The English Volunteer Group Changing How We Study Animals at Night

How can we research animals in the darkness of night, when we can’t even see them properly?

In April 2016, among the spring blossoms in the West Midlands of England, an idea came to Ben Dolan and Paul Hopwood. As certified ringers belonging to the West Midlands Ringing Group — volunteers who mark birds’ legs with bands and unique ID numbers so that researchers can study and track them over time — they were out looking for lapwing chicks. Although they’d managed to find 10 or so birds by eye, others eluded them. Thinking there had to be a better way of locating the chicks, Dolan and Hopwood wondered if thermal imaging might allow them to find birds based on their body heat.

They returned another afternoon with a borrowed thermal camera in hand and tried it out. This time they found more than twice as many of the baby birds.

Inspired, they acquired access to a thermal camera they could use regularly and, the following winter, decided to try using the technology at night.

It was during these dark winter days that they realized how useful thermal could really be.

thermal example
A bird shows up on thermal imaging. Photo courtesy West Midlands Ringing Group

Dolan says thermal imaging can help solve an important conservation problem: If field ecologists don’t see wildlife when they survey during the day, they can declare fields ecological wastelands, leaving the regions open to development without the relevant mitigation strategies to reduce harm to native species.

“And then on the night, we find at times significant numbers of winter migrants utilizing the fields for feeding and roosting,” he says. “So it’s a bit of a worry when daytime surveys are done and nothing of ‘value’ is found, and then on the night we find that actually it is one of the most valuable fields [for local wildlife].”

Waking Up to the Nocturnal

Since they embraced the technology, the West Midlands Ringing Group — which Dolan and Hopwood help run — has pushed the use of thermal imaging for the study of farmland birds. In 2021 they won an award for pioneering the use of the technology in the field.

And it’s not just birds, either: Running ecological surveys, people routinely ignore the needs of all kinds of animals that are active at night.

This bias toward animals who share our circadian rhythm is common throughout the ecological sciences. As it stands, there’s no comprehensive field of study dedicated to nocturnal animals. With up to 30% of vertebrates and 60% of invertebrates predicted to be nocturnal, however, this leaves a massive gap in our understanding of the biosphere — a strange problem to accept in the ongoing global mass extinction.

The lack of study in nocturnal ecology isn’t necessarily due to a lack of trying. More than 70 years ago, American ecologist Orlando Park identified the need to deal with the “nocturnal problem” — to recognize and understand the different needs of nocturnal animals. Even though some humans may consider themselves night owls, human bodies are not really adapted for life under the moon. And that’s always made the study of nocturnal animals difficult.

So how did we study animals at night when we couldn’t even see them properly?

“You just kind of had to infer what animals had done at night based on what you could see, like counting footprints or seeing some of the marks they left behind,” says Wesley Payne, a Ph.D. student in ecology at the University of Hull in Yorkshire, England.

Like the West Midlands Ringing Group, Payne has been using thermal imaging to study the nocturnal behavior of over-wintering waders as part of his doctorate.

“Essentially, thermal just makes it much easier to find whatever you’re looking for,” he says.

Thermal also has some benefits for the birds.

“You’re reducing disturbance because you’re not walking all over the field,” says Dolan. “You can actually see these birds from quite a distance.”

And the benefits of thermal extend far beyond the avian world. Zoologist Priscillia Miard, founder of the Night Spotting Project in Malaysia, has used it to study nocturnal mammals like the slow loris. She has had similar experiences to Dolan’s and Payne’s and says thermal has provided new insights.

“A lot of things we thought about [slow loris] were actually wrong,” she says. “They are more social than we thought, so it really helped research specific behaviors.”

Spreading the Science and the Benefits of Volunteerism

Communicating how thermal has improved their fieldwork has now become a key part of the Ringing Group’s mission. They work directly with other volunteer groups and landowners in England to show them how to use thermal imaging and have set up a global network of interested ringers.

Volunteer ringers play essential roles in conservation. Driven by a passion like birdwatching, they often act as citizen scientists and collect data over many years in their local areas. Professional ecologists, on the other hand, are paid to run surveys to determine the worth of land. This has to be done if someone wants to convert that land to agriculture or housing, for example. The ecologist’s job is to come up with mitigation strategies for protecting local wildlife.

These may appear to serve different roles, but the Ringing Group has started to build a presence in the scientific community, showing that the lines between groups can sometimes blur.

“We’ve written our first paper on thermal and submitted it, and we’re going to write several more as well,” Dolan says. “If you look at academia, there’s not a lot around about thermal imaging for this type of work, so it’s an opportunity for us to share even further.”

Heat Gaps

Even with its wide array of benefits, most ecology companies still don’t seem to be picking the technology up.

“I’m personally not aware of any consultancies that are introducing it as standard practice for breeding and wintering bird surveys,” says Jess Stuart-Smith, an associate ecologist at Focus Environmental Consultants, based in Worcester, England. They use thermal, she says, for studying bats and other consultancies might use thermal for completely nocturnal species, but there are no guidelines for studying birds who may use different land depending on the time of day. Her first experience of using thermal in this capacity came through volunteering for the Ringing Group, and she has slowly been introducing it into her professional work.

Stuart-Smith suggests a lack of awareness explains why nocturnal surveys haven’t become standard practice yet.

“My long-term goal is to get some actual guidelines out there for wintering bird surveys that people can use and implement because you just get a better-rounded picture of land use if you’re looking at it at nighttime as well as daytime,” she says.

But there are also limitations associated with thermal. Miard says research-grade thermal equipment can cost up to $2,000 — an outlay many research-funding agencies aren’t willing to make.

“I think people are interested in thermal, but the price is a big factor that a lot of people here cannot afford,” she says.

Another downside is that the data retrieved can often be quite poor. “What I get mostly is a silhouette of the bird, which has some variation in color, but it can be difficult to tell the species apart,” says Payne.

Where people can’t get close enough to the animal they’re studying — for geographical reasons, for example — thermal becomes less useful. “If you get a dense group of birds, you can’t tell them apart. You just get one blob of heat, because all of the thermal signatures overlap.”

To gather better data, Payne has started using thermal in combination with infrared imaging. Although both technologies detect infrared radiation, they do so at different frequencies, which means the data they generate is completely different. Infrared provides a much more detailed picture of the birds being studied, making it easier to accurately assess the species.

Side-by-side images show the difference in thermal and infrared technologies.
A red-legged partridge in thermal (l) and infrared (r). Photo courtesy West Midlands Ringing Group.

Even so, it’s still a lot harder to find the birds using infrared, as it provides less contrast between the animals and their surroundings than thermal. In that way, the technologies complement one another: One can be used to find the birds, where the other gives more accurate information.

Following his own experience of nocturnal ecology, Payne says the field has a brighter future.

“I think it’s going to grow as equipment becomes cheaper and more portable,” he says. “I really hope it’s going to help conservation and maybe make it more targeted, so that any money going in focuses on where it’s actually going to be most important.”

Meanwhile, Dalton hopes that their work at the Ringing Group shows the value volunteer groups can bring to conservation.

“What we’d like to see is ecology companies, when they speak to landowners, ask if they have volunteer groups on your land surveying? And can you link us with them?” he says. “Groups like ours can offer a hell of a lot to ecology companies — we have that baseline data, which they haven’t got.”

Stuart-Smith has similar thoughts.

“At the end of the day, we’re all doing it for the same goal,” she says. “It’s all about biodiversity net gain. It’s absolutely critical that we’re all interacting with one another.”

Previously in The Revelator:

A Move to Preserve the Night Sky

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The South’s Hidden Climate Threat

It’s not just the coastlines that are recording climate change. Even the mountains of North Carolina are feeling the heat — including some endangered plants.

Excerpted from A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir’s Journey Through an Endangered Land by Dan Chapman. Copyright © 2022 by the author. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Editor’s note: Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman retraced John Muir’s 1867 trek through the South, including the naturalist’s troubling legacy, to reveal environmental damage and loss that’s been largely overlooked.

Boone, North Carolina — It’s a wonder anything survives the ice, snow, and winds that pummel the ridge, let alone the delicate-seeming yellow flowers known as spreading avens. The lovely, long-stemmed perennials are exceedingly rare, officially listed as endangered, and found only in the intemperate highlands of North Carolina and Tennessee. They sprout from shallow acidic soils underlying craggy rock faces and grassy heath balds. At times blasted with full sun, but mostly shrouded in mist, the avens are survivors, Ice Age throwbacks that refuse to die. Geum radiatum is only known to exist in fourteen places, including hard-to-find alpine redoubts reached via deer trail or brambly bushwhacking.

And that is where I find Chris Ulrey, the world’s preeminent spreading avens expert. Granted, not a lot of botanists devote their professional lives to spreading avens. And Chris, a plant ecologist with the National Park Service, doesn’t focus solely on that particular flower, aka Appalachian avens and cliff avens. Yet I know of no other Geum aficionado who, over two weeks each of the last twenty summers, has scoured the highest peaks of the Blue Ridge monitoring the elusive flowers. He has also written a series of authoritative reports on the plant’s status and prospects, all of which underscore that avens are heading down the extinction highway. The culprit? Climate change. Avens, after all, move higher and higher up the mountains in search of cooler climes. So what happens when there’s nowhere else to go? I’d come to this off-piste mountaintop — whose name Chris requests I not mention so rare-plant hunters and rock climbers don’t destroy the remaining avens — to find out.

But Chris is busy, dangling from a hundred-foot rope attached to a vertiginous cliff, rappelling between clumps of avens. At least, I’m told by a colleague that he is. I can’t see Chris. He’s shrouded in thick fog on the other side of a fifty-foot ravine that promises, with one slippery misstep, a most painful death. Occasionally, I can hear Chris. He chirps out the statistics of the latest avens colony — length, width, number of rosettes — either marveling at their hardiness or lamenting their fragility. The colleague duly takes notes and quickly compares them to the flower’s status the previous year. A full scientific accounting will come later. Today is all about the search, and the scenery.Book cover shows city street image next to image of trees

Chris is in his element.

“This is awesome,” he yells skyward, a break in the fog allowing a glimpse of the beatific botanist, head thrown back, arms outstretched, beseeching the heavens.

_______

Most Southerners, if they think about climate change at all, think about the weather. They know about record-breaking temperatures and increasingly nasty storms. They’ll mention droughts or rising seas. They may even connect wildfires and flooding to a warming world. Yet there’s a widespread perception that climate change is mainly a coastal phenomenon. Seventy percent of Americans who live within twenty-five miles of a coast say the changing climate affects their local community, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey. Of those who live more than three hundred miles from the coast, only fifty-seven percent say it affects them.

Perhaps the findings aren’t that surprising. After all, if you witness ever-higher tides and more frequent coastal floods, you’re more likely to believe that something strange is going on. The changes are more subtle, and longer range, across the mountains. But those same climatic forces — higher temperatures, more (and less) precipitation, extreme weather — that hammer the lowlands bedevil every region and ecosystem in the world. And, make no mistake, a warming world portends drastic and irreparable harm to the southern Appalachians, which Muir labeled “the most beautiful deciduous forest I ever saw.”

He never made it to this corner of North Carolina, crossing the Old North State’s southwestern corner instead. The same hills and vales that so entranced Muir during his post–Civil War trek kept a grip on his imagination for the rest of his life. It would take three decades, but Muir eventually returned to the verdant, botanically rich forests of the South. By then he was the nation’s most famous naturalist, his name synonymous with mountains, glaciers, Yosemite, Alaska, and the Sierra Club. In an 1898 letter to Charles Sprague Sargent, the Harvard professor and the nation’s top tree expert, Muir wrote: “I don’t want to die without once more saluting the grand, godly, round-headed trees of the east side of America that I first learned to love and beneath which I used to weep for joy when nobody knew me.”

That fall, Muir joined Sargent and William Canby, a banker and well-regarded amateur botanist, on a month-long tour of the southern Appalachians.  They visited Roan Mountain, the five-mile-long massif of alpine grasslands that explode in a riot of red, pink, and white rhododendrons each spring. Muir, under the weather from days of heavy travel, reposed at the Cloudland Hotel, which straddled the North Carolina–Tennessee line and afforded magnificent views. “All the landscapes in every direction are made up of mountains, a billowing sea of them without bounds as far as one can look,” he wrote to wife Louie, “and every mountain hill & ridge & hollow is densely forested with so many kinds of trees their mere names would fill this sheet.”

Muir made no mention of the spreading avens. Other botanical luminaries did. André Michaux, the famed French botanist, visited Roan in the late eighteenth century and shipped specimens back to Paris. Asa Gray, the ensuing century’s botanist extraordinaire, found avens atop Roan “in the greatest profusion.”

Chris Ulrey has studied Roan’s avens every July for two decades. Compared to The Unnamed Mountain (TUM) that I promised to not identify, Roan is a walk in the park. Motorists can practically drive to the top of the 6,300-foot mountain. Its accessibility, though, makes it an imperfect barometer of the plant’s health. Hikers who leave the AT and other trails trample or pick the flowers. Rock climbers, acid rain, second homes, and ski resorts harm avens elsewhere. But TUM, perhaps more than any other remote mountaintop, offers a truer — and scarier — barometer of the changing climate’s impact on avens and mountain ecology.

Man in helmet and climbing gear hang from the side of a rock face inspecting plants growing on the rock
National Park Service’s Chris Ulrey inspecting a spreading avens clump. Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (CC BY 2.0)

“It’s pristine; nobody comes out here. There are no recreational impacts,” Chris says. “It’s one of the largest populations. We haven’t recorded many deaths. But we rarely see any young plants, which is a concern. If it wasn’t a long-lived plant, it definitely would’ve gone extinct long ago.”

Avens, most likely, were more abundant at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. As the glaciers retreated, and the South warmed, the plants were trapped, unable to migrate farther north. So they crept up the mountains in search of cooler, wetter locales. They settled in their alpine homes above 4,500 feet surrounded by spruces and firs and, in the case of TUM, red oaks. They thrive in humid places with annual temperatures averaging forty-five degrees. Rain and snow amounts may top one hundred inches a year. Most avens face north or northwest, avoiding direct sunlight. Fog is a constant companion. They grow in very shallow soil, as little as two centimeters deep.

Avens made the endangered species list in 1990. A Fish and Wildlife Service “recovery plan” three years later tallied eleven distinct populations of avens; five other groupings had already been extirpated. And eight of the remaining eleven had undergone moderate or significant damage during the previous decade. “Populations are declining and vanishing for reasons that are, in many cases, not clearly understood,” Service biologists wrote.

Chris has a pretty good idea why. In 2016, he authored “Life at the Top: Long-Term Demography, Microclimatic Refugia, and Responses to Climate Change for a High-Elevation Southern Appalachian Endemic Plant,” which appeared in the journal Biological Conservation.  Chris wrote that “climate in the southern Appalachians is projected to rapidly change over the coming few decades [and] is likely to be particularly threatening to rare plants because of their narrow distributions, small population sizes, and specific habitat requirements.”

He’s blunter on top of TUM.

“At the pace we’re going,” he says, “they will not be able to adapt and move — they’ll just blink out.”

Copyright © 2022 by Dan Chapman

Previously in The Revelator:

Move or Change: How Plants and Animals Are Trying to Survive a Warming World

 

Wind Power Is (Finally) Having a Moment

A surge in offshore wind projects has helped make wind power a renewable force.

Wind sweeps across the plains of north-central Oklahoma, spinning the blades of 356 turbines at the Traverse Wind Energy Center. The 998-megawatt facility — the largest wind project built all at one time in North America — came online in March.

It’s a sign of the times, as wind power continues to grow across middle America.

Last year wind was the fourth largest source of electricity generation in the United States — following gas, coal and nuclear — and the largest source of renewable energy. On March 29 it even briefly shot into second place behind gas.

Onshore wind dominates … for now. Texas leads the nation in wind and produces 20% of its generated electricity. In Iowa wind generates 57% of the state’s electricity, with Kansas (44%) and Oklahoma (36%) following.

The pandemic didn’t slow wind development much. The past two years have seen record-breaking installation. In 2020 turbine capacity increased 14.2 gigawatts, with another 17 gigawatts following in 2021. This year 7.6 gigawatts are expected to come online — with half of that capacity coming from Texas.

Utility-scale facilities like Traverse steal the headlines, but much like rooftop solar, there’s also big promise with small-scale, distributed projects. A report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that projects ranging from a 1-kilowatt off-grid turbine to a 10-megawatt community-scale project could make a big contribution to the country’s energy needs. In fact half of our annual electricity consumption could come from smaller, distributed wind capacity, especially when paired with solar or battery storage.

Right now, though, the biggest focus is on large projects — in the water.

a large green house with five small turbines on the roof
A house in Portland, Oregon with wind turbines. Photo: Mark McClure (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

 

Offshore Potential

Last year President Joe Biden announced a U.S. goal of adding 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power capacity — enough to power 10 million homes — by 2030.

After decades when offshore wind stagnated in permitting and political tangles, the Biden administration approved the first two commercial-scale offshore wind projects — Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts and South Fork in the waters between Rhode Island and New York. Nearly a dozen more projects are moving through the permitting pipeline.

Northeast states have jumped to the forefront of the push. New York announced plans to build 9 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035, and about half of that is already under development.

The densely populated region is likely to be a hotspot for wind development.

An auction in February drew $4.37 billion in bids for wind development rights off New York and New Jersey in an area known as the New York Bight. “That is more than three times the revenue received from all U.S. offshore oil and gas lease auctions over the past five years,” reported Reuters.

Close-up view of five offshore turbines in choppy water
The Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island. Photo: Dennis Schroeder / NREL (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

There’s interest farther south, too.

In May TotalEnergies and Duke had the winning bids of a combined $315 million for two lease areas in federal water off the Carolinas. If fully developed, the projects could generate 1.3 gigawatts of offshore wind energy.

The Gulf of Mexico, where thousands of oil platforms dot the waters, may soon be home to offshore wind turbines as the Biden administration reviews 30 million acres of Gulf waters off Texas and Louisiana for possible wind projects.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is expected to release a draft environmental assessment this summer on how offshore wind development would affect the region. Offshore wind jobs are also touted by the administration as a “just transition” for oil and gas workers in the Gulf who are already experienced working on offshore platforms.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards obviously expects good news from BOEM: He’s pushing to add 5 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035.

Floating Turbines

In California wind generates 7% of the state’s electricity. That all comes from turbines on land, but in May the California Energy Commission recommended building 3 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 — and growing that to 10 to 15 gigawatts by 2045.

The federal government has also taken a step toward a lease sale in federal waters off California. Expected in the fall, it would be the first along the Pacific Coast. At the end of May the Department of the Interior issued a proposed sale notice for three possible areas of offshore wind development — one in the Morro Bay Wind Energy Area off central California and two in the Humboldt Wind Energy Area off Northern California.

This opens a 60-day public comment period on the proposed lease areas. If they’re approved their eventual auction could lead to projects that generate 4.5 gigawatts of offshore wind energy — enough to power 1.5 million homes.

one floating turbine in gray sea
A test floating wind turbine in Castine, ME in 2013. Photo: Green Fire Productions (CC BY 2.0)

Offshore wind development in the Pacific will look different than in much of the Atlantic. Because the waters are much deeper, turbines off California will be floating instead of fixed to the ocean floor. The technology is new to the United States but has been in use in European waters for years.

It’s likely to catch on. Oregon officials plan to announce a goal of 3 gigawatts of floating turbines, and Washington could add 2 gigawatts.

It’s not just the West Coast; Maine hopes to explore the possibilities, too. The state has submitted an application to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for a 15-square-mile floating offshore wind research site to refine the technology in the deep waters of the Gulf of Maine.

The Road Ahead

Wind’s progress over recent years is likely to face some speed bumps that could slow — but not halt — the pace of development. Projects will need to be cited and managed to minimize environmental harm. Migratory birds are a particular concern with the development of offshore facilities; so are marine mammals that could become entangled in cables from floating turbines. Other ocean users — like fishers — have pushed back against coastal offshore wind projects.

Supply chain disruptions, rising interest rates and economic unease could also affect growing clean energy companies. But experts say renewables are in a better position now than ever before to ward off a downturn.

What could help ensure favorable winds, though, would be strong policy supporting clean energy — something Congress has yet to deliver. Of particular concern is the fate of the Build Back Better Act, which has been stalled by holdout Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (and a slew of Republicans). If passed, though, it would extend wind and other production tax credits for another decade and help support manufacturing credits for components like wind blades and offshore foundations. That would add more fuel to the fire.

“If it is somehow revived, the clean energy tax title contained in the stalled ‘Build Back Better Act’ would represent one of the largest investments in low carbon and carbon-free energy deployment in the nation’s history,” reported E&E News.

Democrats haven’t given up on the effort yet. If successful, it would give a big boost to the wind industry at a time when the United States desperately needs to make up ground in the climate fight.

As does the rest of the planet. The Global Wind Energy Council — which projects that the world will add more than 110 gigawatts of wind installations each year through 2026 — warns that growth still needs to triple if we hope to avoid climate catastrophe.

That growth could be on its way. The European Union expects to add a record amount of offshore wind this year, while Chile signed a deal in April for three offshore wind developments and a new wind one just started construction in Japan. Meanwhile Taiwan’s biggest offshore wind facility went online April 21, and the first in the Mediterranean started generating electricity the same day.

Those are favorable winds. Whether they’re strong enough remains to be seen.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Offshore Wind Power Is Ready to Boom. Here’s What That Means for Wildlife

Can Species Have ‘Agency’ in Their Own Conservation?

New research suggests understanding species’ social learning and adaptive strategies can make them partners in their salvation.

Animals have individual personalities, can adapt to changing conditions, and can make decisions based on social learning in ways that shape shared human-wildlife spaces. That means they can play an active influence in their own conservation, argues a new paper published in Conservation Biology.

According to the authors, wildlife conservation and management could improve the outcomes of interventions such as translocations, reintroductions and resolving human-wildlife conflicts by explicitly acknowledging these traits — described as “animal agency.”

“Animal agency is an emerging way of seeing animals as ‘helpers’ in their own conservation efforts,” says Matthew Hayek, assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University and the paper’s senior author. “Rather than working against their own idiosyncratic behaviors, conservationists are paying attention to individual animals’ quirks, seeing differences between small groups, and increasingly working with them and achieving better outcomes.”

An Open Mind

But according to the paper, wildlife conservation management usually overlooks the concept of animal agency and prioritizes, as the authors put it, “metrics that treat animals primarily as quantifiable stock.”

To understand this gap, the authors reviewed 190 published evaluations of policies and programs and identified three underlying assumptions that may undermine their results.

First, the policies presuppose that animals from the same species all “behave uniformly” and that behavior mostly remains the same in different contexts.

Second, they assume that animals will revert to an “idealized state of wildness” when they are placed in appropriate wild habitats.

Third, the policies conceive of relationships between humans and wildlife in a narrowly biological or economical way and downplay cultural relationships between humans and animals.

But animals are not mathematical formulae that provide the same answer every time. If they deviate from wildlife managers’ assumptions, they can inadvertently undermine human-established conservation goals.

A wildlife manager overlooks a small beaver in a wire cage
Adam Hundley with a juvenile beaver captured in a live trap at FE Warren Air Force Base. The beaver was released, as nuisance adult beavers were the target of the live trapping. Photo: Alex Schubert/USFWS

The paper lays out several documented cases where animals acted in unanticipated ways, demonstrating their agency and thwarting management efforts in the process.

For example, elephants in Kenya had been detusked to prevent them smashing fences, but they devised new ways of breaking through barriers. Leopards in India were translocated to a protected nature reserve but soon returned to the edges of an urban area, where they conflicted with humans. And in the United States, kangaroo rats that had been translocated to newly restored habitat ended up losing previously established social connections, which resulted in low reproduction and survival rates.

A leopard crowches among the rocks in a waterway
Photo: Joris Komen (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Survival rates can also suffer when “misbehaving” animals earn themselves the label of “problematic” — which can result in their relocation or even their extermination.

But those are reversible problems. The paper also highlights how integrating animal agency in wildlife management and conservation can shift priorities and help policymakers and practitioners shape and implement conservation plans.

To take one aspect of animal agency — personality — bold individuals are more likely to tolerate human disturbance, use conservation infrastructure, or colonize new areas. This has implications for interventions like wildlife-corridor planning, the authors argue, because the scientific models for how animals use corridors present “strikingly different results when different behavioral characteristics are included.”

As another example, accounting for social learning among groups can shift conservationists’ focus from preserving the reproductive potential of younger group members to preserving a group’s culture and generational knowledge. As the case of the kangaroo rat shows, maintaining social ties for some species can matter more for the survival of individual animals than placing them in an ecologically correct habitat.

Collective Agency

This kind of approach can save not just individual animals but whole animal communities.

In the United Kingdom, the success of vaccinating badgers against bovine tuberculosis as an alternative to culling requires engaging with their agency — something I’ve experienced as a badger vaccination volunteer for the past two years. The badgers must be habituated to taking bait — peanuts — and going in and out of traps over a period of about two weeks. For each badger community, volunteers use their own knowledge and that of landowners — such as how bold or shy the animals are, how they behaved during previous vaccination rounds, and how they use the land around their dens — to determine where to set bait and assess the likelihood they will be trapped successfully.

protest art
Badger cull protest art. Photo: Maureen Barlin (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

A more famous example occurred in the Dutch city of Leiden in 2014, where conservationists saved gulls from a proposed cull by helping the city implement measures to change the behavior of both humans and birds.

The gulls, lured to cities by the destruction of their natural coastal habitats and the promise of easy meals, began nesting noisily on rooftops, tearing open garbage bags, and stealing food. Some species, like the black-headed gull and common gull, are in decline, but one Dutch politician proposed lifting their legal protections and shooting them.

That met with opposition from De Vogelbescherming, a bird-protection organization, which offered several alternative interventions. These included using ropes to make rooftops unsuitable for breeding, using stronger garbage bags that could not be torn open, educating people against feeding the birds, creating nesting islands by the coast, and observing which places the birds preferred.

This approach, philosopher Eva Meijer wrote in the 2016 book Animal Ethics in the Age of Humans, “illustrate[s] how we can experiment with interspecies decision-making … When conflicts arise, there needs to be communication [between species] about who can live where.” Without the agency-based methods of conservationists, culling as a management strategy might have prevailed and undermined efforts to preserve dwindling gull populations.

Solving Problems

While many management policies contain shortcomings when it comes to thinking of animals as agents, “on the ground, there are people seeing these phenomena regularly,” says Hayek. This means that knowledge of animal agency may inform decisions made by wildlife managers even when it’s not officially part of policy.

One example cited in the paper comes from a 2016 study on human-bear cohabitation in the Colorado Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. In 1985 Colorado Parks and Wildlife introduced a management policy known as the “two-strike directive” to manage so-called “nuisance bears.” One strike for nuisance behavior, such as breaking into a house to find food, gets a bear trapped, tagged and relocated; a second strike gets them killed. The study explained that the directive — which is still in place — is based on assumptions about bears adapting their behavior in a predictable way to the cues given to them by humans about where they are and are not welcome, such as relocating them to “‘prime’ bear habitat.”

A bear cub rummages around in a dumpster
A bear cub rummages in a dumpster at Hotchkiss National Fish Hatchery during the spring. Photo: Craig Eaton/USFWS

But when bears interpret the cues differently, or behave in some unexpected manner, the wildlife managers who implement the directive learn and adapt their methods accordingly.

“The wildlife managers I spoke to over there acknowledge that these bears have agency, they are individuals, they have a certain way of behaving,” says Susan Boonman-Berson, a co-author on the study and a researcher in human-wildlife conflict, who spent two months in Colorado in 2012 observing the interactions between black bears and wildlife managers. “They want to understand these specific animals, and they don’t see them just generally as bears.”

One manager Boonman-Berson interviewed described how different bears have their own “methods” of getting into people’s property. The manager had to observe and understand the signs they left behind at the site of a break-in to determine the best management strategies. For example, a bear who broke into a car because it still smelled like the owners’ recently purchased cantaloupes could be lured to a trap with fresh fruit.

This also helps managers avoid trapping the wrong bear, perhaps one who might simply wander into a trap set for the “problem” bear. Ironically, this can earn the wrong bear a strike because, by entering the trap, they’re considered to have become more habituated to accessing “easy food.” Recognizing animal agency can also challenge the idea of “problem” or “nuisance” animals that policies like the two-strike directive seek to address. Humans can inadvertently attract animals by providing easy access to food, making urban spaces more attractive than the prime habitat.

“When we attract them and feed them and are really actually inviting them to come closer,” says Boonman-Berson, “I think we should not speak about the ‘problem animal’ because the animal is not a problem.”

The answer, she says, often involves focusing on educating humans rather than managing animals.

“They also call it people management [in Colorado],” says Boonman-Berson. “It’s not black bear management, it’s people management.” The wildlife managers she observed educated residents by encouraging them to secure their trash, keep doors locked, and not grow fruit trees inside areas where they didn’t want bears to venture. This is an example of how humans and animals both contribute to shaping shared environments — one of the tenets of animal agency.

Barriers Remain

These examples show some of the possibilities for integrating the concept of animal agency into wildlife management — but also the challenges. Different aspects of animal agency — personality, social learning, adaptability, and relationship with humans — may be more or less relevant depending on the species and contexts, Hayek and his coauthors argue in their paper. They also acknowledge that there are barriers to a more widespread integration of animal agency into conservation practices, since it introduces “nonuniformity, uncertainty and complexity at the modeling, planning and implementation stages” and might require “more complex, expensive and computationally intensive simulations.”

Indeed, the integration of animal agency into conservation plans has so far been “piecemeal, temporary, and not very popular,” Hayek says.

But, he adds, acknowledging the diversity of behaviors and experiences among animals of the same species can at least start to challenge the assumptions that guide much wildlife management and conservation.

“We can find plenty of examples of animals and humans actually learning from one another in a pretty rich way,” says Hayek. “And that is kind of a mark against the top-down nature of some conservation programs that don’t look to animals for direction.”

Previously in The Revelator:

The Surprising Clue to Reducing Human-Elephant Conflict: Minerals

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On the Clean Water Act’s 50th Birthday, What Should We Celebrate?

Some rivers and lakes wouldn’t be swimmable today without this critical law. But it could use a refresh to help meet our current challenges.

The Clean Water Act came to life the same year I did, kicking and screaming and full of promise. Now we’re both turning 50 — me and the law formally known as the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972.

The half-century mark is a good time to take stock of one’s performance, and it’s fair to say that, like me, the Clean Water Act has some wrinkles and blemishes. As a longtime environmental journalist covering the Chesapeake Bay, I’ve seen the Act struggle as it reached middle age. At times, it hasn’t been all it could be, or all it should be.

It tackled the easy problems first, like factory pollution and sewage discharges, while putting off the harder lifts like agriculture and stormwater. And it’s become weak in the face of problems it doesn’t regulate, like manure runoff from small operations. It can seem, well, tired. As if it’s lost its fight, its verve, and it’s still following routines that don’t quite get the job done. We’re still wrangling over what waters fall under its jurisdiction, and what we define as a waterway. At 50, we should know what we are, right?

But I’ve seen major improvements that wouldn’t have happened without the law. So even if a blowout party is unwarranted (it’s still Covid times, after all), I think the Act is entitled to at least a nice glass of clean H20.

Fifty years after its passage, the Clean Water Act has restored fisheries in many rivers, lakes and estuaries. In Chicago, Pittsburgh, Chattanooga and Washington, D.C., residents can kayak on rivers that were once so fetid no one would dare go near them. Bostonians have taken clean water a step further; they can swim in the Charles. Musicians Randy Newman and Michael Stipe immortalized the burning smell of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River in their songs; today, largely thanks to the Act, the river has a state scenic river designation and has become a centerpiece of Cleveland’s downtown.

Kayakers on river with downtown buildings in the background
Kayakers on the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Photo: Erik Drost (CC BY 2.0)

With its cousin, the Clean Air Act, regulators forced polluters to stop emitting nitrogen, phosphorus, mercury and other pollutants into the air. Steel production, coal mining, oil and gas drilling, nuclear power generation — all these industries were put on notice. If they polluted the water, they wouldn’t be in business long. The government and citizens could file suit under the Clean Water Act. Not wanting to face the negative publicity or the fines, many industries worked with regulators to clean themselves up.

The Clean Water Act doesn’t celebrate its 50-year-milestone alone. It had help. On June 14, 1972 — the day I was born — the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of the pesticide DDT, which was killing eagles and ospreys in massive numbers. That October, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act to safeguard ocean mammals from poaching and other threats.

Thanks to these efforts, Chesapeake Bay now has more nesting pairs of bald eagles than any other place on the U.S. East Coast. The nation’s bird soars at Conowingo Dam, a power-generating station on the Susquehanna River, and at Aberdeen Proving Ground, which was once on the nation’s list of most hazardous sites for its legacy of pollution from munitions testing. Crabbers ply the waters from Baltimore to Norfolk; oyster dredgers work steadily in the Tangier Sound.

No species could thrive without clean water — nor could the fishers whose livelihoods depend on it. Aquaculture, too, has taken a hold in the Chesapeake. The most important consideration for where to locate an oyster farm or hatchery? The water’s salinity, and its cleanliness.

Eagle taking flight from dock on the bay
A bald eagle works on a mid-day fish along a dock pile at Mill Creek in Hampton, Virginia. Photo: Aileen Devlin/Virginia Sea Grant (CC BY-ND 2.0)

I’ve long admired the fortitude of the bipartisan Congress that overrode President Richard Nixon’s veto and passed the law to forever protect the waters of the United States. It wasn’t the first law to do it — the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 made it illegal to discharge refuse of any kind into navigable waters, and it later required federal permits to put structures in the water. But the Clean Water Act expanded protections to all waterways.

Monumental as it was, though, now the Clean Water Act at 50 needs a bit of a refresh, since the pollution it’s meant to stop has changed. In the Chesapeake Bay, our problem today is largely not industrial smokestacks but rather the detritus of how we live our lives. The Act doesn’t regulate these “nonpoint sources,” as we call them: the pesticides coming off our lawns, the motor oil and mercury in our stormwater, the nitrogen and phosphorus from the manure that farmers apply to their fields. We’ve made huge strides in sewage treatment, in standards for nitrogen emissions that end up in our waterways from cars, and in regulations for large animal facilities. But we have yet to figure out how to regulate the pollution that doesn’t come out of a tailpipe or a smokestack.

Another area that needs improvement: EPA officials regularly pass most of the Act’s enforcement to states, and states chronically understaff inspection units. Earlier this year Maryland Environment Secretary Ben Grumbles promised the legislature he would ramp up efforts, but only after lawmakers reviewed reports of how much the situation had deteriorated. If enforcement is lousy in a blue state bordering Washington, D.C., imagine how it looks in other states. All of them need to look at the teeth in their laws.

Laws like the Clean Water Act are good at stopping bad things, but they’re not always up to date for allowing good things. And that’s what we need now, whether it’s large-scale wind turbines in our oceans or manmade islands to protect crucial habitat for shorebirds. We need to eliminate barriers to beneficial uses of natural material, such as living shorelines, and not make the process of farming oysters so onerous. We need developers to understand that filling a wetland and creating another is nothing like no-net-loss; it’s a capitulation of everything we hold dear. Water ecosystems take decades to evolve and grow; laws that protect them must take into account the importance of legacy plants that hold roots together and protect land and water.

Despite the wear and tear, the Clean Water Act is holding up. The women’s magazines keep telling us 50 is still young and vibrant. And I hope that’s true for this law. There’s a lot more to do.

Creative Commons

Previously in The Revelator:

Scientists Find New Way to Reduce Marine ‘Dead Zones’

Building Climate Equity From the Ground Up

We can’t achieve a just clean energy transition if people are struggling to pay their bills and stay in their homes, says equity expert Carmelita Miller. 

Carmelita Miller recalls the black cloud of smoke she saw in the sky the evening of Sept. 9, 2010, when she stepped out of the train station in South San Francisco. Her phone lit up with messages from concerned friends and family. She’d soon learn that a gas pipeline owned by the local power company, PG&E, had exploded in a residential neighborhood a few miles from her home, killing eight people.

Just two years later an explosion across the bay, at a Chevron refinery in Richmond, sent another black cloud of toxic chemicals into the air — and 15,000 people to the emergency room.the ask

“It’s so easy to be cynical about climate justice when things like that are so close to your family,” she says.

Since then she’s seen a growing concern in California over wildfires and heatwaves, situations exacerbated by climate change and fossil fuels. At the same time, Covid hardships have pushed energy utility debt in California to nearly $3 billion, and many families have increasingly struggled to pay their utility bills.

And low-income communities and communities of color are disproportionately affected — by both climate threats and energy debt.

black smoke at refinery
A fire at Chevron’s Richmond, CA refinery in 2012. Photo: Nick Fullerton, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Miller, who was born in the Philippines and grew up in South San Francisco, has spent the past decade trying to get regulators and policymakers to address this burden, and make sure that these same communities aren’t left behind in the clean energy transition. After receiving a law degree, she joined the Greenlining Institute in 2013, eventually becoming the senior director of climate equity. Last month she was hired as the first director of energy equity strategies at the nonprofit RMI. The organization has spent 40 years creating global programs to help speed the transition to clean energy, and her new position will address equity across all of the institute’s programs.

The Revelator spoke to Miller about climate inequities, why the issue is personal for her, and how to best support communities.

You studied the classics in college, before getting a law degree. How did you get involved in climate equity issues?

I always knew that I was going to end up in a form of racial justice advocacy. Even in law school I focused on issues like immigration and employment. It was very natural for me to find programs that weren’t benefiting communities or were harming them.

At Greenlining I was energy counsel and then, eventually, director of the energy and climate team. I worked on low-income proceedings of the California Public Utility Commission and demand-side or customer programs.

It became very clear to me that not a lot of people were paying attention to the heavy financial burden that many community members — even my own family members — were carrying in terms of paying for their energy bills.

Energy equity is personal for you?

I’m way too familiar with it because I grew up poor. I grew up in a household where [making sure we had] housing was primary. But then everything else was a constant negotiation, every paycheck, and every month. Do you get to see the dentist this time around or do you pay your energy bills?

When I joined the Greenlining Institute we were seeing the energy burden in California was so high that many Californians were getting disconnected [from energy services]. That was exacerbated by the recession in 2007 and 2008.

When you overlay those people losing their energy services with those communities impacted by climate change, many are the same. They’re low income communities, vulnerable communities.

We saw people who were going to be disconnected from their power, which could cause them to get evicted, which could cause them to lose their children to Child Protective Services. And then at the same time, those same people are also at risk of being surrounded by wildfire and dealing with extreme heat. That was a very real scenario. It still is a very real scenario.

[A couple of years ago] we were advocating for decarbonizing buildings and transportation to plan for a just transition to clean energy. And then when Covid hit we saw that people couldn’t even keep their homes. California still has a lot of folks who are in debt for energy because Covid just devastated lives and finances.

It became so clear to us that we couldn’t really advocate for energy efficiency, electrification and all the components that will decarbonize our built environment if folks can’t even pay their bills.

What have you seen change in the last decade you’ve been doing this work?

When I started at Greenlining almost 10 year ago, energy and climate justice were separate issues. Now things look different.

We know that energy can be a contributor [to our climate problems], but also a source of benefit and solutions. Companies and governments are beginning to see that and act on it.

Even those who have been afraid to touch the climate issue — banks, the financial sector — we’re showing them that not only is it worth investing in [climate solutions], but we’ll soon be at a time when we won’t have a choice not to.

As RMI’s first director of energy equity strategies, what are your goals?

RMI saw that it had a gap in focusing on residents and particularly frontline communities. In bringing me in, our goal is to create strategies for RMI moving forward that embeds [climate equity] from the get-go.

We hope to lean into our partnerships with organizations on the ground, environmental justice and equity organizations, to ensure that we’re contributing and not taking on someone else’s role. We’re going to figure out what supporting environmental justice and BIPOC communities is for RMI, which focuses on energy transmission and the way we consume energy.

What would success look like?

In the past couple of years, especially because of Covid, it’s hard to feel hopeful and find silver linings. We had people stuck at home and surrounded by wildfire, but it also pushed them to speak out and say, “This ‘business as usual’ — that can’t continue. Let’s talk about what clean energy hasn’t done for me in the past. And let’s talk about what it should do for me and my family.”

Ten or 20 years from now, if I can see that community members are able to show up to whatever forum is happening with knowledge handy so they can advocate for whatever kind of future they want to have for the families, that would be huge.

What’s your advice for others interested in climate equity?

Let’s take the idea of self-determination very seriously. People know what they want for their families. What can we do as advocates, as think tanks, as governmental entities to support that?

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Previously in The Revelator:

Justice First: How to Make the Clean Energy Transition Equitable

 

Why It’s Time to Include Fungi in Global Conservation Goals

Without fungi life on Earth would be unrecognizable. Yet these valuable organisms remain overlooked.

It’s no secret that Earth’s biodiversity is at risk. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 26% of all mammals, 14% of birds and 41% of amphibians are currently threatened worldwide, mainly due to human impacts such as climate change and development.

Other forms of life are also under pressure, but they are harder to count and assess. Some scientists have warned of mass insect die-offs, although others say the case hasn’t been proved. And then there are fungi — microbes that often go unnoticed, with an estimated 2 million to 4 million species. Fewer than 150,000 fungi have received formal scientific descriptions and classifications.

If you enjoy bread, wine or soy sauce, or have taken penicillin or immunosuppressant drugs, thank fungi, which make all of these products possible. Except for baker’s yeast and button mushrooms, most fungi remain overlooked and thrive hidden in the dark and damp. But scientists agree that they are valuable organisms worth protecting.

As mycologists whose biodiversity work includes studying fungi that interact with millipedes, plants, mosquitoes and true bugs, we have devoted our careers to understanding the critical roles fungi play. These relationships can be beneficial, harmful or neutral for the fungus’s partner organism. But it’s not an overstatement to say that without fungi breaking down dead matter and recycling its nutrients, life on Earth would be unrecognizable.

Healthy Ecosystems Need Fungi

The amazing biological fungal kingdom includes everything from bracket fungi, molds and yeasts to mushrooms and more. Fungi are not plants, although they’re usually stocked near fresh produce in grocery stores. In fact, they’re more closely related to animals.

But fungi have some unique features that set them apart. They grow by budding or as long, often branching, threadlike tubes. To reproduce, fungi typically form spores, a stage for spreading and dormancy. Rather than taking food into their bodies to eat, fungi release enzymes onto their food to break it down and then absorb sugars that are released. The fungal kingdom is very diverse, so many fungi break the mold.

Fungi play essential ecological roles worldwide. Some have been forming critical partnerships with plant roots for hundreds of millions of years. Others break down dead plants and animals and return key nutrients to the soil so other life forms can use them.

Fungi are among the few organisms that can degrade lignin, a main component of wood that gives plants their rigidity. Without fungi, our forests would be littered with huge piles of woody debris.

a cluster of small beige mushrooms on green moss
Fungi growing on woody debris. Photo: ramendan (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Still other fungi form unique mutualistic partnerships with insects. Flavodon ambrosius, a white rot decay fungus, not only serves as the primary source of nutrition for certain fungus-farming ambrosia beetles, but it also quickly out-competes other wood-colonizing fungi, which allows these beetles to build large, multigenerational communities. Similarly, leaf-cutter ants raise Leucoagaricus gongylophorus as food by gathering dead plant matter in their nests to feed their fungus partner.

A Mostly Unknown Kingdom

We can only partially appreciate the benefits fungi provide, since scientists have a narrow and very incomplete view of the fungal kingdom. Imagine trying to assemble a 4-million-piece jigsaw puzzle with only 3% to 5% of the pieces. Mycologists struggle to formally describe Earth’s fungal biodiversity while simultaneously assessing various species’ conservation status and tracking losses.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species currently includes 551 fungi, compared to 58,343 plants and 12,100 insects. About 60% of these listed fungal species are gilled mushrooms or lichenized fungi, which represent a very narrow sampling of the fungal kingdom.

Asked what a fungus looks like, the average person will probably imagine a mushroom, which is partly correct. Mushrooms are “fruiting bodies,” or reproductive structures, that only certain fungi produce. But a majority of fungi don’t produce fruiting bodies that are visible to the eye, or any at all, so these “microfungi” go largely overlooked.

Many people see fungi as frightening or disgusting. Today, although positive interest in fungi is growing, species that cause diseases — such as chytrid fungus in amphibians and white-nose syndrome in bats — still receive more attention than fungi playing essential, beneficial roles in the environment.

Protecting Our Fungal Future

Even with limited knowledge about the status of fungi, there is increasing evidence that climate change threatens them as much as it threatens plants, animals and other microbes. Pollution, drought, fire and other disturbances all are contributing to losses of precious fungi.

red spiky fungus in tree branch
A cedar-apple rust fungus in an Eastern red cedar tree. Photo: Matthew Beziat (CC BY-NC 2.0)

This isn’t just true on land. Recent studies of aquatic fungi, which play all kinds of important roles in rivers, lakes and oceans, have raised concerns that little is being done to conserve them.

It is hard to motivate people to care about something they do not know about or understand. And it’s difficult to establish effective conservation programs for organisms that are mysterious even to scientists. But people who care about fungi are trying. In addition to the IUCN Fungal Conservation Committee, which coordinates global fungal conservation initiatives, various nongovernment organizations and nonprofits advocate for fungi.

Over the past two years, we have seen a surge of public interest in all things fungal, from home grow kits and cultivation courses to increased enrollment in local mycological societies. We hope this newfound acceptance can benefit fungi, their habitats and people who study and steward them. One measure of success would be for people to ask not just whether a mushroom is poisonous or edible, but also whether it needs protection.

Delegations from most of the world’s countries will meet in China this fall for a major conference on protecting biodiversity. Their goal is to set international benchmarks for conserving life on Earth for years to come. Mycologists want the plan to include mushrooms, yeasts and molds.

Anyone who takes their curiosity outdoors can use community science platforms, such as iNaturalist, to report their observations of fungi and learn more. Joining a mycology club is a great way to learn how to find and harvest fungi responsibly, without overpicking or damaging their habitats.

Fungi are forming important networks and partnerships all around us in the environment, moving resources and information in all directions between soil, water and other living things. To us, they exemplify the power of connection and cooperation – valuable traits in this precarious phase of life on Earth.The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Previously in The Revelator:

Are Wildlife Identification Apps Good for Conservation?

 

How the Media Stokes Needless Fears About Sharks

Sharks rarely bite people, so why are so many people afraid of them? It has a lot to do with the media, says shark scientist David Shiffman in a new book.

Adapted from Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive With the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator by David Shiffman. Copyright 2022. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

Shark bites are, statistically, so unlikely that in all functional reality you will never experience one. Chapman University conducts an annual Survey of American Fears in which they ask a random sample of Americans about things they’re afraid of. In 2017, sharks were the #41 fear of Americans, with more than 25% of respondents reporting that they are afraid of them. That’s tens of millions of people who are afraid of an animal that kills fewer people than being careless while taking selfies. So why are so many people so afraid of sharks?cover of book with two sharks swimming under water

As reported in a June 27, 2019, National Geographic article about the psychology of fear, people are afraid of sharks for a fairly simple reason: because sharks are large wild animals that can hurt or kill you. It makes sense to be afraid of potentially dangerous animals, despite the very small risk. The fact that they usually don’t hurt people doesn’t mean that they can’t or won’t hurt you. Humans are hardwired to try and avoid being killed by wild animals, which also explains our fear of things like snakes, which are also extremely unlikely to harm you. In general, humans are really bad at conceptualizing relative risk, something that plagues not only the discourse surrounding sharks but also lots of political issues, including gun control, immigration, and the global war on terrorism.

Since that’s a relatively unsatisfying explanation, I’ll go into a little more detail.

Inflammatory Media Coverage of Sharks

Sharks are a frequent subject of popular press coverage, and are rarely covered in a positive light. A 2012 Conservation Biology article looked at hundreds of examples of sharks being written about in major U.S. or Australian newspapers. The authors found that the most common topic of these articles, by far, was sharks biting humans. More than half of all articles about sharks in major papers from 2000 to 2010 were about a shark bite; only 11% even mentioned shark conservation. The article pointed out that this focus on shark violence is likely to be a problem and suggested that experts make an active effort to speak with the popular press about shark research and conservation topics instead of shark bites.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I’ve been using the phrase “shark bites” and not the term “shark attack,” which you may be more familiar with. When you hear the phrase “shark attack,” you picture the shark from Jaws, a malicious creature stalking the coast and killing intentionally simply because it’s evil. As we’ve seen, that’s just not what happens; the phrase “shark attack” is therefore misleading and inflammatory. A 2013 paper by Robert Hueter and Christopher Neff instead suggested a new typology of shark–human interaction terms, including “shark sighting,” “shark encounter,” “shark bite,” and “fatal shark bite”; I use their terminology here.

Due to the “if it bleeds, it leads” principle of some unscrupulous strains of journalism, whenever any shark bites anyone anywhere in the world, it’s headline news everywhere. This creates the false impression that these events are much more common than they really are, especially when very minor bites get inflammatory coverage. The same 2013 Neff and Hueter paper I mentioned above performed a content analysis of how shark “attacks” were covered in the Australian press, and found a startling statistic: in 38% of reported “shark attacks,” THE SHARK DID NOT EVEN TOUCH THE HUMAN. It simply swam near them in a way that the person found threatening or scary.

Sometimes inflammatory media coverage is pretty easy to identify: “Shark Research Makes Us No Safer,” “Blood in the Water But Experts Are Still at Sea,” “Conservation Policies Value Sharks Over Human Lives,” “Has Our Admiration For Sharks Gone Too Far?”, “Great White Shark: Endangered or Just a Danger to Humans?” These are all headlines from one columnist at one newspaper (Fred Pawle at the Australian) that date to the last couple of years. But even the regular language used by journalists who aren’t conspiracy theorists can be inflammatory and fear-mongering. Referring to the ocean, which is a shark’s home, as “shark-infested waters” suggests that there’s something wrong or bad about sharks being there. Referring to wild animals accidentally injuring people as “bloodthirsty” or “monsters” is incorrect and perpetuates public fear and misunderstanding. Similarly, a shark swimming normally and minding its own business is neither “lurking” nor “stalking” humans.

Sometimes popular press coverage is inflammatory even when it’s not talking about sharks that bite people. One particularly egregious example of this happened in January 2015, when some Australian fishers caught a frilled shark in their nets. This long and skinny deep-sea dweller has small but sharp teeth and a snake- or eel-like body. It can grow up to six feet long. Headlines about this incident included words like “Horrific” (NPR), “Terrifying” (the Independent), and “Like a Horror Movie” (Fox News). CNN asked, “What brought this deep-sea monster to the surface?” (It was probably the giant net that it got caught in.)

Sometimes this media coverage takes the form of misidentifying a species in a way that inspires public fear. Recall that, in addition to shark bites being vanishingly rare, most shark species have never killed a human. One outrageous example of inflammatory coverage appeared in a 2014 Daily Mail article, which asked “Is this a great white off the coast of Cornwall?”

Even a cursory glance at the image presented showed that it was clearly not a great white — a sometimes-dangerous and fear-inspiring species — but rather a harmless, plankton-eating basking shark. In an article I wrote for New Scientist analyzing this particular case, I pointed out a series of major flaws in this Daily Mail article. For one thing, the author, Harriet Arkell, didn’t interview a single qualified credentialed expert. She did, however, interview a fisher who wrongly claimed that the only large fish in UK waters were great whites.

Galapagos shark
A curious Galapagos shark approaches scientists. Photo: NOAA and Richard Pyle/Bishop Museum

Making a common but nonetheless grievous error, Arkell also interviewed a self-described “shark aficionado” (read: someone who thinks sharks are neat but doesn’t have any relevant credentials or expertise). As I wrote at the time, “Why quote a shark aficionado, a non-expert who thinks sharks are cool, for a story like this? Can you imagine if journalists did this for other types of story? The White House announced intentions to bomb Islamic State targets in Syria, but counterterrorism aficionado Steve said that he’s pretty sure the organization is actually hiding in Peru. Markets cheered the move to reduce interest rates, but finance aficionado John said that everyone should just buy gold and bury it in their backyards. It would never happen, because it’s ridiculous.”

Similarly, a much-hyped 2013 photo allegedly showed a SHARK IN THE WATER NEAR CHILDREN! Looking at this photo, though, it clearly reveals that the animal in question is not a shark, but a dolphin — which means that an entire week of fear-inducing news was about literally nothing at all. It’s perhaps worth noting here that several of the self-described shark experts who claimed this was a shark were non-scientists who regularly appear on Shark Week programming.

Sometimes, this fear-inducing media coverage could just as easily be dubbed “Fish Seen in Water,” as in the case of a November 2017 Facebook post by CBS Miami with the headline “Spine-Tingling Swim: Tiger Shark Swims Extremely Close to Miami Beach.”

The shark in question didn’t bother anyone, it was just swimming in its natural habitat. Similarly, a February 2018 article in the Charlotte Observer had the headline “A Dangerous Mako Shark Is Haunting NC’s Outer Banks and Won’t Leave.” This shark didn’t so much as smile at anyone. It was swimming through its home, but that particular newspaper headline is calculated to frighten. And it “won’t leave?” Where do you want it to go? It lives in the ocean! Sometimes these articles mention that a shark is “near a beach,” which is another way of saying “in the water, which is its home.” And while we’re talking about this, I’d like to inform Shark Week shows like Shallow Water Invasion that this behavior isn’t new. Sharks always feed near shore; what’s new is everyone has a camera with them all the time, whether it is an iPhone or a drone or a GoPro.

In recent years, particularly flagrant examples of inflammatory media coverage have featured drone footage that shows a shark swimming near humans without bothering them at all. The big story is apparently that the people had a lovely day at the beach without even knowing a shark was near them — isn’t that TERRIFYING?

This kind of sensationalist and inaccurate media coverage is a frequent source of frustration for shark scientists, educators, and conservationists.

Copyright 2022 David Shiffman

Previously in The Revelator

How to Save Sharks and Rays From Extinction

 

The Fight for an Invisible Fish

I became a plaintiff in a lawsuit for the Clear Lake hitch — a fish I’ve never seen. As the species quickly disappears, how much longer will it swim the waters of California?

This spring, in response to reports of dead and dying fish, teams of government wildlife staff and Tribal environmental specialists grabbed their backpack electrofishers, dip nets, buckets, aerated coolers and rubber gloves. For weeks they searched along drought-stressed creeks to save what fish they could find. One by one, they gently stunned and netted 360 adults and fry (juveniles) in rapidly diminishing pools before transporting them for release into a nearby lake.

This was not the first such rescue — similar efforts to save the rare and rapidly declining Clear Lake hitch (Lavinia exilicaulda chi) took place in 2014, 2016 and 2018.

dead hitch
Dead hitch in a vineyard irrigation pond in 2019. Photo: Sarah Ryan.

The Clear Lake hitch is one of 13 species endemic to California’s largest, oldest and now most toxic lake. Known as chi to local tribes, the hitch teeter on the edge of extinction, a fate to which their cousins, two other formerly endemic lake species — the thicktail chub (last seen in 1938) and the Clear Lake splittail (last seen in the 1970s) — have already succumbed.

Clear Lake hitch are vanishing because of our unabated appetites for fossil fuels, sportfishing, irrigation water and wine. They face a seemingly unending series of threats, including climate change-exacerbated drought and rising lake-water temperatures, the introduction of non-native predatory fish, a legacy Superfund mercury site, water diversions to an adjacent county possessing historic water rights, over-appropriated and unmonitored groundwater extractions, and fertilizer and pesticide runoffs from lakeside vineyards causing eutrophication and toxic algal blooms.

It’s us. It’s all of us.

hitch in net
Hitch in a net, courtesy of Alix Tyler, Big Valley Rancheria EPA Office.

Hitch used to spawn in 10 Clear Lake tributaries. Now they’re found, intermittently, in two. California’s most prominent ichthyologist, Peter Moyle, has predicted the hitch’s extinction within this century.

These same forces affect other lake fish, their benthic and shoreline tule reed habitats, and the cultural core of the hitch’s first consumers and venerators: the Pomo. These Indigenous peoples, with whom I work as an ethnoecologist, have occupied the full extent of Clear Lake’s watershed since time immemorial, yet in contemporary times their federal allocated territories have shrunk to under five miles of a 120-mile shoreline.

State Protection, But Not Good Enough

In the summer of 2014, after the worst hitch spawning records at the time, the California Fish and Game Commission designated the hitch as a threatened species. This overdue action came in response to a Center for Biological Diversity* petition accompanied by the agency’s own reports of an 92% loss of hitch spawning habit. It also followed a meeting filled with a vanload of tribal members providing public testimony, including a short summary video I produced and thrust into their hands at the last minute.

* (Editor’s note: The Revelator is published by, but editorially independent from, the Center for Biological Diversity.)

While the threatened species designation was noteworthy, it remains a proverbial drop in the bucket.

As the state’s most imperiled fish, Clear Lake hitch outrank 35 other extinction-prone species and subspecies of fish on California’s threatened and endangered species list.

The state has achieved some conservation advances in the past few years. The listing of the hitch, combined with Big Valley Rancheria’s pathbreaking water-quality monitoring program showing off-the-charts cyanotoxin events on Clear Lake, led to the passage of Assembly Bill 707 and the creation of the Blue Ribbon Committee for the Rehabilitation of Clear Lake, accompanied by a $22 million investment for research and restoration.

But it’s not enough.

Indignities

Where they remain, the hitch struggle to survive amidst all the indignities we heap upon our waterways: endless trash and pollutants, dams, barriers, and roadways, as if wild-flowing waters are dumpsters and construction zones instead of homesteads and nurseries that contain vulnerable, oxygen-dependent beings who swim, forage, mate, and raise their young.

Last year biologists didn’t spot a single juvenile hitch. We don’t know if this was due to infrequent monitoring during the pandemic, severely low counts of reproductive adults in 2017-2019, or creek-spawned fry prevented from making the journey to Clear Lake.

Given the hitch’s typical life span of 5-7 years, one field biologist compared this five-year juvenile recruitment failure to the equivalent of a regional human population going childless for 50 years.

The catastrophic decline of the hitch follows a familiar trope, one repeated for salmon, steelhead and sturgeon — all native fish intrinsically bound to Tribal lifeways. In each case, there were once millions upon millions of these fish, so abundant they overflowed every waterway, so many a person couldn’t walk across the creek without stepping on them. Then came Euro-American settlers, filled with greed for quick profits, ecological ignorance and cultural arrogance. Four generations later these magnificent fish have been extirpated from most waterways or approach single- or double-digit counts where they have managed to persist.

From Anger to Action

Scientists are not normally known for displaying rage, but we left normal several decades ago, the moment the Keeling Curve, measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, began its exponential climb.

Frustrated with the disconnect between several thousand pages of scientific reports and the urgent need for action, I joined the Center for Biological Diversity’s 2021 lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service challenging the agency’s failure to protect the hitch.

I became a plaintiff in a lawsuit for a fish I’ve never seen.

The lawsuit addresses decades of California Fish and Wildlife data showing the hitch’s precipitous decline, echoed by local volunteers’ (the Chi Council) and fishers’ ever-diminishing spring migration counts and researchers documenting ontogenic dietary shifts in trophic habitats for spawning hitch populations. Every piece of evidence pointed in the same direction: Pomo elders seeing flesh-eating parasites worming into hitch skin, middle-aged tribal members unable to find any hitch to show their children, and newly minted Tribal staff monitoring abnormal levels of dissolved oxygen, hazardous algal blooms, and cyanotoxins.

Testing water samples
Sarah Ryan testing Clear Lake water samples. Photo: Jeanine Pfeiffer

Sarah Ryan, Tribal EPA director at Big Valley Rancheria, initiated the first interagency effort to formally track and respond to fish kills. Together, we set up an iNaturalist citizen science fish-kill monitoring project for Clear Lake that correlates with the Tribe’s water-quality monitoring data stream. To improve hitch habitat, lakeside Tribes have led efforts in cyanobacteria bloom tracking and mitigation, aerated shorelines to increase oxygen content, sent fish tissues off for toxins analysis, removed invasive species and trash, and replanted native tule reeds.

“[The Service’s failure to act] really hurt me because I worked all these years to help protect the hitch, and to find out that it wasn’t even considered or even halfway there, I felt bad for Tribal members who don’t have access to the fish to eat, as well as the fact that the hitch would no longer just be there for a food source. Just knowing that the system is broken is a sad thing.”

Irenia Quitiquit, Robinson Rancheria Tribal Council member and elder

A Culturally Important Species

The hitch belongs to the minnow family, reaching the length of an average hand span at adulthood. For a decent meal, you’d need to cook up three or four at least, a number I could easily eat straight from the frying pan — a habit I’ve indulged with surf smelt at a Tolowa Dee-Ni fish camp, another rapidly diminishing, culturally important species with associated traditions for Native California Tribes.

Another standing declarant in the lawsuit — Big Valley Rancheria tribal historic preservation officer Ron Montez, Sr. — shared this account of the importance of chi (hitch) and their decline:

“In the old days people used to come over from nearby areas like Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and the Sacramento Valley to camp out along the creeks, and there would be hundreds of Native people catching chi. People would shout, “The chi are running! Look at the fish over there! Chi! Chi!” and we would grab a bucket or a sack or even just our t-shirts.

There were so many chi. Everyone was excited because fish were jumping and flopping all over the place. I remember having so much fun — I would be soaking wet from diving after them, catching them, and throwing fish to the younger ones to put in the bucket — we were just laughing and having a great time.

Once we got enough fish, it was time to quit. After that we would take the fish back to the reservation, and then it was a community time where everybody would sit around and clean fish together. We would supply fish to the mothers and aunties and people cleaning them. I remember that everybody was happy because we knew we had fish — we knew we had some chi — and it brought a good feeling that we had food now.

Chi were still running back then — in the 1960s, 70s, even 80s — but it was getting less and less. You could still hear the call that “the chi is running” and everybody still did the same thing and took off to gather them. Now … every once in a while somebody tells me, “Oh yeah, the chi ran for a little bit over in this creek over here,” or “yeah, we got a few, but they are all gone now.”

The abundance is gone. The excitement and that cultural aspect of it is gone. It is a sadness now that we feel whenever we talk about chi because they are not like they used to be. That community relationship around them is not there anymore.”

These days, since the state listing of hitch makes fishing for them illegal, the primary ways local Tribes can get their hands on chi is through applying for scientific collection research permits or during urgent rescue operations — when local creek waters are too hot, too toxic, or have too little oxygen in them and a fish kill is imminent.

A Ticking Clock

In April 2022, in response to the lawsuit, the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to “re-evaluate the conservation status of the Clear Lake Hitch” and develop a new 12-month finding to consider Endangered Species Act protection. Currently the agency is holding out until January 2025 to do so, treating the hitch as yet another species to be added to its National Listing Workplan for 2022-2027, which already contains 310 species out of 500 needing review.

This ruling brings to mind the several decades of parallel government heel-dragging on the decommissioning of four hydroelectric facilities on the Klamath River, dam removals essential to securing the future of salmon and orca. Two more devasting spring runs on Clear Lake’s tributaries without federal protection could prove fatal.

The Clear Lake hitch, and the peoples whose lifeways are intertwined with its existence, can’t wait until 2025. Reams of historical and contemporary data on hitch populations already exist, and there’s no statutory threshold definition or specific quantification of the level of data necessary — listing decisions always depend on “the best available science.”

Clear Lake hitch
Photo: Alix Tyler (used with permission)

There is one person who can order the Fish and Wildlife Service to step up before we no longer have a choice. Given the power of the secretary of the Interior to determine when a species is to be listed as endangered, the Honorable Deb Haaland could make a difference for this invisible species with the stroke of a pen — before it disappears into extinction like its long-lost cousins.

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:

Why Indigenous Knowledge Matters to the Future of Fisheries

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Protect This Place: The Langkawi Archipelago, an Ancient Jewel

This nature haven, an important area for marine mammals, is losing its luster as developments come at a price to the ecosystem and wildlife.

The Place:

Langkawi Archipelago, Malaysia, a UNESCO Global Geopark

Why it matters:

Protect This PlaceLangkawi is a place of geological significance, a cluster of 109 tropical islands sitting at the interface between the Straits of Malacca and the Andaman Sea. The archipelago’s natural history dates back more than 550 million years, making it the oldest part of Malaysia and the first landmass in Southeast Asia to have emerged from the seabed. The archipelago is celebrated for its ancient rock formations and geological structures, with plenty of minerals and fossils.

In appreciation of its geological heritage it was awarded the UNESCO Global Geopark status in 2007, the first place in the region to be accorded that status.

Sunset in Langkawi
Sunset in Langkawi.

Langkawi consists of a wide range of productive habitats, from marine ecosystems, riverine landscapes and lowland forests to rainforest-covered mountains that are home to a plethora of wildlife. Some species are endemic to the area, including the bent-toed gecko (Cyrtodactylus langkawiensis) and Maxburetia gracilis, a type of palm. Ancient palm-like cliff cycads (Cycas clivicola) dating back 270 million years can also be found in Langkawi, making the area an evolutionary laboratory for some flora and fauna. Langkawi also has its famous flying five: the colugo (Galeopterus variegatus), the red giant flying squirrel (Petaurista petaurista), the flying paradise tree snake (Chrysopelea paradisi), the twin-spotted flying frog (Rhacophorus bipunctatus) and the flying dragon (Draco sp.).

Unknown to many, the coastal waters around Langkawi harbor at least five marine mammal species. It is one of the few places in the region that hosts relatively healthy populations of cetaceans. Some of the largest known group sizes of Indo-Pacific finless porpoises (Neophocaena phocaenoides) and Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins (Sousa chinensis) have been observed and recorded in the area. Moving farther offshore of Langkawi, you may be greeted (if you’re lucky) by species such as Bryde’s whales (Balaenoptera edeni), Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) and spinner dolphins (Stenella longirostris). Closer to the mainland you may find elusive and endangered Irrawaddy dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris).

Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins
Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins leap from the ocean.

To top it all off, Langkawi is also a bastion of traditional Malay culture on this northwestern coast of peninsular Malaysia. The local legends and folklores, linked closely to old Malay culture, and traditional art forms provide a touch of color to Malaysia’s oldest corner. One such legend tells the story of Mahsuri, a young Malay woman falsely accused of adultery who, in the final moments of her public execution, cursed the island to be unable to prosper for seven generations. Many believe that her curse doomed Langkawi to a supposed late-to-bloom economic development. Other myths tell of fights and misunderstandings that led to the unique location names on the island.

Today locals practice paddy farming on the island while water buffaloes soak lazily in mud puddles among water hyacinth bloom, accompanied by cattle egrets. A drive off the tourist track reveals traditional wooden village houses, representing the local culture and Malay identity.

The threat:

As a tourist haven, Langkawi is constantly being developed. Over the past decade the island’s ever-changing landscape and coastlines have been rapidly transformed. Many coastal areas, mangrove forests and forests continue to suffer from land clearing and planned massive-scale land reclamation to make way for human activities. With more people settling here, more waste is generated, yet Langkawi lacks a proper and efficient waste management system and, in some areas, suffers from improper sewage management.

Unregulated tourism activities also pose a significant threat to Langkawi’s environment and wildlife: Increasing high-speed boat traffic from tour boats, ferries and jet skis erodes the banks of the mangrove forests and threatens marine wildlife with propeller strikes and noise pollution. Dolphins are sustaining severe wounds from interactions with marine debris and people; some have past traumatic injuries from propeller strikes.

My place in this place:

Chocolates. Duty-free shopping. Eagle feeding.

These are some of the most common words many would use when Langkawi is mentioned.

Conservation. Career growth. Friendships.

This is what comes to mind when we think of Langkawi. The island holds a special place in our hearts and has been a constant in our life-changing conservation journey.

Picture karstic formations dotting the landscape, with emerald waters so tempting that all you want to do is jump in — something we often did during our lunch breaks at sea while we were on survey for cetaceans. Our work in Langkawi often took us off the beaten path, and we were privy to parts of it that many people never get to see. Studying the dolphins here, it often feels like they’ve become our comrades, friends we see as we work. We have come to recognize many of these animals, calling them “the OGs” (short for the originals). We watch them grow and mature, some even becoming mothers, and watch their calves become adults. Our time with them fuels our passion and need to study and protect these animals.

humpback dolphin
A breaching humpback dolphin.

For us researchers there’s no shortage of truly unforgettable wild encounters. A near-death experience saw us cowering on the boat as we were caught in the middle of a feeding frenzy, with needlefish frantically leaping out of the water in attempts to escape the dolphins. The long, slender jaws of a needlefish can pierce skin and can even be deadly if you’re sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thankfully, everyone made it out without a scrape.

Less dangerous encounters have included moments like our first Bryde’s whale sighting, just minutes after one of the team members had remarked that finding whales in these waters would be near impossible. But the emerging dorsal fin, attached to a body way too big to be a dolphin, had every one of us either screaming in awe or stunned into a silent shock.

Bryde's whale
Bryde’s whale

Having Langkawi as a setting for work is a great privilege — which is why, off the boat and on land, we strive to bring our experience to the locals, especially the youth. Our work has taken us to schools and public events, where we’ve showcased our research and conservation in the hopes of inspiring ocean stewardship.

Langkawi’s marine environment is a perfect living laboratory for nature learning. The variety of micro-habitats around the archipelago make it possible for many marine species to thrive. We’ve been able to take students out on boat trips to see the dolphins and check out intertidal shores; we’ve told them about the cliff cycads growing off the rocky limestone outcrops — plants that have existed for more than 270 million years. These experiences are rewarding and humbling.

Field trip
A field trip out to sea with local youth.

We’ve made friendships here and fostered camaraderie with the local community as well as the many volunteers and interns who have braved the sun, rain and waves on the boat with us. These friendships have been an unforeseen pleasure, making our long, strenuous days out in Langkawi’s waters more enjoyable.

Who’s protecting it now:

There is presently no law in place protecting Langkawi’s coastal areas and waters. However, efforts to lobby for marine environmental protection and preservation are underway. MareCet, a Malaysian NGO devoted to marine mammal conservation, has shared and contributed research findings and knowledge about marine mammals to several coastal development plans in Langkawi and across to the adjacent mainland coast. Other actions taken by MareCet include submitting open letters against massive reclamation projects in Langkawi and successfully nominating and acquiring international recognition of Langkawi’s waters as an IUCN Important Marine Mammal Area since 2019. Local NGO groups such as Trash Hero Langkawi also expend significant efforts in conducting cleanups around the island. The Department of Fisheries Malaysia manage the adjacent offshore Payar Island Marine Park and have ongoing efforts in restoring the coral reefs in the area.

What this place needs:

Langkawi requires more high-quality ecotourism and a better marketing strategy to promote and heighten the value of its natural environment and biodiversity. The mass tourism direction it’s been moving in over the past decade — despite the official tourism tagline that reads, “Naturally Langkawi” — is a problem. To that end, more capacity building for better-quality nature tourism activities should be provided to local tour operators, and local youth should be encouraged to participate.

In environmentally sensitive areas, tourism activities should be regulated with stricter enforcement. MareCet has planned efforts with local stakeholders to lobby for vessel speed-limit zones in some critical marine areas in Langkawi to safeguard the well-being of cetaceans and other marine wildlife. Langkawi also needs stricter laws, limits, restrictions and careful planning for developments on the island, especially those that involve land clearing and reclamation (sea filling). Protection should also be warranted for ecologically important areas.

Sewage and waste-management systems should be improved on the island, and efforts must be made toward Langkawi being a destination that reduces its consumption of single-use plastics. Scientific research on its biodiversity and ecosystems should be enhanced and continued in the long term to aid with conservation monitoring efforts that can inform management practices.

Lessons from the fight:

Island ecosystems are very hard to replace; they’re less widespread than mainland ecosystems, and endemism is often high. An island is a lot more frail, vulnerable and sensitive to disturbance. From MareCet’s experience, scientific research applied to conservation action and management is imperative to achieve more balanced development between geoheritage and nature conservation and local socioeconomic development.

As important as scientific research, conservation is more than protecting species or places; it involves human behavioral change. It’s vital to engage with the local community and stakeholders for promoting awareness and expanding the space for conservation dialogue across various stakeholders, essentially achieving socially relevant, economically productive, and environmentally sustainable outcomes in the area.

weaving
The dying tradition of weaving sea pandanus.

It’s equally important to integrate conservation education in schools to raise awareness and empower the local youth to be stewards of their island home. Innovative approaches to raising awareness are also an advantage in terms of outreach success — for example, field trips and thought-provoking games.

Follow the fight:

You can learn more about what we do and our updates in Langkawi through our blog, newsletter and social platforms on Facebook and Twitter.

If you are keen to know more about Langkawi Archipelago, here are some publications:

Previously in The Revelator:

Protect This Place: Tallahassee’s Towering English Forest Faces Imminent Destruction

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