Wreck of 17th-Century Dutch Warship Discovered

The wreck of a 17th-century Dutch warship has been discovered off the coast of Tobago, a small island located in the southern Caribbean. Marine archaeologists believe the vessel is possibly the Huis de Kreuningen, which was lost during a bloody fight between Dutch and French colonists.

On March 3, 1677, the French Navy launched a fierce attack against the Dutch in Tobago's Rockley Bay. European settlers coveted Tobago for its strategic location; in fact, the island changed hands more than 30 times after Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World.

The abbreviated story of this particular battle is, "Everybody dies, and every ship sinks," according to Kroum Batchvarov, an assistant professor of maritime archaeology at the University of Connecticut. Indeed, about 2,000 people were killed and up to 14 ships went down during the skirmish. But until now, none of those sunken vessels had been recovered.

This past March, Batchvarov went searching for wrecks in Rockley Bay. Through remote sensing and historical accounts, his team identified a spot where shipwrecks from the battle might have settled on the bottom of the bay. One day, while the rest of his colleagues were sorting out an issue with their GPS systems, Batchvarov and another diver decided to explore under the surface.

"Quite literally, the first thing we saw at the bottom was a cannon," Batchvarov told a small audience here at the Explorers Club headquarters today (Nov. 3).

During that initial, 20-minute dive, the researchers found at least seven cast-iron cannons, some of them large, 18-pounder guns.

"This was one of the most interesting experiences of my life in archaeology, and I have been in this field for about 17 years," Batchvarov said.

None of the sunken ship's timbers have been uncovered yet from the jumbled wreckage, but divers did find relics from life aboard a military vessel, including 72 clay smoking pipes, an array of dining utensils and burned bricks from the ship's galley. They also found a beer jug with three engravings of military generals from antiquity: Joshua, David and Alexander the Great.

Several clues led the team to conclude they were dealing with a Dutch warship from the 17th century. For example, many of the pipes had the mark of a manufacturer that operated in Amsterdam from the 1650s to the 1680s, Batchvarov said.

Because of the size of the cannons found at the site, the archaeologists suspect the wreck could be the 130-foot-long (40 meters), 56-gun warship Huis de Kreuningen. Only one other Dutch vessel, the flagship Bescherming, could have supported such large guns, but it survived the battle, Batchvarov said.

Read more at Discovery News

Apes Have Better Gut Bugs than Humans

It's not a secret that the microbes living in our guts play a huge role in our well-being, or that, at least in the United States, we're doing a good job of killing them off.

But now new research finds that apes -- our closest relative -- have much more varied gut flora than humans do, and especially more varied than people living in the United States.

"It took millions of years, since humans and chimpanzees split from a common ancestor, to become 60 percent different in these colonies living in our digestive systems," said Howard Ochman, professor of integrative biology at The University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study in a press release.

"On the other hand, in apparently only hundreds of years -- and possibly a lot fewer -- people in the United States lost a great deal of diversity in the bacteria living in their gut."

In fact, those of us living in the United States have intestinal microbes that are 70 percent different than chimps'.

That's not good news: a lack of a varied gut microbiome has been linked to asthma, colon cancer and autoimmune disease. There's also evidence that our intestinal microbiome communicates with our brains and that imbalanced gut flora can mess with our minds, causing depression and other mental illnesses.

Scientists studied fecal samples from humans, chimps, bonobos and gorillas to discover our intestinal differences.

Why have American gut microbes changed so quickly -- hundreds, as opposed to millions, of years? The researchers speculate that we spend more time indoors, use antibacterial cleansers and rely too much on antibiotics (which kill gut flora), to name a few reasons.

Read more at Discovery News

Behold a Cosmic Cloud of Spooky Black Smoke

It’s often said where there’s smoke, there’s fire — but the only “fire” here is the reddish glow from vast clouds of ionized hydrogen, set alight by the powerful UV radiation pouring out of nearby hot young stars.

The image above shows just a small part of a huge glowing cloud of hydrogen called Gum 15, located 3,000 light-years away in the southern constellation Vela. The dark areas snaking across it aren’t really smoke but rather lanes of opaque interstellar dust, sculpted by stellar wind and silhouetted against the brightly ionized hydrogen beyond.

This image was taken as part of the ESO Cosmic Gems program with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The nebula was discovered in 1951 by a young Australian astronomer named Colin Gum, who included it and many others in a now-famous catalog of HII emission nebulae published in 1955. The talented and well-liked Gum suffered a tragic death at the young age of 36 in a skiing accident while vacationing in Switzerland in 1960.

Today, this and 84 other emission nebulae bear his name along with a crater on the moon.

From Discovery News

Crater Hunters Find New Clues to Ancient Impact Storm

Back when Wisconsin and western Russia once shared an address south of the equator, a violent collision in the asteroid belt blasted Earth with meteorites.

The space rock smashup showered Earth with up to 100 times more meteorites than today's rate (a rock the size of a football field hits the planet about every 10,000 years). Yet, only a dozen or so impact craters have been found from the ancient bombardment 470 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period. Most are in North America, Sweden and western Russia. There are only about 185 known impact craters on Earth of any age, while the moon has more than 100,000.

But the number of Ordovician craters may soon take off. That's because it's easier and cheaper than ever to hunt down evidence that confirms an impact. The clinchers include shocked minerals, deformed rocks and structural features that match other craters.

"Google Earth images are not good enough to identify an impact structure," noted planetary geologist Christian Köeberl on Oct. 22, at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. During the Vancouver meeting, researchers presented new clues that bring suspected craters in Wisconsin, Kentucky and Tennessee closer to official listings as Ordovician impact craters.

The three enigmatic structures retain their circular shape, but have lost most of their original features through erosion. In the last century, quarrying has also slowly dismantled the Wisconsin crater. Only the central uplift seems to persist. When a meteorite hits, the impact's force causes the underlying rock to rebound upward, leaving a topographic high in the center of the crater.

In each state, researchers looked for traces of minerals shattered or heated by the impact. So far, no one has found one of the smoking guns in crater research: shatter cones, the finely fractured rocks created when the shock wave travels through the ground. The fractures are often arranged in a conical shape, like an ice cream cone.

Three little craters

But even without a smoking gun, at Brussels Hill in Door County, Wisconsin, a meteorite impact is the best explanation for the perfectly round, 130-foot-tall (40 meters) hill, said Emily Zawacki, an undergraduate at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. The flat-topped peak is filled with fractured blocks of Cambrian sandstone that should lie some 1,300 feet below the younger carbonate rocks. The fragmented rocks all tilt toward the center of the hill, and a series of faults radiate outward from its center.

The evidence all points to a deeply eroded impact crater, Zawacki said. "This is a highly disturbed area in otherwise flat-lying stratigraphy," Zawacki said. "It very clearly is anomalous and we feel a meteoritic impact best explains it."

In the middle of Tennessee, the Howell Structure has confounded geologists for decades. The bowl-shaped basin is about the same diameter as Brussels Hill (about 1.2 miles, or 2 km). In this case, however, the suspected crater is weaker than the surrounding rocks, creating a depression. A pile of fragmented carbonate and other craterlike features suggests an impact origin.

Keith Milam, a professor at Ohio University in Athens, recently uncovered a rare trove of rock cores drilled at Howell in the 1960s. John Bensko, a retired lunar geologist from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, provided the 15 segments. Bensko oversaw the testing of drilling equipment intended for the canceled Apollo 18 program. The first tests on the rock cores suggest the fragmented carbonate rocks were shocked by a meteorite impact, Milam reported at the Vancouver meeting.

Finally, the Jeptha Knob structure in Kentucky is a site that stands out on Google Earth and just needs the right mineral evidence to certify its impact origin. "I don't think you can say for sure this is an impact structure yet," said Eric Gibbs, an undergraduate at Ohio University in Athens. Gibbs is testing the X-ray diffraction pattern produced by minerals from the crater. The pattern shortens and widens with increasing shock, he said.

The initial tests, presented at the Vancouver geology meeting, support an impact origin for the hill. Jeptha Knob is the highest point in Kentucky's Bluegrass Region, rising some 300 feet (90 m) above the surrounding farms. The round crater is ringed by faults and busted-up Ordovician limestone, but topped by flat layers of younger carbonate rocks.

The apparent alignment of many of these craters makes it seem that some coincidence favored Earth's tropical latitudes during the big Ordovician bombardment.

Read more at Discovery News

Mysterious Missing Pulsars May Have Gotten Wrapped in Dark Matter and Turned Into Black Holes

The core of the Milky Way at a distance of some 26,000 light years from Earth.

The center of the galaxy should be chock-full of rapidly spinning, dense stellar corpses known as pulsars. The problem is, astronomers can’t seem to find them.

The galactic center is a bustling place. Lots of gas, dust, and stars zip about, orbiting a supermassive black hole about three million times more massive than the sun. With so many stars, astronomers estimate that there should be hundreds of dead ones, says astrophysicist Joseph Bramante of Notre Dame University. Scientists have found only a single young pulsar at the galactic center, where there should be as many as 50 such youngsters.

Bramante and astrophysicist Tim Linden of the University of Chicago have a possible solution to this missing-pulsar problem, which they describe in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters. Maybe those pulsars are absent because dark matter, which is plentiful in the galactic center, gloms onto the pulsars, accumulating until the pulsars become so dense they collapse into a black hole. Poof. No more pulsars.

A Different Kind of Dark Matter

Dark matter, of course, is the weird stuff that’s everywhere—filling roughly a quarter of the universe—but is invisible and hardly interacts with anything, making its presence known only by how its gravitational pull interacts with other astrophysical objects.

One of the more popular candidates for dark matter is weakly interacting massive particles, or a WIMPs. Underground detectors are hunting for WIMPs and debate has raged over whether gamma rays streaming from the galactic center come from WIMPs annihilating one another. In general, any particle and its antimatter partner will annihilate each other in a flurry of energy. But WIMPs don’t have an antimatter counterpart. Instead, they’re thought to be their own antiparticles, so one WIMP can annihilate a fellow WIMP.

But over the last few years, physicists have considered another class of dark matter called asymmetric dark matter. Unlike WIMPs, this type of dark matter does have an antimatter counterpart.

Asymmetric dark matter appeals to physicists because it’s intrinsically linked to the imbalance of matter and antimatter: There’s a lot more matter in the universe than antimatter (which is a big deal, because without this disparity, everything in the universe—including us—would’ve been annihilated and wouldn’t exist). Likewise, according to the theory, there’s much more dark matter than anti-dark-matter.

Physicists think that in the beginning, the big bang should’ve created as much matter as antimatter. But something altered this balance. No one’s sure what this mechanism was, but it might also have triggered an imbalance in dark matter (hence it is “asymmetric”).

Dark matter is concentrated at the galactic center, and if it’s asymmetric, then it could collect at the center of pulsars, pulled in by gravity. Pulsars are extremely dense—imagine the sun squeezed into a region the size of a small city—so its gravity is strong enough to attract plenty of dark matter. Eventually, the pulsar would accumulate so much mass that it would collapse into a black hole.

Finding Pulsars

The idea that dark matter can cause pulsars to implode isn’t new, says astrophysicist Kathryn Zurek of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. But the new research is the first to apply this possibility to the missing-pulsar problem.

If the hypothesis is correct, Bramante says, then pulsars around the galactic center could only get so old before grabbing so much dark matter that they turn into black holes. Because the density of dark matter drops the farther you go from the center, the researchers predict that the maximum age of pulsars will increase with distance from the center.

Observing this distinct pattern would be strong evidence that dark matter is not only causing pulsars to implode, but also that it’s asymmetric, Bramante says. “The most exciting part about this is just from looking at pulsars, you can perhaps say what dark matter is made of,” he said. Measuring this pattern would also help physicists narrow down the mass of the dark matter particle.

But it won’t be easy to detect this signature. Astronomers will need to collect much more data about the galactic center’s pulsars by searching for radio signals, Bramante says. The hope is that as astronomers explore the galactic center with a wider range of radio frequencies, they will uncover more pulsars.

Still Speculative

Still, the idea that dark matter is behind the missing pulsar problem is speculative. How likely is this scenario? “I think it’s unlikely—or at least it is too early to say anything definitive,” said Zurek, who was one of the first to revive the notion of asymmetric dark matter in 2009. The tricky part is being able to know for sure that any measurable pattern in the pulsar population is due to dark-matter-induced collapse and not something else.

Even if astronomers find this pulsar signature, it’s still far from being definitive evidence for asymmetric dark matter, Zurek says. “Realistically, when dark matter is detected, we are going to need multiple, complementary probes to begin to be convinced that we have a handle on the theory of dark matter,” she said.

And asymmetric dark matter may not have anything to do with the missing pulsar problem at all. The problem is relatively new, Bramante says, so astronomers may find more plausible, conventional explanations. “I’d say give them some time and maybe they come up with some competing explanation that’s more fleshed out,” he said.

Nevertheless, the idea is worth pursuing, says Haibo Yu of the University of California, Riverside. If anything, this analysis is a good example of how scientists can understand dark matter by exploring how it may influence astrophysical objects. “This tells us there are ways to explore dark matter that we’ve never thought of before,” he said. “We should have an open mind to see all possible effects that dark matter can have.”

Read more at Wired Science

Lone Gray Wolf May Be Roaming Grand Canyon

A wayward gray wolf has been spotted several times this month around the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, according to conservationists.

The wolf, which is wearing an inactive radio collar, could be the first of its species to roam Arizona in 70 years; gray wolves were exterminated from the state in the 1940s.

Federal authorities are investigating the sightings. Representatives from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) said they are trying to confirm whether the animal is actually a wolf or a "wolf-dog hybrid" by collecting a feces sample.

The animal doesn't appear to be a hybrid, at least in photos taken by observers, but the possibility can't be ruled out until a genetic test is conducted, said Michael Robinson, a wolf advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit environmental group based in Tucson.

"Until more is known about this animal, visitors to the area are cautioned that this may be a wolf from the northern Rocky Mountain population and fully protected under the Endangered Species Act," FWS representatives said in a statement.

If the wolf did indeed come from the northern Rocky Mountain population, it would have traveled across hundreds of miles to get to northern Arizona; the southernmost breeding population of gray wolves in the Rockies lives just south of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, Robinson said.

Gray wolves once lived across most of the continental United States, but the predators were aggressively hunted and sometimes killed for bounties through the early 20th century. By the mid-20th century, the only places gray wolves could be found below the Canadian border were a sliver of land in northern Minnesota and Michigan's Isle Royale.

The species was then protected under the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s. Conservation efforts and reintroduction programs helped gray wolves return to parts of their range. There are now more than 5,000 gray wolves in the continental United States, primarily in the western Great Lakes states of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the northern Rocky Mountain states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, as well as eastern Oregon and Washington.

A small population of Mexican wolves (a subspecies of gray wolves) has also been reintroduced to parts of Arizona and New Mexico. The gray wolf spotted in Grand Canyon National Park does not appear to be a Mexican wolf, because its body is bulkier and its ears are more compact than those of a typical Mexican wolf, Robinson said.

The sightings of the Grand Canyon gray wolf are reminiscent of another recent episode involving a wandering male wolf, OR-7, also known as Journey. OR-7 rose to fame in 2012 after he left his pack in Oregon to go to California, becoming the first known wolf in the state in 87 years. Since then, the wolf (which is tracked by a radio collar) has gone back and forth between Oregon and California several times. As of this summer, he was raising his first puppies with a mate.

OR-7's travels raised hopes that California could once again be home to wild wolves. Similarly, the lone wolf in Arizona is an encouraging sign that it's possible for the species to make a comeback in the remote lands around the Grand Canyon.

Unfortunately, many roving wolf stories don't have happy endings. When wildlife officials find out about a wolf that has ventured outside its usual territory, it's often because the creature has been shot or found dead, Robinson said. Last year, coyote hunters shot and killed wolves in Missouri and Kansas. A wolf that wandered from Montana to Colorado in 2009 was killed by poison.

Read more at Discovery News

Common New England Spider May Be Venomous

Wandering around the windowsills and kitchen floors of New England is a common spider with a surprisingly nasty bite. In a new report, scientists identified the broad-faced sac spider — a frequent intruder in New England homes in the autumn — as the culprit in a recent envenomation of a woman in Connecticut.

This news might come as a surprise to New Englanders who didn't think this local spider's bite had any effect on humans. However, Yankees shouldn't be too alarmed. The 50-year-old woman who sustained the spider bite didn't suffer any serious side effects, according to the case study, published in September in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

The victim was reportedly standing in her kitchen, when she felt pain in her leg. She later described the bite as feeling "like the sting of a wasp," said Charles Vossbrinck, one of the co-authors of the report and a scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, a part of the state's Department of Environmental Sciences, in New Haven. The site of the bite became red and slightly swollen almost immediately. But by the following day, the swelling around the bite had gone down, and the woman didn't require medical attention.

Luckily for scientists who study Connecticut's spiders, the bite victim used a broom to retrieve the fanged culprit from under a kitchen cabinet. She brought the specimen to the Connecticut Department of Environmental Sciences, where Vossbrinck identified it as a broad-faced sac spider (Trachelas tranquillus).

"This is a hunting spider. There are hunting spiders, and then there are those that rely mostly on a web to catch prey," Vossbrinck told Live Science. This means that the broad-faced sac spider is prone to wandering around looking for food, and it may have crawled up the woman's leg while it was taking a stroll through her kitchen, he added.

But the broad-faced spider isn't native to New England kitchens. Most of the time, it prefers the great outdoors, where it can typically be found outside of buildings under siding and on windowsills, as well as at the base of plants, on fences, inside rolled leaves and under stones and boards, according to the College of Agricultural Sciences at Pennsylvania State University.

But because T. tranquillus tends to hang around buildings, there's a chance New Englanders might see these spiders indoors, as well. Connecticut locals typically report seeing the spiders in their homes in the autumn, Vossbrinck said. And T. tranquillus, as well asits cousins that belong to the genus Cheiracanthium, are among the most common spiders found in houses in Boston, according to the case report.

Although the bite victim in this most recent case didn't require medical attention, the first confirmed case of envenomation by the broad-faced sac spider in Connecticut — which occurred in 1969 — suggests that medical attention may be necessary in some instances. In that case, a 23-year-old woman was bitten by one of these spidersand needed antibiotics after the bite became infected. The new case is only the second confirmed case of envenomation by T. tranquillus, the authors noted.

Read more at Discovery News

'Exozodiacal' Light Detected Around Alien Habitable Zones

Zodiacal light, as seen from Earth, can often be witnessed shortly after twilight or before dawn; it appears as a faint glow apparently emanating from the direction of the sun. This glow is caused by scattered sunlight from grains of dust distributed throughout interplanetary space.

Now, for the first time, astronomers have surveyed exozodiacal light — the same phenomena, albeit much brighter — in 9 other star systems near their habitable zones.

The observations were made possible through the use of the ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), located at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, in near-infrared light. The interferometer was fed with light from four 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes that imitate a much larger telescope of equivalent diameter as the distance between the telescopes. This allows extreme sensitivity in the observations, distinguishing the faint scattered light extending to the habitable zones surrounding the target stars.

Exozodiacal light has been observed before, but this is the first large-scale survey effort that has scanned dozens of targets.

The exozodiacal light detected in this survey is not caused by grains of dust that have formed disks around stars that will eventually go on to form planets. Like the solar system’s zodiacal light, these stars’ exozodiacal light is caused by the dust of asteroid and comets that have been ground up throughout the evolution of those star systems.

“If we want to study the evolution of Earth-like planets close to the habitable zone, we need to observe the zodiacal dust in this region around other stars,” said Steve Ertel, of ESO and the University of Grenoble in France. “Detecting and characterizing this kind of dust around other stars is a way to study the architecture and evolution of planetary systems.”

As dust production should diminish over time, the researchers were surprised to find that all the stars with exozodiacal light were in fact older, in contradiction to this idea.

As the exozodiacal light detected in this study is 1,000 times brighter than the zodiacal light in our solar system, the researchers point out that trying to directly image exoplanets within this glow will be made significantly harder. As the glow overlaps those stars’ habitable zones, the detection of Earth-sized exoplanets in habitable zones just became significantly harder — bright exozodiacal light may drown out the exoplanet’s own reflected starlight.

Read more at Discovery News

Cell division, minus the cells

The process of cell division is central to life. The last stage, when two daughter cells split from each other, has fascinated scientists since the dawn of cell biology in the Victorian era. For just as long, it has been notoriously difficult to study this final step, when the dividing cell creates a furrow before cleaving in two.

The name given to this process by those early biologists, cytokinesis, translates as "cell movement" and captures the sense of a highly active and organized series of events. Scientists have now learned much more about the proteins involved and their behavior, and yet a central mystery remains: How does the cell signal where the furrow should be?

There is a simple reason for that blind spot: It's hard to see and test such a complex feat in living cells. Now Harvard Medical School systems biologists report in Science that they have reconstituted cytokinesis -- complete with signals that direct molecular traffic -- without the cell. Combining frog-egg extracts with lipid membranes that mimic the membrane of the cell, they built a cell-free system that recapitulates how the cleavage furrow is assembled.

This cell-free system has two huge advantages: It expands the scale of the furrow-building events, making them easier to see, and it gives the researchers an easy way to manipulate the proteins involved. Quickly removing and returning proteins to see how changes in the molecular players affect cytokinesis is impossible when the cell is whole, but easy when the cellular innards are spread out on a microscope slide.

The key challenge, though, was that the behavior of cytokinesis is entirely dependent on having a membrane to furrow -- and membranes are exactly what have to be removed to make the system cell-free. What made this work possible was the realization that a controlled, flat membrane -- made from two layers of artificial lipid supported on glass -- could substitute for the curved, constantly moving and complex membrane of the cell.

"We really built what goes on in the cell," said Timothy Mitchison, the Hasib Sabbagh Professor of Systems Biology at HMS. "We believe our work is a step forward, not only for understanding the assembly of the cleavage furrow but also, more generally, for understanding the biophysics of cytokinesis signaling."

The team includes co-senior authors Mitchison and Christine Field, HMS instructor in systems biology, and co-lead authors Phuong Nguyen, a graduate student in chemical biology, and Aaron Groen, a research fellow in systems biology.

Their work began with gently crushing unfertilized egg cells from the Xenopus frog and isolating their internal contents. Scientists have previously used such egg extracts to reconstitute microtubule-based structures called mitotic spindles that align chromosomes properly in preparation for cell division. The HMS team went further.

To start, the scientists turned to their molecular stockpile to come up with such building blocks as artificial centrosomes and fluorescently labeled microtubules. They then mimicked fertilization and added labeled antibodies or proteins to visualize the self-organization of structures required for the cell division process, using fluorescence microscopy in ways that aren't possible with actual living cells in tissue cultures.

The final component was the model of the cell membrane.

"To really prove that we reconstituted the cytokinesis signal, we needed to add the bilayer membrane and then see if it could recruit the proteins that would be on the cortex of the cell," Field said about the specialized layer beneath the cell membrane. "That's the signal to the membrane we were looking for."

The scientists saw this signal in part because Field chose to include actin in their system, a cellular component that is often discarded because it makes it so difficult to do experiments with the egg extract. Actin's job in the cell is to assemble into long filaments and meshworks, like Lego blocks fitting together.

The filaments provide a scaffold that allows other cellular components, including membranes, to move and change shape. So Field reasoned that, despite the difficulty of using actin, it would be important to include it in a system intended to recapitulate the signals involved in membrane furrowing.

"It's not only microtubules signaling to the plasma membrane, but also microtubules signaling to the actin cortex that forms on top of the plasma membrane," Nguyen said. "This phenomenon can be seen only when actin is around."

There are multiple signaling complexes at work in the cleavage furrow, "talking" from the microtubules to the actin cortex and the cell membrane.

Read more at Science Daily

Rare Dwarf Buffalo Charges Against Extinction

The population of the Philippines' dwarf buffalo, one of the world's rarest animals, has grown to its largest since efforts to save them from extinction began, conservationists said Friday.

An annual survey counted 382 tamaraws in a protected mountain area this year, an increase from 345 in 2013, according to data from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The tamaraw, famed for its distinct v-shaped horns, can be found only in the mountains of Mindoro, a farming island in the central Philippines.

The stocky tamaraw, with its chocolate brown coat, runs wild in the forest and weighs half as much as the more common carabao, which is used by farmers in the Philippines to plough rice fields.

"The tamaraw is the flagship species of the Philippines. It is our moral obligation and international commitment to preserve them," forest ranger Rodel Boyles, who heads a joint government and private sector conservation effort, told AFP.

"If they are not protected, the species might get wiped out in five years," he said.

The tamaraw is considered "critically endangered" -- two steps away from extinction -- by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Hunting and the destruction of their habitat to make way for grazing areas for cattle led to their near decimation, as the population fell from 10,000 in the 1900s to just 154 by 2000, according to the WWF.

The government and private sector's Tamaraw Conservation Programme aims to double the dwarf buffalo's population from 300 in the mid-2000s to 600 by 2020, Gregg Yan, a local spokesman for the WWF told AFP.

This requires ramping up forest patrols to ward off poachers and installing hidden cameras in the mountains to better understand the behaviour of the beast, Yann said.

A team of 30 forest rangers patrol a 37-acre portion of a mountain that is considered the buffalo's "core habitat", Boyles said.

"They are hunted down for food and trophy. When a species is rare, their price in the black market also goes up," he said.

Read more at Discovery News