June 15, 2006 — The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) has used a camera “trap” to capture the first-ever images of the critically endangered wild rhino in the Borneo jungles. The rhino is believed to be one of a population of just 13 whose existence was confirmed last year in a remote part of Malaysia’s Sabah state, according to WWF. Very few other rhinos are believed to survive elsewhere in Borneo. “The rhinos in Sabah spend their lives in dense jungle where they are rarely seen, which accounts for the lack of any previous photographs of them in the wild,” WWF said in a statement.

June 16, 2006 — Rats, like humans, contemplate problems by carefully weighing the costs and benefits of a situation before making decisions, according to a new study on Wistar rats, a rodent developed for research. The study is the first to demonstrate that a non-human animal creates a desired ratio, or standard, to decide between options requiring varying levels of effort and that yield different rewards. A person buying a new car, for example, must weigh the cost and the effort needed to make payments versus the value of the car. Rats, and likely all rodents, do something similar, only under a lot more pressure. “In its natural habitat, rats are facing the problem that little is under their control, so they are facing various levels and forms of uncertainty all the time,” said Ruud van den Bos, who led the research. “For instance, the quality and amount of food items at patches varies over time and between different patches, thus benefits are not always the same.”

June 16, 2006 — President Bush plans to designate a vast new marine sanctuary Thursday, extending stronger federal protections to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and its endangered monk seals, nesting green sea turtles and other rare species. The nation’s newest national monument, which will be given a native Hawaiian name based on suggestions from state residents, covers an archipelago stretching 1,400 miles long and 100 miles wide in the Pacific Ocean. The region is home to more than 7,000 species, at least a fourth of them found nowhere else. The decision to create the nation’s 75th national monument immediately sets aside 140,000 square miles of largely uninhabited islands, atolls, coral reef colonies and underwater peaks known as seamounts to be managed by federal and state agencies. Conrad C. Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which will manage nearly all of it, said the new protected area would dwarf all others. “It’s the single-largest act of ocean conservation in history. It’s a large milestone,” Lautenbacher said. “It is a place to maintain biodiversity and to maintain basically the nurseries of the Pacific. It spawns a lot of the life that permeates the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”