A little songbird known as the blackpoll warbler departs each fall from New England and eastern Canada to migrate nonstop in a direct line over the Atlantic Ocean toward South America.

To track the birds' migration route, scientists used miniaturized light-sensing geolocators attached to the birds like tiny backpacks.

According to the study, which appears in the March issue of Biology Letters, the birds complete a nonstop flight ranging from about 1,410 to 1,721 miles (2,270 to 2,770 km) in just two to three days, making landfall somewhere in Puerto Rico, Cuba and the islands known as the Greater Antilles, from there going on to northern Venezuela and Colombia.

First author Bill DeLuca is an environmental conservation research fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He said:

We're really excited to report that this is one of the longest nonstop overwater flights ever recorded for a songbird, and finally confirms what has long been believed to be one of the most extraordinary migratory feats on the planet.

While other birds, such as albatrosses, sandpipers and gulls are known for trans-oceanic flights, most migratory songbirds that winter in South America take a less risky, continental route south through Mexico and Central America, the authors note. A water landing would be fatal to a warbler.

In the recent past, DeLuca explains, geolocators have been too large and heavy for use in studying songbird migration. The tiny blackpoll warbler, at around half an ounce (12 grams), was too small to carry even the smallest of traditional tracking instruments. Scientists had only ground observations and radar as tools.

But with recent advances have made geolocators lighter and smaller. For this work, the researchers harnessed miniaturized geolocators about the size of a dime and weighing only 0.5g to the birds' lower backs like a tiny backpack. By retrieving these when the warblers returned to Canada and Vermont the following spring, then analyzing the data, DeLuca and colleagues could trace their migration routes.

So-called light-level geolocators use solar geolocation, a method used for centuries by mariners and explorers. It is based on the fact that day length varies with latitude while time of solar noon varies with longitude. So all the instrument needs to do is record the date and length of daylight, from which daily locations can then be inferred once the geolocator is recaptured.

DeLuca said:

When we accessed the locators, we saw the blackpolls' journey was indeed directly over the Atlantic. The distances travelled ranged from 2,270 to 2,770 kilometers.

Ryan Norris of the University of Guelph was the Canadian team leader. He said that to prepare for the flight, the birds build up their fat stores.

They eat as much as possible, in some cases doubling their body mass in fat so they can fly without needing food or water. For blackpolls, they don't have the option of failing or coming up a bit short. It's a fly-or-die journey that requires so much energy.

These birds come back every spring very close to the same place they used in the previous breeding season, so with any luck you can catch them again. Of course there is high mortality among migrating songbirds on such a long journey, we believe only about half return.

DeLuca added:

It was pretty thrilling to get the return birds back, because their migratory feat in itself is on the brink of impossibility. We worried that stacking one more tiny card against their success might result in them being unable to complete the migration. Many migratory songbirds, blackpolls included, are experiencing alarming population declines for a variety of reasons, if we can learn more about where these birds spend their time, particularly during the nonbreeding season, we can begin to examine and address what might be causing the declines.

As for why the blackpoll undertakes such a perilous journey while other species follow a longer but safer coastal route, the authors say that because migration is the most perilous part of a songbird's year, it may make sense to get it over with as quickly as possible. However, this and other questions remain to be studied.

Bottom line: According to a study in the March issue of Biology Letters, the blackpoll warbler completes a nonstop migration over the Atlantic ocean, ranging from about 1,410 to 1,721 miles (2,270 to 2,770 km), in just two to three days.

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A mammoth tiger shark weighing more than 450kg (992 pounds) has been caught by hand off a beach in New South Wales.

Max Muggeridge, 19, who has been a shark fisherman for more than seven years, took three hours to hand reel in the beast.

“I knew I had hooked onto a very good fish but it wasn't until it got closer I could see it was massive... almost the size of a whale," he told Business Insider.

"Not wasting any time I instantly locked the drag down to full, and shoved my hands in the reel for extra pressure. My reel got so hot I couldn't touch it, we poured water over the reel and that left me with a big cloud of steam blow up in my face."

Muggeridge made the trip down the coast from Queensland, south of the border to Pottsville with his girlfriend. Little did he know that he would be later have to single-handedly reel in what would have been a world record-sized catch.

The current catch and release world record for a tiger shark is held by Joey Polk for a shark 3.25m in fork length and 3.88m overall.

Muggeridge's shark was estimated at 4.4m, but the teenager - who describes himself as a shark conservationist first and a fisherman second - didn't get the required measurements for the record, concerned that the shark needed to get back out to sea after the long reel in.

"I'd rather let it swim away than follow the protocol. It's [the record] just a piece of paper," he said.

"[On release] I swam out after her to make sure she swam off OK, but she quickly outswam me which was a great sign that she had recovered quickly."

Muggeridge said the catch was his childhood dream.

"I was in absolute astonishment (reeling it in); it was everything I ever dreamed about as kid. I started fishing as a child in the rivers and I guess I’ve always wanted bigger and better.

"I've been fascinated by these creatures but when I do catch them I always tag them and release. It's all for research.

"I wouldn't change the experience for anything in the world. It was true old school sharkin'."

Following a deadly summer in Australian waters, with many shark sightings and multiple attacks, we asked Muggeridge whether he has noticed a difference in his catches.

"In summer, sharks always come closer to the shore and that's also the season humans go to the beach," he said.

"This summer we did get two really good sharks but I would say that would be because I've improved myself."

Tiger sharks are considered the most dangerous shark in the world, only behind the great white.

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NOW WATCH: Animated map of what Earth would look like if all the ice melted

California just entered its fourth year in record-breaking drought, but that hasn't stopped food and beverage giant Nestlé from drawing water from multiple reserves in the state to make its bottled water.

People are furious.

The company uses California water in its Arrowhead and Pure Life brands, which usually sell for about a dollar each. 

In response, a group has drawn up a petition demanding that Nestle halt its operations in the state.

The campaign is being run by Courage, a nonprofit organization based in California, and it's gathered 135,000 signatures since going up at the end of March.  

Nestlé gets to draw water from this area of the state thanks to its longstanding contract with the Morongo Band of Cahuila Mission Indians, who are based in a southern area of the state near the Coachella Valley, according to the Desert Sun. The company's plant is based just inside the Morongo Reservation.

Regardless of where the plant is located, there are currently no laws on the books to regulate how much water can be taken from underground aquifers (a.k.a. "groundwater.") New regulations were recently introduced for this exact purpose, but they won't kick in for serveral years. The only laws that exist now govern surface water, the kind in rivers and lakes.

"All water belongs to people of the state, but if [Nestlé is] drawing groundwater, that is unregulated,"public information officer for the California State Water Resources Control Board Tim Moran told ABC News. That means Nestlé (and anyone else, for that matter) can draw as much water from the area's underground aquifers as it wants.

And they're taking quite a lot, at least by some accounts.

In 2013, the most recent year for which Morongo submitted reports, nearly 600 acre-feet of groundwater was tapped in the area, which translates to about 200 million gallons a year, the Desert Sun reports. That's enough water to supply the needs of around 400 homes in the Coachella Valley.

Still, that amount pales compared to the amount California Governor Jerry Brown hopes to save (500 billion gallons) with the water restrictions announced last week.

But some argue that drawing any amount from this area is dangerous, especially in the middle of Califonria's worst drought in 1,200 years.

"The reason this particular plant is of special concern is precisely because water is so scarce in the basin," Peter Gleick, president of a water research non-profit and author of the book "Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water"told the Desert Sun.

"If you had the same bottling plant in a water-rich area, then the amount of water bottled and diverted would be a small fraction of the total water available," he added. "But this is a desert ecosystem. Surface water in the desert is exceedingly rare and has a much higher environmental value than the same amount of water somewhere else."

In other words — especially now — every drop counts.

Business Insider has reached out to Nestlé for comment and will update this post when they get back to us.

UP NEXT: Chart shows how some of your favorite foods could be making California's drought worse

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NOW WATCH: Animated map shows what would happen to China if all the Earth's ice melted

An invisible force threatens to destroy life as we know it, yet society remains largely indifferent.

A small group of devoted soldiers, who know the true strength of this threat, warn us of the horror to come. But alas, their warnings are to no avail. Sound familiar?

Fans of HBO’s Game of Thrones, which returns this Sunday for its fifth season, will surely think of the Night’s Watch. For the uninitiated, those are the black-clad warriors who struggle to convince the rest of the realm that everyone is in imminent danger. Ignore the fact that the source of that danger is some zombie-like creatures called White Walkers, and and it might start to sound like something that we’re grappling with in our own dragon-less world: climate change.

In 2012, Arizona State University’s Manjana Milkoreit was struck by the meaningful dialogue transpiring online about the overlaps between Game of Thrones and climate change. These bloggers weren't’t simply talking about the show, Milkoreit tells me, but instead were using metaphors to instigate real political conversations—conversations about responsibility, indifference, activism, and the future.

Fans of the show have surely connected the dots already, but the metaphor goes: Winter and the merciless White Walkers represent climate change; the Night’s Watch—the only people who know the extent of the horror Westeros will soon face—are climate scientists; and the status-obsessed capital city of King’s Landing represents an ignorant and inactive public and/or government.

The response, or lack thereof, in Westeros mirrors our own political inaction.

While, of course, Game of Thrones’ Winter spells years of cold darkness, and climate change, most likely, will take the form of heat and drought, they overlap in terms of their potential cultural and political ramifications.

“Winter in Westeros is a season of expected danger, associated with major, long-term changes in temperature, life style, agriculture, and food supplies,” Milkoreit, whose work has appeared in Ecology and Society, Climatic Change, and SAGE Open, writes in her soon-to-be-published paper. "[Climate change] is associated with life-style changes and discomfort, challenges for agriculture and food supply. Instead of mystical dangers, there are a range of unknown and mainly uncontrollable risks.”

The response, or lack thereof, in Westeros mirrors our own political inaction. “The people [in Westeros] tend to ignore this threat, tend to not pay attention to the people on the wall who send these messages,” Milkoreit says. “Instead, they are fighting over political power and struggling to run the continent and worrying about foreign enemies who have weapons of mass destruction—like dragons.”

There is a shared ignorance between our worlds, Milkoreit notes: Both Westeros and modern Western culture worry about other, shallower problems; we're both short sighted; and neither people invests enough energy in dealing with climate change. Politics, in each case, is the primary hindrance to any consequential preparations for the impending change. On various blogs, Milkoreit saw these types of conversations arise within the context of Game of Thrones, but quickly transition to realistic discussions of action necessary to combat climate change.

“This shared cultural experience—passion for a TV show—becomes the central reference point, the foundation, for this kind of communication,” Milkoreit writes in her paper. “It connects bloggers and their audiences in a unique way, creating a shared set of ideas, stories, images and emotions that are independent of worldview, party affiliation, gender or geography.”

Shows like Game of Thrones, while filled with dragons and magic, spark meaningful dialogue.

Looking beyond Game of Thrones, Milkoreit maintains that fiction—or, more specifically, the imagination—can have a major effect on present politics. In fact, this time last year, she started the one-of-a-kind Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative at ASU, which, in her own words, aims to “really to explore the role of imagination—or lack thereof—in responding to climate change.”

People tend to have a very limited imagination about what a climate-changed future might look like. Even climate thought leaders and scientists lack imagination when looking forward, she says. But shows like Game of Thrones, while filled with dragons and magic, spark meaningful dialogue.

“I think this show with these blogs might have an effect on how people think about climate change, and how people imagine their futures—futures they want, futures they don’t want—and that kind of imagination might affect how they make choices in the present,” Milkoreit says. “It’s a very complex undertaking to integrate scientific understanding, beliefs about how worlds change—social worlds, technologic worlds—and how those things play out over long periods of time. I think pop culture and things like Game of Thrones might help people do that.”

SEE ALSO: The new Republican majority in Congress can't stand that the Pentagon and CIA are worried about climate change

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NOW WATCH: Bill Nye Reveals Why Climate Change Is So Hard To Stop

At least once each year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature updates its Red List of Threatened Species to keep tabs on which animals in the world are at risk of extinction. 

The news isn't good. The IUCN estimates that 26% of the world's mammals are threatened, meaning scientists evaluated them to be critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable. But this is just the IUCN's best estimate — the environmental organization says the percentage of threatened mammal species could be as low as 22% (still bad) or as high as 37% (let's hope not). 

Where in the world do these threatened mammals live? Take a look at this map:

The map, put together with data from the World Bank, shows the four countries with over 90 threatened mammal species in red: Indonesia (184), Madagascar (114), Mexico (101), and India (94). 

Indonesia

IUCN data says Indonesia hosts 670 mammal species, more than any other country in the world. The island nation also has the highest rates of deforestation in the world, according to a report published in Nature Climate Change in 2014.

That deforestation destroys the homes of many mammals, leading to population decline. It also separates them from other groups of their species, driving the dwindling populations to inbreeding.

That combination puts a lot of mammals at risk, including the Bornean Orangutan, which has been listed as endangered since 2000. The orangutan is losing its forest habitat as people cut down trees for timber and to convert the forest to farms. Poaching and people capturing orangutans for pets are also decreasing the number of orangutans in the wild. 

Madagascar

Like Indonesia, Madagascar has high biodiversity. There are 111 threatened mammal species endemic to Madagascar, meaning they're found no where else in the world but this island with an area slightly less than twice the size of Arizona. 

One of those endemic mammals, the Black-and-white Ruffed Lemur, is listed as critically endangered because of habitat loss and unsustainable hunting. They're big and active during the day, which makes them one of the species of lemur humans hunt the most for food. 

Mexico

Habitat loss from human encroachment is a distressingly common theme — the IUCN says it's the greatest threat to mammals all over the world. Baird's Tapir, listed as endangered in Mexico, is no exception. The scientists who reported on the tapir to IUCN estimated that at least 50% of the animal's habitat throughout Central America was lost in the past 33 years. 

The tapir is also at a disadvantage biologically, because it takes them so long to reproduce. Tapir mothers carry one baby for 13 months, then care for that baby up to two years after its birth. That means the population doesn't grow very fast, making it even more difficult for tapirs to cope with habitat loss and hunting.

India

In addition to causing habitat loss, when humans move into spaces where animals live it increases the frequency of conflicts between humans and animals, which further threatens animal populations. In India, for example, endangered Asian Elephants eat or trample crops growing in what used to be their habitat before humans took over the land for agriculture. Not only are elephants losing their habitat, but hundreds also die in clashes with people who don't want the elephants to eat their crops (and the conflicts don't end well for people either). According to the IUCN, addressing conflicts between humans and elephants in Asia is one of today's largest conservation challenges. 

For a closer look at where the most mammal species are threatened, check out the map with breakdowns by continent:

UP NEXT: Amazing chart shows the planet's longest-living animals

SEE ALSO: 7 animals humans are trying to kill off

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NOW WATCH: These fishermen can’t wait to battle Wisconsin winters to catch this rare fish

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is planning to impose a major new regulation on offshore oil and gas drilling to try to prevent the kind of explosions that caused the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing Obama administration officials.

The Interior Department could make the announcement as early as Monday, the paper said.

It is timed to coincide with the five-year anniversary of the BP disaster, which killed 11 men and sent millions of barrels of oil spewing into the gulf.

The rule is expected to tighten safety requirements on blowout preventers, devices that are the last line of protection to stop explosions in undersea oil and gas wells, the Times reported.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in 2010 was caused in part when the buckling of a section of drill pipe led to the malfunction of a supposedly fail-safe blowout preventer on a BP well, the paper said.

The regulation comes as the Obama administration is taking steps to open up vast new areas of federal waters off the southeast Atlantic Coast to drilling, a decision that has infuriated environmentalists, the Times reported.

It will be the third and biggest new drilling-equipment regulation put forth by the Obama administration in response to the disaster, the Times said. In 2010, the Interior Department announced new regulations on drilling well casings, and in 2012, it announced new regulations on the cementing of wells.

(Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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NOW WATCH: Animated map of what Earth would look like if all the ice melted

Cities, with their dense populations and public transit systems are often seen as hotbeds of green innovation —places where bicycles, subways, and light rail are transforming how we get around. But new research shows that fast-growing cities are some of the worst culprits when it comes to CO2 emissions from cars.

In a study published in PNAS this week, researchers dug through 33 years of traffic data from across the country, and used it to estimate local carbon emissions. They found that cities with large amounts of suburban sprawl were among the worst offenders.

“DARTE (the Database of Road Transportation Emissions) reveals that urban areas (meaning city centers plus their suburbs) were responsible for 80 percent of the growth in vehicle CO2 emissions since 1980, and for 63 percent of total 2012 vehicle CO2 emissions,” Conor Gately, the lead author of the paper, said in a press release.

The map below shows carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles. Urban areas, in red, emitted the largest amount of carbon dioxide per square kilometer.

On some level, this isn't all that surprising; more people live in the cities and suburbs than rural areas, and that means more cars and more CO2. But what was interesting was that the data didn't line up with previous estimates that assumed the relationship between population density and the amount of driving in an area is linear. It turns out that isn't exactly the case. Instead, the amount of driving increases more rapidly than expected until the population hits 1,650 people per square kilometer. After that it increases more slowly. As a result, some city centers' CO2 emissions were overestimated by almost 500 percent, while suburban emissions across the board were underestimated.

Having accurate estimates of CO2 emissions is important for cities that are looking to cut their carbon footprint. “For metropolitan areas that want to address CO2 emissions from their regional economy, knowing where they are is a prerequisite to doing anything about it,” Gately said. “You can’t affect what you can’t measure.”

Luckily, there is hope for urban areas. While there were increases in many urban areas across the country, in cities that were already very dense, like Boston and New York, the amount of per-capita emissions went down —an indication that greener policies that encourage less carbon-intensive options are prevailing.

This article originally appeared on Popular Science

This article was written by Mary Beth Griggs from Popular Science and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

SEE ALSO: This equation proves that climate change is linked to humanity's carbon emissions

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You might've heard the news last week that if there's one food you shouldn't be eating in the middle of the California drought, it's almonds.

Compared with many other fruits, nuts, and vegetables, almonds seem particularly wasteful, requiring a whole gallon of water per nut.

But what about the foods we eat that aren't fruits, nuts, or vegetables?

I'm talking about meat. Red meat, in particular. From raising the cows to washing and processing the meat, burgers and steaks require far more water per ounce than a handful of nuts do.

This chart, from a presentation made by University of California Davis professor Blaine Davis, makes the difference pretty clear:

Those arrows point to "forages" and alfalfa — crops raised almost exclusively for feeding farm animals. In California, the largest milk-producing state in the US, the vast majority of these animals are cows. "Forages" include the fields that get watered for cows to graze on and the corn and other irrigated crops that later get churned into cow feed.

Both of these use way more water than the almonds and pistachios shown near the top of the chart.

The difference is even more dramatic when you think about how much water is required to produce just one ounce of each food.

A whopping 106 gallons of water goes into making just one ounce of beef. By comparison, just about 23 gallons are needed for an ounce of almonds (about 23 nuts), the Los Angeles Times reported recently.

SEE ALSO: Chart shows how some of your favorite foods could be making California's drought worse

DON'T MISS: People are furious that Nestle is still bottling and selling California's water in the middle of the drought

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NOW WATCH: The Dark Side Of Salt Farming On South Korea's Controversial 'Slave Islands'

The water beneath Antarctica's thick ice may be dark and chilly, but it still harbors a surprising amount of sea life, including sea stars, sponges and anemones, according to a new underwater robotic expedition.

Researchers captured the aquatic footage at Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf with a new remotely operated vehicle (ROV), dubbed Icefin. The ROV is capable of diving 0.9 miles (1.5 kilometers) below sea level and conducting 1.9-mile-long (3 km) surveys, they said.

First, the researchers had to cut a 12-inch hole through about 66 feet (20 m) of ice. Then, they dropped Icefin through the hole, and directed it to dive down another 1,640 feet (500 m) to the seafloor, they said.

Earlier underwater vehicles in Icefin's class could dive only a few hundred meters, a limiting factor given that the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica can be up to 3.1 miles (5 km) deep.

"What truly separates Icefin from some of the other vehicles is that it's fairly slender, yet still has all of the sensors that the scientists … need," Mick West, the robot's principal research engineer and a senior research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, said in a statement. "Our vehicle has instrumentation aboard both for navigation and ocean science that other vehicles do not."

For instance, since GPS doesn't work under Antarctica's thick ice, Icefin uses a navigation system known as SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). SLAM allows the robot to triangulate its position based on its range and the features around it, such as those on the seafloor below it or the ice above it.

"Using algorithms such as SLAM allows us to construct a map of the unknown under-ice environment," West said. "When you can do that, you can begin to get a 3D picture of what's going on under the water."

In spite of Antarctica's harsh environment, Icefin's videos showed an active community of organisms thriving on the seafloor. Such footage may help scientists learn how animals survive in extreme locations, and understand how Antarctica's ice shelves are changing amidst warming conditions, the researchers said.

"We saw evidence of a complex community on the seafloor that has never been observed before, and unprecedented detail on the ice-ocean interface that hasn't been achieved before," said Britney Schmidt, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech and the principle investigator of the Icefin project.

Icefin may even help scientists search for life on other planets. For instance, Jupiter's moon Europa has ice-capped oceans that are remarkably similar to Antarctica's ice-covered waters, the researchers said.

"We're advancing hypotheses that we need for Europa, and understanding ocean systems here better," Schmidt said. "We're also developing and getting comfortable with technologies that make polar science, and eventually Europa science, more realistic."

The team finished its Antarctic research in December 2014. Icefin is slated to explore the Arctic in the summer of 2016 and return to Antarctica that fall, the researchers said.

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

• Album: Stunning Photos of Antarctic Ice
• Guide to Antarctica (Infographic)
• Marine Marvels: Spectacular Photos of Sea Creatures
• Robot Finds Antarctic Life At 'Never Visited Depths' | Video

Copyright 2015 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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NOW WATCH: Scientists Have A Theory About What Caused A Mysterious Mile-Wide Crater In Antarctica

The bottlenose dolphins we know, love, and celebrate on April 14, National Dolphin Day, are gray — presumably because that's the color thousands of years of evolution has proved best for them so far.

But one bottlenose dolphin captured and kept by the Taiji Whale Museum in Japan doesn't have any pigment in its entire body. It's an albino.

It looks pure white in the picture above, but its skin actually appears pink, which you can see in the picture of it swimming beside a normal-colored dolphin below.

Albinism occurs when an animal completely lacks melanin, the compound that gives the skin and eyes color. The dolphin at Taiji is only the 14th abnormally pale bottlenose dolphin people have seen (there's a species of pink dolphin that lives in the Amazon), and believed to be the 2nd true albino dolphin raised in an aquarium.

The dolphin was captured off the coast of Japan on January 18, 2014, during a yearly dolphin hunt in Taiji made notorious by the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary "The Cove," which shows fishermen herding dolphins into a cove either to be captured for aquarium display or killed for meat.

Japan's Wakayama Prefecture, which includes Taiji, reported that 1,218 dolphins and small whales were captured there in 2011, though it didn't specify how many of those captured were killed.

In 2014 environmental activists filed a lawsuit against the Taiji Whaling Museum, saying the museum had not allowed outside experts to come check on the albino dolphin.

Researchers from the Taiji Whaling Museum say the dolphin's health has been monitored "properly" through observing behavior and periodic blood tests. The museum, along with the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology and the Institute of Cetacean Research published a paper about the albino dolphin in Mammal Study in March 2015. The paper didn't explicitly respond to the lawsuit's claim, but the authors stated they wanted to keep the dolphin "physically and mentally healthy" for further research.

We're hoping it's healthy. It's no surprise the pink dolphin captured the attention of so many with its rare and dashing good looks.

SEE ALSO: Unbelievable shot shows lion milliseconds from attacking photographer

DON'T MISS: This map of countries with the most threatened mammals is heartbreaking

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NOW WATCH: Secret US military program to train animals as suicide bombers included a plan to attack Japan with explosive-laden bats

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Southern California's water wholesaler voted on Tuesday to cut its deliveries to cities and communities by 15 percent as the state clamps down on water usage amid a devastating four-year drought.

The Metropolitan Water District's plan aims to put cities in the greater Los Angeles area in compliance with an order by Governor Jerry Brown to reduce water use by 25 percent, the first mandatory statewide reduction in California history.

Beginning in July, two-dozen member agencies will be fined up to four times their regular rates for demanding excess water. Those penalties will range from $1,480 to $2,960 per acre-foot of water.   

The cutbacks are expected to last a year, with opportunities each month to amend the system. A formal reconsideration is scheduled for December, during the rainy season.

If Brown's statewide plan succeeds, businesses and residents will use only three-quarters of the amount they used in 2013. The savings would amount to some 1.5 million acre-feet of water in the next nine months, just as the state snowpack is at its lowest level on record.

The Metropolitan Water District (MWD) has imposed its own restrictions only four times since 1977. The last instance was in 2008, when Southern California succeeded in reaching a 10 percent reduction goal. Officials are optimistic local agencies will again meet their targets.

"I have a lot of faith that Southern Californians will rally toward this,” MWD General Manager Jeffrey Kightlinger said, adding, “It’s not time to panic.”Some board members had pushed for a higher cutback rate of 20 percent – a difference of 100,000 acre-feet, or 326,000 gallons (1.2 million liters). Just one acre-foot can provide for two average households a year.

“We’re spending down our savings account and hoping to win the lottery to pay it back,” board member Judy Abdo, who represents Santa Monica, said at Tuesday's meeting.

But the agency voted for the lower amount, deeming it a manageable target. The current plan will conserve about 300,000 acre-feet of water. 

Kightlinger said the water supply drop combined with incentives to conserve – such as rebates to rip out thirsty lawns – will help Southern California reach its state target of a 25 percent cutback.

It will be up to retailers to decide if they need to hike consumer rates to discourage use and deflect penalties, officials added.

(Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Eric Beech)

SEE ALSO: Chart shows how some of your favorite foods could be making California's drought worse

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You may have heard that Greek yogurt has a big waste problem. To make it thick and creamy, producers strain out all of its liquid. They end up with an enormous amount of watery, acidic byproduct that they still have no idea what to do with.

Which brings us to an even more pressing problem: the water.

Making one small container — a single serving — of Greek yogurt requires 90 gallons of water, Mother Jones reports.

That's a lot of water, especially considering that California, the nation's biggest dairy producer, is in the middle of its fourth year of the most extreme drought in over a millennia.

A serving of almonds, by comparison, uses just 23 gallons. On the other hand, red meat, which requires water at nearly every step of the production process, is even worse at 850 gallons for an 8-ounce steak.

It all comes down to one major issue: A huge amount of all the crops we grow (and irrigate) are fed to animals — whether we eat their meat or just use their milk.

Take alfalfa, for example. Whether it's dried and made into hay or chopped up and processed into feed, almost all of it is grown for the sole purpose of feeding animals. And a huge portion of those animals — especially in California — are dairy cows, which we use to make milk and (you guessed it) yogurt.

The problem with going Greek

Because cows eat thirsty crops, all dairy products require a pretty hefty amount of water. A glass of milk, for example, translates into 30 gallons of water, while a slice of cheese needs 25 gallons. By comparison, a regular container of yogurt, which requires 35 gallons, doesn't seem so bad.

But make that yogurt Greek and bam! You're up to 90 gallons of water — all for one little container.

Why? The reason Greek yogurt is so thick and creamy is because, as mentioned above, all its water has been drained out. Regular yogurt still has all that water.

That means that in order to get the same amount of yogurt (think about half a cup, which is the typical single serving), you need far more of the original solution of the Greek stuff. That way, by the time all the water is squeezed out, you're still left with enough to fill a single serving.

So while Greek yogurt might be a delicious, protein-rich snack, it's probably not your best bet in the middle of the drought.

READ MORE: One chart sums up the real problem in the California drought — and it isn't almonds

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Around a quarter of the world's mammal species are threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which updates its Red List of Threatened Species yearly.

A map of the countries with the most threatened mammal species (courtesy of the Eco Experts) shows that Mexico, with 101 threatened mammals, is one of the countries with the most. Calling a species "threatened" means scientists have classified it as either critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable.

So why is Mexico one of the worst offenders?

One factor contributing to Mexico's high number of threatened mammal species is the country's high biodiversity. According to the IUCN, Mexico has the 4th highest number of mammal species of any country in the world, at 523. Too bad nearly a fifth are in trouble.

Habitat loss is the biggest threat the world's mammals face, IUCN says. Human activity is the main cause of habitat loss, but it comes in many flavors. In Mexico, IUCN data names agriculture as a key threat for 48 of the 101 threatened species, and logging is a problem for 42 of them. The next biggest factor that eats away at animal habitats is developing land for residential or commercial use, which is having a big impact on 17 mammal species in the country.

Who's in trouble?

Deforestation, hunting, and disease are the biggest threats for the endangered Black Howling Monkey, which lives in the Yucatan Peninsula. The monkey named for its unique vocalization, achieved through a resonating chamber in its voice box, is both hunted for food and captured to be a pet. Groups as large as 10 monkeys hold "howling sessions" in the early morning, and can be heard farther than a mile away, giving hunters an easy target.

The pet trade is also a problem for the other endangered primate that makes its home in Mexico, Geoffroy's Spider Monkey, though habitat loss is its greatest threat. Since 83% of the spider monkey's diet is fruit, it plays a major role dispersing plant seeds in the rainforest. The seeds of a whopping 138 plant species pass through the spider monkey's digestive system en route to their final resting place.

The majority of Mexico's endangered mammals (60) are rodents, like the San Quintin Kangaroo Rat. This rodent species is critically endangered, and hasn't been seen since 1986, so it may even be extinct. Everywhere suitable for the kangaroo rat to live has been converted to agriculture, according to the IUCN.

The rest of the list includes several species of bats, shrews, a handful of carnivores, whales, rabbits, a couple hoofed mammals, the Baird's tapir, and the West Indian Manatee, besides the two monkeys.

81 of the 101 threatened mammals in Mexico are endemic species, meaning they're found nowhere else in the world. So if they go extinct in Mexico, they're gone for good.

Here's hoping the San Quintin Kangaroo Rat, for one, is still out there somewhere.

SEE ALSO: This map of countries with the most threatened mammals is heartbreaking

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Here's one thing successive Japanese governments seem to agree on: Japan should be able to go out and kill a lot of whales.

On Monday, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) rejected Japan's proposal to kill 4,000 whales in the Antarctic over the next 12 years. But the commission has no power to stop Japan from conducting a hunt anyway.

A panel convened by the Commission found that Japan did not provide enough evidence for its claim that the hunt was for scientific purposes, one of the few legal exceptions to a worldwide ban on commercial whaling issued in 1986.

"I believe that we'll move forward with the aim of resuming whaling around the end of the year," the commissioner, Joji Morishita said, according to Reuters.

Despite opposition from the IWC, countries are free to issue themselves permits for scientific whaling, and are not obligated to modify their research based on IWC recommendations.

Japan exploited that loophole since 1987. But in 2010, and again in 2012, the governments of Australia and New Zealand filed cases with the International Court of Justice, arguing that Japan's justifications for whaling in international waters were invalid and violated the 1986 ban.

Last March, the court agreed, bring to a halt much of Japan whaling operations in the Antarctic. But in September, Japan submitted a new plan for whaling to the IWC, saying it complies with the recommendations of the court.

Despite the IWC's announcement, Phillip Clapham of the National Marine Mammal Laboratory told VICE News that Japan is likely to move ahead with its whale hunt.

"Japan doesn't need permission under the convention to do scientific whaling," he said. "They'll get a lot of crap and criticism over how bad this science is and how unnecessary it is. But they don't actually need permission."

Japan has killed approximately 14,000 whales since the moratorium started in 1986, Clapham said.

Its proposal targets the Minke whale, the smallest of the baleen whales, which are found in all of the world's oceans but favor the icy waters of the poles. Japan wants to kill up to 3,996 of the whales over the course of the next 12 years, ostensibly to study the age at which females reach sexual maturity.

Japan estimates that about 50 females between the age of four and 13 would need to be killed annually. But because it's impossible to tell the sex of a whale before it's harpooned, it estimates the total number of whales killed at 333 per year, including males and females of the wrong age.

"It's the same old kind of weird science approach to whaling," Patrick Ramage, director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare's Whale Program, told VICE News. "It's not science, it's just kind of, '101 things to do with a dead whale.'"

Japan has long said it needs to hunt whales in order to manage their populations and has claimed that killing whales is important for reducing competition with human fisheries.

"It's ridiculous," Clapham told VICE News. "There's no real evidence for it."

In the 1940s, when the IWC was formed, killing whales was the only way to study their biology, Clapham said. Now, scientists can use techniques like photography and numbering and tagging individual whales in order to monitor whole populations.

Researchers can also perform biopsies on living whales, taking a small amount of tissue for DNA analysis, which leaves the whale relatively unscathed. It has the added benefit of allowing scientists track the same whale over its lifetime. Japan used these techniques in the Antarctic this winter and is expected to provide details of its research at the IWC's May meeting.

"The best science in the world today is not killing whales and cutting them up into little pieces," Ramage told VICE News. "It's studying living whales in the marine environment and how they interact with it."

UP NEXT: Mexico has a shockingly high number of threatened and endangered species

SEE ALSO: This map of countries with the most threatened mammals is heartbreaking

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The western gray whale now holds the record as the mammal with the longest known migration, researchers say.

A female western gray whale swam from Russia to Mexico and back again — a total of 13,988 miles (22,511 kilometers) — in 172 days, according to a new report.

Until now, the title of the longest-migrating mammal belonged to the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae), which migrates up to 10,190 miles (16,400 km) round trip as it travels between its breeding grounds near the equator and the food-rich waters of the Arctic and Antarctic, according to Guinness World Records.

But the new report shows that a female western gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) named Vavara (the Russian equivalent of the name Barbara), has stolen the record.

Researchers placed satellite-monitoring tags on seven western gray whales living off Russia's Sakhalin Island, where the mammals feed every year. Vavara was the only whale whose tag stayed intact throughout the entire journey, said the study's lead researcher, Bruce Mate, the director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University. 

Western gray whales are critically endangered; they were once even thought to be extinct, Mate said. Before the new study, little was known about these animals' migratory paths, and many researchers suspected that the whales migrated in a loop from Russia to the South China Sea.

Instead, the tagging study shows that Vavara swam to Mexico.

"She crossed the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska [and] the lengths of the North American continent to get down to the Baja breeding calf lagoons that are used by eastern North Pacific animals," Mate said.

Western or eastern?

Curiously, the western gray whale's cousin, the eastern gray whale, also swims off the coast of Baja California in Mexico. Eastern gray whales are not endangered, Mate said. It's entirely possible that Vavara and the six other whales that Mate and his team tracked are actually eastern gray whales that had migrated westward all the way to Russia, he said.

It's also possible what researchers have thought of as two whale groups, western and eastern, are actually a single whale species, although more research is needed to know for sure, Mate said.

Evidence from photographs of whales taken by whale researchers also suggests they are just one group. For example, 10 western gray whales spotted in Russia have been photographed near British Columbia and Baja California, Mexico, the researchers said in the study.

Research on the genes of two whales also supports the idea that these two whale groups are actually one.

What's more, two other western gray whales, Agent and Flex, tagged by Mate and his colleagues took migration routes similar to Vavara's. However, Agent's tag stopped working in the Gulf of Alaska, and Flex's tag conked out near Lincoln City, Oregon.

Perhaps the whales currently thought of as western gray whales came from the population of gray whales once thought to be extinct, Mate said. Or, maybe they are actually eastern gray whales that expanded their range once the western gray whales disappeared.

"It's a question that still needs to be addressed," Mate said. "It's still under investigation."

Vavara's journey

Several aspects of Vavara's journey caught the researchers' attention. For one thing, she didn't follow the same exact route on her way there and back. This suggests that she knew the general way, and didn't need to hug the coast to orient herself.

"My respect for navigational skills in gray whales has changed tremendously," Mate told Live Science.

It also appears that Vavara did not stop to feed during her 5.5-month migration. Like other baleen whales (whales that have baleen plates in their mouths that filter food), gray whales typically don't eat during migration, Mate said.

"These animals do well enough feeding in Russia to sustain a migration that's pretty extreme," Mate said.

The study is published in the April 15 (Wednesday) online edition of the journal Biology Letters.

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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Jane Goodall's groundbreaking work with chimpanzees in Tanzania, Africa, was the achievement of a childhood dream and the time she often looks back on as the happiest in her life.

But after spending decades observing primates on the ground, she finally got a glimpse of their habitat from afar, in a plane, and was immediately struck with panic.

The area she'd been working in was fast disappearing. People were cutting down trees, encroaching on the chimps' habitat from all sides.

"It was absolutely horrifying to see," Goodall said on Wednesday at an event in New York.

Goodall quickly realized that if she really wanted to help the chimpanzees she'd studied, she'd have to protect their home first.

This meant she'd have to shift her career in a big way. Instead of working mainly with primates in the field, she'd need to find ways to protect their habitats. For this, she'd need to work more with people than animals.

She took action quickly, first turning the area where she'd worked, around the Gombe Stream on the northwest border of Tanzania, into a recognized national park.

That distinction kept tourists and people from coming into the area and using its resources whenever they please. As one of Tanzania's official national parks, the area began to have limited public access. Anyone entering could do so only with permission; tourist groups had to be licensed and register with the park before they went into it.

Soon after, Goodall created the Jane Goodall Institute, a global nonprofit that aims to increase people's knowledge of great apes and their habitats and support primate research and conservation projects throughout the world.

Are her efforts working?

Deforestation is an ongoing problem across the globe, but recent evidence indicates that the trend has been slowing a bit.

A March report from the UN Food and Agriculture organization, for example, found that we'd lost 25% fewer trees between 2011 and 2015 than we had during the previous 10-year period.

Experts say the slowing trend owes at least some credit to the work of organizations like the Jane Goodall Institute.

By helping increase local communities' access to education and basic resources like clean water, these groups aim to help reduce poverty and empower people in the areas near wildlife to help conserve it. And it seems to be working.

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There are some badass carnivorous cone snails who hunt fish by tethering them in place with a harpoon-shaped tooth and then injecting a venom that messes with their nervous system.

Now, researchers studying worm-hunting snails have detected the presence of a venom toxin similar to those found in their fish-killing relatives.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week, suggest that venom enabled the evolutionary transition from eating worms to eating much bigger, faster vertebrates.

Predators who change their prey preference can ignite the creation of new biodiversity—but we rarely get to see how that shift occurs.

One example that we've been able to reconstruct involves bees, who are derived from wasps: Sphecoid wasps (carnivores) feed arthropod prey to their developing larvae, and bees (vegetarians) feed pollen to their young. Bee diversity really took off when they starting utilizing different flowering plants, and now, there are thousands of species.

Meanwhile, there are over 700 species of marine cone snails, and they all capture their prey using venom. Of these, about 100 or so specialize on fish. But exactly how did slow-moving snails who can't even swim start eating fish?

To investigate, University of Utah's Russell Teichert, Baldomero Olivera, and colleagues analyzed the behavior, molecular biology, and phylogenetics of a worm-hunting cone snail from the Pacific Ocean called Conus tessulatus. In the wild, these guys feed on polychaete worms with a long, fleshy proboscis. And if you put them in a tank with fish, they'd happily attack them too, even without a harpoon-shaped tooth. You can watch videos of the cone snail eating worms and attempting to envenomate a fish here.

The team discovered the presence of a venom protein—called δ-conotoxin TsVIA—which acts on the nerve cells of vertebrate species. Specifically, it targets sodium channels, and it's similar to the δ-conotoxin found in fish-hunting cone snail species. Fish killers use it to trigger "extreme hyperexcitability" of the vertebrate nervous system, resulting in almost instant paralysis. It's as though the fish had been hit with a Taser, the authors describe.

Within the cone snail family tree, the ancestral δ-conotoxin emerged before their forebears developed a taste for fish, Science reports. And the venom likely first served as a defensive adaptation to ward off competitors going after the same tasty worms. That toxin, the researchers say, pre-adapted the worm-hunting cone snail lineage—enabling a later shift to hunting fish.

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When she was asked by the New York Times recently whether the Earth would be a better or worse place by 2050, chimpanzee expert, UN Messenger of Peace, and author of a book titled "Reason For Hope," Jane Goodall had a surprisingly bleak response:

"I see the world in 50 years, perhaps 100, as a dark place," Goodall said.

What's terrifying about Goodall's vision isn't how dystopian it sounds, but rather how prescient it's already proven to be.

From the spread of deadly, antibiotic-resistant superbugs to the destruction of habitats that are home to critical life-prolonging drugs, Goodall was right on the money.

But at an event in New York on Wednesday, she assured her audience that she still had hope.

Here are three main predictions Goodall made that are already coming true, along with her reasons for continued optimism:

People will be fleeing their homes if we don't take action on climate change

"Environmental refugees,"Goodall told the Times, "will have fled their destroyed homelands, flooded by the rising seas or buried by the encroaching deserts. Many people will be starving as they fight for access to water and land."

This is already happening — 22 million people were displaced by natural disasters in 2013— but it's not too late to stop it.

A recent study found that if developed countries like the US and UK cut the amount of pollutants they released in 1990 in half, we could prevent the planet from warming further than the 2 degree Celsius limit scientists have proposed. While this sounds like a lofty goal, there are things we can do on a local scale to help.

Preserving animal habitats and forests is one way of combatting the problem, said Goodall on Wednesday. These lush green areas act as carbon sinks, absorbing vast amounts of the pollution we add to the air. In Tanzania, Goodall worked with local governments to turn the area where she did her groundbreaking research into a national park.

Infections will be harder to control — unless we stop overusing antibiotics

"Medical science will be unable to cope with new infections,"Goodall said, "as bacteria build up resistance to more and more antibiotics and the tropical forests where so many medical cures are sourced are destroyed."

Last year, 23,000 Americans died from bacterial infections that didn't respond to antibiotics. Certain strains of "nightmare bacteria" kill up to half of the patients they infect, and cases are becoming increasingly common across 42 states.

Yet one of the biggest users of antibiotics in the US isn't doctors or their patients — it's agribusiness.

Between 2009 and 2013, sales of antibiotics for use in livestock jumped by 20%.

One way to work against this dangerous trend, said Goodall, is simply to cut back on the amount of meat and animal products we eat. Goodall, a vegetarian, suggested we think more often "of the consequences of the small things we do," such as "what we buy and where it comes from."

"We can make ethical decisions," she said.

Continued deforestation will have devastating impacts — but we're already beginning to slow down this trend

Goodall also predicted the destruction of the rainforest, which had long been accelerating since she initially spoke about it to the Times in 2012. Each year, we lose a chunk of rainforest the size of Panama (18 million hectares, up from 13 million in 2010) to deforestation, the vast majority of which is caused by logging and farming.

This kind of destruction is showing its first signs of slowing.

A March report from the UN Food and Agriculture organization, for example, found that we'd lost 25% fewer trees between 2011 and 2015 than we had during the previous 10-year period. Experts say the slowing trend owes at least some credit to the work of organizations like the Jane Goodall Institute.

By helping increase local communities' access to education and basic resources like clean water, these groups aim to help reduce poverty and empower people in the areas near wildlife to help conserve it. And it seems to be working.

UP NEXT: The heartbreaking reason Jane Goodall stopped doing what she loved most

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An African monkey thought to be extinct has been spotted again by researchers, who returned from a remote Congo forest in March with the first-ever photos of the rare red primate.

Until this year, scientists hadn't seen the Bouvier's red colobus monkey in the wild since the 1970s.

The small primate lives in groups in swampy forests along the Congo River, in the Republic of the Congo. Hunting and logging decimated its population, leading some scientists to suggest the monkey was extinct.

Now, independent explorers have rediscovered the rare monkey. The researchers, Lieven Devreese of Belgium and Gaël Elie Gnondo Gobolo of the Republic of the Congo, set off in February to track down the elusive species. Their expedition was supported by donations collected through the crowdfunding website Indiegogo, and funding from the Wildlife Conservation Society.

"Our photos are the world's first [of the monkey], and confirm that the species is not extinct," Devreese said in a statement.

There are several species of red colobus monkey. Until now, scientists only knew of the Bouvier's red species from a few museum specimens collected more than 100 years ago.

This particular colobus monkey shows little fear of humans — one reason it is so vulnerable to bushmeat hunters. Instead of fleeing hunters or curious scientists, the monkeys gaze at them from the trees. This makes the large groups easy pickings for the bushmeat trade, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

"Thankfully, many of these colobus monkeys live in the recently gazetted national park and are protected from threats such as logging, agriculture and roads, all of which can lead to increased hunting," Fiona Maisels, a biologist and expert on Central Africa for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in the statement.

To find the Bouvier's red colobus monkey, Devreese and Gobolo asked locals to describe local monkeys and their calls. This helped narrow down where remaining colobus groups might live. The researchers started in the town of Owando, and then hired a dugout canoe in Makoua to traverse the Likouala River.

The team made its first sighting on the Bokiba River in the Republic of the Congo's Ntokou-Pikounda National Park, an area that protects gorillas, chimpanzees and elephants.

"After searching the swamps on the left bank of the Bokiba River for four days, changing camp twice — and just before running out of food, battery and courage — we finally found a group of Bouvier's red colobus monkeys on Monday," the researchers posted on Indiegogo on March 3. "What a beautiful monkey!"

Follow Becky Oskin @beckyoskin. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California water regulators on Saturday revised a still-tentative drought plan by easing cuts for Los Angeles and San Diego and bumping up reduction targets in the areas that consume the most water.

The changes are an apparent response to criticism from cities, which would have taken the brunt of the cuts under the original plan presented earlier this month.

But regulators are standing pat on what critics say is the initial plan's leniency toward the state's huge agricultural industry.

With the country's most populous state entering the fourth year of a devastating drought, Governor Jerry Brown has ordered an overall 25 percent cut in urban water use though the first statewide mandatory reductions in California's history.

The plan, developed by the state's Water Resources Control Board, is scheduled to be approved in early May, but officials said more fine-tuning could take place before then.

"We're not at the point where we can set a single target for everywhere in California, because climates are so different and because we're in an emergency," Felicia Marcus, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, said in a conference call with reporters.

Brown has said cities that already use less water than others would have to make relatively smaller cuts, while those with higher per-capita use are facing more stringent targets.

The plan that regulators presented earlier this month would have divided local water agencies into four tiers, imposing a 10 percent conservation standard on those that use less water per capita and a 35 percent standard on those that use the most.

The plan unveiled on Saturday essentially doubles the number of tiers. Regulators said the additional categories would mean agencies with similar levels of consumption would not fall into tiers with vastly different curtailment standards.

Los Angeles and San Diego, the state's No. 1 and No. 2 cities, respectively in population, would each find themselves in a tier with a mandatory curtailment of 16 percent under the revised plan, compared to 20 percent in the tier they would have fallen under in the previous plan.

The suppliers with the highest per capita water use would have to accept a 36 percent cut, up from 35 percent.

Meanwhile, environmentalists and some urban dwellers say the state's $45 billion agriculture industry should bear a greater share of water savings, given its massive water use.

But Marcus defended the industry, saying farmers have already "taken very severe cuts."

The water board has proposed fining water utilities up to $10,000 per day if they fail to persuade residents and businesses to meet their conservation goals.

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