Deer night-vision cameras in Welsh forests as culling increases

The number of wild deer being culled in Wales has doubled in the past five years, according to officials.

It follows an explosion in deer populations, increasing by an estimated 25% a year in some parts of Wales.

The Forestry Commission in Wales (FCW) says about 1,000 have been shot over this winter.

The various breeds of deer have now become such a problem in Welsh woodlands that night-vision cameras will be used to monitor them.

The FCW said the new cameras would provide vital information about the movement of deer in forestry, where the animals can damage vegetation and trees.

David Jam, the FCW's wildlife management officer, said: "We base our culling on woodland impacts, so if we are getting high impacts in an area for a number of years and we are seeing a pattern there, then we need to increase the level of culling.

"When the woodland regenerates to a level where it can sustain a good population of deer then you can ease that culling pressure off.

"There is a balance - we don't just cull and cull and cull.

Read on:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17004403

'Cat-Eye' Boy Video Said To Show Chinese Child Who Sees In Dark

According to a news reel from China, a young boy there possesses the ability to see in the dark. Like a Siamese cat's, his sky-blue eyes flash neon green when illuminated by a flashlight, and his night vision is good enough to enable him to fill out questionnaires while sitting in a pitch black room — or so say the reporters who visited Nong Yousui in his hometown of Dahua three years ago.

The footage of Nong and his strange-looking eyes originally surfaced in 2009; it got little attention at the time, but is now making a splash all over the Web. If the boy really does have a genetic mutation that confers night vision, then he would be an interesting subject for analysis by vision scientists, evolutionary biologists, and genetic engineers alike — but does he? 

The experts we shared the video with say Nong does have unusually colored irises considering his ethnicity, but he's not the next step in human evolution.

Night vision is made possible by a layer of cells, called the tapetum lucidum, in the eyes of cats and other nocturnal animals. This thin layer is a "retroreflector" — when a beam of light hits it, it reflects the light directly back along its incoming path. The reflected beam constructively interferes with the incoming light beam, amplifying the overall signal that hits the retina and enabling the animal to see in very low-light conditions. Retroreflection also causes cat eyes to flash when they are lit upon at night, and experts say Nong's eyes, if they are truly catlike, should do the same. [Red-Green & Blue-Yellow: The Stunning Colors You Can't See]

"It would be easy to test the boy’s eyes for retroreflection (eyeshine), which would be indicative of a tapetum lucidum," said Nathaniel Greene, a physicist at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania who has studied retroreflection.

Read on and see video:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/31/cat-eyes-boy_n_1244543.html