,” though it suggested that slithering and swimming to points north may take awhile.
“One python transited continuously for 58.5 hours and traveled 2.43 kilometers in a single day,” the review said of a snake followed with radio tracking.
More research should be conducted to develop and evaluate new tools to eradicate pythons and to refine existing ones, the study found, adding that controlling the species’ spread is critical to protecting the Everglades. Earlier studies found that Burmese pythons, which are nonnative apex predators originally from South Asia, had decimated native species, including wading birds, marsh rabbits and white-tailed deer.
Pythons found in Florida have measured longer than 15 feet and weighed more than 200 pounds, the review found; even hatchlings can be more than two feet long.
The pythons’ voracious spread is all the more alarming given the billions of dollars that the state and the federal government have spent on restoring the Everglades, the review noted, calling invasive species “one of the greatest threats to restoration success.”
Florida, with its subtropical climate, numerous entry ports and prolific live animal trade, has at least 139 established invasive species, meaning that they are reproducing in the wild, according to the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. More than 500 nonnative species have been reported in the state over time.
Pythons, like invasive iguanas, have been known to emerge from the occasional South Florida toilet bowl; the review notes that while Burmese pythons have mostly been spotted in and around Everglades National Park and other swamplands, many have also been found in Naples and the western outskirts of Miami.
Once a year, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission holds a python hunt open to the public, challenging people to find and remove as many snakes as they can. Participants must take a training course online or in person about humanely killing pythons using either preferred mechanical methods, like a stun gun, or manual ones, like hunting knives, since the hunt does not allow the use of firearms. Last year’s winner took home $10,000 for hunting down 28 pythons.
Dustin Crum, who has been hunting pythons for a decade, took home $1,500 for capturing the longest snake in the competition, an 11-footer. He won in the same category in 2021 after catching a 15-footer.
“We started out doing this stuff as a hobby and just couldn’t believe we could catch giant constrictors like that in the wild,” said Mr. Crum, 42, who now hunts pythons full time. The state pays hunters $50 per foot for the first four feet of snake and $25 for each subsequent foot, he said, as well as an hourly rate. Outside of the state-sponsored competition for the public, Mr. Crum does use guns to kill the snakes.
“I’ll say a little prayer: ‘Hey, it’s not your fault,’” he said.
Sometimes, scientists ask to get the pythons alive so that they can be tracked. Hunters like Mr. Crum deposit them in designated drop boxes during night hunts and email researchers to come get them in the morning.
Pythons became popular exotic pets in the United States in the 1970s. Some eventually grew so large that their owners released them into the wild. By 2000, scientists had documented multiple generations of pythons living across a relatively large geographic area in the Everglades and Florida’s southern tip.
The realization that pythons were prodigiously reproducing and nearly wiping out native species helped lead to regulations restricting python importation and ownership. But by then, it was too late to stop their spread.
Detecting pythons, which like to hide in marshes and thrive in remote habitats, is so challenging that experts do not know how many exist in Florida, though they estimate that there are at least tens of thousands. More than 18,000 have been removed since 2000, including 2,500 in 2022, according to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Melissa Miller of the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida is helping lead a large-scale python removal project that also hopes to get a better sense of the snakes’ abundance by putting trackers on more of them and measuring the reproductive output of more females. (She is also part of a team of experts at the university, known as the “Croc Docs,” that researches wildlife in South Florida and the Caribbean.) Another part of the project will use drones to track many tagged pythons at once. Someday, a genetic biocontrol tool might emerge to help suppress the population, she said.
“We don’t really have a reliable estimate of how many are out there,” Dr. Miller said. “They’re kind of a cautionary tale to not to release pets, to make sure you report invasive species immediately.”
Florida makes it easy with a hotline: 888-IVE-GOT1.
Pythons are so large that they are not easily kept in enclosures to study them. The U.S.G.S. review suggested building a research center to conduct captive and small-scale trials.
In late 2021, a team from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida found likely the largest Burmese python ever recorded in the state: a 215-pound female with 122 eggs inside her.
“It helps you visualize what it ate, in pounds of native wildlife, to get to that,” said Ian Bartoszek, the environmental science project manager for the group.
If there is any good news in the U.S.G.S. review, it is that there have been no reports of humans in Florida being killed by wild pythons, which squeeze their prey to death before swallowing it; captive pythons are responsible for the few recorded fatalities.
Python breeding season generally extends from November to March or April, Mr. Bartoszek said. The team at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida uses tagged male pythons as “scouts” to lead researchers to females. This season, a V.I.P. — “that’s Very Important Python,” Mr. Bartoszek said — named Jesse led the team to two large females within two weeks.
“We’ve had to do a lot of kayaking out to some of them this season,” he said. Female pythons in the area that the group studies have been smaller lately, he added, a sign that tracking and hunting them might be making a dent in the number that survive long enough to get big: “It’s getting very hard for those animals to find us females,” he said.
Hurricane Ian, the powerful Category 4 storm that crashed into Southwest Florida last September, did not have much effect on the pythons his team tracks, he added. Prolonged cold snaps have killed off some snakes in the past, the U.S.G.S. review noted, but such weather has become increasingly rare in southern Florida.
Mr. Bartoszek said pythons had adapted over time to Florida, with those closer to the coast behaving slightly differently than those inland. But native species have adapted, too, and python hatchlings now have a few predators: snakes, alligators and at least one bobcat that was caught on camera preying on a clutch of python eggs.
“The Everglades,” Mr. Bartoszek said, “is fighting back.”
wader
Well-Known Angler
Pentagon believes alien mothership could be eyeing Earth
Government officials stated a possible alien “parent craft” could release “many small probes” on Earth.
Aquarius
Angler
Pentagon believes alien mothership could be eyeing Earth
Government officials stated a possible alien “parent craft” could release “many small probes” on Earth.www.yahoo.com
What ever happened to the Murder Hornets?
wader
Well-Known Angler
movetheboat
Well-Known Angler
AND YET ANOTHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wrongly convicted Brooklyn man to be exonerated after serving 19 years for murder: Initial NYPD investigation lasted less than 24 hours and ignored six witnesses who all swore then 17-year-old was not the shooter
- Emel McDowell spent nearly 20 years in prison for a 1990 house party murder he did not commit
- On Thursday, he was officially exonerated by a New York City court
- His long fight for justice led him to a legal career, he now works as a litigation paralegal at a criminal defense firm
PUBLISHED: 12:58 EDT, 16 March 2023 | UPDATED: 16:03 EDT, 16 March
Wrongly convicted man exonerated after serving 19 years for murder
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/
A Brooklyn man who spent nearly two decades withering in prison for a 1990 murder he did not commit will formally have his conviction vacated on Thursday, after an investigation proved his claim that his friend was responsible for the shooting.
Emel McDowell was 17 year old when victim Jonathan Powell was shot dead following a fight at a Bedford-Stuyvesant house party on October 27, 1990.
At the time, the New York Police Department investigated the crime for a mere 24 hours, which ended with detectives arresting McDowell, despite witness statements that conflicted and an insistence from McDowell that it was his friend who actually did the shooting.
Later, it was determined that police did not run an adequate investigation into the friend, failing to explore the possibility that he was the shooter. Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn District Attorney said that the system had 'failed Emel McDowell.'
On Thursday, a smiling McDowell in a charcoal suit and loafers walked out of a New York courthouse an exonerated man. When asked how he was feeling, he said: 'I'm great, I'm doing great.'
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dsedy
Well-Known Angler
LOL really ....
www.zerohedge.com
Pornhub Acquired By Canadian Private Equity Firm 'Ethical Capital Partners' | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Researchers identify 55 more white sharks in Cape Cod waters
pressherald.com/2023/03/16/researchers-identify-55-more-white-sharks-in-cape-cod-waters/By MARK PRATT March 16, 2023
The scientific nonprofit that tracks the white shark population in Cape Cod waters identified 55 sharks never before documented in the area during its most recent research season, but experts say that’s no reason for tourists who flock to the vacation hotpsot every summer to be afraid of going in the water.
The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy has now has documented more than 600 of the apex predators since it began monitoring the population in 2014, staff scientist Megan Winton said Wednesday. Many of the sharks return to the area year after year to feed on the abundant seals that call Cape Cod home.
Scientists during last year’s research trips from mid-June until early November documented the return of 63 sharks that had previously been spotted in the area, the nonprofit announced this month.
Don’t worry. Identifying more sharks does not mean there are more of them out there and does not mean a greater risk to the public.
“It’s not necessarily indicative of there being more sharks off of Cape Cod,” Winton said. “What we’ve seen the last couple years in terms of activity and sightings has been par for the course of what we’ve been seeing for the past several years.”
In Maine, the department of marine resources has stepped up efforts to monitor shark activity by placing 28 receivers along the coast since 2021. The department said last summer that it had confirmed 35 great white shark sightings in Maine waters through August.
The fear that people have about white sharks because of the 1975 movie “Jaws” – about a massive great white terrorizing a New England resort town – and two shark attacks off Cape Cod in 2018, one of them fatal, is largely misplaced, Winton said.
“It’s important for people to keep in mind that white sharks are not the monsters they are portrayed to be in the media,” she said. “They’re not lurking off our beaches. Humans are not on the menu.”
Cape Cod is the only known white shark aggregation site in the northwest Atlantic, and because they tend to stick close to shore as they hunt for seals, the area has become a goldmine of information for researchers, she said.
The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy scientists, in collaboration with other researchers, have been able to find out more about the sharks’ lifecycle, growth rates, the risks they face in the open ocean, and travel patterns as they swim thousands of miles up and down the eastern coast of the U.S. and Canada.
For example, a shark first documented off Cape Cod in 2017 was caught and tagged off Hilton Head, South Carolina, in 2021 and during that time had grown three feet, the conservancy said.
The researchers capture underwater images of the sharks using a camera on a painter’s pole. Sharks that have never been documented before are given a name, often based on unique markings. The images and information are entered on the conservancy’s publicly-available shark database.
Koala, a 9-foot male first spotted last year, has a marking that looks like a koala’s face. Quack, a 9-foot female first documented in 2018, has a marking that resembles a duck. Some are named after local sports stars, including Brady and Big Papi.
The public should use the information from the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy to educate themselves about sharks so they can make informed choices while on the water.
“Giving folks open access to their shark catalog is a great educational tool for the public,” said Greg Skomal, the state Division of Marine Fisheries shark expert who works closely with the conservancy.
“People identify with individual animals,” he said. “It’s one thing to talk about a species; it’s another to talk about an individual within that species. People can look at this catalog and they can get a sense of how to use our coastal areas.”
I understand she also offers exfoliations with the fish house calls...
Construction workers have been at work demolishing an abandoned tuberculosis hospital in Queens over the past several months, dismantling the long-empty wards and carting off the bricks. But first, they had to figure out what to do with a school of goldfish which for unknown reasons had come to call the flooded basement home. Three hundred of them.
Their go-to goldfish rescuer? A beautician from the Bronx.
Brenda Prohaska, who teaches cosmetology at an alternative learning high school, had only a passing interest in fish when she joined a local aquarium interest group a few years ago. She just had some questions how to treat ich, an illness that had wiped out her mollies. Then the pandemic lockdown began and the fish club became a fish 911.
Messages poured in: There were sultan fish languishing in a closed acupuncture office in Midtown Manhattan, a cluster of spike-topped apple snails forfeited by a Bronx family fleeing the contagion, and a nearly 20-year-old Oscar fish in Co-Op City whose owner had died of the coronavirus.
“I thought someone else would answer the call,” Ms. Prohaska, 51, said in an interview in her house on City Island in the Bronx, over the burble of hundreds of gallons of aquarium water. Beside her, the foot-long sultan fish from the acupuncture office chewed a fresh earthworm she had plopped in his tank. “They didn’t, so I had to.”
Ms. Prohaska has since taken up a heavy mantle few — including herself — knew was there for the taking-up: She has become the city’s on-call fish rescuer. The safe extraction of most of the mysterious goldfish from beneath the Neponsit Adult Home in Rockaway Park was just one of about 90 rescues she has undertaken in the past three years.
(Like any good fish tale, the goldfish caper gets bigger in the retelling: The Rockaway rescue effort included not just nets, traps and crusts of bread but a group of L.G.B.T.Q. activists who frequented the beach nearby, a disabled construction worker from Pennsylvania and a woman who asked to be known as a “fish fairy godmother” for privacy. But more on that later.)
The pandemic has ebbed, but Ms. Prohaska has not stopped. The fish need her too much, she says. The volume may be related to a post-pandemic phenomenon: giving away pets that were purchased as a lockdown balm. Small-animal intakes spiked by more than 12 percent nationwide in 2022, compared with the year before, according to Shelter Animals Count, which collects data from more than 6,000 shelters, though they still remain about 9 percent lower than before the pandemic. Via her Facebook page, NYC Fish Rescue, people alert Ms. Prohaska to their fish problems.
They are as varied as fish in the sea: a messy divorce in which a restraining order prevented a spouse from collecting his fahaka pufferfish; a man moving to California stopped by Transportation Security Administration agents at the airport for trying to take his suckermouth catfish in his carry-on bag.
Though people give Ms. Prohaska fish and their trappings, NYC Fish Rescue is not a business. She plans to create a nonprofit entity but has not yet had time.
Ms. Prohaska has a hard time explaining why the plight of helpless fish called to her. A cancer survivor, she says saving them gave her a sense of control, particularly during the pandemic. “I always have been a giver, so it almost comes easy to me,” she said. “They are living things, and I feel like nobody really cares that much.”
At first she kept every angelfish, betta and gourami. She drove to save them in a beat-up hearse that she bought from a haunted attraction in Connecticut and that now serves as her fish rescue ambulance. (It is filled with fish gravel, aquarium filters and a terrifying clown mannequin from its previous life.) But the stress of cleaning multiple tanks and worrying about the creatures was too taxing, she said. She had to move one tank out of her bedroom because fretting over the cichlid’s happiness left her sleepless.
“It’s taxing — I worry about the fish,” she said. “It’s what drives me; I do it. But I don’t know if it’s good for me because it just causes me heartache and stress.”
Eventually, a man named Laboy Wiggins rescued the fish rescuer. Mr. Wiggins, 51, a disabled construction worker who lives in West Pittston, Pa., found NYC Fish Rescue on Facebook in 2020. The connection between the two fish sympathizers was instant, both said. Now, sometimes several times a week, he loads his Lincoln Navigator with the tools of the fish rescue trade — buckets and nets — and drives upward of three hours to New York City to rescue the fish to which Ms. Prohaska directs him.
Fish grew from a pastime to a solace for Mr. Wiggins, who took up the hobby when a car accident shattered his leg in 2009, requiring more than 30 surgeries, he said. Soon, it became an all-encompassing passion. “I just went berserk,” he said. “I went really crazy with it, but it’s a good kind of crazy. Fish is peaceful.”
He gets peace from the 700-gallon tank he installed in his living room, and the 500-gallon one upstairs, home to two Amazonian pacus that he rescued at Ms. Prohaska’s behest from a Long Island Rail Road depot in Queens. Their owner, a longtime railroad employee who was retiring, had kept them for over a decade, Mr. Wiggins said, but could not take them home. They are huge.
He found that keeping fish was much more than just a way to pass time while immobilized: A child sexual abuse survivor, Mr. Wiggins spent 18 years in prison for robbery and assault and was released about 15 years ago. “I was acting out my trauma,” he said. In 2020 he joined a number of men in suing a Pennsylvania reform school where he says he was abused. The opportunity to rescue fish with Ms. Prohaska felt healing.
“These fish is innocent,” he said. “And they are being mistreated — they didn’t ask for that.”
Mr. Wiggins and Ms. Prohaska find it galling that, while dog and cat rescues abound, there are few dedicated fish rescues, and that the animals, some of which live for decades, are often dumped or even flushed.
Since 2018, Animal Care Centers of New York City, which takes in surrendered animals, has received just 144 fish and one hermit crab, according to Katy Hansen, a spokeswoman. “It’s hard to believe that in a city of nine million we’ve only taken in about 140 fish, when we’ve taken in thousands of other animals,” Ms. Hansen said. “My biggest fear is that people are just flushing them down the toilet, and they are sentient beings.”
In the next few days, Mr. Wiggins will receive a special delivery from New York City: the last of the goldfish from underneath the tuberculosis hospital.
It is the end of a journey for the Queens goldfish, though their beginnings remain a mystery: Some theorize they were washed under the building after flooding from Hurricane Sandy scooped them from private ponds.
When the hospital’s destruction was announced, activists associated with the abutting beach, Bay 1 of Jacob Riis Park, a longtime refuge for L.G.B.T.Q. and other marginalized people, began a grass-roots effort to save the fish.
Beachgoers scooped out as many fish as they could and demanded that demolition wait until the whole goldfish school could be spared. In response, New York City Health and Hospitals, which owns the Rockaway property and oversaw the demolition, contacted the fish rescue.
In New York City parks, fish rescues are rare, according to Bonnie McGuire, the director of the parks department’s urban park rangers. Fish that are released in park waterways most often do not survive, she said. “Goldfish — or any other domesticated pets — don’t belong in parks. Do not release any pets into wild areas,” Ms. McGuire said in an email. “It’s not good for the ecosystem or the pet!”
Ms. Prohaska arrived in Rockaway with nets, but the subbasement was too deep to reach the goldfish, she said. She set traps loaded with Italian bread and caught more than 100; large ones went to a private pond in Mount Vernon, and 50 or so fry went to a woman in Scarsdale, who declined to give her name. (“I would like to be the gold fish fairy,” she said, in a text message to Ms. Prohaska.)
The mission continued. Since September a contractor working on the site has methodically fished them out with baited traps, according to New York City Health and Hospitals. It will end when the final fish are delivered to Mr. Wiggins in the next week. They will live in a pond outside a nearby Catholic church, he said — the ones he can bear to part with.
“It’s not every day you find fish at your construction site,” Manny Saez, the vice president of facilities at New York City Health and Hospitals said in an email. “But we’re happy they found a safe home.”
How a Bronx Beautician Became New York’s On-Call Fish Rescuer
Three hundred goldfish in a hospital basement, a suckermouth at the airport: When fish are in crisis, a local woman and a partner in Pennsylvania ride to the rescue.Construction workers have been at work demolishing an abandoned tuberculosis hospital in Queens over the past several months, dismantling the long-empty wards and carting off the bricks. But first, they had to figure out what to do with a school of goldfish which for unknown reasons had come to call the flooded basement home. Three hundred of them.
Their go-to goldfish rescuer? A beautician from the Bronx.
Brenda Prohaska, who teaches cosmetology at an alternative learning high school, had only a passing interest in fish when she joined a local aquarium interest group a few years ago. She just had some questions how to treat ich, an illness that had wiped out her mollies. Then the pandemic lockdown began and the fish club became a fish 911.
Messages poured in: There were sultan fish languishing in a closed acupuncture office in Midtown Manhattan, a cluster of spike-topped apple snails forfeited by a Bronx family fleeing the contagion, and a nearly 20-year-old Oscar fish in Co-Op City whose owner had died of the coronavirus.
“I thought someone else would answer the call,” Ms. Prohaska, 51, said in an interview in her house on City Island in the Bronx, over the burble of hundreds of gallons of aquarium water. Beside her, the foot-long sultan fish from the acupuncture office chewed a fresh earthworm she had plopped in his tank. “They didn’t, so I had to.”
Ms. Prohaska has since taken up a heavy mantle few — including herself — knew was there for the taking-up: She has become the city’s on-call fish rescuer. The safe extraction of most of the mysterious goldfish from beneath the Neponsit Adult Home in Rockaway Park was just one of about 90 rescues she has undertaken in the past three years.
(Like any good fish tale, the goldfish caper gets bigger in the retelling: The Rockaway rescue effort included not just nets, traps and crusts of bread but a group of L.G.B.T.Q. activists who frequented the beach nearby, a disabled construction worker from Pennsylvania and a woman who asked to be known as a “fish fairy godmother” for privacy. But more on that later.)
The pandemic has ebbed, but Ms. Prohaska has not stopped. The fish need her too much, she says. The volume may be related to a post-pandemic phenomenon: giving away pets that were purchased as a lockdown balm. Small-animal intakes spiked by more than 12 percent nationwide in 2022, compared with the year before, according to Shelter Animals Count, which collects data from more than 6,000 shelters, though they still remain about 9 percent lower than before the pandemic. Via her Facebook page, NYC Fish Rescue, people alert Ms. Prohaska to their fish problems.
They are as varied as fish in the sea: a messy divorce in which a restraining order prevented a spouse from collecting his fahaka pufferfish; a man moving to California stopped by Transportation Security Administration agents at the airport for trying to take his suckermouth catfish in his carry-on bag.
Though people give Ms. Prohaska fish and their trappings, NYC Fish Rescue is not a business. She plans to create a nonprofit entity but has not yet had time.
Ms. Prohaska has a hard time explaining why the plight of helpless fish called to her. A cancer survivor, she says saving them gave her a sense of control, particularly during the pandemic. “I always have been a giver, so it almost comes easy to me,” she said. “They are living things, and I feel like nobody really cares that much.”
At first she kept every angelfish, betta and gourami. She drove to save them in a beat-up hearse that she bought from a haunted attraction in Connecticut and that now serves as her fish rescue ambulance. (It is filled with fish gravel, aquarium filters and a terrifying clown mannequin from its previous life.) But the stress of cleaning multiple tanks and worrying about the creatures was too taxing, she said. She had to move one tank out of her bedroom because fretting over the cichlid’s happiness left her sleepless.
“It’s taxing — I worry about the fish,” she said. “It’s what drives me; I do it. But I don’t know if it’s good for me because it just causes me heartache and stress.”
Eventually, a man named Laboy Wiggins rescued the fish rescuer. Mr. Wiggins, 51, a disabled construction worker who lives in West Pittston, Pa., found NYC Fish Rescue on Facebook in 2020. The connection between the two fish sympathizers was instant, both said. Now, sometimes several times a week, he loads his Lincoln Navigator with the tools of the fish rescue trade — buckets and nets — and drives upward of three hours to New York City to rescue the fish to which Ms. Prohaska directs him.
Fish grew from a pastime to a solace for Mr. Wiggins, who took up the hobby when a car accident shattered his leg in 2009, requiring more than 30 surgeries, he said. Soon, it became an all-encompassing passion. “I just went berserk,” he said. “I went really crazy with it, but it’s a good kind of crazy. Fish is peaceful.”
He gets peace from the 700-gallon tank he installed in his living room, and the 500-gallon one upstairs, home to two Amazonian pacus that he rescued at Ms. Prohaska’s behest from a Long Island Rail Road depot in Queens. Their owner, a longtime railroad employee who was retiring, had kept them for over a decade, Mr. Wiggins said, but could not take them home. They are huge.
He found that keeping fish was much more than just a way to pass time while immobilized: A child sexual abuse survivor, Mr. Wiggins spent 18 years in prison for robbery and assault and was released about 15 years ago. “I was acting out my trauma,” he said. In 2020 he joined a number of men in suing a Pennsylvania reform school where he says he was abused. The opportunity to rescue fish with Ms. Prohaska felt healing.
“These fish is innocent,” he said. “And they are being mistreated — they didn’t ask for that.”
Mr. Wiggins and Ms. Prohaska find it galling that, while dog and cat rescues abound, there are few dedicated fish rescues, and that the animals, some of which live for decades, are often dumped or even flushed.
Since 2018, Animal Care Centers of New York City, which takes in surrendered animals, has received just 144 fish and one hermit crab, according to Katy Hansen, a spokeswoman. “It’s hard to believe that in a city of nine million we’ve only taken in about 140 fish, when we’ve taken in thousands of other animals,” Ms. Hansen said. “My biggest fear is that people are just flushing them down the toilet, and they are sentient beings.”
In the next few days, Mr. Wiggins will receive a special delivery from New York City: the last of the goldfish from underneath the tuberculosis hospital.
It is the end of a journey for the Queens goldfish, though their beginnings remain a mystery: Some theorize they were washed under the building after flooding from Hurricane Sandy scooped them from private ponds.
When the hospital’s destruction was announced, activists associated with the abutting beach, Bay 1 of Jacob Riis Park, a longtime refuge for L.G.B.T.Q. and other marginalized people, began a grass-roots effort to save the fish.
Beachgoers scooped out as many fish as they could and demanded that demolition wait until the whole goldfish school could be spared. In response, New York City Health and Hospitals, which owns the Rockaway property and oversaw the demolition, contacted the fish rescue.
In New York City parks, fish rescues are rare, according to Bonnie McGuire, the director of the parks department’s urban park rangers. Fish that are released in park waterways most often do not survive, she said. “Goldfish — or any other domesticated pets — don’t belong in parks. Do not release any pets into wild areas,” Ms. McGuire said in an email. “It’s not good for the ecosystem or the pet!”
Ms. Prohaska arrived in Rockaway with nets, but the subbasement was too deep to reach the goldfish, she said. She set traps loaded with Italian bread and caught more than 100; large ones went to a private pond in Mount Vernon, and 50 or so fry went to a woman in Scarsdale, who declined to give her name. (“I would like to be the gold fish fairy,” she said, in a text message to Ms. Prohaska.)
The mission continued. Since September a contractor working on the site has methodically fished them out with baited traps, according to New York City Health and Hospitals. It will end when the final fish are delivered to Mr. Wiggins in the next week. They will live in a pond outside a nearby Catholic church, he said — the ones he can bear to part with.
“It’s not every day you find fish at your construction site,” Manny Saez, the vice president of facilities at New York City Health and Hospitals said in an email. “But we’re happy they found a safe home.”
Seriously, wtf?
nypost.com
Eyedrops kill 1, force others to have eyes removed due to drug-resistant bacteria: CDC alert
Four people infected have been forced to have their eyes surgically removed, while 68 patients in 16 US states have been diagnosed with a rare bacterial infection linked to preservative-free eyedro…
nypost.com
movetheboat
Well-Known Angler
Billionaires Lose Battle to Block Nantucket Clam Shack
SHUCK IT!Noah Kirsch
Wealth And Power Reporter
Published Mar. 17, 2023 5:13PM ET
REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji
Several ultra-rich property owners on Nantucket, the island near Cape Cod, have lost their initial battle to prevent a clam shack from opening near their homes. The disgruntled residents include finance billionaires Charles Schwab and Charles Johnson, along with their spouses; their attorney had argued that the proposed licenses would “destroy the ambience” of the area and “substantially interfere with my clients’ peaceful residential use of their property.” Sadly for them, the Nantucket Select Board voted 3-1 in favor of the business. But the conflict may not be over. “Maybe the billionaires will sue everyone and then #occupynorthwharf and we will make ‘Clam Guevara’ T-shirts,” one of the proprietors reportedly said before the vote.
Constant battle when the affluent rub elbows with the common folk.Billionaires Lose Battle to Block Nantucket Clam Shack
SHUCK IT!
Noah Kirsch
Wealth And Power Reporter
Published Mar. 17, 2023 5:13PM ET
REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji
Several ultra-rich property owners on Nantucket, the island near Cape Cod, have lost their initial battle to prevent a clam shack from opening near their homes. The disgruntled residents include finance billionaires Charles Schwab and Charles Johnson, along with their spouses; their attorney had argued that the proposed licenses would “destroy the ambience” of the area and “substantially interfere with my clients’ peaceful residential use of their property.” Sadly for them, the Nantucket Select Board voted 3-1 in favor of the business. But the conflict may not be over. “Maybe the billionaires will sue everyone and then #occupynorthwharf and we will make ‘Clam Guevara’ T-shirts,” one of the proprietors reportedly said before the vote.
Around here, it's usually started by people moving into working waterfronts and then being upset that the noise starts just before dawn and they're smelling "ripe" herring and bunker for lobster bait. Like Nantucket, the local selectboards are comprised of locals with family lineages going back 100s of years, with many lobstermen relatives so the complaints get squelched very quickly...
I know quite a few states that are really divided, including another one whose major city is also Portland, and the "Home" of this website as well. Will be interesting to see what transpires here...
COVE, Ore. — Corey Cook still holds a fondness for her days living in Portland, where the downtown pubs and riverfront cherry blossoms made her proud to call the Rose City home during her 20s.
But as she started growing wary of the metro area’s congestion and liberal politics, she moved to the suburbs, then the exurbs, before heading east, eventually escaping Portland’s sphere of influence on the other side of the Cascade Mountains in 2017. But even here, where she now runs a Christian camp amid the foothill pines overlooking the Grande Ronde Valley, she cannot help but notice how the values of western Oregon are held over the eastern part of the state by way of laws making guns less accessible and abortions more accessible.
Unwilling to move east into Idaho, farther from her family, Ms. Cook, 52, now wonders if redrawing the state maps could instead bring Idaho’s values to her.
“Oregon is not a unified state to me anymore,” she said. “To say that I’m an Oregonian is a geographic truth, but it doesn’t really have meaning to me the way that it did before I lived in eastern Oregon.”
The broad sense of estrangement felt across rural Oregon has led conservatives in recent years to pursue a scrupulous strategy to open a theoretical escape hatch, gathering thousands of signatures for a series of ballot measures that have now passed in 11 counties. Those measures require regular meetings to discuss the idea of secession. In those places, including Union County, Ms. Cook’s new home, county commissioners in rooms adorned by Oregon flags and maps are now obligated to talk about whether it would one day make sense to be part of Idaho.
The “Greater Idaho” movement joins a long history of U.S. defection struggles. In California, for example, there have been more than 200 attempts over the years to break up the state. Greater Idaho sees its solution as more simple — a shift in an existing border that would claim the entire eastern half of Oregon without creating an entirely new state. Despite being a political long shot, the sustained and growing interest from residents in the area and attention from politicians in Idaho have illustrated how much the state is already divided in spirit.
“It’s got worse over the years,” said John Lively, a Democratic state representative who grew up in one of the counties considering the secession plan. “It’s really reflective of the divide we have in our country.”
Mr. Lively has met with Greater Idaho leaders, saying that while he does not support their effort, the movement has followed the appropriate channels and opened up an opportunity for western Oregonians to take notice of why people on the other side of the state have grown so disaffected.
Last month, taking notice of the percolating chatter on the other side of the border, Idaho’s state representatives approved a measure to initiate formal discussions with Oregon over whether and how to redraw a state boundary that spans some 300 miles. Oregon lawmakers have so far not answered the call.
To some residents in eastern Oregon, the secession movement has been cathartic, a sort of relief valve for decades of boiling frustrations with government in a region that has in the distant and not-too-distant past hosted its share of anti-government violence.
To others, the secession effort has felt quixotic, or even idiotic. Success would require passage through the state legislatures in both states and in Congress, requiring the Democrats who currently control broad political power at the Capitol in Salem, Ore., to get onboard with the idea of giving up half the state to a neighbor that does not share their values. Such a shift would leave others in the region more vulnerable, including the Klamath Tribes, where there are fears that a switch to Idaho would undermine efforts to fight for environmental protections on their ancestral lands.
A Marine Corps veteran who helps develop products for the hunting industry, Mr. Nash makes visits to the grocery store that can mean hours of serendipitous conversation with every person he sees.
Mr. Nash, 36, has watched eastern Oregon’s growing frustration with government policies that alter the region’s way of life. Limits on logging contributed to a steep decline in the sprawling timber industry, leading to mill closures and mass layoffs. “Eastern Oregon largely gets treated as western Oregon’s playground,” he said.
Mr. Nash plans to vote to advance the secession debate, though he does not support actual implementation. He fears that a switch to Idaho would bring its own set of complications.
“I don’t think there is a historical precedent to say ‘this is going to work,’” Mr. Nash said. “I’d just rather we figure out how to restore Oregon to a better place.”
Redrawing the map would require much more than fresh cartography. Logistical challenges grow more thorny with each new question: Would people in eastern Oregon be ready to embrace a sales tax? How would Idaho, which bans legal marijuana, manage eastern Oregon’s thriving weed industry? How would the states transition eastern Oregon’s state employees, with some benefits already earned, to a new retirement system with different rules and compensation?
Barbara Dee Ehardt, an Idaho Republican state representative who sponsored a resolution to invite cross-state talks, said she saw benefits for conservatives in Idaho. Among them, she said, a border shifting westward would move legal marijuana and legal abortions farther from the reach of people in her state.
Leading the Greater Idaho movement is Mike McCarter, 75, a resident of La Pine worked for 30 years in the state’s nursery industry and currently teaches classes on concealed handguns and shooting, and recently acquired an Idaho flag for his home.
Mr. McCarter said in an interview that in the process of spreading his message, he has spoken with the People’s Rights group, which is led by Ammon Bundy. In 2016, Mr. Bundy started an armed takeover of a wildlife refuge in Harney County, which has voted to join the Oregon secession movement.
But Mr. McCarter said that he does not align with the group’s tactics, adding that he wants his effort to provide an outlet for people to express their frustrations through peaceful means.
“We are not looking at the civil disobedience way,” he said.
State boundaries, he argued, were set with the idea of organizing like-minded people and can be adjusted to conform with evolving communities, as when divisions between the eastern and western parts of Virginia led to the creation of West Virginia.
“Even though people can say the odds are still way against it — and they probably are — it’s still bringing the issue to the surface,” Mr. McCarter said.
On their own, the county commissioners have little power to alter Oregon’s state lines, but supporters of the Greater Idaho movement have continued to put pressure on them, in hopes they will put pressure on state lawmakers. At the meeting last month, the activists urged the commissioners to formally notify their state lawmakers that local citizens had voted to engage in the idea.
The commissioners agreed, approving the message unanimously.
“I do share the frustrations of the people that are wanting to do it,” Donna Beverage, one of the commissioners, said after the meeting. “I just don’t know how difficult it is going to be. But at the same time, when people are frustrated, we can fight for change.”
Oregon’s Rural-Urban Divide Sparks Talk of Secession
Conservatives have approved a series of ballot measures in pursuit of an improbable plan to redraw the state’s border. We spent time in the region under dispute to see what the debate says about the country’s divisions.COVE, Ore. — Corey Cook still holds a fondness for her days living in Portland, where the downtown pubs and riverfront cherry blossoms made her proud to call the Rose City home during her 20s.
But as she started growing wary of the metro area’s congestion and liberal politics, she moved to the suburbs, then the exurbs, before heading east, eventually escaping Portland’s sphere of influence on the other side of the Cascade Mountains in 2017. But even here, where she now runs a Christian camp amid the foothill pines overlooking the Grande Ronde Valley, she cannot help but notice how the values of western Oregon are held over the eastern part of the state by way of laws making guns less accessible and abortions more accessible.
Unwilling to move east into Idaho, farther from her family, Ms. Cook, 52, now wonders if redrawing the state maps could instead bring Idaho’s values to her.
“Oregon is not a unified state to me anymore,” she said. “To say that I’m an Oregonian is a geographic truth, but it doesn’t really have meaning to me the way that it did before I lived in eastern Oregon.”
The broad sense of estrangement felt across rural Oregon has led conservatives in recent years to pursue a scrupulous strategy to open a theoretical escape hatch, gathering thousands of signatures for a series of ballot measures that have now passed in 11 counties. Those measures require regular meetings to discuss the idea of secession. In those places, including Union County, Ms. Cook’s new home, county commissioners in rooms adorned by Oregon flags and maps are now obligated to talk about whether it would one day make sense to be part of Idaho.
The “Greater Idaho” movement joins a long history of U.S. defection struggles. In California, for example, there have been more than 200 attempts over the years to break up the state. Greater Idaho sees its solution as more simple — a shift in an existing border that would claim the entire eastern half of Oregon without creating an entirely new state. Despite being a political long shot, the sustained and growing interest from residents in the area and attention from politicians in Idaho have illustrated how much the state is already divided in spirit.
“It’s got worse over the years,” said John Lively, a Democratic state representative who grew up in one of the counties considering the secession plan. “It’s really reflective of the divide we have in our country.”
Mr. Lively has met with Greater Idaho leaders, saying that while he does not support their effort, the movement has followed the appropriate channels and opened up an opportunity for western Oregonians to take notice of why people on the other side of the state have grown so disaffected.
Last month, taking notice of the percolating chatter on the other side of the border, Idaho’s state representatives approved a measure to initiate formal discussions with Oregon over whether and how to redraw a state boundary that spans some 300 miles. Oregon lawmakers have so far not answered the call.
To some residents in eastern Oregon, the secession movement has been cathartic, a sort of relief valve for decades of boiling frustrations with government in a region that has in the distant and not-too-distant past hosted its share of anti-government violence.
To others, the secession effort has felt quixotic, or even idiotic. Success would require passage through the state legislatures in both states and in Congress, requiring the Democrats who currently control broad political power at the Capitol in Salem, Ore., to get onboard with the idea of giving up half the state to a neighbor that does not share their values. Such a shift would leave others in the region more vulnerable, including the Klamath Tribes, where there are fears that a switch to Idaho would undermine efforts to fight for environmental protections on their ancestral lands.
A Marine Corps veteran who helps develop products for the hunting industry, Mr. Nash makes visits to the grocery store that can mean hours of serendipitous conversation with every person he sees.
Mr. Nash, 36, has watched eastern Oregon’s growing frustration with government policies that alter the region’s way of life. Limits on logging contributed to a steep decline in the sprawling timber industry, leading to mill closures and mass layoffs. “Eastern Oregon largely gets treated as western Oregon’s playground,” he said.
Mr. Nash plans to vote to advance the secession debate, though he does not support actual implementation. He fears that a switch to Idaho would bring its own set of complications.
“I don’t think there is a historical precedent to say ‘this is going to work,’” Mr. Nash said. “I’d just rather we figure out how to restore Oregon to a better place.”
Redrawing the map would require much more than fresh cartography. Logistical challenges grow more thorny with each new question: Would people in eastern Oregon be ready to embrace a sales tax? How would Idaho, which bans legal marijuana, manage eastern Oregon’s thriving weed industry? How would the states transition eastern Oregon’s state employees, with some benefits already earned, to a new retirement system with different rules and compensation?
Barbara Dee Ehardt, an Idaho Republican state representative who sponsored a resolution to invite cross-state talks, said she saw benefits for conservatives in Idaho. Among them, she said, a border shifting westward would move legal marijuana and legal abortions farther from the reach of people in her state.
Leading the Greater Idaho movement is Mike McCarter, 75, a resident of La Pine worked for 30 years in the state’s nursery industry and currently teaches classes on concealed handguns and shooting, and recently acquired an Idaho flag for his home.
Mr. McCarter said in an interview that in the process of spreading his message, he has spoken with the People’s Rights group, which is led by Ammon Bundy. In 2016, Mr. Bundy started an armed takeover of a wildlife refuge in Harney County, which has voted to join the Oregon secession movement.
But Mr. McCarter said that he does not align with the group’s tactics, adding that he wants his effort to provide an outlet for people to express their frustrations through peaceful means.
“We are not looking at the civil disobedience way,” he said.
State boundaries, he argued, were set with the idea of organizing like-minded people and can be adjusted to conform with evolving communities, as when divisions between the eastern and western parts of Virginia led to the creation of West Virginia.
Tell Us About Where You Live
“Even though people can say the odds are still way against it — and they probably are — it’s still bringing the issue to the surface,” Mr. McCarter said.
On their own, the county commissioners have little power to alter Oregon’s state lines, but supporters of the Greater Idaho movement have continued to put pressure on them, in hopes they will put pressure on state lawmakers. At the meeting last month, the activists urged the commissioners to formally notify their state lawmakers that local citizens had voted to engage in the idea.
The commissioners agreed, approving the message unanimously.
“I do share the frustrations of the people that are wanting to do it,” Donna Beverage, one of the commissioners, said after the meeting. “I just don’t know how difficult it is going to be. But at the same time, when people are frustrated, we can fight for change.”
Poor Andre and his Friends, but I'm thinking not many here, especially those around Cape Cod, will be feeling much remorse...
Last summer, the highly contagious strain of avian influenza that had been spreading through North American birds made its way into marine mammals, causing a spike in seal strandings along the coast of Maine. In June and July, more than 150 dead or ailing seals washed ashore.
Now, a study provides new insight into the outbreak. Of the 41 stranded seals tested for the virus, nearly half were infected with it, scientists reported on Wednesday in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. It is likely that wild birds introduced the virus to seals at least twice, the researchers concluded. In several seals, the virus had mutations that are associated with adaptation to mammals.
The risk to humans remains low, and the seal outbreak waned quickly, the scientists said.
“It was a dead-end event, as far as we can tell,” said Kaitlin Sawatzki, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University and an author of the new paper. “The virus that entered into those seals has not persisted.”
But the report comes amid growing concerns that the virus, which has already caused the largest bird flu outbreak in the nation’s history, could adapt to spread more efficiently among mammals, potentially sparking a new pandemic.
It remains unclear whether the seals were spreading the virus to one another or primarily picking it up from birds. But the number of affected seals suggests that either the virus spreads easily among the marine mammals or that the barrier for bird-to-seal transmission is low.
“We truly don’t know if it’s transmitting from bird to seal, bird to seal, bird to seal 100 times over or if it’s going into a couple of seals and then spreading,” said Wendy Puryear, a virologist at the Tufts veterinary school and an author of the new paper. “Both are possible,” she added. “Neither are great.”
Either scenario calls for closer monitoring of seals, said David Stallknecht, an expert on wildlife diseases and influenza at the University of Georgia, who was not involved in the research.
“We need to just keep our eyes on them,” he said. “The easiest way to tell if this persists in seals is to keep testing them.”
The current version of H5N1 has become unusually widespread in wild birds and has spilled over repeatedly into mammals, including bobcats, raccoons and foxes. Scientists believe that most wild mammals are contracting the virus directly from birds.
But a bird flu outbreak on a Spanish mink farm last fall suggested that the virus could spread efficiently among some mammalian species. And a mass die-off of sea lions in Peru has raised concerns that marine mammals might be spreading the virus to one another, too.
Seals are known to be susceptible to avian influenza, and other versions of the virus have previously caused outbreaks in the animals.
The new study is a collaboration between researchers at several academic institutions and wildlife organizations, including Marine Mammals of Maine and New England Wildlife Centers, as well as federal scientists.
The researchers collected samples from 1,079 wild birds and 132 gray seals and harbor seals stranded along the North Atlantic coast from Jan. 20 to July 31, 2022. “That gave us a really powerful ability to see what is happening in the birds and the seals in the same time in the same region,” Dr. Puryear said.
There were two waves of flu in wild birds, the researchers found. The first, which peaked in March 2022, primarily affected raptors, while the second, which began in June, hit gulls and sea ducks known as eiders.
No seals tested positive for avian influenza during the first wave of bird infections. But during the summer stranding event, 19 of 41 seals tested positive.
The researchers found two slightly different versions of the virus in the seals. One matched what was circulating in terns, while the other resembled what was circulating in a broader array of birds, including gulls and eiders. The finding suggests that the virus spilled over at least twice.
Because these seals do not typically eat birds, the scientists suspect that the animals are picking up the virus from the environment, perhaps through contact with bird droppings.
Viral samples from the seals also had mutations that were rare or absent in birds. Three seal samples had mutations that have been shown to improve viral replication or increase virulence in mammals.
Such mutations are not unique. In another recent study, a team of Canadian scientists found the same mutations in some viral samples taken from bird-flu-infected foxes. “When there’s a bird-to-mammalian spillover event, they seem to be acquired to pretty quickly,” Dr. Sawatzki said.
The presence of these mutations is not, in and of itself, a reason to “sound the alarm,” Dr. Stallknecht said. But continued surveillance is necessary not only to safeguard human health but also to protect wild animals from a virus that has already proved devastating.
“These emerging diseases need to be looked at on a bigger scale than just ‘pandemic potential,’” he said, “because they affect a lot of other species on the globe.”
Scientists Investigate a Bird Flu Outbreak in Seals
Wild birds passed the virus to seals in New England at least twice last summer, a new study suggests.Last summer, the highly contagious strain of avian influenza that had been spreading through North American birds made its way into marine mammals, causing a spike in seal strandings along the coast of Maine. In June and July, more than 150 dead or ailing seals washed ashore.
Now, a study provides new insight into the outbreak. Of the 41 stranded seals tested for the virus, nearly half were infected with it, scientists reported on Wednesday in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. It is likely that wild birds introduced the virus to seals at least twice, the researchers concluded. In several seals, the virus had mutations that are associated with adaptation to mammals.
The risk to humans remains low, and the seal outbreak waned quickly, the scientists said.
“It was a dead-end event, as far as we can tell,” said Kaitlin Sawatzki, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University and an author of the new paper. “The virus that entered into those seals has not persisted.”
But the report comes amid growing concerns that the virus, which has already caused the largest bird flu outbreak in the nation’s history, could adapt to spread more efficiently among mammals, potentially sparking a new pandemic.
It remains unclear whether the seals were spreading the virus to one another or primarily picking it up from birds. But the number of affected seals suggests that either the virus spreads easily among the marine mammals or that the barrier for bird-to-seal transmission is low.
“We truly don’t know if it’s transmitting from bird to seal, bird to seal, bird to seal 100 times over or if it’s going into a couple of seals and then spreading,” said Wendy Puryear, a virologist at the Tufts veterinary school and an author of the new paper. “Both are possible,” she added. “Neither are great.”
Either scenario calls for closer monitoring of seals, said David Stallknecht, an expert on wildlife diseases and influenza at the University of Georgia, who was not involved in the research.
“We need to just keep our eyes on them,” he said. “The easiest way to tell if this persists in seals is to keep testing them.”
The current version of H5N1 has become unusually widespread in wild birds and has spilled over repeatedly into mammals, including bobcats, raccoons and foxes. Scientists believe that most wild mammals are contracting the virus directly from birds.
But a bird flu outbreak on a Spanish mink farm last fall suggested that the virus could spread efficiently among some mammalian species. And a mass die-off of sea lions in Peru has raised concerns that marine mammals might be spreading the virus to one another, too.
Seals are known to be susceptible to avian influenza, and other versions of the virus have previously caused outbreaks in the animals.
The new study is a collaboration between researchers at several academic institutions and wildlife organizations, including Marine Mammals of Maine and New England Wildlife Centers, as well as federal scientists.
The researchers collected samples from 1,079 wild birds and 132 gray seals and harbor seals stranded along the North Atlantic coast from Jan. 20 to July 31, 2022. “That gave us a really powerful ability to see what is happening in the birds and the seals in the same time in the same region,” Dr. Puryear said.
There were two waves of flu in wild birds, the researchers found. The first, which peaked in March 2022, primarily affected raptors, while the second, which began in June, hit gulls and sea ducks known as eiders.
No seals tested positive for avian influenza during the first wave of bird infections. But during the summer stranding event, 19 of 41 seals tested positive.
The researchers found two slightly different versions of the virus in the seals. One matched what was circulating in terns, while the other resembled what was circulating in a broader array of birds, including gulls and eiders. The finding suggests that the virus spilled over at least twice.
Because these seals do not typically eat birds, the scientists suspect that the animals are picking up the virus from the environment, perhaps through contact with bird droppings.
Viral samples from the seals also had mutations that were rare or absent in birds. Three seal samples had mutations that have been shown to improve viral replication or increase virulence in mammals.
Such mutations are not unique. In another recent study, a team of Canadian scientists found the same mutations in some viral samples taken from bird-flu-infected foxes. “When there’s a bird-to-mammalian spillover event, they seem to be acquired to pretty quickly,” Dr. Sawatzki said.
The presence of these mutations is not, in and of itself, a reason to “sound the alarm,” Dr. Stallknecht said. But continued surveillance is necessary not only to safeguard human health but also to protect wild animals from a virus that has already proved devastating.
“These emerging diseases need to be looked at on a bigger scale than just ‘pandemic potential,’” he said, “because they affect a lot of other species on the globe.”
Rick67
Well-Known Angler
So the great whites will switch to swimmers.
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