An American man who lived in The Bahamas for 20 years was found floating naked on May 2, face down in a pool at Point House - a luxury home at Lyford Cay - but the matter was never reported by police.

Now some are starting to inquire as to why. According to information obtained by The Guardian, 54-year-old Dan Tuckfield Sr. was autopsied, cremated and flown out of the country two days after being found dead.

Tuckfield's body was found at the Lyford Cay home of billionaire financier Louis Bacon around 10 a.m. on Sunday, May 2, according to reports obtained by The Guardian.

Tuckfield's death certificate listed his time of death as 9:30 a.m. on May 2.

However, the certificate said the body, which police reportedly discovered just 30 minutes later, already showed "signs of decomposition."

Tuckfield's cause of death was listed as "coronary artery disease" and listed no antecedent causes.

An autopsy reportedly took place on Monday, May 3, the body was cremated on Tuesday, May 4 and flown out of the country by a relative that same day, according to a source close to the matter.

A Lyford Cay resident, who did not want to be named, said that Tuckfield was last seen alive leaving the Captain's Table restaurant near the Lyford Cay Marina sometime Saturday evening.

It is unclear who found Tuckfield's body, but it is understood that no one else was at the home when his body was discovered.

Click here to read more in The Nassau Guardian

NASSAU, Bahamas -- Executives of the Bahamas China Friendship Association paid a courtesy call on Governor General His Excellency Sir Arthur Foulkes at Government House, Wednesday, May 12. Pictured from left: Aaron Brice, Trustee; Anthony Capron, Vice President; the Governor General who is a patron and former Vice President of the Association; Philip Simon, President and Lloyd Wong, Public Relations Director. (BIS photo/Letisha Henderson)

Nassau, Bahamas -- The Ministry of Tourism has joined the Downtown Nassau Partnership (DNP) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Marine Resources to host the Great Bahamian Seafood Festival.

This joint promotion is scheduled for the weekend of May 28-29 on the waterfront west of the British Colonial Hilton.

Minister of Tourism & Aviation Senator the Hon Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace made the announcement during a press conference held at the Bullion Bar at the British Colonial Hilton, Thursday, May 6.

Mr Vanderpool-Wallace said he was excited to be a part of this event.  “This festival is very appropriate because The Bahamas has always been viewed as a ‘seafood’ haven especially due to one of our staples – the conch.”

He added that events such as this one would greatly highlight The Bahamas and offer an additional form of entertainment for visitors to the country.

Chairman of the Nassau Tourism Development Board, Charles Klonaris said all great cities host festivals. 

He noted that just recently over 280,000 people attended Sunfest on West Palm Beach’s revitalized waterfront and over $2 million were raised for charity during a four-day festival in South Beach.

“Downtown should have a vibrancy that extends its life beyond the 9 to 5 with wide options on things to do, places to see and people to meet.”

DNP Managing Director, Vaughn Roberts said the timing of the festival was set to capitalize on the Memorial Day holiday weekend, traditionally one of the biggest travel weekends for North Americans.

“The Great Bahamian Seafood & Wine Festival will celebrate our passion for food, wine and entertainment and offer chefs, caterers and restaurateurs opportunities to showcase seafood cuisine as a part of the Bahamian cultural experience,” said Mr Roberts.

The main festival site on Saturday, May 29 is at the edge of historic Nassau, however, participating restaurants throughout New Providence and Paradise Island will offer special dishes and fixed price menus from May 22 – 30.

Restaurants participating include: Aqua, Black Angus, The Bahamian Club, Graycliff, Ichiban, August Moon, Poop Deck (East and West), Provence, Travellers Rest, Café Matisse, Lucian’s of Chicago, Seafront Sushi, Van Breugels and Indigo.

The festival kicks off Friday, May 28 with a gala event at The Jacaranda House on Parliament Street in the evening.

Survival of the fittest is put to a test in the Bahamas: Are the reptiles affected more by competition for resources or by predators?

By covering large swaths of land with netting, making lizards jog on treadmills and turning six Caribbean islands into Darwinian laboratories, evolutionary biologists have made important discoveries about what drives the evolution of island lizards.

The report, published online Sunday in the journal Nature, has broader implications for the practical study of evolution, researchers said. It serves as a rare demonstration that theories about natural selection can be directly tested in the field.

Ryan Calsbeek and Robert Cox of Dartmouth College traveled to the Bahamas to figure out what had been more important in shaping the evolution of brown anole lizards that live there: competition among one another for resources such as food or shelter, or evasion of predators.

To do so, the scientists set up several scenarios. They covered two small islands more or less the size of a baseball diamond entirely in bird-netting to protect the lizards from seabirds, thus removing the animals' only predators.

On another pair of islands, they introduced a few snakes (male, so that they wouldn't reproduce and permanently invade the islands). This meant the lizards had more predators — more "predation pressure" — to worry about.

They left another two islands alone, leaving the lizards to contend with just the bird predators.

They packed some islands with lizards and left others scantly populated, so they could gauge what effect competition might have on the populations. A higher lizard density meant there would be more lizards vying for the same resources.

Setting up the experiment was exhausting, said Calsbeek, lead author of the paper. That first sweaty day, they picked their way across the cactus-studded island encircled by the jagged edges of an old coral reef, checking for birds and spreading netting over the vegetation.

A tourist in a boat puttered by, and asked them — were they doing science, or making art?

"When you pulled away from the island, it really did look like a sculpture in bird-netting," Calsbeek said. A total of 1,300 lizards were released on the islands in May 2008 and 2009, at the beginning of each breeding season. Before the release, the researchers had measured the length of each male lizard's hind limb and put each animal on a 3-foot-long treadmill surrounded by plexiglass to record its running speed.

Each lizard had been individually tattooed so the scientists would know exactly which ones survived.

Four months later, the scientists went back to the islands, recaptured as many lizards as they could and examined the traits of the survivors.

They found no significant physical differences between the lizards on islands where predators had been removed (courtesy of bird-netting), where predators had been added (in the form of snakes), or islands that had been left as they were.

However, on the islands that were crowded with lizards, the scientists found that the surviving males had slightly longer hind limbs, larger body size and greater endurance on a treadmill. They concluded that the biggest pressures faced by the island lizards — the ones that would drive their evolution — came not from predators but from competition.

The finding plays into a larger debate about the extent to which these two forces drive natural selection, said Thomas B. Smith, director of the Center for Tropical Research at UCLA, who was not involved in the study.

"What this experiment does is tease apart those two things, in a very elegant way," Smith said.

The authors said the finding applies strictly to island lizards. They expect that for brown anole lizards living on the mainland the opposite may be true — that predation will be more important than competition.

But the most important thing about the study, they added, was it showed that evolution is not just a theoretical science but one that can be tested in the field.

The ability to test for evolutionary forces is "particularly important in the United States, where more than 50% of Americans are skeptical of" Darwin's theory of evolution, Calsbeek said. "I think what we've done here should speak directly to that. Even a skeptic could go out and perform an experiment [and] hopefully, if they approach it with an open mind, it might persuade them."

Click here to read more in The Los Angeles Times

Survival of the fittest is put to a test in the Bahamas: Are the reptiles affected more by competition for resources or by predators?

By covering large swaths of land with netting, making lizards jog on treadmills and turning six Caribbean islands into Darwinian laboratories, evolutionary biologists have made important discoveries about what drives the evolution of island lizards.

The report, published online Sunday in the journal Nature, has broader implications for the practical study of evolution, researchers said. It serves as a rare demonstration that theories about natural selection can be directly tested in the field.

Ryan Calsbeek and Robert Cox of Dartmouth College traveled to the Bahamas to figure out what had been more important in shaping the evolution of brown anole lizards that live there: competition among one another for resources such as food or shelter, or evasion of predators.

To do so, the scientists set up several scenarios. They covered two small islands more or less the size of a baseball diamond entirely in bird-netting to protect the lizards from seabirds, thus removing the animals' only predators.

On another pair of islands, they introduced a few snakes (male, so that they wouldn't reproduce and permanently invade the islands). This meant the lizards had more predators — more "predation pressure" — to worry about.

They left another two islands alone, leaving the lizards to contend with just the bird predators.

They packed some islands with lizards and left others scantly populated, so they could gauge what effect competition might have on the populations. A higher lizard density meant there would be more lizards vying for the same resources.

Setting up the experiment was exhausting, said Calsbeek, lead author of the paper. That first sweaty day, they picked their way across the cactus-studded island encircled by the jagged edges of an old coral reef, checking for birds and spreading netting over the vegetation.

A tourist in a boat puttered by, and asked them — were they doing science, or making art?

"When you pulled away from the island, it really did look like a sculpture in bird-netting," Calsbeek said. A total of 1,300 lizards were released on the islands in May 2008 and 2009, at the beginning of each breeding season. Before the release, the researchers had measured the length of each male lizard's hind limb and put each animal on a 3-foot-long treadmill surrounded by plexiglass to record its running speed.

Each lizard had been individually tattooed so the scientists would know exactly which ones survived.

Four months later, the scientists went back to the islands, recaptured as many lizards as they could and examined the traits of the survivors.

They found no significant physical differences between the lizards on islands where predators had been removed (courtesy of bird-netting), where predators had been added (in the form of snakes), or islands that had been left as they were.

However, on the islands that were crowded with lizards, the scientists found that the surviving males had slightly longer hind limbs, larger body size and greater endurance on a treadmill. They concluded that the biggest pressures faced by the island lizards — the ones that would drive their evolution — came not from predators but from competition.

The finding plays into a larger debate about the extent to which these two forces drive natural selection, said Thomas B. Smith, director of the Center for Tropical Research at UCLA, who was not involved in the study.

"What this experiment does is tease apart those two things, in a very elegant way," Smith said.

The authors said the finding applies strictly to island lizards. They expect that for brown anole lizards living on the mainland the opposite may be true — that predation will be more important than competition.

But the most important thing about the study, they added, was it showed that evolution is not just a theoretical science but one that can be tested in the field.

The ability to test for evolutionary forces is "particularly important in the United States, where more than 50% of Americans are skeptical of" Darwin's theory of evolution, Calsbeek said. "I think what we've done here should speak directly to that. Even a skeptic could go out and perform an experiment [and] hopefully, if they approach it with an open mind, it might persuade them."

Click here to read more in The Los Angeles Times

Survival of the fittest is put to a test in the Bahamas: Are the reptiles affected more by competition for resources or by predators?

By covering large swaths of land with netting, making lizards jog on treadmills and turning six Caribbean islands into Darwinian laboratories, evolutionary biologists have made important discoveries about what drives the evolution of island lizards.

The report, published online Sunday in the journal Nature, has broader implications for the practical study of evolution, researchers said. It serves as a rare demonstration that theories about natural selection can be directly tested in the field.

Ryan Calsbeek and Robert Cox of Dartmouth College traveled to the Bahamas to figure out what had been more important in shaping the evolution of brown anole lizards that live there: competition among one another for resources such as food or shelter, or evasion of predators.

To do so, the scientists set up several scenarios. They covered two small islands more or less the size of a baseball diamond entirely in bird-netting to protect the lizards from seabirds, thus removing the animals' only predators.

On another pair of islands, they introduced a few snakes (male, so that they wouldn't reproduce and permanently invade the islands). This meant the lizards had more predators — more "predation pressure" — to worry about.

They left another two islands alone, leaving the lizards to contend with just the bird predators.

They packed some islands with lizards and left others scantly populated, so they could gauge what effect competition might have on the populations. A higher lizard density meant there would be more lizards vying for the same resources.

Setting up the experiment was exhausting, said Calsbeek, lead author of the paper. That first sweaty day, they picked their way across the cactus-studded island encircled by the jagged edges of an old coral reef, checking for birds and spreading netting over the vegetation.

A tourist in a boat puttered by, and asked them — were they doing science, or making art?

"When you pulled away from the island, it really did look like a sculpture in bird-netting," Calsbeek said. A total of 1,300 lizards were released on the islands in May 2008 and 2009, at the beginning of each breeding season. Before the release, the researchers had measured the length of each male lizard's hind limb and put each animal on a 3-foot-long treadmill surrounded by plexiglass to record its running speed.

Each lizard had been individually tattooed so the scientists would know exactly which ones survived.

Four months later, the scientists went back to the islands, recaptured as many lizards as they could and examined the traits of the survivors.

They found no significant physical differences between the lizards on islands where predators had been removed (courtesy of bird-netting), where predators had been added (in the form of snakes), or islands that had been left as they were.

However, on the islands that were crowded with lizards, the scientists found that the surviving males had slightly longer hind limbs, larger body size and greater endurance on a treadmill. They concluded that the biggest pressures faced by the island lizards — the ones that would drive their evolution — came not from predators but from competition.

The finding plays into a larger debate about the extent to which these two forces drive natural selection, said Thomas B. Smith, director of the Center for Tropical Research at UCLA, who was not involved in the study.

"What this experiment does is tease apart those two things, in a very elegant way," Smith said.

The authors said the finding applies strictly to island lizards. They expect that for brown anole lizards living on the mainland the opposite may be true — that predation will be more important than competition.

But the most important thing about the study, they added, was it showed that evolution is not just a theoretical science but one that can be tested in the field.

The ability to test for evolutionary forces is "particularly important in the United States, where more than 50% of Americans are skeptical of" Darwin's theory of evolution, Calsbeek said. "I think what we've done here should speak directly to that. Even a skeptic could go out and perform an experiment [and] hopefully, if they approach it with an open mind, it might persuade them."

Click here to read more in The Los Angeles Times