Looking Beyond the Charismatic Megafauna

Wolves and polar bears are great, but so are bats, fish, plants and invertebrates (among others worthy of our attention).

There’s a phrase that describes species like polar bears, wolves, gorillas and giant pandas: “charismatic megafauna.”

There’s nothing wrong with being a large, good-looking species, but charisma can often come with a price. For one thing, all the species I just listed are endangered — many of them in no small part to their attractiveness.

Perhaps more importantly, though, humans — including journalists — can sometimes give these charismatic species a bit too much of the spotlight. That leaves a lot of other species on the sidelines. What about snails, bats, snakes, fish, mussels, insects and even plants? Do they get the attention they need from people? Or do they get left behind by the conservation community? Beyond that, what can we do to give these species more focus, and why do they deserve the effort?

To help address these questions, I gathered an all-star team of experts for a panel discussion called “Beyond Megafauna,” which took place in Pittsburgh last month at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Joining me on the panel were wildlife journalist Jason Bittel; Tierra Curry, senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity (publishers of The Revelator); and Justin Wheeler, communications specialist with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

You can hear the whole conversation — including some great questions from the journalists in the audience — below:

Images:

The Secret Value of Trash

Some people think beach cleanup efforts don’t accomplish much. They’re missing part of the picture.

On September 16, 2017, environmental advocates Robert DiGiovanni, Jr., and Beth Fiteni slowly walked along West Meadow Beach in Stony Brook, New York, scanning their eyes over the sand for trash. Joining them were 14 other people — a mix of conservationists, college students and retirees — all helping pluck garbage off the beach. The group was just one of five taking part in cleanups on West Meadow Beach that day, all part of the Ocean Conservancy’s 32nd annual International Coastal Cleanup, a global effort to get people out of their houses and onto beaches to help clean up trash — mostly plastic.

This year nearly 800,000 other volunteers worldwide participated in the cleanup. It and other efforts to clean beaches have gained traction in the movement to address plastic pollution.

Most conservation experts, including DiGiovanni, founder and chief scientist at the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, and Fiteni, founder and president of Green Inside and Out Consulting, support cleanup efforts. But while beach cleanups are surely an immediate help to coastal ecosystems, many such experts say the beach-cleanup model is flawed, and that it can actually encourage continued pollution of natural environments.

“What we’re doing — cleaning up our own mess — addresses just a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself,” says DiGiovanni. “In a week’s time, the same amount of trash we’ve cleaned up will wash right up, or be littered, onto the beach again.”

Together, DiGiovanni, Fiteni and their volunteers covered a 99,025-square-foot area of shoreline (92,000 square meters), cleaning up hundreds of plastic items such as lighters, plastic utensils and balloons. They recorded each item on a data sheet that they later sent to the Ocean Conservancy. To minimize their own trash footprint, DiGiovanni and Fiteni provided volunteers with reusable gardening gloves and plastic bags for collecting trash.

beach cleanup
© Erica Cirino, all rights reserved.

What the group collected was a very small portion of the 18,062,911 pounds (8,193,199 kilograms) of trash collected globally this year by all International Coastal Cleanup participants — which is an even smaller fraction of the 18,000,000,000 pounds of plastic debris that’s dumped, littered, or otherwise finds its way into the oceans every year, according to a recent study.

Although each participant in this cleanup didn’t collect a very large amount of trash individually, and more would soon replace what was picked up, it turns out it was the nature of the collected trash that mattered. Data on the trash that’s been cleaned up — during the international effort and also cleanups held by other nonprofits that collect and share plastic pollution data publicly, such as Hawaii Wildlife Fund, Trash Hero, Algalita, Plastic Change and 5 Gyres — can tell experts more about human plastic use and pollution patterns.

“This information provides information about debris ‘hotspots’ and identifies which items are most common on beaches,” says George Leonard, chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, which has the world’s largest and longest-running public database on marine debris. He adds that this data can be used by environmental advocates to promote policies such as better waste management infrastructure, bans on ecologically damaging items like plastic bags and foam and more scientific research on the plastic pollution problem’s scale and scope — and these actions are what might ultimately stem the tide of plastic pollution into the natural environment.

Government programs like the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program and the European Commission’s Marine Directive also perform routine research on plastic prevalence on beaches and in the oceans. Of particular concern is microplastic — tiny bits of plastic smaller than 5 millimeters in diameter that come from larger pieces of plastic that are broken up by the sun, waves and wind. These bits of plastic have been found to absorb and leach toxic chemicals, which can kill marine life when consumed.

And all of this environmental harm starts with people using plastic items on land. “Plastics enters the oceans through a wide variety of pathways on land, including illegal dumping, poor waste management, littering, laundering of textiles and use of personal care products that contain plastic ‘microbeads,’” says Leonard.

Creating plastic-alternative materials and handling plastic trash more responsibly are important components to reducing global plastic pollution. However, experts say that changing habits appears to be the key to stopping plastic pollution. And habits can change with greater awareness and policies aimed at curbing or stopping use of plastic products. Using data collected by the Ocean Conservancy and other groups, and also their personal experiences cleaning up trash from coastal ecosystems, ocean advocates and concerned citizens have swayed hundreds of municipalities and countries across the globe — from San Francisco, California, to Kenya, Africa — to ban or tax plastic bags, plastic utensils and/or plastic/foam food containers. Studies analyzing these bans, including those on the cities of Los Angeles and San Jose, have found them to be effective at reducing plastic bag use and litter.

Until all people understand how their actions are connected to plastic pollution in the natural environment and policies are implemented worldwide, beach cleanups are a good way of raising awareness, according to Allison Schutes, associate director for the Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas Program, which oversees the annual cleanup events. “Our hope is that at some point in the not-too-distant future we’ll no longer need the International Coastal Cleanup; our collective efforts to stop trash at its source will have succeeded.”

© 2017 Erica Cirino. All rights reserved.

Seeds of Truth: Johnny Appleseed’s Context and Legacy

A new graphic novel digs into the man, the myth, the legend — and the society that inspired them all.

It’s not always easy to separate the man from the myth.

Take Johnny Appleseed, for example. To most people Johnny’s a figure of fable, a loner who wandered the country with a tin pot on his head, dropping apple seeds into the soil wherever he traveled, spreading the fabulous fruit from American coast to coast.

Pretty much all of that is false.

The truth of Johnny Appleseed — a complex man named John Chapman (1774-1845) — is much more interesting. Chapman was a businessman, a nonstop traveler, a missionary, an avowed pacifist and socialist, a pioneering advocate of protecting nature, an anti-industrialist and yes, a man who loved his apples.

Alas, the historical truth about this man-become-myth is also more than a bit more frustrating for people who want to dive into the details. Many details about Chapman’s life remain a mystery. He left few records, and precious little was written about him while he was still alive, making it difficult for modern writers to reconstruct his coming and goings nearly two centuries after his death.

So what’s a biographer to do with this dearth of information? One answer is to write about what little we do know, while also delving into Chapman’s significance, both in his own time and today.

johnny appleseedThat’s the path taken by scholar Paul Buhle and cartoonist Noah Van Sciver in their new graphic novel, “Johnny Appleseed” (Fantagraphics Books, $19.99). The book covers the few facts that we know about Chapman’s life and simultaneously explores the Appleseed myth, along with the nascent philosophies and religious trends of his day.

And what a day (or century) it was. Chapman was born just before the American Revolution and died not long before the Civil War. These were heady, contradictory years for American society. As Buhle writes in his introduction, Chapman’s wandering decades were a time of “ardent reformism including women’s rights, abolitionism, and vegetarianism,” all of which existed side by side with “slavery, the advancing white settlements, the plundering of natural resources, and the dispossession of Native Americans.”

Interestingly enough, Chapman’s story starts with both apples and the absence of American Indians. In one of the book’s early scenes, Buhl and Van Sciver recount a discussion between young Johnny and his widower father, Nathaniel, a veteran of the American Revolution and the battle at Bunker Hill. The father reveals that the apple trees surrounding their family farm were planted by Iroquois before British soldiers wiped out both the people and their orchards.

We don’t know exactly how growing up with a veteran father in a landscape scarred by war affected young Johnny, but the through-line is clear: He grew up to become a planter of apples as well as one of the few American travelers who treated the native people he encountered with respect — enough so that they embraced him in return.

Chapman’s journeys started not long after his childhood ended. According to accounts, he grew weary of running a farm with his father and stepmother. One day in 1796, he decided, on the spur of the moment, to take off and start wandering, his younger brother at least briefly in tow. In depicting the departure, Buhle and Van Sciver illustrate both young Chapman’s appreciation of nature and the rapid loss of wildlife in the face of encroaching civilization. “To me,” Chapman says in the book, “Nature is God’s haven. I can tell you name of dozens of flowers, and trees of kinds we don’t have much anymore in our parents’ part of Massachusetts.”

Johnny Appleseed
Noah Van Sciver/Fantagraphics

John’s brother didn’t stay on the trail long, apparently, so Chapman turned to a different companion: books. As he traveled he devoured volumes on religion and philosophy, an important element of the rest of his life. His journeys took place at a time of great religious experimentation in the Americas, seeing the birth of the Quakers, the Shakers and the Swedenborgians (today known as the New Church). This latter religion, with its embrace of nature and socialism, appealed to Chapman, and he became a missionary, spreading its word along with his apple seeds. Historians still debate exactly how Chapman encountered Swedenborgian teachings, but Buhle spends a full chapter exploring them in the book, providing context for how they influenced Chapman and, to a degree, modern environmentalism.

Johnny Appleseed
Noah Van Sciver/Fantagraphics

No matter what role religion played in his life, nature played a larger one. The scenes depicted in the graphic novel — lushly illustrated in Van Sciver’s delicate pen-and-ink style — show a country where Chapman felt at home, strikingly unfamiliar to our modern world. “In the few accounts of travelers meeting Johnny along his travels,” Buhle writes, “he expressed a simple delight of being alive in God’s kingdom of nature. And he might have asked, as a Midwest writer did about his childhood during Johnny’s old age, ‘Have you lain beside some pond, a broadening of a creek above an ancient beaver dam at night, and watched the muskrats at the frays and feeding? Have you stood sometimes, in the sheer delight of it, and drawn into distended lungs the air clarified by hundreds of miles of sweep over an inland sea?’”

No, most of us haven’t. These worlds gone by, captured in black and white ink, give the book a haunting quality. You can’t help but wonder, as you read, what parallel world we might be living in today if Johnny Appleseed and his ilk had not become such footnotes in history — if their thoughts and ideas had taken seed, like apples, across the American landscape.

Alas that world is long gone, but Johnny Appleseed’s influence — and that of the philosophies he embraced — still runs through a deep vein in modern life. Buhle weaves together a tapestry of linked threads, ranging from naturalist John Muir to the migrant workers of the early 20th century to Woodie Guthrie and the Beat poets and beyond.

And then there’s Chapman’s physical influence on our daily lives: the apples that pervade our agriculture, our stores and our diets. Even this is an environmental story: Buhle briefly recounts the 1980s fight against the apple pesticide Alar that in many ways still influences the environmental movement.

Yes, Johnny Appleseed as most of us know him may be a myth. The details of his real life are few and far between. But his influence remains, and this book illuminates that legacy.

Previously in The Revelator:

John James Audubon Takes Flight in New Graphic Novel

Climate Change Is Causing a ‘Catastrophic’ Shortage of Food for Birds in the Galápagos

Researchers forecast that a decline in availability of nutritious sardines will shrink the population of Darwin’s famous Nazca boobies.

One of the most famous bird species in the Galápagos Islands faces a potentially catastrophic shortage of nutritious food, and climate change may be to blame.

News of this nutritional deficiency, which is affecting Nazca boobies (Sula granti) — the iconic bird species Charles Darwin studied before writing his groundbreaking work On the Origin of Species — comes from a new study published recently in PLOS One. The study makes a rare connection between ocean warming and species population effects in the tropics.

“All the data suggests that they are struggling to find food,” says Emily Tompkins, a Ph.D. student at Wake Forest University and lead author of the study, who started fieldwork in 2010. “Not only are they getting a lower quality prey, but we’re also seeing that they’re coming back with fewer fish, or more often than not, no fish at all.”

Tompkins joined an ongoing study that has been observing the species for decades. After 30 years of logging data on the birds’ diet, breeding and survivability, researchers on Isla Española found evidence of a shrinking population. Within the past decade the boobies’ reproductive success, which is defined as the probability of producing an independent offspring, fell by approximately 50 percent. Why? Because the warmer waters surrounding the islands became intolerable for their main prey, the sardine (Sardina pilchardus), which can only live in waters measuring between 14 degrees Celsius and 20 degrees Celsius.

“Nazca boobies are top predators, their diet composition is simple, and loss of their sardine prey is catastrophic,” the study’s conclusion reads.

To compensate for the scarcity, Tompkins says, Nazca boobies started switching their primary diet in 1997 to flying fish (several species from the genus Exocoetidae), which are basically junk food compared to the nutrient- and lipid-rich sardine. Scientists found that chicks raised primarily on the flying fish had a slower growth rate, and their survivability declined.

What happened to the sardines is still a mystery. Some populations may have died off, while some may have moved closer to the poles. Tompkins thinks their disappearance might have something to do with oceanographic variables like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a recurring pattern of warm and cool water-temperature phases that cycle every 20-30 years. That pattern has long seemed to be correlated with abundance in sardine populations, although there isn’t any concrete data to back it up.

“We don’t know for sure what happened to the sardines,” says Tompkins. “Studying pelagic populations of fish [which live neither close to the bottom of the ocean or near the shore] is much harder,” than studying marine birds, she points out.

Regardless of where the sardines went, the study does conclude that if the waters around the Galápagos warm at the rate scientists have forecasted (up by 4.5 degrees Celsius), the sardines will be completely absent from those waters within 100 years. This has implications not only for Nazca boobies but for other species that rely on them as a primary food source, including blue-footed boobies (S. nebouxii) and Galápagos sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki).

“If the current links that we’ve uncovered right now in the last decade continue to hold in the future, and if sardines are absent in the Galápagos, the data that we have, which comes from really fine-scale observations of individual reproductive success and survival suggest that the population will decline,” says Tompkins. “Much of the success of these birds is dependent on their food source.”

This study represents a rare look at the effects of climate change in the tropics, which are famed for being cradles of endemism and fountains of biodiversity. David Anderson a professor of biology at Wake Forest University considers this study — which he co-authored — significant because “few connections have been made between ocean warming and population effects in tropics.” He says the poor prognosis for the Nazca boobies may apply to other predator species in the region which will also face stiff challenges adjusting to rapid climate change in the tropics due to their typically long generation times and little capacity for adaptive evolution.

“We can expect similar consequences for food webs everywhere under climate change, with unfamiliar combinations of predators and prey being thrown together by the changes in habitat,” says Anderson.

© 2017 Francis Flisiuk. All rights reserved.

Previously in The Revelator:

Lobsters in Hot Water: Climate Change Threatens Maine’s Most Valuable Fishery

The Fungus Killing America’s Bats: “Sometimes You’ll See Piles of Dead Bats”

Since it first turned up in 2007, white-nose syndrome has killed millions of bats — and it’s not done yet.

It’s Friday evening in Pittsburgh, and the mosquitoes are out in force. One bites at my arm and I try to slap it away. Another takes the opportunity to land on my neck. I manage to shoo this one off before it tastes blood.

I’m at Carrie Furnaces, a massive historic ironworks on the banks of Pennsylvania’s Monongahela River. Stories-tall rusting structures loom all around me, as do the occasional trees poking their way out of the ground. A tour guide, leading a group from the Society of Environmental Journalists conference, tells me the soil here is full of heavy metals and other pollutants from the factory, which operated for nearly a century before closing in 1982. Plants and trees have started to recolonize the area, but cleaning up the soil itself remains an unlikely task that could cost millions and millions of dollars — if it’s even feasible. Another nearby site, he tells me, was so polluted that it couldn’t be reclaimed and had to be paved over.

For a moment, as I walk the grounds around Carrie Furnaces, I wonder about the toxic substances biding their time beneath my feet. Quickly, though, I become more concerned about what’s in the air — or what’s missing from it. As another bug lands on my hand, I can’t help but think we’d be experiencing fewer mosquito bites if Pennsylvania’s bat populations had not been devastated over the past 10 years.

It’s a day earlier, and the sun is still young in the morning sky. A group of journalists from the conference has piled onto a bus on our way to Laurel Caverns, the biggest cave system in Pennsylvania. With us are representatives of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there to tell us about a fungus called Pseudogymnoascus destructans, best known by the name of the often-fatal disease it causes in bats, white-nose syndrome (WNS).

Since the pathogen first turned up in 2006, millions of bats have fallen victim to its deadly embrace. It often collects around their snouts, which is where the disease got its name, but that’s not where the worst damage occurs. “It erodes right through their wing membranes,” Robyn Niver, endangered species biologist with the Service, tells us during the two-hour bus ride from downtown Pittsburgh. “Flight is extremely important for bats, and the fungus affects their basic ability to move around and forage for themselves.”

The easily transmissible fungus also does something to bats’ metabolism, causing the animals to wake up during hibernation more than twice as often as they normally would. This increase in winter activity burns up the bats’ winter reserves of fat, water and electrolytes, leaving the animals hungry, thirsty and confused. “If they go out to forage in the winter, there’s nothing available to them,” Niver says. “They’ll go out on the landscape and just die. Sometimes you’ll see piles of dead bats. Other times they’re just gone.” Caves that once held tens of thousands of bats now, more often than not, now lie nearly empty.

bat bones
Bat skulls and bones on the floor of Aeolus Cave, a white-nose syndrome site in Vermont. Photo: Ann Froschauer/USFWS

That’s the case in Laurel Canyons. Before the disease turned up, the caves were the winter home of a relatively small population of hibernating bats, about 2,500 animals from four species. Last year, Canyons representative Laura Hall later tells us, they counted just 12 bats.

We knew going into Laurel Canyons for our two-hour underground tour that we weren’t likely to see any of the flying mammals. For one thing, it was still a few weeks before hibernation season. For another, the guides wouldn’t have taken us into the bats’ hibernacula. But still, knowing what we knew, the caves we explored felt eerily silent and empty.

Other Pennsylvania caves must seem even worse. Greg Turner, a mammologist and WNS researcher with the state’s Bureau of Wildlife Management, shared information on bat declines throughout the state. One mine, he tells us, had more than 30,000 bats in 2007. White-nose syndrome arrived just three years later. By 2013 only 155 bats remained. In cave after cave, that pattern has repeated itself.

And Pennsylvania is not alone. White-nose can now be found in 31 states and 5 Canadian provinces and has affected nine bat species, including the endangered gray bat (Myotis grisescens) and Indiana bat (M. sodalis). Some populations have fallen 99 percent or more, meaning other species could soon become officially endangered.

white nose syndrome map

When the fungus first turned up — probably accidentally carried by humans from Europe, where it has no effect on the continent’s bats, to a cave in Albany, New York — no one expected it to be as bad as it has become. “We all just thought, maybe it will only be in one site and it won’t be a big deal,” Niver says. “Then the next year happened. 2008 was a terrible year. We had mass mortality in Vermont.” Some estimates suggest half a million bats died that winter.

After that the disease just “took off,” she says. “We were hopeful it wasn’t going to be much of anything, but every winter just was devastatingly proving us wrong. It was terrible.”

Biologists around the northeast scrambled to figure out what was happening. “There were just these bats dying and there was nothing we could do,” Niver says. “We didn’t know what was killing them. We would have these weekly phone calls just trying to figure out who found it where and on which species. We went through all the steps of grief.”

Fortunately, there was already a model for figuring out these types of pathogens: the working groups for bee colony collapse disorder. Biologists quickly organized, developed their own working group, identified the fungus and developed protocols to help slow its spread.

Those protocols for human activity, however, can only do so much when all it takes is the beat of a bat’s wings to spread tiny but deadly fungal spores to all of its neighbors. And protocols can’t stop bats from migrating, which has taken the fungus from coast to coast in just over a decade. As that happened, the death toll has climbed. Biologists estimate that at least 5 to 6 million bats — probably more — have died since 2007.

What is the impact these mass bat fatalities? It’s too early to know. “I feel like we’re just in this huge environmental experiment,” Niver tells me. Scientists never had very good information on insect populations, so we don’t know how exactly they’re changing as the bats disappear. She suggests it’s time to start keeping an eye on things like gypsy moth or tent caterpillar outbreaks, which could become a problem without bats to control the insects’ populations. Other pest insects could also be a problem; a 2011 study estimated that bats provide an estimated $22.9 billion a year in economic services by eating insects that could damage crops.

Then there’s the impact on the bats themselves. Some species could become endangered, if they’re not already.

Meanwhile, other bats are actually changing in the face of the disease. Turner tells us that some bats have started to hibernate at colder temperatures where they could be safer from the fungus, while Niver says some species have potentially started to expand their territories into habitats previously inhabited by one of the species hardest hit by the disease, the little brown bat (M. lucifugus).

The bats may also be starting to change physically or behaviorally. Turner shared data, still pending publication, which suggests that some bats that survive the initial infection in one year appear to be packing on additional weight to help them persist through their next hibernations.

Despite these minor adaptations in some populations, the future for bats in this country is precarious. Over the past year the fungus has spread to Texas and Washington state; Niver says biologists in the East are warning their colleagues in the West what to expect. The message isn’t an easy one: “Don’t count on anything being different enough for your bats to survive,” she warns.

Survival of any bats, now, is the key. Turner tells us their best hope is not that the declines will stop, only that they’ll level off. “Stabilization,” he says, “that’s what we’re hoping for.”

laurel cavern
Journalists descend into Laurel Cavern. Photo: John R. Platt

As we come to the close of our underground tour, our guide — a former steelworker named Justin — brings us into a large cavern where there’s room for us to sit or lean against the rock walls. This, he tells us, is our opportunity to experience total darkness. One by one, we switch off our flashlights and headlamps. The room grows darker and darker until all light disappears. Our eyes struggle to adjust, but there’s nothing they can do except send false signals to our brain.

Then Justin tells us to enjoy a moment of silence. The journalists stop talking, and for a few minutes all we can hear is the soft rustle of wind through the caverns around us.

It’s peaceful, but it would have been more comforting to hear the flap of a bat’s wings in the darkness.

The Big Picture: 3 Toxic Crises Boiling Over in Florida

A difficult hurricane season unearths issues ranging from cancer hotspots to deadly bacteria.

Ah, Florida — home to famous natural landscapes and amazing wildlife, but also to more than 20 million people and billion-dollar industries. Decades of booming development in Florida — all of it built in the path of Atlantic hurricanes — have brought to a head some toxic problems the state still struggles to solve. Every major flooding event, like the one following this year’s Hurricane Irma, leaches toxic waste into people’s homes and drinking water.

Florida is particularly vulnerable to storm surges and flooding from hurricanes like Irma. Click through the gallery to explore the natural disaster risks facing Florida and increasing its residents’ toxic risks:

Threat #1: Superfund Sites

The EPA’s “Superfund” program oversees the cleanup of hazardous waste sites. Ahead of Hurricane Irma, the EPA worked to secure about 80 sites ranked at the highest priority for cleanup from Miami to North Carolina — but Florida alone contains more than 50 Superfund sites at this priority level, with approximately 500 hazardous waste sites in total. Superfund sites in Florida have been linked to increased cancer risk, and experts worry that these sites are vulnerable to flooding and spreading toxic pollution.

Threat #2: Radioactive Waste

Florida is a unique host to two phenomena: phosphate mining, which produces radioactive waste, and sinkholes. Much of the state’s land is vulnerable to giving way under the weight of soaking water — in fact, Hurricane Irma brought an increase in sinkhole activity to at least eight communities. When sinkholes form below stores of phosphate mining wastewater, that radioactive material empties into the Floridan aquifer.

Threat #3: Livestock Sewage

Overflowing raw sewage — 84 million gallons of it — flooded homes and claimed life and limb in Florida following Hurricane Irma.

And that’s just sewage from cities and other communities. While human sewage is only a problem if sanitation facilities fail, livestock sewage remains unregulated and vulnerable to flooding. Florida produces millions of tons of livestock manure every year, which is either stored or use to irrigate fields in its raw, untreated form.

Irma will not be the last time these problems emerge. Florida faces a potent mix of threats every time torrential rain or storm surges bathe the state in its own toxic environmental footprint. Experts worry that current and proposed regulations for Superfund cleanups, the phosphate industry and factory farming are all seriously flawed, especially in the face of climate change and warming oceans, which could make the next storms that Florida encounters even more powerful — and more toxic.

Credits/References:

Navy Dolphins Get a New Mission: Saving the Vaquita

Highly trained military dolphins have been dispatched to round up the last 30 vaquita porpoises and (hopefully) save the species from extinction.

If things go according to plan, the sight of a leaping dolphin in the Gulf of California could be a sign of hope for the critically endangered vaquita porpoise (Phocoena sinus).

Only about 30 of these rare, tiny cetaceans remain, and their numbers are falling fast due to rampant illegal fishing in the area. Many conservationists fear the species could become extinct in the next year or so without drastic conservation efforts.

vaquita population declineThat’s where the larger bottlenose dolphins come in. Used by the U.S. Navy to locate so-called “aggressive swimmers” in combat situations, the dolphins have been trained to leap into the air when they encounter their targets, providing a visual cue for watchers on nearby ships.

A 2004 Navy press release describes how the dolphins are used in wartime: “Due to their hydrodynamic shape and a highly effective biological sonar system, the bottlenose dolphins are uniquely equipped to detect, locate and mark underwater threat swimmers, divers, and swimmer delivery vehicles, through a process called echolocation, in which the dolphins emit broad-band high frequency clicks and listen to the echoes of those clicks as they bounce off objects.”

The Navy loading its trained dolphins onto a cargo plane earlier this month. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Rob Simpson

The dolphins’ natural abilities will complement more technological efforts to local the vaquitas. “The dolphins’ echolocation goes out 200 meters or so,” Barbara Taylor from the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Consortium for Vaquita Conservation, Protection, and Recovery (VaquitaCPR), told me this past June. “We can see them with binoculars out to about 1,500 meters. So, we’ll have a much larger sweeping pattern than the Navy dolphins will.” The dolphins, however, may be able to initially get much closer to their endangered cousins than ship-based observers. “One of the difficult things about vaquitas is that they move away from motorized vessel noise,” Taylor said.

If the dolphins do spot any vaquitas, conservationists will rush in to try to remove them from the water and relocate them to a specially constructed saltwater pen. In that protected environment, it’s hoped, they’ll be safe from illegal fishing nets and may be able to start breeding.

The team, made up of international conservation groups and government agencies, hopes to eventually rescue 12 vaquitas, although right now no one knows if the animals will even survive in captivity.

“If the animals cannot accept care by humans, if they are not able to adapt to our care, we will put them back,” Cynthia Smith, executive director of the U.S. National Marine Mammal Foundation, told the Orange County Register. “We do not ultimately want to cause them harm.”

The plan has earned its critics, some of which point out that dolphins have been known to kill porpoises in the wild (even the Navy considers their dolphins too dangerous to allow trainers to swim with them). Others say this action seems more intended to save the Navy’s expensive Marine Mammal Program rather than the vaquitas themselves.

Even those that support the plan — including the Center for Biological Diversity, publishers of The Revelator — point out that rescuing any vaquitas from the Gulf of California will ultimately be pointless if the Mexican government does not step up efforts to eliminate illegal fishing in the area.

Regardless of the uncertainty and criticism, this next year represents what could be our last chance to save the vaquita from extinction. We’ll be waiting for news of those leaping dolphins and the animals they could eventually rescue.

Previously in The Revelator:

Last Chance to Save the Vaquita?

Snails Are Going Extinct: Here’s Why That Matters

They may not be the most charismatic group of species, but we can learn a lot from the lowly snail.

Ah, snails. They’re small. They’re slimy. They lack the charisma of a polar bear or a gorilla. And yet just like flora and fauna all over the world, they’re disappearing.

In Hawaii, a critically endangered snail called Achatinella fuscobasis has been brought into captivity to help learn how to keep them alive in the wild. In New Zealand, a snail known only as Rhytida oconnori has found itself constrained to a habitat just one square kilometer in size. On Fiji, scientists have expressed an “urgent need” to keep the island’s unique tree snails from going extinct. That fate may have already happened to three snail species in Malaysia after a mining company wiped out their only habitats, a series of limestone hills. Closer to home, 14 species of Nevada springsnails could be wiped out by a plan to pump away the groundwater their microhabitats depend upon.

That’s just scratching the surface. By my count, nearly 140 scientific papers about endangered snails have been published so far this year.

All of which begs the question: why does the extinction of a snail matter?

Obviously the answer to that question depends on the exact species, but we can make generalizations. Many birds, fish and other species rely on snails as important parts of their diets. Most land snail species consume fungi and leaf litter, helping with decomposition, and many are carnivores, so they help keep other species in check.

Beyond that, there’s actually a lot that we can learn from snails. “From the most practical standpoint, snails have a few pretty interesting characteristics that tell us we should probably pay attention,” says snail researcher Rebecca Rundell, assistant professor at State University of New York. For one thing, their shells — which they carry with them their entire lives (because they’d die without them) — are made of calcium carbonate, which provides a record of their lives. Unlike plant husks or insect exoskeletons, these shells tend to persist after a snail has died, leaving behind a valuable tool for researchers. “We can look in marine sediment and pockets of soil for evidence of past ecological communities, and thus evidence for environmental change in a particular area,” she says.

Living snails can also serve as indicators when something is wrong with the environment, something we’re already seeing with ocean acidification. “If snails in the ocean that make their shells, their protection, exclusively from calcium carbonate are having trouble building them, then that means the ocean is in big trouble,” Rundell says.

They can provide similar clues on land, where land snails often have particularly narrow habitat requirements. “They need certain levels of moisture, shade, and decaying matter,” Rundell says. “When they don’t have this, they start dying off.” That’s just the start: If tiny land snails start to disappear, it’s important to ask what might happen next. “It might give you a chance to change course,” she says, “to detect subtle changes that humans might not otherwise be able to see until it is too late.”

Snails also help us to answer bigger questions. “The fact that many of these land snail species have small geographic ranges and that there are many species, make them fascinating subjects for learning about how life on Earth evolved,” Rundell says, adding that “scientists really rely on groups like Pacific island land snails to tell life’s story.”

That opportunity, however, is at risk. “We are losing snail species at an astronomical rate,” Rundell says, “one that is equivalent to, if not exceeding, the worldwide rate of loss of amphibians.” Most species have extremely limited ranges, making them, as she puts it, “particularly susceptible to human-induced extinction.”

Meanwhile, the number of people studying snails remains relatively small. “That means we are at a big disadvantage in not only documenting land snail diversity, particularly in the tropics, but also learning from it in terms of what snails have to tell us about how life on Earth evolved,” Rundell says.

Saving snails from extinction is no easy feat. For one thing, their habitats are just too easy to destroy. For another, we don’t even know what it would take to keep most snail species alive in captivity, a function of their narrow microhabitat requirements. “One snail species might be feeding on hundreds of species of fungi that are unique to that particular forest,” Rundell says. “It is very difficult to replicate these diets in the lab.” A handful of captive-breeding efforts have been successful, but Rundell says they are labor-intensive and hard to fund.

Rundell’s own work studying Pacific island snails has shown her what it would take to reverse this snail-extinction trend. “Ultimately what is most important for land snails is the human element: people working together to protect what is most unique, precious, and irreplaceable on these islands—native forest,” she says. “This involves documenting what is there using a combination of field work and the study of natural history museum specimens. It also involves learning lessons from the past unchecked development such as agriculture and later urbanization, particularly in lowland tropical forests, and figuring out how we can protect as many pieces left as possible.” This, she says, has the “added benefit of leaving parts of the watershed, storm protection, and forest food and medicinal resources intact for people to survive in these places.”

So why does snail extinction matter? Just like everything else, snails are an important piece of the puzzle that makes this planet function. They’re also a way to help us better understand how we got here — and maybe where we’re going.

Previously in Extinction Countdown:

(A version of this article was originally published by Scientific American.)

South Africa’s Climate-Fueled Fire Factories

Fires cost South Africa more than $750 million in damages in 2015.

Shongaziph Ngcongo awoke one windy night in August to find her thatched-roof house ablaze. She just managed to grab her six children and a few meagre possessions before escaping the wildfires that burnt down her valley.

Ngcongo lives in an idyllic-looking rural community located in hills above the Nhlazuka valley. In this rural part of KwaZulu-Natal, people live in traditional rondavel homes that are spread out among thornveld valleys. Steep hillsides make the homesteads easy targets for wildfires, especially those with thatched roofs.

“When fires start in the valley, sparks fly up on top of the thatch and then the houses start burning,” says community member Bono Cwazibe.

Many of the wildfires are caused by people hunting bush pigs: they set the bush alight to flush out wild animals, and when the flames get out of control they spread rapidly through the dry thornveld scrub and grasslands. The community has no firebreaks, so their livestock, crops and homes are vulnerable to fire attacks.

The peak fire season in Nhlazuka, which has a population of 7,903, is in August as wind speeds reach up to 100 knots an hour. Wildfires cause loss of grazing for livestock, and some community farmers have had their sugarcane plots destroyed.

Every year an average of three to four wildfires ignited in Nhlazuka spread to commercial farming land and timber forests in neighboring areas. These wildfires are often detected only after they have entered the commercial properties, and by then the damage is done.

Nhlazuka’s fire factory is not isolated: at least 16,027 fires were detected across South Africa between January and June this year, statistics from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Fire Information for Resource Management System show.

The cost of fire incidents amounted to more than R1-billion ($750 million) in damages across the country in 2015, according to The Fire Protection Association of Southern Africa.

Building Resilience

With temperatures rising and drought spreading due to the impacts of global climate change, neighbourhoods such as Nhlazuka that are vulnerable to wildfires need to build up resilience.

Nhlazuka is part of the uMgungundlovu district municipality, identified in scientific studies as an area of high climate change risk. This is because increased warming, rainfall, wildfires and extreme weather events have already been observed, with increasingly negative impacts on local people, ecosystems and economies.

The municipality is adapting to the effects of climate change by implementing the uMngeni Resilience Project, in partnership with the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Agriculture, Earth and Environmental Sciences, South African National Biodiversity Institute, Fire Protection Associations, Working on Fire and Department of Environmental Affairs.

A fire early warning system in Nhlazuka is one of the resilience measures being put in place during a five-year, multi-component project supported by the Adaptation Fund, a global initiative that finances climate adaptation projects in developing countries.

“There is no doubt that climate change is real and that it is happening,” says uMgungundlovu mayor Thobekile Maphumulo. “Last year our municipality, along with many other parts of South Africa, faced a severe drought that we are still recovering from.”

2016 fires graph“We have seen an increase in sudden and severe high-intensity weather events, such as storms, lightning and flooding, that risk human life and cause damage to the environment, infrastructure and people’s homes.”

The uMngeni Resilience Project responds to the anticipated changes in climate in the uMgungundlovu district by reducing climate vulnerability and increasing the adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities and small-scale farmers.

“Climate change and all that it brings with it – droughts that threaten food security, cause job losses in the agricultural sector and affect availability of water; storms and flooding that threaten human lives and homes – is likely to make poverty, inequality and unemployment worse.

“It is vital that we work with communities, particularly those that are most vulnerable, to build their resilience so that when the worst comes, the impacts will be less, they will be able to rebuild quicker and emerge stronger and more self-sufficient,” Maphumulo says.

FireHawk Down

In 1994 commercial farmers and the timber industry joined forces to install FireHawk, the first computer-assisted fire detection system in the world, in the Richmond local municipality. Nhlazuka is a ward of Richmond, about 80km away, and the municipality plans to deploy the FireHawk system as part of the uMngeni Resilience Project.

FireHawk consists of 360-degree rotating cameras mounted on a 27m-high tower overlooking the area. The cameras stream images to the FireHawk detection center, where a bank of computers are monitored 24/7 by operators working three eight-hour shifts a day.

When the cameras detect smoke or a potential fire, the computers help the operator to zoom into the site and watch it live, to determine the direction of the fire, how far away it is and how threatening it is. Once it is confirmed that a fire is threatening, it is then positioned on a map to show its exact location.

The FireHawk system has a cross-referencing feature which provides 99.9 percent accuracy of the location of the fire. Once the operator positions the location of the fire on the map, he then selects another camera with a clear view of the fire. There are two cameras looking at the fire from two different angles, enabling the operator to determine the distance of the fire from farms and homes.

The operator’s duty is to notify the owner of the property where the fire has been located. If it is a threat, firefighting personnel and vehicles are quickly dispatched from the Richmond incident command center based next to the FireHawk detection center.

The Richmond FireHawk system detects an average of 350 wildfires a year, although each season is different. The most wildfires detected in one season was five years ago, with 540 fires.

Last year was the best season, with the detection of 84 wildfires. Terry Tedder, who has worked at the Richmond Fire Protection Association since 2007, says increased education in fire prevention and management methods is helping to reduce the number of wildfire incidents.

The FireHawk team aims to erect a 30m camera tower system in Nhlazuka at the Thusong community center, which has an eagle’s-eye view over the community. The early warning system should be piloted in 2018, and the dream is to have a Working on Fire team stationed at the center, says Tedder.

“Detection is not enough, we need a team to extinguish the fires close to the community. It takes about an hour to drive from the main town of Richmond to Nhlazuka, so even if a fire is detected early it may be too late by the time a firefighting team arrives to assist,” says Tedder.

Mayor Maphumulo says the FireHawk early warning system needs to be part of a holistic fire-fighting approach in Nhlazuka: “We won’t just focus on sending out warnings, but will work with the communities to develop local fire management and response plans so that everyone knows how to respond to the different types of warnings. This system will help us to avoid loss of life and property from veld and forest fires.”

Tedder says the Richmond FireHawk system covers an area of about 240,000 hectares (925 square miles) and is funded by members in the timber and commercial farming industries.

Until now its protection did not include the 17,000 to 20,000 hectares of community land owned by the Ingonyama Trust in uMgungundlovu municipality, including Nhlazuka. The trust is the registered owner of large tracts of land in KwaZulu-Natal that have historically been part of the Zulu kingdom, dating back to various Zulu kings.

“The biggest challenge fire protection associations face is the issue of costs of firefighting staff and equipment. Commercial farmers can afford the equipment to help with the prevention and management of fire, but rural areas cannot, making them not self-sufficient,” says Tedder.

FireWise Interventions

Bono Cwazibe, who grew up in Nhlazuka, is the local supervisor of a national government initiative called the FireWise Communities Programme. His job involves door-to-door education on preventative fire methods and assisting in the clearing of fire-fueling alien plants.

Bono and the community do not fully understand climate change and its global impacts, but he believes the resilience project is part of the uMgungundlovu municipality’s goal of educating the community about climate change.

Since the implementation of FireWise in 2014, he says, the number of fires in the Nhlazuka area have decreased. It takes on average five hours to put out a fire once it has spread and to date, there is only one known death due to fire that occurred in 2013.

In the past four years, the residents of Nhlazuka began receiving municipal water facilities and electricity. Receiving electricity has reduced the number of fires as people no longer need to cook on open fires – disposing of ash and strong wind speeds easily carried the sparks.

Another intervention has seen more than 70 percent of the thatched roofs replaced by tin roofs. This doesn’t solve the problem completely, however, as most of the homes are built with timber structures and once alight, the entire house can burn down.

Carrying her three-month-old granddaughter on her back, Shongaziph Ngcongo (44) says her thatched roof was replaced with a tin one after her home burnt down and this has helped her to feel safer.

“We would be happy to have a way to detect fires early,” she says. “This is important, because then we can take precautionary measures and protect ourselves. Wildfires affect us. They damage our belongings and our fields.”

Originally published at oxpeckers.org

This investigation by #ClimaTracker and Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism was produced in partnership with Code for Africa, and funded by ImpactAfrica and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Extinct Frogs and the Golden Goose

Research into the frog-killing chytrid fungus earns a Golden Goose Award, recognizing the value of federally funded science.

The first dead toads showed up in 1991.

At the time no one knew why they had died — only that they were suffering from some sort of mysterious skin disease. More frog and toad deaths soon followed, but for years the cause remained a mystery.

Today we know the truth about those fatalities. They were the result of the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, also known as Bd or chytrid, which causes a fatal skin infection in most amphibians that encounter it. Over the past few decades, the fungus has killed millions of frogs around the world and plunged hundreds of species into extinction.

Last week the four researchers who discovered Bd — Joyce Longcore, Elaine Lamirande, Don Nichols and Allan Pessier — were among the recipients of the sixth annual Golden Goose Awards, an honor created to recognize the value of federally funded basic research — studies that may often appear strange or obscure on the surface but lead to significant social or economic benefits for humanity.

“The Golden Goose Award reminds us why politicians must leave scientific research to the scientists,” Congressman Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) said in a prepared release. “This year’s winners prove how obscure and even unbelievable studies can change the world as we know it. We must continue to support our scientists whose brilliance and ingenuity keep America the greatest nation on earth.”

The awards come at a time when the Trump administration has proposed massive — and politically unpopular — cuts in federal funding for basic science and health research.

All of this year’s Golden Goose Award recipients had particularly strong environmental impacts. Also recognized were research into soy-based proteins that have replaced toxic, cancer-causing formaldehyde in much of the plywood made in the United States and the world-changing field of mathematics known as “fuzzy logic,” which has an almost endless array of environmental applications.

None of these achievements would have been possible without funding from the federal government. “We wouldn’t have been in the right place at the right time” to discover Bd without the government’s specialized resources, Pessier said during last week’s awards ceremony.

Even if the Trump administration fails to cut budgets, this type of work could still be at risk. Oregon State University researcher Kaichang Li, whose research into soy protein adhesives was funded by the USDA, said during the ceremony that the current trend is to provide huge grants in the neighborhood of $20 million, not the small type of grant that led to his discoveries. “We need small grants so people can explore crazy ideas,” he said.

You can watch a short documentary about this year’s recipients below: