Los Angeles They're cute, furry, and when they're not chasing each other around kelp forests, they're floating on their backs like miniature teddy bears. Hunted nearly to extinction for their luxuriant fur--the thickest of any mammal's--the sea otters of California were making a comeback until they started mysteriously dying off. State wildlife officials recovered a record 281 dead otters last ...

or as the ends of a boiv are drawn together." They have a legend that it visits the country every thirty years. The epidemic arrived in Bhamo in June last, having travelled up the Irrawaddy Yalley starting in Rangoon in May and visiting Mandalay during the early part of June. It is interesting to note this following of the important trade route. It is not unlikely that the epidemic originated f...

The Eurasian otter, Lutra lutra, has a Palaearctic distribution and has suffered a severe decline throughout Europe during the last century. Previous studies in this and other mustelids have shown reduced levels of variability in mitochondrial DNA, although otter phylogeographic studies were restricted to central-western Europe. In this work we have sequenced 361 bp of the mtDNA control region ...

Although protected for nearly a century, California's sea otters have been slow to recover, in part due to exposure to fecally-associated protozoal pathogens like Toxoplasma gondii and Sarcocystis neurona. However, potential impacts from exposure to fecal bacteria have not been systematically explored. Using selective media, we examined feces from live and dead sea otters from California for sp...

All existing sea otter, Enhydra lutris, populations have suffered at least one historic population bottleneck stemming from the fur trade extirpations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We examined genetic variation, gene flow, and population structure at five microsatellite loci in samples from five pre-fur trade populations throughout the sea otter's historical range: California, Ore...

search of the seminal papers and significant books devoted to the study of various types of logic t e reveals that many proofs are missing. Indeed, if one seeks an axiomatic proof (of the type that Hilber njoyed) relying solely on, say, condensed detachment, in many cases one finds that none is offered by d t the literature. In part prompted by this discovery, we embarked on an intense study de...

Recovery criteria for depleted species or populations normally are based on demographic measures, the goal being to maintain enough individuals over a sufficiently large area to assure a socially tolerable risk of future extinction. Such demographically based recovery criteria may be insufficient to restore the functional roles of strongly interacting species. We explored the idea of developing...

Toxoplasma gondii and Sarcocystis neurona are protozoan parasites with terrestrial definitive hosts, and both pathogens can cause fatal disease in a wide range of marine animals. Close monitoring of threatened southern sea otters (Enhydra lutris nereis) in California allowed for the diagnosis of dual transplacental transmission of T. gondii and S. neurona in a wild female otter that was chronic...

Vagococcus lutrae is a Gram-positive coccus initially isolated from the common otter (Lutra lutra) but that has never been reported as a human pathogen. We describe the first case of human infection due to Vagococcus lutrae in Marseille, France.