Camel- breeding technology

ABU DHABI (AFP) – Cutting-edge camel breeding technology, including embryo transfers and cloning, is being pioneered in the United Arab Emirates to reproduce the prized desert beasts that now fetch staggering sums.

At an auction in the desert near Abu Dhabi in February, an Emirati paid 24 million dirhams (6.47 million dollars) for three camels, including one which cost 2.72 million dollars.

Known as "ships of the desert" and used since ancient times as four-footed transportation across the sands of Arabia, camels are hugely popular with Gulf residents, but the field of camel biology barely existed three decades ago.

Now the UAE now has the most advanced camel research centres in the world, said Abdul Haq Anouassi, the Moroccan director of the Veterinary Research Centre (VRC) in Sweihan, Abu Dhabi, which breeds camels on a commercial basis and for research.

Research on camel breeding has been driven by the popularity of camel racing in the Gulf and the demand for improved stock, he said.

VRC, which is owned by Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al-Nahayan and Sheikh Hazza bin Zayed Al-Nahayan, two brothers from the Abu Dhabi royal family, is the only centre to perform embryo transfers on a commercial basis, Anouassi said.

It employs four veterinarians, another researcher with a doctorate, and eight technicians, and is home to 1,500 camels, he said.

The Camel Reproduction Centre in Dubai, which is owned by the emirate's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashed Al-Maktoum and houses about 150 camels, is for research only, said Julian Skidmore, the English woman who runs it.

Researchers from the centre participated in the world's first successful cloning of a camel, which was named Injaz and was born in 2009, Skidmore said, and the centre has also produced a "cama," or a camel-llama hybrid.

Female camels only give birth to one baby every two years, which covers the gestation period of 13 months and breast-feeding for a year, as camels cannot be weaned as quickly as cows, Anouassi said.

VRC therefore uses an embryo transfer technique to increase the number of offspring from prized camels, he explained.

"We collect the embryo from the uterus of a she-camel and we transfer it into the uterus of a receiver," said Anouassi, adding that "we take the elite females that won races and we try to produce the maximum we can."

"Instead of giving you one baby every two years, she will give you 10 or 20 in one year. The baby is gestated in a receiver female but with the genetics of elite male and females," he said.

Fifteen camels sold for a total of 2.06 million dirhams (about 560,000 dollars) at an auction organised by VRC in Abu Dhabi last week were all descendants of Jabbar, a famous racing camel owned by the late founder of the UAE, and were all the result of embryo transfers, Anouassi said.

VRC's camels are popular due to the scientific control of their lineage, according to several buyers during the auction, as well as auctioneer Saif Omeir al-Kutbi.

"I came here because it is the best lineage. I can know who is the father and who is the mother," said Mohammad Saeed al-Amiri, an Emirati who owns 100 camels, during the auction.

Camel cloning research at Dubai's Camel Reproduction Centre is continuing, Skidmore said.

"We did a second one that was born this year, from a racing animal," she said, adding that, "we have a few more pregnant now."

VRC is now going ahead with its own research on camel cloning.

"So far we have not obtained any actual viable births" from cloning, Anouassi said. "We published experiences on the embryos we obtained, on the beginning of gestation up to three months, but then they die."

Cloning has implications for camel beauty contests, as a beautiful camel that has aged could be cloned, Anouassi said. Camel beauty contests are popular throughout the Gulf.

VRC is also conducting research on artificial insemination for camels, which has resulted in live births, but it is not yet used on a large scale, Anouassi said. The Camel Reproduction Centre and VRC both have camel sperm banks.

Interest in camels, which like falcons are a symbol of traditional Gulf Arab culture, does not appear to be waning.

While the world economic crisis saw businesses grind to a halt and commodity prices plunge, camel prices actually rose, said Khalifa al-Nuaimi, the chief executive of Sheikh Hamdan's office.

"We go to many auctions. If I like a camel, I can pay one million or two million (dirhams, or about 270,000-540,000 dollars). This is not a problem," said Rashed Saeed al-Mansouri, whose father owns 55 camels in the UAE and 50 in Saudi Arabia, at VRC's auction in Abu Dhabi last week.

'Goldilocks' planet

WASHINGTON – Astronomers say they have for the first time spotted a planet beyond our own in what is sometimes called the Goldilocks zone for life: Not too hot, not too cold. Juuuust right.

Not too far from its star, not too close. So it could contain liquid water. The planet itself is neither too big nor too small for the proper surface, gravity and atmosphere.

It's just right. Just like Earth.

"This really is the first Goldilocks planet," said co-discoverer R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

The new planet sits smack in the middle of what astronomers refer to as the habitable zone, unlike any of the nearly 500 other planets astronomers have found outside our solar system. And it is in our galactic neighborhood, suggesting that plenty of Earth-like planets circle other stars.

Finding a planet that could potentially support life is a major step toward answering the timeless question: Are we alone?

Scientists have jumped the gun before on proclaiming that planets outside our solar system were habitable only to have them turn out to be not quite so conducive to life. But this one is so clearly in the right zone that five outside astronomers told The Associated Press it seems to be the real thing.

"This is the first one I'm truly excited about," said Penn State University's Jim Kasting. He said this planet is a "pretty prime candidate" for harboring life.

Life on other planets doesn't mean E.T. Even a simple single-cell bacteria or the equivalent of shower mold would shake perceptions about the uniqueness of life on Earth.

But there are still many unanswered questions about this strange planet. It is about three times the mass of Earth, slightly larger in width and much closer to its star — 14 million miles away versus 93 million. It's so close to its version of the sun that it orbits every 37 days. And it doesn't rotate much, so one side is almost always bright, the other dark.

Temperatures can be as hot as 160 degrees or as frigid as 25 degrees below zero, but in between — in the land of constant sunrise — it would be "shirt-sleeve weather," said co-discoverer Steven Vogt of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

It's unknown whether water actually exists on the planet, and what kind of atmosphere it has. But because conditions are ideal for liquid water, and because there always seems to be life on Earth where there is water, Vogt believes "that chances for life on this planet are 100 percent."

The astronomers' findings are being published in Astrophysical Journal and were announced by the National Science Foundation on Wednesday.

The planet circles a star called Gliese 581. It's about 120 trillion miles away, so it would take several generations for a spaceship to get there. It may seem like a long distance, but in the scheme of the vast universe, this planet is "like right in our face, right next door to us," Vogt said in an interview.

That close proximity and the way it was found so early in astronomers' search for habitable planets hints to scientists that planets like Earth are probably not that rare.

Vogt and Butler ran some calculations, with giant fudge factors built in, and figured that as much as one out of five to 10 stars in the universe have planets that are Earth-sized and in the habitable zone.

With an estimated 200 billion stars in the universe, that means maybe 40 billion planets that have the potential for life, Vogt said. However, Ohio State University's Scott Gaudi cautioned that is too speculative about how common these planets are.

Vogt and Butler used ground-based telescopes to track the star's precise movements over 11 years and watch for wobbles that indicate planets are circling it. The newly discovered planet is actually the sixth found circling Gliese 581. Two looked promising for habitability for a while, another turned out to be too hot and the fifth is likely too cold. This sixth one bracketed right in the sweet spot in between, Vogt said.

With the star designated "a," its sixth planet is called Gliese 581g.

"It's not a very interesting name and it's a beautiful planet," Vogt said. Unofficially, he's named it after his wife: "I call it Zarmina's World."

The star Gliese 581 is a dwarf, about one-third the strength of our sun. Because of that, it can't be seen without a telescope from Earth, although it is in the Libra constellation, Vogt said.

But if you were standing on this new planet, you could easily see our sun, Butler said.

The low-energy dwarf star will live on for billions of years, much longer than our sun, he said. And that just increases the likelihood of life developing on the planet, the discoverers said.

"It's pretty hard to stop life once you give it the right conditions," Vogt said