Jonathan Hartzell could not possibly have a better friend than Cojack, a Jack Russell Terrier.

The 15-year old was deep in slumber late Thursday afternoon at his home on Lakeview Place when Cojack’s bark roused him to attention. Jonathan was surprised to find himself surrounded by smoke.

The house was on fire.

Both the teenager and the dog made it to safety.

Neighbors reported hearing a loud “pop” five to 10 minutes before Cojack succeeded in waking Jonathan. The fire heavily damaged the house and may have started in the screened porch next to the backyard pool.

The house has belonged to Jonathan’s parents, Shelly and Stan Hartzell, for 16 years, and it has been for sale for several months.

Stan Hartzell, who was at the Englewood Sports Complex when the fire started, said he had done a lot of work to make the home marketable.

“I just had it all fixed up,” he said. “All the windows were just put in, and they’re gone. The roof was just put on. It’s something.”

The back of the house sustained the most damage, and the concrete blocks along the side were scorched. The roof was burned through in places.

Fire officials had no explanation for the fire Thursday night.

With their home in ruins, and some of their photographs spread out on the lawn, the family planned to spend the night in a camper parked in the driveway.

Dolphins living off the coast of Wales whistle, bark and groan in a different dialect from dolphins off the western coast of Ireland, scientists have discovered.

Different physical environments might have contributed to the mammals developing distinctive sets of vocalisations or “dialects”, said Simon Berrow from the Shannon Dolphin and Wildlife Foundation.

Berrow supervised a master’s thesis by student Ronan Hickey at University of Wales, Bangor, who analysed 1,882 whistles from the dolphins in the Shannon estuary and bottlenose dolphins in Cardigan Bay in Wales. The study found 32 different sound categories, of which eight were only produced by the Shannon animals.

“The idea that the sounds are different is not a bad notion - you’d expect the information had to be different given the diversity of the areas where they reside,” Berrow told Reuters, adding he would use the data to create a dictionary of sounds and pursue the research further, should time and money allow.

She hears the whispers when she walks into a store with Conrad, dressed in a green jacket, at her side.

“Theyll say, Shes blind,” Sally Fleming-McCullagh says and smiles. “I usually like to make eye contact with them.”

A member of Paws With a Purpose, Fleming-McCullagh is raising one of six Labrador retrievers the valley group hopes will graduate into guide work for the blind.

The short-term, intensive program is sponsored by a national group called Guide Dogs for the Blind. The process is both challenging and rewarding, members said.

“I could give money to a charity, but this is something that is priceless,” said Fleming-McCullagh, who is raising her fifth dog.

Raisers receive the dogs when they are about 2 months old and keep them for a little more than a year.

During that time, the animals are subjected to a strict regimen designed to prepare them for their future owners needs.

No table scraps. No fetch.

“Youre basically training them not to be a dog,” Candy Berthrong said.

If a dog decided to chase after a ball, “it wouldnt be an issue for us, but if you cant see it could be dangerous,” Moriah Berthrong said.

Even while they are being trained, the dogs are considered service animals in Utah, allowing raisers to take them to work, school, restaurants or shopping malls.

Candy Berthrong said she has taken her Labrador, Dorian, to a number of musical performances even the opera.

“Hes getting very cultured,” she said.

Raisers are not charged with training the animals. When the dogs are ready, they are sent to a campus in California or Oregon for extensive training.

By the time they are done, the animals have received about $100,000 worth of training, Fleming-McCullagh said.

Most in the group are self-proclaimed dog lovers who develop deep bonds with the animals.

“They say dog owners start to look like their dogs,” Berthrong said. “I can vouch for that; I have dog hair everywhere.”

Parting ways with the dogs often proves the greatest challenge for the raisers. How they do it is the first question raisers are usually asked, they said.

“When I raised my first dog, I thought, Labs are a dime a dozen. Im not going to get attached,” Lynn Anne Hansen said. “It took about five minutes to realize I was wrong.”

Hansen is raising Arcadia, her sixth lab in six years.

But when Moriah Berthrong attended graduation for Val, the Labrador she raised last year, she gained a better understanding of why she became involved with the group.

The womans face “lit up” as she reveled in being able to take walks at night with her new companion.

“I love dogs,” Moriah Berthrong said. “But I do not have the relationship that these people have with them.”

Alex doesn’t know it, but the 12-year-old golden retriever is actually a hero of cancer research.

“When she was about 10, we noticed that she started to limp,” said her owner, Kevin Darling, an IT professional living near Columbus, Ohio. “She had the beginning stages of osteosarcoma — bone cancer.”

Because the tumor was confined to Alex’s left front leg, veterinarians recommended amputating the limb and then giving the dog chemo. “They said she probably had a 50 percent chance of living one year,” said Darling, 45.

He took that chance, and nearly three years later, Alex, minus one front leg, is still “full-tilt running, keeping up with my other dogs,” Darling said.

And the bone cancer? A tiny piece of it, along with blood samples from a number of Alex’s littermates and other relatives, is slated to become part of the first U.S. canine tumor tissue bank in Frederick, Md. The bank — formally called a “biospecimen repository” — began accepting the first of a projected 3,000 canine biopsy samples on May 1.

The new facility lies adjacent to the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s own library of human cancer samples. That’s no accident — the canine tissue bank is the dream of a group of researchers who know that malignancies that occur spontaneously in dogs hold vital clues to human cancer.

“The cells of the dog are actually very, very similar to our own cells in terms of their genetic makeup,” explained Dr. Matthew Breen, an associate professor of genomics at the college of veterinary medicine at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Breen is also the treasurer of the nonprofit Canine Comparative Oncology Genomics Consortium (CCOGC), the driving force behind the tissue bank.

The mapping of both the dog and human genomes over the past decade “has shown very clearly that humans and dogs are very closely related,” Breen said. “The gene that causes brown eyes in you is probably the gene that causes brown eyes in a dog.”

Dogs share something else with humans that makes them ideal models for cancer research, added Dr. Jaime Modiano, an associate professor of immunology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and a CCOGC board member.

“Environmental risk factors for human cancers are virtually duplicated in a dog,” he noted. Unlike lab rats or mice, companion dogs “swim in the same water we swim in, they run on the same grass we run on,” Modiano said.

And unlike lab animals — which are usually artificially induced to develop cancers — the samples collected in the canine cancer tissue bank will come from pet dogs who develop malignancies spontaneously, just as Alex did.

“Mice don’t ‘get’ cancer, they are given cancer,” Breen pointed out. “That’s why this is so exciting. We, as a community, see the dog as the best biological model for spontaneous cancers, just as they occur in humans.”

Americans’ four-legged friends — especially purebreds — have other tricks of biology that make them invaluable models for cancer research. Humans — much like “mutt” dogs — breed willy-nilly, Breen said. But pedigreed dogs are bred so tightly that their DNA remains relatively unchanged.

That genetic purity cuts down on what Breen described as “background noise” within the genome, making cancer-causing mutations easier to identify.

In people, cancer genomics “is like trying to listen to a radio that’s out of tune,” Breen said. “There’s just too much interference. But in some dog populations, all of a sudden a lot of that background interference is removed. So nature’s message — the pinpoint of this or that particular gene — comes in loud and clear. It’s like the radio gets tuned in.”

That could mean more and quicker discoveries in cancer genetics, he said.

“I predict that we will find more cancer-associate genes by studying dog cancers over the next 10 years than is likely possible by studying human cancers over the same time,” Breen said. And once a particular “oncogene” is spotted somewhere on the dog genome, scientists will simply head for the corresponding locus on the human genome to find it there.

“We can immediately translate that information into human genome information, then go look in human populations with human cancers,” Breen said.

Canine cancer research is already saving and improving human lives, Modiano added.

One example: A recent NCI study into an experimental drug aimed at helping children with bone cancer was stopped early after it failed to extend the lives of dogs with the same disease.

“That saved innumerable kids from being treated with something that wasn’t going to help them and was going to cause them toxicity,” Modiano explained.

Even better, a new vaccine against deadly malignant melanoma has gotten much closer to FDA approval after researchers at New York’s Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center showed it worked wonders in dogs stricken with the skin cancer.

“In fact, it’s going to be available as a viable commercial product that vets can get off the shelf” for dogs later this year, Modiano said.

He and Breen are hard at work themselves, developing blood tests that can predict how well dogs with leukemia will respond to particular treatments. “We are also now working with groups of medical oncologists to see about these liquid tumors in people, trying to see how well it carries over for them,” Modiano said.

All of this research should gain new momentum with the launch of the new biospecimen repository. According to Breen, the CCOGC, in partnership with the American Kennel Club’s Canine Health Foundation, has already raised $1.7 million of the $2.2 million it needs to open the repository.

They also hope to open five dedicated specimen-collection sites nationwide. Three of those sites — at Colorado State University, Ohio State University and the University of Wisconsin — have already started collecting biopsy and blood samples as of the beginning of May.

Darling said he’s just proud Alex has been able to help.

“Alex may get cancer again and not survive,” he said. “But if what I have done has helped somebody in the future — a person, a dog — I’d like to know that. To know that I played a part in making that happen.”

A rare Siberian tiger that was moved from Quebec to Edmonton’s Valley Zoo last year has apparently been missing one of the biggest comforts of home - the French language.

Zoo staff in Edmonton say the magnificent 300-pound tiger called Boris responds better to French than to the English most commonly heard in Alberta. The zoo is now urging French-speakers to visit Boris so he can hear the language he so appreciates.

“He was being aloof most of the time, but as soon as he heard the French language, he came over to the bars,” said Dean Triechel, the zoo’s operations supervisor.

Boris first arrived at the Valley Zoo last May after spending the first seven years of his life at the Granby Zoo in Quebec. He was unresponsive upon his arrival, but when Ginette Heppelle, a native French speaker who works at the zoo, visited his enclosure area a few days later, she called out to him in French and the response was immediate.

“He just got up from the back of his enclosure and walked over to the fence, so that’s when one of the keepers said that he responded to me because I spoke to him in French. That’s where it all started,” said Heppelle.

She points out that Boris’s new surroundings probably made the giant cat as uncomfortable as anything else, but still thinks it could be comforting for Boris to hear his “native tongue.”

“If anything, it will just remind him of home and it will probably make him feel pretty good,” she said.

Joseph Stookey, a professor in the department of large animal clinical sciences at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatchewan, doubts the tiger would appreciate hearing French words from the public. He also notes that changes in the tiger’s physical environment would probably have the biggest impact on his comfort level.

“You can imagine all of the conversations that people have around that enclosure, and I don’t think the tiger would put that together in any kind of meaningful way,” he said. “The animal knows it’s in a strange place and it’s going to feel that way for a long time … (Language) is going to be a small part of this great, big unfamiliar picture for the animal.”

Triechel, the zoo’s operations manager, admits he’s just as keen to have people learn more about the Siberian tiger as he is about having them speak French to Boris. Siberian tigers are an endangered species, and it is estimated there are less than 500 left in the world today.

Boris is part of the Species Survival Plan program, which organizes managed breeding programs for some animals facing extinction.

At least a dozen bald eagle nests along the Maine coast were destroyed during the Patriot’s Day storm, including one in Damariscotta that had been home to eagles since the 1950s.

Even when the trees and nests survived, many of the eggs or chicks in them did not.

Twenty or 30 years ago, such a blow would have been disaster for the state’s birds. Today eagles have rebounded so dramatically from near-extinction in Maine and other states that the destructive spring weather is expected to be only a brief setback in their continuing expansion, including into southern Maine.

Bald eagles have come so far, in fact, that the species is widely expected to be taken off the federal endangered species list next month. State officials also hope to take the bird off Maine’s protected list soon afterward, and they are working to set up long-term conservation agreements to protect Maine nests once the core regulatory protections are lifted.

“We thought we were going to lose the whole population,” said Ray “Bucky” Owen, a retired wildlife biology professor and former Department Inland Fisheries and Wildlife director. “They’re now in every county in the state and continue to expand. It’s a super success story.”

The eagle population nationwide was decimated by DDT and other pesticides, which caused eggshells to crack and reproduction to fail. Adult eagles also were killed in traps and by people who shot at them.

By 1963, there were only 417 nesting pairs of bald eagles counted in the lower 48 states.

Maine had about 35 pairs in the early 1970s, although those eagles produced only about six eaglets each year because of the effects of pesticides. Almost all of Maine’s remaining eagles nested around Cobscook Bay at the eastern tip of the state.

Eagles were added to the federal endangered species list in 1967. DDT was banned in 1972, 10 years after naturalist Rachel Carson, in her book “Silent Spring,” raised alarms about the chemical.

For nearly two decades starting in the 1960s, Owen and other biologists worked intensively to rescue the birds in Maine. They got a zoo to supply eggs from captive eagles. Then they put them into nests so wild birds would incubate them. They also brought in fledgling eagles, which were successfully adopted and raised by the Maine birds.

They put out uncontaminated food to keep the existing birds nourished — more than 100,000 pounds of meat from moose, cows, horses, beavers and other animals, according to Owen.

“There was nothing we could do to increase reproduction, but we could decrease mortality,” he said. “Even losing a bird or two was significant back then.”

They even rebuilt the wing of one eagle that had been shot. Owen and other biologists used the feathers from a dead eagle they had in a freezer and successfully transplanted them.

“We actually cut the feathers off and super-glued a dowel (into the injured eagle’s wing) and then glued a feather on the dowel at the right angle,” he said. The bird eventually flew away and was seen a year later eating at a feeding station, according to Owen.

SUSTAINED ANNUAL INCREASE

Pesticide regulations eventually had the intended effect and, by the late 1980s, eagles started reproducing at a healthier rate.

“We have been experiencing about an 8 percent annual increase for 20 years now,” said Charlie Todd, biologist with Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

Last year, Maine biologists counted 414 breeding pairs, more than in all other Northeastern states combined. Nationally, the number has climbed to 9,789, according to the latest federal count.

The bald eagle was upgraded from endangered to threatened in 1995. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed in 1999 that the bird be removed from the list. The deadline for that decision is June 29.

Todd and other Maine officials are finishing their annual spring survey of Maine’s eagle population and have taken more than 30 survey flights so far this year. They are still working to come up with a final count, but they say the spring clearly has been a harsh one.

First, the heavy snowstorm in early April forced some eagles to abandon eggs, and the biologists saw empty nests. Then, after the Patriot’s Day storm, biologists saw many nests — and the trees they were in — had blown down.

The loss of the nest next to Damariscotta Lake was significant because it had survived through the depths of the population decline.

“It’s been monitored by the agency since 1974, and the landowners say it was built in 1958,” Todd said. “For many years, it was (home to) the only successful pair in western Maine, so its passing is a major ordeal.”

Biologists expect eagles that lost nests to start building new ones soon in the same territories, but many eagle pairs won’t be raising young this year.

The effect of the storms is expected to be evident as the smaller number of new eaglets reaches maturity in five years and begins to reproduce. It won’t be a long-term setback, however, because the population is still growing, biologists said.

FEDERAL, STATE DELISTING LIKELY

Biologists also have been encouraged to find nests in 22 new territories, including in Cumberland County. Biologists believe eagles gradually are adapting to sounds and activity and are nesting closer to people and development.

This spring survey could be the last in Maine. The federal government has not allocated the $10,000 for flying time next spring, another sign that the bird probably will not be listed much longer.

State officials may try to cobble together the money for future surveys, but they hope it won’t be necessary. Todd is working to establish long-term nest-protection agreements that would clear the way for the Legislature to take the eagle off the state protected list, too.

The state’s listing carries more aggressive protections, including a quarter-mile “no disturbance” buffer around each nest. Before the state moves to delist eagles, Todd must negotiate with landowners to get permanent protection of 150 nesting areas, such as with conservation easements. He’s more than halfway toward reaching that goal and has many additional voluntary landowner agreements to protect nests.

Eagles still will be federally protected under the Bald Eagle Protection Act, which dates to 1940 and was intended to stop people from killing or injuring the national symbol.

Taking eagles off the protection lists, especially the state list, however, is expected to leave some nests exposed to Maine’s spreading suburbia.

“I think we will see disturbance become a factor again, but we have so many birds now, I think we’ll continue to have a strong population,” Owen said. He predicts the numbers will continue to climb in Maine to 600 or more eagle pairs.

MORE MERCURY REGULATION URGED

The biggest remaining threats to eagles are the decline of migratory fish runs into Maine rivers that provided abundant food, and the lingering environmental contamination.

Although Maine already has one of the strongest populations in the country, eagles here are not as productive as eagles in some other areas, such as around Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. That’s because of the mercury Maine eagles ingest when they pull contaminated fish out of Maine’s rivers and lakes, biologists said.

“These birds are carrying around a tremendous burden of mercury,” said Chris DeSorbo, a biologist with the BioDiversity Research Institute in Gorham.

DeSorbo has been climbing trees to collect blood and feather samples for three years. While levels of some contaminants continue to fall, DeSorbo and others have found higher mercury levels here than have been found elsewhere in the country.

DeSorbo and others want more regulation of mercury pollution that drifts east from power plants and waste incinerators. He also supports taking eagles off the protected lists because the Endangered Species Act clearly has done its job. “If we don’t delist them, are we going to make it so nobody wants to list anything ever again?” DeSorbo said.

Maine Audubon, a nonprofit group that advocates for wildlife protection, has urged the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to broaden other protections for eagles in preparation for delisting, but it also believes the time is right to delist.

“Once a species recovers, we want to make room on the list for more species,” said Susan Gallo, a wildlife biologist with Maine Audubon. “The number of species waiting to be put on the list is just phenomenal.”

The biologists who worked so hard to bring the birds back say they do expect the population to face setbacks, whether caused by storms or by people. Now the eagles can handle that without their help, however.

“It’s our wildest dream, you might say, to have this dilemma,” Todd said. “We’re not going to put them to the test irresponsibly, especially after all of this effort.”

At 4 feet high, with handsome gray-blue feathers, a long yellow bill and a dramatic black head plume, the great blue heron is a striking bird.

And the only way a backyard birder used to be able to spot one would be if it flew overhead on its way to a nesting site. Herons are fish eaters, so seed-stocked bird feeders hold no interest for them.

But, as a large number of area fish fanciers have discovered, ornamental ponds stocked with koi are to herons what sugar-water feeders are to hummingbirds — bird buffets.

Terry Knauer, owner of Economy Aquatic Gardens on Preston Highway in Louisville, said he has “three or four customers a day” coming in to replace fish that have been speared by great blue herons. This can be an expensive proposition, since these fish cost from $20 to a few hundred dollars each.

“We’re pet people,” Knauer said. “People stand at my counter and cry. They get attached to their fish.”

When asked if raccoons might not be the culprits, Knauer explained that raccoons leave a mess. “They stir up and muddy the ponds. And they leave behind scales and the fish heads.”

Herons simply swoop down, spear a fish and fly off.

This bad news for fish owners is the result of good news for the birds.

Brainard Palmer-Ball Jr., terrestrial vertebrate zoologist with the Kentucky State Nature Preserves Commission and author of “The Kentucky Breeding Bird Atlas,” explained that the herons have made a comeback.

“The population of great blue herons is growing rapidly,” he noted. “They are recovering from near absence in Kentucky as a breeding bird in the 1960s and early 1970s due to the accumulation of pesticide residues in the ecosystem.”

These were chemicals such as DDT, which became concentrated in the food chain and caused declines in numbers of many species of fish-eating birds, including bald eagles as well as herons.

The pesticide residue was a second blow to the great blue herons, which had suffered a decline earlier in the century when they were hunted for their plumage.

Herons are now protected from hunting and are among the most abundant wading birds in North America, found in both coastal and inland habitats.

In fact, Palmer-Ball emphasized that their habitat in Jefferson County, “… is definitely not (suffering) a reduction.”

He said that there are “sometimes as many as 50 (herons) at the Falls of the Ohio and there are two nesting colonies known in Jefferson County, along Harrods Creek and along Floyds Fork.”

A survey in 2004 found there were about 40 pairs in those two colonies.

People are seeing more of the birds because of “increasing numbers and adaptability on the part of the great blues,” Palmer-Ball said.

A Hungarian research team reported the first Central European cloned rabbit in Godollo, near Budapest, on Friday, noting that this makes them one of five teams worldwide to successfully clone a bunny.

The rabbit, named Tapsilla - equivalent to Thumpella in English - was born last week, said Professor Andras Dinnyes, head of the Agricultural Biotechnology Research Centre’s research team, adding that she had been a twin, but that her sib had died shortly after their birth by C-section. Tapsilla is doing quite well, Dinnyes said.

Cloned mammals are an excellent way to model various disorders that affect humans, Dinnyes said, and different animals can help researchers to learn more about specific ailments. Rabbits show promise in contributing to the study of vascular disorders and can play a major role in the development of new medications, he said.

Herds of cows producing skimmed milk could soon be roaming our pastures, reports Cath O’Driscoll in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI. Scientists in New Zealand have discovered that some cows have genes that give them a natural ability to produce skimmed milk and plan to use this information to breed herds of milkers producing only skimmed milk.

The researchers also plan to breed commercial herds producing milk with the unique characteristics required to make a butter that is spreadable straight from the fridge. They have already identified a cow, Marge, with the genes required to do this and say a commercial herd is likely by 2011. The milk is very low in saturated fats and so should be high in polyunsaturates and monounsaturated fats.

Experts say that the discovery of these rogue milkers could completely revolutionise the dairy industry. Ed Komorowski, technical director at Dairy UK says that the New Zealand approach could be used to breed cows that still produce full-fat milk but with only the good fats, which could swing things back in favour of full-fat milk. In the UK, for example, only 25% of milk sold is full fat. ‘In future if whole milk can be made to contain unsaturated fats – which are good for you – then it might mean that people change back to whole milk products. The big thing about dairy products is taste, so this would be a way of giving the benefits of taste without the disadvantage of saturated fats,’ according to Komorowski.

This may also overcome the problem of waste. ‘If you can genetically produce milk without fat then that may turn out to be a very good solution to what might later be a big disposal issue,’ says Komorowski. Producing skimmed and semi-skimmed milk means there is a lot of fat left over.

Komorowski noted, however, that although the lower-fat milk may be healthier, it will be interesting to see how much milk the cows actually produce.

The rogue cows were discovered when biotech company ViaLactia screened the range of milk compositions across the entire herd of 4m New Zealand cattle. New Zealand dairy firm Fonterra has already made milk products from Marge’s milk and they maintain the positive taste.

Arthur Du Mosch has averted a cat-astrophe.

The 49-year-old nature guide was fast asleep Monday, his family and pet cat dozing beside him, when a larger feline hopped in his bed for a latenight visit - a wild leopard, to be exact.

Du Mosch, 49, a nature guide, didn’t flinch. Clad only in underwear and a T-shirt, he lunged at the leopard, grabbed it around the neck, then pinned it down for 20 minutes - until park rangers arrived on the scene.

“This kind of thing doesn’t happen every day,” he said, plainly. “I don’t know why I did it. I wasn’t thinking, I just acted.”

Raviv Shapira, who heads the southern district of the Israel Nature and Parks Protection Authority, said a half-dozen of the leopards have been spotted near Du Mosch’s small community in the Negev desert in southern Israel, “but we have never heard of a leopard coming into a private home,” he said.

He said it was food, not curiosity, that lured the cat.

Those who near humans are usually old and weak, and too frail to hunt in the wild, resorting instead to the easier option of chasing down domestic dogs and cats, Shapira added.

Leopards in Israel pose no threat to people and, in fact, this leopard was chasing Du Mosch’s cat and not the humans sleeping in the bed, Shapira said. He said the leopard was very weak when captured.

Du Mosch said he probably would not have been able to control the big cat were it in better health. As a nature guide, he said, he was familiar with animals and did his best to hold down the leopard without harming it. He said he took it all in stride, “but the kids were excited.”

His young daughter had been in the room at the time because a mosquito in her own bedroom had frightened her, he said.

Nature officials said they were assessing the leopard’s health and would soon likely release him back into the wild, after fitting him with a tracking device.