invertebrate
Black sea clams 'giving off as much gas as 20,000 cows.'
Scientists have found clams and worms in the Baltic Sea are giving off as much gas as 20,000 dairy cows.
Scientists have found clams and worms in the Baltic Sea are giving off as much gas as 20,000 dairy cows.
They are worried because large amounts of methane and nitrous oxides are being released from the bacteria in their guts.
The discovery of these greenhouse gases means they will need to be taken into account when tackling global warming.
A Cardiff and Stockholm universities' study found 10% of methane emissions from the Baltic Sea came from clams.
The study's co-author Dr Ernest Chi Fru, from Cardiff University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, said: "What is puzzling is that the Baltic Sea makes up only about 0.1% of Earth's oceans, implying that globally, apparently harmless bivalve animals at the bottom of the world's oceans may in fact be contributing ridiculous amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere that is unaccounted for."
And Dr Stefano Bonaglia, from Stockholm University, added: "It sounds funny but small animals in the seafloor may act like cows in a stable, both groups being important contributors of methane due to the bacteria in their gut.
Greenhouse gases
"These small yet very abundant animals may play an important, but so far neglected role in regulating the emissions of greenhouse gases in the sea."
The findings have also led to a warning about any plans by other scientists to farm oysters, mussels and clams and releasing them into the seas.
The idea behind that move is to counter algae which is growing because of fertilisers which are washed off land by rain water into rivers and lakes.
But given the amount of gases produced, the authors have warned that the potential impacts need to be considered before deciding whether to promote shellfish farming to large areas of the ocean.
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Beyond biodiversity: A new way of looking at how species interconnect.
In a development that has important implications for conservation, scientists are increasingly focusing not just on what species are present in an ecosystem, but on the roles that certain key species play in shaping their environment.
In 1966, an ecologist at the University of Washington named Robert Paine removed all the ochre starfish from a short stretch of Pacific shoreline on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The absence of the predator had a dramatic effect on its ecosystem. In less than a year, a diverse tidal environment collapsed into a monoculture of mussels because the starfish was no longer around to eat them.
By keeping mussel numbers down, the starfish had allowed many other species to thrive, from seaweed to sponges. Paine’s research led to the well-known concept of keystone species: The idea that some species in an ecosystem have prevailing traits — in this case preying on mussels — whose importance is far greater than the dominant traits of other species in that ecosystem.
Now, a half-century later, researchers are taking the study of traits much farther, with some scientists concluding that understanding the function of species can tell us more about ecosystems than knowing which species are present — a concept known as functional diversity. This idea is not merely academic, as scientists say that understanding functional diversity can play an important role in shaping conservation programs to enhance biodiversity and preserve or restore ecosystems.
“The trait perspective is very powerful,” says Jonathan Lefcheck, a researcher at the Bigelow Marine Lab in East Boothbay, Maine who studies functional diversity in marine environments. “Some species in an ecosystem are redundant, and some species are very powerful.”
Much about the concept is also unknown. One case study is taking place along the Mekong River, a 2,700-mile waterway that serves as a vital fishery for millions of people in Southeast Asia. While the fishery is healthy now, widespread changes in the ecosystem — including the proposed construction of numerous dams and the development of riparian forests and wetlands — could mean that key fish species might not be around to carry out important functions, such as keeping prey numbers in check or recycling nutrients.
“There is simply no understanding of how the construction of a dam today, and another five years from now, and another in 10 years — all in the same river basin — will impact the biodiversity and push it past a point of no return, where large scale species extinctions are imminent,” said Leo Saenz, director of eco-hydrology for Conservation International.
So a team of ecologists from Conservation International is trying to determine which roles various species in the Mekong fill that are critical to perpetuating a healthy ecosystem. Those species might be predators like the giant snakehead, which helps control other fish populations so they don’t become too numerous, or thick groves of mangrove forests in shallow areas that provide a nursery for a wide variety of fish species. Models can then predict the best way to protect these key species and ensure a healthy river over the long term.
“Ecosystem resilience is an important part of what we aim to maintain, both for the interest of biodiversity conservation and for the maintenance of the ecosystem services that nature provides,” says Trond Larsen, a biologist who heads Conservation International’s Rapid Assessment Program for biodiversity.
Some scientists now compare knowing which species are present in an ecosystem to knowing only which parts of a car are present. Functional trait ecology is a deeper dive into ecosystem dynamics to help understand how the parts come together to create a natural environment that runs smoothly, like a well-tuned automobile, thus enabling a more focused protection of the vital parts that keep it going.
“Say you have two habitats with 10 different species in each,” explains Marc Cadotte, a professor of Urban Forest Conservation and Biology at the University of Toronto. “Yet, they might not be comparable at all if in one of those habitats eight of those 10 species are similar and redundant, while in the other habitat, all 10 species are unique from one other. We need alternative measures for biodiversity that tell us something about the niche differences, trait differences, how species are interacting, and how they are using resources. Functional diversity and phylogenetic diversity are meant to capture that.”
Phylogenetic diversity refers to species that have few or no close relatives and that are very different from other species, which may mean that they can contribute in very different ways to an ecosystem. Protecting phylogenetic diversity, then, is part of protecting important functions. The distinctive pearl bubble coral is one example, as it provides shelter to shrimp, an important food for the highly endangered hawksbill turtle.
Better understanding these aspects of ecosystems is a game-changer for the conservation of biodiversity. The Indo-West Pacific region, between the east coast of Africa and South Asia, has the highest diversity of life in the world’s oceans. But many species there, such as damselfishes and butterfly fishes, have a lot of overlap with other species in terms of traits — somewhat similar body sizes, similar habitats and habits, how and where they school, etc. That means they may have a narrower range of traits that may be important for ecosystem function.
“In the Galapagos, on the other hand, there are fewer species, but each of those species is doing something much different than the others,” says Lefcheck, who worked on research looking at functional diversity there. “If you were prioritizing your conservation efforts, you might focus on the Galapagos. Even though it doesn’t have as much biodiversity in the traditional sense, it has a much greater diversity of form and function.”
“Functional diversity is incredibly difficult to determine,” says Larsen of Conservation International, “but generating an improved understanding of the relationship between species and their functional diversity is key to understanding and mitigating impacts or threats from development.” His organization works to protect tuna and sharks, for example, because these predators help maintain a healthy and balanced ecosystem by keeping numbers of prey from growing too large and by culling the sick and the weak.
In a recent study in the journal Nature, researchers say that focusing on species function and evolutionary heritage can narrow the focus on what needs to be protected most urgently. “Biodiversity conservation has mostly focused on species, but some species may offer much more critical or unique functions or evolutionary heritage than others — something current conservation planning does not readily address,” says Walter Jetz, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University.
The researchers noted that 26 percent of the world’s bird and mammal species are not included in protected reserves. Focusing on the most important traits and evolutionary heritage of those species would allow conservationists to narrow their protection of critical biodiversity with just a 5 percent increase in protected areas, and would be far less costly than trying to protect them all, the Nature study shows.
As traits are better understood in ecosystems, Lefcheck says, it allows tweaking and management of ecosystems for certain outcomes. “You could choose to conserve the species that are very different than others that might lead to changes in the ecosystem that could be considered beneficial,” he says. That has potential for fisheries management, for example. “When I tell someone, ‘This species has been around for 2.6 million years,’ that’s very esoteric in a way,” says Lefcheck. “But if I can say, ‘This large-bodied species produces a lot of biomass, and it can crop down invasive algae, and it plays a high-functioning and critical role in the ecosystem,’ you might want to protect species that have that trait.”
Such is the case with parrotfish and surgeonfish — “reef-grazers” that eat algae and keep coral reefs healthy. Because of these key traits, the government of Belize has enacted a law to protect these two species.
Understanding traits also can enhance ecosystem restoration projects. While building a new oyster aquaculture fishery can provide a commercial harvest, “we also know that oysters provide a lot of other services,” says Lefcheck. “They filter the water. They provide nooks and crannies for small fish and invertebrates to live in, and they are fish food for the tasty things we like to catch and to put on the dinner table. Where is the optimum placement of this restoration to enhance the variety of services we get from the oysters beyond just having the reefs there?”
The benefits of understanding functional diversity can go well beyond ecosystem restoration. In Toronto, for example, green (plant-covered) roofs are required on most new commercial buildings to help cool the city and reduce storm water runoff. A monoculture of grass called sedum is used. In studies, though, Cadotte and colleagues have found that if grass species that are distantly related and dissimilar are used in the mix, they have different traits that provide more shade for the soil and help the roof keep the building cooler. This mix also reduces stormwater runoff by about 20 percent.
The formal study of functional traits can be traced back to the 1990s, when ecologist David Tilman at the University of Minnesota did research on grasslands. He found that those regions with more species diversity did better during a drought, and only a few of the grasses resistant to drought were needed. Later, he and his colleagues discovered that the presence of some grasses with certain traits, such as an ability to fix nitrogen, was more important than overall species diversity.
Researchers in Jena, Germany established the Jena Experiment to follow up on this work. They found that there are plants, such as wild tobacco, that emit “messenger molecules” when they are under assault by herbivores to attract predators from miles away that eat their enemies. This trait not only benefits the tobacco, but other species in the neighboring plant community.
Experts say these findings could also help agriculture rely less on pesticides by understanding the right mix of plants to maximize predator defenses. “Varying the expression of just a few genes in a few individuals can have large protective effects for the whole field,” says Meredith Schuman, a researcher on the Jena Experiment at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. “It’s an economically tenable way to recover the lost benefits of biodiversity for the vast expanses of land that have already been converted from natural, biodiverse habitats into agricultural monocultures.”
These new approaches to ecology show how limited the science has been. Many researchers welcome the change. “Ecology has moved from counting species to accounting for species,” says Cadotte.
Jim Robbins is a veteran journalist based in Helena, Montana. He has written for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and numerous other publications. His latest book, The Wonder of Birds: What they Tell Us about the World, Ourselves and a Better Future, is due out in May.
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Yolanda Sun
Analysis: Why we must talk about population.
Reading David Roberts’ recent explanation of why he never writes on overpopulation, I felt compelled to reply.
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A Response to David Roberts’ Self-Censorship on Overpopulation
Reading David Roberts’ recent explanation of why he never writes on overpopulation, I felt compelled to reply. While Roberts made a set of superficially convincing arguments, ultimately he’s wrong not to focus directly on the population pressures we’re facing. Not confronting population head-on is like looking out the window of a plane and realizing you’re about to crash but refusing to tell the other passengers about the impending crash. Instead you spend your remaining moments convincing people that it’s “empowering” to wear their seat belts. That it’s a good for their health to put their laptops away and hold their head between their legs. Sure, you’ll convince some—and those you do convince might be better off—but you’ll convince far fewer as the sense of urgency is gone.
Reducing the global population is essential in addressing humanity’s impact on the planet—along with reducing overall consumption (affluence) and the use of unsustainable technologies (all variables in the I = PAT equation). And after the missteps of the Sierra Club and some governments, Roberts can be excused for why he feels it may be smarter to simply address the P in the equation indirectly by focusing on women empowerment and providing good access to family planning (and I would add providing comprehensive sexuality education to all children, as Mona Kaidbey and Robert Engelman and discuss in EarthEd: Rethinking Education on a Changing Planet). But that won’t be enough.
Stabilizing population is urgent. The goal should not simply be to nudge along a little less growth so population stabilizes at 9 billion rather than 9.5 or 10 billion. Instead, we need to make a long term plan to get population back to a manageable range. How far to scale population back, as noted 10 years ago by Roberts in another essay on why he doesn’t talk about population, “is up for debate, but probably a lot.” Some, including Paul Ehrlich, have suggested the ideal population range is around 1-3 billion, depending on how badly we have damaged the Earth’s systems and how much we want to consume moving forward. If Roberts is serious when he says he wants poor countries to be less poor “than their forebearers” then that means the Affluence variable in the I = PAT equation will increase. Yes, affluence elsewhere must shrink in accordance (and I wholeheartedly agree that wealth inequities need to be grappled with as does consumerism more broadly), but our population—particularly the 2-3 billion of us in the global consumer class—is completely overwhelming Earth’s systems.
One-Planet Living
In Is Sustainability Still Possible?, Jennie Moore and William Rees explored what a one-planet lifestyle would look like (in a world with 7 billion not 9.5 billion) and their analysis shows that if we lived within Earth’s limits, gone would be the days of driving personal vehicles, flying, eating meat, living in large homes, and essentially the entire consumer society that we know today. Frankly, that’s fine with me, considering the ecological, social and health costs of modern society—but most will not accept that. And considering that—and that policymakers and economists and even most environmentalists still believe further economic growth is possible and even beneficial—it’s increasingly hard to imagine any scenario other than a horrifying ecological collapse in our future.
That is another reason why we should prioritize population degrowth. Every million people not born is a million not to die when climate change brings about terrible flooding, droughts, disasters and famines it will in the increasingly near future. And please don’t take this to the absurd extreme that, ‘well, let’s just stop reproducing altogether and then there’ll be no suffering.’ I’m not saying people should have no children at all (here’s another Tucker Carlson video for you to enjoy, this one with the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement). But people should have far fewer—particularly in overdeveloped countries like the United States. I personally chose to have one child, even though both my wife and I would like to have a second. But I deemed it morally irresponsible, or in the words of bioethicist Travis Rieder probably not ‘honorable’ to have a second, particularly knowing what’s in store for our kids in the coming century, and knowing that by living in the United States, I am a ravenous consumer no matter how hard I try to be otherwise.
Historical Efforts
Roberts also selectively focuses on history to better make his point—providing examples of the Sierra Club brouhaha but not the work of all the population organizations that helped shift population trends in a positive direction. And while there have certainly been tragic missteps—such as India’s efforts at forced sterilization—there have been unqualified successes. In his book Countdown, Alan Weissman describes the amazing case study of Iran, which through a focused campaign, reduced population growth dramatically. Yes, the primary tactics were to provide free family planning and education, which I don’t think anyone will disagree are very smart tactics, but the government was clear in its goal and the urgency—and also supplemented its efforts with social marketing to create a smaller “normal” family size, including advertisements on TV, banners, and billboards that “One is good. Two is enough.” Similar successes can be seen in the efforts of the Population Media Center that uses soap operas to shift norms around population size.
While I don’t know if the numbers were or could ever be estimated, efforts like Iran’s and PMC’s, like Stephanie Mills committing so publicly to never have children at the height of her reproductive years, and Paul Ehrlich capturing the public’s attention with his warnings about the population bomb, all of this helped focus our collective attention on population issues in the 1960’s and 70’s and helped slow population growth.
Ultimately, Ehrlich, with as much criticism as he receives, was not wrong about the population bomb. His warnings and the efforts they helped trigger—along with the Green Revolution—allowed us to extend the fuse. But in all those years, the fissile material has also been building, and when the bomb finally explodes, the shockwaves will be felt around the world. In fact, even Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution warned, “Unless progress with agricultural yields remains very strong,” which Borlaug noted cannot continue indefinitely unless we cut down our forests, which he implored us not to do, “the next century will experience sheer human misery that, on a numerical scale, will exceed the worst of everything that has come before.”
Immigration
As for immigrants—sure it probably wasn’t the best idea for Professor Phil Cafaro to go on Tucker Carlson’s show to support anti-immigrant sentiments, but Cafaro’s point is valid, even if uncomfortable and confusing for progressives. Until America has a one-planet footprint, all new immigrants are going to increase global impacts because they’ll consume more in the US than in their home countries. (This even suggests all adoption ideally should be domestic, which is a-whole-nother can of worms!)
That’s not to say we should ban immigration or foreign adoption, but it means we should have a clear plan around immigration (along with one on reducing American consumption) and we should offset immigration by reductions in births of Americans (easier done if we have a population goal in mind for the United States). This offset is essentially what’s happening in European countries that have smaller than replacement rate birthrates—but the problem there is that this cultivates anti-immigrant sentiments as white European populations suddenly darken. With America at least, we have always been an immigrant nation so theoretically we could adapt, though obviously the current administration and its supporters are fomenting the same fears and biases that Americans have shown since its early days, as waves of immigrants from Ireland, Southern Europe, China, and Mexico started arriving.
Setting Goals
Is it so scary or morally fraught to start advocating for a smaller global population—or at the very least start talking openly about population challenges? Is it impossible to imagine nurturing a one-child family size norm in the US and Europe (where each child’s impact is many times greater than a child’s in a developing country)? One is good. Two is enough. Three is too many.
As Roberts notes, momentum is already bringing us toward smaller family sizes—but that same momentum is also bringing us toward higher consumption rates. Some smart social marketing and celebrity modeling could bring us toward population reductions quicker. Breaking the myth that sole children are spoiled and lonely—as Bill McKibben did in his great book Maybe One—would be a good place to start. As would showing the economic and environmental benefits of having one child. And so would making it cool to have one child. Perhaps that’s the marketing slogan we use: “It’s Hip to Have One.”
And let developing countries shape their own population targets so as to avoid the obvious criticisms of imperialism (maybe it’s even time for a Framework Convention on Population Growth to go along with the Framework Convention on Climate Change—so all countries can feel ownership in this effort). But clearly, population stabilization is as important in developing countries—not because of the immediate effects on human impact (I), but because as Earth systems finally break down after the decades of abuse we’ve delivered, people are going to retreat from their flooding towns, their drought stricken lands, their war-torn regions, and they’re going to have to go somewhere. And then the right-wing extremists will say “we told you so,” waving their copies of Camp of Saints in their hands as they do, and be perfectly poised to take over more government institutions—and that may be the population crisis’ scariest outcome of all.
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19 Western species won’t receive federal protections.
The animals range from minuscule Nevada mollusks to dwindling Pacific walruses.
On Oct. 4, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that 25 animals were not warranted for listing under the Endangered Species Act. Nineteen of those species — ranging from a sooty-colored woodpecker that hunts beetles in burned forests, to tiny snails found only in a few isolated springs in the Great Basin desert — live in the West. In no case did the Service find the species’ numbers to be increasing at this time; still, the Service concluded that none were in danger of disappearing altogether in the future. Here are the Western species that didn’t make the cut:
14 different species of Nevada springsnail
A surprising diversity of these minuscule molluscs lives in freshwater springs scattered across the Great Basin desert of Nevada and Utah. But those tiny aquatic havens are challenged by the region’s growing aridity: As groundwater pumping increases, some springs will run dry, according to the Service’s assessment. For example, one of the three springs where a springsnail called the Corn Creek Pyrg dwells is likely to dry up in the coming years because of groundwater pumping. As the water goes, so will that population. But the species is not a candidate for listing, because two other populations will remain. Thirteen other springsnail species are also not candidates.
Black-backed woodpecker
These dusky-backed birds blend in against the burned trees where they often forage. Because they have only three toes on each foot, they are not the most agile climbers, but their modified feet — and heads — make them excellent at clinging to burned trees and excavating beetle larvae. Though their range extends across the boreal forests of the northern U.S. and southern Canada, black-backed woodpeckers are rare. While petitioners for listing argued that the woodpeckers in the Pacific Northwest and in the Badlands of South Dakota were unique enough to warrant separate protections — and might even be two new subspecies, based on genetic research — the Service disagreed.
Boreal Toad
Living in shallow, slow-moving water in high elevation forests and meadows in Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, boreal toads are dwindling mainly because of chytrid fungus, an infection that's wiped out amphibians across the planet. It’s unknown how many boreal toads are left. Toads with chytridiomycosis stop absorbing electrolytes through their skin; eventually, their hearts stop. The Service believes that the toads will develop adequate resistance to the chytrid fungus over the next 50 years to survive this global epidemic, and that climate change will not further decimate the toads’ remaining populations in the meantime.
Fisher
Close relatives of otters, minks and weasels, fishers are among the only predators capable of taking down porcupines. These tough little solitary creatures live in complex, mature forests, where they den in naturally occurring cavities in downed timber and old snags. Fur trappers decimated fisher populations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The northern Rocky Mountain population, ranging from northern Idaho to southwestern Montana, has been found to be genetically distinct from other fisher populations, but it’s unknown how many count among its numbers. The species was rejected for listing because the Service found that trapping — which continues legally in Montana and incidentally in Idaho — does not pose a significant threat to the animals.
Great Sand Dunes Tiger Beetle
This half-inch, brown and white beetle, with an iridescent green and brown head and giant chomping mandibles, is adapted to life on the sand. It’s covered in white hairs that protect it from abrasion, and it burrows into the sand to get out of the heat and cold. It’s unknown how many of these shiny arthropods, which live only in southern Colorado’s Great Sand Dune formation, exist, or how connected to one another their sub-populations are. According to the Service, neither gas and oil leases held by private corporations on tiger beetle habitat, nor future predictions of a hotter and drier climate, nor ongoing trampling by sand dune tourists, elk, or ranched bison pose enough danger to the endemic beetle for its existence to be in jeopardy.
Pacific Walrus
One of the largest fin-footed mammals in the world, the Pacific walrus lives in the shallow continental shelf waters of the Bering and Chukchi seas, where it depends on patches of frozen pack ice to reach offshore breeding and feeding areas. It’s unknown how many Pacific walruses remain. Their migration patterns are intertwined with sea ice patterns: In the winter, they spend time on Bering Sea ice. As that ice melts, females and juveniles migrate north to feeding areas in the Chuchki sea, where sea ice historically has remained year-round. The Service agreed in 2011 that the Pacific walrus was sliding toward extinction and declared its listing under the ESA “warranted but precluded.” Yes, the walrus was going extinct and should be protected by listing, the agency decided, but other listings were more pressing. Now, nearly seven years later, the Service has backtracked. While acknowledging that sea ice loss from climate change is the biggest threat to the pinniped’s survival, the Service concluded that the magnitude of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on marine ecosystems — including sea ice loss, prey reduction, and walrus responses — can’t accurately be predicted beyond 2060. The Service further found that Pacific walruses will be able to adapt to using terrestrial habitat, rather than ice, for breeding and feeding.
Maya L. Kapoor is an associate editor with High Country News. Follow her at @Kapoor_ML
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Rob
High marine extinction risk by 2100.
If marine extinction is not a reality for many species by the end of this century, scientists say, it will certainly be a strong probability.
Mass marine extinction may be inevitable. If humans go on burning fossil fuels under the notorious “business as usual” scenario, then by 2100 they will have added so much carbon to the world’s oceans that a sixth mass extinction of marine species will follow, inexorably.
And even if the 197 nations that agreed in Paris in 2015 to take steps to limit global warming in fact do so, then by 2100 humans will have added 300 billion tons of carbon to the seas. And a US scientist has calculated that the critical threshold for mass extinction stands at 310 billion tons.
So in either case, the world will be condemned to, or at imminent risk of, a “great dying” of the kind that characterised the end of the geological period called the Permian, in which 95% of marine species vanished, or the Cretaceous era that witnessed the last of the dinosaurs.
Daniel Rothman, a geophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reports in the journal Science Advances that he worked through hundreds of scientific studies to identify 31 occasions of significant change in 542 million years in the planet’s carbon cycle – in which plants draw down carbon from the atmosphere and cycle it through the animal community and back into the atmosphere.
Happening now
For each event, including the five great mass extinctions in the geological record, he estimated the record of carbon preserved in the rocks, to find a predictable threshold at which catastrophe might be an outcome. Four of the five great extinction events lay beyond this threshold. He then considered the timescales of such extinction events to arrive at his modern-day danger zone figure of 310 billion tons.
And by 2100, unconstrained fossil fuel combustion may have tipped the planet into “unknown territory,” he says.
“This is not saying that disaster occurs the next day. It’s saying that, if left unchecked, the carbon cycle would move into a realm which would no longer be stable, and would behave in a way that would be difficult to predict. In the geologic past, this type of behaviour is associated with mass extinction.”
In effect, Professor Rothman has used a mathematical technique to predict an event many biologists believe is already happening. Pollution, the clearing of the wilderness and the disruption of habitat have already placed many species at risk. Global warming as a consequence of the combustion of fossil fuels will, they have repeatedly said, make a bad situation worse.
“Our activities as humans are pushing species to the brink so fast that it’s impossible for conservationists to assess the declines in real time. Even those species that we thought were abundant and safe now face an imminent threat of extinction”
Researchers have already begun to record local extinctions – the disappearance of once-familiar creatures from local landscapes – and climate change that will follow global warming could heighten the hazard for animals and plants already under stress.
And Professor Rothman’s warning came hard on the heels of several studies that indicate the dangerous impact of climate change.
Scientists from the University of Washington in Seattle warn that as the world’s waters warm, fish will have to migrate to survive, and those that cannot – the ones in lakes and river systems – could be at risk.
They report in the journal Nature Climate Change that they looked at available physiological data and climate predictions to see how 3,000 species in oceans and rivers would respond to warmer waters and to judge what the “breaking point” temperatures for any species would be.
Many losers
“Nowhere on Earth are fish spared from having to cope with climate change”, said senior author Julian Olden, professor of aquatic and fishery sciences. “Fish have unique challenges – they either have to make rapid movements to track their temperature requirements, or they will be forced to adapt quickly.”
But other creatures in the most extreme environments are affected too. British Antarctic Survey scientists report in Nature Climate Change that they used computer models to test a warming scenario for 900 species of marine invertebrates that live in the south polar seas.
Even a small warming of 0.4°C will cause unique local animals to change their distribution, and although some will fare well, overall there will be more losers than winners.
“While a few species might thrive at least during the early decades of warming, the future for a whole range of invertebrates from starfish to corals is bleak, and there’s nowhere to swim to, nowhere to hide when you’re sitting on the bottom of the world’s coldest and most southerly ocean and it’s getting warmer by the decade”, said Huw Griffiths, the Survey scientist who led the research.
Africa in jeopardy
As if to hammer home the message, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has just issued its latest warnings on imminent extinction. This international body has now rated 25,062 species as in danger of extinction out of a list of more than 87,000.
The latest list includes five of the six species of ash tree native to North America, some of them threatened by an invasive beetle infestation, helped by global warming, and five species of African antelope.
“Our activities as humans are pushing species to the brink so fast that it’s impossible for conservationists to assess the declines in real time,” says Inger Andersen, director general of the IUCN.
“Even those species that we thought were abundant and safe – such as antelopes in Africa or ash trees in the US – now face an imminent threat of extinction.”
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UK College of Agriculture/flickr
Drowning in grain: How Big Ag sowed seeds of a profit-slashing glut.
Abundant supplies have helped lower food prices across the world, but the benefit to consumers and impoverished nations is muted by several factors.
SPECIAL REPORT-Drowning in grain: How Big Ag sowed seeds of a profit-slashing glut
by Reuters
Wednesday, 27 September 2017 11:00 GMT
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Abundant supplies have helped lower food prices across the world, but the benefit to consumers and impoverished nations is muted by several factors
By Rod Nickel
CARMAN, Manitoba, Sept 27 (Reuters) - On Canada's fertile Prairies, dominated by the yellows and golds of canola and wheat, summers are too short to grow corn on a major scale.
But Monsanto Co is working to develop what it hopes will be North America's fastest-maturing corn, allowing farmers to grow more in Western Canada and other inhospitable climates, such as Ukraine.
The seed and chemical giant projects that western Canadian corn plantings could multiply 20 times to 10 million acres by 2025 - adding some 1.1 billion bushels, or nearly 3 percent to current global production.
The question, amid historically high supplies and low grain prices, is whether the world really needs more corn.
A global grains glut is now in its fourth year, with supplies bloated by favorable weather, increasingly high-tech farm practices and tougher plant breeds.
The bin-busting harvests of cheap corn, wheat and soybeans are undermining the business models of the world's largest agriculture firms and the farmers who use their products and services. Some analysts say the firms have effectively innovated their way into a stubbornly oversupplied market.
Never has the world produced so much more food than can be consumed in one season. World ending stocks of total grains - the leftover supplies before a new harvest - have climbed for four straight years and are poised to reach a record 638 million tonnes in 2016/17, according to USDA data.
Farmers and agriculture firms could once count on periodic bouts of crop-destroying weather to tame gluts and drive up prices. But genetically modified crops that repel plant-chewing insects, withstand lethal chemicals and mature faster have made the trend toward oversupply more resistant to traditional boom-and-bust agrarian cycles, experts say.
Another key factor: China - the world's second-biggest corn grower - adopted stockpiling policies a decade ago when crop supplies ran thin, resulting in greater production than the world needs.
"I think the norm is where we are now," said Bryan Agbabian, director of agriculture equities at Allianz Global Investors.
Allianz investors seem to agree: The value of two agriculture equity funds that Agbabian manages fell to $300 million this year from $800 million in 2011 as crop prices slid, he said.
Abundant supplies have helped lower food prices across the world, but the benefit to consumers and impoverished nations is muted by several factors, including problems with corruption and distribution of food in developing regions, said Sylvain Charlebois, professor of food distribution and policy at Canada's Dalhousie University.
The bumper harvests may actually harm poor communities more than they benefit their residents in food savings because lower prices depress farm incomes in the same areas, said John Baffes, a senior economist at the World Bank.
Even as farmers reap bountiful harvests, U.S. net farm incomes this year will total $63.4 billion - about half of their earnings in 2013, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast.
Lower incomes mean farmers cannot spend as much on seed, fertilizer and machinery, extending their pain to firms across the agriculture sector.
Potash Corp of Saskatchewan, the world's biggest fertilizer company by capacity, closed its newest potash mine last year, eliminating more than 400 jobs, and has seen its U.S.-listed shares fall by nearly half since the beginning of 2015. The drop erased $14 billion in value, and left Potash seeking to merge with rival Agrium Inc.
With profits under pressure, seed and chemical companies are scrambling to consolidate.
Monsanto's annual profit in 2016 was its smallest in six years. It agreed last year to combine with Bayer AG, which would create the world's largest integrated pesticide and seed company if the deal closes next year.
Grain handler Bunge Ltd said this summer it would cut costs, and left the door open to selling itself after posting a 34 percent drop in quarterly earnings.
Bunge CEO Soren Schroder sought to reassure investors in May by saying all that was needed to trim supplies was one bad stretch of weather in the U.S. Midwest.
But the glut pervades many major farming regions, making it unlikely that drought or floods in one region could wipe out the mounting global surplus. Even with dry conditions in North America, Europe and Australia, the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts that this year will bring the second-biggest global corn, wheat and soybean harvests ever.
Bunge's Schroder made his comment about bad weather less than three weeks before confirming an informal merger approach from commodities giant Glencore Plc.
"When prices tanked, farmers were no longer willing to pay more" for seed and chemicals, said Jonas Oxgaard, analyst at investment management firm Bernstein. "The mergers are absolutely driven by oversupply because their growth is gone."
Monsanto spokeswoman Trish Jordan said the company believes demand growth still justifies corn expansion, and she disputed the notion that crop science advances are backfiring on agricultural technology firms.
Monsanto rival DowDuPont Inc is making the same bet and currently sells the shortest-season field corn in North America, maturing in 70 days, spokesman Ali Aziz said.
Success in the lab and the field, however, has contributed to oversupply and may continue to sustain it, said Oxgaard, the Bernstein analyst.
"It's somewhat the seed companies' fault - they keep breeding better and better seeds every year," he said.
DARWIN, SEX AND CORN
Charles Darwin helped plant the seeds of the grain glut. The biologist and evolution theorist showed in the late 1800s that cross-fertilization of plants - in which sex cells are fused between crop varieties of the same species - creates a more vigorous breed than those that are self-fertilized.
His work and others' influenced successive generations of crop scientists and led to the development of hybrid corn, said Stephen Moose, a professor specializing in crop genetics at University of Illinois.
U.S. farmers started planting the first significant acres of hybrid corn in the 1930s, and by 1950 it made up nearly all the corn seeded in the United States.
Yields exploded. Farmers who reaped 20.5 bushels of corn per acre in 1930 harvested an average of 38.2 bushels in 1950, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Further hybrid breeding breakthroughs generated corn with leaves that grow more erect, allowing farmers to sow it more densely without starving plants of sunlight. Yields first topped 100 bushels per acre in 1978.
After conventional breeding breakthroughs became harder to find, corn gained new vigor through the 1990s with genetic modification.
In 1996, U.S. regulators approved corn that was genetically engineered to produce bug-killing proteins, accomplished by inserting a bacterium hostile to the corn borer insect into the plant genome.
Before the end of the 1990s, corn able to resist weed-killing chemical glufosinate or Monsanto's glyphosate hit the market.
Those modified varieties and others that followed proved pivotal in generating the abundant corn crops that have since become commonplace, Moose said.
"In the seed industry, it stimulated a whole other round of investment," Moose said.
In the 20 years since GMO corn reached U.S. farms, yields jumped another 37 percent to a record 174.6 bushels per acre last year.
Some experts believe the expansion of corn yields may soon hit a ceiling. The crop may be nearing the natural limit of its production potential, and crop yields will likely plateau in the next decade, based on how plants convert light to food and their ability to recover from heat, said Ken Cassman, agronomy professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Technology has also provided better defences against pests.
Syngenta AG's Viptera and Duracade traits, used to control worms and beetles, launched in 2010 and 2013. SmartStax corn seed, introduced by Monsanto and Dow in 2009, brought twin benefits of insect protection and herbicide tolerance, said Paul Bertels, vice-president of production and sustainability at U.S.-based National Corn Growers Association.
The breakthroughs in seed and pesticide technologies have not come without problems. Monsanto is now embroiled in a controversy over dicamba, a big-selling chemical designed to kill weeds that harm Monsanto's genetically modified crops.
Many U.S. farmers say dicamba has drifted from its intended fields, damaging plants that are not resistant to the chemical. Monsanto believes the main causes of drifting are errors by farmers and applicators in deploying the herbicide, company spokeswoman Charla Lord said.
GROWING CORN IN ALASKA
As it grew stronger, corn grew faster. Corn that required 120 days to mature in the U.S. Corn Belt during the 1960s now needs only 105 to 115 days.
Farmers in northern North Dakota plant and harvest corn in 80 days, and have doubled the state's production in five years.
Fast corn is now stirring even the imaginations of researchers in the far north.
University of Alaska Fairbanks horticulture professor Meriam Karlsson grew hundreds of corn plants in the Arctic state in 2015.
The plants, germinated in a greenhouse before they were transplanted outside, grew from a short-season garden corn variety that matured in less than 60 days. Corn rose only four to five feet, allowing plants to spend maximum energy on growing ears, rather than leaves and stalks.
Karlsson had expected few corn plants to survive in Fairbanks - less than 120 miles (190 kilometers) from the Arctic Circle.
"It's much more adaptable than I expected," she said. "Amazing what breeding can do. It was kind of exciting that you could do it."
The lure of technology comes down to money for farmers.
Even with Chicago corn futures down more than 50 percent from their 2012 record high, the high-yielding crop offers one of the strongest returns to Canadian farmers, generating profits per acre four times that of canola, based on average prices and costs, said National Bank analyst Greg Colman.
As corn spreads across the Canadian Prairies, those robust yields are winning farmers over, said Dan Wright, Monsanto Canada's lead for corn and soybeans.
"Once you harvest corn at 140 or 180 bushels, it's something you want to do again," he said.
While corn compares nicely to some crops, it offers U.S. farmers marginal returns at current prices, Bernstein's Oxgaard said. Switching to other crops is not easy in areas like the U.S. Midwest, where farmers traditionally swing between corn and soybeans, and have invested in costly equipment to grow them.
GLUT TRACES ROOTS TO SHORTAGE
The problems of plenty were on nobody's mind less than a decade ago. In 2008, a dramatic food price run-up stirred riots from Haiti to Egypt.
Four years later, the U.S. Midwest, the engine of the global corn and soybean growing machine, suffered its worst drought in decades, opening gaping cracks in the soil and withering crops.
Chicago corn and soybean futures hit record highs as U.S. production fell to multi-year lows.
But high prices proved the cure for high prices.
Farmers in traditionally less productive corn-growing countries such as Russia, Argentina and Brazil expanded corn output to seize bigger profits.
U.S. farming quickly rebounded, reaping record corn harvests in three of the next four years.
New corn varieties have made global production more balanced than ever, with 12 countries producing at least 10 million tonnes of corn annually, up from 10 before the drought.
Even if U.S. or Brazilian corn crops suffered major weather damage, the world would still have the expanding Black Sea corn region to tap, not to mention China's enormous supplies, said Bertels, of the U.S. corn growers association.
China's stockpiling policies, enacted in 2007 when corn supplies were tight, also stimulated oversupply. Aiming for self-sufficiency in grains, Beijing bought virtually the entire domestic crop each year and paid farmers as much as 60 percent more than global prices.
The program stuffed Chinese warehouses with some 250 million tonnes of corn by the time Beijing scrapped it last year. China is now boosting incentives for farmers to switch to soybeans from corn.
"The world's corn is mainly in China," said Li Qiang, chief consultant at Shanghai JC Intelligence Co Ltd.
He said it will take three to four years for stocks to reach a "normal" level of around 40-50 million tonnes.
The Black Sea region, made up of Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, has become a disruptive force with rapidly expanding exports. Moscow aims to drive grain production to 150 million tonnes by 2030 from 117 million in 2016 after increasing storage and export capacity in ports in the last couple of years.
Glut conditions are expected to ease modestly this year, amid dry conditions in China and the United States, but supplies are still so large that prices remain weak.
OVERSUPPLY OF EVERYTHING
In northern North Dakota, an expanding frontier for corn and soybeans, Paul Thomas started dabbling in both crops about a decade ago on his farm near Minot, seeking higher returns than wheat.
Both are now among his biggest crops, including short-season Monsanto corn varieties that have only been available for a couple of years.
Profits may be tougher for Thomas to eke out this year due to dry weather and soft prices, but he shrugs off the struggle.
"We're very capable of producing a large amount of bushels given an economic incentive," he said. "If we end up over-producing, then we shift to one that's more in need. That's just the way agriculture works."
Thomas acknowledged, however, that the traditional dynamic may be changing in this current glut.
"I don't know any single crop that isn't in oversupply," he said.
Seeding equipment is becoming more precise, and increasingly cost-conscious farmers are applying fertilizer and chemicals more intelligently, said Al Mussell, head of research at Canadian think tank Agri-Food Economic Systems.
Monsanto projects that corn will become by the mid-2020s one of the biggest crops produced in Canada, which is an agriculture-exporting powerhouse in canola, wheat, oats and pork.
Soybeans are also spreading across Canada. Farmers seeded a record high 7.3 million acres in 2017, up 75 percent in five years.
On Monsanto's research farm in Carman, Manitoba, the next target is marketing a corn variety that matures in 70 days within the next two years. After that: an even quicker plant to snatch DowDuPont's claim to North America's fastest corn.
It is ambitious but realistic, said Kelly Boddy, manager of Monsanto's research farm.
"Wind the clock back a few years," he said, "and breeders wouldn't have thought it possible."
(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba; Additional reporting by Polina Devitt in Moscow; Michael Hirtzer in Chicago and Dominique Patton and Jo Mason in Beijing; Editing by Simon Webb and Brian Thevenot)
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Citizens plot bug slaughter to protect Canada's freshwater.
Canadian researchers have created a kind of bar code technology for bugs that could help them understand the impacts of human activity on watersheds.
Citizens plot bug slaughter to protect Canada's freshwater
By Elizabeth McSheffrey in News | September 25th 2017
Living Lakes Canada's Raegan Mallison collects a benthic invertebrate sample from the Ottawa River on Mon. Sept. 25, 2017. Photo by Alex Tétreault
Think of it as a barcode for bugs.
You take a sample of freshwater insects, run those insects under a rapid genetic scanner, and out pops a species name and classification. It's a new technology born and raised in Canada and it could help preserve more than 30,000 fresh water lakes throughout the country.
It's called environmental DNA (or eDNA for short) and it's used to identify benthic invertebrates, a community of backbone-less bugs that includes water flies, beetles and snails. These small, bottom-feeding insects are considered 'bioindicators' of freshwater health, as each unique species has a highly-sensitive, measurable intolerance for habitat shifts from climate change, pollution or naturally-occurring causes.
"It bioaccumulates," explained Elizabeth Hendriks, vice-president of WWF-Canada's freshwater program. "If there’s an issue with the bugs, you want to catch it before it becomes an issue with the fish and the caribou, and then humans."
She spoke from the banks of the Ottawa River in the Canada's capital region on Monday, where WWF-Canada launched its new citizen-scientist monitoring program. In partnership with Living Lakes Canada and the federal government, the program aims to improve watershed management and wildlife protection by using local volunteers to collect credible freshwater insect samples for data-deficient watersheds.
Hendriks confirmed there will be "some insect mortality in the process," but said there is such a large species base to sample from, the conservation organization is confident that the sampling program won't disrupt the balance of any ecosystems.
Living Lakes Canada program director Heather Lescheid picks out freshwater insects for eDNA testing from the Ottawa River on Mon. Sept. 25, 2017. Photo by Alex Tétreault
Data gaps and species decline
Canada is home to one-fifth of the world's freshwater, including tens of thousands of interconnected rivers, lakes and streams. Recent reports from WWF-Canada found that all the country's watersheds are under stress from human activities, but data deficiency on indicators like benthic invertebrates prevents scientists from fully understanding the impacts of 15 of Canada's 25 major watersheds.
Half of Canada's monitored vertebrate species are in decline, reports the conservation organization, by an average of 80 per cent since 1970.
“I think we all recognize that Canada is full of lakes and rivers. Some are hard to get to and some, like (the Ottawa River) today, are easy to get to, but we need Canadian citizens out there helping, understanding that water is a shared resource and shared responsibility," said Hendriks.
Insects in the samples collected by citizen participants will be sent to Ontario's University of Guelph — which pioneered the eDNA technology — for scanning. The results will be added to a massive species database that will increase Canada's understanding of threats to freshwater ecosystems, said zoologist Donald Baird.
Attending the launch on behalf of Environment and Climate Change Canada, the federal researcher said that prior to eDNA's existence, scientists collecting benthic invertebrate samples would have spent most of their time counting leg hairs under a microscope to identify each species.
Federal scientist Donald Baird of Canada's National Water Research Institute explains the importance of eDNA technology in conserving and understanding the country's at-rish freshwater ecosystems. He is seen here at the launch of WWF-Canada's citizen-science monitoring program on the banks of the Ottawa River on Mon. Sept. 25, 2017. Photo by Alex Tétreault
A 'soup for DNA'
This is a much faster, much more powerful method, he explained, that allows researchers to get a broad picture of large watershed ecosystems.
"You probably know from CSI (the television show) that it’s difficult to go anywhere without leaving a trace of your DNA behind," he told National Observer. "It’s the same thing in nature. You can imagine all these things living in here — the bugs, fish, and wildlife — are shedding cells in the water, their mucus and so on.
"Essentially, it’s a soup for DNA. You can take a sample of the water and you can extract the DNA from that, look at it, and match it like a barcode in a supermarket."
While Environment Canada actively supports citizen science and is working hard to protect Canada's freshwater, Baird added, it's impossible for scientists to be everywhere at once. That's why partnerships with the university, conservation organizations and volunteer citizens are essential, he said.
Living Lakes Canada helps train volunteers on sample collection and WWF-Canada is in charge of mobilizing the masses.
"It’s difficult for a government entity to mobilize volunteers in the way an NGO can," said WWF-Canada president and CEO David Miller. "We have the capacity to mobilize volunteers across the country... We need to engage citizens otherwise we simply won’t have the data."
The program was launched Monday in Ottawa and on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, and will expand in spring 2018 to other data-deficient watersheds.
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