biodiversity

Nice job, Einstein

I'll give you some hints. Just a few days ago, a man walked on a stage a few hundred yards from where I sit to accept an honorary degree in science. Following is the speech that preceded the award:

As Einstein is to relativity you are to biodiversity -- the insight that our world is unimaginatively rich in its number of species, whose lives are inextricably woven together. This idea has powered much subsequent biological research and re-shaped forever human understanding of the world and our place within it. This intellectual journey began, as so often in science, with a child's curiosity -- in your case with the ants you collected in the series of Southern towns in which you were raised. Your fascination in the face of nature's detail led to your adult study of how species adapt to their surroundings and how genes and culture interact to affect social behavior. Most recently you have inspired the growing inquiry into the vast array of species with which we share this planet and into the delicate web that holds together all life. In doing so you have fathered the modern environmental movement and inspired countless scientists with the knowledge that there is so very much more of life to be discovered. Like Einstein you, too, are dedicated to unifying ideas across the disciplines -- to finding those areas in which science, humanities, and social sciences converge -- and to exploring how science can best inform religion, morality, and ethics. And, as relativity shaped so much of the human agenda of the Twentieth Century, so biodiversity stands poised to do in the Twenty-First -- providing head-spinning new insights along with the sober realization that upon the use we make of this knowledge hangs the very existence of human life.

How wildlife biologists are becoming hospice workers

This guest essay comes from Meera Subramanian, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and writes about culture and the environment for The New York Times, Salon, Audubon, and other publications.

A year ago, I was sitting in New York City's Bryant Park interviewing a wildlife biologist about vultures, three species of which are well on their way to extinction in South Asia. Munir Virani, who oversees the South Asian Vulture Crisis project for the Peregrine Fund, dropped a phrase that sank like lead. "We are monitoring to extinction," he said, his dark eyes instinctually looking up, scanning the stretch of sky among the trees for life, maybe even a peregrine falcon that nests on the nearby MetLife Building in midtown.

He is a biologist, the name of his field spawning from the Greek root word for life. And yet he and many others in his field have become the equivalent of hospice workers. They come to know and care for their ward, but they are working in defense mode, backs pressed up against a wall of looming threats to all forms of life on earth -- terrestrial and aquatic; mammalian, avian, and amphibian.

Whether or not Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson is right when he estimates that we are losing 30,000 species per year -- that's three species per hour -- there is no denying that this is a time of loss. "We are monitoring everywhere in a rapidly changing landscape. It's incredibly frustrating," Virani told me. "There is no feel-good effect in this work."

By all reckoning, it's too late for the vultures. By the time scientists isolated a livestock drug as the cause of the deaths, 95 percent of the population had crashed in less than a decade, and there weren't enough left in the wild to begin a captive breeding program.

Ultimatum to the rest of the world

In response to intense pressure from indigenous and environmental organizations opposed to drilling for oil in an Amazon rainforest, this May Ecuador asked the world for financial help, according to the Environmental News Service.

The oil fields under Yasuni National Park are estimated to contain 900 million to 1 billion barrels of oil, about one-quarter of Ecuador's total reserves. In about a year, international oil companies will be allowed to bid for the right to drill.

To avoid this fate, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa is asking the international community for about $350 million a year.

They may not all be bad.

Two recent news stories from the Chesapeake illustrate well the opposite poles in the debate on invasive species. The first details the appearance of the cuddly-sounding mitten crab in Chesapeake waters, an Asian species that has also hitchhiked in ships to California, Germany and Great Britain. Articles about it use terms like alien and exotic for the little fellas, often pitting them against the beleaguered native blue crabs.

So the news that a foreign species of aquatic vegetation, once considered a major nuisance when it began rapidly colonizing the nearby Potomac River, has instead benefited the watershed's ecosystem interested me. Hydrilla first appeared in 1983 and created dense vegetation masses and even impeded boat traffic in some areas. It was feared that it would interfere with the native vegetation, itself an important food source for waterfowl and fish.

This 17-year study of hydrilla, though, found that not only did it not crowd out native species, but the natives actually increased. Hydrilla also became an important winter food source for waterfowl communities, which increased over this period. All of which makes me wonder about the hype and hyperbole used to describe each new "invasion."

Good reading on Mongabay

There is so much good stuff over there I hardly know where to start. You might consider subscribing to the weekly email.

Top of the list is an interview with Luke Hunter (the same biologist I pissed off with my pincushion post). Coincidentally, roughly a fifth of the interview dealt with that topic:

... does conservation of the species require radio-tagging? There are many, many cases where it does not. I often read proposals by graduate students who are wishing to radio-collar cats to address a conservation issue when they could far better achieve their goal by some other means.

Trapping or darting animals does increase their vulnerability, so it is critical to reduce that as much as possible. The great bulk of biologists I've met are very concerned about this and take great care in reducing the risk.

Take a few minutes out of your life (or off your boss's time clock) to sign this petition. This was my message: "Please cosponsor the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act. Your grandchildren will thank you." Dooo it ...

Umbra on cane toads

Dear Umbra, I’m currently studying in Australia. I was recently in Queensland, where as you probably know, cane toads are a huge problem. There are over 200 million of the toxic toads, and this invasive species has been killing off native wildlife and just in general causing lots of problems. In fact, they have huge […]

Encyclopedia of Life off to a slow start

A couple of emails and an article in the latest issue of Science have roused me to post on the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) website. The site is not functional yet but has a whiz-bang demo (completely fake) put together by a company called AvenueA|Razorfish that is well worth checking out.

However, that was the only thing that impressed me about the site. The article in Science just inflamed my skepticism:

Trends on an ever-shrinking planet

I was at Coop Power's excellent annual renewable energy summit in western Massachusetts recently. Richard Heinberg was there as a presenter. He discussed his well-regarded peak oil projections, and he then put that curve next to his peak uranium and peak coal projections. That visual drew gasps from the crowd -- especially the peak coal bit.

Sure we've got lots of coal, but its quality ain't what it used to be, and won't go as far. Check his data. This got me thinking of all the indexes we might put forward to track important trends on this ever-shrinking planet.

The next one I'd promote, given our perilous reliance on the mobile hives that are driven from farm to farm to pollinate our crops, plus this winter's mysterious honeybee population crash, would have to be peak bees. And how about peak freshwater. What would you propose?

So far, small-scale, local-minded beekeepers have dodged hive collapse.

This post marks the launch of Fork it Over, in which I (attempt to) answer questions inspired by my Victual Reality column. Got a question about food and the politics that surround it? Fork it over, by emailing it to victuals(at)grist(dot)org. Reader Brooklynolmec writes in to inquire: are organically managed bees faring any better these […]