While in lockdown, artist Mesa Schumacher took her fans around the world by drawing a new species every day.
You can accomplish a lot in a year.
Take artist Mesa Schumacher, for example. At the beginning of 2021 she set herself a lofty goal: Create and post illustrations for 365 species around the world.
With the final weeks of the year counting down, she’s accomplished what she set out to do and shared more than 300 digital illustrations of whales, reptiles, carnivores, birds, invertebrates and a host of other interesting creatures, many of which are threatened or endangered.
#Biodiversity is so important for our ecosystems to function. We barely scrape the surface in our knowledge of life and biostrategies that exist on our planet.
Her Project Animalia helped fill a void in her life in the middle of the worldwide pandemic, when she found herself spending a lot more time at home with two young children.
“I was kind of in the depths of Covid winter despair,” Schumacher says. “I thought, ‘I just want to do something this year that’s going to be positive and that I can share.’ I committed to it the night before 2021.”
The work also helped fill a gap in her creative and professional life.
“I have a master’s in biomedical and medical illustration,” she says, “but I just love drawing animals, and frankly, there’s not as much demand drawing species anymore. We have so many photographs of animals.”
It’s a bit ironic, then, that many of the images started with her own reference photos, collected during worldwide travels.
“I spent the last couple of years living in Katmandu,” she says. “I like visiting places where I can go searching for animals. I go out in the national parks and find some species that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.”
That personal experience adds something special to her drawings, allowing her to capture a species’ personality, weight and the way it moves through the world.
“It’s always nice when I’ve had personal interaction with an animal, or I’ve gotten to see it in the wild,” she says. “Those drawings are kind special to me, and they often come out better.”
Schumacher draws each animal digitally, starting on an iPad in a program called Procreate and finishing in Photoshop. Some images she completes in less than an hour. “Some of them take, uh, many hours,” she admits.
Although she started posting the results on Jan. 1, before she had a backlog of drawings ready to publish, she quickly adapted and has had as many as 10 or 20 in the works at a given time.
“I can work on them based on my mood,” she says. “Maybe I just feel like drawing scales.”
As the year progressed, Schumacher says she’s drawn many species from her own personal checklist. “There are a lot of species that I have wanted to draw for years and years, and I’ve just never gotten around to it.” That includes a fair number of whales:
Hey, it’s my birthday!
Happy day, here is Project Animalia day #16 Beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas)
Some of the animals, meanwhile, come from suggestions by her social-media followers, including scientists and conservationists around the world.
“That’s been the fun, connected part of this whole thing,” she says. “I don’t love social media, but I do love that this year it’s been connecting me to people who are passionate about something that I love. And the best thing about this has been these mini-collaborations with people making great requests of animals that I didn’t know about, or didn’t know that much about, and sharing their stories.”
In a similar vein, Schumacher found she helped open viewers’ eyes to some amazing, new-to-them species — which is how I learned about Madagascar’s satanic leaf-tailed gecko, which looks more like a fantasy illustration than a real animal:
Someone left the hell-mouth door open for the most metal of animals…disguised as a leaf and hanging from branches, it’s…
“I love hearing it when people say, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know this species existed and I just went down a rabbit hole and learned all these new things.’”
That, she says, may be the ultimate message of Project Animalia.
“Biodiversity and conservation have such implications for so many things, including pandemic diseases, but if people don’t even know if things exist, well, the better something is known the more people want to see it continue existing.”
With Day 365 looming, Schumacher says she’s grateful for the yearlong project, which has challenged her artistically. “I’ve become a better painter,” she says.
It’s also offered relief during troubling times. “It’s been a real spark. I think it kept me motivated while we’re all kind of in this dreary time.”
And with so many species under her belt, does Schumacher know yet what she’ll post on Dec. 31?
“That’s a secret,” she says, returning to her iPad.
New research reveals that one third of sharks and their relatives are at risk. But the scientists say several clear policy choices can help.
Can you imagine an ocean without sharks? That’s a distinct possibility in some parts of the world, as new research reveals that one third of chondrichthyan fish species — that’s sharks, skates, rays and chimeras — are now threatened with extinction.
Sharks and their relatives face a lot of threats around the world, including the destruction of coastal ecosystems and pollution. But the research finds that one danger eclipses all the others: overfishing.
White cheek sharks slaughtered for the illegal shark fin trade. Photo: Interpol.
And that, in turn, speaks to a bigger problem: It’s not just sharks. We’re rapidly emptying the oceans of marine life around the globe, which experts say could lead to ecological collapse in the water and starvation for humans on land.
“Problems with sharks and rays forewarn of coming problems,” says Nick Dulvy, a professor at Simon Fraser University and lead author of the new study.
Dulvy says this research examines the problem through the lens of sharks and rays, but it “may be the most complete picture of the effects of fishing on the world’s oceans.”
Now that we understand the scope of the overfishing problem, what can we do about it — while there’s still time to save many of these species from extinction?
Start With the Science
“Overfishing can, and must, be tackled through the implementation of science-based catch limits, bycatch mitigation and behavior change,” says Ali Hood, the director of conservation at the Shark Trust.
We know this works. Science-based catch limits have been effectively established for around 10% of shark fisheries around the world, including most of the shark fisheries in the United States, and many currently unsustainable fisheries could be made more sustainable with relatively modest changes to management. Mitigation techniques such as fishing gear changes have helped reduce bycatch. Seasonal area closures and marine protected areas, when put in the right place, can play a huge role.
Fisheries for some species can be made more sustainable, but other species are so far gone that more extreme measures are needed.
“Vulnerable or near threatened species can be brought into sustainability through better fisheries management, but some species are so sensitive that strict limits on catch are needed,” Dulvy says.
Case in point: the shortfin mako shark, commonly caught as bycatch in Atlantic tuna and swordfish fisheries and experiencing catastrophic population declines.
“Perhaps the world’s clearest case for urgent conservation action is the North Atlantic shortfin mako,” says Sonja Fordham, the president of Shark Advocates International and a coauthor on the new study. “The advice from International Commission for Conservation of Atlantic Tunas scientists has been clear since 2017. A dramatic reduction in fishing pressure is urgently needed to reverse decline and the first basic step is a complete prohibition on retention.”
Shortfin mako shark. Photo: NOAA (uncredited)
The ICCAT finally listened to its own scientists in late November, when it agreed to ban fishers in the North Atlantic from landing any shortfin mako sharks, even accidentally. The move effectively bans any fishing for this heavily exploited species. While conservationists like Fordham celebrate the move, they also caution that the retention ban is temporary and in its current form won’t last long enough to allow makos to fully recover.
Engage Communities and the Public
Many experts say the way to solve overfishing is to work with the communities living near sharks to come up with solutions. Top-down solutions that don’t incorporate a region’s needs and voices are less likely to be followed by locals. For example, pressure from international environmental groups to reduce shark fishing led to the collapse of some fishing communities in Indonesia, which resulted in former fishermen turning to activities like human trafficking and drug and weapons smuggling to pay their bills.
In contrast, a model pioneered by the Shark Reef Marine Protected Area in Fiji takes revenue from international SCUBA tourists and pays former fishermen to not fish.
Public-awareness campaigns and initiatives can also generate support for sharks, influence consumer behavior, and even inspire legislative action.
“Concerned citizens are key to reversing shark and ray declines and can help a lot by just letting policymakers know that they support conservation efforts,” says Fordham. “They help build the political will necessary to ensure government commitments are followed up with concrete actions, such as limits on fishing. Whether it’s contacting policymakers and news editors or celebrating species through social media and art, everyone can help. Vocal public support for shark and ray conservation is not only meaningful. It’s essential for a brighter future.”
In the most recent example of this citizen engagement, public pressure persuaded the Canadian government to switch their position and support last month’s ban on retaining mako sharks in Atlantic fisheries.
Expand the Concept of ‘Sharks’
Although public support has certainly helped some shark species, the same can’t be said for lesser-known shark relatives like the sawfishes and guitarfishes.
“We need the public to not only broaden their concept of a ‘shark’ but also care enough to speak up on rays’ behalf,” says Fordham. “Rays are generally more threatened and much less protected than sharks, and the reasons why we worry about shark overfishing apply to rays as well.”
Fordham uses social media conversations like #FlatSharkFriday and #ElevateTheSkate to try to get members of the public to learn about and care about skates and rays (lovingly termed “the flat sharks”) as much as they care about sharks. She points out that the public is increasingly aware of especially famous species like manta rays and sawfishes, but lots of skate and rays (including “rhino rays”) still need our help.
Don’t Look for Silver Bullet Solutions
While the shark conservation crisis is often associated with demand in China for shark fin soup and some charismatic species like makos, it’s truly a global problem that can’t be solved easily.
“Almost every costal nation in the world catches sharks and rays, including many species now threatened with extinction, and all have a role to play in preventing the impending mass extinction,” says Luke Warwick, director of shark and ray conservation for the Wildlife Conservation Society, who was not involved in this study.
Although some conservation groups advocate for simply banning all shark fishing to address the crisis, experience shows that the issues are much more complicated.
“The reality is that in many nations, sharks and their relatives play important roles in food security and livelihoods, and as a result, simply banning fishing will lead to significant social and economic problems,” says Colin Simpfendorfer, an adjunct professor of marine biology at James Cook University and a coauthor on the new study. “We need to ensure that communities that rely on sharks and rays can continue to do so.”
Simpfendorfer notes that this doesn’t mean that unsustainable overfishing must be allowed to continue, but that cutting off a vital food supply cold turkey is not the best solution.
Dulvy agrees. “Shutting down all shark fisheries means a billion-dollar hole in coastal economies, and a food security crisis,” he says.
Something Must Be Done
Unfortunately, in a pattern familiar to environmentalists, governments have made many great-sounding shark conservation commitments over the years and haven’t always followed through.
“These alarming population declines are the results of decades of indifference by many governments,” says Hood. “This situation is avoidable, and we need to move shark conservation beyond rhetoric and address reality. Will governments now listen to the calls of the shark conservation community and take concerted action?”
This crisis demands a response, in the form of more and stronger conservation policies tailored to each specific situation. Failure to act could have terrible ecological consequences for the ocean and the humans who depend on it.
“Without decisive action to reduce the take of sharks and rays in fisheries, the extinction crisis will worsen, and more species will go extinct,” Simpfendorfer says.
Author’s note: David Shiffman is a former postdoctoral research fellow in the Dulvy lab at Simon Fraser University, and a current senior research advisor to the IUCN Red List’s Tuna and Billfish Specialist Group. He has never worked directly on IUCN Red List Shark Specialist Group research projects.
The oil and gas industry has refined its techniques to stay a step ahead over decades. And it has no plans to stop anytime soon.
This article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.
Despite countless investigations, lawsuits, social shaming, and regulations dating back decades, the oil and gas industry remains formidable. After all, it has made consuming its products seem like a human necessity. It has confused the public about climate science, bought the eternal gratitude of one of America’s two main political parties, and repeatedly out-maneuvered regulatory efforts. And it has done all this, in part, by thinking ahead and then acting ruthlessly. While the rest of us were playing checkers, its executives were playing three-dimensional chess.
Take this brief tour of the industry’s history, and then ask yourself: Is there any doubt that these companies are now plotting to keep the profits rolling in, even as mega-hurricanes and roaring wildfires scream the dangers of the climate emergency?
The John D. Rockefeller Myth
Ida Tarbell is one of the most celebrated investigative journalists in American history. Long before Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal, Tarbell’s reporting broke up the Standard Oil monopoly. In 19 articles that became a widely read book, History of the Standard Oil Company, published in 1904, she exposed its unsavory practices. In 1911, federal regulators used Tarbell’s findings to break Standard Oil into 33 much smaller companies.
Standard Oil postcard from 1914. Scanned by Steve Shook (CC BY 2.0)
David had slain Goliath. The U.S. government had set a monopoly-busting standard for future generations. John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil’s owner, lost. The good guys won — or so it seemed.
In fact Rockefeller saw what was coming and ended up profiting — massively — from the breakup of his company. Rockefeller made sure to retain significant stock holdings in each of Standard Oil’s 33 offspring and position them in different parts of the U.S. where they wouldn’t compete against one another. Collectively, the 33 offspring went on to make Rockefeller very, very rich. Indeed, it was the breakup of Standard Oil that tripled his wealth and made him the wealthiest man in the world. In 1916, five years after Standard Oil was broken up, Rockefeller became the world’s first billionaire.
Say It Ain’t So, Dr. Seuss!
One of the offspring of Standard Oil was Esso (S-O, spelled out), which later launched one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. It did so by relying on the talents of a young cartoonist who millions would later adore under his pen name, Dr. Seuss. Decades before authoring the pro-environment parable The Lorax, Theodore Geisel helped Esso market “Flit,” a household spray gun that killed mosquitoes. What Americans weren’t told was that the pesticide DDT made up 5% of each blast of Flit.
When Esso put considerable creative resources behind the Flit campaign, they were looking years ahead to a time when they would also successfully market oil-based products. The campaign ran for 17 years in the 1940s and 1950s, at the time an unheard length of time for an ad campaign. It taught Esso and other Standard Oil companies how to sell derivative products (like plastic and pesticides) that made the company and the brand a household name in the minds of the public. In its day, “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” was as ubiquitous as “Got Milk?” is today.
“Quick, Henry, the Flit!” was Dr. Seuss’s first famous catchphrase. He created ad campaigns for 17 years before he published his books! pic.twitter.com/O9gAdZfoob
At the time, the public (and even many scientists) didn’t appreciate the deadly nature of DDT. That didn’t come until the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. But accepting that DDT was deadly was hard, in part because of the genius of Geisel, whose wacky characters — strikingly similar to the figures who would later populate Dr. Seuss books — energetically extolled Flit’s alleged benefits.
Geisel later said the experience “taught me conciseness and how to marry pictures with words.” The Flit ad campaign was incredibly smart and clever marketing. It taught the industry how to sell a dangerous and unnecessary product as if it were something useful and even fun.
Years later, ExxonMobil would take that cleverness to new heights in its advertorials. They weren’t about clever characters. But they were awfully clever, containing few, if any, outright lies, but a whole lot of half-truths and misrepresentations. It was clever enough to convince the New York Times to run them without labeling them as the advertisements that they, in fact, were. Their climate “advertorials” appeared in the op-ed page of the New York Times and were part of what scholars have called “the longest, regular (weekly) use of media to influence public and elite opinion in contemporary America.”
Controlling Climate Science
Big Oil also saw climate change coming. As abundant investigative reporting and academic studies have documented, the companies’ own scientists were telling their executives in the 1970s that burning more oil and other fossil fuels would overheat the planet. (Other scientists had been saying so since the 1960s.) The companies responded by lying about the danger of their products, blunting public awareness, and lobbying against government action. The result is today’s climate emergency.
Less well known is how oil and gas companies didn’t just lie about their own research. They also mounted a stealth campaign to monitor and influence what the rest of the scientific community learned and said about climate change.
The companies embedded scientists in universities and made sure they were present at important conferences. They nominated them to be contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body whose assessments from 1990 onward defined what the press, public and policymakers thought was true about climate science. While the IPCC reports, which rely on consensus science, were sound, Big Oil’s scientific participation gave them an insider’s view of the road ahead. More ominously, they introduced the art of questioning the consensus science in forums where every word is parsed.
The industry was employing a strategy pioneered by tobacco companies, but with a twist. Beginning in the 1950s, the tobacco industry cultivated a sotto voce network of scientists at scores of American universities and medical schools, whose work it funded. Some of these scientists were actively engaged in research to discredit the idea that cigarette smoking was a health risk, but most of it was more subtle; the industry supported research on causes of cancer and heart disease other than tobacco, such as radon, asbestos and diet. It was a form of misdirection, designed to deflect our attention away from the harms of tobacco and onto other things. The scheme worked for a while, but when it was exposed in the 1990s, in part through lawsuits, the bad publicity largely killed it. What self-respecting scientist would take tobacco industry money after that?
The oil and gas industry learned from that mistake and decided that, instead of working surreptitiously, it would work in the open. And rather than work primarily with individual scientists whose work might be of use, it would seek to influence the direction of the scientific community as a whole. The industry’s internal scientists continued to do research and publish peer-reviewed articles, but the industry also openly funded university collaborations and other researchers. From the late 1970s through the 1980s, Exxon was known both as a climate research pioneer, and as a generous patron of university science, supporting student research and fellowships at many major universities. Its scientists also worked alongside senior colleagues at NASA, the Department of Energy and other key institutions, and funded breakfasts, luncheons and other activities at scientific meetings. Those efforts had the net effect of creating goodwill and bonds of loyalty. It’s been effective.
The industry’s scientists may have been operating in good faith, but their work helped delay public recognition of the scientific consensus that climate change was unequivocally man-made, happening now, and very dangerous. The industry’s extensive presence in the field also gave it early access to cutting edge research it used to its advantage. Exxon, for example, designed oil platforms to accommodate more rapid sea-level rise, even as the company publicly denied that climate change was occurring.
Don’t Call It Methane, It’s ‘Natural Gas’
Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, yet it has received far less attention. One reason is that the oil and gas industry has positioned methane — which marketing experts cleverly labeled “natural gas” — as the future of the energy economy. The industry promotes methane gas as a “clean” fuel that’s needed to bridge the transition from today’s carbon economy to tomorrow’s renewable energy era. Some go further and see gas as a permanent part of the energy landscape: BP’s plan is renewables plus gas for the foreseeable future, and the company and other oil majors frequently invoke“low carbon” instead of “no carbon.”
Except that methane gas isn’t clean. It’s about 80 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide is.
Flaring at oil and gas wells release methane into the air. Photo: WildEarth Guardians, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
As recently as a decade ago, many scientists and environmentalists viewed “natural gas” as a climate hero. The oil and gas industry’s ad guys encouraged this view by portraying gas as a coal killer. The American Petroleum Institute paid millions to run its first-ever Super Bowl ad in 2017, portraying gas as an engine of innovation that powers the American way of life. Between 2008 and 2019, API spent more than $750 million on public relations, advertising, and communications (for both oil and gas interests), an analysis by the Climate Investigations Center found. Today, most Americans view gas as clean, even though science shows that we can’t meet our climate goals without quickly transitioning away from it. The bottom line is that we can’t solve a problem caused by fossil fuels with more fossil fuels. But the industry has made a lot of us think otherwise.
There’s little chance the oil and gas industry can defeat renewable energy in the long term. Wind, solar and geothermal, which are clean and cost-competitive, will eventually dominate energy markets. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, GridLab and Energy Innovation have found that the U.S. can achieve 90% clean electricity by the year 2035 with no new gas and at no additional cost to consumers.
But the oil and gas industry doesn’t need to win the fight in the long term. It just needs to win right now so it can keep developing oil and gas fields that will be in use for decades to come. To do that, it just has to keep doing what it has done for the past 25 years: Win today, fight again tomorrow.
A Spider’s Web of Pipelines
Here’s a final example of how the oil and gas industry plans for the next war even as its adversaries are still fighting the last one. Almost no one outside of a few law firms, trade groups, and congressional staff in Washington, DC, knows what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is or does. But the oil and gas industry knows and it moved quickly after Donald Trump became president to lay the groundwork for decades of future fossil fuel dependency.
FERC has long been a rubber stamp for the oil and gas industry. The industry proposes gas pipelines, and FERC approves them. When FERC approves a pipeline, that approval grants the pipeline eminent domain, which in effect makes the pipeline all but impossible to stop.
Eminent domain gives a company the legal right to build a pipeline through landowners’ properties, and there is nothing they or state or county officials can do about it. A couple of states have successfully, though temporarily, blocked pipelines by invoking federal statutes such as the Clean Water Act. But if those state cases reach the current Supreme Court, the three justices Trump appointed — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney-Barrett — are almost certain to rule in the industry’s favor.
Oil and gas industry executives seized upon Trump’s arrival in the White House. In the opening days of his administration, independent researchers listened in on public trade gatherings of the executives, who talked about “flooding the zone” at FERC. The industry planned to submit not just one or two but nearly a dozen interstate gas pipeline requests. Plotted on a map, the projected pipelines covered so much of the U.S. that they resembled a spider’s web.
Dakota Access Pipeline being installed between farms, as seen from 50th Avenue in New Salem, North Dakota. Photo: Tony Webster, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Once pipelines are in the system, companies can start to build them, and utility commissioners in every corner of America see this gas “infrastructure” as a fait accompli. And pipelines are built to last decades. In fact, if properly maintained, a pipeline can last forever in principle. This strategy could allow the oil and gas industry to lock in fossil fuel dependency for the rest of the century.
In hindsight, it’s clear that oil and gas industry leaders used outright climate denial when it suited their corporate and political interests throughout the 1990s. But now that outright denial is no longer credible, they’ve pivoted from denial to delay. Industry PR and marketing efforts have shifted massive resources to a central message that, yes, climate change is real, but that the necessary changes will require more research and decades to implement, and above all, more fossil fuels. Climate delay is the new climate denial.
Nearly every major oil and gas company now claims that they accept the science and that they support sensible climate policies. But their actions speak louder than words. It’s clear that the future they want is one that still uses fossil fuels abundantly — regardless of what the science says. Whether it is selling deadly pesticides or deadly fossil fuels, they will do what it takes to keep their products on the market. Now that we’re in a race to a clean energy future, it’s time to recognize that they simply can’t be trusted as partners in that race. We’ve been fooled too many times.
The COVID-19 pandemic gave me a chance to put down my paper field guides and test my preconceptions about some popular digital tools.
I’m an old-fashioned naturalist. Wherever I am — and that may be in the middle of a sentence, like now — I enjoy identifying the wild things I see, learning their names, and learning facts about them, like how they find mates, breed, migrate and so on.
My fascination with wild creatures began in elementary school with a tank of aquarium fish. Then I got into snakes, other reptiles and frogs and, in my early teen years, birds. In the decades since then I’ve enjoyed naturalisting around the world, everywhere from wildernesses to megalopolises, from fresh mountain peaks to fetid sewage plants. I’ve found some amazing, rare species in strong-smelling places.
But even though I can identify hundreds of bird species from snatches of song, well over 1,000 by sight, and instantly recall the Latin names of hundreds of reptiles, I’ve always been bad at identifying certain types of species — plants and insects in particular.
Typically, when I get to a new place and find a flower or a bug, I page through a local field guide and almost immediately get lost. The problem with plants and insects is that most places have too bloody many different kinds of them! I usually have no idea where to start looking in the book or which aspects of the flower/bug I’m staring at will allow me to tell it apart from any of the many, many other similar species in the guide.
This failure to identify is not just a problem for nerdy nature enthusiasts like me but for the health of the biosphere: How can people be expected to make ecologically sound decisions when they can’t begin to know the difference between even the most common species of plants or insects? Both these groups are critical to ecosystem function almost everywhere.
Technology to the Rescue?
In recent years smart people have built digital tools that can automatically identify wild species from descriptions, images or audio recordings. An increasing number of apps and websites can help you name birds, plants, dragonflies, etc. — just about any living thing on Earth — if you upload a cellphone snap, record a sound, or input data into a decision tree.
But are these apps and sites a good thing? When they first began appearing I was doubtful, as were many naturalists of my acquaintance.
Why? For starters, they’re not always correct — they can make identification errors.
And I’ve always felt that paging though a book to identify a species makes you a better naturalist. You are forced to observe with focus and care while comparing pictures and written descriptions of multiple similar species to arrive at an identification. This simultaneously teaches you about multiple species and gives you additional facts to help reinforce your memory.
When you upload a photo or sound to an app, you’re not obliged to observe nature with care. You don’t always get to see similar or related species. Because there’s so little effort involved, the apps seemed to trivialize the process of engaging with wildlife. (Easy come, easy go.) They can, it seemed to me, distance us from nature by turning it into just another screen-based game when we need less of that and more In Real Life connection with actual wild stuff.
Also, many of these tools use machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence to generate identifications, which are the same technologies used by autocratic governments and power-hungry corporations to surveil us and limit human freedom. By using these tools, are you helping to refine them and expand their insidious reach?
This was my thinking about these digital ID tools last year. But then, shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic, my wife became seriously ill with long Covid. I quit working to look after her and our kids full time for almost a year, and this, combined with extended lockdowns, severely curtailed my opportunities for getting out into nature. I was largely limited to short excursions in our yard in Cape Town, South Africa, with the hope of seeing a few birds fly by.
During this stressful time — I actually began to turn gray with worry — some friends asked me take part in the City Nature Challenge, a yearly international competition between naturalists to see which city can record more wild species within its metro boundaries. I’d heard about it but never taken part, because it involved installing an app called iNaturalist — one of the abovementioned digital tools of which I was so skeptical.
— CityNatureChallenge (@citnatchallenge) May 4, 2021
iNaturalist is quite simple in principle. You sign on (for free) and create observations by uploading photos of any living thing you can snap a picture of: Plants, bugs, birds, mushrooms, whatever. iNaturalist uses algorithms to try to automatically identify the species in your photos and then invites other (human) contributors to confirm or correct the identification. All observations are compiled into a huge open database that scientists and members of the iNaturalist community can access — you can see which species have been observed nearby, for example.
With few other opportunities to get my nature fix, I caved and signed on. Because of pandemic lockdowns, I was limited to observing yard species, as was almost every other City Nature Challenge participant in South Africa. This was frustrating: Cape Town is the most biodiverse city in the world. I could see nearby mountain slopes covered in hyper-speciose fynbos habitats from my back door, but I couldn’t reach them. Aside from birds, most of the species I was able to observe in my yard were small plants and insects, groups I’d given up on knowing anything useful about.
I began making cellphone shots of beetles, butterflies and garden weeds and uploading them to the app. Many were quickly identified by iNaturalist’s algorithms, and the app also showed me similar species that had been seen nearby. Many identifications were confirmed by human iNaturalist contributors, some of whom provided useful ID tips in comments on my observations and patiently answered my (often stupid) questions about them.
Very soon I found myself learning the butterflies and dragonflies in my yard, and many of the head-spinning variety of local plants that I’d previously been clueless about. I was able to use my previously acquired skills to help others ID birds and reptiles from around the world. I connected with friendly insect and wildflower experts in my neighborhood who I’d never known about before.
And I found a home for thousands of photos that I’d taken during nature excursions in previous years — photos of interesting things I’d seen and planned to identify later, but never gotten back to because it was just too confusing and time-consuming. Now I can upload them to iNaturalist, and even if the algorithms don’t produce a perfect ID, they can at least point me in the right direction. Sooner or later a human will weigh in and tell me what’s what.
I like how easy it is: If I see something interesting, I just whip out my phone, snap a few pics, and upload them in less than a minute. The world is becoming even richer to me. I’ve made online naturalist friends from whom I’m still learning — iNaturalist is like Facebook that way, but without all the nonsense — and I have the satisfaction of contributing to a global database that can be used to track climate change, focus conservation efforts, and even find new species.
I can also vicariously observe wildlife to relax at the end of another exhausting day during another month without travel by logging on for a few minutes to identify species in photos that other iNaturalist observers have taken all over the world. I’m keeping up my North American warbler ID skills even though I haven’t been there in years.
Is iNaturalist the one great thing that’ll transform wild species conservation for the better, forever?
No, because there are no silver bullets in conservation. iNaturalist isn’t perfect; it can be slow, especially in the Global South, and its user interfaces can be improved. It must also, in my view, develop a more sophisticated approach to storing and displaying threatened species observations. It sometimes obscures the locations of threatened species that could benefit from being known to occur in a certain place and reveals the exact locations of species that are sought by poachers and collectors.
I still love and recommend old-fashioned paper field guides for more manageable groups of species like birds and mammals. But iNaturalist has changed my mind about digital wildlife tools, which are not only generating vital data to track the effects of climate change and the health of wild species but can grow nature literacy in beginners and diehard naturalists alike. Get yourself outdoors — and online — now!
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or its employees.
A new study hopes to inspire water managers — and the rest of us — to begin planning for how climate change will dramatically reduce snowpack.
It’s that time of year in the West. Winter enthusiasts have started waxing their skis and crossing their fingers for a plentiful snowpack — something that’s been in short supply of late. Of course, it’s not just recreation at stake, as a sweeping drought still has a hold over a region that needs a lot more water to replenish depleted reservoirs and ecosystems.
While tourists watch the weekend weather reports, scientists also have their eye on winter conditions further ahead.
A new study in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment sounds the alarm about mounting research showing the West is on track for a future where little to no snow becomes a regular winter occurrence. If greenhouse gas emissions aren’t reduced, models show significant reductions in snowpack in the West’s mountains over the next 35 to 60 years — with far-reaching implications for ecosystems, agriculture and communities.
Erica Siirila-Woodburn, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of the study’s lead authors, says these findings shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. The April 1 snow-water equivalent — a common measurement to determine the amount of water in snowpack — has already declined by 20% since the mid-1950s.
“This isn’t a future problem. This is something that’s already happening,” she says.
While things aren’t great now, they’re likely to get much worse during the second half of the century, the study explains.
During the second half of the century, the models predict that most years in the West — from 78-94% of winters — will see little to no snow. California will experience this shift first. Five consecutive years with less than half the usual snowpack could occur as early as the late 2040s, compared to the 2060s for other mountain basins in the West.
Despite these troubling predictions, the issue of snowpack declines still doesn’t get enough attention in discussions about climate change, says study co-author Alan Rhoades, a hydroclimate research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley.
“We wanted to elevate the urgency of snow loss to the level of some other climate impacts that we often see in the news, like sea-level rise, wildfires and extreme weather events,” he says. “We view this as one of the central issues for the Western U.S. in terms of water supply, reliability and ecosystem health.”
A significant decline in winter snowpack is likely to have “multibillion-dollar implications,” the study explains.
The West’s water system was built around reliance on a snowpack that builds up over the winter months and then melts in the late spring or summer, helping to fill reservoirs and irrigate farmland at the driest times of the year.
The accumulation of snow in the mountains function like giant reservoirs — and big ones.
Snow runoff near Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada Mountains on Feb. 27, 2020. Photo: Jonathan Wong / California Department of Water Resources
“The April 1st snow-water equivalent in the Sierra Nevada roughly doubles the surface reservoir storage of California,” explains Rhoades. “Not only that, snow is this bridge between when precipitation starts to shut off — like when we start to stop getting atmospheric rivers or these major storm events that drive precipitation — and then when peak demand occurs.”
But warmer temperatures from our burning of fossil fuels are changing how much snow falls. It’s also leading to runoff occurring earlier in the year, which may not align with when it’s needed most by people — or plants and animals.
Warming temperatures also mean that even less water may reach downstream reservoirs because it’s being absorbed by thirstier soil and plants along the way — further diminishing water supply.
Sometimes even a seemingly small reduction in snow can have large effects on water availability when combined with higher temperatures and drought conditions — as was the case recently in the Colorado River basin.
“Last year, there was 83% snowpack in the Colorado Rockies that really turned into about 30% hydrology, meaning that by the time the snow melted, only 30% of it actually went into hydrology — into the river and down the basin,” Randy Lavasseur, acting superintendent of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, told the Camas-Washougal Post-Record. “The rest of it, the soils were so dry, it just absorbed in the soil.”
Less water available for ecosystems could change what kinds of plants are able to grow. Drier vegetation can also increase wildfire risk. And decreased water in rivers and wetlands could harm a host of aquatic species. Already many species of salmon are struggling to survive in rivers where low flows become too warm in summer months for the cold-water loving fish — a scenario that’s likely to get much worse with a diminishing snowpack.
People, too, will feel the pinch.
A major reduction in water supply could dry up millions of acres of irrigated agricultural land and reduce the drinking water available to rural residents and urban dwellers alike, while also reducing power from hydroelectric generation.
While the most significant reductions in snowpack are still decades ahead, planning for potential changes to water availability should start happening right away, the study’s authors say.
“The climate is projected to change pretty dramatically over the next 50 years,” says Rhoades. “So if we do need more infrastructure or we need to alter how we manage our infrastructure, how do we take into account the changing hydro-climate?”
We’ll need to get creative with ways to reduce how much water we use and stretch water supplies further. Conservation and efficiency will be needed across households and industries. Groundwater reservoirs can be actively managed to increase storage capacity to take better advantage of surplus water when it occurs. And new technologies can help better manage reservoirs, treat polluted water, or transform wastewater into potable water.
Whatever solutions are employed, though, they’ll need to be done with the long-term climate picture in mind and other ecological considerations, like preserving biodiversity.
“Decisions and investments made today will extend multiple generations, operate for half-centuries or more, and need to function within rapidly changing hydroclimatic conditions,” the researchers write.
Employing different demand and supply-side solutions will also take time, money and a lot of collaboration — which is why the study’s authors urge action right away. And not just from water managers. Everyone from academics to stakeholders and policymakers need to get out of their traditional “silos” and work together to address the problem.
“I think partnership shouldn’t be overlooked,” says Siirila-Woodburn.
With an entire water infrastructure system built across the West “based on the assumption of an abundant snowpack,” he says, “there hasn’t been a lot of proactive thought in a concerted way on what we do about that changing.”
The time to begin that proactive planning, Siirila-Woodburn says, is now.
A new podcast puts BIPOC storytelling front and center in working for solutions to the plastic crisis.
Forget clothes made out of recycled plastic. Forget beach cleanups. These are just distractions, says Shilpi Chhotray. She’s the founder of the new podcast People Over Plastic, a BIPOC storytelling collective that’s taking on plastics, climate change, and racial and gender justice — one episode at a time.
To Chhotray, the real solutions to halting the plastic crisis come from stopping the production of plastics and the fossil fuels needed to make them. And from scaling zero-waste supply chains, businesses and cities. And from addressing the harms done to communities of color that have borne the brunt of plastic pollution for decades — both in the United States and abroad.
Want to know more? Chhotray hopes so. After years of working as an activist and communications leader on plastics issues, she founded the podcast to focus on how we can work together to address the crisis.
Each episode, around 30 minutes, features two guests — usually one from the United States and another from either Asia, Africa or Latin America. It’s a balance of stories about innovation, art, and activism — all pointing toward solutions, all told by BIPOC voices — with a goal of taking the conversation about plastics well beyond traditional environmental circles.
The Revelator spoke with Chhotray about the power of storytelling, upcoming guests she’s most excited about and who she hopes listens to the podcast.
You’ve been working on plastic issues for a while. How did the idea of this podcast come about?
People Over Plastics founder Shilpi Chhotray. Photo: Smeeta Mahanti
I come from a marine science and conservation policy background. I started looking at microplastics in fish in 2014. Back then it was called marine debris — people weren’t even calling it plastic pollution yet. Over the years I learned that that was just the tip of the iceberg. When I joined Break Free From Plastic in 2017, I got laser-focused on the human side of the issue and the social justice side of it.
I worked at Break Free From Plastic for about four years and I loved every second of it. I was meeting with people all over the world. I was part of very complex and interesting strategy conversations. The missing link, though, was that we were not getting outside the regular environmental circles. When I talked to people outside of our community, they didn’t really know that plastic came from oil. And I was seeing more and more of these influencers and celebrities wearing sports bras made of recycled water bottles. We know that isn’t a real solution, it’s a distraction.
After giving birth to my son, I spent about four months on maternity leave [and] I was really able to step back and just sort of marinate on what I was seeing from the outside. I decided I wanted to get even more honed in on the storytelling side of things and getting into circles that weren’t talking about the intersectional issues of plastic, which are so important.
So that’s where this idea was born for a storytelling collective led by BIPOC voices. The podcast has three focus areas; climate, innovation, and racial and gender justice. Generally, all of the episodes cover these three pillars.
There’s a lot of press about the threat to ocean life from plastics. Tell me about the coverage gap you’re trying to close by focusing on BIPOC communities that are also in harm’s way.
By focusing on just the ocean, you’re putting the accountability on the end of the lifecycle, which means consumers. It’s a very easy way for corporations to divert attention from their role in the crisis.
The other thing that misses is that it’s communities of color all over the world — from the Gulf South in the United States to Manila, Philippines — who are the most impacted in very brutal ways by the entire plastic pollution lifecycle. We’re not just talking about a little bit of trash in the community. They’re drowning in it.
And oftentimes it’s trash from another part of the world. The United States is outsourcing about 60% of our waste. When you talk to recycling centers, they’ll say they’re sending it to foreign markets. These “foreign markets” are often the backyards of my friends.
I’ve visited a lot of these communities and they have some of the brightest minds working on this issue. But unfortunately, their voices aren’t always the ones making headlines.
I think with all of the racial justice uprisings with George Floyd, with Black Lives Matter, with youth activists, there’s a moment right now where we need to pivot on plastics — and environmental issues in general — and really give the social justice piece the justice it deserves.
The most powerful way to do that is to set up systems so that people can tell their own stories.
The very first interview in your podcast is with artist Von Wong. What kind of power do you think art has to move the needle on this issue?
Art is this incredible way to pull people in by not saying anything at all. And I’m a very wordy individual — I’m a communicator. But I wanted to have this first episode present itself as discovery-to-frontline. And what I mean by that is art can be a way to discover an issue, whether you’re deep in the weeds of it like me or are someone who has decided to skip the straw during lunch — who might not know all the issues but knows this isn’t good for the planet.
So this is a way to pull people in from all walks of life with different backgrounds on plastics and intersectionality. Von Wong’s work is really, really exciting. It’s almost fantasy-like, and he uses plastic in a way that you can’t look away from it.
I built a 3 story tall giant faucet with plastics flowing out of it to invite the world to #TurnOffThePlasticTap
He’s a long-time friend of mine and when he started telling me about his Turnoff the Plastic Tap project, which was featured in episode one, I was really interested in the oil piece. So it’s not just turning off the tap on the brands and the corporations, let’s also turn the tap off on the industry that’s producing it, which is fossil fuels.
That was a really important hook for us to start with and then go to Miss Sharon [Lavigne], who is on the frontlines of the fossil fuels and petrochemicals side of things [in St. James Parish, Louisiana].
What are some of the other stories you’re featuring?
One of the people I interview in episode three is the great-grandson of the famous dabbawalas network in India. It’s a 130-year-old system. These gents get on a bike and they deliver a hot lunch to people at work every day in a [metal lunchbox]. It’s not a catering service, though — they go to the house of the person at work, pick up the lunch from whoever’s cooking it, and then they bike with it over to the place of work to deliver the hot lunch. There’s no plastic in this system. There’s no emissions because they’re on bikes. In Mumbai they deliver around 200,000 lunches a day.
I also talked to Zuleyka Strasner, who’s an incredible entrepreneur. She also has a very interesting background being Black and trans and competing for money with Silicon Valley 22-year-old Stanford tech kids. She founded Zero Grocery, which is scaling the supply chain to be as efficient as Amazon, but completely plastic free.
These are the kinds of people I’m interested in. Yes, they are people of color. Yes, they have inspiring lived experiences. But they’re also wicked smart and they’re scaling these systems that could be replicated in every city in the world. That’s what’s going to move the needle.
It’s not whether I have my Klean Kanteen [reusable bottle] today. That’s not enough anymore and we need to get that message across. And that goes for policies to ban the bag. Great, ban the bag. Ban the straw. We need an overhaul of all the problematic single-use items and then also stop the petrochemical industry from growing. And we do that through the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which is in Congress right now.
We’re really trying to drive home the message to decisionmakers that who is at the table matters tremendously. BIPOC people are impacted by this issue the most. We need to be not only inviting them to the table but creating the space for them to create the table as well. That’s actually what episode two is about. It’s called “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
Knowing that personal responsibility isn’t enough, what should people do to try and affect the system-level changes we need?
That’s such a good question. I want to meet people where they’re at. That’s why I created this podcast, because not everyone has the bandwidth to call their senator, do a letter-writing campaign or show up at Starbucks to protest. After I became a mom, it really changed my mindset and got me thinking about what people can do on their morning commute, when they’re in the shower, when they’re at the dinner table. Could they listen for 30 minutes to these stories? Then, if they feel compelled, take that next step and learn about a policy or a brand audit or how to force corporations to be more accountable.
One of the easiest things people can do is tweet. If you can tweet a story and tag a brand and be like, “Hey, I like your product, but I hate your packaging. Do something about it.” It shouldn’t be on the consumer. These multibillion-dollar corporations have multibillion-dollar budgets, and they need to innovate.
That’s really my ask: Can you use the platforms that are at your fingertips to make some noise?
One of my friends told me that she was shook after hearing Miss Sharon’s story. She happens to have 95,000 followers on Instagram. If she puts out that one story, that in my mind is its own campaign tool.
For us, we’re asking people to listen and have a chat with your kids at dinner, or if you’re the kid, have a chat with your parents over lunch. I think there’s something really powerful about learning stories.
I would like everybody to listen to this podcast, which is probably not the smartest [goal] because everyone’s like, “you need to figure out your target audience.” But you know, my target audience is honestly the planet.
There’s so much power in these stories that wherever you are in society — whether you’re a fifth grader or you are somebody that’s a policymaker — there’s a way for you to plug in.
Doing something every day will help to change your attitude and create momentum for change.
A recent poll found that people today, especially younger people, feel helpless when it comes to fighting climate change.
Here’s the thing: That’s exactly how polluting corporations want you to feel. The more people believe their actions don’t matter, the more they find themselves rolling over and accepting the status quo.
Yes, solving the climate crisis requires bold action from governments and corporations, but that doesn’t mean individuals have to sit on the sidelines. Not only do our actions add up and influence others, we also have the ability to push for — and demand — systemic change.
And that push, importantly, can help turn our individual feelings of hopelessness around. Psychologists and climate activists tell us we can go from feeling helpless or hopeless about the future and toward a more positive, productive attitude just by taking a few steps forward.
Done correctly, these steps we take can also create a momentum for the future. As scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote last month: “If we wait for someone else to fix the problem, we’ll never solve it. But when we raise our voices to call for change, when we take action together — that’s when we find that hope is all around us.”
With that in mind, we’ve created a simple action plan for the next 30 days. They include small steps we can take to advocate for bigger societal changes — and in the process remind us that the power for change lies in ourselves, too.
Start at the Top:
Submit a public comment on proposed federal rules or regulations. You can find opportunities to voice your support or concerns at regulations.gov. You might be surprised how few comments have already been submitted, or how much your voice might matter.
Write to your senator to demand action on climate — either in general or about a specific legislative action. (Find your elected officials’ contact information here.)
Write to your congressional representative with a similar request, perhaps one more tailored to your district. Remember, your voice as a voter counts 365 days a year, not just on Election Day.
Now Think Local:
Write to your mayor or other community leader about how you see climate affecting your region and encourage them to take action.
Write to your town parks manager and ask about their plans to keep green spaces open in the face of warming temperatures, wildfires and increased extreme storms.
Attend your local planning board meeting and speak out about any projects you feel don’t pass environmental muster. You can’t stop runaway development without getting in front of the people who make the decisions about what goes where.
Attend a school board meeting to support educators’ efforts to teach science (or, you know, to verify that they’re actually teaching it in the first place).
Next Up, the Corporations:
Write to a major corporation or retailer to offer feedback about their business models — for example, overpackaging. Can’t find a public email address? Sometimes it pays to take photos and share them on social media.
Now strike closer to home. Write to a top employer in your town or county to ask about their climate policies or request they adopt more sustainable business practices. (The more specific, the better; it shows you know and understand their business and their role in your shared community.)
Ask your energy company about switching your account to renewable sources. The more customers who sign up to get their power from wind or solar, the better.
Hit ‘em in their stock portfolios. If you or your town, company, church, pension plan or friends have any investments in fossil fuels, intentionally or otherwise, divesting is a great way to send a message that profiting on destruction is no longer socially or financially acceptable.
Focus on Your Neighborhood:
Walk — or run! — around your neighborhood with a garbage bag or two to pick up trash and recyclables, then post what you find to social media. (This isn’t necessarily about shaming people; it’s a good way to show our effect on the environment.)
Attend a larger cleanup day in your area. Connect with local activists and organizations while you’re at it. You’re going to need people to talk to about all of this, so build your community as you go along.
Find a Little Free Library in your area and stock it with environmentally themed books. You never know who might find and read them. (Don’t have a Little Free Library near you? Talk to your local bricks-and-mortar library about setting up a display or webpage about their climate-related books and related materials.)
Ask how you can help an environmental justice cause in your area. We can practically guarantee some neighborhoods in your community suffer higher environmental burdens than others (if you don’t know of any, one place to start your search is the Environmental Justice Atlas). Find out how you can support existing efforts or create awareness. Oh, and if you’re in an area affected by these burdens, it’s OK to ask for help.
Attend a protest. Add your voice to a public event demanding action while meeting like-minded people. (Pro tip: Buy a reusable whiteboard instead of making new posters that will just end up in the trash.)
Game the Algorithms:
Share positive news. Fight the incentive for social media to focus on the stories and disinformation that makes people angry and tears us apart. The Earth Optimism and Conservation Optimism accounts are good places to start.
Follow a climate scientist on social media to amplify their voices. Check out Katharine Hayhoe’s “Scientists who do climate” list on Twitter for ideas (or just bookmark the whole list).
Review a green product you like and write about the qualities that you find worthy of praise. In the online commerce world we live in now, products (and businesses) live or die by five-star reviews. (You can also give negative reviews to products you find egregious, or those whose marketing claims amount to little more than greenwashing.)
Find climate-denying videos on YouTube (Tucker Carlson is a good start) and give them thumbs-down votes so fewer people get them in their recommendations. (Just don’t watch too long: That way lies madness.)
Keep Learning:
Ask your friends about their favorite energy-saving techniques. Do this online and you might end up with a lot of interesting suggestions that everyone can learn from. As Texas State University environmental studies professor Tom Ptak wrote recently, “When enough individuals make changes that lower daily household energy consumption, huge emissions reductions can result.”
Start or join an environmental book club so you’re up to date on the latest climate science or related issues (and can share with like-minded other readers). Here’s a list of recent books to get you started.
Write to your local media — either a letter for publication about an issue, or just a friendly note to a local editor or reporter to praise their climate coverage. (You could also suggest they do more to cover it.)
Donate or subscribe to environmental news. A thriving independent press serves as an essential watchdog against corporate malfeasance and government corruption.
Set up a Google Alert for a topic you’re passionate about. It can be as simple as “climate change,” a topic like “sea-level rise,” or more specific like “climate” and the name of your town.
Read up on a skeptic’s argument so you can debunk disinformation when you encounter it — which you will.
Think Longer Term:
Sign up with a voter-registration effort in your area, or a voter-motivation effort through a national organization like the Environmental Voter Project — or make a plan to volunteer on Election Day. (You’re registered to vote, too, right?)
Consider running for office or encouraging your friends to do so. The 2022 election is right around the corner, and too many races remain unopposed.
Donate to an environmental nonprofit to support the ongoing fight. Every dollar helps. You time matters, too, so if you can’t afford to give, there’s probably a good way for you to donate your time by making phone calls, sharing petitions, stuffing envelopes, or doing something that matches your particular skillset.
Wait, This Month Has 31 Days!
Take some time to reflect on the past month. What worked? What didn’t? What did you learn? What would you like to do again? What didn’t make it onto this list that you’d like to try? Another month looms around the corner, and the opportunities to make a difference are endless — even as the time to act grows shorter.
A troubling new report finds that one third of sharks and their relatives are threatened with extinction. How did the international research team perform this analysis during the pandemic?
This September a team of dozens of scientists announced grim news: Around one third of the world’s 1,199 known sharks and related species, they assessed, are now threatened with extinction.
The startling message from members of the IUCN Shark Specialist Group, which published their results in the journal Current Biology, means that sharks and their relatives are much worse off than previously understood. The last global assessment of shark species, published in 2014, found 24% of species at risk.
The more complete — and more worrying — picture of the extinction risk for these species provides critical information for conservationists, scientists and policymakers, as well as the people who live and work near shark populations.
But getting there, especially during a pandemic, posed more than a few challenges.
Diverse Species and Diverse Threats Require Diverse Experts
Gathering the data needed to assess — and reassess — nearly 1,200 species required a staggering amount of work, involving 353 experts from more than 70 countries who met during 17 different week-long regional workshops stretching out over more than five years.
Before the pandemic hit, the core team racked up a ton of frequent flier miles. “We had to submit over 340 travel expense reimbursement claims,” says Nick Dulvy, a professor at Simon Fraser University and the lead author of new shark assessment.
An endangered Caribbean reef shark. Photo: Brian Gratwicke (CC BY 2.0)
Many workshops took place at academic institutions or hotel meeting rooms. One was held in the atrium of an aquarium — which seemed like a fun idea until school groups full of excited (and loud) children arrived.
After Covid-19 travel restrictions arrived, the process shifted online. That required everyone to work odd hours to accommodate job and home schedules for colleagues in all sorts of time zones.
The effort involved intense research: More than 20,000 cited sources informed the assessment.
But it wasn’t just science that made the work possible; organizers and participants also credit the model, which prioritized respect, diversity and inclusion, cooperation and trust.
Regional workshop organizers made sure to invite and include local experts, including at least one from each country being discussed. For example, 2017’s Arabian Seas and Adjacent Waters workshop included representatives from Somalia, Oman, India, the Maldives Sudan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iran and the UAE.
“Being able to understand what’s happening on the ground is important,” says Rima Jabado, lead scientist for the Elasmo Project and chair of the IUCN Shark Specialist Group. “A room full of Westerners can’t effectively talk about conservation problems in a country they’ve never been to, and conservation challenges can be difficult to interpret if you don’t know the local context. We made the choice to go to these countries, bringing people together, which was great not just for analyzing all this data, but for forming new collaborations and relationships.”
Ensuring gender equality of participants was also a priority for organizers, as was inviting a range of professionals.
“We don’t just invite academics, but also representatives from environmental nonprofits and government fisheries agencies,” says Dulvy. “We might have been able to get some of the information we needed via email, but we need to know what sharks are caught by what gear types where. People with real-time recent experience with the local system are much more helpful.”
Sand tiger shark. Photo: Greg McFall/NOAA
The inclusive model used serves in stark contrast to the problematic practice of “parachute science” or “colonial science,” in which researchers from wealthy countries visit field sites in the global south to collect data but don’t work with or help local experts.
That commitment to inclusivity garnered praise from outside experts.
“Building mutually respectful, equal partnerships that are beneficial to the location in question is absolutely key here,” says Asha de Vos, founder and executive director of the Sri Lanka-based conservation organization Oceanswell, who was not a part of this study. “If we’re making decisions about our common heritage, we need to be inclusive when moving those decisions. We need everyone at the table, and we need to empower the people on the ground.”
Prepping the People and Information
Getting the people together was one thing. Gathering, condensing and analyzing the data was another.
It started with a core team of Shark Specialist Group experts who attended multiple workshops and compiled all the data from the 1,199 species assessments. The core team served as authors of the summary paper, while many of the invited local experts became coauthors on the individual species assessments. Since these local experts came from a variety of fields with a variety of areas of expertise, everyone needed to complete IUCN Red List training in advance to understand how their data fit into the IUCN assessment scheme. Red List categories are complex, quantitative, and use very technical language, so it was important to make sure that everyone was using the same definitions of terms before, for example, deciding if the data showed that a species was critically endangered.
Scalloped hammerhead shark by Kris-Mikael Krister (CC BY 2.0)
The training also emphasized the need to come up with scientifically rigorous results.
“You need to come in here in an objective way and look at the data and be honest about what’s happening and not happening,” Jabado says. “The IUCN is very science-based, and we can’t assign a status to species [just] because it will give us funding or be a problem for managers.”
Once everyone was on the same page, the real work began. Prior to the workshops, participants prepared background briefings on local conditions and key species, along with summaries of new and relevant scientific literature for everyone to read. Determining the Red List status for each species required data on their distribution, their overlap with threats, their reproductive biology and, whenever possible, their population trends. (A common misconception is that a Red List assessment of “data deficient” means that scientists know nothing about the species and any random bit of new knowledge is helpful for their conservation, but really it only means we don’t have data on population trends over time.)
While the actual deliberations of Red List workshops are confidential, organizers told me that in general these workshops were where the data crunching and any associated discussions or deliberations occurred. And these discussions are where local expertise is critical — a Western scientist half a world away can read a spreadsheet emailed from Indonesia, but sometimes local experience provides key context and greater understanding. Local experts may also be aware of important data sources others may not have, such as fishing records or scientific papers published in non-English journals.
It’s also during these meetings that teams of experts get to know each other, sometimes resulting in long-term regional or global collaborations. Organizers told me that several research collaborations around the world began as conversations during coffee breaks at Red List workshops, a clear emergent benefit of this model.
After the workshops, when people went home (or logged off Zoom), the writeups for each species were finalized. When all assessments and reassessments were complete — for example, the new assessment that recategorized Caribbean reef sharks from “near-threatened” to “endangered” — the team began to write the summary paper.
That’s when they found the staggering and sad results that made headlines.
The Result: An Index of Loss and Hope
Each shark and related species, except for the handful of species discovered since 2014, received updated IUCN Red List conservation assessments as part of the process.
That helps determine conservation priorities for individual species, but the bigger picture of risk to entire categories of species — such as mammals, amphibians or corals — emerges from what’s known as a “Red List Index,” which shows how Red List assessments have changed over time. The summary paper determined a Red List Index for sharks for the first time and showed their collective decline on a par with other threatened species groups.
“Putting sharks on the Red List Index puts them in front of the eyes of policymakers,” says Dulvy.
He says this is particularly important, because previous Red List Indexes didn’t include any marine vertebrates.
Because of that, the existing indexes also didn’t document one of the major dangers facing species around the world. “What was missing from this picture was an indicator showing the biggest threat to the oceans: overfishing,” he says.
For sharks, overfishing poses a threat to 100% of at-risk species, and the sole threat to 67% of them. The rest face threats from overfishing combined with habitat loss, climate change and pollution.
Sharks in a Yemen fish market. Photo: Rod Waddington (CC BY-SA 2.0)
All told, the new assessment identified population declines for multiple shark species — mostly due to overfishing — as well as three probable extinctions of species that haven’t been observed in more than 80 years.
That weighed heavily on the participants.
“Any one person might work on one species, and you know what’s happening and you think it’s bad, but you think maybe it’s just me,” Jabado says. “But when you sit in a room and hear the same story for so many other species, it’s depressing.”
While this global perspective of the impacts of overfishing on marine life is scary, at the same time, she adds, the process created some sense of hope.
“We can’t make progress unless we’re working together,” she says. “Conservation can be very depressing, but being in a room full of passionate, dedicated people is inspiring.”
Author’s note: Shiffman is a former postdoctoral research fellow in the Dulvy lab at Simon Fraser University and a current senior research advisor to the IUCN Red List’s Tuna and Billfish Specialist Group. He has never worked directly on IUCN Red List Shark Specialist Group research projects.
Keeping Antarctica pristine is becoming more challenging with growing threats from human activity and climate change.
We tend to think Antarctica is isolated and far away — biologically speaking, this is true. But the continent is busier than you probably imagine, with many national programs and tourist operators crisscrossing the globe to get there.
And each vessel, each cargo item, and each person could be harboring non-native species, hitchhiking their way south. This threat to Antarctica’s fragile ecosystem is what our new evaluation, released Nov. 19, grapples with.
We mapped the last five years of planes and ships visiting the continent, illuminating for the first time the extent of travel across the hemispheres and the potential source locations for non-native species. We found that, luckily, while some have breached Antarctica, they generally have yet to get a stranglehold, leaving the continent still relatively pristine.
But Antarctica is getting busier, with new research stations, rebuilding and more tourism activities planned. Our challenge is to keep it pristine under this growing human activity and climate change threat.
Life Evolved in Isolation
Biodiversity-wise, much of the planet is mixed up. The scientific term is homogenization, where species, such as weeds, pests and diseases, from one place are transported elsewhere and establish. This means they begin to reproduce and influence the ecosystem, often to the detriment of the locals.
Most life in Antarctica is jammed onto tiny coastal ice-free fringes, and this is where most research stations, ships and people are.
This includes unique animals (think Adélie penguins, Weddell seals and snow petrels), mosses and lichens that harbor tiny invertebrates (such as mites, waterbears and springtails), and an array of microbes such as cyanobacteria. The adjacent coast and ocean team with life, too.
Adelie penguins in Antarctica. Photo: Scott Ableman, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The more we learn about them, the more outstanding life at the end of the planetary spectrum becomes. Just this month, new scientific discoveries identified that some Antarctic bacteria live on air, and make their own water using hydrogen as fuel.
When the Southern Ocean was formed some 30 million years ago, natural barriers were created with the rest of the world. This includes the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the strongest ocean current on the planet, and its associated strong westerly surface winds, icy air and ocean temperatures.
This means life in Antarctica evolved in isolation, with flora and fauna that commonly exist nowhere else and can cope with frigid conditions. But the simplicity of Antarctica’s food webs can often mean there are gaps in the ecosystem that other species from around the world can fill.
In May 2014, for example, routine biosecurity surveillance detected non-native springtails (tiny insect-like invertebrates) in a hydroponic facility at an Australian Antarctic station.
This station, an ice-free oasis, previously lacked these interlopers, and they had the potential to alter the local fragile ecosystem permanently. Thankfully, a rapid and effective response successfully eradicated them.
Pressures from climate change are exacerbating the challenges of human activity on Antarctica, as climate change is bringing milder conditions to these wildlife-rich areas, both on land and sea.
As glaciers melt, new areas are exposed, which allows non-Antarctic species greater opportunity to establish and possibly outcompete locals for resources, such as nutrients and precious, ice-free space.
So Far, We’ve Been Lucky
Our past research focused on non-native propagules — things that propagate like microbes, viruses, seeds, spores, insects and pregnant rats — and how they entrain themselves into Antarctica.
They can be easily caught on people’s clothing and equipment, in fresh food, cargo and machinery. In fact, research from the last decade found that visitors who hadn’t cleaned their clothing and equipment carried on average nine seeds each.
But few non-native species have established in Antarctica, despite their best efforts.
To date, only 11 non-native invertebrate species — including springtails, mites, a midge and an earthworm — have established across a range of locations in the warmer parts of Antarctica, including Signy Island and the Antarctic Peninsula. In the marine realm, some non-native species have been seen but it’s thought none have survived and established.
Microbes are another matter. Each visitor to Antarctica carries millions of microbial passengers, and many of these microbes are left behind. Around most research stations, human gut microbes from sewage have mingled with native microbes, including exchanging antibiotic resistance genes.
Last year, for example, a rare harmful bacteria, pathogenic to both humans and birds, was detected in guano (poo) from both Adélie and gentoo penguin colonies at sites with high rates of human visitors. COVID-19 also made its way to Antarctica last December.
Both these cases risk so-called “reverse zoonosis”, where humans spread disease to local wildlife.
What Do We Do About It?
Three factors have helped maintain Antarctica’s near-pristine status: the physical isolation, cold conditions and co-operation between nations through the Antarctic Treaty. The Treaty is underpinned by the Environmental Protocol, which aims to prevent and respond to threats and pressures to the continent.
There is unanimous commitment from Antarctic Treaty nations towards preventing the establishment of non-native species. This includes adopting a science-based, non-native species manual, which provides guidance on how to prevent, monitor, and respond to introductions of non-native species.
But time is of the essence. We must better prepare for the inevitable arrival of more non-native species to prevent them from establishing, as we continue to break the barriers protecting Antarctica. One approach is to tailor the newly developed 3As approach to environmental management: Awareness of values, Anticipation of the pressures, Action to stem the pressures.
This means ramping up monitoring, taking note of predictions of what non-native species could sneak through biosecurity and establish under new conditions, and putting in place pre-determined response plans to act quickly when they do.
The elusive fish, the world’s largest rays, find themselves among the most endangered marine fish in the world.
Sawfish are well known for their unique body parts called rostra: long, chainsaw-like nose extensions, which have a sixth sense. But that extra level of perception does little to protect them from human exploitation.
Species name:
Narrow sawfish (Anoxypristis cuspidata), also known as the pointed or knifetooth sawfish.
Description:
You can distinguish these medium-sized, gray sawfish from other species just by looking at their rostra, which lack the typical teeth along their quarter-length closest to the base. They grow to about 11 feet long and are known for their docile temperament — unless they’re cornered.
Narrow sawfish, 1878 illustration via Biodiversity Heritage Library
Where it’s found:
The species is distributed in Indo-Pacific marine waters and estuaries.
IUCN Red List status:
Endangered, with a population decline of 50-70% over three generations (approximately 18 years). It’s also listed in Appendix I of CITES, which bans international trade.
Major threats:
The toothed rostrum and the fact that these fish swim close to the sea floor make narrow sawfish extremely susceptible to fishing, especially the use of gill nets and demersal trawls. They’re often, if not always, caught as bycatch.
Notable conservation programs:
Narrow sawfish are nationally protected in Indonesia, but there are few conservation efforts directed at the species throughout its range.
My favorite (and worst) experience:
To save them, I must first find them. That’s the most basic mission for me and my team, and it’s not easy. It took three months in the field before we saw any — and when we finally did, it was seven dead juveniles in a single fisher’s catch in Merauke, Papua.
Photo: Sihar Aditia Silalahi (used with permission)
It was a jarring feeling, seeing my first real sawfishes in the wild but having them be dead. I experienced delight at the chance to finally hold them in my hands, but realized their existence hovers on the brink.
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