Police across the globe have seized thousands of wild animals, including primates and big cats, and arrested nearly 600 suspects in a vast crackdown on illegal wildlife smuggling, Interpol said Wednesday.

Covering 109 countries, the operation was carried out in coordination with the World Customs Organization (WCO), with investigators homing in on trafficking routes and crime hotspots, the international policing body said.

Dubbed Operation Thunderball, the Singapore-based investigation sought to target transnational crime networks seeking to profit from wildlife smuggling activities. It was the third such Interpol mission in recent years.

An Interpol spokeswoman said police were holding 582 suspects with further arrests and prosecutions expected to follow.

Among the animals seized were 23 primates, 30 big cats, more than 4,300 birds, nearly 1,500 live reptiles and close to 10,000 turtles and tortoises, Interpol said.

They also confiscated 440 elephant tusks and an additional 545 kilogrammes of ivory, the organisation said, pointing to a flourishing illegal wildlife trade online.

In Spain, 21 people were arrested thanks to an online investigation, and in Italy, a similar probe led police to seize 1,850 birds.

"Wildlife crime not only strips our environment of its resources, it also has an impact through the associated violence, money laundering and fraud," said Interpol secretary general Juergen Stock.

Interpol said slight declines in the seizures of certain species were a sign that continued enforcement efforts were bearing fruit and that compliance levels were improving.

"It is vital that we stop criminals from putting livelihoods, security, economies and the sustainability of our planet at risk by illegally exploiting wild flora and fauna," said Ivonne Higuero, secretary general of CITES, an endangered species organisation.

Interpol has previously carried out similar large-scale crackdowns in 2017 and 2018 that netted seizures worth several million dollars.

Parents' 'memory' of environmental stress inherited across generations
Washington (UPI) Jul 9, 2019 - While actual memories aren't passed along to offspring, new research suggests the genetic effects of environmental stressors experienced by parents can be inherited across generations.

The findings, published this week in the journal eLife, offer a new perspective on the nature-versus-nurture debate.

"While neuronally encoded behavior isn't thought to be inherited across generations, we wanted to test the possibility that environmentally triggered modifications could allow 'memory' of parental experiences to be inherited," Julianna "Lita" Bozler, a doctoral candidate in the Bosco Lab at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, said in a news release.

For their experiment, researchers exposed fruit flies, Drosophilia melanogaster, to parasitoid wasps, which deposit their eggs into fruit fly larvae. The wasps, once hatched, kill and eat the larvae. To keep their offspring safe, female fruit flies exposed to wasps switch up their dietary habits and begin targeting food containing ethanol, which serves as a protective egg laying substrate.

Scientists collected the eggs of two groups of fruit flies. One group was unexposed, while the other was forced to cohabitate with wasps for several days. Researchers monitored the development of each group of offspring, neither of which were exposed to adult fruit flies or wasps. The offspring of fruit fly females exposed to wasps continued to show a preference for ethanol-rich food sources.

"We found that the original wasp-exposed flies laid about 94 percent of their eggs on ethanol food, and that this behavior persisted in their offspring, even though they'd never had direct interaction with wasps," said Bozler.

The second generation of fruit flies laid 73 percent of their eggs on an ethanol substrate.

"Remarkably, this inherited ethanol preference persisted for five generations, gradually reverting back to a pre-wasp exposed level," Bozler said. "This tells us that inheritance of ethanol preference is not a permanent germline change, but rather a reversible trait."

Researchers determined both male and female offspring of wasp-exposed females produced lower levels of Neuropeptide-F, or NPF. The neuronal shift encouraged a preference for ethanol.

According to Giovanni Bosco, a professor of molecular and systems biology at Geisel, the findings by Bozler and her research partner Balint Kacsoh could provide insights into the mechanisms biologic inheritance in humans and other animals.

"Of particular interest, are the conserved signaling functions of NPF and its mammalian counterpart NPY in humans," Bosco said. "We hope that our findings may lead to greater insights into the role that parental experiences play across generations in diseases such as drug and alcohol disorders."

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When spiders leave the nest, they turn aggressive
Washington (UPI) Jul 2, 2019
Spiders who exhibit sociability and tolerance when they're first born often become aggressive when they leave the nest and plot out on their own. Now, scientists are beginning to understand why. Most spiders are solitary creatures and, like other solitary animals, solo spiders tend to behave aggressively toward other spiders. But most spiders aren't born aggressive. Spiderlings spend their earliest days living alongside their many brothers and sisters. During this developmental stage, young spi ... read more