biodiversity_extinction
TEDxSydney
Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction.
Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off.
Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction
Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off
Jane Dalton @IndyVoices Sunday 8 October 2017 00:00 BST
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The Independent Online
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“Chip is much more popular than me everywhere we go,” Chris Darwin says, jovially co-operating by posing for photos with the toy bald eagle he carries on his shoulder. “I nicked him from my children’s bedroom and he gets lots of attention.”
To meet Mr Darwin, laidback, cheerful and ultra-friendly, you would never guess he tried to commit suicide 26 years ago. He’s perfectly open about it, as much as he is passionate about his new work that sprang from the famous surname.
Mr Darwin’s great, great grandfather, Charles, may have developed the theory of the origin of species but today his descendant has picked up the evolutionary science baton to defend mass extinctions of species.
“We all have crucibles,” he says of the dark period when, aged 30, he tried to end his life by cycling over a cliff (he was saved by a random tree branch). “Critical moments when something normally bad happens that changes the rest of your life, and mine was this suicide event. Slowly I came to the concept that I needed purpose in life.”
Darwin the younger looked at all the world’s big problems – starvation, polluted water, disease – and settled on the crisis of mass extinctions as one he felt he wanted to help tackle. “So in 1991 I set off down that road.”
Bird man: Chris Darwin is making it his mission to halt wildlife decline (Jane Dalton)
When asked to what extent he was influenced by his legendary ancestor’s work in identifying the origins of man, he bursts into a roar of laughter. “It was entirely independent,” he insists in a voice heavy with irony.
Chris Darwin, 56, had come to London from his home in Australia for a groundbreaking conference attempting to tackle the growing crisis of the world’s rapidly diminishing wildlife, and one of the key causes of that loss – worldwide demand for meat.
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More than 50 of the best minds in the fields of ecology, agriculture, public health, biology, oceanography, eco-investment and food retailing joined forces over two days to brainstorm ideas on how to stem the rapid shrinkage of the natural world caused by damaging agricultural practices.
The Extinction and Livestock Conference, with at least 500 delegates, was the world’s first ever conference examining how modern meat production affects life on Earth, and, put simply, it was designed to find ways to revolutionise the world’s food and farming systems to prevent mass species extinctions.
“We have to stop this,” says Mr Darwin, and he recalls how his great, great grandfather regretted on his death not having done more for other animals – a sentiment that shaped his decision to turn around his “self-indulgent, selfish” life, which involved working in advertising, and do something for the planet.
Wildlife under attack
The fact that the food on our plates is a major cause of shocking declines in wildlife – ranging from elephants and jaguar to barn owls, water vole and bumble bees – may come as a surprise to many. But for the experts gathered for the conference the link was clear. What was less easy to see was how to force practical global change.
Nobody can be in any doubt about the alarming rate at which animals, reptiles and birds are becoming extinct. The journal Science says we are wiping out species at 1,000 times their natural rate.
In the past 40 years alone half the world’s wildlife species have been lost, with conservation giant the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) predicting Earth is on course to lose two-thirds of its species within the next three years.
Marco Lambertini, director-general of WWF International, could not have put it more starkly: “Lose biodiversity, and the natural world – including the life-support systems as we know them – will collapse.”
Changing our spots: if we don't change our diets then animals, such as jaguar, face extinction (AFP/Getty)
The depth of the crisis was underlined earlier this year when scientists announced we were already living through an era of the world’s sixth mass extinction – caused by human activity. What was happening was so urgent, they warned, it should be termed not “mass extinction” but “biological annihilation”.
The researchers revealed, in the journal Nature, their findings that tens of thousands of species – including a quarter of all mammals and 13 per cent of birds – are now threatened with extinction. The researchers, who studied 27,600 species, said: “Dwindling population sizes and range-shrinkages amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilisation.”
And it’s not just land mammals that are disappearing. Last year a study in the journal Science suggested sharks, whales and sea turtles were dying in disproportionately greater numbers than smaller animals – the reverse of earlier extinctions.
The link with food
Climate change and hunting are usually blamed for declines in the natural world but at Extinction Conference 17, WWF revealed fresh research showing 60 per cent of global biodiversity loss is down to meat-based diets.
Its report, Appetite for Destruction, laid bare how the vast scale of cereals and soya grown specifically to feed animals farmed for meat is soaking up great tracts of land, taking huge quantities of fresh water and eliminating wild species.
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What’s more, the study says, the world is consuming more animal protein than it needs: the average UK consumption of protein is between 64g and 88g, compared with guidelines of 45g-55g. Poultry such as chicken and duck are the biggest users of crop feed worldwide, with pigs second.
One study found that 60 per cent of EU cereal production (and 67 per cent in the US) is used as animal feed – yet for every 100 calories fed to animals as crops, we receive on average just 17-30 calories in the form of meat and milk.
It's a jungle out there: deforestation for food production is a massive problem (AFP/Getty)
According to the charity Compassion in World Farming (CiWF), the destructive practices were set in train after the Second World War, when intensive farming techniques spread from the US to Europe. Vast landscapes were replaced by “monoculture” – a single crop – in fields liberally treated with pesticides and fertilisers. They killed the insects, bees and butterflies at the bottom of the food chain and wiped away bird habitats, while active deforestation for food production is leaving ever smaller landscapes for mammals, from jaguar and elephants to polar bears and rhinos.
It’s happening in exotic locations – such as Indonesia, where the palm oil industry wrecks habitats and leads to elephants, porcupine and wild pigs being poisoned – and closer to home, where decades of use of nitrogen and other chemicals on farms has led to dire warnings about Britain’s soil having fewer than 100 harvests left.
But worldwide, the overwhelming problem, experts say, is the highly inefficient use of land to grow soya and cereals that are then fed to chickens, pigs and cattle slaughtered for meat.
According to The Economist, although livestock provides just 17 per cent of global calories consumed, it requires twice that proportion of the Earth’s fresh water, feed and farmland because of the crops required. And this makes it the greatest user of land in the world.
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Philip Lymbery, chief executive of CiWF, which organised the conference, set out the causal links between modern intensive farming practices and the destruction of the natural world in his book Dead Zone, which explains how intensive rearing of animals in Britain and abroad to produce meat cheaply involves destroying forests half the size of the UK for farmland each year.
In South America, rainforests have been replaced by swathes of soya crops to feed cattle, pigs and chickens. Some 13 million hectares there – about the size of Greece – are used for soya imported by the EU, nearly all for industrial feed, according to WWF.
The system is so inefficient, says Lymbery, that “worldwide, if grain-fed animals were restored to pasture and the cereals and soya went to people instead, there would be enough for an extra four billion people”. Feeding animals on crops that are fit for humans is “the biggest single area of food waste on the planet”.
Sting in the tail: use of pesticides in fields is one of the factors leading to a decline in bees (CiWF)
“Many people claim factory farming is the answer to feeding a burgeoning population but this couldn’t be further from the truth,” he says.
Intensively grazed landscapes, with fertilisers and pesticides and the demise of stubble, have led to steep declines in barn owls and other farmland birds and small mammals, while chemical run-off from fields is seen as a key cause of bee decline.
CiWF is not the only voice linking extinctions with our diets. The UN has stated that “intensive livestock production is probably the largest sector-specific source of water pollution”. The Soil Association says the UK’s food system accounts for 30 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions, largely because of industrialised processes.
And WWF has warned: “We could witness a two-thirds decline in the half-century from 1970 to 2020, unless we act now to reform our food and energy systems and meet global commitments on addressing climate change, protecting biodiversity and supporting sustainable development.”
Solutions
Seven years ago, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity drew up a strategic plan, signed by 196 countries, of detailed targets for 2020 to slow wildlife decline. Since then scientists have repeatedly warned not just that the targets would be missed but also that biodiversity loss was worsening. The lack of action was one factor behind the Extinction Conference.
Lymbery said it should be the start of a “global conversation” on transforming food and farming worldwide, and called for a fresh UN convention. “To safeguard the future, we need some kind of global agreement to replace factory farming with a regenerative food system. But that’s not all. We all have the power, three times a day, to save wildlife and end an awful lot of farm animal cruelty.”
Mucking in: We have it in our power to prevent factory farming – by changing our behaviour (AFP/Getty)
Duncan Williamson, of WWF, proposed feeding farm animals on specially cultivated insects and algae, to dramatically reduce deforestation and water use needed as animal feed.
Food producers, meanwhile, showcased a new vegan burger that “sizzles and bleeds like meat”, endorsed by Joanna Lumley, the star of Absolutely Fabulous.
Less meat
Time and again, the solutions by conference experts led to a need to end industrial animal farming – which meant animal campaigners were suddenly no longer the only ones urging people to scale back drastically the amount of chicken, pork, beef, salmon, dairy and eggs consumed.
Chris Darwin, who spent six weeks on a container ship travelling to Britain to avoid flying, said: “Verifiable evidence indicates meat consumption globally will double in the next 35 years, and if that occurs so much forest will have to be cut down around the world that we’re going to cause a mass extinction of species within the next hundred years. And we cannot let that happen.”
He explained passionately how a typical diet uses “two-and-a-half planets” in terms of resources but cutting out wasteful animal produce uses “a quarter of the planet”.
Cut it out: Rainforests are being chopped down and replaced by soya crops (AFP/Getty Images)
He is using modern technology that would have astounded his great, great grandfather to fight back against the seemingly relentless decline of the natural world – in the form of an iPhone app helping people to switch to a more plant-based diet.
By tapping in what they eat, people can receive feedback over time on how many animals, carbon emissions and how much land and water they have saved, as well as days of lifespan added, and their placing on a leaderboard.
“What is the single silver bullet to solve this problem?” he says. “We need behavioural change to solve this problem – and that is to eat less meat.”
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Panda habitat is shrinking and tourists are adding to the problem, study says.
Overall habitat in southwest China decreased in size by 4.9 per cent from 1976 to 2001, researchers found.
Growing numbers of tourists visiting southwest China to see the iconic panda are contributing to its habitat loss, environmental scientists warn.
A study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution on Monday found that the habitat of giant pandas has become smaller and more fragmented over the past four decades.
The overall habitat shrank by 4.9 per cent from 1976 to 2001, according to the researchers, while the average size of each area where pandas lived decreased by 24 per cent in that period.
Although the numbers improved slightly from 2001 to 2013 thanks to conservation work, the recovery failed to offset habitat loss in the past.
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The research, conducted by scientists in China and the United States, was based on satellite and remote sensing data from 1976 to 2013.
The authors said road construction, logging and earthquakes had contributed to previous habitat loss, and a recent increase in tourism had added to the problem.
China has invested heavily in panda conservation, establishing nature reserves, planting bamboo forests and setting up breeding programmes. It also plans to open a huge Giant Panda National Park in 2020, linking dozens of isolated habitats.
Meanwhile, more people are travelling to these reserves in Sichuan province to see the animal, and contributing tourist dollars to the area.
The planned 27,134 sq km national park is expected to bring even more visitors, but the government says it will protect the ecosystem of the conservation area, stressing its role in providing an experience of nature that also educates tourists.
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Fan Zhiyong, an expert on panda conservation at WWF China, said it would be highly unlikely tourists would see any wild pandas in such a park but the presence of humans could be damaging to the animals.
“These animals are extremely sensitive to any disturbance,” Fan said. “When humans come in, pandas go out.”
Panda numbers have rebounded in the past decade because of conservation efforts – national surveys put the wild population at 1,864 in 2014, far fewer than 40 years ago but up slightly from a decade earlier – prompting the International Union for Conservation of Nature last year to lower its status from “endangered” to “vulnerable”.
But the authors of the study said that status failed to take into account the emerging threats from shrinking habitats.
At the moment, 18 of the 30 panda groups living in the wild in southwest China have fewer than 10 individual pandas – meaning they face a high risk of local extinction, according to the study.
“Currently, pandas are facing great threats and challenges from habitat fragmentation, population isolation, infrastructure development, tourism and climate change,” the researchers said.
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Fan said more research was needed to determine how to balance tourism with panda conservation work.
“This is a problem faced by all nature reserves in the world,” Fan said. “China still lags behind when it comes to studying the effects of tourism on the ecosystem.”
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Chad Horwedel
Illinois' vanishing bugs and why it matters to Earth.
Endangered insects, a little-known part of the Endangered Species Act, prepare for life under Trump.
Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune
A beast with black wings buzzed close and darted past us into the trees: What was that? Was that it? That had to be it. Mallory Sbelgio, citizen scientist, entomologist in training, defender of rare insects, did not quite roll her eyes, though it was remarkable her eyes remained in her head: No, she said, no, that wasn’t the bug we were looking for. She continued walking. Our insect was rarer — in decline throughout the country, but especially Illinois. We were hunting the Hine’s emerald dragonfly, one of relatively few insects to receive a special status: It’s protected by the Endangered Species Act.
A long sliver of a thing alighted on a curling blade of grass, its body sky blue, its wings slim windowpanes. It clung to its green, then zipped off.
There!
“Nope,” Sbelgio said. “Damselfly.”
It was a bright Saturday morning, and we were walking along the Des Plaines River in Will County, stepping around the spongy marshes and flooded banks left by a downpour a few hours before. Dragonflies darted inches above the waterline. But not our dragonfly. Sbelgio was too polite to state the obvious: This was a waste of time, we would never stumble onto a Hine’s by wandering around a forest preserve. Success was statistically unrealistic: According to Andres Ortega, an ecologist who specializes in insects for DuPage County, where the Hine’s is slightly more prevalent, its population in Illinois is “close to extinction — like maybe just 200 to 300 a year. So, incredibly low for an insect.”
Think finding an endangered elephant is hard?
Try finding an endangered insect.
Sbelgio crouched and peered into the forest. She wasn’t always a bug person. As a child, she was scared of everything, until one day her father brought home a tarantula, as a happy-birthday joke. To her shock, she has been hooked on insects ever since. The 27-year-old Lombard native has studied entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and zoology at Miami University in Ohio; lately, she has been trying to start a nonprofit to raise awareness of endangered insects in Illinois.
“All the energy goes into endangered fish and mammals,” she said. “So there are not a lot of us out here, but someone has to advocate for bugs. Most of the time I mention I stand up for endangered insects, I’m met with dead silence. People think ‘endangered’ and ‘insects’ don’t go together. But lose insects, and we are dismantling our ecosystem.”
The good news? As summer ends, there are fewer insects, fewer swats.
The bad news? That insect you just swatted might be the last of its kind.
Scientist after scientist, and research study after research study, has agreed our ecosystem is indeed being dismantled, partly because extinction rates for thousands of wildlife species have accelerated in the past decade. The really bad news: Insects constitute a majority of those species. Tarantulas, for instance. Some biologists believe most tarantulas could be extinct within our lifetime. The suspects are not hard to guess: climate change, development, the human-made decline of natural habitats.
One hope, entomologists say, is the Endangered Species Act.
Invertebrates have been on it since 1976, when the Fish and Wildlife Service granted protections to seven species of butterflies. Yet, the trouble with insects is, well, most are not a “charismatic species,” scientists’ term for superstars of the endangered animal kingdom. We coo for pandas and whales. Ants, not so much. “Honestly, endangered insects have been a (public relations) nightmare,” said May Berenbaum, the head of UIUC’s department of entomology. She received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama; “The X-Files” named a character after her. But ask about protecting insects and even she acknowledges “insects are a hard case (for protection). Try arguing for a pygmy hog-sucking louse. Not a great name for something we might want to save.”
You can make eye contact with a rare river otter.
Try that with a beetle that buries roadkill for lunch.
And now, insects face a more existential hurdle — the Trump administration, which has signaled it intends to gut the Endangered Species Act. Never mind melting glaciers — explain to a politician why the extinction of the rattlesnake-master borer moth is a crisis. As the Entomological Society of America noted in a recent statement of support for the Endangered Species Act: Insects are 75 percent of species, and insects are necessary for a healthy environment, but only 84 species of invertebrates have government protection, compared to 439 vertebrates.
So the battle for bugs is lonely.
Sbelgio stared into the forest and shook her head: “People don’t get it. They don’t think insects impact their world at all — something moved!” She trudged off into the thicket, ever careful of where she stepped.
Specimens in the Insects, Arachnids and Myriapods collection of the Field Museum.
Fifty years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued its first list of endangered and threatened species to be federally protected, an outcome of 1966’s Endangered Species Preservation Act. Some of the initial 76 protected animals included manatees, bald eagles, Columbian white-tailed deer and the American alligator. You know, relatable.
By 1970, protections were extended to invertebrates, and in 1973, at the urging of the Nixon administration, the Endangered Species Act, a significantly beefed-up version of the 1966 law, was passed to include protections for the habitats of endangered species. It wasn’t the federal government’s first rodeo with animal conservation: The Lacey Act of 1900, a response to the decline of passenger pigeons (which eventually went extinct), addressed the illegal trade of animals. Later legislation tried to slow whale hunting and the shooting of migratory birds. Today, the federal Endangered Species List isn’t even the only list: Many states keep their own lists, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which has published a broader “Red List” since 1964, classifies 195 insect species (worldwide) as “critically endangered.”
Still, the Endangered Species Act remains a regulatory outlier compared with conservation laws in many countries, said Andy Suarez, an entomologist at UIUC. “Never mind it gives value to a species, which many people find abstract. The language is pretty blanket — it preserves entire habitats. That’s why a lot of people are terrified of losing it under Trump — conservationists will never get anything like it again.”
Despite strong laws, however, insect protection is awkward.
Insects are small and everywhere. Their lives are short. More butterflies receive protection than, say, flies because they’re outgoing, they pollinate — if you can see a bug, you have a better chance of compiling data on it. Said Michael Jeffords, an entomologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey: “Illinois is an insect Venn diagram. We’re on the edge of a lot of (insect) ranges, so accuracy gets rough. On the other hand, we’ve been collecting data since the 1850s. If you don’t see an insect that once lived here, you know they’re done — or their habitat is.”
Bugs die quietly every day.
Since millions of insects remain unidentified, entire species have vanished before we knew they existed. As California condors were captured in the 1980s and brought into breeding programs to prevent their extinction, scientists washed them. However, doing this killed a louse that lived only on California condors. Now that louse is extinct.
The federal Endangered Species Act lists 85 endangered or threatened insects. Illinois’ list is 15 species long and includes Karner blue butterflies, springtails, stoneflies and a scorpion. Crystal Maier, collections manager for invertebrates at the Field Museum, has most of them. She has 4 million bugs stuck on boards, 12 million more floating in alcohol. She walks the cold hallways of the museum’s insect storage room, locates the scientific name of a species, then slides out a series of wooden trays with dead specimens stuck with pins. It’s a combination library/morgue. “And there you ... go,” she says cheerfully.
Behold, the striped bark scorpion.
Found rarely in Illinois on the eastern banks of the Mississippi River, outside St. Louis; grows no more than 3 inches; black stripe on its back; resembles a crustacean; stings. Maier puts it back and reaches for rare springtails, so tiny the specimens float in vials placed inside jars.
Ask an entomologist why it matters to protect bugs like this, and they rattle off reasons, economic, environmental, moral: Bugs provide billions of dollars of pollinated crops, according to agricultural studies. In the Chicago area, said John Legge, Chicago conservation director of the Nature Conservancy, a lack of biodiversity in natural spaces “can be an illustration of the threat of climate change.” (A few years ago, after an uncommonly cool spring in the Indiana Dunes caused the Karner blue to emerge too soon, the population crashed and never recovered.) Maier, whose own specialty is aquatic beetles, said the biodiversity of the insects along a river or stream is often a warning light of water quality.
There are times, though, where she is hesitant to identify a rare species: “Because you’re not just naming a species anymore, you’re pointing out habitat for protection — which gets politicized.” Indeed, the Reagan administration sought to remove all insects from protection. Instead, “pests” — mosquitoes, ticks, certain beetles, anything regarded as having a negative impact on health or economic concerns like crops — were prohibited. “Yet people assume all bugs are pests,” Berenbaum said. “During the W. Bush years, a recommendation was made to set aside 9,200 acres in Hawaii for flies found nowhere else that had bacterial qualities useful, some said, in developing drugs. The White House said ‘OK,’ and then it set aside 18 acres — a giant middle finger to bugs.”
Consider the journey of the rusty patched bumblebee.
Once common throughout the Midwest and Northeast, it’s found in only 13 states now (including Illinois). It pollinates cranberries, tomatoes. Even dead and stuck with a pin, it’s adorable: fuzzy, colored like an autumn forest. Last fall, the Obama administration announced it would be added to the Endangered Species List. Hours before Rusty was officially listed, the Trump administration delayed inclusion, explaining more study was needed. A coalition of farm and real estate interests had petitioned against Rusty. After the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit, the White House backed down and included Rusty.
This bee’s story isn’t over.
In the spring, work on the Longmeadow Parkway Corridor Project in Kane County, which cut through the bee’s habitat, was halted, then restarted; that battle is ongoing. Yet Rusty’s inclusion has been pivotal, said Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Portland, Ore.-based Xerces Society, which led the decadelong petition process for protection. He sees the bee as a “charismatic” gateway to bringing attention to endangered insects in general. “But the endgame is never the listing. Insects get less money than endangered animals, and almost nothing if they’re not listed, so now the struggle for conservation action begins.”
Xerces, founded in 1971, a pioneer in insect conservation, is not alone. The Nature Conservancy in Chicago buys land that protects local insect habitats; museums launch butterfly counter iPhone apps; the St. Louis Zoo established a Center for American Burying Beetle Conservation.
Just off the lobby of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum — some distance from the live-butterfly exhibit, to prevent contagion — Allen Lawrence, associate curator of entomology, and Doug Taron, chief curator of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, breed Baltimore checkerspot butterflies, a vulnerable species. The lab is humid, small. A graduate student is hunched over a table, using a thin paintbrush to delicately sift caterpillar poop from paper cups. That’s nearly the entire arrangement: cups, student, a humidifier, a few leaf greens of food.
“With insects, it doesn’t cost a lot to make a difference,” Lawrence said.
Next summer, after three years, the project will release its Baltimores in Elgin. “Habitat conditions have to be ideal,” Taron said. “The problem is that nature, no matter what you do, throws so much at you.” As with many things in life, it’s the spineless that take the roughest hits.
Grass poked through the fast-moving current on the Des Plaines River. Geese honk-honked overhead. Mallory Sbelgio watched a harvestman (aka daddy longlegs) step carefully around her hand.
It was no Hine’s emerald dragonfly.
Dead specimens alone are hard to find. Andres Ortega, in DuPage, is eager to change this. His Hine’s breeding project in Warrenville is a year old. On waterways, he’s carving the kind of shallow channels that Hine’s look for. And though he wasn’t involved, when the Illinois Tollway built Interstate 355 across the Des Plaines, the state made the road higher than planned, so motorists didn’t accidentally speed up the Hine’s extinction.
“Why spend so much money on a dragonfly?” he asked. “Extinction is normal and happens, but when that removal is unnatural, as we are seeing all over the world, we have a cascading crisis in our backyards.”
The prognosis is grim.
Sbelgio pictures herself on the front lines by staying small. The state rejected her proposal for a nonprofit organization centered on endangered insects. But she’s not going away. Endangered insects make the Endangered Species Act accessible in a way that an endangered polar bear does not, she said — it’s a niche waiting for a leader.
A small quick oblong alien crawled past.
Oh! There!
“That’s an ant,” Sbelgio said. “Don’t worry. There’s a lot of ants.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
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Fighting for a foothold.
White abalone are both critically endangered and crucial to their coastal ecosystems, so scientists have launched a Hail Mary effort to save them.
SOLUTIONS | 09.19.17
Fighting for a Foothold
White abalone are both critically endangered and crucial to their coastal ecosystems, so scientists have launched a Hail Mary effort to save them.
Story by Gloria Dickie
Photographs by Kathryn Whitney
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Kristin Aquilino pushes open a heavy metal door with a small sign bearing the words, White Abalone Spawning and Culturing in Process. “This is where the magic happens,” says Aquilino, who directs the white abalone captive breeding program here at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory, an expansive research facility situated on a windy, jagged stretch of coastline in northern California. It’s shortly after 7 a.m., and she and her team have already been at work for several hours.
Today is Spawning Day—the one time each year when white abalone can be coaxed to release their sperm and eggs, giving researchers the chance to rear the next generation. Each of the 14 brood stock in their care, including the only wild-born white abalone female in captivity, sits in its own bucket, bathing in a hydrogen peroxide solution that, after a few hours, should stimulate the mollusk to spawn. “There’s a lot on the line,” Aquilino explains. With white abalone (Haliotis sorenseni) failing to reproduce in the wild, this program is essential to the species’ survival. But she doesn’t have high hopes for the new wild female, which released eggs out of stress when divers collected her in Southern California a few weeks earlier. “My guess is she’s done.”
White abalone once numbered in the millions, from Point Conception, near Santa Barbara, California to Punta Abreojos, Mexico, more than 1,200 kilometers (800 miles) to the south. Today, only about 2,000 isolated survivors remain along California’s coast, where the species is considered to be functionally extinct. No two individuals live near enough—within 2 meters (6 feet) of one another—for their sperm and eggs to meet when released into the water. As white abalone numbers have fallen, other creatures have proliferated in their wake. Urchins now overgraze the fragile kelp forests that protect coastlines from eroding into the sea. Despite conservation efforts, abalone numbers have continued to drop in recent decades. Researchers have been left with no choice but to try to breed the animals in captivity and release them into the wilds of the California Coast in a last-ditch effort to save the species—and the habitat they shore up.
Just after 9:00 a.m., an hour earlier than anticipated, there’s a sudden flurry of activity as technicians cluster around one of the white buckets. Wild abalone 312 is spawning. “You go girl!” yips Aquilino, as a cloud of brown eggs shoots out of one of the respiratory pores on her shell—an orifice through which the animals both breathe and release eggs or sperm. Given the unlikelihood that this abalone lived near a male in the wild, Aquilino says this could be the first time she’s had a chance to reproduce in decades. “That’s a very long dry spell,” Aquilino says, especially for an animal with a lifespan of 35 to 40 years. Ten minutes later, in 309’s bucket, a cloud of milky abalone ejaculate plumes, and technicians swiftly elbow their way in with pipettes to collect the sperm. In a matter of minutes, Aquilino is inside a refrigerated fertilization room and singularly focused, mixing the fresh sperm and eggs in precise ratios. “It’s like Match.com with 309 and 312,” she says, injecting a dropper-full of sperm into a pitcher of eggs.
After more than a decade of trial-and-error, white abalone are finally hitting their stride in captivity. By day’s end, the wild female will have spawned some 700,000 viable eggs—introducing new genes into the captive population for the first time in 14 years. In total, the team estimated they had created 8 million embryos—20,000 of which they expect to make it to the adult stage. That’s in addition to the tens of thousands of juveniles researchers have already reared in their nursery.
As scientists prepare to release the first captive-bred individuals into the wild in the next year or so, much remains unknown about the ecological role of the marine invertebrate and the rising threats to their long-term recovery: a mysterious disease brought on by warm waters, the predators that exploit naive captive-raised abalone, and the yet-to-be-determined impacts of climate change. Indeed, the coast is hardly clear for abalone in California.
In the wild, white abalone typically live a hundred feet or more below the surface, so researchers often use remotely-operated submersible vehicles to study them. As a result, research on the basics of abalone biology and ecology has been slow, and scientists were largely unaware of the rapid decline of abalone populations until it was almost too late.
“Abalone’s ultimate downfall is that they’re delicious,” says Jenny Hofmeister, a marine scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. White abalone, highly prized by markets in Asia and restaurants in stateside Chinatowns, are said to be tastier than the red, black, pink, or green abalone species. In the 1970s, California opened up a commercial fishery for white abalone, and divers gathered the animals by the hundreds of thousands. As white abalone became rarer in the wild, the price per pound jumped from $2.50 in 1981 to $7 in 1993—roughly double the value of other abalone species. Before long, the abalone that remained on the seafloor were too few and far between to reproduce.
Fearing extinction, the California Department of Fish and Game banned commercial fishing of white abalone in 1996 and of all abalone species in 1997. Today, the only fishery that remains is for recreational fishing of red abalone in northern California, where their densities are still sustainable. But that hasn’t stopped white abalone from showing up in fishermen’s hauls. Today, a single white abalone can sell for hundreds of dollars—a temptation some divers are unable to resist. Aquilino says she’s heard people describe it as “finding a $100 bill on the ocean floor.”
Based on surveys conducted in the 1990s showing that white abalone populations had declined by 99 percent in southern California in just two decades, the species was designated as a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act. Petitions from the Center for Biological Diversity and the Marine Conservation Biology Institute eventually led to the white abalone being listed in 2001—the first marine invertebrate to receive federal protection. In the years that followed, scientists and the government mounted a valiant effort to bring the animal back from the brink, but white abalone numbers continued to drop. Between 2002 and 2011, some of the sparse, wild California populations declined by an additional 78 percent.
“Something knocked them out,” says Buzz Owen, 82, a retired commercial fisherman and avid abalone researcher who first described hybridization among various species. “But there were multiple things at work.”
On top of illegal harvests, a disease called Withering Foot Syndrome first showed up near the Channel Islands off the southern California Coast in 1986, and by the 1990s it had spread to waters near the mainland. Once infected, abalone stop eating. The abalone is then forced to consume its own body mass, causing the foot muscle to wither and lose its life-giving grip on the rocky seafloor. The deadly disease affects every abalone species in California, but white abalone are particularly hard hit.
Even more troubling, the emergence of Withering Foot Syndrome is temperature-dependent. A white abalone in a lab, under optimal conditions, can be infected with the pathogen and not experience any symptoms. But as soon as the water temperature warms to between 18 and 20 degrees Celsius (64 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit), the disease kicks in, killing the mollusk within months.
In the wild, white abalone occupy deep waters that are normally cool enough to keep them healthy. But between 2014 and 2016, El Niño and an anomalous mass of warm water meteorologists call “The Blob” pushed temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean two degrees Celsius above normal. This warmed every monitored white abalone site in southern California, some of them past the 18-degree threshold. Climate change is expected to routinely bring warmer water temperatures to some stretches of white abalone habitat, potentially eliminating their thermal protection in these areas altogether.
To make matters worse, rising ocean temperatures are also wreaking havoc on the animals’ habitat and food sources. Kelp forests need temperatures between 5 and 20 degrees Celsius (41 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit) to thrive. When water temperatures increase, the amount of dissolved inorganic nitrogen drops, and kelp abundance begins to fall as well.
A Brief History of White Abalone
Thanks to over-harvesting, reproductive failure, and infections, white abalone has gone from abundant to endangered in just half a century. But science has been staging an intervention in hopes of improving the species' odds of survival. Click on the green circles to learn more.
19601970198019902000201020201968White abalone harvest takes off in CaliforniaAt its peak, 144,000 pounds of white abalone is harvested in a year1978White abalone harvest plummets; a mere 3,600 pounds are harvested this year1997California prohibits commercial and recreational fishing of white abaloneWhite abalone numbers at a monitoring site in Tanner Bank, California continue to fall despite protections2002-201419722001White abalone is federally listed as an endangered species
When I meet Jim Moore inside the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Shellfish Health Lab, the invertebrate pathologist is peering through a microscope, examining dyed tissue samples taken from captive white abalone. He’s hoping that by documenting the process of necrosis—what an abalone’s tissues do after the animal dies—he’ll be able to sort out the difference between changes caused by pathogenic disease and those that happen naturally after death. “It’s difficult for us to figure out when an abalone is really dead—often once [researchers] realize, it’s been dead for a while,” he says. This makes it hard to know if an infection took hold before the animal died (perhaps causing death) or after.
To keep Withering Foot Syndrome at bay in the nursery, Moore gives the animals a bath in an antibiotic called oxytetracycline and treats them with UV radiation as soon as they arrive. Researchers can douse the animals once more before stocking them in the wild, to protect them from the disease for a few more months, but without continual treatment the abalone are likely to become infected.
In a stroke of evolutionary good fortune, a bacterial phage, or hyper-parasite, emerged a few years ago, fighting off the syndrome in wild populations of black abalone, as well as on red abalone farms in central California. In black abalone, for example, researchers found the phage reduced the infection load in targeted tissue by roughly half. The phage has since spread and is protecting abalone populations throughout their range, wherever the pathogen is found. Moore says researchers have no clue where it came from or how it arrived, but “the enemy of your enemy is your friend,” he says. The phage has shown mixed results to date in saving white abalone, but considering its enigmatic nature, there’s hope that the phage, or another variant, may turn out to provide some level of protection.
Progress has also been made in keeping illegal harvest to a minimum. To pin down poachers, Erin Meredith, senior wildlife forensic specialist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Wildlife Forensic Laboratory, helped to develop a genetic test to distinguish between red, black, pink, green, flat and white species. Now, when enforcement officers come across suspected abalone poachers in the field, they can take tissue samples from the mollusks and send them to a lab for species identification. Meredith’s test also enables officers to analyze items used in potential poaching activities, such as the suspect’s dive gloves, wetsuits and pry knives—anything that may have come into contact with the abalone. And it’s working. Earlier this year, Meredith received her first case involving potentially poached white abalone in southern California.
The challenge that remains is figuring out how and where to return the captive-bred abalone to the wild once researchers receive federal approval to release them—possibly within the next year. Even if scientists manage to protect abalone from poachers and disease, predators threaten to undo all the gains achieved so far.
The 22-foot Boston Whaler dubbed Kelpfish rolls in the choppy waters off San Diego as pelicans dive like sharpshooters around the boat, snapping up fish and gulping them down quivering gullets that reverberate with each flop. Sea lions and porpoises swim by, taking advantage of the ocean’s bounty. On the horizon, a California Department of Fish and Wildlife enforcement officer patrols the protected waters, on the lookout for possible poachers. But today, most of the action is happening far beneath the waves.
After 45 minutes, a stream of fizzing bubbles rises to the water’s surface, signaling the return of divers Jenny Hofmeister and Arturo Ramirez. The two waterlogged black shapes emerge from a cloud of tuna crabs and weedy kelp and haul themselves from the cool water along with mesh bags filled with a collection of sea creatures. After a quick swig of ginger tea to warm up, Hofmeister begins sifting through her scavenged treasures: an empty cowrie shell; five Kellet’s whelks; a starfish; and a half-dozen red abalone shells, their occupants long-since eaten.
Over the past week, Hofmeister and a team of divers from the Bodega Marine Laboratory have been performing predator surveys in a range of stocked habitat plots along the California coastline. Last year, to test the waters, the team released 3,200 farm-raised red abalone in Long Beach—a process they call outplanting. “We saw a very quick and immediate increase in octopus right next to our abalone a few days after we put them out there,” Hofmeister says. “We call it ‘ringing the dinner bell’.”
Octopuses are abalone’s most voracious predators in deep water, but crabs, lobsters, and fish will target them, too. Captive-bred abalone released into the wild, researchers theorize, are stressed in their new environment and haven’t developed fast-acting fear responses yet. The abalone’s first lines of defense are passive: camouflage and a hard shell. If pursued by a slow-moving predator, like a starfish or predatory snail, abalone can retreat, if only at a literal snail’s pace. When faster-moving threats approach, abalone can engage their mollusk death grip, clamping down on a rock and holding on for dear life. But studies show that farm-raised abalone don’t clamp down fast enough. And even if they do, some predators, like octopuses, are able to bore through their shells.
Hofmeister pulls out her waterproof chart and begins performing casual necropsies on each of the red abalone shells she’s collected. “Damage to the shell can give us an indicator of what ate it,” she says, picking up a tiny green and gray shell with chips along the edge. “This was probably a crab or a lobster, because they’ll use their sharp claws to flip the abalone off the rock.” Octopus kills, she continues, can be identified by the pin-prick-sized hole it makes through the middle of the abalone shell with its rasping tongue to reach the main muscle, where the octopus injects a paralyzing toxin. This allows the octopus to pry the abalone off the rock and devour it. “There is not much we can do to increase the armor of the abalone,” Hofmeister says. "If we can find a way to deter octopus, that might be our best bet.”
So far, about 700 of the 7,200 outplanted red abalone from the trial have been accounted for across nine sites in coastal Los Angeles and San Diego, 400 of them dead and 300 alive. The site Hofmeister is monitoring today seems to be showing better survival rates than other locations as well as fewer predators. As she packages each abalone shell in a small plastic bag, another dive team swings by in their boat and passes over a white plastic bucket containing a California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) collected at one of their survey plots.
“A lot of my research is addressing how we can outsmart the octopus,” says Hofmeister as she hoists the slimy, red mollusk from the water in the bucket, already stained with the animal’s defensive ink. She empties the toxic contents over the side of the boat as the octopus suctions tightly to her hand. Because octopuses use their tentacles to “taste” their way along the seafloor, Hofmeister wonders if it would be feasible to coat the abalone’s shell with an unpalatable concoction to deter predators. She explains, “We want a coating that doesn’t hurt the abalone, but if an octopus touches it, he’s like ‘Nope!’” Alternatively, if researchers find areas that octopuses steer clear of—a patch of sandy terrain or rocky relief too unpleasant to traverse—these might be good spots to release white abalone.
Hofmeister pulls out her measuring stick and takes a read of the size of the octopus’s mantle. Then she checks for any physical damage; tentacle R2 is missing its tip, but it will regrow. Last, she sexes the octopus and estimates her to be six months old. By year’s end, she’ll double in size. “Don’t ink, don’t ink, don’t ink,” Hofmeister mutters as she returns the animal back to the bucket of water.
She inks.
By mid-afternoon, our boat is harbor-bound, speeding over dark blue waters. The clouds that hung low throughout the morning have dissipated, and the mansions of San Diego loom large above the shoreline. Mitt Romney has a $12 million beachfront vacation home here, not far from John McCain’s $1 million luxury condo.
One of the biggest challenges of white abalone restoration is getting people to care about an animal that so closely resembles a rock. Abalone are the antithesis of charismatic megafauna. Still, Aquilino is on a mission to make the world see these creatures as both “cute” and vital to the ocean’s health. If people can look past the animals’ hard exterior, they may invest more in saving abalone, which play a critical role in maintaining the nation’s kelp forests and the coastlines these ecosystems hold together.
In this part of southern California, where white abalone have all but disappeared, sea urchin populations have exploded over the past 20 years, forming so-called “urchin barrens.” With no abalone around to compete for habitat and vital resources, urchins move out of subtidal cracks and crevices to mow down kelp and the ecosystems the plants support. In California, it’s these kelp forests that protect coastlines from wave action. “They absorb a lot of the ocean’s energy,” explains Hofmeister. As sea levels rise, waves will likely be able to travel farther inland, even during calm conditions, eroding away land. Storm surges bring larger waves, and with them, the potential to cause catastrophic damage. “Without kelp forests, Romney’s house is going to be gone,” she says.
According to a 2013 study in Nature, if protective nearshore habitats such as kelp forests were lost, we would see a doubling of the number of poor families, elderly people, and property value exposed to coastal hazards like flooding and sea level rise by 2100. And without abalone, kelp forests’ days may be numbered. It’s not just a matter of getting people to acknowledge that abalone are cute; the mollusks provide tangible, measurable economic benefits in the form of coastal protection.
“The kelp forest is an ecosystem that supports a lot of different species,” explains Hofmeister. Remove one of those species, and the whole ecosystem can crumble. When sea otters disappeared in the Aleutian Archipelago in southeast Alaska, for example, urchins exploded and ate all the kelp until the forest disappeared, and with it many of the species it supported, such as seals, sharks, and sea lions. But when sea otters were extirpated in southern California, where other species that preyed on the urchins still existed, the forests remained resilient. “The more biodiverse an ecosystem is, the more resilient it is to change,” Hofmeister says. “Diversity saved the kelp forests then, and diversity is what is going save the kelp forests now.”
Photo credits:
Header: A white abalone at the Bodega Marine Lab. Photograph by John Burgess/The Press Democrat
The Bodega Marine Lab in Horseshoe Cove.
The Shellfish Health Lab.
A dyed sample of diseased abalone tissue.
Homes overlooking the waters of San Diego. Photograph by Gloria Dickie.
Footer: The rocky coast of Northern California.
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Save our bats, belugas and bobolinks.
According to the World Wildlife Fund Canada, 451 of 903 mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species across the country have declined in number by a shocking average of 83 per cent. Governments must act immediately to save them from extinction.
Save our bats, belugas and bobolinks: Editorial
According to the World Wildlife Fund Canada, 451 of 903 mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species across the country have declined in number by a shocking average of 83 per cent. Governments must act immediately to save them from extinction.
The little brown bat is just one of the hundreds of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibian and fish species across the country threatened with extinction. (JOE MCDONALD / CORBIS)
By Star Editorial Board
Mon., Sept. 18, 2017
Think of the little brown bat as Canada’s canary in the coalmine. In what scientists believe might be the most rapid decline of a mammal species ever documented, 94 per cent of the big-eared creatures have been wiped out in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec.
One reason for their precipitous disappearance appears to be a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome that is spreading westward and threatening to extinguish the lives of all these pretty predators, which play an important role in their ecosystem by noshing on night-flying insects.
But there’s also something more broadly worrying at play. According to a World Wildlife Fund Canada report released on Friday, this was a species that was already threatened, like Canada’s other bat populations, from habitat destruction by humans.
Indeed, the little brown bats are just one of 403 mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species across the country whose numbers shrunk on average by 83 per cent between 1970 and 2014 – a shocking decline largely driven by human activity. Oft-cited causes include population growth, climate change, pollution and hunting.
In Canada, the report suggests, our attempts to protect endangered wildlife have been inadequate. “The federal Species at Risk Act (SARA) has faltered in its mission to protect Canada’s most beleaguered wildlife,” the report says. Between 1970 and 2014, the 87 species now supposedly protected under the act saw their populations fall overall by 63 per cent. And since SARA was enacted in 2002, the average rate of decline has actually increased.
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Governments across the country must act now on this frightening species loss. As the Star has argued before, the human-driven destruction of biodiversity poses a threat to our food, water, the health of our economy, to our very viability.
But there are solutions. The WWF study, Living Planet Report Canada, describes several areas where governments are making progress and several ways in which they might be doing more.
Waterfowl numbers, for example, increased by 54 per cent, mainly due to widespread wetland preservation. And populations of raptors, such as falcons, grew by 88 per cent because they are no longer harmed by the now-banned toxic insecticide DDT.
In other areas, progress will require new approaches.
Currently, for instance, government is too slow to enforce existing protections for endangered species. For example, the St. Lawrence beluga was known to be at risk before the act was passed in 2002, yet it took until 2015 for the government to take the actions required by the law.
Moreover, as the report notes, there are too many shrinking species to effectively protect each individually. Instead, governments should focus on protecting entire ecosystems.
On this, Ottawa has much work to do. According to a study released earlier this year by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Canada — home to 20 per cent of the world’s forests and 24 per cent of its wetlands — lags behind much of the world when it comes to protecting its lands and fresh waters and, as a result, its biodiversity.
So far, we have managed to protect only a piddling 10.6 per cent of Canada’s vast wilderness. Compare that to Germany’s 37.8 per cent.
WWF Canada also rightly recommends we commit to more research on ecosystem health and species habitat and, crucially, on the impacts of climate change.
By failing our bats, belugas and bobolinks, among dozens of other at-risk species, we are failing both nature and ourselves. Their future is, after all, inextricably linked to ours. We can and must do better.
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Resurrecting a long-lost Galapagos giant tortoise.
The last pure Floreana tortoise died out some time not long after Darwin visited in 1835, another tale of runaway human consumption dooming a species to extinction.
IF YOU GO to Floreana Island, in the Galapagos, you can still see descendants of the giant tortoises that Darwin documented in the 19th century. From the dock, just weave between indolent sea lions and impassive ruby-red marine iguanas and ask around for the truck to the highlands. It’ll be driven by one one of the locals and you can sit on a wooden bench in the back. Hop off at the Asilo de la Paz and wander around until you come across the largest land reptile you have ever seen, eating some iceberg lettuce on a concrete slab. If you’re lucky, he or she might cast an unimpressed look in your direction.
There are a handful of big tortoises up here in corrals, and some young, toaster-sized ones too. But these tortoises aren’t really the species that once lived on Floreana, Chelonoidis elephantopus. The last pure Floreana tortoise died out some time not long after Darwin visited in 1835, another tale of runaway human consumption dooming a species to extinction. The tortoises on Floreana today are mongrels, many bred from former pets. But it may be possible to resurrect the Floreana tortoise yet—by studying a long-lost population left by pirates on an extinct volcano.
Back before it was made illegal, many families on this island had a couple big tortoises ambling around as mascots. But all those ancient looking creatures originally came from other islands. One way you can tell is their shells—most of the post-pets have classically domed shells, while the original Floreana tortoises had a pronounced saddleback-shaped shell that allowed them to crane their necks up high and reach tall vegetation on this extra-dry and sparse island.
Geneticists knew from century-old museum specimens that there were also saddlebacks on remote Wolf Volcano on Isabella, more than 100 miles away. DNA tests of those specimens hinted that some might have genes from Floreana, so in 2008, a group of 50 researchers geared up and went looking for more tortoises with those saddle-shaped shells. They found all shapes and sizes of tortoises, and like proper scientists, took blood samples from 1,600 of them.
Back at the lab, this blood revealed many individuals that were hybrids of the Floreana species and another species. Their going theory is that whalers and buccaneers, who are known to have swung by the Galapagos to pick up some tortoise meals to go, may have stashed some Floreana tortoises near the remote volcano and then never returned to pick them up. The newcomers settled down and mated with the locals.
Although there were no pure Floreana tortoises, the researchers were excited to get their mitts on those genes. They were also excited to find some animals who seemed to be relatives of the late Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta Island tortoises—another saddlebacked species. For many conservationists, the ideal restoration of any island would involve not just reintroducing any old Galapagos tortoises, but introducing the right tortoises. They had to go back. With big nets.
“It was a huge task to actually find them and physically move them there,” says Luciano Beheregaray, a geneticist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and one of the scientists who went back to the Wolf Volcano in 2015 with GPS units, El Nino-level rain gear, and machetes. The team scoured the thick and spiny brush for animals with pronounced saddlebacks. “When we found a potentially important tortoise, we had to clear the area with machetes so the helicopter could drop the net,” Beheregaray says. This time, they used shell shape to identify promising candidates and airlifted 32 out.
Wednesday, in the journal Scientific Reports, a global team of researchers is reporting on the genes they managed to snag on that trip. No Pinta Island genes, alas. Lonesome George’s kind isn’t likely to plod the Earth again any time soon. But they got 23 tortoises (nine males and 14 females) with enough Floreana genes to start bringing that species back to life.
These days, Crispr gene editing and cloning are being mooted as tools to bring back everything from the long-dead mammoth to the more-recently-extinct passenger pigeon. But in this case, no fancy genetic wizardry is required—you simply breed the tortoises with the highest levels of Floreana genes together until you have something with a very high percentage of those genes. It will take some time, though, since tortoises don’t reach sexual maturity for a quarter century.
The breeding process doesn’t have to be perfect for the tortoises to take hold: Once they are back in their native habitat, evolution will take over, says James Gibbs, a tortoise expert at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. “I am intrigued with letting these imperfect tortoises go and letting evolutionary process refit them to the island,” he says—adding that it is important to start with animals that at least have a saddleback, since they can reach more food during Floreana’s periodic and tough droughts.
However, if conservationists do succeed in bringing back Floreana, they’ll have some prep work to do. Today, the island is home to a thriving population of cats and rats that eat tortoise eggs and young—don’t be surprised if you see a rat or two flat on the road on the way back down the hill to the dock. If the renewed species is going to have a chance, these predators will have to go. Luckily, a conservation group called Island Conservation is planning just such an eradication in the next few years since the rodents also threaten rare birds like the Floreana mockingbird and the Galápagos Petrel.
Once the tortoises are back in large numbers, they are likely to change the face of the island. Where it is dense forest, they will uproot and knock down trees and bushes to make beds, creating a sort of tortoise savanna, says Gibbs. And they’ll move around the seeds of the cactus trees. Despite their modest pace, “they really are a major force,” Gibbs says.
The airlifted tortoises from Wolf Volcano, some likely over 100 years old, are settling in at a captive breeding center in Puerto Ayora, the Galapagos’s busiest city, on Santa Cruz Island. Just as they were once valued by pirates as containers of calories, they are now valued as containers of genes. But they are also individuals. “I can assure you that I helped to clean and prepare the corrals where they were housed and there is space, plenty of food and water,” says Beheregaray. “They are being treated there as Lonesome George used to be treated there—as special animals.”
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Extraction, exploitation and the morality of switching from gasoline to cobalt for cars.
Is it as ethical as we think to switch from fossil fuel extraction to cobalt extraction?
EXTRACTION, EXPLOITATION AND THE MORALITY OF SWITCHING FROM GASOLINE TO COBALT FOR CARS
08/11/2017 07:07 am ET
Marc Gopin and Tom Duncan
August 11, 2017
A good point was raised recently as we have all been piling on fossil fuel as the ultimate evil on the planet, whereas electric cars, self-driving cars and the sophisticated algorithms of a global taxi system could finally bring us to the end of the combustion engine. That would be a nice good riddance, but some are crying foul. Cobalt is essential for the new kind of cars, and it is a virtual certainty that the same extractive industry that brought us the horror of coal mines will bring us a horror of exploitation through the extraction of cobalt. Indeed, it is already happening in Congo. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764208/Child-miners-aged-four-living-hell-Earth.html . Imagine what the fossil fuel industry and the climate deniers will do with great headlines, screaming “Liberals drive feel good electric cars while torturing children”.
The tough question: Is it as ethical as we think to switch from fossil fuel extraction to cobalt extraction? The short answer is yes, but wait for the long answer too. The short answer is yes, because fossil fuels are leading to the extinction of much of life on earth by the vast majority of scientists’ projections. By sheer numbers of all of sentient lives at stake, all of the trillions of humans of the future, all of the animal life, we live in an emergency time when we must reverse global warming, and in fact we have the means to do so.
Speaking with the wisdom of the great ethical traditions, the utilitarian ethical calculus is clear in favor of saving the most lives, now and in the future.
But that still leaves a more principled or Kantian point of view deeply troubled by buying cobalt at the present time, and the principled ethicists should be, and should take action to change the situation.
First, a reality check. Much of the diamond mining, oil mining in Africa and the rare metals mining all share horrific conditions and environmental degradation.
Here then are the Kantian ethical recommendations.
1. These industries should be either cleaned up and made more socially and environmentally sustainable or shut down. No in between.
2. There are rare earth mines in USA, Canada and Australia that could serve electric cars, but the price is cheaper from other nations and so these mines don't operate. There needs to be a commitment from electric car and battery companies to sign up to an accord pledging they won't buy from these mines in the Congo, and impose heavy fines if they don't stand by the agreement. Same way the blood diamond campaign happened of building awareness into the supply chain. For example, this potential cobalt mine in Australia could be providing late amounts of cobalt, but it hanky been invested in enough. There are similar stories for Canada. https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-03-06/high-grade-cobalt-discovery-hailed-as-significant-milestone/8323928
3. Congo produces 65% of the world's cobalt, and that is a problem, since it will be irresistible to use their cobalt if the big money moves toward electric cars. So there is an issue of distribution of capital and how those decisions get made without reference to social and environmental impacts, which is not a problem exclusive to electric vehicles, it's a problem for all industrial markets of the world.
4. Instead capital needs to move in ways that serve social and environmental good, whereas till now capital has the only function of increasing more capital, no matter the consequence. Consequences such as the 40,000 children working in terrible conditions that most likely will kill them as young adults. It's a systemic issue, not singular to electric vehicles.
5. Nearly all types of mining are bad in terms of impacts. If you say all types of mining have horrible impacts, you then look at other impacts of their life cycle. It turns out that electric vehicles are 2x better than gasoline cars with life cycle emissions, and batteries are now 95% recyclable. So there will be much less mining overall once large amounts of batteries are in the marketplace circulation. Less mining, less exploitation. And electric cars have 3.7x less emissions when using 100% renewable energy grid. But lowering emissions in one part of the world cannot lead to enslavement and violence against people, children and the environment as a trade off in another part of the world, and so we most move forward with the switch, and at the same time fight for the ethical extraction of cobalt, as we have done with diamonds.
6. Finally, we need to stop outsourcing misery to the rest of the world, we need to bring home local manufacturing and therefore locally sustainable practices. It means we may pay more, but frankly the mining companies have been privatizing profits and socializing losses for decades. So the true cost is never accounted for, and that needs to change. The electric car is not the problem, on the contrary. But global extraction by the first world from the developing is and always has been the travesty. That would need to be remedied under locally more expensive production, so that companies socializing costs are actually made to pay for those losses. This then makes local manufacturing under much tighter environmental and social controls, competitive.
Dr. Marc Gopin is Director of CRDC, and James Laue Professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, and Tom Duncan is a 15 year veteran of Environmental Justice Practice and Research, and Research Fellow at CRDC, and Director of its Back To Eden Project on a Sustainable Earth
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