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Hurricane Maria: Three weeks after landfall, Puerto Rico is still dark, dry, frustrated.
While the metropolis of San Juan inches toward normalcy, much of the rest of the island still awaits basic services.
Three weeks since Hurricane Maria, much of Puerto Rico still dark, thirsty and frustrated
By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Arelis R. Hernández October 11 at 7:56 PM Follow @RoigFranzia Follow @arelisrhdz
Neighbors sit on a couch outside their destroyed homes as sun sets in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, on Sept. 26 — about a week after Hurricane Maria hit. (Gerald Herbert/AP)
YABUCOA, Puerto Rico — Late each night, Rafael Surillo Ruiz, the mayor of a town with one of Puerto Rico’s most critical ports, drives for miles on darkened roads, easing around downed power lines and crumpled tree branches — to check his email.
At the wheel of his “guagua”— local slang for an SUV — he sometimes finds a spotty cellphone signal on a highway overpass, and there he sits, often for hours, scrolling through messages. During the day, with no working landline and no Internet access, he operates more like a 19th-century mayor of Yabucoa, orchestrating the city’s business in an information vacuum, dispatching notes scrawled on slips of paper — about problems such as balky generators and misdirected water deliveries — that he hands to runners.
On the other side of the mayor’s favorite overpass spot, one of the generators at the area’s biggest hospital has collapsed from exhaustion, and the frazzled staff have stopped admitting new patients. Deeper into the island’s mountainous interior, thirsty Puerto Ricans draw drinking water from the mud-caked crevices of roadside rock formations and bathe in creeks too small to have names.
“We feel completely abandoned here,” Surillo Ruiz said with a heavy sigh.
[A light amid the darkness, a Puerto Rico church stands up as its community struggles]
It has been three weeks since Hurricane Maria savaged Puerto Rico, and life in the capital city of San Juan inches toward something that remotely resembles a new, uncomfortable form of normalcy. Families once again loll on the shaded steps of the Mercado de Santurce traditional market on a Sunday afternoon, and a smattering of restaurants and stores open their doors along sidewalks still thick with debris and tangled power lines.
But much of the rest of the island lies in the chokehold of a turgid, frustrating and perilous slog toward recovery.
Cars pass through a damaged area in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, on Sept. 29. (Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images)
When night comes, the vast majority of this 100-mile long, 35-mile wide island plunges into profound darkness, exposing the impotence of a long-troubled power grid that was tattered by Maria’s winds and rains. Eighty-four percent of the island is still without power, according to the governor’s office, and local officials in many areas are steeling themselves — with a sense of anger and dread — for six months or more without electricity.
Roughly half of Puerto Ricans have no working cellphone service, creating islands of isolation within the island and cutting off hundreds of thousands of people in regions outside the largest metropolitan areas from regular contact with their families, aid groups, medical care and the central government. Christine Enid Nieves Rodriguez, who has set up a community kitchen near the southeastern city of Humacao, has dubbed the new reality Puerto Rico’s “dystopian future.”
The jumbled contents of a store lie exposed to the elements where a roof was torn away at the Palma Real Shopping Center in Humacao, as seen Sept. 22, two days after Hurricane Maria devastated large areas of Puerto Rico. (Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/For The Washington Post)
Accompanying that vision of the future are worries about outbreaks of diseases such as scabies and Zika, which is transmitted by mosquitoes breeding in standing water. Just 63 percent of the island’s residents have access to clean drinking water, and only 60 percent of wastewater treatment plants are operating, according to figures released by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In poorer communities, such as the San Juan neighborhood of Carolina and the mountain town of Canovanas, doctors are seeing worrying numbers of patients with conjunctivitis and gastritis brought on by contaminated water and poor hygiene.
With electrical and cellphone outages complicating commerce, large swaths of the island — and even many spots within the biggest cities — are cash-only zones, as if credit cards never existed. More than 40 percent of bank branches have yet to reopen, according to the governor’s office, and barely more than 560 ATMs are functioning for an island with a population of more than 3.4 million.
Most of Puerto Rico is still in the dark after Hurricane Maria VIEW GRAPHIC
On the upside, chronic gasoline shortages that plagued the early days after the storm seem to be easing, at least in the larger cities, and 86 percent of grocery stores have reopened. But the journey to fill the gas tank or the shopping cart can be an exercise in faith and blind courage. In the sprawling metropolis of San Juan, crisscrossed by major highways and multilane streets, most streetlights are not functioning. Only a surge of post-hurricane politeness and patience seems to be preventing the morgues from swelling with traffic fatalities.
The roads in and out of San Juan are lined by denuded hillsides, their rocky, frayed surfaces exposed to the sunlight. The storm acted like a blowtorch, searing off leaves and stripping away topsoil. A surreal consequence of Maria’s transformation of the island’s landscape is the lack of shade in once-divine town squares and jungle-like hinterlands.
It is enough to make many Puerto Ricans consider fleeing the island for good, even though the thought of leaving a place they love can still seem implausible. What awaits many of them here is protracted subsistence living. In places such as the surfer haven of Playa Jobos on the northwestern coast, a woman whose wooden house was blown to bits has taken to living in a disabled food truck outfitted with a hammock.
“When I think about grandchildren, I know that I don’t want this for them,” said Lucy Rivera, an unemployed single mother who has crammed nine people, including her disabled mother and mentally ill brother, into a house that lost its roof in the town of Canovanas near El Yunque National Forest.
Rivera has no money, and her government assistance card is useless in the many businesses that have gone cash-only. So she sits in traffic for hours in a borrowed car trying to find food and get medical care.
On a recent afternoon on one of those choked Puerto Rican roads, cars jammed with children and plastic jugs pulled over to gaze at the ingenuity of Jesus Sanchez, a wiry 74-year-old retiree. Sanchez had fished a six-foot length of PVC pipe out of a ditch in Toa Alta, an ancient town 17 miles outside San Juan. He had lashed it to a forked branch with some shredded cloth and inserted the mouth of the pipe into a crook that began gushing water in the steep limestone hillside above his head.
“Now!” he called to his wife, Ana Marrero Nieves.
Marrero Nieves proceeded to toss plastic jugs — empty containers that once held cranberry juice and canola oil — over to Sanchez, who clung to the muddy slope, slipping and sliding, but smiling. More than 2½ weeks had passed since the storm, and he had not received any aid at their house, where the windows were blown out. But, from the hillside, he drew sustenance, just as he had done for days.
“If it wasn’t for this, how many would have died?” he said.
Ruth Santiago refreshes herself with water from a pipe in Morovis, Puerto Rico, on Oct. 4. Hurricane Maria destroyed the town's bridge. (Alvin Baez/Reuters)
The roads narrow as they snake up the mountains, then dip down into the jaw-dropping valleys of central Puerto Rico, passing by town after town where the wind tore roofs off nearly every humble cinder-block dwelling and splintered the yet-humbler wooden shacks. Flamboyant trees that once prettied the countryside with branches lit by brilliant red flowers lie by the thousands alongside thick-trunked rubber trees. Stands of bamboo with stalks thicker than the fat end of a baseball bat form archways that scrape the roofs of all but the squattest of cars.
Being miles away from the coast provided no safety to the residents of Morovis, a town of about 30,000 that sprawls over bluffs and into ravines in north-central Puerto Rico. Zerimar Rivera, a 31-year-old mother of twin boys, couldn’t stand the smell of sweat anymore and headed for a trickling creek south of town.
“We’re going to the washboard, like in the time of our grandparents,” she called out to a friend, as she plunged a shirt into a five-
gallon paint primer bucket filled with creek water and detergent. Rivera is a teacher, and like many middle- and lower-middle-class Puerto Ricans, she is paid only when she works, and she has not worked a moment since the storm hit on Sept. 20.
Rafael Reyes, his wife, Xarelis Negron, and their son, Xariel, stand next to salvaged belongings wrapped in plastic on the foundation of their shattered home in the San Lorenzo neighborhood of Morovis, Puerto Rico, on Oct. 7. (Ramon Espinosa/AP)
Rivera’s dilemma is the same as that facing Eric Bonet and Sherrie Berrios, a couple who work as dog groomers in the town of Barceloneta. One day after the storm, Berrios says, they were hungry and thirsty when Bonet turned to her and said, “I think I’m going to turn the car into a pickup truck.”
Bonet quickly stripped the seats out of the back of their 1994 Nissan Altima. He enlisted a buddy to join them and stuffed some couch cushions in the back so Berrios would have a place to sit, and they were off in search of aluminum.
In Morovis, they scored big-time, rifling through a pile of garbage across from an outdoor bar until they found an old-
fashioned restaurant sign with an aluminum frame. Bonet ripped it off with an eight-inch Ginsu kitchen knife and added the loot to the rest of the treasures they had strapped to the car’s roof. Days of work earned them $140 at 30 cents a pound.
[There was once a bridge here: A devastated Puerto Rico community deals with isolation after Maria]
There is almost no place on the island where the enterprising scavenger couple couldn’t stand a decent chance of adding to their pile. The storm was so brutal and so wide that it covered the length and breadth of the island, damaging at least 60,000 homes, according to government estimates that some here consider far below the real figure. But only one place can claim to be the spot where Maria made landfall, and that is down along the southeastern coast near Yabucoa, where Surillo Ruiz is mayor.
Yabucoa sits in a wide, fertile valley, which is perfect for growing plantains but is also an ideal funnel for hurricane winds. On an incline overlooking the valley, Carmen Manso presides at a senior center that doubles as a local museum inside a grand, century-old house with wide wooden beams and tile floors that resemble a checkerboard. Her handful of clients, including several who served in the U.S. military, stick to the lower floor because the storm tore off much of the building’s roof, exposing upstairs rooms filled with paintings, artifacts and beds.
“When it rains, this is like Niagara Falls,” Manso said with a chuckle. She does not have much choice but to laugh. One morning she set off with several of her clients’ ATM cards so she could withdraw money for them.
She drove 25 minutes to the town of Humacao, but the bank was closed.
She drove another half-hour to the town of Gurabo, but they had run out of money.
She pressed on another 20 minutes down the road and arrived at a bank in Caguas. The line at the ATM trailed down the street; 2½ hours later, she finally was able to pull out some cash for her clients. And she still had to drive home.
Motorists wait in line to buy gasoline in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, in Morovis, Puerto Rico. (Gerald Herbert/AP)
She returned to a place where the mayor had been run out of city hall by storm winds that punched a massive, jagged hole in the roof, turning the building into an outsize, end-to-end pass-through window. The mayor is now based in a small conference room in his town’s medical clinic. He got a satellite phone as government recovery aid, but he can’t make it work — a complaint other mayors with similar technology have echoed.
On his nightly trip in search of a cellphone signal, Surillo Ruiz keeps hearing from people on the U.S. mainland who want to help his town. One night it was Ricky Martin, the heartthrob Puerto Rican singer whose charitable foundation has been active in the relief effort. But Surillo Ruiz really does not know how to respond to most requests. He has little faith, he says, that aid intended for Yabucoa will make it to Yabucoa. He worries that it will either be misappropriated because of corruption or mishandled through incompetence or confusion.
He worries even more about the potential for a health crisis. The nearest full-scale medical center — Ryder Memorial Hospital, a 103-year-old nonprofit institution — is 13 hard-driving miles away. The hospital, too, is cut off from the world.
“When people say send me an email, I say, ‘What! By smoke signals?’ ” said Deana Hallman, Ryder’s medical director.
[Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis nowhere more obvious than at hospitals]
Hallman and other hospital executives were unstinting in their criticism of Puerto Rico’s health secretary, Rafael Rodriguez-Mercado, accusing him of wasting time “assigning blame” to others and sowing “divisiveness.” Health Department officials have not responded to requests for comment.
One of Ryder’s generators failed a few days ago, and several critically ill patients had to be flown to a U.S. Navy hospital ship. By last weekend, the other generators, which according to the hospital’s protocols are not supposed to run for more than seven days, had been operating for 17.
By chance, Hallman was passing through an area with cell coverage a few days ago, and she lurched her car to a stop. An administrator at another hospital told her about a meeting with government health officials in San Juan, a gathering that was supposed to be an opportunity for the government to tell hospitals what it could do to help them.
Each hospital got a sheet listing the aid it would receive following government assessments of their needs.
Some of the lists were long. Ryder’s was short.
It had just one item: diesel.
There was only one problem: Ryder had not asked for diesel, Hallman said. It had plenty.
Instead, the hospital had been asking — over and over, through 10 site visits by Puerto Rican and federal officials — for repairs to the electrical grid that would end their reliance on generators.
“The government just needs to put the grid back,” Lirio Torres Sepulveda, a Ryder executive said. “That’s their job.”
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MEPs block Commission from widening endocrine disruptor definition.
MEPs today blocked a Commission proposal that would have exempted some chemicals from being identified as endocrine disruptors due to wider criteria.
MEPs block Commission from widening endocrine disruptor definition
By Niamh Michail
04-Oct-2017 - Last updated on 04-Oct-2017 at 14:31 GMT
1 COMMENT
MEPs today blocked a Commission proposal that would have exempted some chemicals from being identified as endocrine disruptors due to wider criteria.
The Commission must now come up with a new proposal, taking MEP's requests into account.
The Parliament, which voted on the issue this afternoon (4 October) needed an absolute majority of 376 votes to veto the proposal, which it narrowly won with 389 votes in favour, 235 against and 70 abstentions.
The objection, co-signed by MEP Bas Eickhout, a member of the Greens and European Free Alliance (EFA) party, and backed by the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI), said the Commission had exceeded its mandate by proposing to exempt some substances from the scope of criteria for identifying the chemicals
The Commission’s proposal can be read here.
Environmental Scientist at Pesticide Action Network (PAN), Angeliki Lyssimachou, said the vote was an example of "true democracy in action".
The result of the vote was also welcomed by pan-EU consumer group BEUC which said the Commission's "unfit definition" would have seen too many chemicals escape the regulatory net.
The ENVI committee objection reads: "The specification of scientific criteria for the determination of endocrine-disrupting properties may only be performed objectively, in the light of scientific data relating to that system, independently of all other considerations, in particular economic ones."
Exposure to these endocrine disrupting chemicals, which are used in food packaging and on pesticides and biocides in food production, has been linked to decreased fertility, a rise in endocrine-related cancers, low sperm quality, obesity and cognition deficit and neurodegenerative diseases, according to one 2015 study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
Ahead of the vote, Eickhout said: "It is unacceptable that the Commission tries to lift a ban of certain endocrine disrupters via the backdoor of comitology to further the interests of the pesticides industry. The Commission has a mandate to come up with scientific criteria for endocrine disrupters, but not to undo a ban decided by the legislator.”
According to Eickhout, the vote was “an opportunity to halt the Commission from exceeding its powers, insist on the rule of law and maintain existing restrictions".
RULE OF LAW wins! European Parliament just stopped Commission from exceeding its power, on #endocrinedisrupters, by 389/235/70 @GreensEP
— FoodPolicyRevolution (@FoodRevEU) October 4, 2017
Chemicals known or suspected to be endocrine disruptors are used not just in pesticides but in food packaging, cosmetics and toys.
The Danish Consumer Council tested tins of peeled tomatoes and found five out of eight contained bisphenol A.
Meanwhile the French group UFC Que-Choisir commissioned laboratory tests and found known or suspected endocrine disruptors, such as ethylhexyl methoxycinnamate, in seven out of 17 suncreams.
Chemical cocktails
Yesterday, PAN published a report which showed the extent of endocrine disrupting pesticide residues found in EU food on the market.
Using 2015 monitoring data for 45,889 fresh fruit and vegetable samples that it acquired through a public access request, it found that just over one third (34%) of fruit consumed in Europe contained endocrine disrupting pesticides. Citrus fruit mandarins, oranges and grapefruit were the worst offenders – between 46 and 57% of samples contained residues with EDPs.
Celery and rocket were the worst offenders for vegetables, with 35 to 40% of samples containing residues.
Several fruit and vegetables contained up to eight EDPs per sample, for which the “collective toxic potential effects are not assessed”, PAN said.
The report reads: “Governments should put consumers’ health and the protection of the environment before the profit of the pesticide industry, which will always push to use more pesticides in agriculture, even though the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive 2009/128/EC34 calls all member states to use synthetic pesticides only as a last resource, after (and provided that) all non-chemical methods have failed.”
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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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Male infertility crisis in US has experts baffled.
The sudden rise in male infertility is a scary national crisis, and we can't blame it on Trump—or can we?
Hagai Levine doesn’t scare easily. The Hebrew University public health researcher is the former chief epidemiologist for the Israel Defense Forces, which means he’s acquainted with danger and risk in a way most of his academic counterparts aren’t. So when he raises doubts about the future of the human race, it’s worth listening. Together with Shanna Swan, a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Levine authored a major new analysis that tracked male sperm levels over the past few decades, and what he found frightened him. “Reproduction may be the most important function of any species,” says Levine. “Something is very wrong with men.”
That’s something you may not be used to hearing. It may take a man and a woman—or at least a sperm and an egg—to form new life, but it is women who bear the medical and psychological burden of trying to get—and stay—pregnant. It is women whose lifestyle choices are endlessly dissected for their supposed impact on fertility, and women who hear the ominous tick of the biological clock. Women are bombarded with countless fertility diets, special fertility-boosting yoga practices and all the fertility apps they can fit on their phone. They are the targets of a fertility industry expected to be valued at more than $21 billion globally by 2020. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fixates on women, tracking infertility in the U.S. by tallying the number of supposedly infertile women. “It is as if the entire medical realm is shaped to cater to women’s infertility and women’s bodies,” says Liberty Barnes, a sociologist and the author of Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity. “For men, there’s just nothing there.”
That absence might be understandable if women were solely responsible for the success or failure of a pregnancy. But they’re not. According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the male partner is either the sole or contributing cause in about 40 percent of cases of infertility. Past infections, medical conditions, hormonal imbalances and more can all cause what is known as male factor infertility. Men even have their own version of a biological clock. Beginning around their mid-30s, male fertility gradually degrades, and while most men produce sperm to their dying day, those past 40 who help conceive have a greater risk of passing on genetic abnormalities to their children, including autism. “Men are a huge part of this problem,” says Barbara Collura, the president and CEO of Resolve: the National Infertility Association.
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Startling new evidence suggests male infertility may be much worse than it appears. According to Levine and Swan’s work, sperm levels—the most important measurement of male fertility—are declining throughout much of the world, including the U.S. The report, published in late July, reviewed thousands of studies and concluded that sperm concentration had fallen by 59.3 percent among men in Western countries between 1973 and 2011. Four decades ago, the average Western man had a sperm concentration of 99 million per milliliter. By 2011, that had fallen to 47.1 million. The plummet is alarming because sperm concentrations below 40 million per milliliter are considered below normal and can impair fertility. (The researchers found no significant declines for non-Western men, in part because of a lack of quality data, though other studies have found major drops in countries like China and Japan.) And the decline has grown steeper in recent years, which means that the crisis is deepening. “This is pretty scary,” says Swan, who has long studied reproductive health. “I think we should be very concerned about this trend.”
Although there have reports of declining sperm counts before, they were easy to ignore. Research on sperm levels has been spotty, using different methodologies and drawing from varying groups, making it difficult to know that the declines some scientists observed were real, and not a function of miscounting. Skeptics of the latest conclusions countered that the new report was a study of many studies—it could only be as good as the work from which it drew. And even if the conclusions of the meta-analysis are accurate, the average sperm count still leaves most men on the normal side of fertile. Just barely.Yet fertility rates—the number of live births per woman—have drastically declined in the same countries with falling sperm counts. That includes the U.S., where fertility rates hit a record low this year, and where women are no longer bearing enough children to replace the existing population. Women need to average roughly 2.1 children—enough to replace themselves and their partner, with a spare bit to offset kids who don’t survive to reproductive age—to keep a country’s population stable through birth alone. The U.S. is at 1.8 and dependent on continued immigration to keep the population growing. Sociological and economic factors play a role in the changing size of the American family. Fertility rates were above the replacement level until the 2007 recession, then they plunged. And despite a years-long economic recovery and low unemployment, they’re still falling. Pair that with studies showing that nearly one in six couples in the U.S. trying to get pregnant can’t do so over the course of a year of unprotected sex—the medical definition of infertility—and it’s clear that something beyond economic insecurity is preventing Americans from having as many babies as they want. “When I see birth rates going down, I worry as a fertility doctor that men’s sperm counts are declining,” says Harry Fisch, a urologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.
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This would seem to be the moment for the medical world to throw everything it can at understanding what is happening to male fertility. Yet researchers on male reproduction are forced to rely on less-than-perfect data because the kind of comprehensive, longitudinal studies that might conclusively tell us what is happening to sperm counts have never been done. The irony is that the medical establishment has been accused—with reason—of ignoring the particular needs of women over the years, yet in reproduction it is men whose problems are poorly studied and often misunderstood. Some experts even wonder whether an unconscious desire to ignore threats to male fertility may be tied up in fears over the future of masculinity itself. “Here is direct evidence that that function of reproduction is failing,” says Michael Eisenberg, a urologist and an associate professor at Stanford University, referring to the latest sperm-level research. “We should try to figure out why that is.”What we do know about declining sperm counts tells us a great deal about not only reproduction but also the overall health of men—and what it tells us isn’t good. Young men may think themselves invincible, but the male reproductive system is a surprisingly temperamental machine. Obesity, inactivity, smoking—your basic poor modern lifestyle choices—can dramatically reduce sperm counts, as can exposure to some environmental toxins. Low sperm counts may presage a premature death, even among men in the prime of their lives who might seem otherwise healthy. “Sperm count decline is the canary in the coal mine,” says Levine. “There is something very wrong in the environment.” Which means there may be something very wrong with men.
Why Johnny Can’t BreedThe study of sperm has always been murky. In 1677, the Dutch draper and amateur scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek collected his semen immediately after having sex with his wife, examined it under a microscope of his own creation and saw millions of wriggling, tiny “animalcules” swimming in the seminal fluid. The Dutchman was the first person to observe human sperm cells, though he insisted that the sperm alone made an embryo that was merely nourished by the female egg and ovaries. Van Leeuwenhoek was simply following the example of classical thinkers like Aristotle, who believed female partners at most provided a fertile bed of soil in which the seed provided by a man could germinate and flower into a child. It wouldn’t be until the 19th century that the true roles of the sperm and the egg were finally sorted out.All those wriggling “swimmers” van Leeuwenhoek saw are what you would see if you magnified the sample of a healthy fertile man. A sperm cell is built for one thing: motion. Its torpedo-like head is a nugget of DNA containing the 23 chromosomes the male partner contributes to his future child, connected to a long tail or flagellum that propels the sperm to the egg, all running on the cellular rocket fuel of fructose, which is in the semen. Most sperm will never come close to an egg—while a fertile man ejaculates 20 million to 300 million sperm per milliliter of semen, only a few dozen might reach their destination, and only one can drill through the egg’s membrane and achieve conception. The chemical makeup of the vagina is actively hostile to sperm, which can only survive because semen contains alkaline substances that offset the acidic environment. That’s the paradox of sperm counts—although one healthy sperm is enough to make a baby, it takes tens of millions of sperm to beat the odds, which means that significant declines in sperm counts will eventually degrade overall male fertility. Notes Swan: “Even a relatively small change in the mean sperm count has a big impact on the percentage of men who will be classified as infertile or subfertile”—meaning a reduced level of fertility that makes it harder to conceive.
The fears about male infertility go beyond the stuff of dry science. “It’s the virility and fertility dilemma,” says Sharon Covington, an infertility therapist in Maryland. “How a man sees himself, and how the world sees him as a man, is often tied to his ability to impregnate a woman.” So perhaps it’s not surprising that the argument over how much sperm counts are declining—if they are declining—has been less a courteous scientific debate than a ferocious battle that has gone on for more than two decades.
This war began in Denmark, in 1990, when Danish pediatric endocrinologist Niels Skakkebaek began looking into male reproductive health. For years, he had been troubled by the rise in testicular cancer, as well as an increase in the number of boys with malformed testes. He thought assessing sperm quality and quantity might give him a clue to what was happening to his patients.
In 1992, Skakkebaek and colleagues reviewed all the published studies of sperm counts from around the world. (Sperm counts are done by tallying the number of sperm cells in one microliter of semen and then multiplying by 10,000 to estimate the total sperm in a milliliter—not dissimilar from the way police try to estimate the size of a large crowd from a geographic sample.) They calculated that the average sperm count in 1940 was about 113 million per milliliter of semen, and that by 1990 it had fallen to 66 million. In addition, they saw a threefold increase in the number of men with a sperm count below 20 million, the point at which infertility becomes a serious risk.Skakkebaek’s 1992 paper raised concern about the ability of the human species to continue reproducing itself, but skeptics immediately attacked, questioning the reliability of the original sperm studies the analysis was based on. The studies drew from very different groups of men of varying age and fertility. (Sperm count tends to decline with age, and men who gave a semen sample in a visit to a fertility clinic can reasonably be expected to have a lower count than, say, healthy men selected as donors for a sperm bank.) Some scientists believe older and less precise techniques for sperm counting may have artificially inflated the sperm levels of our fathers and grandfathers, which would make the drop to current counts appear steeper than it is.That’s why the new meta-analysis is so important. Swan, Levine and their international colleagues carefully sorted through more than 7,500 peer-reviewed papers before narrowing their search to 185 papers involving 43,000 men from around the world. By excluding studies before 1973, they cut out some of the less reliable older measurements, and they discarded any studies of men with known fertility complications or who were smokers, since smoking lowers sperm count. It’s not perfect—no meta-analysis is—but this evidence is the best we currently have, and the conclusions are disturbing. “The community is coming around on this,” says Eisenberg. “There have been some good counterarguments about sperm-level decline, but this paper really puts a lot of those arguments to bed.”Environmental CastrationProving that sperm levels are dropping has been difficult enough, and teasing out the cause is even tougher. Obesity, which has risen dramatically in Western countries while sperm counts have supposedly dropped, is linked to poor semen quality, as is physical inactivity. A 2013 study of American college students found that men who exercised more than 15 hours a week had sperm counts 73 percent higher than men who exercised less than five hours a week. And men who watched 20 or more hours of TV a week had much lower sperm counts than those who watched little to no TV. Stress is also a risk factor, as is alcohol use, which is on an upswing in the U.S., and drug use, which is increasing thanks to the opioid epidemic. Some scientists have theorized that electromagnetic fields from devices like cellphones could degrade semen quality, leading to weak and immobile sperm. Even heat can play a role. We know for certain that high temperatures can kill sperm, which is why the testicles are outside the body, keeping them up to 5.4 degrees cooler. Researchers know that birth rates decline nine months after a heat wave, leading some infertility experts to believe that climate change may actually be a factor in sperm count decline.Age also matters. In a recent study, Laura Dodge of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center looked at thousands of attempts at in vitro fertilization (IVF) performed in the Boston area and tried to gauge the impact of both male and female age on success. Female age remained the dominant factor, but male age factored in as well—women under the age of 30 with a male partner between 40 and 42 were significantly less likely to give birth than those whose male partner was between 30 and 35. That dovetails with other research showing that as men age, their sperm suffers increasing numbers of mutations, which in turn can make it slightly more likely that their children will be born with disorders like autism and schizophrenia. Older mothers may get the blame for infertility, but a new study found that new fathers in the U.S. are on average nearly four years older than they were in 1972, while almost 9 percent of new American fathers are over 40, double the percentage from 45 years ago. “We tell men that age is not an issue, but now we know that the male biological clock is real,” says Fisch.So is it simply modern life itself—obesity, inactivity, stress, cellphones, even older parenthood—that’s driving down sperm levels? It’s the beginning of an answer, but not the full one. Tobacco use definitely hurts sperm counts, yet smoking has fallen significantly in the U.S. That’s one reason a growing band of researchers have come to suspect the influence of toxins in the environment—specifically, endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in compounds like bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates.The theory is straightforward enough: These chemicals mimic the effect of the feminizing hormone estrogen and can interfere with masculinizing hormones like testosterone. The chemicals, which are found in many plastics throughout the environment, may be rewiring the sensitive male reproductive system, eroding sperm quality and quantity and even contributing to the sort of testicular disorders that first alarmed Skakkebaek years ago. The production of sperm is tightly regulated by the body’s hormones, and so any interference with those hormones—say, through exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals—could make itself felt first through damage to sperm quantity or quality. “You could still have sperm, but [levels] might be significantly lower than your father’s,” says Germaine Louis, the director and senior investigator at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.Most of the evidence for how these chemicals affect sperm comes from animal studies. A 2011 study found that mice who received daily BPA injections had lower sperm counts and testosterone levels than mice who received saline injections. A startling study from 2016 of fish in U.S. wildlife refuges in the Northeast found that 60 to 100 percent of all the male smallmouth bass studied had eggs growing in their testes—a startling feminization—which researchers linked to endocrine disrupters in the waters. Other studies have shown that phthalates appear to disrupt the masculinization of young lab rats. Animal models aren’t perfect, but as University of Texas toxicologist Andrea Gore notes, “the biology of reproduction is incredibly similar in all mammals. We are all vertebrates, and we have the same reproductive organs and processes that develop similarly with the same hormones.”Scientists can’t expose humans to endocrine disrupters in a controlled experiment, but some recent research has found associations between exposure to BPA and phthalates in the world, and declining sperm counts and male infertility in adults. A 2010 study of Chinese factory workers by De-Kun Li at Kaiser Permanente found that increasing levels of BPA in urine were significantly linked with decreased sperm count and quality, even among men who were exposed to levels of BPA comparable to men in the general American population. Another study from 2014 followed about 500 couples trying to conceive and found that phthalate exposure among men was tied to reduced fertility. These findings are all associations, which means that while exposure to endocrine disrupters is more likely to be found in men suffering from reduced fertility, it doesn’t mean that the chemicals themselves are definitively the cause. But the studies are stacking up. “For some of the endocrine disrupters like phthalates, the basic evidence is strong that they affect reproductive health,” says Louis, who carried out the phthalates study.Even more concerning, but harder to prove, is the damage endocrine disrupters may be doing in utero. As a fetus develops in a mother’s uterus, it is barraged by hormones and other chemicals that sculpt development. That includes the male reproductive system—testicles are formed in the womb, and although sperm levels can be altered in adulthood, they seem to be largely set before a boy is born. That means we could see sperm levels continue to decline for years, as boys who were exposed to endocrine disrupters before birth reach reproductive age and run into problems trying to have children of their own. “This trend hasn’t turned around, and it’s not going to turn around on its own,” says Swan, who has been studying the effects of endocrine disrupters for decades. “We don’t have a lot of time to lose.”The Baby Un-BoomIf this is a crisis, why is the medical establishment still arguing over the accuracy of statistical methods that approximate sperm levels from a variety pack of studies? Trying to figure out what is happening to sperm levels isn’t like trying to create an HIV vaccine. Researchers could follow a cohort of representative men from early adulthood through their reproductive years, taking regular semen samples under the same conditions and tracking lifestyle and environmental factors, including exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Such long-term studies aren’t easy or cheap, but somehow we’ve managed to pull them off for certain illnesses, like cardiovascular disease and cancer. The future of the human race—whether it has one—would seem to qualify as an important topic to explore in depth. “Why are we messing about with this?” says professor Allan Pacey, a male fertility expert at the University of Sheffield. “Let’s just answer the question.”A major, comprehensive study of semen quality has never been funded, however. Doctors are reluctant to even ask men for semen samples, and most men seem reluctant to give one—even though, as Eisenberg wryly notes, “it’s a lot more pleasant for the patient than a blood draw.”
“Male infertility has been ignored for 30 years,” says Christopher Barratt, a professor of reproductive medicine at the University of Dundee in Scotland. “What we understand can be written on a postage stamp.”The average man knows much, much less. Few men could even name the medical specialty that covers male reproductive health—it’s urology—and fewer still have ever seen a urologist, given that there are fewer than 12,000 of them in the U.S., about one-third the number of OB-GYNs in the country. Aside from a few online forums, there are no real support systems for men with infertility issues. Many men lack basic knowledge about risk factors for infertility. A 2016 Canadian study found that men could identify only about 50 percent of the potential risks to sperm production, largely missing out on known threats like obesity and frequent bicycling. “Most men just assume that when they want to have children they’ll be able to,” says Phyllis Zelkowitz, the director of research at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal and the lead author on the study. “But that isn’t the case for a certain number of people.”The continued ignorance of male infertility is, in its way, another form of male privilege. Pretending that pregnancy is almost entirely a female responsibility means that women are forced to carry the burden and the blame when it goes wrong, while men, who are just as vital to healthy conception, rarely worry about how their lifestyles impact their own fertility or their possible children. “Women will often be sent to invasive, expensive procedures for fertility before a sperm test is ever done,” says Resolve’s Collura.So men are getting off free while their female partners put themselves through painful and expensive fertility treatments. Well, not exactly. The constant production of new sperm cells makes semen highly sensitive to toxins and disease, making it an ideal surrogate for male health—“like blood pressure,” as Louis puts it—beyond what it might signal for fertility. Poor sperm levels and infertility are a clear sign that men’s health is failing. One 2015 study found that men diagnosed with infertility have a higher risk of developing health issues like heart disease, diabetes and alcohol abuse, while another connected infertility to cancer. “Semen quality isn’t just about a couple getting pregnant,” says Louis. “There is increasing evidence at the population level that men with diminished semen quality die earlier and have more chronic diseases. This is as important to health as any disease state.”That male reproductive health goes mostly ignored in the face of those concerns is a striking example of what Cynthia Daniels, a political scientist at Rutgers University and the author of Exposing Men: The Science and Politics of Male Reproduction , calls the “paradox of male privilege.” A society that values men over women would presumably pour money and resources into determining exactly what is happening to sperm counts and reproductive health. But that would risk confirming that men, who are socially conditioned to think of themselves as indestructible, are in fact vulnerable—and vulnerable in that part of themselves most vital to manhood. At a moment when other talismans of masculinity, like the ability to financially support a family, are under assault, acknowledging the risk to reproduction may feel even more threatening to men. “Recognizing the male reproductive health problem unravels the notion of who men are and how they achieve masculinity,” says Daniels. “It seems to be more important to protect our norms of masculinity and traditional gender relations than it is to address the real health needs of men.”
One way to accomplish that goal is to enable men to take responsibility for their reproductive health. That’s what Greg Sommer, the chief scientific officer of Sandstone Diagnostics, is trying to do with Trak, a kit men can use to evaluate their sperm levels. It’s one of several similar do-it-yourself sperm testing services that offer men the chance to assess their own fertility without stepping inside a doctor’s office. That approach is more than a mere convenience because men are significantly less likely to go to the doctor than women, especially men in their prime reproductive years, when their health is otherwise likely to be good.Real, substantive change is needed from the medical and funding communities to address the male infertility crisis. It may be true, as skeptics countered after the publication of Swan and Levine’s meta-analysis, that we’re a long way from declining sperm counts heralding the end of the human race, at least as portrayed in works of pop art like The Children of Men and The Handmaid’s Tale . Millions of men and women are having children every day—even if an increasing number need artificial help like IVF. Yet more and more countries find themselves unable to raise their fertility rates above the level needed to replace their population, leading one prominent demographer to prophesy that the world has already reached “peak child.”It’s difficult not to wonder and worry about what will come next. “It’s an inconvenient message, but the species is under threat, and that should be a wake-up call to all of us,” says Skakkebaek. “If this doesn’t change in a generation, it is going to be an enormously different society for our grandchildren and their children.”Assuming, of course, they can have them.
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US is eliminating its Arctic and climate envoys. What message does that send?
The envoys gave the U.S. seasoned voices in international negotiations involving complex issues around climate change and the future of the Arctic region.
As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson eliminates or shifts dozens of high-level diplomatic positions within the State Department—including the special envoys for climate change and the Arctic— those who have spent careers on these issues worry about the message being sent to the international community.
"On the appearance side, I think it definitely will be read by other governments as downgrading our interests," said Brooks Yeager, who was the deputy secretary for environment at the end of the Clinton administration. "At least in appearance, we're not devoting the same level of attention as other governments."
In a letter sent to Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) this week, Tillerson identified 36 special envoy positions that he plans to abolish. "I believe that the Department will be able to better execute its mission by integrating certain envoys and special representative offices within the regional and functional bureaus, and eliminating those that have accomplished or outlived their original purpose," Tillerson wrote.
The move is in step with the continued shrinking of the federal government under President Donald Trump, where an exodus of Obama staffers, a hiring freeze and a lack of political appointments has left the State Department's ranks thinner by the week.
The appointees who have held top positions as envoys on climate change and the Arctic have represented the United States in international climate negotiations and in multilateral diplomatic talks on the future of the Arctic region. Currently, both of those positions are vacant. Jonathan Pershing, former special envoy for climate change, and Admiral Robert Papp, former special representative for the Arctic, both resigned after Trump's election.
Positions Expected to Take Over Remain Unfilled
Tillerson said the work done by their offices will shift to the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (known as OES)—a corner of the State Department that previously played a central role in international negotiations, but which is currently dormant as upper-level positions remain unfilled.
One State Department employee familiar with the Office of the Special Representative to the Arctic said the transition could be seamless—but for one thing: "They are still lacking specific policy guidance on many things they work on. Their work has been forced into a lull because they have not been given any guidance on something they can proactively do."
"They're all sitting there twiddling their thumbs," the employee said.
The elimination of the envoy offices will affect seven positions and $761,000 in the climate change office and an additional five positions and $438,000 in the Arctic office. Trump's proposed budget calls for a 32 percent cut to the State Department budget.
The OES is currently helmed by Acting Assistant Secretary Judith G. Garber, but acting secretaries aren't in a good position to make policy decisions because they lack the authority of a congressionally confirmed appointee. Now, the OES ranks are about to be thinned even further, as Daniel A. Reifsnyder, the deputy assistant secretary for environment, who plans to leave the department soon.
Loss of U.S. Leadership?
"This strikes me as close to the elimination of capacity," said Rafe Pomerance, a member of the Polar Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine who served as a deputy assistant secretary for environment and development under President Clinton until 1999. Shifting the responsibilities of the Arctic and climate change envoys "would not be a disaster," Pomerance said, as long as there were a clear commitment in the OES to deal with the issues. "But fundamentally, Tillerson is not there on this," he said. "Either on the climate issue globally or in the Arctic."
"The notion that we're going to exhibit any positive leadership on this feels pretty hopeless. Rather, we're slowing it all down," Pomerance said.
Although the Trump administration, which has said it will leave the international Paris climate agreement, nevertheless expects to participate in negotiations pending its eventual withdrawal, the lack of top appointees to attend meetings like the next conference of treaty parties in Bonn in November will likely render it impotent.
Todd Stern, who was the United States' chief negotiator for the Paris Agreement as the special envoy for climate change from 2009 to 2016, said that while the position wasn't necessary to get the work done, it certainly helped. "It allowed the United States to have a very senior level person who was focusing just on this issue," he said.
"The administration has already shown its colors on this issue," Stern said, referring to the Trump administration's public statements about climate change and continuing efforts to roll back U.S. climate policies. "It's no surprise that they decided to do away with my office. Indeed, I would have been quite surprised if they had not done that, given the orientation they have clearly demonstrated."
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To save the rivers and the woods, try hurling a few dead fish.
An innovative program is restoring order to Pacific Northwest ecosystems, one salmon carcass at a time.
One cool September day, I visited a fish hatchery in Sweet Home, Oregon, a lumber town in the foothills of the Cascades east of Corvallis. I was there to see the year’s final holding of spring Chinook salmon collected, spawned, and ultimately tossed into a local creek as “stream enrichment”: fertilizer for the ecosystem. I would follow them up the highway as they were delivered to a small tributary of the South Santiam River that had lost its wild fish and thus, for decades, been starved of the important nutrients that salmon gather at sea.
When I arrived at the hatchery, a group of teenage volunteers from Sweet Home High was busy helping technicians with the harvest of sperm and glowing, orange eggs to spawn the next generation of salmon fry. This miracle of procreation, orchestrated by hand in a few hundred square feet with the aid of knives, once occurred across hundreds of stair-stepped, free-flowing miles of tributaries along the upper South Santiam, which eventually flows to the Willamette River, the Columbia, and then the Pacific. But in 1968, a dam was built above the hatchery, which prevented natural salmon runs from reaching these beautiful spawning waters naturally.
Today, on average, only about 200 wild salmon are tanker-trucked around the reservoir each year by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) to breed in the upper watershed—a relic of former times, a pittance. This presents a conundrum, because we’ve learned that salmon play a crucial role in keeping forests healthy. When they die, their bodies decompose along banks, where the tree roots and creatures absorb their fertile nutrients. Nitrogen, especially, is a key gift to forests, because it’s needed for both chlorophyll, which is essential to photosynthesis, and nucleic acids, which are found at the heart of every cell.
Within 80 feet of the streams where salmon nest and decompose, tree-growth rates can be triple that of nearby salmonless rivers. This accelerated tree growth is important because it means bankside groves will require far fewer years to produce—or reestablish—large trees critical to the health of salmon runs. A vigorous canopy shades streams, optimizing temperatures for eggs buried in gravel nests, called redds, and also prevents erosion, which can clog the interstices in the gravel that deliver oxygen to embryos. Leaves that fall into the stream feed insects, which salmon young then devour. Moreover, trees drop branches and ultimately topple into streams, where they form logjams that slow water, and so catch and retain gravel for spawning. The larger the trunk, the better to withstand annual and periodic floods, and behind them, adult and juvenile salmon can find shelter from torrents or everyday current. In this way, fish carry the health and rehabilitation of their own habitat on their backs, in their very being. They spur new canopy and large woody debris that their own brood and future generations depend on.
Because of logging, dams, and now climate change, however, the wild salmon populations in the Northwest are a fraction of what they were. They navigate just 40 percent of their historic range. In Oregon, only 12 percent of historic numbers still exist, which means forests aren’t receiving close to the nutrients they once did. Plenty of artificially raised salmon return to hatcheries, however, and these excess fish are terrifically ripe—quite rotten—for the tossing. In 2016, ODFW threw some 33,000 carcasses into creeks. In Washington, about 39,000 carcasses were hurled in 2016, and nearly 1.7 million have been dumped in the state since 1995. Carcasses are so essential to the carrying capacity of streams that, in places like Idaho, where the runs are especially beleaguered and fewer excess fish are available from hatcheries, biologists have experimented with carcass “analogs”: sacks of nutrients (remainders from commercial fish factories, and more) that slowly dissolve, mimicking a genuine carcass.
But we had the real, leaky thing at the South Santiam Hatchery: 290 salmon, two giant totes worth. Before noon, Karen Hans and Lance Gatchell arrived to pick up the dead fish and caravan upriver with the little white school bus carrying the teenagers. Gatchell is a hydrologist and fish biologist for the Sweet Home Ranger District of the Willamette National Forest. Hans is an ODFW STEP biologist—Salmon and Trout Enhancement Program. A forklift loaded the totes onto Hans and Gatchell’s truck beds, and we drove off toward the fishes’ next, if not final, resting place: Soda Fork Creek. We pulled over along a ferny bank, and Hans, much practiced, gave a demonstration of proper chucking technique. Spearing a heavy fish, she swung it up in front of her. Then, with the torque of an ice skater, she pivoted the fish around and behind her, and let it fly. There was a splash down below. One by one, the students picked up spears and followed suit.
Led by Gatchell, the Forest Service had earlier performed a “tree tipping” restoration in Soda Fork Creek. Towering, living trees had been pulled down into the stream by bulldozers with cables, as if they’d naturally fallen. All along the stream, piles of three or four Douglas fir lay across each other like a monstrous game of pickup sticks. These “trash racks,” as Gatchell dubbed them, already were catching other woody debris, becoming a basket weave of fallen forest. Eventually they would net fish, too: Studies have shown that logjams dense with sticks and branches are the best sieves for carcasses, snagging and holding them. Keeping those nutrients in the forest, and so in the family.
The fish that landed directly in the stream were funneled below one of these logjams and collected in a translucent pool, where they would stay, for now. But eventually, the dead would vanish: Within hours of the carcasses’ arrival, crawdads would discover them and prod and begin to saw. After a month submerged, more than 40 percent of each fish’s bulk would leach away imperceptibly. Aquatic insects would nibble, a hoary white microbial layer would claim its skin. Downstream, a schmear of algae and bacteria fueled by the rotting fish would burgeon on underwater rocks. In turn, aquatic insects would boom, up to eightfold. Though there weren’t wild salmon in Soda Fork just yet, steelhead—a giant sea-run trout in the same genus—had returned. Last year’s brood would feed directly on the pale shreds of their distant relations.
Despite the teenagers’ strength, some of the carcasses landed shy of Soda Fork and were left marooned, as if by receding water, on the cobble island built up behind the trash rack. No one was sweating these errant tosses: Carcasses are naturally dragged onshore. In some places, bears devour about half the carrion and scatter it—with an emphasis on scat—throughout the riparian zone. Where fish are plentiful, bruins consume only the most delectable cuts and offer the rest to smaller but not lesser scavengers: raccoons, weasels, otters, eagles, vultures, ants, beetles, spiders, mites, slugs, the worms curling under the decay, and flies, forever flies. In turn, these animals scatter the salmon widely as they die.
One more stop, at a concrete bridge a quarter mile upstream: “Okay, listen up everybody,” said Hans, above the chatter and purr of the creek. “We’re going to pull out this tote, and we’re going to dump it over the side. You guys are familiar with energy drinks like Red Bull and Rockstar? Well, what’s in this tote is like an energy drink for the creek. All these nutrients are ready to go into the food chain.” Inside the white tote was a raspberry-colored juice that had oozed from the fish, along with bits of flesh, stray tails, and black scraps of liver and kidney. Karen and four boys poured the bloody contents of the tote over the bridge’s rail. The ruby cascade fell 40 feet to Soda Fork, and a chorus of “ohhhs” and “ewwws” rose up from the bystanders. We boarded the bus and raced that Red Bull back to school as we drove the 20 miles west to Sweet Home.
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Rome, city of ancient aqueducts, faces water rationing.
A blistering summer has left parts of Europe parched and plagued by wildfires, but it is a particular indignity in the Eternal City.
ROME — Rome’s cold, clean water has flowed through ancient aqueducts, gurgled in baroque fountains and poured incessantly from thousands of the 19th-century spouts that still grace the city streets. For millenniums, water has symbolized Rome’s dominion over nature, its engineering prowess and deep, seemingly inexhaustible spring of good fortune.
“It’s a sign of abundance, but also it’s a sign of power,” said Guido Giordano, a geologist who specializes in water at University Roma Tre. “Since the foundational myth of Romulus and Remus coming from the river, water is inherent to the foundation of Rome.”
And now it is indicative of its latest fall.
A severe drought and sweltering temperatures have led city officials to consider rationing drinking water for eight hours a day for a million and a half Rome residents.
The water crisis has become yet another sign of man being at the mercy of an increasingly extreme climate, but also of once-mighty Rome’s political impotence, managerial ineptitude and overall decline.
Rome’s embattled mayor, Virginia Raggi, has vowed to prevent the rationing, even as smaller towns have already resorted to closing some taps. Ms. Raggi, whose administration has been widely criticized as ineffective, seems aware that depriving Romans of their drinking water could potentially sink her.
Since May, the city-controlled water utility, Acea, has rushed to repair 2,000 of its 7,000 kilometers of water pipes, recovering a hundred liters of water per second.
Even as the Acea website boasts “Roma, Regina Aquarum” (Rome, Queen of the Waters), its system has become so decrepit that about 44 percent of the water is stolen, spills out underground or pools onto the street.
The city has lowered water pressure to aid conservation, forcing residents of top-floor apartments to lug buckets up to their bathrooms and kitchens. “Faucets at risk. A run on bottled water,” news programs have blared.
This week, Italy’s health minister spoke anxiously about the havoc water rationing would wreak on hospitals and the sick. On Thursday, Italy’s minister for the environment appeared in the Senate to express his grave concerns about the drought’s impact on lakes, and suggested that authorities should look into cases of water theft.
On June 22, after criticism of her inaction, Ms. Raggi braved the opposition and decided to start a staggering closure of the 2,500 iconic “nasone” — or big nose — drinking fountains throughout the city. As of Wednesday, she had closed 200 of them, according to the water utility.
The city is also fighting a deadline from the Latium region, to which Rome belongs, to stop draining fresh water from nearby Lake Bracciano. The lake provides 8 percent of Rome’s water and has sunk about 1.5 meters, or nearly five feet.
Wednesday morning, technicians measured the water level in Anguillara Sabazia, a small town bordering the lake. Working under a ruined monument dedicated in the 18th century by Pius XI, the surveyors determined the lake had risen about a centimeter after a Tuesday night rainstorm.
One surveyor shrugged and said the change did not matter, and motioned to the banks around him, where a rowboat was beached on newly exposed earth. “It’s dry,” he said.
Nearby, on a pier, Mauro Noro, 42, cast out his fishing line and said the water was as low as he had ever seen it. “They shouldn’t send anymore water from here to Rome,” he said.
But without Lake Bracciano to help quench the city’s thirst, Ms. Raggi and the water utility are at a loss.
This spring was the second-hottest in the last 60 years, and the driest, with only 26 days of rain compared with 88 in 2016. A recent report by Legambiente, an Italian environmental organization, said that rain had declined 80 to 85 percent in Latium compared with last year.
And Latium is far from Italy’s only parched region. Several of Italy’s 20 regions have asked for the declaration of a state of emergency to address deep droughts. The farmers’ association Coldiretti has estimated 2 billion euros’ worth of damage to agriculture.
In May, the regions of Trentino and Veneto in the country’s northeast bickered over water resources. (“The War of Water,” read a headline in the Turin-based La Stampa.)
Some Italians have looked skyward for assistance. This summer, a local agriculture official from Veneto walked from Cittadella to Padova, all the while praying for St. Anthony to open the heavens. In Roscigno Campania, some faithful took the Madonna of Constantinople, known as “the water-making Madonna,” out for a procession.
Those prayers have so far not been answered. But the Vatican, for its part, is not letting a good water crisis go to waste.
In an effort to highlight Pope Francis’ emphasis on the environment, the Vatican on Monday began cutting off water to 100 of its fountains, including the famous ones designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in St. Peter’s Square.
“It’s not like the Vatican is dying of water problems, but we get the water from the same places Rome gets it from, Lake Bracciano and the aqueducts,” said Greg Burke, the Vatican’s spokesman, who acknowledged that some of the closures were symbolic, as the fountains operated on recycled water.
Making explicit reference to the pope’s encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si’,” Mr. Burke added, “Sometimes you have to make a sacrifice; that is the message.”
Such sacrifices would have seemed unimaginable a few years ago, or even 2,329 years ago.
In 312 B.C., the city finished the underground Appio aqueduct, and in following centuries, most of the water brought in came from groundwater within a 25-mile radius. The aqueducts poured 186,666 gallons of water a minute into the city, serving more than a million people, according to “The Seven Hills of Rome: A Geological Tour of the Eternal City.”
The ancient Romans had their own version of Acea; Sextus Julius Frontinus served as water commissioner for the emperors Nerva and Trajan. Worried about drought and fires, he oversaw the construction of emergency reservoirs. Water leakage was a problem then, too, but vandals and thieves were punished.
Except for a dry spell in the Dark Ages, the constant current of clean drinking water has for centuries astonished visitors to Rome. The water carried by 35 miles of graceful aqueducts from Lake Bracciano to Rome reminded the 18th-century German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of conquerors returning triumphantly to the city.
“It is the most peaceful of benefactors that enters with a like power,” he wrote. “And is received with immediate gratitude and admiration for its long and strenuous march.”
The campaign has gotten tougher. A general lack of rain followed by short but concentrated storms means more surface runoff and less infiltration into the underground water supplies.
Also, the recent absence of snow cover on the Apennine mountain range that is the main source of Rome’s water means less water has seeped into the city’s aquifers.
Beyond Rome, blistering temperatures have set off wildfires that have driven residents and tourists in Sicily into the sea, where boats waited to evacuate them.
Similar disasters have swept southern France, Spain, Portugal and Croatia in this dry, scorching summer. In Italy, firefighters have doused fires across the country, including in areas around Rome.
“Rome must not be left alone to face this environmental disaster,” Ms. Raggi said as she toured one area hit by fire. But ultimately it is the sky, gloriously and frustratingly clear, that has proved most uncooperative.
Even Mr. Giordano, the geologist who studies water for a living, is having a tough time adjusting to the depletion in this ancient land of aquatic plenty.
“I grew up with the feeling that the water in Rome was always flowing,” he said, adding that when news of the possible water rationing hit, he thought: “Wow. In Rome.”
Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.
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