#this is also how we document the ranges of species and where they are disappearing or migrating

[rjzimmerman]

This story makes me think of the mentality of destruction. Put a human and shovel together, and the human digs. Put a human on a bulldozer, and the two together destroy. The digging may have nefarious purposes and it might be destructive, but even if it is, the damage is relatively insignificant. We can’t say that about the bulldozer. What does an engineer think when he plans where the bulldozer scrapes? What does the politician think when she/he approves the plan, or sees images of its outcome? What does the driver of the bulldozer think as she or she watches the blade of the bulldozer destroy everything in the way? I have a hard time imagining how a moral person can allow any of that to happen.

Excerpt from this story from the Sierra Club:

As shocking as the Trump administration’s most recent demolition of the desert wilderness has been, scientists and Interior Department officials say that it is just a continuation of the destruction that has been unfolding for years as US-Mexico border militarization has intensified.

Archaeologists Rick and Sandy Martynec are among those who have witnessed the erosion of environmental protections firsthand. For the past 25 years, the Martynecs, independent researchers, have been conducting archaeological surveys in Arizona along the US-Mexico border. In a roughly 20-by-20-mile stretch of desert, the husband and wife team has documented more than 600 distinct archeological sites, ranging from 10,000-year-old Paleo-Indian campsites to O’odham farming villages inhabited as recently as the 18th century.

As they’ve documented the rich historical and cultural records, the couple has seen a fragile desert ecosystem become a casualty of US border policy. About two decades ago, when the Martynecs were doing survey work in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge at Las Playas—a series of dry lakebeds that once filled during the summer monsoon season—they frequently encountered wildlife, including coyotes, mountain lions, and more than a dozen bird species such as hummingbirds and owls. The pooling of the water in the lakebeds, which lie on both sides of the border, has sustained this unique desert environment.

But they have also observed something else: As the number of migrants coming across the border increased in the early 2000s, so too did the roads within the refuge, 90 percent of which is designated wilderness. Small, rarely used dirt tracks were becoming well-traveled multilane roads used primarily by Border Patrol agents. In the post-9/11 period, Border Patrol was granted expansive new powers and funding to police the border. In one instance, Rick Martynec measured a frequently used Border Patrol “corridor” that was at least 200 yards wide. “Until you actually see it, walk it, it just can’t be imagined,” Martynec said.

The new roads have begun to change the way water moves in this part of the Sonoran Desert. Now when seasonal rains occur, the water no longer flows into the playas but often runs in torrents along the roadways. “Almost every conceivable water source has been choked off by roads and by dams,” Martynec said.

This has had a devastating impact on the region’s ecology. Entire groves of mesquite trees and vegetation surrounding the playas have withered. The birds and mammals have largely disappeared. Martynec said that they haven’t seen a coyote out there in five or six years. The biologically complex desert soil—which was once home to ephemeral grasses and small trees and which can take decades to recover once disturbed—looks like a cracked moonscape. Around 2010, after completing their archaeological research in the region, some of it carried out on behalf of the Cabeza Prieta refuge, the Martynecs wrote a separate seven-page paper titled “The Death of Las Playas?”

The end of the story has an interesting perspective:

Due north of Las Playas is the Growler Valley, one of the most remote and deadly routes for migrants traveling through the desert. For the past several years, the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths has enlisted volunteers to leave water and food at various locations within the refuge.

But the Trump administration, with assistance from the Fish and Wildlife Service and other land-management agencies, has begun to crack down on their activities. At one trial, a federal judge said that the activists had undermined “the national decision to maintain the refuge in its pristine nature.” Earlier this year, four members of the group were convicted and several more currently face trial for, among other things, violating the Wilderness Act.

#trump wall #US Mexico border #Arizona #desert #Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

[scifigeneration]

Friday essay: is this the Endgame - and did we win or did we lose?

by Danielle Clode

In Avengers: Endgame, Clint Barton (aka Hawkeye) experiences insurmountable loss. Perhaps his grief represents our fear of making sacrifices to save the planet. Marvel Studios/IMDB

I had a momentary brain-fade when I went to the movies this week.

“Three tickets to … what’s it called again?” I asked.

“Endgame”, the ticket seller replied firmly, “What other movie is there?”

At over three hours long, it certainly is a movie for the fans, packed full of emotionally satisfying vignettes and snappy interactions for the cast of thousands that has become the Avengers trademark. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a faster three-hour movie.

Avengers: Endgame, the concluding half of Avengers: Infinity War, has quickly become one of the biggest grossing movies of all time. By pure numbers these are important and influential movies. So what are they are telling us?

Let me say at the outset that this is not a critique of the movie itself. I’m not going to document plot holes, flaws in logic or whether or not the science is correct. I’m happy to suspend a bit of disbelief for the sake of a good story. But I am interested in the function that stories like these play and what they reveal about our broader hopes and fears.

Jeremy Renner and Ava Russo in Avengers: Endgame. Marvel Studios/IMDB

Although not pitched as one, Endgame is an environmental movie – and an apt one for our times. Its predecessor, Infinity War, saw the world under threat from powerful villain Thanos, whose home world had been destroyed by overpopulation and resource exploitation. His grief sets him on a quest (involving, naturally, a gauntlet studded with variously magical and powerful stones) to halve the population of the universe.

Despite being cast as the antagonist, it is Thanos’s character who undertakes the “hero’s journey” in this movie. By the end of Infinity War, Thanos manages to achieve his goal across the universe, without violence – painlessly and humanely, with a click of the fingers – wiping out exactly 50% of the population at random, all at once.

It’s a little unclear in Infinity War what Thanos intends to reduce: half the human population or half of all sentient life. His track record had focussed on people, killing “people planet by planet, massacre by massacre”. In Endgame the goal is broadened. Not just all humans or even all sentient life forms, not just the resource exploiters and over-users, but half of all life forms. It’s a telling ecological misstep.

Clearly, it’s the people that matter and humans in particular. Despite having the breadth of the universe as a stage, even the alien Avengers are strikingly Earth-centric, with the exception of Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers, who is the only one, aside from Thanos, who cares that the same thing is happening across thousands of planets.

Various critics have discussed whether Thanos’s population reduction strategy would work – at least in terms of halving the human population of Earth. And they generally conclude that it wouldn’t.

But this is an over-simplification of the movie’s message. The specific population reduction strategy Thanos employs can also be read as a broader environmental goal – to “restore” ecological balance. Climate change, pollution, species extinctions, overpopulation, resource use and distribution are all connected parts of the broader issue of environmental sustainability. The question is not, is population reduction a viable strategy? (Probably not.) Nor even, would a reduced human population be good for the planet? (Perhaps, if it were sustainable.)

The question Endgame poses for us is, are we willing to make personal sacrifices to save our own futures? To which the answer is a categorical no.

Environmental activists from Greenpeace protest against climate change in Berlin in May 2019. Felipe Trueba/EPA/AAP

Our greatest fears

Eco-catastrophe fiction is often castigated for not being scientifically accurate, and for failing to promote action on any of the various threats that face our planet – overpopulation, pollution, extinction, nuclear fallout, climate change. But when my colleague and I looked at climate change fiction across the centuries, we found that such stories are not about providing answers to our problems, but articulating our greatest fears. These stories – in book or movie form – are reflections of how society imagines the world of the future.

Eco-catastrophe stories have been a part of our culture from the earliest mythological stories of floods, fires, eruptions and storms. These stories of punishment and redemption form the foundation for much of our literature, not least that of superheroes with god-like or even godly powers.

The emergence of both the novel (and modern science) in the 17th and 18th centuries saw a growing awareness of environmental change reflected in fiction. Early Romantic literature may have seen climate change as a metaphor for social progress and human advancement into a Utopia, but that rapidly shifted into the dystopian fears that dominate environmental fictional literature today.

From the mid-19th century onwards, fiction, and particularly science fiction, closely tracked developments in science. Our deeper understanding of past ice-ages and the influence of solar variation, geological instability and the oscillations of the earth on climate, emerged in stories like Gabriel De Tarde’s Underground Man, S Fowler Wright’s Deluge and William Wallace Cook’s Tales of Twenty Hundred.

Goodreads

Extra-terrestrial influences (comets rather than aliens) provided the catalyst for eco-catastrophe fiction in the 19th and 20th centuries. This phase was a phenomenon undoubtedly inspired by the first-hand experience of the “little Ice Age” which caused widespread famine, crop failures, and food riots across the Northern Hemisphere. Astronomer Camille Flammarion’s Omega: The Last Days of the World (1893-4) was perhaps one of the most influential of the comet-inspired fictions and marked the continuing dominance of dystopian over utopian visions for the future.

This pattern continued into the 20th and 21st centuries and, as the climate change debate expanded from a restricted scientific focus to a broader social and political dimension, the literature expanded from science fiction to a broader range of literary forms. Eco-catastrophe has emerged in every genre from thrillers to literary fiction and particularly young adult fiction. And of course, in the visual forms of storytelling – superhero, science fiction and apocalypse movies.

A sense of inevitability and hopelessness pervades much of the modern literature on climate change, irrespective of sub-genre. Rarely is climate change depicted as being solved by human agency. For many, the damage of climate change can only be overcome with the assistance of either supernatural or extra-terrestrial powers. We can see the same patterns in movies where the future of humanity is so often saved by superior intelligence rather than our own, either aliens, angels, or, as in Interstellar, our unrecognisably advanced selves.

Anne Hathaway and Wes Bentley in Interstellar, a film where only our unrecognisably advanced selves can save humanity. Warner Bros/Paramount Pictures/IMDB

Distrust of scientists

The history of eco-castastrophic stories reveals that, far from being agents of resolution and improvement, scientists are mostly depicted as untrustworthy or even responsible for the crisis. Environmentalists are even less trustworthy than the scientists; they are frequently depicted as extremist and violent loonies.

This distrust is reflected throughout the Avengers franchise. The original 2012 Avengers film saw Tony Stark’s (aka Iron Man) sustainable power source, the Arc Reactor, co-opted to create a wormhole entry point for alien invasion. The shadowy law enforcement agency, SHIELD, subverts research into the environmental potential of the Tesseract, an alien object with infinite energy, for weapons development. The same theme recurs – green technology is dangerous and scientists cannot be trusted.

Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) in The Avengers (2012). Marvel Studios/IMDB

And nor can “environmentalists” like Thanos. On his home planet, his environmental crusade earns him the title “The Mad Titan”. By the end of Infinity War, however, he has completed his quest, accepted the sacrifice his choices entail, and his hero’s journey is at an end. Both he and the world have been transformed into a new order. Thanos sits in the countryside and watches the sunset.

Except that it’s not a happy ending. Endgame opens with a powerful scene that illustrates the central problem. Clint Barton (or to use his “made-up name”, Hawkeye) is picnicking with his family in the country – having given up his action persona – and is teaching his daughter to shoot arrows. As he turns away for a moment, his daughter, wife and two sons all suddenly disappear – victims of the 50% erasure. Hawkeye’s loss is both excessive and insurmountable. He loses everything.

Versions of this continuing loss permeate the movie. Hawkeye retreats into his vengeful violent superhero persona. Thor drinks himself, comically, into oblivion. Captain America runs group counselling sessions helping people to move on.

The differing manifestations of grief are represented in different characters – denial, anger, depression, bargaining, even acceptance. But these are not stages that characters work through. Ultimately all the characters are grief-stricken and unable to move forwards, except for Tony Stark, who has moved on but decides that, in a hastily explained piece of time-travel sleight of hand, he can fix the most of the problems without losing the future he has created for himself.

Nonetheless, the future in which our environmental problems are resolved is infused with melancholy. While Thanos’s rural retreat is a pastoral idyll, the rest of the world is empty, seemingly devoid of life. When Captain America mentions the environmental restoration, he is flippantly dismissed by Black Widow:

You know, if you’re about to tell me to look on the bright side - I’m about to hit you in the head with a peanut butter sandwich.

In traditional superhero stories, the hero(ine) must sacrifice the thing they love most for the betterment of the world. But in Infinity War and Endgame, the heroes sacrifice the betterment of the world to save (or at least reconcile with) the things they love best. Individual interests win out over social or environmental restoration. Rather than securing the future we need, they save the world of the past. With superheroes like this, my sympathies lie with the villains (and not just because of Tom Hiddleston).

Tom Hiddleston in Avengers: Infinity War. With superheroes like the Marvel team, who needs villains? Marvel Studios/IMDB

So, is Endgame a paean to conservative values, a retreat to an idealised version of the past, a failure to meet the genuine challenges that face the Earth and its ever expanding human population?

Nathaniel Rich, author of Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) once argued: “I don’t think that the novelist necessarily has the responsibility to write about global warming … but I do feel novelists should write about what these things do to the human heart.” This is true of movies too.

What Endgame reveals is that in our hearts we are afraid that the price of environmental salvation is too high, that the losses will be too great, that we will not be able to cope with the scale of the personal sacrifice required.

An insight into the cultural zeitgeist

There is no point in complaining that there are no great climate change movies, or books, with real solutions, or which inspire real action. This is not their purpose. Movies and books don’t help us to overcome our fears, they simply express them. But surely they also reinforce them. Cliched fears about the risks of environmental change, scientists and technology may not be intentionally promoted but they risk promulgating pervasive subconscious biases that both perpetuate and delay vital cultural change.

The real risks of environmental inaction, of course, massively outweigh the risks of any environmental action. But that message does not yet seem to be permeating the popular psyche.

It may well be true, too, that the worst environmental costs will not be borne by the relatively well-off viewers of Avengers movies, but disproportionately by poorer and more vulnerable communities (something that only heightens the irony of fictional East African nation Wakanda’s role in the Avengers franchise).

A 2017 climate march in Washington DC. Nicole S Glass/ Shutterstock

Effective environmental action does not demand the destruction of half the human population. But it does require the vastly more efficient use and distribution of resources. The sacrifice is not that of the individual, but the vested interests in old-world resources and technology who would prefer not to incur the costs of change. Responding to environmental change does not threaten our comforts, but failing to act will.

Endgame isn’t the endgame: it’s an insight into the cultural zeitgeist. Neither threats nor solutions come from purple aliens, gods or superheroes. They come from us – politicians, scientists, environmentalists, industry and the general public.

Markets, technology and industries can and will adapt rapidly to changing circumstances, in milliseconds, months or even decades. Economies recover, but species do not. The environment takes millennia to adapt and what is lost never comes back. We need to face our fears and find solutions to these problems, rather than just perpetuating the fantasy of regressing into the past.

As Peter Parker says: “You can’t be a friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, if there’s no neighbourhood.”

About The Author:

Danielle Clode is a Senior Research Fellow in Creative Writing at Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

#movies #science fiction #science in cinema #Marvel #Avengers Endgame #science #science communication #Climate Change #cli-fi #avengers infinity war

[orbemnews]

What to Save? Climate Change Forces Brutal Choices at National Parks. For more than a century, the core mission of the National Park Service has been preserving the natural heritage of the United States. But now, as the planet warms, transforming ecosystems, the agency is conceding that its traditional goal of absolute conservation is no longer viable in many cases. Late last month the service published an 80-page document that lays out new guidance for park managers in the era of climate change. The document, along with two peer-reviewed papers, is essentially a tool kit for the new world. It aims to help park ecologists and managers confront the fact that, increasingly, they must now actively choose what to save, what to shepherd through radical environmental transformation and what will vanish forever. “The concept of things going back to some historical fixed condition is really just no longer tenable,” said Patty Glick, a senior scientist for climate adaptation at the National Wildlife Federation and one of the lead authors of the document. The new research and guidance — which focus on how to plan for worst-case scenarios, decide what species and landscapes to prioritize, and how to assess the risk of relocating those that can’t survive otherwise — represent a kind of “reckoning” for the Park Service, Ms. Glick said. For a profession long tied to maintaining historical precedents, the change is brutal, said Gregor W. Schuurman, a scientist with the climate change response program at the Park Service who helped to write the new guidance. “It’s bargaining. Nobody wants to do this. We all got in this game, as the Park Service mission says, to ‘conserve unimpaired,’” Dr. Schuurman said. “But if you can’t do that in the way you thought, you have to see what you can do. There’s often more flexibility there than one imagines.” The team behind the report kept a low profile during the Trump Administration, when the Park Service was at the center of frequent political battles. In 2018, for example, managers tried to delete humanity’s role in climate change from a report on sea-level rise. The day before President Biden’s inauguration, they began publishing their papers, which were years in the making. The first one, titled “Resist, Accept, Direct,” aims to help park employees triage species and landscapes. In some cases, that will mean giving up long efforts to save them. The second outlines how to assess risks when relocating species. That may be crucial to saving plants and animals that can no longer survive in their natural habitat. Those two papers were the basis for the guidance published last month. On the very first page of that document, set over a photo of the charred Santa Monica Mountains after the 2018 Woolsey fire, the authors state that “it will not be possible to safeguard all park resources, processes, assets, and values in their current form or context over the long term.” Decisions about what to protect are especially imminent for forests, where changes are leading some researchers to wonder if the age of North American woodlands is coming to an end. In the United States Southwest, for example, research suggests that, in the event of wildfires, up to 30 percent of forestland might never grow back because global warming favors shrubs or grasslands in their ranges. Joshua trees appear likely to lose all of their habitat in their namesake national park by the end of the century. The new guidelines essentially ask park managers to think beyond resistance to change, begin considering transformation as the prevailing theme to be greeted and managed. In some isolated cases, resisting ecological change might work for a while. In other cases, losses must be accepted. But just as often, there may be room to shepherd changes in a less calamitous direction. For example, some native tree species in Acadia National Park, Maine, are struggling to survive as temperatures warm. Invasive, brambly shrubs, brought to the United States as ornamental plants, are much better at adapting to the warmer temperatures than native species and are quickly moving in to take their place. The invasives produce leaves earlier in spring than native species, shading out any young tree that tries to emerge. And, as mild weather arrives earlier and earlier (the growing season has already lengthened by two months in coastal Maine over the last century and a half because of global warming), the brambles only get more successful and abundant. “They’re dense thickets and you can’t walk through them,” said Abraham Miller-Rushing, an ecologist and the science coordinator at Acadia National Park. They’re also a perfect habitat for ticks that can carry Lyme disease. For the last 30 years, the park has sent out teams of people to cut down and pull out the shrubs. But that won’t work for long. “The models show that of the 10 most common tree species in the park, nine of them are predicted to lose habitat over the next 80 years, either declining a lot or disappearing entirely,” Dr. Miller-Rushing said. That includes red spruce, which make up 40 percent of the trees in the park. If those disappear, much of the forest floor would suddenly open to the invasive shrubs, which would fill the open space faster than any manual effort could stop them. Right now, park managers are still finding new red spruce saplings around the park, which is a good sign. But things could change very quickly — much sooner than 80 years from now. “That decline could be rapid,” Dr. Miller-Rushing said. Red spruce is very sensitive to drought. “You could imagine a scenario where we get a drought combined with an insect pest or pathogen. That could knock back the spruce really quickly.” It’s already happened to the red pine. Almost every one of the species in the park has been wiped out over the past 6 years by a single invasive insect, the red pine scale. “That’s likely how a lot of these transitions will happen,” Dr. Miller-Rushing said. “Not slow, but fast.” Acadia park managers are already using the Resist, Accept, Direct framework to decide what to do. Right now, they are considering selecting certain southerly tree species to hand-plant inside the park, in the hope that they will avoid a forest full of brambles. Whatever action they take, in the coming decades, the park won’t look like the Acadia of the past. “When our forests change to hardwoods, or, God forbid, invasive shrub land, the postcards would look different then,” Dr. Miller-Rushing said. “There’s definitely a sense of loss,” he added, but also “a sense of urgency.” Dr. Miller-Rushing finished his doctorate in conservation biology in 2007. At the time, he said, protected areas like the national parks were still being thought about as static places that could be preserved forever with the right techniques. “We weren’t being trained on how to manage for change,” he said. “We were being trained on how to keep things like they were in the past.” That means nearly everyone in his line of work was caught unprepared for the current reality. “You have a whole profession of people having to shift how we think,” Dr. Miller-Rushing said. The changes come at a time when other aspects of America’s traditional approach to conservation, like the forced removal of Indigenous people from the lands they had managed for thousands of years, are also being re-examined. Far from being untouched expanses, it is now understood that those lands were actually shaped by Native American stewardship. Researchers have found evidence, for example, that Native burning practices helped keep the lush oak and pine forests that Europeans colonists encountered along the East Coast healthy and free of undesirable species. Amid those big shifts, the new framework appears to be gaining acceptance, including outside the Park Service. In April, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service published a new webpage about Resist, Accept, Direct, acknowledging that climate change is fundamentally shifting the ecology inside several of its wildlife refuges. In 2017, Canadian officials got in touch, looking for new approaches to conservation under climate change. Parks Canada has been considering the concept since then. And, in March, Dr. Schuurman was invited to present the framework to officials at South Africa’s park service. “I think what the Park Service is proposing here is a well thought-out, reasonable response,” said Susan G. Clark, an adjunct professor of wildlife ecology and policy sciences at the Yale School of the Environment who was not involved in producing the new documents. “It does signal the Park Service rethinking its responsibilities, and also what it can and can’t do in the face of all this change.” “We’ll have to learn as we go, and we’ll have to learn very quickly,” Dr. Clark added. “There’s clearly a lot more coming.” Dr. Schuurman said he hoped the framework would help managers make smart choices in an uncertain world. For now, he said, climate change is teaching them to abandon the concept of “forever.” It doesn’t apply to the parks they manage today. “Climate change busts that up.” According to Dr. Miller-Rushing, the former approach might have been flawed from the beginning. The rule of nature, after all, is change. Now, the climate crisis is making that clear. “We were probably always wrong to think about protected places as static,” he said. Source link Orbem News #brutal #Change #choices #Climate #forces #National #parks #save

[sciencespies]

Climate change caused mangrove collapse in Oman

https://sciencespies.com/nature/climate-change-caused-mangrove-collapse-in-oman/

Climate change caused mangrove collapse in Oman

Most of the mangrove forests on the coasts of Oman disappeared about 6,000 years ago. Until now, the reason for this was not entirely clear. A current study of the University of Bonn (Germany) now sheds light on this: It indicates that the collapse of coastal ecosystems was caused by climatic changes. In contrast, falling sea level or overuse by humans are not likely to be the reasons. The speed of the mangrove extinction was dramatic: Many of the stocks were irreversibly lost within a few decades. The results are published in the journal Quaternary Research.

Mangroves are trees that occupy a very special ecological niche: They grow in the so-called tidal range, meaning coastal areas that are under water at high tide and dry at low tide. Mangroves like a warm climate; most species do not tolerate sea surface temperatures below 24 °C (75°F). They are tolerant to salt, but only up to a tolerance limit that varies from species to species. “This is why we find them nowadays mostly in regions where enough rain falls to reduce salinization of the soil,” explains Valeska Decker of the Institute for Geosciences at the University of Bonn, the lead author of the study.

Fossil finds prove that there used to be many mangrove lagoons on the coast of Oman. However, some 6,000 years ago these suddenly largely vanished – the reasons for this were previously disputed. Over the past few years, Decker traveled several times to the easternmost country of the Arabian Peninsula to pursue this question for her doctoral thesis. With the support of her doctoral supervisor Prof. Gösta Hoffmann, she compiled numerous geochemical, sedimentological and archaeological findings into an overall picture. “From our point of view, everything suggests that the collapse of these ecosystems has climatic reasons,” she says.

Low pressure trough shifted to the south

Along the equator there is a low pressure trough, the Intertropical Convergence Zone, which is situated a little further north or south depending on the season. The Indian summer monsoon, for example, is linked to this zone. It is believed that about 10,000 years ago this zone was much further north than today, which meant the monsoon affected large parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Just over 6,000 years ago this low-pressure trough then shifted to the south, but the reason for this and how fast is still not completely clear.

“That this was the case has been well documented for several years,” explains Decker. “Our results now indicate that this climate change had two effects: On the one hand, it caused salinization of the soil, which put the mangroves under extreme stress. On the other hand, the vegetation cover in the affected areas decreased in general due to the greater drought.” This increased erosion: The wind carried large amounts of the barren soil into the lagoons. These silted up and successively dried up. The whole thing happened surprisingly fast: “The ecosystems probably disappeared within a few decades,” stresses Decker. According to previous studies, the environmental changes were gradual. The mangrove ecosystems struggled till a certain threshold was reached and then collapsed within decades. Nowadays, the only mangroves in Oman are those of a particularly robust species and are found only in a few places.

She was able to exclude other possible causes for the disappearance of the mangroves in her study. For example, the researchers found no evidence of a drop in sea level 6,000 years ago that could have triggered the mangrove extinction. “Archaeological findings also speak against a man-made ecological catastrophe,” she says. “It is true that there were humans living in the coastal regions who used the mangroves as firewood. However, they were nomads who did not build permanent settlements. This meant that their need for wood was relatively low – low enough to rule out overuse as a cause.”

Decker and her colleagues now want to further investigate how much the annual precipitation changed and what impact this had on the region. To this end, the researchers plan to study the pollen that has persisted in the lagoon sediment for thousands of years. They want to find out how the vegetation changed as a result of the drought. The results could also be relevant for us: In many regions of the world, the climate is changing at a dramatic pace. Germany has also suffered increasingly from long droughts in recent years. Foresters are therefore already planning to plant more drought-resistant species in this country; this is a consequence of climate change that may leave long-term marks in the history of vegetation.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Bonn. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

#Nature

#Nature

[evolutionsvoid]

Despite centuries of exploration and documentation, the world still holds many mysteries. Islands that no one has ever stepped foot on, impenetrable mountains or jungles that no one is able to conquer. Things lurking in the shadows that we cannot comprehend, and phenomena so bizarre that our minds cannot grasp their purpose. No matter how hard we may try as a civilized world, there will still be mysteries out there. The maps shall always have blurred edges and the untamed wilds shall always speak of monsters. We seek to conquer the unknown, but it is a being who shall always win the war, despite the number of battles it loses. As a natural historian, it is frustrating, but exhilarating at the same time. It is irritating to know that there will always be species or creatures that elude our sights and understanding, but that at least means there is still something to search for. I may curse at the odd critter that escapes my eyes and notes, but it gives me something to hunt for. I may dream of a day where I have found and documented every living thing in this world, but it is a thought that dwells in my nightmares as well. I can't help but think that an accomplishment of that enormity would only serve make our world that much smaller. Which is better: being surrounded by vast stretches of the unknown, or being fully aware of the size of the box you are forever trapped in? It makes you wonder... Excuse me for my ramblings and meanderings, I just got lost in thought! What I was trying to say was that the world is filled with unknown creatures and beasts, many who still elude documentation. It is frustrating to come up empty when searching for myths and legends, but in some instances, there are even worse outcomes. It is bad enough to not know the creature that lurks in the shadows, but it is even worse to not understand them when you see them in broad daylight. What I am referring to, of course, is the famous Bunyip. 

In a time when we are still baffled by certain myths and monsters, it seems strange to say that a certain species is famous for being mysterious. You would think that would be a label that applied to a lot of mythical beasties, but bizarrely enough, the Bunyip takes the cake on that. That is because the Bunyip has been actually sighted multiple times, but no one can ever freaking agree on what it looks like! Each description of it seems to vary between observers, to the point where people have begun to believe that the Bunyip has magical powers of obfuscation. You get people saying that it has the tusks of a walrus, but than others claim it has the beak of a bird. Some state that it has hair upon its back, but the next guy you ask will say it has scales! It is such a muddled mess, that many natural historians have stopped asking local opinions when it comes to the Bunyip. A part of it is to avoid messing up their own studies, but a big reason to stop asking is to avoid starting anymore bar fights. So, what do we know about the Bunyip? The big thing that we know is that it likes water. Many sightings have occurred around lakes and ponds, with the creature partially emerging from the murky depths. Very rarely does it ever show more than its head and back, but even when it does full body exposure, people still get confused. Many can at least agree to a long neck, which rises from the waters to search for prey. Those who wander in the shallows or by the shore will be prime targets for its attack. When prey gets close to its watery home, it shall grab them in its fangs/tusks/beak/whatever and drag them down under. All that is seen from this quick attack is thrashing in the water, and then the still calm of a glassy surface. At this point, it is obvious that the Bunyip hungers for meat, and is mainly a predator. This has led to many legends and horror stories crafted around this creature, most of them used to keep children away from strange ponds and unknown waters. With no agreement on its appearance, the Bunyip has essentially become a boogieman for the locals. The morals that come from its tales range from "don't go swimming by yourself" to "tourists should really watch where they are going." Despite its tendency to eat unwary travelers and foolish swimmers, the Bunyip has also gained a humorous side in local culture. The Bunyip always comes up in conversations when one is making fun of a drunk or a crazy person. "And you rode a Bunyip all the way home," is a phrase that people love to say when some drunk is trying to describe the events of a forgetful night. Whenever someone fails to properly describe something, or is at a loss of words, some people will just say "must have been a Bunyip." The Bunyip is often a favorite creature to bring up around outsiders, mainly to make fun of them or to pull a prank. One particular joke that locals like to pull is to dress up someone in a fake Bunyip getup and then try to scare travelers. The costumes are often obviously fake and outlandish, which is part of the joke. The "Bunyip" will come rushing out, and the locals will yell "Look out! A Bunyip!" This is obvious bait for a tourist to say "that's not a Bunyip!" At that point the person in the costume will put their hands on their hips and say "Oh yeah? Then what is?" Hilarity promptly ensues from the locals. The actual appearance of the Bunyip is something that will probably elude us for quite some time. Attempts to capture or kill one of these creatures have all failed. They love to stick to murky lakes, and they only thing they ever really show is their heads. To make it even harder, Bunyips are deceptively strong. In one instance, a team of hunters got a rope around the Bunyip's neck and tried to pull the beast from the waters. The rope failed to budge the creature, and it didn't even seem to choke it. Eventually, the rope snapped from the stress, and the creature retreated to the depths. They also appear to be quite fast when they need to be, able to dodge their heads away from spears and arrows. Even when someone lands a hit on their head, the Bunyip seems to just shake this off and then disappears down below. Diving down below to spot it is impossible, due to the dirty waters and hungry creature. Draining the pond and lake is never really an option, since people like their water sources. In one case, a mage came to the pond of a Bunyip and used their fire spells to bring the water body to a boil. They hoped to kill the beast, so that they could haul the body out and finally get a look at it. What came out of the boiling waters, however, were just meaty chunks. The seething waters seemed to just cause the creature to burst, leaving it in an unidentifiable state. Heck, they couldn't even find its bones! All attempts at identifying this creature have come back with failures, and a part of me believes that people are starting to stop trying. Locals have begun to leave the creatures be, and often discourage others from trying to hunt them. Even natural historians have started to shy away from studying this mysterious creature, going after more interesting prey. Perhaps we as a society are starting to understand the need for mystery. To have that one stone that we do not turn over, just to have the comfort of knowing there is still more out there.           Chlora Myron Dryad Natural Historian Note written below: Chlora, this entry itself is fine, but I really think we should cut out your existential crisis at the beginning there.  -Eucella- Hastily scrawled note below: I know a few things YOU could cut out!  -Chlora- ------------------------------------------------------------- Some time ago, I was looking up stuff about the Bunyip, trying to find inspiration for a design. I was stumbling around Wikipedia, when it said that some guy named George French Angus collected descriptions of the beast and said (supposedly) that its common form was that of a giant starfish (unconfirmed if he or anyone ever actually said that. It is Wikipedia after all). Despite no sources or ways to confirm that this statement is actually real, I immediately ran with it. The chance to turn some mythical beast into an echinoderm could not be passed up, and I refused to go with any other interpretation. So that is why the Bunyip is a sea star in my universe. Because supposedly some guy maybe once said that it could possibly be, but no one really knows, a giant starfish but that is just what he heard supposedly. A perfectly credible source!     It is also kind of funny to write an entry about a creature that is hard to interpret, despite the fact that the picture shows the thing plain as day. Oh well

#bunyip #monster #creature #myth #art #drawing #starfish #sea star

[loveanimalstory-blog]

Chimpanzees Are Going Through a Tragic Loss

Imagine that an alien species landed on Earth and, through their mere presence, those aliens caused our art to fade, our music to homogenize, and our technological know-how to disappear. that's effectively what humans are doing to our closest relatives—chimpanzees. Back in 1999, a team of scientists led by Andrew Whiten (and including Jane Goodall) showed that chimpanzees from different parts of Africa behave very differently from each other. Some groups use sticks to extract honey, while others use those self-same tools to fish for ants. Some would get each other’s attention by rapping branches with their knuckles, while others did it by loudly ripping leaves with their teeth. The team identified 39 of those traditions that are practiced by some communities but not others—a pattern that, at the time, hadn’t been seen in any animal except humans. it had been evidence, the team said, that chimps have their own cultures. It took an extended time to convince skeptics that such cultures exist, but now we've many samples of animals learning local traditions from each other. Some orangutans blow raspberries at one another before they are going to bed. One dolphin learned to tail-walk from captive individuals and spread that trick to its own wild peers once released. Humpbacks and other whales have distinctive calls and songs in several seas. And chimps still stand out with “one of the foremost impressive cultural repertoires of nonhuman animals,” says Ammie Kalan, of the Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. But just when many scientists have come to simply accept the existence of animal cultures, many of these cultures might vanish. Kalan and her colleagues have shown, through years of intensive fieldwork, that the very presence of humans has eroded the range of chimpanzee behavior. Where we flourish, their cultures shrivel. it's a bitterly ironic thing to find out on the 20th anniversary of Whiten’s classic study. “It’s amazing to think that just 60 years ago, we knew next to zilch of the behavior of our sister species within the wild,” Whiten says. “But now, even as we are truly going to know our primate cousins, the actions of humans are closing the window on all we've discovered.” “Sometimes within the rush to conserve the species, I feel we ditch the individuals,” says Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews. “Each population, each community, even each generation of chimpanzees is exclusive . an occasion might only have a little impact on the entire population of chimpanzees, but it's going to wipe out a whole community—an entire culture. regardless of what we do to revive habitat or support increase, we may never be ready to restore that culture.” Since 2010, Kalan has been performing on the Pan African Programme, an intensive effort to catalog chimp behavior in 46 sites across the species’ entire range, led by Hjalmar Kühl, Christophe Boesch, and Mimi Arandjelovic. At each site, the team checked whether chimps were completing any of 31 different behaviors, including many from Whiten’s original list, and a few that had only been recently discovered. “We had things like termite fishing, and fishing, algae fishing, stone-throwing, leaf clipping, using sticks as marrow picks, using caves, bathing, and nut-cracking,” Kalan says. After all this work, the team showed that chimps living in areas most suffering from humans were 88 percent less likely to point out anybody of the 31 behaviors than those living within the most unaffected regions. “However we divided the info, we got an equivalent very obvious pattern,” Kalan says. It’s hard to prove a negative, though, and it’s always possible that the chimps were up to their old tricks without the team noticing. But the Pan African Programme team filmed the apes using camera traps, to capture behavior without disturbing the animals. It checked surely traditions by trying to find discarded tools or checking for specific foods among the apes’ poop. And it scored the chimps generously: albeit it only saw a specific behavior once, it recorded the behavior as being present. If anything, the new results underestimate the extent to which humans suppress chimpanzee cultures. Such suppression isn’t deliberate. Chimpanzees and other apes learn skills and customs from each other, and people chains of tradition depend upon having enough individuals to find out from. So when humans kill chimps for bushmeat, they aren’t just killing individuals—they also are destroying opportunities for the survivors to find out new things. once they fragment the forests during which chimps live, they’re stopping the flow of ideas between populations. The primatologist Carel van Schaik wrote about these problems in 2002 after studying orangutans, and he predicted then that “major traditional erosion is to be expected altogether great apes.” “I realized that testing the hypothesis would be extremely difficult,” van Schaik says, but “thanks to the gargantuan efforts by this team, we have the primary data, and that they appear to totally confirm the model. It’s a really impressive study.” And it’s worrying, he adds, because many of those cultural behaviors aren’t arbitrary. They’re adaptations, and their loss could push an already species even closer to extinction. No one knows whether the hemorrhage of chimp culture is getting worse. Few places have tracked chimp behavior over long periods, and people that have also are more likely to possess protected their animals from human influence. And “not all human impacts are an equivalent,” cautions Hobaiter, the University of St. Andrews primatologist. Clearing forests for vegetable oil is extremely different from sustainably employing a forest as a food source. The Pan African Programme team clumped many indicators of human presence into one metric, but teasing them apart is vital. “Long-term conservation approaches are only getting to be effective through the support and leadership of the local communities who live there,” Hobaiter says. In some cases, the presence of individuals might create new traditions to exchange those on the team’s list. In Bossou, Guinea, chimps have started drinking the wine that's fermented on palm trees. In other areas, they’ve taken to raiding human crops. “If you’re getting tons of energy from high-nutrition human foods, you don’t need to spend half your day breaking nuts,” Kalan says. There’s certainly evidence that chimps can adapt to the presence of humans—but can they innovate quickly enough to catch up on the loss of their old ways? Even if they will, isn’t that also a tragedy? We care about the loss of our own cultures. We work to document languages that are going extinct. We store old art in museums. We establish heritage sites to guard our cultural and historical treasures. It seems shortsighted—unimaginative, even—to be so concerned with our own traditions, but so blasé about those of our closest cousins, especially when we’ve barely begun to appreciate how rich their cultural landscape is often. Parts of that landscape could be lost before anyone realizes why it exists. In 2016, the Pan African Programme team reported that some West African chimpanzees habitually throw stones against an equivalent tree, creating buildups of rocks that are like human cairns. nobody knows why they are doing this. “We’re still investigating it,” Kalan says. “And we'd be running out of your time .” Other animals also are likely losing their ancestral knowledge at our hands. When poachers kill an elephant matriarch, they also kill her memories of hidden water sources and anti-lion tactics, leaving her family during a more precarious place. When moose and bighorn were exterminated from parts of the U.S., their generations-old awareness of the simplest migration routes died with them. Relocated individuals, who were meant to replenish the once-lost populations, didn’t know where to travel, then did not migrate. These discoveries mean that conservationists got to believe saving species during a completely new way—by preserving animal traditions also as bodies and genes. “Instead of focusing only on the conservation of genetically based entities like species, we now got to also consider culturally-based entities,” says Whiten, who made an identical argument last week during a paper co-written with many scholars of animal cultures. Kalan and therefore the Pan African Programme team even think that conservationists should recognize places connected with unique traditions as chimpanzee cultural-heritage sites. “When we encounter a nut-cracking site that’s been used for several generations, that site is a component of the cultural heritage of this one population of chimps,” Kalan says. an equivalent concept might apply to orangutans, whales, and other cultured creatures. “What we've learned about culture also can be applied to how we conserve animals,” Whiten adds. When people raised endangered whooping cranes in captivity, that they had to point out the naive birds the way to migrate by hopping into ultralight aircraft and showing them the way. “Where animals are to be reintroduced to areas during which they earlier became extinct, we've to form special efforts to reinstate the cultural knowledge they lost,”

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

New evidence that Siberian volcanic eruptions caused extinction 250 million years ago A team of scientists has found new evidence that the Great Permian Extinction, which occurred approximately 250 million years ago, was caused by massive volcanic eruptions that led to significant environmental changes. The study, which appears in the journal Scientific Reports, reports a global spike in the chemical element nickel at the time of extinction. The anomalous nickel most likely came from emanations related to the concurrent huge volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. These eruptions, the researchers say, are associated with nickel-rich magmatic intrusions -- rocks formed from the cooling of magma -- that contain some of the greatest deposits of nickel ore on the planet. Using an Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer, which measures the abundance of rare elements at their atomic level, the scientists documented anomalous peaks of nickel in regions ranging from the Arctic to India at the time of the Great Permian Extinction -- distributions that suggest these nickel anomalies were a worldwide phenomenon. This new evidence of a nickel fingerprint at the time of the extinctions convinced the scientists that it was the volcanic upheaval in Siberia that produced intense global warming and other environmental changes that led to the disappearance of more than 90 percent of all species. "The Siberian volcanic eruptions and related massive intrusions of nickel-rich magmas into the Earth's crust apparently emitted nickel-rich volatiles into the atmosphere, where they were distributed globally," explains New York University geologist Michael Rampino, the paper's senior author. "At the same time, explosive interactions of the magma with older coal deposits could have released large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, two greenhouse gases, which would explain the intense global warming recorded in the oceans and on land at the time of the mass extinctions. The warm oceans also became sluggish and depleted in dissolved oxygen, contributing to the extinction of many forms of life in the sea". "This new finding, which contributes further evidence that the Siberian Trap eruptions were the catalyst for the most extensive extinction event Earth has ever endured, has exciting implications," says Sedelia Rodriguez, a co-author of the paper and lecturer in the department of Environmental Science at Barnard College. "We look forward to expanding our research on nickel and other elements to delineate the specific areas affected by this eruption. In doing so, we hope to learn more about how these events trigger massive extinctions that affect both land and marine animals. Additionally, we hope this research will contribute to determining whether an event of this magnitude is possible in the future."

#space #science #Astronomy #astrophysics #planetary science #mass extinction #permian mass extinction #geology #physics #disaster

[hydrus]

Version 405

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I had a good week. 'system:number of tags' now supports namespace filtering.

number of tags

The 'system:number of tags' predicate now lets you attach a namespace, so you can search for 'files with two character tags' or 'files with more than one creator', or any other combination you can think of. Also, all 'number of tags' queries have been optimised, and are now typically much faster, particularly when mixed with other tags. They are also quickly cancellable, so if you do enter a very slow one, it should respond fairly quickly if you hit the 'stop search' button that appears after a delay.

I updated a bunch of the database code here to support new types of search. With the namespace searching, you can enter a blank namespace to search for 'unnamespaced' tags, and if you have a very specific need, you can now enter a wildcard namespace, like 'crea*', perhaps to help search for typos.

Unfortunately, I am removing 'system:number of tags' from the 'default system predicates' options panel. EDIT: I am hiding the whole panel now. This horrid stack of UI runs on ancient and difficult-to-update code, so rather than wrestle with it more, I plan to retire it and replace it with a clean system that also allows for editing search predicates in place (e.g. right-clicking an active search predicate and changing the >2 to >3 or similar).

I am really happy with how namespace counting turned out, and I have wanted it myself for a long time. Let me know how it works for you.

duplicate subscription queries

I believe the subscription data storage rewrite introduced a bug where when you paste queries into a sub and it says 'x y z are already in the sub and will not be added', they were being added anyway!

I fixed it. If you paste into subs a lot and get this message regularly, please check your subs for dupes! Now we have faster and more flexible subs, some users have also asked for broader de-duping tech that spans across multiple subs or does upper/lower case deduping, so I also expect to write buttons to do this in the near future, so you may also just want to wait for that.

ptr parents

Please note that the public tag repository is turning off tag parent submissions for regular users for a bit. If you haven't seen it already, the 'ptr' tab in manage tag parents will disappear in a few days. The task of cleaning up old and ongoing mistakes is proving too awkward with the current tools, so it is halted until I have a 'virtual parents' rework done, which will allow for more cleanly undoable parents (and hence less contagious bad ones). If you have seen 'shadow the hedgehog' or other bizarre tags appearing in odd places, this is what we hope to fix.

I have scheduled my next 'medium-size' job week, 408, to be for a 'presentation' tag cache, which will allow fast and accurate searching and loading of the tags you actually see on the front end. It will start with siblings, extend to tag filtering/censorship, and then parents will be made virtual and moved to it as well. This was a priority at the end of last year, before Qt and 2020's fun appeared, so I would now like to focus on it again.

full list

tag search:

system:number of tags now supports namespaces, for example 'find files with two character tags'! (issue #280)

it also supports wildcard namespaces, as now do regular namespace search predicates. both run faster. "crea*:anything" is now possible

system:number of tags has been optimised, and in many cases is now ten to a hundred times faster

system:number of tags still does not support siblings, something I hope to start correcting as of v408

both tag existence (numtags =0 or greater than 0) and tag count database routines now respond quickly to 'cancel search' commands, so if you do run a slow query (a bare 'has creator tag' search on 'all known files' on the PTR, for instance), you can now back out quickly after the 'stop' button appears

note that 'system:number of character tags greater than 0' and '= 0' are equivalent to +/-character:anything, which will be swapped in if you enter these. also, +/-unnamespaced:anything can now appear

the program is a bit better about determining =0 and greater than 0 and less than 1 being 'none' and 'any but none', when it needs to determine optimisations and special labels

unfortunately, I am taking away the default value for system:num tags in the options page (edit: I am killing the whole panel now). this old ugly mess of stacked predicate edit panels works on ancient, difficult to update code, so I will retire it and replace it with a unified system that is easy to use, supports in-search system predicate editing, and keeps up with changes automatically

system:number of tags is now comfortable with redundancies--if you add >2 and >4, it now knows that >4 is the true lower bound (previously, the one used was random)

boring code changes here:

updated tag existence and tag count searches to take advantage of the tag cache when in a specific file domain (which is pretty much all the time), which should speed them up significantly

updated tag existence and tag count searches to more carefully plan their queries, speeding them up both in advantageous and difficult situations

cleaned up tag existence and tag count code significantly

updated all edit system predicate panels to return full predicate objects, a step towards decoupling them and allowing in-place system predicate editing

wrote a new number test object to hold and help with number range test values. num tags now uses it, and eventually all range predicates will too

the namespace existence search code ('anything' queries) is now folded into the new generalised tag existence search code

streamlined how the search context propagates through all database tag searching--now, most queries do not know or care about domain or current/pending status--they just iterate over n tables as determined by a specialised routine

added a handful of unit tests for the new namespace num tag searching

.

database repair:

the database menu has a new entry, 'repopulate truncated mappings tables', under the newly renamed 'check and repair' submenu, which will try its best to 'fix' a client.mappings.db file that has been truncated due to hard drive fault by repopulating from the local-file-only tag cache. do not run this unless you know you need to

the 'help my db is broke.txt' document has a full update pass. the language is clearer, common issues and questions are better addressed, two new recovery routines are added, a section on the stages after boot recovery (like the new repopulate job above) is added, and I added my stock 'now become a backup patrician' nag at the end

the debug routine to clear cached service info numbers is now moved to the 'regenerate' database menu. this thing fixes hanging incorrect 'pending' counts until I can fix it properly

.

the rest:

fixed an issue where when you pasted queries into a subscription, those that were already in the sub (and got the dialog saying so), were being added anyway! I believe this bug came in the last few weeks, after the data storage rewrite. please check your pasted-into subs for dupes

fixed tab double middle-click behaviour (so you can spam page close), which I thought I had fixed last week but actually messed up completely right at the end (issue #314)

cleaned up some more of the page tab event code--it was a mess all around. should all be on Qt now, no wx hacks

network jobs will no longer wait for and consume bandwidth start tokens while all network traffic is paused. all bandwidth competition now halts. (previously, they would continue to consume tokens according to current rules and then all rush to start as soon as traffic was resumed)

fixed some client booru/client api requests to correctly 404 on missing file results, rather than 500

cleaned up some file sort code and fixed the sort string conversion, which was rendering the opposite sort direction (asc/desc) in summary labels (e.g. on manage favourite searches)

cleaned up some ui layout stretching code, including some borked tag import options expand sizing

improved some button and padding layout definitions, and improved, slightly, the way the top-right media viewer hover window lays itself out and changes its size on media change

improved some review services layout. should be fewer weird heights and widths in unusual situations, and the new multi-column list fits better

the manage subs dialog now saves its changes to db more cleanly and atomically

updated the default derpibooru parser to pull species tags. ten points if you can guess what that is most of the time

next week

Next week is cleanup. I did some layout/sizing work this week, and it was nice to clear out some cobwebs, so I'll keep pushing on that. I'd like to bring back system predicate defaults as well, with a cleaner system.

#release

[watchilove]

Ulysse Nardin has just offered a grant to the Azores University’s marine research centre to acquire ten pop-up biologging sensors to tag blue sharks in the Atlantic and document our knowledge of this endangered species. Swimming with blue sharks, his DIVER 44mm on the wrist, Fred Buyle tags marine animals in their natural environment using non-invasive techniques. Buyle is using his underwater photography and freediving skills to change the way we see the seas.

Many marine species are difficult to study because components of their lifecycles occur solely or partially outside of the observable realm of researchers. Advances in biologging tags have begun to give us glimpses into these unobservable states. However, many of these tags require rigid attachment to animals, which normally requires catching and restraining the animals. These methods become prohibitive with large, dangerous, or rare species, such as large predatory sharks, and can have significant consequences for individual survival and behaviour. Therefore, there is a need for methods and hardware to non-invasively and rigidly attach biologging tags to sharks that present limited effects on the animals and researchers.

Blue sharks tagging

Scientists in the Azores islands of Portugal are gaining a new understanding into the lives of one of the ocean’s most fascinating and mysterious creatures, the blue shark (Prionace glauca). Jorge Fontes, an Azorean native marine ecologist at Okeanos-UAc marine research center, University of the Azores, leads a team of researchers studying this charismatic elasmobranch in the Azores archipelago. Though recreational divers come from all over the world to see the memorizing sharks, not much is known about the natural history fine-scale behaviour and habitat use. With the help of Fred Buyle, combining their amazing freediving skills with creative non-invasive attachment methods and state-of-the-art prototype data and video logging towed tags, Jorge Fontes has been pioneering the investigation of their fine-scale behaviour and ecology, providing a new and unprecedented look into the life of these mysterious and elegant sharks.

The beauty of the new non-invasive tagging method lays on its simplicity. Like an underwater cowboy, the free divers place a self-releasing “lasso” that is retained on the shark’s pectoral fins as they constantly move forward to force the water flow through the gills, towing the low drag torpedo-shaped camera tags and sensors. These innovative tags, rated to 2000 meters, combine multiple high-frequency accelerometers, magnetometer, speed, depth, temperature sensors as well as HD video. At night and bellow 100 m, two red LEDs are triggered to allow a glimpse into the world of darkness that contrasts with the crystal-clear water at the top of the seamounts. Red lighting is designed to not impact the behaviour of both the sharks and their prey. After 24 or 48h, the lasso dissolves and the tag floats to the surface and to transmit satellite and radio beacons used to track and recover the tags for data download and recharge for the next deployment. Using these tools, the team will be able to learn some of their secrets.

Bold, respectful and talented, Fred Buyle has not finished surprising us.

Three sharks are killed by man every second as against five humans killed by sharks each year [1].

90 % of sharks have disappeared from the Mediterranean [2].

By targeting sick or wounded fish, sharks keep the ecosystem in balance [3].

Tens of tagged great white sharks led scientists to a remote mid-Pacific area where they gather for a few months. It was nicknamed the “White Shark Café” [4]!

The thresher shark uses its surprisingly long caudal fin to whip and knock out its prey [5].

[1] hécatombe (Marine Policy, 2013) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X13000055?via%3 Dihubhumains tués (International Shark Attack Files, 2019) https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/shark-attacks/yearly-worldwide-summary/ [2] disparition (Conservation Biology, 2008) https://web.stanford.edu/~ferretti/Ferretti.etal.2008.pdf [3] https://www.nausicaa.fr/article/les-requins-dans-le-monde/ https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/sharks-rays/sharks [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyCkbaBgYNA [5] https://www.cyanplanet.org/amigo-sa-mga-iho

Questions & Answers With Fred Buyle & Jorge Fontes

How long does the tag remain on the shark?  

It normally remains up to 48h but it can also be more.

What is the list of the parameters detected with the tags?

We record high frequency (100 Hz; 100 measurements per second), 3D acceleration, gyro and magnetic heading, speed, depth and temperature. Moreover, when the shark surfaces for less than a second, its GPS position is recorded. We also collect the HD video with red lights in the camera tag version. We are interested in the vertical and horizontal behaviours, feeding and social interactions and energy use, based on the tail beats and speed essentially.

Are there any advances in miniaturization of these biologging tags? They seem very big for the animal. 

We are currently looking for funding to miniaturize the tags. Anyway, the tags are super low drag, which signifies that we don’t add more than 5% drag and float to the animal, meaning we are limited to tagging blue sharks over 2.5 m long.

Is there a massive potential of animal-borne sensors to teach us about the oceans and global warming?

Yes. We are currently looking to integrate an O2 sensor in our tags to learn how the deoxygenation of the oceans due to warming, and excess of CO2 will affect deep diving sharks that forage at depth for example. Devil rays and whale sharks also dive very deep, possibly to forage or to orient themselves over long migrations. Therefore, if O2 is depleted at depth, it will be a barrier for these guys.

Sometimes an animal’s mood makes all the difference. Are they surprisingly easy to tag – if you can catch them at the right time?

Indeed, we can only tag the animals that are “in the mood”. If we try to impose our methods, the animal will just swim away, therefore yes, we depend on the animal’s attitude and character.

What is the average time that it takes to see a blue shark and put a tag on it? Is it 10 minutes, an hour? 

It is hard to say, because chumming to attract can range from 10 min to 4-5 hours. It is very variable and depends a lot on the behavior and abundance of sharks in the area.

Apparently, researchers have developed a huge variety of workarounds and electronic tags. Can you tell us more about what’s available for scientists today?

Today the most popular technology used are the acoustic tags (they output a “ping” that needs to be tracked with a hydrophone – active following or a network of stations) and satellite tracking tags. The most used sat tags are spots (ping position when at the surface for a few minutes) and PAT archival tags, that measure and archive (over months) depth, temperature and light levels. In the end, the stored information is sent to a satellite and to the researcher. Light levels can be used to estimate movement tracks over large scales (ocean wide), but the error is significant at smaller scales. There is a number of custom-made tags that have similar sensors as we have but are all for fixed attachment, and you normally need to fish and restrain the shark. If it’s a big shark and you can approach, they can be attached to the dorsal fin with a clamp.

Can you show us a chart or any results of a successful tag monitoring? 

This is relatively complex as there are many variables being measured. Below is an example regarding the depth and tail beet cycles of a tiger shark we did recently in Hawaii.

About Fred Buyle

Buyle is a free diver and underwater photographer born in 1972. He has been connected to the sea since childhood when he spent several months each year on the family sailboat. At 10, an age when most kids are still skipping rope in the schoolyard, he discovered free diving. Plunging into the oxygen tank-free technique for the next years of his life, he became a scuba diving instructor, teaching free diving in beginning in 1991.

He set his first world record in 1995 and decided to dedicate his life to free diving. He broke three additional world records between 1997 and 2000 and in 1999, passed the mythical 100-meter depth on one breath of air.

In 2002, he began a second career in underwater photography. His goal:  to show the beauty of free diving and the animals in their natural, underwater world. Using only natural light, Buyle has captured images of sharks, ray, fish, dolphins and countless other majestic specimens of marine life.

Buyle comes from an artistic background; His grand grandfather was a pioneer of photography in the 1890’s, his grandfather was a painter and his father an advertising and fashion photographer during the 1960’s. His work reflects these influences, showing a subtle beauty that only comes with an experienced eye.

Buyle uses a simple formula for his photographs: water, available light, a camera and one breath of air. With simple equipment and freedom to move around, a free diver can capture unique moments. Fred has been taking pictures as far down as 60 meters on a single breath of air in remote locations inaccessible to even scuba divers. This “Zen” approach makes Buyle’s photography different from any other underwater photography.

Concerned by conservations issues, in 2005 Buyle began to work with marine biologists, assisting them in their field work. He uses his freediving abilities to approach the animals and perform tasks such as acoustic and satellite tagging and DNA sampling. Buyle has worked with teams from Colombia, Mexico, France, the UK, the Philippines and South Africa, sharing his practical knowledge and personal experience with marine life. Fearlessly approaching great white sharks, great hammerheads, scalloped hammerheads, lemon sharks, ferox sharks, humpback whales, sperm whales and orcas, he never uses a protective cage, which can disturb the animals.

During these missions, Fred carefully documents the field work he performs in order to contribute to the conservation efforts on a larger scale through talks, conferences and his own website. He believes that positive imagery is more effective than the catastrophism widely used in the media nowadays and his images are used by NGOs around the world for their conservation campaigns.

About Jorge Fontes

Jorge Fontes is an Azorean Marine Biologist with broad scientific background and interests ranging from the ecology, management and conservation of coastal ecosystems to the behaviour and conservation of marine megafauna from the Open Ocean and deep sea. Jorge has also a solid background in applied marine technology, ranging from applied marine robotics to the development of innovative non/invasive marine animal tracking solutions.

About Ulysse Nardin – Manufacture of Freedom

Ulysse Nardin is the Pioneering Manufacture inspired by the sea and delivering innovative timepieces to free spirits.

Founded by Mr. Ulysse Nardin in 1846 and a proud member of the global luxury group Kering since November 2014, Ulysse Nardin has written some of the finest chapters in the history of Haute Horlogerie. The company’s earliest renown came from its links to the nautical world: its marine chronometers are among the most reliable ever made, still sought by collectors around the world. A pioneer of cutting-edge technologies and the innovative use of materials like silicon, the brand is one of the few with the in-house expertise to produce its own high-precision components and movements. This exceptional level of watchmaking excellence has earned Ulysse Nardin membership in the most exclusive circle of Swiss watchmaking, the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie. Today, from its sites in Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, the brand’s continuing quest for horological perfection centres around five collections: The Marine, the Diver, the Classico, the Executive and the Freak. In 2020, Ulysse Nardin explores the Xtremes, bringing the X-factor to the core of its collections. www.ulysse-nardin.com

Follow Ulysse Nardin

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UlysseNardinwatches/ Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/ulyssenardinofficial Twitter: https://twitter.com/ulysse_nardin

#weareulysse

Fred Buyle, Underwater Cowboy Ulysse Nardin has just offered a grant to the Azores University’s marine research centre to acquire ten pop-up biologging sensors to tag blue sharks in the Atlantic and document our knowledge of this endangered species.

#Diver #Diver watch #Diver x #diver&039;s watches #Fred Buyle #interview #jorge fontes #lifestyle #people #Press release #Ulysse Nardin #Ulysse Nardin Diver #ulysse nardin diver 44mm

[faceofmalawi]

Rare Orange-Eyed Owl Species Not Seen For Almost 125 Years Is Spotted In Malaysia

For the first time since it was first discovered 125 ago, people have spotted the Bornean subspecies of the Rajah Scops Owl in the montane forest of Mount Kinabalu, Malaysia. Ecologists from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center made the announcement last month in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology, where they also attached the first images of it in its natural habitat. The scientists noted that while most of the basic elements of this owl’s ecology are still unknown – e.g. sounds, distribution, breeding biology, and the size of its population – “phylogeographic patterns of montane birds in Borneo and Sumatra, as well as plumage characters, suggest that O. b. brookii may be deserving of species classification.”

Image: Getty Images Science Direct describes phylogeography as a field of study that focuses on understanding the relationships among individual genotypes within a given species or a group of closely related species and correlate the examined relationships to the species or group’s spatial distribution. Loading... In this way, experts can trace the biogeographic history of infraspecific populations and form a better understanding of other factors such as gene flow, fragmentation, colonization, and range expansion.

Image: Andy Boyce But when it comes to Borneo’s Otus brookii brookii, the experts say that quantitative phylogenetic analysis is currently impossible, even though they note that understanding its ecology, distribution and taxonomy “could have important conservation implications.” Loading... According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, taxonomy is the study of principles of the scientific classification of organisms and their arrangement based on “presumed natural relationships.”

Image: Getty Images According to study author Andy Boyce, the rediscovery – made in Sabah back – was all thanks to perfect timing. He was on a mission to find out how different bird species behave across various elevations with the University of Montana when he received news from technician Keegan Tranquillo about a weird-looking orange-eyed owl. Loading... “If we didn’t document it right then and there, this bird could disappear again for who knows how long,” he said. “It was a really rapid progression of emotion. There was nervousness and anticipation as I was trying to get there, hoping the bird would still be there. Just huge excitement, and a little bit of disbelief, when I first saw the bird and realized what it was. And then, immediately, a lot of anxiety again.” The creature is said to be a quarter larger than normal Malay owls and has grey, black and dark brown plumage.

Image: Getty Images Loading... Otus brookii brookii is a mystery and not even its voice and the location of its core habitat are known. Its partner subspecies Otus brookii solokensis is located in Sumatra. Boyce believes the owl hasn’t been seen in such a long time due to the low population and that it may be “endemic” to that island, even though he was able to find the owl for a second time after a deep two-week-long search. He said that while the species are “going extinct so fast that we’re probably losing species that we never even knew existed,” humans “can’t conserve what we don’t know exists.” “It reminds us as humans, and as scientists, that there are things, there are places in this world—even at this point where we have our fingerprints all over the planet—that we still just don’t have a grasp of and we’re still surprised on a daily basis by things that we find,” Boyce said. Read the full article

#AndyBoyce #Borneansubspecies #RajahScopsOwl

[orbemnews]

In the Oceans, the Volume Is Rising as Never Before Although clown fish are conceived on coral reefs, they spend the first part of their lives as larvae drifting in the open ocean. The fish are not yet orange, striped or even capable of swimming. They are still plankton, a term that comes from the Greek word for “wanderer,” and wander they do, drifting at the mercy of the currents in an oceanic rumspringa. When the baby clown fish grow big enough to swim against the tide, they high-tail it home. The fish can’t see the reef, but they can hear its snapping, grunting, gurgling, popping and croaking. These noises make up the soundscape of a healthy reef, and larval fish rely on these soundscapes to find their way back to the reefs, where they will spend the rest of their lives — that is, if they can hear them. But humans — and their ships, seismic surveys, air guns, pile drivers, dynamite fishing, drilling platforms, speedboats and even surfing — have made the ocean an unbearably noisy place for marine life, according to a sweeping review of the prevalence and intensity of the impacts of anthropogenic ocean noise published on Thursday in the journal Science. The paper, a collaboration among 25 authors from across the globe and various fields of marine acoustics, is the largest synthesis of evidence on the effects of oceanic noise pollution. “They hit the nail on the head,” said Kerri Seger, a senior scientist at Applied Ocean Sciences who was not involved with the research. “By the third page, I was like, ‘I’m going to send this to my students.’” Anthropogenic noise often drowns out the natural soundscapes, putting marine life under immense stress. In the case of baby clown fish, the noise can even doom them to wander the seas without direction, unable to find their way home. “The cycle is broken,” said Carlos Duarte, a marine ecologist at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and the lead author on the paper. “The soundtrack of home is now hard to hear, and in many cases has disappeared.” Drowning out the signals In the ocean, visual cues disappear after tens of yards, and chemical cues dissipate after hundreds of yards. But sound can travel thousands of miles and link animals across oceanic basins and in darkness, Dr. Duarte said. As a result, many marine species are impeccably adapted to detect and communicate with sound. Dolphins call one another by unique names. Toadfish hum. Bearded seals trill. Whales sing. Scientists have been aware of underwater anthropogenic noise, and how far it propagates, for around a century, according to Christine Erbe, the director of the Center for Marine Science and Technology at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and an author on the paper. But early research on how noise might affect marine life focused on how individual large animals responded to temporary noise sources, such as a whale taking a detour around oil rigs during its migration. The new study maps out how underwater noise affects countless groups of marine life, including zooplankton and jellyfish. “The extent of the problem of noise pollution has only recently dawned on us,” Dr. Erbe wrote in an email. The idea for the paper came to Dr. Duarte seven years ago. He had been aware of the importance of ocean sound for much of his long career as an ecologist, but he felt that the issue was not recognized on a global scale. Dr. Duarte found that the scientific community that focused on ocean soundscapes was relatively small and siloed, with marine mammal vocalizations in one corner, and underwater seismic activity, acoustic tomography and policymakers in other, distant corners. “We’ve all been on our little gold rushes,” said Steve Simpson, a marine biologist at the University of Exeter in England and an author on the paper. Dr. Duarte wanted to bring together the various corners to synthesize all the evidence they had gathered into a single conversation; maybe something this grand would finally result in policy changes. The authors screened more than 10,000 papers to ensure they captured every tendril of marine acoustics research from the past few decades, according to Dr. Simpson. Patterns quickly emerged demonstrating the detrimental effects that noise has on almost all marine life. “With all that research, you realize you know more than you think you know,” he said. Dr. Simpson has studied underwater bioacoustics — how fish and marine invertebrates perceive their environment and communicate through sound — for 20 years. Out in the field, he became accustomed to waiting for a passing ship to rumble by before going back to work studying the fish. “I realized, ‘Oh wait, these fish experience ships coming by every day,’” he said. Marine life can adapt to noise pollution by swimming, crawling or oozing away from it, which means some animals are more successful than others. Whales can learn to skirt busy shipping lanes and fish can dodge the thrum of an approaching fishing vessel, but benthic creatures like slow-moving sea cucumbers have little recourse. If the noise settles in more permanently, some animals simply leave for good. When acoustic harassment devices were installed to deter seals from preying on salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago in British Columbia, killer whale populations declined significantly until the devices were removed, according to a 2002 study. These forced evacuations reduce population sizes as more animals give up territory and compete for the same pools of resources. And certain species that are bound to limited biogeographic ranges, such as the endangered Maui dolphin, have nowhere else to go. “Animals can’t avoid the sound because it’s everywhere,” Dr. Duarte said. Even temporary sounds can cause chronic hearing damage in the sea creatures unlucky enough to be caught in the acoustic wake. Both fish and marine mammals have hair cells, sensory receptors for hearing. Fish can regrow these cells, but marine mammals probably cannot. Luckily, unlike greenhouse gases or chemicals, sound is a relatively controllable pollutant. “Noise is about the easiest problem to solve in the ocean,” Dr. Simpson said. “We know exactly what causes noise, we know where it is, and we know how to stop it.” In search of quiet Many solutions to anthropogenic noise pollution already exist, and are even quite simple. “Slow down, move the shipping lane, avoid sensitive areas, change propellers,” Dr. Simpson said. Many ships rely on propellers that cause a great deal of cavitation: Tiny bubbles form around the propeller blade and produce a horrible screeching noise. But quieter designs exist, or are in the works. “Propeller design is a very fast-moving technological space,” Dr. Simpson said. Other innovations include bubble curtains, which can wrap around a pile driver and insulate the sound. The researchers also flagged deep-sea mining as an emergent industry that could become a major source of underwater noise, and suggested that new technologies could be designed to minimize sound before commercial mining starts. The authors hope the review connects with policymakers, who have historically ignored noise as a significant anthropogenic stressor on marine life. The United Nations Law of the Sea B.B.N.J. agreement, a document that manages biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction, does not mention noise among its list of cumulative impacts. The U.N.’s 14th sustainable development goal, which focuses on underwater life, does not explicitly mention noise, according to Dr. Seger of Applied Ocean Sciences. “The U.N. had an ocean noise week where they sat down and listened to it and then went on to another topic,” she said. The paper in Science went through three rounds of editing, the last of which occurred after Covid-19 had created many unplanned experiments: Shipping activity slowed down, the oceans fell relatively silent, and marine mammals and sharks returned to previously noisy waterways where they were rarely seen. “Recovery can be almost immediate,” Dr. Duarte said. Alive with sound A healthy ocean is not a silent ocean — hail crackling into white-crested waves, glaciers thudding into water, gases burbling from hydrothermal vents, and countless creatures chittering, rasping and singing are all signs of a normal environment. One of the 20 authors on the paper is the multimedia artist Jana Winderen, who created a six-minute audio track that shifts from a healthy ocean — the calls of bearded seals, snapping crustaceans and rain — to a disturbed ocean, with motorboats and pile driving. A year ago, while studying invasive species in sea grass meadows in waters near Greece, Dr. Duarte was just about to come up for air when he heard a horrendous rumble above him: “a huge warship on top of me, going at full speed.” He stayed glued to the seafloor until the navy vessel passed, careful to slow down his breathing and not deplete his tank. Around 10 minutes later, the sound ebbed and Dr. Duarte was able to come up safely for air. “I have sympathy for these creatures,” he said. When warships and other anthropogenic noises cease, sea grass meadows have a soundscape entirely their own. In the daytime, the photosynthesizing meadows generate tiny bubbles of oxygen that wobble up the water column, growing until they burst. All together, the bubble blasts make a scintillating sound like many little bells, beckoning larval fish to come home. Source link Orbem News #Oceans #rising #Volume

[myflowerfriends]

Blog 3 Revision: History of the Earth and Humans

On the topic of human history and sustainability, this blog post will analyze the negative and positive actions that people have taken throughout history in effect with the natural environment.

Big History is the study of history from the beginning of time. It is not specialized to ‘conventional history,’ which is focused on evidence from human writings. Because of its vastness, academics theorize based on a range of subjects, pulling together concepts from humanities, social sciences, earth sciences, life sciences, chemistry and physics. Big History academics analyze trends, patterns, and common themes that have occurred since the Big Bang. [1]

Those who criticize Big History claim that it ignores the impact that humans have had on the earth. But truly, Big History is important in that it is promoting the narrative that humans are not the only life form on this planet today, nor have they always been—they have been around for only the past several million years in a time scale that reaches for hundreds of millions of years. For the concept of ‘history’ to begin only as the beginnings of writing is to ignore thousands of years of oral history that. And to study only the beginning of humankind is to ignore the basis of humankind, and all that came before us. It is to take humanity off of our pedestal and recognize our equality with the rest of the universe. This is particularly important to recognize when analyzing the recent patterns of extinction.

Figure 1: Big History Timeline, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History.

The film “Call of Life: Facing the 6th Mass Extinction” covers the ongoing challenges of extinction in the world. The interviewees in this film give lots of jarring statistics and percentages. The beginning of the film explains how the natural rate of extinction is askew; species are going extinct faster than ever, potentially 10, 100, or 10,000 times as fast, as one interviewee puts it. Where these assumptions come from, it is not explained, but the general idea is that humans are damaging the earth in escalating ways, with direct drivers including over-exploitation, overpopulation, global warming, pollution, habitat loss, and invasive species.[2]

Once a species becomes extinct, there is no bringing it back. Humans only know of the existence a small amount of species on this earth—species that we didn’t even know existed are disappearing.

The film then goes on to explain why there has not been enough change done to fix this issue, citing nature deficiency, economic growth and consumer culture, denialism, and the concept that ignorance is bliss. Even so, for decades people have been aware of humankind’s effects on the environment and taken action to reverse the damage being done.

Figure 2: Collapse Cover Artwork, 2005. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed

This can be compared with Jared Diamond’s explanation in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, where he identifies climate change, environmental problems, hostile neighbors, collapse of essential trading partners, and the society’s response to the foregoing four factors as the factors that contribute to the collapse of a society. While I have not read this book, I have read Guns, Germs and Steel, which attempts at answering the question: why did history unfold differently on different continents?

In the Afterword of this book, Diamond compares Zambia and the Netherlands. Zambia has more natural resources, and before technological revolution was an area where humankind thrived—unlike the Netherlands, which had limited life due to its climate. Yet Zambia is one of the world’s poorest countries and the Netherlands is one of the wealthiest. Although Diamond can be too much of a naturalist at times, it is points such as this that show that there absolutely is an involvement in the political economy that can define a country.

As it is understood through the concept of the Anthropocene, humans have significantly changed the geological structure of the earth. The Anthropocene is the designated epoch telling that human beings are the most prominent force on earth’s geological range, though the concept is still not a recognized subdivision of geologic time by the International Commission on Stratigraphy nor the International Union of Geological Sciences.

Figure 3: Screencap from Anthropocene, 2018. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ed-burtynsky-anthropocene

Edward Burtynsky has recognized this change and documents the results. While I was unable to access Manufactured Landscapes, I have seen his film Anthropocene: The Human Epoch before. When I began watching the film, I wanted more dialogue, or research, or humans. But I realized later on that the point of the film was to so intensely show the footage of human’s damage to the earth. I think of what he photographed, and how easy it would be for myself to find evidence of humans taking over the earth. A flight from the east to west coast will show mark of human societies at least every few minutes, even in the wildest areas. I think back to what Manhattan was like before it became a concrete jungle—what it looked like in all the eras of US environmental history, according to the Chapter Supplement listed in our readings for this week.[3]

These four eras of history are conventional, as they clump the beginning era into the time 0-1607, a range that Big History theorists would consider to be far too humanist. Sometimes it is necessary to take a closer analysis of history, as shown in Stoll’s “U.S. Environmentalism since 1945: A Brief History with Documents.” [4] Specialized articles such as this can show some of the hidden truths that may get glossed over in Big History. The question of ‘for whom’ also becomes prevalent, particularly when understanding why leaders take the actions they do-- who is really benefiting?

I am with the belief that we have the knowledge to overcome this suffering and potential extinction. It comes down to willingness to work together for the greater good of all people and creatures.

Question: Should environmental history be more integrated into regular history courses, for students of any education levels?

[1] “Big History” Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History

[2] Thompson, Monte. Call of Life: Facing the 6th Mass Extinction, 2010. https://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/7350/Call-of-Life--Facing-the-Mass-Extinction

[3] “Chapter: Supplements: Supplement 3: Environmental History of the United States, pp. S6-S8, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RuRSAMjcAdIciXGO3JQhlO8SpGbeasFn/view

[4] Stoll, U.S. Environmentalism since 1945: A Brief History with Documents,https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzKbjVLpnX0RSkxfVzBrMW02TnM/view.

[bigyack-com]

To Prevent Next Coronavirus, Stop the Wildlife Trade, Conservationists Say

The coronavirus spreading from China has sickened at least 73,000 people and killed at least 2,000, setting in motion a global health emergency. But humans aren’t the only species infected. Coronaviruses attack a variety of birds and mammals. The new virus seems to have leapt from wildlife to humans in a seafood and meat market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were slaughtered and sold as food. That’s a familiar story. The SARS epidemic, also caused by a coronavirus, began in China with the consumption of a catlike animal called the palm civet. The MERS epidemic began with a coronavirus transmitted to humans from camels in the Middle East. In the spread of yet another coronavirus, conservationists see a public health lesson: If you want to prevent epidemics that begin in animals, halt the global trade in wildlife. “This issue is not just a conservation issue anymore,” said Grace Ge Gabriel, Asia regional director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “It’s a public health issue, a biosafety issue and a national security issue.” China is a linchpin in the illegal trade. Last month, as the coronavirus spread, the central government in Beijing issued a nationwide but temporary ban on all trade in wild animals, including their transport and sale in markets, restaurants and via online platforms. The government order warned that officials would “severely investigate and punish” violators and provided a hotline for citizens to report infractions. Officials in Beijing now have drafted legislation to end “the pernicious habit of eating wildlife,” according to a statement released on Monday by the standing committee of the National Peoples Congress. Chinese citizens are “angry because they’ve learned that wildlife traded for food has once again caused a national health crisis, and because a small number of wildlife traders continue to hold the entire country hostage,” said Peter Li, an associate professor of East Asian politics at the University of Houston-Downtown who specializes in China’s domestic policies. Experts still do not know which species transmitted the new coronavirus, technically called SARS-CoV-2, to people. But pangolins, also known as scaly anteaters, are now the leading suspects. The world’s most trafficked mammal, pangolins are barred from international trade and are protected domestically in China. But pangolin meat and blood are considered delicacies on the black market, and sales of their scales for use in traditional Chinese medicine remain legal for certain hospitals and pharmacies. Updated Feb. 10, 2020 What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures. How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat. Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance. What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights. How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick. Whatever the source turns out to be, the new ban on wildlife trade comes too late to stanch the spread of this latest coronavirus. “Now that human-to-human transmission is happening, the ban has no real consequence for this outbreak at all,” said Christian Walzer, executive director of health at the Wildlife Conservation Society. The government’s ban also lasts only until “the epidemic situation is lifted nationwide,” according to the government’s order. Dr. Walzer and others believe that the ban needs to be permanent if it is to have any effect on reducing the risk of future zoonotic diseases. “Otherwise, we’ll be having this conversation at regular intervals,” he said. During the SARS epidemic in 2003, China enacted a narrower wildlife trade ban. Many conservationists and medical professionals, including members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, hoped it would be permanent, but the trade roared back after the crisis ended. “Once a disease jumps into humans, all the responses are reactive and the focus is on human health,” said Dr. Alonso Aguirre, a wildlife ecologist at George Mason University. After the crisis passes, attention turns away from the trade that brought the disease to humans, he added. Scientists have been calling for permanent restrictions for at least three decades. “We never go back to the source of why these things happen in the first place,” Dr. Aguirre said.

Laboratories for creating new viruses

China and Southeast Asia are hot spots for emerging zoonotic diseases, pathogens that naturally occur in wildlife and find their way to domestic animals and humans through mutation or new contact. Biodiversity loss, combined with high rates of deforestation, raises the risk of these infections by bringing people and livestock into contact with wildlife, and by altering the environment to favor transmission of certain diseases, such as malaria, Zika and dengue. Demand for animals and their parts — to eat or for use in traditional medicine — carries potential pathogens far and wide. But the coronavirus outbreak has not snuffed out demand for wildlife, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency, a nonprofit group based in London that researches and campaigns against environmental crime. Even now, some online sellers in China and Laos are touting illegal traditional medicines containing rhino horn and other animal parts as cures for coronavirus, the group found. Some cite a document issued last month by China’s National Health Commission that lists traditional animal-based remedies as recommended treatments for coronavirus infection. No one knows the full scope of wildlife trade worldwide, but the numbers are staggering — on the order of millions of animals of hundreds of species trafficked each day, according to Vincent Nijman, a wildlife trade researcher at Oxford Brookes University in England. A study published last October in the journal Science estimated that wildlife trade includes 5,600 species, nearly one-fifth of the world’s known vertebrate animals. While some wildlife trade is illegal, much of the hidden industry comprises legal, oftentimes unregulated trade of unprotected species like rodents, bats, snakes and frogs. Wildlife trade in Asia is especially risky to human health, because these animals are often transported and sold live. “Even if one of these jumps is a rare occurrence, there are millions and millions of contacts that occur every day in these types of markets,” said Andres Gomez, an ecologist and veterinarian at ICF International, a global consulting services company based in Virginia. “You’re playing with fire.” Live meat markets are perfect laboratories for creating new viruses. Stressed animals shed more viruses and are more susceptible to infections, and cages are often stacked on top of each other, facilitating exposure. “You have a bird pooping on a turtle that poops on a civet,” Dr. Walzer said. “For getting new viruses to emerge, you couldn’t do it much better even if you tried.” Basic hygiene is usually lacking as well, Dr. Nijman added: “The same chopping block is being used for every piece of meat, the same knife for all species. No one is washing their hands.” Increasingly varied species and populations are mixed at markets. Better transportation — and the fact that many local species have disappeared — means that wildlife is imported from an ever-larger radius. Newer exotic species are frequently introduced for trade, as well. China has approved 54 wild species for commercial breeding and sale, including American red foxes, Australian zebra finches and African ostriches. This diversity was reflected at the market in Wuhan where the new coronavirus originated. A single meat shop there sold live peacocks, rats, foxes, crocodiles, wolf cubs, turtles, snakes, wild pigs and more. “The billboard from that store advertised feet, blood, intestines and other body parts from over 70 species,” said Ms. Gabriel, of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “It’s staggering.” In Guangdong Province in 2003, these shops were temporarily shuttered as SARS emerged. Wildlife trade and consumption declined in the immediate aftermath, but the business resumed within about a year, despite calls for a permanent ban. “China should not have forgotten the pain after the wound was healed,” Dr. Li said. Some experts believe that a complete ban on wildlife trade is neither necessary nor practical. “Wildlife trade is not some horrific habit people have, something awful that shouldn’t be done,” said Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research group in New York City. “It’s a deep-seated part of human culture.” In Western countries, for example, people regularly consume meat caught in the wild, including venison, rabbit and game birds, Dr. Daszak said. Rather than ban all wildlife trade in China, he and other scientists have called for strictly monitored captive-breeding of certain wild species. Additional measures could include a permanent trade ban on certain high-risk species, like bats, and the introduction of “a series of common-sense hygiene and welfare rules,” Dr. Nijman said. Other scientists argue that without a full and permanent ban on wildlife trade, it is only a matter of time until the next virus emerges. “Unless something changes, this is just one in the series,” he said of the current coronavirus epidemic. “We have to decide as a society if we’re comfortable maintaining the risk that the next one is one that kills most people who get infected.” China’s authoritarian government has the power to permanently ban all wildlife trade, Dr. Li noted. But he is not optimistic that it will happen. The country’s wildlife policies are based on “the premise that wildlife is a natural resource to be utilized,” he said, and officials tend to view nature through an economic rather than ecological lens. Banning wildlife trade would require a fundamental shift. “The Chinese government has created an enormous problem for itself by encouraging wildlife use,” Dr. Li said. “Now it must choose whether to favor the economic interests of a small minority, or to favor the public health interests of 1.4 billion Chinese people and the world.” Read the full article

#Conservationists #Coronavirus #health #HealthNews #prevent #Stop #Trade #Wildlife

[mastcomm]

To Prevent the Next Coronavirus, Stop the Wildlife Trade

The coronavirus spreading from China has sickened at least 73,000 people and killed at least 2,000, setting in motion a global health emergency. But humans aren’t the only species infected.

Coronaviruses attack a variety of birds and mammals. The new virus seems to have leapt from wildlife to humans in a seafood and meat market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were slaughtered and sold as food.

That’s a familiar story. The SARS epidemic, also caused by a coronavirus, began in China with the consumption of a catlike animal called the palm civet. The MERS epidemic began with a coronavirus transmitted to humans from camels in the Middle East.

In the spread of yet another coronavirus, conservationists see a public health lesson: If you want to prevent epidemics that begin in animals, halt the global trade in wildlife.

“This issue is not just a conservation issue anymore,” said Grace Ge Gabriel, Asia regional director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “It’s a public health issue, a biosafety issue and a national security issue.”

China is a linchpin in the illegal trade. Last month, as the coronavirus spread, the central government in Beijing issued a nationwide but temporary ban on all trade in wild animals, including their transport and sale in markets, restaurants and via online platforms.

The government order warned that officials would “severely investigate and punish” violators and provided a hotline for citizens to report infractions. Officials in Beijing now have drafted legislation to end “the pernicious habit of eating wildlife,” according to a statement released on Monday by the standing committee of the National Peoples Congress.

Chinese citizens are “angry because they’ve learned that wildlife traded for food has once again caused a national health crisis, and because a small number of wildlife traders continue to hold the entire country hostage,” said Peter Li, an associate professor of East Asian politics at the University of Houston-Downtown who specializes in China’s domestic policies.

Experts still do not know which species transmitted the new coronavirus, technically called SARS-CoV-2, to people. But pangolins, also known as scaly anteaters, are now the leading suspects.

The world’s most trafficked mammal, pangolins are barred from international trade and are protected domestically in China. But pangolin meat and blood are considered delicacies on the black market, and sales of their scales for use in traditional Chinese medicine remain legal for certain hospitals and pharmacies.

Updated Feb. 10, 2020

What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.

How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat.

Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance.

What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights.

How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick.

Whatever the source turns out to be, the new ban on wildlife trade comes too late to stanch the spread of this latest coronavirus.

“Now that human-to-human transmission is happening, the ban has no real consequence for this outbreak at all,” said Christian Walzer, executive director of health at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The government’s ban also lasts only until “the epidemic situation is lifted nationwide,” according to the government’s order. Dr. Walzer and others believe that the ban needs to be permanent if it is to have any effect on reducing the risk of future zoonotic diseases.

“Otherwise, we’ll be having this conversation at regular intervals,” he said.

During the SARS epidemic in 2003, China enacted a narrower wildlife trade ban. Many conservationists and medical professionals, including members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, hoped it would be permanent, but the trade roared back after the crisis ended.

“Once a disease jumps into humans, all the responses are reactive and the focus is on human health,” said Dr. Alonso Aguirre, a wildlife ecologist at George Mason University.

After the crisis passes, attention turns away from the trade that brought the disease to humans, he added. Scientists have been calling for permanent restrictions for at least three decades.

“We never go back to the source of why these things happen in the first place,” Dr. Aguirre said.

Laboratories for creating new viruses

China and Southeast Asia are hot spots for emerging zoonotic diseases, pathogens that naturally occur in wildlife and find their way to domestic animals and humans through mutation or new contact.

Biodiversity loss, combined with high rates of deforestation, raises the risk of these infections by bringing people and livestock into contact with wildlife, and by altering the environment to favor transmission of certain diseases, such as malaria, Zika and dengue.

Demand for animals and their parts — to eat or for use in traditional medicine — carries potential pathogens far and wide.

But the coronavirus outbreak has not snuffed out demand for wildlife, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency, a nonprofit group based in London that researches and campaigns against environmental crime.

Even now, some online sellers in China and Laos are touting illegal traditional medicines containing rhino horn and other animal parts as cures for coronavirus, the group found. Some cite a document issued last month by China’s National Health Commission that lists traditional animal-based remedies as recommended treatments for coronavirus infection.

No one knows the full scope of wildlife trade worldwide, but the numbers are staggering — on the order of millions of animals of hundreds of species trafficked each day, according to Vincent Nijman, a wildlife trade researcher at Oxford Brookes University in England.

A study published last October in the journal Science estimated that wildlife trade includes 5,600 species, nearly one-fifth of the world’s known vertebrate animals.

While some wildlife trade is illegal, much of the hidden industry comprises legal, oftentimes unregulated trade of unprotected species like rodents, bats, snakes and frogs. Wildlife trade in Asia is especially risky to human health, because these animals are often transported and sold live.

“Even if one of these jumps is a rare occurrence, there are millions and millions of contacts that occur every day in these types of markets,” said Andres Gomez, an ecologist and veterinarian at ICF International, a global consulting services company based in Virginia. “You’re playing with fire.”

Live meat markets are perfect laboratories for creating new viruses. Stressed animals shed more viruses and are more susceptible to infections, and cages are often stacked on top of each other, facilitating exposure.

“You have a bird pooping on a turtle that poops on a civet,” Dr. Walzer said. “For getting new viruses to emerge, you couldn’t do it much better even if you tried.”

Basic hygiene is usually lacking as well, Dr. Nijman added: “The same chopping block is being used for every piece of meat, the same knife for all species. No one is washing their hands.”

Increasingly varied species and populations are mixed at markets. Better transportation — and the fact that many local species have disappeared — means that wildlife is imported from an ever-larger radius. Newer exotic species are frequently introduced for trade, as well.

China has approved 54 wild species for commercial breeding and sale, including American red foxes, Australian zebra finches and African ostriches.

This diversity was reflected at the market in Wuhan where the new coronavirus originated. A single meat shop there sold live peacocks, rats, foxes, crocodiles, wolf cubs, turtles, snakes, wild pigs and more.

“The billboard from that store advertised feet, blood, intestines and other body parts from over 70 species,” said Ms. Gabriel, of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “It’s staggering.”

In Guangdong Province in 2003, these shops were temporarily shuttered as SARS emerged. Wildlife trade and consumption declined in the immediate aftermath, but the business resumed within about a year, despite calls for a permanent ban.

“China should not have forgotten the pain after the wound was healed,” Dr. Li said.

Some experts believe that a complete ban on wildlife trade is neither necessary nor practical.

“Wildlife trade is not some horrific habit people have, something awful that shouldn’t be done,” said Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research group in New York City. “It’s a deep-seated part of human culture.”

In Western countries, for example, people regularly consume meat caught in the wild, including venison, rabbit and game birds, Dr. Daszak said.

Rather than ban all wildlife trade in China, he and other scientists have called for strictly monitored captive-breeding of certain wild species.

Additional measures could include a permanent trade ban on certain high-risk species, like bats, and the introduction of “a series of common-sense hygiene and welfare rules,” Dr. Nijman said.

Other scientists argue that without a full and permanent ban on wildlife trade, it is only a matter of time until the next virus emerges.

“Unless something changes, this is just one in the series,” he said of the current coronavirus epidemic. “We have to decide as a society if we’re comfortable maintaining the risk that the next one is one that kills most people who get infected.”

China’s authoritarian government has the power to permanently ban all wildlife trade, Dr. Li noted. But he is not optimistic that it will happen.

The country’s wildlife policies are based on “the premise that wildlife is a natural resource to be utilized,” he said, and officials tend to view nature through an economic rather than ecological lens.

Banning wildlife trade would require a fundamental shift.

“The Chinese government has created an enormous problem for itself by encouraging wildlife use,” Dr. Li said. “Now it must choose whether to favor the economic interests of a small minority, or to favor the public health interests of 1.4 billion Chinese people and the world.”

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[sciencespies]

Tropical Snakes Suffer as a Fungus Kills the Frogs They Prey On

https://sciencespies.com/news/tropical-snakes-suffer-as-a-fungus-kills-the-frogs-they-prey-on/

Tropical Snakes Suffer as a Fungus Kills the Frogs They Prey On

Tropical snakes are masters of disguise, skillfully camouflaged and capable of holding a position for hours without moving a muscle. This made for challenging work for herpetologist Karen Lips, now at the University of Maryland, who spent 13 years counting the snakes of El Copé in central Panama.

Lips had anticipated the arrival of chytrid, a fungus that has been killing off huge numbers of amphibians in Central America since the 1990s. The effects of the disease were well documented—a massive collapse of frog populations was coming. So Lips set up wildlife surveys to track tropical snake populations that prey on amphibians before and after the fungus swept through El Copé. The study, published today in the journal Science, found that it’s most likely that snake species fell as a result of the mass frog die-off.

“It’s hard for us to pinpoint how many species there were before and after, and there’s a wide range of possible numbers,” quantitative ecologist Elise Zipkin tells Ed Yong at the Atlantic. Finding camouflaged snakes makes for touch fieldwork. Instead, she says, “we can talk about the probability of decline. That’s the best we’ll ever be doing, because there’s no scenario where we could just collect more data. We now have probably the strongest evidence that we’ll ever have that there are cascading effects.”

The researchers surveyed animal populations by walking quarter-mile paths around El Copé from 1997 to 2012, catching whatever reptiles and amphibians they could find and recording their species and body size. In 2004, chytrid killed more than three quarters of the region’s frogs, so the final data analysis excluded 2005 and 2006, when the region was adjusting.

The effect on frog populations was made clear by the absences of their nightly songs and the fact that “dead frogs were everywhere,” Lips tells Jonathan Lambert at Science News, but chytrid’s effect on snakes was harder to measure.

“The tropical snake community here is incredibly diverse, but also really poorly studied,” Lips tells Science News. “Many of these species are rare to begin with. They hide out in hard to reach places, and they’ve evolved to be camouflaged.”

The survey found 30 species of snakes before chytrid hit the region, and 21 species afterward. Some of the snakes the researchers found afterward were skinnier, as if they were starving, according to a statement. But because the snake species are rare and diverse, the data aren’t exactly clear-cut. Some species only appeared in the survey after the frog die-off, but they were probably still in the region beforehand. And vice versa: species that didn’t appear in the after-chytrid surveys may not have disappeared from the region.

“I don’t think I appreciated how difficult it was going to be,” Lips tells the Atlantic. “It took a long time to find someone to help us analyze the data.”

That’s where Zipkin’s data analysis came in. Instead of calculating a direct value for snake species loss, the team calculated the likelihood that snake species are less diverse now than they were before the fungus killed off the region’s frogs. After taking into account the different abundances of local snake species, how many snakes are likely to be along a quarter-mile path and how likely a surveying herpetologist is to spot one, Zipkin’s mathematical model came to a conclusion: “We can say with 85 percent probability that there are fewer species present after chytrid,” she tells Science News.

Snakes that rely heavily on frogs, like the Argus goo-eater that eats frog eggs, fared badly after chytrid. But snakes like the eyelash viper, for which frogs are just one part of a well-rounded diet of bats, birds and rodents, have done well.

“When there’s a collapse [like that in frogs after chytrid], the focus is usually on the group that collapsed,” Cornell University evolutionary biologist Kelly Zamudio, who wasn’t involved in the study, tells Science News. “It’s an intuitive idea,” she tells Science News, to look more broadly at the ecosystem, but one that requires good data from both before and after a collapse.

The likely loss of species is a common story across environments under stress. But the study also points to the ways that conservation and the protection of key members of an ecosystem, in this case frogs, can uplift an environment.

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[tvtiokistwimicmptgxz-blog]

What is “The Sixth Extinction?”

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

Exerpts by Niles Eldredge

There is little doubt left in the minds of professional biologists that Earth is currently faced with a mounting loss of species that threatens to rival the five great mass extinctions of the geological past. As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year — which breaks down to the even more daunting statistic of some three species per hour. Some biologists have begun to feel that this biodiversity crisis — this “Sixth Extinction” — is even more severe, and more imminent, than Wilson had supposed.

Extinction in the past

The major global biotic turnovers were all caused by physical events that lay outside the normal climatic and other physical disturbances which species, and entire ecosystems, experience and survive. What caused them?

The previous mass extinctions were due to natural causes. First major extinction (c. 440 mya): Climate change (relatively severe and sudden global cooling) seems to have been at work at the first of these-the end-Ordovician mass extinction that caused such pronounced change in marine life (little or no life existed on land at that time). 25% of families lost (a family may consist of a few to thousands of species).

Second major extinction (c. 370 mya): The next such event, near the end of the Devonian Period, may or may not have been the result of global climate change. 19% of families lost.

Third major Extinction (c. 245 mya): Scenarios explaining what happened at the greatest mass extinction event of them all (so far, at least!) at the end of the Permian Period have been complex amalgams of climate change perhaps rooted in plate tectonics movements. Very recently, however, evidence suggests that a bolide impact similar to the end-Cretaceous event may have been the cause. 54% of families lost.

Fourth major extinction (c. 210 mya): The event at the end of the Triassic Period, shortly after dinosaurs and mammals had first evolved, also remains difficult to pin down in terms of precise causes. 23% of families lost.

Fifth major extinction (c. 65 mya): Most famous, perhaps, was the most recent of these events at the end-Cretaceous. It wiped out the remaining terrestrial dinosaurs and marine ammonites, as well as many other species across the phylogenetic spectrum, in all habitats sampled from the fossil record. Consensus has emerged in the past decade that this event was caused by one (possibly multiple) collisions between Earth and an extraterrestrial bolide (probably cometary). Some geologists, however, point to the great volcanic event that produced the Deccan traps of India as part of the chain of physical events that disrupted ecosystems so severely that many species on land and sea rapidly succumbed to extinction. 17% of families lost.

How is The Sixth Extinction different from previous events?

The current mass extinction is caused by humans.

At first glance, the physically caused extinction events of the past might seem to have little or nothing to tell us about the current Sixth Extinction, which is a patently human-caused event. For there is little doubt that humans are the direct cause of ecosystem stress and species destruction in the modern world through such activities as:

-transformation of the landscape

-overexploitation of species

-pollution

-the introduction of alien species

And, because Homo sapiens is clearly a species of animal (however behaviorally and ecologically peculiar an animal), the Sixth Extinction would seem to be the first recorded global extinction event that has a biotic, rather than a physical, cause.

We are bringing about massive changes in the environment.

Yet, upon further reflection, human impact on the planet is a direct analogue of the Cretaceous cometary collision. Sixty-five million years ago that extraterrestrial impact — through its sheer explosive power, followed immediately by its injections of so much debris into the upper reaches of the atmosphere that global temperatures plummeted and, most critically, photosynthesis was severely inhibited — wreaked havoc on the living systems of Earth. That is precisely what human beings are doing to the planet right now: humans are causing vast physical changes on the planet.

What is the Sixth Extinction?

We can divide the Sixth Extinction into two discrete phases:

-Phase One began when the first modern humans began to disperse to different parts of the world about 100,000 years ago.

-Phase Two began about 10,000 years ago when humans turned to agriculture.

Humans began disrupting the environment as soon as they appeared on Earth.

The first phase began shortly after Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and the anatomically modern humans began migrating out of Africa and spreading throughout the world. Humans reached the middle east 90,000 years ago. They were in Europe starting around 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals, who had long lived in Europe, survived our arrival for less than 10,000 years, but then abruptly disappeared — victims, according to many paleoanthropologists, of our arrival through outright warfare or the more subtle, though potentially no less devastating effects, of being on the losing side of ecological competition.

Everywhere, shortly after modern humans arrived, many (especially, though by no means exclusively, the larger) native species typically became extinct. Humans were like bulls in a China shop:

-They disrupted ecosystems by overhunting game species, which never experienced contact with humans before.

-And perhaps they spread microbial disease-causing organisms as well.

The fossil record attests to human destruction of ecosystems:

-Wherever early humans migrated, other species became extinct.

-Humans arrived in large numbers in North America roughly 12,500 years ago-and sites revealing the butchering of mammoths, mastodons and extinct buffalo are well documented throughout the continent. The demise of the bulk of the La Brea tar pit Pleistocene fauna coincided with our arrival.

-The Caribbean lost several of its larger species when humans arrived some 8000 years ago.

-Extinction struck elements of the Australian megafauna much earlier-when humans arrived some 40,000 years ago. Madagascar-something of an anomaly, as humans only arrived there two thousand years ago-also fits the pattern well: the larger species (elephant birds, a species of hippo, plus larger lemurs) rapidly disappeared soon after humans arrived.

Indeed, only in places where earlier hominid species had lived (Africa, of course, but also most of Europe and Asia) did the fauna, already adapted to hominid presence, survive the first wave of the Sixth Extinction pretty much intact. The rest of the world’s species, which had never before encountered hominids in their local ecosystems, were as naively unwary as all but the most recently arrived species (such as Vermilion Flycatchers) of the Galapagos Islands remain to this day.

Why does the Sixth Extinction continue?

The invention of agriculture accelerated the pace of the Sixth Extinction.

Phase two of the Sixth Extinction began around 10,000 years ago with the invention of agriculture-perhaps first in the Natufian culture of the Middle East. Agriculture appears to have been invented several different times in various different places, and has, in the intervening years, spread around the entire globe.

Agriculture represents the single most profound ecological change in the entire 3.5 billion-year history of life. With its invention:

-Humans did not have to interact with other species for survival, and so could manipulate other species for their own use

-Humans did not have to adhere to the ecosystem’s carrying capacity, and so could overpopulate

-Humans do not live with nature but outside it.

Homo sapiens became the first species to stop living inside local ecosystems. All other species, including our ancestral hominid ancestors, all pre-agricultural humans, and remnant hunter-gatherer societies still extant exist as semi-isolated populations playing specific roles (i.e., have “niches”) in local ecosystems. This is not so with post-agricultural revolution humans, who in effect have stepped outside local ecosystems. Indeed, to develop agriculture is essentially to declare war on ecosystems – converting land to produce one or two food crops, with all other native plant species all now classified as unwanted “weeds” — and all but a few domesticated species of animals now considered as pests.

The total number of organisms within a species is limited by many factors-most crucial of which is the “carrying capacity” of the local ecosystem: given the energetic needs and energy-procuring adaptations of a given species, there are only so many squirrels, oak trees and hawks that can inhabit a given stretch of habitat. Agriculture had the effect of removing the natural local-ecosystem upper limit of the size of human populations. Though crops still fail regularly, and famine and disease still stalk the land, there is no doubt that agriculture in the main has had an enormous impact on human population size:

-Earth can’t sustain the trend in human population growth. It is reaching its limit in carrying capacity.

-Estimates vary, but range between 1 and 10 million people on earth 10,000 years ago.

-There are now over 6 billion people.

-The numbers continue to increase logarithmically — so that there will be 8 billion by 2020.

-There is presumably an upper limit to the carrying capacity of humans on earth — of the numbers that agriculture can support — and that number is usually estimated at between 13-15 billion, though some people think the ultimate numbers might be much higher.

This explosion of human population, especially in the post-Industrial Revolution years of the past two centuries, coupled with the unequal distribution and consumption of wealth on the planet, is the underlying cause of the Sixth Extinction. There is a vicious cycle:

-Overpopulation, invasive species, and overexploitation are fueling the extinction.

-More lands are cleared and more efficient production techniques (most recently engendered largely through genetic engineering) to feed the growing number of humans — and in response, the human population continues to expand.

-Higher fossil energy use is helping agriculture spread, further modifying the environment.

-Humans continue to fish (12 of the 13 major fisheries on the planet are now considered severely depleted) and harvest timber for building materials and just plain fuel, pollution, and soil erosion from agriculture creates dead zones in fisheries (as in the Gulf of Mexico)

-While the human Diaspora has meant the spread, as well, of alien species that more often than not thrive at the detriment of native species. For example, invasive species have contributed to 42% of all threatened and endangered species in the U.S.

Can conservation measures stop the Sixth Extinction?

Only 10% of the world’s species survived the third mass extinction. Will any survive this one?

The world’s ecosystems have been plunged into chaos, with some conservation biologists thinking that no system, not even the vast oceans, remains untouched by human presence. Conservation measures, sustainable development, and, ultimately, stabilization of human population numbers and consumption patterns seem to offer some hope that the Sixth Extinction will not develop to the extent of the third global extinction, some 245 mya, when 90% of the world’s species were lost.

Though it is true that life, so incredibly resilient, has always recovered (though after long lags) after major extinction spasms, it is only after whatever has caused the extinction event has dissipated. That cause, in the case of the Sixth Extinction, is ourselves — Homo sapiens. This means we can continue on the path to our own extinction, or, preferably, we modify our behavior toward the global ecosystem of which we are still very much a part. The latter must happen before the Sixth Extinction can be declared over, and life can once again rebound.

© 2005, American Institute of Biological Sciences. Educators have permission to reprint articles for classroom use; other users, please contact [email protected] for reprint permission. See reprint policy.

Paleontologist Dr. Niles Eldredge is the Curator-in-Chief of the permanent exhibition “Hall of Biodiversity” at the American Museum of Natural History and adjunct professor at the City University of New York. He has devoted his career to examining evolutionary theory through the fossil record, publishing his views in more than 160 scientific articles, reviews, and books. Life in the Balance: Humanity and the Biodiversity Crisisis his most recent book.

www.gc.cuny.edu/directories/faculty/E.htm

Articles and Resources on The Sixth Extinction

Consequences of the Sixth Extinction The article “How Will Sixth Extinction Affect Evolution of Species?,” on our site, describes how the current loss of biodiversity will affect evolution in the long run. www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/myers_knoll.html

BioScience Article “Global Conservation of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.” Habitat destruction has driven much of the current biodiversity extinction crisis, and it compromises the essential benefits, or ecosystem services that humans derive from functioning ecosystems. Securing both species and ecosystem services might be accomplished with common solutions. Yet it is unknown whether these two major conservation objectives coincide broadly enough worldwide to enable global strategies for both goals to gain synergy. In this November 2007, BioScience article, Will Turner and his colleagues assess the concordance between these two objectives, explore how the concordance varies across different regions, and examine the global potential for safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystem services simultaneously. Read the abstract, or log in to purchase the full article. caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1641/B571009

Biodiversity in the next millennium American Museum of Natural History’s nationwide survey (undated) “reveals biodiversity crisis — the fastest mass extinction in Earth’s history.” cbc.amnh.org/crisis/mncntnt.html

National Geographic A 2/99 article about the Sixth Extinction, with views from several leading scientists. www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/9902/fngm/index.html

Extinction through time Find out about cycles of life and death and extinction patterns through time. www.carleton.ca/Museum/extinction/tablecont.html

Is Humanity Suicidal? Edward O. Wilson asks us why we stay on the course to our own self-destruction. www.well.com/user/davidu/suicidal.html

A Field Guide to the Sixth Extinction Niles Eldredge writes in 1999 about a few of the millions of plants and animals that won’t make it to the next millennium. The second link takes you to the site’s main page, entitled “Mass Extinction Underway — The World Wide Web’s most comprehensive source of information on the current mass extinction,” which provides links to numerous other resources. www.well.com/user/davidu/fieldguide.html www.well.com/user/davidu/extinction.html

Global Environment Outlook 3 The United Nations Environment Programme released this major report in May 2002. The report collated the thoughts of more than 1,000 contributors to assess the environmental impact of the last 30 years and outline policy ideas for the next three decades. It concluded that without action, the world may experience severe environmental problems within 30 years. The entire report can be read online or purchased online. www.unep.org/geo/geo3/index.htm

Test your environmental knowledge A 1999 survey showed that only one in three adult Americans had a passing understanding of the most pressing environmental issues. How do you measure up? Explanatory answers provided. www.youthactionnet.org/quizzes/global_environment.cfm

World Atlas of Biodiversity — interactive map The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released the firstWorld Atlas of Biodiversityin August 2002. This link takes you to their online interactive map that helps you search for data about species/land/water loss, extinction over time, and human global development. Click on the “?” for a help page that explains how to interact with this map. stort.unep-wcmc.org/imaps/gb2002/book/viewer.htm

The Sixth Great Extinction: A Status Report Earth Policy Institute’s 2004 update on the status of loss of biodiversity. www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update35.htm

Books

» The Biodiversity Crisis: Losing What Countsby The American Museum of Natural History (New Press, 2001).

» The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of of Life and the Future of Humankindby Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (Doubleday and Company, 1996).

Get Involved

The Biodiversity Project You can choose a way to get involved in protecting biodiversity — from educational resources to community outreach. www.biodiversityproject.org/html/resources/introduction.htm

The Nature Conservancy Select a state from the menu and find out how you can become an environmental volunteer in that state. www.nature.org/volunteer/

Information for Action “This website explains the environmental problems & offers solutions to fix them. There are many valuable resources available” including lobbying info, contacts database, & news updates. www.informaction.org/

Harmony “Harmony Foundation is all about education for the environment. We offer publications and programs… ‘Building Sustainable Societies’ offers innovative training for educators and community group leaders to support local action on important environmental issues.” www.harmonyfdn.ca

Earth Talk: Environmental advocacy for professionals This discussion community and learning network seeks to contribute to global ecological sustainability by enabling communication connections between those working on behalf of forests, water, and climate. www.ecoearth.info/

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Tiger Illustration by Dorothy Lathrop from "Fierce-Face: The story of a tiger" by Dhan Gopal Mukerji (1936)

Posted by B.S. Wise on 2009-11-09 16:20:31

Tagged: , tigers , conflict , authority , soveriegnty , independent , survival , evolution , Illustrated , by , Dorothy , Lathrop , creative , art , thought , free , will , jungle , extinction , endangered , mankind , bengal , stripes , Fierce-Face , Niles Eldredge , The Sixth Extinction

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