Watching the World

Population Control​—A Dilemma for Zoos

“No zoo today can get by without contraception,” says Henning Wiesner, head zoologist at Munich’s Hellabrunn Zoo. Animals in zoos reproduce rapidly, their offspring thrive, and they tend to live longer than their counterparts in the wild. But zoos have limited space. Hence the need for contraceptives. However, “family planning in the zoo has a hitch. Animals don’t care much for it,” says the German magazine Focus. Bears, for example, sniff out contraceptives hidden in food and remove them. Oral contraceptives can also cause health problems, such as breast cancer, in certain animals. Other options are castration and sterilization, but these bring new problems. For one thing, they are permanent, and offspring may be needed in the future. Second, doctored animals cease producing sex hormones, a change that may harm their social status among others of their kind. Still another option is to cull, or kill off, unwanted offspring​—but that infuriates many animal lovers and animal-protection groups. So zoos face a real dilemma.

 Electronic Trash

Some 155,000 tons of electronic waste, dubbed e-waste, was discarded by Canadians in 2002, comments Canada’s National Post newspaper. According to an Environment Canada report, Canadians threw out “an estimated two million television sets, 1.1-million VCRs and 348,000 CD players​—most considered obsolete after only a few years of use.” Electronic equipment “is often discarded because it no longer meets the need of the user, not because it is broken,” the report states. Much of this waste may be dangerous. Just one television, for instance, “can contain up to two kilograms [4.5 pounds] of lead,” says the Post. And mercury, which is found in certain display panels, is now contaminating landfills. At the current rate, e-waste will double by 2010, warns Environment Canada.

Ants and Antibiotics

“Scientists have found that some ants grow mushroom crops to feed their young, even using antibiotics as a form of ‘pesticide’ to protect them,” says the international edition of The Miami Herald. Called leaf cutters, these ants transplant, prune, and weed their crops just as a farmer does. The antibiotic, which protects the ants’ crops from an infectious mold, is produced by a bacteria that belongs to the Streptomycete family and lives on the leaf cutter’s outer skin. Ted Schultz, insect specialist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., notes that while humans must constantly invent new antibiotics to overcome drug-resistant germs, leaf cutters have been using the same antibiotic successfully for aeons. Understanding the ants’ secret “could be directly relevant to human survival,” states Schultz.

A Global Health Catastrophe

The world is headed for “one of the biggest health catastrophes” it has ever seen, thanks to an alarming increase in diabetes, warns Britain’s Professor Sir George Alberti, president of the International Diabetes Federation (IDF). According to IDF figures, over 300 million people worldwide have impaired glucose tolerance, which often leads to diabetes, reports Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Type 2 diabetes, once affecting mainly older people, is now making inroads into the health of Britain’s young who have grown obese because of a diet of junk food and a lack of exercise. “The enormous frustration is that most of this [diabetes and its effects] is preventable through lifestyle,” says Alberti. Developing countries may also see diabetes soar as they adopt “the unhealthy diet and urban lifestyles of the affluent world,” comments The Guardian.

The Changing Italian Family

From 1995 to 2001, the number of unmarried couples living together in Italy almost doubled, the number getting married decreased, and the number of people living alone increased. These findings, published in the newspaper La Repubblica, are based on data collected by the Italian National Statistics Institute (ISTAT). Over the same period, average family size dwindled to just 2.6 members. According to ISTAT, many couples are choosing to live together out of wedlock for “trial periods” with a view to possible marriage.

Owls’ Super Senses

Thanks in part to their enormous eyes and binocular vision, owls have “the sharpest night vision in the animal kingdom,” reports Australian Geographic magazine. And many of them “can detect sounds 10 times fainter than a human can.” What contributes to this acute hearing? “To varying degrees,” says the article, “the different owl species share an extraordinary ear feature: one ear opening is higher than the other.” This arrangement makes it easier for owls to locate moving prey. Owls of the Tyto genus have an additional refinement in the form of a disk of facial feathers. This adjustable disk collects sound and funnels it to the ear. Furthermore, the medulla, a part of the brain associated with hearing, is more complex in owls than in other birds.

Avoidable Hepatitis Infections

Most “hepatitis infections result from the lack of hygiene on the part of medical staff,” says the Polish weekly Polityka. In 1997 the National Institute of Hygiene in Poland reported 992 hepatitis C infections, but five years later the number was 1,892. The article laments the current lack of any licensed vaccine against hepatitis C. Professor Andrzej Gładysz, a national consultant on infectious diseases, says: “It is no exaggeration to say that in Poland we have 500 thousand to 600 thousand people infected with hepatitis C virus.” And most of these infections “occur in doctors’ or dentists’ offices,” states Jacek Juszczyk of the Infectious Diseases Clinic at the Medical University in Poznan. Concludes Polityka: “When we are in the hands of a doctor, we would like to be sure that those hands are good and clean.”

Proliferation of Shantytowns

“Almost a billion people, 32 percent of the inhabitants of the world’s cities, live in impoverished urban areas,” says Mexico City’s El Universal newspaper. A United Nations study cites Bogotá, Havana, Mexico City, Quito, and Rio de Janeiro as examples of cities seeing a proliferation of shantytowns. What are the causes? In the case of Bogotá, the UN report attributes the mushrooming shantytowns to “the rapid growth of the population, the strong emigration from rural areas, and violence, which has displaced entire communities,” says the paper. Additionally, 23 percent of the population in that city lived below the poverty line in the year 2000 compared with 19.4 percent in 1994.