Planting Coral Gardens to Save Florida’s Reefs

Volunteers flock to Key Largo to go underwater and help restore one of the world’s most important ecosystems.

Coral reefs support vibrant marine ecosystems, stimulate tourism and fishing industries, and protect shorelines from tropical storms and erosion. But reefs around the globe have been hit hard by pollution, overfishing and climate change, which is causing increasingly frequent and severe coral bleaching. Scientists predict severe bleaching on 99% of the world’s reefs within this century unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Saving coral reefs requires major systemic changes — dramatic cuts in energy consumption, switching to renewable energy, managing overfishing and pollution, and restoring target reefs.

Restoration efforts have now become a priority for many scientists. This series looks at some of those efforts.

Early on a June morning, a group of 10 people dressed in shorts and flipflops gathers in a classroom at the Coral Restoration Foundation Exploration Center in Key Largo, Florida. We have come from Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, Texas, and just down the road to help save Florida’s coral reefs.

The 360-mile-long Florida reef is the third largest in the world. But since the 1970s, nearly 90% of its corals have died due to climate change, hurricanes, disease and human development. Reefs around the world are suffering from similar threats, and we’re just some of the thousands of volunteers joining scientists, government and non-government agencies, and private companies fighting to stop this loss.

As scuba divers, we take it personally.

“This loss has happened in my lifetime,” says Sage Morningstar, the foundation intern leading today’s volunteer training. Others of us remember diving the Florida reef years ago or hearing about its former glory from those who did. The foundation created its public dive program for people like us in 2017, and since then more than 4,000 volunteers have participated.

Corals reproduce both sexually and asexually, the latter through fragmentation — when a piece breaks off, reattaches to the reef, and grows a new colony. The Coral Restoration Foundation uses fragmentation to grow corals in seven underwater nurseries along the South Florida coast, each containing hundreds of underwater structures called Coral Trees. Teams build the trees in a nearby facility, put them in the water, and attach about 60 small fragments. The corals grow for six to nine months, then are tagged, taken to a restoration site, and attached to a living reef through a process called outplanting. The nurseries now are self-sufficient, meaning fragments for new growth come from corals already there.

Five of the foundation’s restoration sites — Carysfort Reef, Horseshoe Reef, Sombrero Reef, Looe Key and Eastern Dry Rocks — are also part of Mission: Iconic Reefs, an ambitious effort by NOAA to restore seven Florida reefs (the other two are Cheeca Rocks and Newfound Harbor). Other parties involved are Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, The Florida Aquarium, The Nature Conservancy, Reef Renewal and the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.

The project totals 3 million square feet of restoration. It’s not just about planting more corals, but the most resilient corals, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary superintendent Sarah Fangman explained in a webinar in early 2021.

While some have criticized the agency for launching this mission while the threats continue, we can’t afford to wait. “Natural recovery can’t happen fast enough,” Fangman stressed during the webinar. “Yes, we have to address temperature stress, water quality, and other threats to give this system a chance, but restoration helps it along while we’re fixing those things.”

The morning training session complete, our group heads to the dive shop. But then Mother Nature steps in, sending a storm that cancels the trip. Disappointment shows in every face; each of us was excited about doing something meaningful today, contributing in however small a way to the reefs.

The plan had called for us to board the dive boat and go to the Tavernier Coral Nursery to clean some of the 500 trees standing in the sandy bottom there under about 30 feet of water.

Groves of the trees create an orderly grid that covers 1.5 acres, each grove containing a different species. In the one we were to clean, fragments of endangered staghorn coral hang like ornaments on the spindly Charlie Brown-ish tree structures. Volunteers use brushes to remove algae from monofilament line that holds each fragment and small chisels to scrape the stuff from the branches and trunks of the coral trees. On a healthy reef, but to a lesser extent in this nursery setting, herbivorous fish species like parrotfish keep algae in check, lest it grow over and kill corals by smothering them or blocking the sunlight.

One section of the nursery is a sort of genetic ark, holding hundreds of coral genotypes — the complete set of an individual organism’s genes, including variations.

“Biodiversity is primary,” says Morningstar. “We have genotypes here that no longer exist in the wild.” That genetic diversity makes it more likely that at least some of the corals survive if something happens on the reef, such as high temperatures or disease. It’s a key component of outplanting efforts.

Out next stop was to be Craysfort Reef, to plant staghorn corals that have grown big enough to venture from the nursery. On these dives, the crew hits the water first, schlepping milk crates of fragments, small hammers, and containers of epoxy. Volunteers follow and buddy teams are assigned to a tagged section of reef. Each measures a hammer’s length from an existing coral fragment, cleans three saucer-sized spots on the reef, applies epoxy, and attaches the new fragments at the three points. Proper attachment is critical, as the corals must survive the incessant action of normal waves and the more forceful waves of storms.

So, although volunteers are encouraged to attach as many corals as possible during the timed dive, the goal is quality, not quantity. The foundation team checks each planting and teams work outward in a circular fashion. This pattern allows the corals to grow together and fuse into one large colony. (Because the fragments come from the same original coral, they grow together rather than competing for space, as unrelated corals do.)

Working underwater has unique challenges and divers say outplanting can be quite frustrating. Surging ocean waters move you back and forth at this shallow depth, and you must control your buoyancy to avoid damaging any corals. Each scrape of the hammer moves your body. Fish attracted by the stirred-up algae get in the way. Most people use up their air faster than they would on a recreational dive. But the frustration pales against the importance of the task.

After these dive trips, volunteers scatter to the various attractions of the Keys, but work continues for the foundation team. The staff creates and maintains the nurseries, conducts regular outplanting dives on their own, and leads public outreach events and dives. They also monitor survival of individual outplants and the effect of restoration efforts on the larger ecosystem. Monitoring now is done primarily via a technique called photomosaic, which uses software to stitch together multiple photographs and create a map of a restoration site.

“With photomosaics, we are able to see survival and growth of all our outplants, not just a select sample,” Morningstar says. The technique, which several published studies have validated, also reduces the time spent on monitoring corals, freeing up more time for planting them.

Since 2012 Coral Restoration Foundation has outplanted more than 220,000 corals (nearly 13,500 of those by volunteers) representing more than 365,000 square feet of habitat. The foundation also ticked off another important indicator of success: the first-ever spawning of nursery-raised corals in the wild.

“Making babies is hard, especially for corals,” Morningstar says, adding that spawning is a clear sign of reef health.

While scuba divers and residents of the Florida coast have an obvious stake in this effort, coral loss affects almost everyone. The annual economic value of the world’s coral reefs is an estimated $9.9 trillion — two times that of tidal marshes and wetlands and seven times more than tropical forests. This value comes from the role of reefs in supporting 25% of all marine life, providing food and livelihoods for coastal residents, underpinning tourism, and protecting shorelines and structures from wave energy, especially during storms. Coral reef services benefit more than a billion people around the world. That makes restoration an important investment.

“Restoring a tenth of the world’s coral reefs would cost in the range of $4 to $8 trillion,” writes marine biologist Juli Berwald in her book Life on the Rocks. “A 2014 study of coral reefs valued their ecosystem services at $362,000 per hectare per year. Frank Mars said it required a $250,000 investment to restore a hectare of reef. So, you’ve got a return on investment of about 1.5 with coral reefs.” Restoring coral reefs is “a reasonable investment,” she concludes. (The method developed in Indonesia by Mars — yes, the candy company — uses six-legged rebar structures populated with coral fragments and networked together on the ocean floor; Mars says 8 divers could construct a basketball court-sized ‘reef’ in 3 hours.)

It remains true that unless and until humans stop doing the things that harm reefs, these restoration efforts are a bit like trying to empty the sea with a bucket. But again, wait and it may be too late. And there’s more that people can do.

“Put pressure on policymakers around the world,” suggests Jessica Levy, the foundation’s director of restoration strategy. “Support policies, candidates and leaders who support climate response. We need this to be a political issue, unfortunately. Make ocean friendly choices in your daily life, choosing sustainable seafood and reducing plastic consumption and your carbon footprint. It all contributes, but we really need to ensure that governments take action.”

And show up in Key Largo, too, if you can. The corals need all hands on deck. I plan to make a return trip — and hope for better weather.

Previously in The Revelator:

Coral Reefs Are in Crisis. Could a Controversial Idea Help?

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The Great Plains: Bringing Back an ‘American Serengeti’

Conservationists are working to preserve eastern Montana’s intact prairie and return its assemblage of native wildlife.

Some people call the Great Plains “flyover country.” Outdoor enthusiasts sail above it on the way to the mountains of Acadia, California’s redwoods or Utah’s red rock. Conservationists, too, have bypassed the region. Few big public preserves or parks exist there.the ask

Ecologist Curtis Freese hopes that changes.

His new book, Back From the Collapse: American Prairie and the Restoration of Great Plains Wildlife, is a call to protect and restore the northern Great Plains and the biodiversity it once held in great numbers. That includes swift foxes, beavers, river otters, bison, elk, pronghorn, black-footed ferrets, grizzly bears, wolves and numerous species of grassland birds.

Some of that work is already underway. In 2002 Freese helped launch the nonprofit American Prairie, which aims to establish a preserve of 3.2 million acres in northeast Montana where the mixed-grass prairie has escaped the wrath of the plow that uprooted many other areas of the Great Plains. The group’s about halfway to its goal, with nearly 600,000 acres of deeded lands or leased public lands, along with 1.1 million acres of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.

“The region offers our best chance to reassemble the native wildlife community within a vast reserve large enough to preserve the ecosystem to its fullest potential,” he writes in the book.Cover with title and bison on prairie.

The Revelator spoke with Freese about the biodiversity of the northern Great Plains, what it would take to restore native wildlife, and what obstacles remain.

Why do you think the Great Plains is often neglected when it comes to conservation?

I think there’s two main reasons. One was that compared to wetlands or forests or mountains, agriculture could simply get a quick jump on colonizing the Great Plains. You didn’t have to drain the wetlands, you didn’t have to clear the forest, you just opened the gates and let the cows out. It was all right there, ready to eat or plow.

Secondly, the turnover from 1870 to 1895 was dramatic. There had never been such a big change in the world so quickly — from an ecosystem where there was nothing but wild ungulates, to one that virtually eliminated all the ungulates and you had nothing but livestock. Because it was eliminated so quickly, there wasn’t a chance for the public to appreciate what had been — to say, “We need a big Great Plains park like Yellowstone.” We never had the chance.

What was the biodiversity of the region like before European colonization brought plows and cows? And how does that compare with what’s there now?

This was one wild, rambunctious system that went through a lot of ups and downs. We had glaciers covering it just 12,000 years ago. In the mixed-grass prairie it’s 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and sometimes it’s -50 degrees in the winter, so you’ve got to be tough to live there. Prairie wildlife exhibits that. Bison don’t need to go to water nearly as much as cows do.

When Lewis and Clark went through eastern Montana [in 1805-1806] they saw more wildlife than any other place in their trip — either to the east or to the west of the Rocky Mountains — all the way to the coast. It was just a remarkable ecosystem that we once had.

Curtis Freese. Courtesy of the author.

Now most of the species are either [greatly diminished] or not there at all, such as the wolf. Wolves now are in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, but back in the 1880s and 1890s, the state put a bounty on them, and every year roughly 4,000 to 6,000 wolves were killed, mostly in the plains of eastern Montana.

Today we’ve got relatively good numbers of deer because people like to hunt deer and they’re not quite so threatening to agriculture. But the elk numbers are highly suppressed because of depredation concerns about crop land, and pronghorn numbers are still down. The bison is simply a fraction of 1% of what it once was.

What’s the potential to be able to restore some of these populations of native wildlife?

What I see in northeast Montana — and what’s great about this ecosystem — is its diversity of habitat. You’ve got the Missouri River running through it. Then you’ve got floodplains and the rugged Badlands-like environment as you come out of the floodplain up into the rolling prairie. And then there are these isolated mountain ranges, like the Little Rocky Mountains, with pine forests. You have this wonderful cross section of habitats that support a great diversity of species. Some only live down in those floodplains. Some live in the rolling prairie, like the swift fox, and others live in the more mountainous and forested areas, like mountain lions.

The diversity of habitat is there, and much of it’s intact, but there’s still a threat of prairie being plowed up and put into wheat and barley. Once you plow it up, that’s the killer threat. Nothing survives very well in a wheat field.

Pronghorn standing in prairie grass.
Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge was established, in part, for pronghorn. Photo: USFWS (CC BY 2.0)

Put bison out there [instead], they’ll double the population every three or four years, no problem. Three of the Indian reservations in the region have bison. Grasslands National Park just across the border in Saskatchewan has bison. But we need to create much bigger herds of bison to mimic what they once did to that ecosystem and support the diversity of grassland habitat by their grazing. So there’s a long way to go in terms of building back the wildlife numbers.

Some, like the black-footed ferret, have a real challenge ahead of them because prairie dogs, which are their main source of food, continue to be poisoned and shot. Another threat is an introduced disease that came decades ago from Asia and is highly lethal to prairie dogs, as well as ferrets.

Others are also going to take some extraordinary effort to bring back. With wolves and grizzly bears, the problem isn’t a lack of food — or as we say, the “ecological carrying capacity” of the environment. It’s the social carrying capacity — people’s tolerance for big predators. We need to have some innovative approaches to enabling these big predators.

What does recovery look like for native grassland birds, many of whom are also declining?

Ecologist Andy Boyce said that recovering birds should be the easiest. They don’t threaten anybody. They move around to find the best habitat. And yet we still have declining bird populations because of three main threats.

One is the ongoing conversion of grasslands to cropland. The problem there as much as anything is the huge farm subsidies that lead to more plow-up and conversion of prairie to cropland.

The second is homogeneous grazing. In rangeland management the idea is to have the cows eat half the grass and leave half the grass everywhere. Uniform grazing. Well, to a lot of birds, that’s the worst outcome because some birds like it grazed down to the ground. Other birds like it not grazed at all. If you’re a five-inch-tall bird, that difference in grass height is like the difference for us of walking through a forest versus the shrubland.

So we need bison, and sometimes fire, to go back and recreate that diversity of grassland habitat, which birds depend upon.

The third one that’s an increasing threat are the new neonicotinoid insecticides, which are shown to be highly toxic to migratory birds and pollinators like butterflies and bees.

What’s needed to boost conservation in the region?

There are three pillars of conservation in the Great Plains. The first is no more sod busting, no more conversion of grassland to cropland.

Number two is the ranching community needs to be much more friendly to prairie wildlife. A lot of ranchers do a good job. There’s a lot of good ranch management going on, but a lot of them don’t. For example, prairie dogs are still much maligned and not tolerated, and they don’t create that much of a problem for ranching. And we also still see bison as belonging behind a fence, which is nuts.

We need to have a new kind of approach to ranching that realizes wildlife like bison, big predators, and small animals like prairie dogs, all have a place. Ranching can provide corridors and safe passage between parks, refuges and reserves for wildlife to move through.

Then third, we’ve got to have big protected areas of a million acres or more. Those are the cornerstone of wildlife conservation, whether you’re in the Great Plains, the Amazon or the Arctic. So we need more places like American Prairie and the Charles M. Russell Refuge across the Great Plains if we want to restore and conserve everything from prairie birds to ferrets to large predators and ungulates.

Black-footed ferret staring at camera
A black-footed ferret in the Charles M. Russell Wildlife Refuge. Photo: USFWS, (CC BY 2.0)

We’ve got a lot of public lands in the Bureau of Land Management lands and National Grasslands, which are managed by the Forest Service. An act of Congress could convert those into more protected status.

Those places have a multiple-use mandate that includes biodiversity conservation. I think we simply have to provide greater weight to the biodiversity benefits of these public lands that belong to all the public, not just to the ranching communities that graze them. I think we need to have a shift in attitudes about what the best use of these lands is. And I think in a lot of cases, these public lands, the best use is for wildlife biodiversity conservation.

In just the Great Plains alone, we’re spending $10 billion a year to subsidize farming. What if we just took 10% or 20% of that and we apply it to buying and conserving grasslands?

Private lands have got to be part of the solution too, because especially in the southern Plains, almost all the lands are private lands.

A third part of the solution is Tribes. Indian reservations are engaging in wildlife restoration as well.

American Prairie, working with the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, can serve as a place where the American public can visit a landscape of an endless sky and wildlife with no fences, the likes of which you won’t see unless you go to the African Serengeti now. It used to be the African Serengeti in the Great Plains. Once people experience that, it’s going to be a revelation of, “Yes, we could have this, we could restore it.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Wolves as Teachers

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Species Spotlight: Saving the Bog Buck Moth

This striking insect just gained Endangered Species Act protection, but its habitat is still disappearing.

Species SpotlightThe bog buck moth, a member of the silk moth family Saturniidae, is known from just a handful of sites around the North American Great Lakes. Unlike its close relatives, it lives in peatlands where its larvae feed on a wetland plant, Menyanthes trifoliata. Thanks to the difficulty of access to its boggy habitat, it was “discovered” only quite recently, in 1977, in central New York. Menyanthes-feeding buck moths were subsequently found in several additional sites in New York, as well as in Ontario and Wisconsin. Most populations have declined since their discovery, and several have disappeared.

Bog buck moths have been listed as endangered in New York since 1999 and Canada since 2009. In April 2023 they were placed on the U.S. endangered species list. Although the species had been a candidate for U.S. listing since the early 1990s, lack of information on its biology and uncertainty surrounding its taxonomy led to delays in its consideration.

Species name:

That’s a good question — one that has engendered a great deal of debate and confusion. For decades the bog buck moth was considered an ecological subtype of either Hemileuca maia or H. nevadensis, distinguished from other populations by the peatland habitat and ability to consume Menyanthes, but with no clear morphological separation. Recent genetic analyses have confirmed its position as a distinct lineage among the H. maia populations of the northeastern United States.

In 2020 two new names were proposed: as a subspecies (H. maia menyanthevora) and as a separate species (H. iroquois). These names were proposed nearly simultaneously, in unconventional publications, and left open some questions as to which populations should be included. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is currently using the menyanthevora subspecies designation, and limiting it to the New York and Ontario populations, in framing its endangered listing and recovery plans.

Description:

This is a large day-flying moth, with striking black and white bands on its wings and reddish-orange marks on its body. The larvae are dark brown to black, with red and yellow spots, and they bear irritating hairs and spines that increase in size and noxiousness as the larvae reach their sixth and final instar (phase).

Two moths cling to a leafless branch while mating.
Bog buck moths mating. Photo by Karen Rachel Sime. Used with permission.

The bog buck moth has several fascinating, unusual behaviors adapting it to the wetland habitat. Its oviposition (egg-laying) behavior is remarkable. Typical moths, including other H. maia, lay eggs on the food plant their larvae will eat, but bog buck moths oviposit not on Menyanthes plants but rather on various other plants in their vicinity. This is necessary because the eggs are laid in the fall and hatch in spring, and Menyanthes plants die back to their underwater rhizomes over the winter. The eggs are laid in clusters of 100-200; the larvae hatch simultaneously and move out en masse to seek Menyanthes. The group sizes become smaller as the larvae grow larger. A single Menyanthes shoot cannot support the complete growth of a bog buck moth, and so the caterpillars face the considerable challenge, throughout their development, of working their way through a mostly inundated habitat to find food. They cannot swim.

Where it’s found:

Menyanthes-feeding H. maia populations have been discovered in two fens in Wisconsin, six in New York, and two in Ontario. The Wisconsin populations are now considered a separate lineage — having perhaps independently colonized the fen habitat — and thus are not included in the U.S. endangered species listing. Of the others, only the two sites in Ontario and one in New York are currently occupied, the other New York populations having vanished over the past 30 years. The sites themselves are small, with each population typically occupying a few hundred square meters of suitable habitat. The density of moths at a healthy site can be astonishingly high, however, for short periods of time, with thousands of larvae crowding the Menyanthes patches for a few weeks in the spring, and hundreds of adult moths visible at once during the fall mating flight in late September into early October.

Major threats:

Presumably the bog buck moth was once fairly common in the wetlands surrounding the Great Lakes, but most of this sort of habitat has been destroyed over the past 200 years: drained, filled in, urbanized. At least some of the recently documented extirpations can be largely attributed to ongoing habitat degradation. Menyanthes grows only in very wet parts of a bog and does not tolerate shade, making it sensitive to shifts in water levels and overgrowth by other plants. The quality of the small habitat patches occupied by bog buck moths can be degraded by the changes in the hydrologic cycle caused by nearby road and home construction, alteration of adjacent waterways, and climate change. Pollution, such as fertilizer or septic runoff, has also threatened some sites, as have invasive plants (particularly glossy buckthorn and nonnative cattails) that can quickly alter the fen habitat.

Notable conservation programs or legal protections:

The remaining bog buck moth sites are protected in that access to them is restricted, minimizing direct and immediate threats. However, they’re not isolated from disturbances in the surrounding landscapes and watersheds. Endangered species listings offer frameworks for further protection.

My favorite experience:

Almost no virgin forest remains in central New York, and nearly every patch of land has at least at some point in the past 250 years been used for crops or livestock. The fens in which bog buck moths occur feel like strange tiny islands of undisturbed primordial wilderness amidst this highly altered landscape.

I love visiting these sites. After thrashing and wading through the swampy thickets that surround the fens, I find a footing on the floating peat mat and I am suddenly surrounded by odd carnivorous plants, in a habitat reminiscent of a wilder New York, unpaved and untraveled, no people, pets, or livestock, no visible evidence of their presence. People sounds are relegated to the far distance, and it’s so quiet that I can hear the moths flicker by.

The beauty of the mating flight, with hundreds of black-and-white moths set against the backdrop of fall colors, is a privilege to see, and I hope that it can be preserved.

What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?

Habitat protection for the remaining occupied sites is critical. Some of the sites from which populations have disappeared appear to still have suitable habitat, so reintroduction from healthy populations is a possibility.

More research on its biology is needed as well. Population studies conducted in New York over the past 25 years have documented dramatic fluctuations, as well as extirpations, but the causes are not clear. While some of the declines have been attributed to habitat succession and degradation, the possible effects of parasites, disease, and changes in rainfall or snowpack as well as other climate-related variables remain uncertain.

Key research:

Cryan, J.F., and R. Dirig. 2020. Moths of the Past: Eastern North American buck moths (Hemileuca, Saturniidae), with notes on their origin, evolution, and biogeography. Pine Bush Historic Preservation Project Occasional Publication No. 2. 44 pp.

Dupuis, J.R., S.M. Geib, C. Schmidt, and D. Rubinoff. 2020. Genomic-wide sequencing reveals remarkable connection between widely disjunct populations of the internationally threatened bog buck moth. Insect Conservation and Diversity 13: 495-500. https://doi.org/10.1111/icad.12432

Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight. 

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How to Make Friends and Influence People — to Save the World

What persuades people to help protect threatened species and ecosystems? Most scientists think facts alone will change minds. They’re wrong.

Anne Toomey has a tough message for me: Facts alone won’t convince anyone to help an endangered species or ecosystem.

I’m a scientist trained to evaluate data and support evidence-based decision-making, so to me, this is a jarring statement. But personal experience, as well as decades of data, help me realize it’s true.

I’ve spent the past decade communicating with the public about why marine life deserves our conservation attention. I’ll often share shark facts on social media, or with policymakers, only to see people reject objectively true information — or, even more bafflingly, accept that the facts are accurate but choose not to support a conservation policy endorsed by experts and evidence.

Toomey, a conservation scientist at Pace University’s Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences, tells me why this happens: It’s human psychology.

“Knowledge is formed by our experiences, not just by reading facts in a textbook,” she says. “Scientists believe ‘if only people knew what I know, they’d think differently from how they think now.’ But that’s not how it works. We don’t just need to give people information. We need to start understanding how that information can be brought into a process of change-making.”

That’s where Toomey comes in. Her work focuses on understanding what makes the public take action to save threatened species and the ecosystems that they, and we, depend on. It’s an important field of research, as developing policy solutions to address the planet’s many environmental threats requires more than just convincing conservation scientists and environmental activists — we also need the public on our side.

How do we accomplish that? Toomey has reviewed decades of psychological and education research on how to change minds and then applied it to environmental science. Her results may surprise many conservation scientists and environmental activists whose public outreach often focuses entirely on sharing facts.

What Doesn’t Work

The way traditional science and conservation outreach work is based on the long-debunked “knowledge deficit” model of understanding how people make decisions.

“According to the deficit model, the problem is that people don’t have enough information, and with the right information, they’ll change their behavior,” says Kiki Sanford, cofounder of the Association for Science Communicators and host of the podcast This Week in Science. “I, an expert who knows something, am going to give you some information, and that’ll make you a smarter and better citizen who makes better choices.”

A woman makes an announcement through a bullhorn while two students recoil from the noise
Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay

Though the idea that information alone doesn’t change minds may be startling to conservation scientists, to scholars and practitioners of science communication it’s a long-established fact. Folks in the science communication world call the knowledge deficit model “a zombie idea — it just won’t die,” says Amanda Stanley, executive director of COMPASS, an organization that trains scientists how to communicate more effectively. “The real reason why it won’t go away is that sharing information feels like a safe space for scientists. Scientists aren’t used to thinking about what we want to change as a result of our actions.”

Many of the world’s most pressing conservation challenges, from habitat loss to pollution to poaching to climate change and everything in between, require people to modify their behaviors, and that requires either strong new regulations or convincing them to adopt new habits and practices. In short, we need to change people’s minds to save the planet, so it’s important to understand how to do so.

“Conservation science was formed with a mission,” Toomey tells me. “We aren’t trying to learn more about the world for knowledge’s sake — the goal is to conserve biodiversity. If we’re starting with this goal in mind, how do we use the tools we have to accomplish our mission?”

Just Sharing Facts Doesn’t Work. Try This Instead

The first part of the answer, Toomey says, requires recognizing that what many scientists have long been doing doesn’t work. We can’t try the same thing over and over and expect different results, especially when scientific research from related fields has repeatedly proven that this is a flawed model.

We’ll get better results, Stanley says, by clearly defining our goal for change, then tailoring our communications and outreach strategy to accomplish that goal, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.

For example, one under-discussed consequence of climate change is its disruptive effect on fisheries as fish populations move to get away from suddenly warmer water. This will push fish we’ve relied upon out of our reach, with negative consequences for the livelihoods of coastal communities and global food security. Just telling someone the truth that “the fish will move” won’t fix that.

“When someone says they want to inform policymakers about how fish move in response to climate change, I tell them that isn’t enough,” says Stanley. “We need to have goals in mind before we start discussing tactics to achieve those goals. What exactly do they want policymakers to know? What exactly do they want policymakers to do with that information? Without answering both these questions, we won’t be effective.”

In other words, don’t just mention dry statistics. Put them into a context that policymakers will understand, care about, and feel motivated to act upon.

“And since most surveyed scientists are uncomfortable with the idea that the goal of communicating with the public should be to inspire some kind of behavior change, maybe it’s not surprising that so much of our outreach isn’t successfully changing minds.”

Another element of successfully changing minds comes down to building community relationships. People are more willing to listen to someone they know, someone who has helped them before than some random expert who just tells them what they’re doing “wrong.”

“Our understanding of the world is shaped by lots of things: the people around us, where we grew up, the things we’ve seen,” Toomey says. “Think about connection, not persuasion. Stop thinking about ‘how do we get these people to think differently, to act differently,’ and instead think about ‘who are these people, what do they care about, where do they get their information, who and what do they trust?’”

Stanley agrees that building relationships is important, “as is making sure that communication is a dialogue and that people feel listened to and respected.”

Ultimately, facts do have a role to play, they just can’t be the sole focus.

“Facts are the pool that you go swimming in after you have already put your bathing suit on,” Toomey says. “Imagine if you get pushed into the pool while wearing your work clothes. You’re going to want to get out as soon as possible, and you’re going to be pissed off at the person who pushed you in! But if you’re already interested in learning more, facts are hugely important. We should make facts available, but not assume that they’re the gateway to change.”

One last thing to keep in mind: If you still believe that facts and evidence alone are enough to change peoples’ minds after reading a summary of decades of facts and evidence showing this isn’t the case, you’ve proven Toomey’s point.

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Previously in The Revelator:

The Climate Movement Must Reimagine Its Relationship With Art

Trophy Hunting Propaganda Is One More Form of Greenwashing

As the United Kingdom proposes to ban trophy imports, hunting proponents ramp up their efforts to dismiss their critics.

The United Kingdom’s House of Lords is considering a bill that proposes to ban trophy-hunting imports into the country. The bill passed its second reading on June 16, after having passed through the House of Commons. It will now go to the committee stage of the Upper House (Lords), which is expected to rule in favor of its passing, if perhaps in amended form.

Meanwhile the global industry that feels threatened by the bill has pushed its propaganda machinery into overdrive.

Its carefully scripted narrative goes something like this: We all hate the idea of African wildlife being killed, dismembered and reassembled into a trophy for someone’s wall as a reminder of some conquest that was cruel and hardly sport in any meaningful sense of that word. But we must live with this necessary evil, because, counterintuitively, trophy hunting is killing to conserve.

In the UK media, even the likes of George Monbiot have nailed their pro-hunting colors to the mast, if reluctantly. In another example of this narrative, Professor Amy Dickman — in a letter to the Financial Times — opines that trophy hunting ultimately saves more animals than it kills and dismisses any criticism as merely “virtue-signaling.” With wildlife trade researcher Dilys Roe, she aired a video lecture that explains why all of us should be a bit slower to condemn trophy hunting.

It can all be very confusing. The latest broadside is that anyone opposed to trophy hunting is not only “virtue-signaling” but an unwitting perpetrator of neocolonial attitudes toward African people, telling Africans how to run their countries. Those of us who associate the trophy hunting of big game with men in white hats and big rifles traipsing through private reserves (or public ones initially created to protect animals from being trophy-hunted to extinction) are actually the neocolonialists.

Thankfully, environmental anthropologist Sian Sullivan has illuminated what is going on here with a great degree of academic skill and rigor. In a newly published article in the Journal of Political Ecology, Sullivan shows that the trophy-hunting industry has become adept at employing subversive narratives to greenwash its extractive activities.

Sullivan opens where the story begins. In 1996 Safari Club International established its African Chapter. It was designed, among other things, to sensitize new provincial and national governments to “wildlife as an economic development and rural development and management tool.” It similarly sought to expand opportunities for hunting into “tribal lands…linked to rural development.”

One can see how this plays out everywhere now. We are told that in rural areas, where few jobs are available, we should not deprive local Africans of scarce job opportunities created by trophy hunting. That very little of this income accrues at the household level, and most goes up the chain to operators and concession owners, is inconvenient but typically ignored in favor of clever-sounding soundbites.

Alongside this Safari Club strategy, “community-based natural resource management” initiatives were established, initially by the Southern Africa Regional Programme in Zambia and Zimbabwe and then into other countries such as Botswana — often with core funding from USAID, in which “sustainable use” of wildlife was promoted as a pragmatic approach to conversation.

The soundbite stuck: “If it pays, it stays.”

Stacey Witherwax examines a shipment of hunting trophies being shipped from South Africa to the United States.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Stacey Witherwax examines a shipment of hunting trophies being shipped from South Africa to the United States. (Public domain)

“Sustainable use” basically means that wildlife can be extracted by commercial operators external to rural African communities in exchange for (some) money and protein. How equitable, meaningful or sustainable this is remains an unanswered question. As Sullivan notes, anyone who points out how “sustainable use” is used as a vehicle to advance elite interests “often seems to prompt systematic attempts to silence or block ‘errant voices.’” Safari Club and academics who defend trophy hunting largely employ the same language, and SCI makes sweeping comments on its website, such as “The science is clear: hunting results in more wildlife, more wild landscapes and a better coexistence with nature.” As Sullivan shows, the science is far from clear, but anyone who raises questions about it is going to be dismissed as pushing a western neocolonial animal-rights agenda.

The oft-repeated claim is that the sport generates funds for local communities, but there’s little even in the best peer-reviewed literature I’ve reviewed that quantifies this benefit or details how the money is distributed. That’s why many academics have at least been honest enough to say that trophy hunting could generate revenue for local communities if it was well governed.

But corruption remains rife in the industry, which is invariably not well governed. For instance, we see no public science informing us how the maximum sustainable yield for elephants in Botswana was determined, which is meant to inform the country’s annual hunting quota. The numbers seem to be randomly chosen and even more randomly allocated across concessions, as if elephant populations were static. Also, nobody seems to want to answer why Tanzania’s Selous Game Reserve (now the Nyerere National Park) lost at least 60,000 elephants from 2009 to 2014, while 19 of the 20 concessions were dedicated to trophy hunting.

In part two of her paper, Sullivan provides a comprehensive definition of trophy hunting as a “consumptive form of commodified wildlife utilization involving the killing of animals considered and constructed as ‘wild,’ and the transportation and export of preserved parts of their bodies as objects effecting recall of a hunting event.” This is a “sport” that serves elite interests while being framed as necessary for maintaining animal population health. Standard greenwashing.

Sullivan then details the volume of endangered species extracted from African countries through trophy hunting between 2013 and 2022. Roughly 4,200 trophies are reported as having been exported; importers report receiving 4,800. Lags in the reporting system create uncertainty, as the numbers often don’t tally. By specific animal in the listing of species “threatened with extinction,” leopards are by far the most popular, with 3,154 trophies exported in the past decade. While 203 elephant trophies are reported to have been exported (from CITES Appendix I), 455 are reported as imported, a discrepancy that seems alarming.

A wall of hunting trophies
The trophy room at Paleis Het Loo, The Netherlands. Photo: Gilbert Sopakuwa (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

While Botswana’s elephants are listed on CITES Appendix II (not endangered), the government has set a quota for 336 animals to be shot in 2023, and over 200 were shot last year. The government typically argues that this will reduce human-elephant conflict by increasing the tolerance threshold for such conflict among local community members whose crops are often destroyed. It also argues that Botswana suffers from elephant over-population. However, zero evidence suggests that trophy hunting reduces conflict or makes any impact on a supposed over-population problem (a claim also unsupported by any evidence). In fact former President Ian Khama put an end to trophy hunting in 2014 precisely because wildlife numbers were in sharp decline. Botswana then became a haven for elephants from neighboring countries, which continued to suffer poaching epidemics while allowing trophy hunting.

The evidence against the trophy hunting of elephants is extremely strong. In just one recent scientific paper, which is never cited by trophy-hunting proponents, elephant conservation researcher Connie Allen and co-authors write:

“Our results challenge the assumption that older male elephants are redundant in the population and raise concerns over the biased removal of old bulls that currently occurs in both legal trophy hunting and illegal poaching. Selective harvesting of older males could have detrimental effects on the wider elephant society through loss of leaders crucial to younger male navigation in unknown, risky environments.”

Those opposed to the UK trophy import ban are quick to argue that African countries significantly rely on trophy-hunting revenue, but this significance is either not quantified or stated without quantifying the opportunity costs such as those indicated by Allen and colleagues.

Moreover, conservationists who virtue-signal that they would never virtue-signal are slow to acknowledge counterarguments. Those of us who disagree with trophy hunting as a necessary conservation tool have argued that alternatives to trophy hunting exist but often aren’t trialed because trophy-hunting presence crowds them out.

The disinformation campaign from the trophy hunters is powerful and well-funded. At Safari Club’s 50th annual convention in January 2022, an evening banquet raised “over US$15 million for SCI’s advocacy and conservation efforts,” according to Sullivan. One example of subversion will suffice: The “Inclusive Conservation Group” utilized the first word in its name not to run genuinely inclusive conservation programs, but to run social media campaigns worth over $500,000 from 2016 to 2017, financed by SCI’s Hunter Legacy 100 Fund but falsely employing the word “inclusive” to gain legitimacy. The #LetAfricaLive campaign “vigorously promoted the idea that any critique of trophy hunting is a form of neocolonialism.” Facebook removed the campaign because of the way in which real people were used to create the perception of wide-spread support of their narratives by leaving comments on post by media entities and public figures, which they deemed to be “deceptive” as they blurred the line between healthy debate and manipulation.

Talking of manipulation, a recent piece by journalist Jared Kukura reveals that UK charity Jamma International “pumped millions of dollars into sustainable use propaganda.” Kukura documents the “sustainable use” groups who have taken “money from Jamma… with the specific intention of communicating a positive view of trophy hunting.” Jamma has sponsored an astonishing array of propaganda material designed to promote trophy hunting as necessary to conservation.

Sullivan closes off with a case study of Namibia, often touted as the model child for how trophy hunting revenues can contribute to conservation. The reality here is that trophy hunting businesses are mostly run from freehold farms appropriated from Indigenous Africans through settler colonialism. She concludes that local communities don’t benefit, and that “income concentrates upwards towards the hunting operator whilst low incomes and precarity characterize the employment of African ‘trackers and skinners and ‘support staff.’”

The ways in which trophy hunting exacerbates inequality doesn’t fit the narrative that it’s a countercolonial method of conservation and redistribution. To the contrary, Sullivan writes, “this is an industry that consolidates rather than transforms circumstances of hyper-inequality that plague countries such as Namibia, even as hunting advocates repeat the lie that the flourishing or rural households and communal area wildlife alike is dependent on trophy-hunting extractivism.”

Sullivan has spoken truth to power, but you can expect that she will be dismissed as one more leftist greenie with zero expertise.

We shouldn’t let that happen. The UK must ignore the propaganda greenwashing and finally pass this long-awaited trophy-hunting import ban — and other nations should follow their example.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Lion-Hunting by Trump Donors Is Awful, But the Trade in Lion Bones Is Worse

Protect This Place: The Montana River Threatened By a Shuttered Pulp Mill

Industrial waste from a mill is leaching into the groundwater and polluting the Clark Fork River. A major flood could cause an even bigger catastrophe.

The Place: 

The Smurfit-Stone pulp mill site along the Clark Fork River in Montana was shuttered in 2010 but still poses an environmental threat.

Why it matters: 

The Clark Fork River — situated in western Montana in the heart of the ancestral homelands of the Salish, Kalispel, and Ksanka peoples — is an important part of the history of the region, as well as the present and future for all who live here.Protect This Place

Rising out of the Continental Divide and flowing through a 14-million-acre basin, the river is a rich habitat for bountiful fish and wildlife, a magnet for recreation, an economic driver for our riverside communities, and an agricultural resource. 

The threat:

The pulp and paper mill operated near Frenchtown — 11 miles from Missoula — for 53 years, discarding industrial and toxic wastes in unlined dumps, sludge ponds, and wastewater settling ponds next to the river. The huge dumps cover roughly 140–190 acres.

Map of location northeast of MissoulaThe wastewater ponds were drained long ago, but the soil and groundwater remain polluted with dangerous toxins, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, furans and arsenic. The fish in this reach of the Clark Fork and downstream suffer from contamination. The only thing separating the site from the river is a deteriorating, four-mile-long gravel berm. A major flood could breach the berm and cause an even bigger catastrophe by sweeping pollutants downstream for hundreds of miles

My place in this place: 

The Clark Fork River is the heart of our community and one of the central reasons people have lived in this place for millennia. It’s a gorgeous and dynamic river through every season, home to eagles, herons, moose, bull trout and beaver, among a myriad of other species.

Although the river is often characterized as the hardworking backbone of the industrial, agricultural and recreational economy, it’s also a place that inspires love and gratitude beyond its value as a resource. It has been described to me as a living relative who deserves respect and appreciation.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, author Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness…” Protecting and restoring the Clark Fork River starts with a sense of gratitude and responsibility.

Last summer, while getting ready to launch rafts on a tributary of the Clark Fork for a four-day camping trip, I learned the Ojibwe word for “thank you.” Miigwech, we said to the river before stepping onto our small rafts and entrusting ourselves to the power of the high, fast waters.

“Miigwech,” I murmured this winter as I crunched across snow and stepped into the icy waters of the Clark Fork with the Missoula Cold Soakers — a group of over a dozen people who happily plunge into the cold river every Saturday. As I slowly stepped deeper and deeper in the cold water, I was thankful for this place of such immense beauty, which brings our community together and reminds us of the joy of being alive.

The Clark Fork River is the place I take visiting friends and relatives when I want to show off our home. It’s the place I take my child for an afternoon of play. I walk along the riverbanks when I need to think or simply move my body in fresh air. Through it all, I recognize that we owe the river a duty of care, not only for all it gives us, but also for its place in the ecosystem and the generations that will follow us.

Who’s protecting it now:

The Clark Fork Coalition was started as a nonprofit in 1985 by a group of concerned locals who worked together to keep the pulp mill from discharging waste directly into the river, year-round. Since then, the Coalition has grown, expanding advocacy and restoration work throughout the Clark Fork River basin. But it’s still focused on the mess at the now-closed pulp mill.

In 2011 the Environmental Protection Agency started an investigation of the site and determined that International Paper, WestRock and Wakefield are the corporations responsible for cleanup. But over a decade later, cleanup has yet to begin.

In April American Rivers named the Clark Fork River as one of America’s 10 Most Endangered Rivers due to the remaining toxic contamination and the threat of a flood causing an even bigger environmental catastrophe.

What this place needs:

To protect this place, we need more robust data about the extent and location of contamination. Then we need the EPA to act quickly to clean up the dumps, remove the berms and restore the floodplain. 

Lessons from the fight:

Protecting a place as large and varied as the Clark Fork Watershed requires perseverance, resources and passion.

We have learned that a vital factor in protecting the river is community engagement. When people understand how the ecosystem works and how we can live as part of it, they are willing to fight for solutions that support human needs while protecting the river now and in the future.

All the work we have accomplished in the basin — stopping the original discharge permit from the mill, restoring flow levels and fish passage in tributaries, tracking the progress on another Superfund site upriver — have come about because concerned people learned about the challenges, understood the value of the river and acted out of love for this place.

The Clark Fork Coalition and its partners have launched a Clean Smurfit Now! campaign to educate the public and decision makers about the threat and put pressure on the EPA to take action before a major flood makes the situation worse.

Follow the fight:

The Clark Fork Coalition, American Rivers and Montana Public Interest Research Group are collecting signatures and comments to send to the EPA expressing concerns and pushing action.

Watch these videos on the damage Smurfit-Stone causes on the Clark Fork River to learn more.

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Previously in The Revelator:

‘There’s No Memory of the Joy.’ Why 40 Years of Superfund Work Hasn’t Saved Tar Creek

 

Carnivore Conservation Is Tougher in the Mountains

Scientists “tromp out there into far-away places” to learn how to help recover three elusive, high-mountain predators: wolverines, Canada lynx and Cascade red foxes. 

When the Yakama Nation detected a wolverine on Washington’s Mt. Adams in 2005, outside the animal’s known distribution, Jocelyn Akins wanted to learn more. Was it part of a population that hadn’t been previously known or a lone animal seeking new territory?the ask

To answer those questions, Akins, who had previously studied wolverines and grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains, launched the Cascades Carnivore Project in 2008. Studying these elusive and rare mountain carnivores is no easy feat. After setting up remote camera traps with the help of friends and other volunteers, it was 15 months before they got their first photograph of a wolverine. And it wasn’t until 2018 when field researchers working with Akins documented the first female wolverine in 75 years in Washington’s South Cascade Mountains.

Over the course of months skiing and snow-shoeing into remote alpine areas, Akins also became fascinated with another rare and elusive mountain dweller: Cascade red foxes, a subspecies found only in Washington that sits perilously close to extinction. With very little known about them, she embarked on a Ph.D. program to use genetics to understand the conservation status of these foxes and figure out ways to reconnect their populations across the landscape.

The Cascade Carnivore Project now helps lead research efforts into three rare, elusive mountain predators in the region: Cascade red foxes, wolverines and Canada lynx.

The Revelator spoke with Akins about the challenges of studying these animals, why they’re important to the ecosystem and what’s needed to help them recover.

Woman next to monitoring device on tree.
Cascade Carnivore Project founder Jocelyn Akins. Photo: Cascade Carnivore Project

What are you finding out about these three species?

Rare carnivores, especially ones that live at high elevation, are hard to collect data on. They naturally occur at low densities, and then they’ve had many threats from habitat loss to over-trapping to loss of connectivity that’s causing numbers to go down even further.

Much of getting a handle on the conservation needs of high-elevation carnivores is first getting baseline data. We know that these three species are extremely low in abundance. All of them only occur in a portion of their historical distribution — their range is really contracted.

Canada lynx are probably doing the worst of all of those three species. There are very few left in Washington. They occur almost exclusively in western Washington, east of the Cascade crest, in the Okanagan area.

How do you go about studying them when they’re hard to find? 

You’ve got to tromp out there into far-away places just to get to where they live, but that’s what attracted me to this research. I just love to figure out how to do this.

We use non-invasive methods to collect information on the species without ever seeing them.

We hike along trails up high in the mountains and collect carnivore scats. We do this systematically across vast swaths of the Cascade range with field crews and community science volunteers. That allows us to identify different individuals within a species and then look at the health of the population.

The other thing we do is we set camera stations designed specifically for wolverines.

wolverine facing camera
A adult female wolverine stands at a camera station in Mt. Rainier National Park. Photo: NPS/Cascades Carnivore Project

They’re set up in a way that the photographs show the ventral side of the animal — their throat and chest — because each wolverine has a unique white pattern in that area that we call a chest blaze. We can identify each wolverine just based on photos, and then we can track them as they move from one of our stations to another and better understand which portion of the landscape they occupy.

They also leave hair samples that we can send to the lab and have the DNA extracted. That allows us to compare individuals and understand if the genetic diversity of a population is low or if an individual has the signature of a Canadian wolverine or a wolverine from Idaho. We can understand this recolonization that the wolverines are doing on their own. Where did they come from to return to Washington?

[By around the 1930s] they were all wiped out from the western United States by over-trapping. There had also been this systematic targeting of carnivores that was focused on other species — primarily wolves, coyotes and bears — but it really had an impact on wolverines because they’re scavengers and they were eating the poisoned bait.

Eventually wolverines returned to Washington on their own from British Columbia. And there’s been a wolverine nicknamed Stormy, living in the Wallowa Mountains in [eastern] Oregon, that came from Idaho.

This year in May a wolverine was photographed on the south bank of the Columbia River in the suburbs of Portland. It was just bonkers. We don’t know if that wolverine swam across the Columbia River and came perhaps from our study area in Washington. We’re waiting for someone to get a better photo.

It was in Portland and then beelined into the Cascades of Oregon.

Coincidentally, a couple weeks later, a wolverine showed up in central California, but it’s probably not the same one. That would be a bit too far.

There was one wolverine in California in 2008 that had the signature of an Idaho wolverine. So there’s a couple avenues that they can use to repopulate the lower 48 in the Western states. But it’s a really slow process and full of tons of risk.

What are you learning about how climate change will affect the three species you’re studying?

All three species are snow-adapted. Lynx have these enormous feet. Wolverines do as well. Cascade red foxes occur at high elevation year-round. It doesn’t come down in the winter like cougars and bears do following elk and deer. These three carnivores rely upon snow. They are adapted to snow. They’re good at capturing prey on snow throughout the winter.

The wolverine is particularly interesting because wolverines give birth in the heart of winter from about January to March high up in the mountains at treeline. The moms dig through the snowpack right down to the ground. In the Cascades, that’s 10 or 12 feet of snow. This snow den protects the wolverine kits from predation and cold.

It’s very important for wolverines to have snow. Globally more than 90% of wolverine habitat is where snow persists into the late spring because the females need the snow to have their dens, and then they need the kits to stay in those dens as the first spring is happening. In February, March and April, the little wolverines are in the dens. And if the snow were to melt too fast at that time of year and disappear, then those kits would be really vulnerable to predation.

The other thing that’s super cool is that females provision their kits on their own. She has to roam her territory — a much smaller area of it, because she can’t leave her kits for too long because they won’t survive. So she needs to have food sources that are close by in the middle of winter at high elevation, where there’s snow everywhere, and there’s just not that much food because all the other species have moved down in elevation or are hibernating. There are just a few species active in the winter.

One thing that she does as a scavenger is if she finds a carcass in, say, the early winter, she’ll shove it down a tree well near her den or her den-to-be. And then she can find that food later, and she can bring it to her kits, or she can eat it herself because she can’t travel too far from her den. The tree wells act like refrigerators. They keep the food cold and safe. That’s another important reason why wolverines need snow.

We’re doing a study right now called DNA metabarcoding, where we extract every fragment of DNA that’s in the wolverine scat, and then we sequence it. We can see all these different prey that the wolverines are eating, and we can learn what are the important species. We’re starting to accumulate a list of exactly what they eat in Washington — it’s things like snowshoe hares, hoary marmots, songbirds and some ground squirrels. Mostly small mammals up to mountain goat carcasses.

What are the challenges to trying to conserve these carnivores? Do you find public opposition even though these animals rarely interact with people?

Wolverines, foxes and lynx aren’t eating people’s livestock. They’re up high in the mountains, and so they’re not preying on people’s pets. Still, I’m surprised when people are opposed to rare carnivore conservation.

Cascade red fox sitting on a rock with evergreen trees in background.
A Cascade red fox. Photo: Gretchen Kay Stuart

I think there’s so much to be done to educate people about the role [of these animals] in the ecosystem. As predators they keep prey populations in check. They’re out there preying on the weak and the injured first. Those are the easier animals to kill. So they keep disease in check. They keep prey populations healthy, and as a result, prey populations don’t overpopulate the landscape and they don’t over-browse it or negatively impact native plant species.

One of the big challenges is that a lot of people just don’t even know that these species even exist. Certainly people rarely see them. When I started the Cascades Carnivore Project, people didn’t even know what a Cascade red fox was. And X-Men hasn’t really helped. Everyone just thinks that wolverines are superheroes.

I think there’s quite a bit of support for their conservation, but there’s still a long way to go.

What do they need to recover? Is it better connectivity from things like safe highway overpasses or do they need more large areas of land to be protected?

Probably both. A lot of their habitat is within protected public lands. Some are in wilderness areas. And some do occur outside of protected areas. But they also need to cross unprotected lands to disperse and set up new home ranges.

Major highways are quite a large source of mortality for those three species, especially for wolverines. We’ve lost several wolverines in the last couple years from road kills. When you think that there’s something like 35 to 45, maybe 50 wolverines in Washington, and you lose one or two a year — especially in the south Cascades where there’s less than 10 — it doesn’t bode well for the population sustaining itself.

We’re just starting a genetic study of Canada lynx, so we don’t have answers there, but for the Cascade red fox, they’re somewhat inbred, and their levels of genetic diversity that we can test through sampling their DNA are low. There are barriers across their distribution, particularly Interstate 90. Connectivity is a problem for all three of those species.

There’s a legacy of population decline from those things I mentioned, like trapping and predator control programs that were targeting other species. In order for these high-elevation carnivores to recover, their populations need to grow, and then they need to be able to move across the landscape. Right now that’s hard because there’s lots of human disturbance in between places where they might like to set up a home range.

Previously in The Revelator:

Fisher Rewilding: How Washington State Is Restoring a Native Carnivore

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How 30×30 Ocean Conservation Can Protect Human Rights and Nature

New international agreements are a step in the right direction, but the real work to ensure robust and equitable protections is just beginning. 

The ocean sustains all life on Earth. It absorbs around 25% of all human CO2 emissions and captures 90% of the heat those emissions generate. It’s also a key source of protein for 3.3 billion people around the world. But only 8% of the ocean is designated as protected and, in reality, even these areas are all too often left unmonitored and unsecured. Changing that, effectively and justly, can no longer wait.

The good news is that some important progress is happening. The 2022 COP15 United Nations Biodiversity Conference agreement established the 30×30 target to protect 30% of marine and terrestrial ecosystems by 2030. In March, member states agreed to the United Nations High Seas Treaty, which will help protect some of the most remote parts of the ocean in the areas beyond national jurisdiction. The treaty, which still remains to be signed and ratified by at least 60 countries, could be a key tool to enable 30×30 ocean conservation.

Now it’s crucial to ensure that new marine protected areas — aka MPAs — created under 30×30 plans are resilient and robust. Many current “protections” fail to adequately safeguard nature. For example, allowing bottom trawling and other destructive industrial fishing activities in MPAs makes a mockery of their intended purpose. We can’t afford to continue making the same mistake.

In bottom trawling, vessels drag vast weighted nets along the seabed, scooping up enormous amounts of marine life and turning many ocean floors into lifeless deserts. This unselective fishing picks up everything from turtles to centuries-old coral reefs.

Close-up of turtle under water.
Sea turtle underwater. Photo: Bart Lukasik / Ocean Image Bank

In New Zealand between just 2018 and 2019, 1,515-4,769 tonnes of coral were destroyed on the seabed by bottom trawling. When wildlife is wiped out, livelihoods in coastal communities often rapidly follow.

When it comes to waters of the European Union, 12% are designated as MPAs, but less than 1% of those areas are strictly protected. The protections are also clearly not working — bottom trawling takes place more in MPAs than in unprotected areas in the EU. Meanwhile, bottom trawling and dredging took place in 97% of the United Kingdom’s MPAs in 2019.

These failures are just some examples of a global problem with direct human consequences. More than 100 million people depend on small-scale and subsistence fishing for food resources and livelihoods, often with few alternatives available for income or food.

Bottom trawlers often fish off the coasts of less wealthy nations in direct competition with local fishers, undermining their most basic human rights. The vast carbon emissions from bottom trawling — an estimate 1 billion tonnes of carbon per year from the seabed — worsen the accelerating climate crisis around the world.

COP15 and the High Seas Treaty were important steps forward, but the real work starts now. The Environmental Justice Foundation’s Ocean Manifesto provides a policy roadmap to get there. It demands that the High Seas Treaty be ratified as quickly as possible, with the rapid designation of a network of MPAs in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

While the treaty doesn’t directly protect the ocean from existing threats like illegal fishing, overfishing and deep-sea mining, the relevant international bodies, like the International Seabed Authority, must echo the spirit of this treaty by taking immediate action to protect the ocean for all humankind.

Swift action to cut the ecological footprint of bottom trawling is sorely needed. Banning it in all MPAs and prohibiting it in areas that have so far been spared would be a start toward an effective global MPA network. This network should be co-designed with Indigenous peoples and local communities, not just co-managed.

Two lines of people hold a fishing net at the shoreline.
Small-scale fishers in the Philippines. Photo: Bernard Spragg

All action must center the rights, leadership and active participation of local communities, resource users, and Indigenous peoples. This should be done to support cultural, economic and social rights, but it also improves conservation outcomes, benefiting wildlife, people and the planet all at once.

If world leaders can turn the recent progress on 30×30 into tangible action by their governments, with an unswerving focus on just, effective conservation, we can restore a healthy relationship with nature, support the ocean as it defends us from global heating, and halt the ongoing extinction crisis.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

Previously in The Revelator:

The Top 10 Ocean Biodiversity Hotspots to Protect

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Wildlife Winners and Losers From the West’s Snowy Winter

A swing from drought to heavy snow and rain has been a mixed blessing for the West’s plants and animals.

The superbloom can be seen from space. California’s wet winter — bolstered by a torrent of atmospheric rivers — has yielded a bumper crop of colorful, knee-high wildflowers cascading across hillsides in the region.

It wasn’t all roses — or purple phacelia — earlier in the year. The state’s heavy winter rains at lower elevations and dozens of feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains took more than 20 lives, cost billions in damages and prompted 47 counties to declare a state of emergency. Many still brace for flooding as one of the largest snowpacks on record melts out of the mountains and rushes downstream.

Other states like Wyoming, Colorado and Utah also received above-average snowpacks, which has helped to ease drought across the West. But for wildlife throughout the region, the rain and snow has been a mixed blessing.

The impacts to wildlife — both positive and negative — vary widely, says Caitlin Roddy, environmental program manager for the North Central region of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The Bad

In many places ungulates suffered significantly.

Wyoming saw deep snowpacks at lower elevations that proved deadly. Mule deer and pronghorn starved to death by the thousands. The Wyoming range mule deer herd, one of the state’s 37 herds, lost half its numbers.  

Deer and elk herds in Northern Colorado were also hit hard by the deep snowpack, which made finding food more difficult. That forced the animals to roadways where they could move more easily but were exposed to threats from vehicle collisions.

It was a similar story in northern Utah, where record-breaking snow falls also made it difficult for mule deer to find food, leading to expected losses in one area of 70% of adults and 90% of fawns.

“What you’re seeing in other states with ungulates, we’re expecting the same issues, but we don’t have our data yet to give hard numbers,” says Roddy. California is likely to see lower pronghorn and elk numbers, she says, but deer, which can move to lower elevations where snowpack wasn’t as heavy, should fare okay.

Fewer pronghorn and elk could cause problems in the months and years ahead, including changing the behavior of one their predators: mountain lions.

“When there’s limited forage for the ungulates, then they don’t have a good reproductive year and there’s fewer of them,” she says. “Then the mountain lion population, you’d expect it to decline after that, and you hope that they don’t switch to alternative prey, which is livestock.”

That could lead to more human-mountain lion conflicts.

Other animals could face declines as well.

For bi-state sage grouse, which number only 3,300 as they await Endangered Species Act protections, heavy snows would have made finding food harder. Researchers are concerned the birds may be further imperiled by predators as they undertake showy displays to attract mates while white snow still covers their breeding grounds.

Birds that nest near the ground at high elevations, like white-crowned sparrows, may skip breeding if there’s still too much snow, Ryan Burnett, Sierra Nevada group director at Point Blue Conservation Science, told the Los Angeles Times.

Some people may be surprised to know that the wet winter weather may also yield a worse wildfire season.

“We tend to think if there’s a lot rain it means less fire, but really it’s the opposite – rain means you also see more plant growth overall, and that can increase the fuel load,” says Roddy. “[Those plants are] going to dry out at the tail end of the summer because that’s how our climate works. So it could be a difficult fire year for us.”

The Good

The wet weather certain wasn’t all bad news. For many species, it was a boon.

Populations of native salmon, steelhead and trout — previously diminished by low river flows from drought and diversions for human use — will now find revived creeks that provide good spawning habitat. The higher river flows can make it easier for them to migrate. And when rivers wash up onto floodplains, nutrients that help fish develop and thrive are returned to the water.

Migratory birds that travel the Pacific Flyway will benefit from more water in wildlife refuges and flooded rice fields. This will help reduce disease outbreaks that occur when the birds are forced into small areas with limited water.

Hundreds of snow geese on a green field and in the air.
A large flock of snow geese takes flight from a field next in Sutter County, California. Photo: Kenneth James / California Department of Water Resources

The wet winter will also result in an increase in vegetation this spring and summer that Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep enjoy, helping them to boost fat reserves for next winter. Unlike their counterparts in the northern part of the state, deer herds in southern Utah are benefitting from greener vegetation and more moisture, with experts expecting a higher-than-normal survival rate.

Lots of rain also gave blue oaks, a tree found only in California, a needed reprieve, says Angela Moskow of the California Wildlife Foundation.

“The drought was hard on California’s oaks, and so too has been the shifting climate — the intense heat combined with dry weather is really stressing some of them,” she says. “For the oaks, we’re happy in general to have the rains.”

That will help the trees and many others. Some 330 vertebrate species in the state depend on oaks, and many more insects and other plants are associated with the woodlands.

But long-term drought and higher temperatures have also taken a toll on other forests. Roddy cautions that when it comes to the Sierra Nevada’s pine forests, much more precipitation is needed.

“For the pine forests, I don’t know that a single wet year will make that much of a difference,” she says. “If this is the beginning of this long-term drought that we’re in lessening and we end up having more average or above-average water years, then that would be a good thing for the forest.”

It’s a reminder that for many species, it will take months or years to understand the full effect of this winter’s weather — and the bigger changes ahead. Not all wildlife will be able to quickly adapt to extreme weather events amplified by climate change, not to mention long-term changes in temperature and precipitation.

That’s not an invitation to intervene. “Just because it’s an extreme year, it doesn’t mean the wildlife need you to feed them,” says Roddy. “Give them a chance to be wild.”

Plants and animals do need our help in curbing climate change, though — and not just in the United States, of course. As plants and animals face climate-induced weather extremes across the globe, researchers say there’s a key thing we can do to help beyond the work of rapidly limiting the burning of greenhouse gasses: protect and restore habitat.

“The one fail-safe option for helping species cope with extreme events is to retain intact habitats, as these are the places where species are most resilient to extreme events,” Australian scientists Sean Maxwell and James Watson wrote in The Conversation. “Where intact habitat protection is not possible, restoring land or seascapes can also help species to adapt to extreme events.”

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Previously in The Revelator:

As Extreme Weather Events Increase, What Are the Risks to Wildlife?

 

Species Spotlight: The West African Slender-Snouted Crocodile

With fewer than 500 individuals left, this is not only one of the word’s lesser-known crocodilian species but one of our most endangered reptiles.

Species name:

West African slender-snouted crocodile (Mecistops cataphractus)

Description:

The slender-snouted crocodile can grow to approximately 13 feet long. This species has a narrow snout, which it uses to eat fish and small mammals. Its coloring tends to vary from dark tan to light olive, with dark flecking that creates a slightly patterned, mottled look.

A crocodile stares directly into the camera
West African slender-snouted crocodile at San Diego Zoo. Photo courtesy San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

Where it’s found:

Slender-snouted crocodiles can be found in smaller river tributaries in densely forested habitats of West Africa, including Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau and Togo.

IUCN Red List status:

Critically endangered. They are also categorized as CITES Appendix I, which bans all international trade, and are federally listed as endangered by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Major threats:

Subsistence hunting and habitat destruction are some of the major threats faced by this species. Hunting for skins in Central and West Africa has abated due to declining population numbers and the availability of skins, and to a lesser extent from restrictions on international trade established by CITES. Modern anthropogenic pressures hampering recovery of the species include bushmeat markets; small-scale, subsistence fisheries (resulting in a reduced prey base and incidental mortality in fishing nets); and habitat modification (where large tracts of forest are cleared for cacao and rubber plantations or settlements).

Notable conservation programs:

Project Mecistops, along with work that colleagues are doing though the IUCN Crocodile Specialist Group.

The crocodile swims underwater while several fish float nearby
West African slender-snouted crocodile at San Diego Zoo. Photo courtesy San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

My favorite experience:

We helped sponsor and participate in the third West and Central Africa Regional IUCN Crocodile Specialist Group meetings, held in Cote d’Ivoire in December 2015. These gatherings focused on helping create regional conservation initiatives, including a headstart program at the Abidjan Zoo. It was a great opportunity to meet colleagues; share advice and recommendations on animal care; and gain knowledge on how to care for eggs, incubation parameters, care and feeding of offspring, and interpretive components and related education programs.

As part of this meeting, we were also able to visit a resident population of West African slender-snouted crocodiles in a remote field site in Liberia. It was amazing to travel to such a far-flung location and see this species in its native habitat. The site was beautiful and intact. There, we lodged at a field research facility with a group of regional biology students who were just beginning their conservation careers.

What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?

We need more field work and monitoring of remaining populations in West Africa, along with more regional protections of habitats and long-term creation of wildlife corridors to help link isolated remnant populations. I work as the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Species Survival Plan coordinator for this species, and more human care documentation of its preferred requirements is needed to share with colleagues in West Africa who care for animals in headstart and assurance colony facilities, along with best care practices implemented for headstarted animals as they near reintroduction age and size in West Africa. Increased education is also needed for regional schools and other facilities in West Africa, to help reduce hunting and impacts from habitat destruction. Finally, better understanding of diversity for cryptic species such as this is critical to help maintain healthy assurance populations in human care, to eventually serve as source populations for reintroductions into native habitats.

Key research:

Detectability and impact of repetitive surveys on threatened West African crocodylians

Systematic revision of the living African Slender-snouted Crocodiles (Mecistops Gray, 1844)

West African Slender-snouted Crocodile (Mecistops cataphractus) AZA Species Survival Plan

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