Species Spotlight: The Buffy-Headed Marmoset Is Menaced on Multiple Fronts

This miniature monkey from Brazil faces a losing battle with disease, invasive species and an ever-shrinking habitat.

As the rainforests of Brazil disappear, so do their unique inhabitants. A tiny monkey represents the dangers faced by much of Brazil’s biodiversity but also illustrates the opportunity we have to save them.

Species name:

The buffy-headed marmoset (Callithrix flaviceps)

Description:

This miniscule marmoset is a small, neotropical primate that weighs just 1 pound (460g) on average. It’s endemic to the Atlantic forests of the southeastern region of Brazil, where it has the smallest distribution of any species in the Callithrix genus.

Buffy-headed marmosets have a light, gray-brownish coat, with a cream-colored face, a yellowish-beige head and neck, and short, yellowish ear tufts. One endearing characteristic is the grayish shade of the fur above their eyes, which gives their faces a clownish appearance.

Where it’s found:

These marmosets live mainly in the Atlantic forest fragments in the states of Espírito Santo and Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil. They range from south of the Rio Doce in Minas Gerais into the mountainous region of Espírito Santo state. The southernmost part of the species’ range extends west into eastern Minas Gerais, where it’s found in scattered localities in the Rio Manhuaçu basin as far as the Manhuaçu municipality.

The range of the species distribution overlaps with that of buffy tufted-ear marmoset (C. aurita), where a natural hybridization zone occurs.

Major threats:

The species inhabits areas that have suffered the effects of numerous anthropogenic pressures through extensive fragmentation and deforestation of forests due to expansion of urban areas, mining and agricultural activities. This has led to the replacement of native flora by pastures, coffee and eucalyptus plantations, as well as harmful activities like burning that are associated with agricultural expansion.

In addition to these threats, the introduction of invasive primate species such as the common marmoset (C. jacchus) and black-eared marmoset (C. pencillata) precipitated a serious increase in competition and hybridization with the buffy-headed marmoset. Hybridization is particularly concerning as it leads to the loss of the genetic characteristics and could ultimately be a cause of extinction if the current scenario persists.

Another serious threat to the species comes from emerging diseases such as yellow fever, which since the last epidemic outbreak in 2016 has eliminated countless individuals of the species in the wild. We estimate that this has led to a sharp drop in C. flaviceps in some regions.

IUCN Red List status:

The buffy-headed marmoset status has only recently been updated to critically endangered by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species due to a drastic population reduction. This decline is in large part the consequence of habitat destruction, the effects of hybridization and competition with invasive marmoset species, and the yellow fever epidemic that has reduced at least one of the more significant subpopulations by 90%.

Notable conservation programs or legal protections:

The Brazilian Ministry of Environment, through the ICMBio (Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation), has created National Action Plans that aim to prioritize conservation actions to support endangered species. The National Action Plan for the Conservation of the Atlantic Forest Primates and the Maned Sloth (PAN PPMA), created in 2018, covers 13 native species, including the buffy-headed marmoset and the closely related buffy-tufted marmoset, also an endangered species.

There are also initiatives for the conservation of marmosets, such as the Mountain Marmosets Conservation Program, which has been working in collaboration with several researchers and national and international institutions to put into practice the actions established by the PPMA PAN.

Through this program a series of guides, protocols and decision keys are currently being developed to conduct studies and research with C. flaviceps. and C. aurita. One of the actions originated from this international project was the creation of the Mountain Marmosets Conservation Center at the Federal University of Viçosa, which is the first center of primatology in the world focused exclusively on both mountain marmosets, and in developing conservation activities in situ and ex situ.

Our favorite experiences:

Carla: My favorite experience with this species came at a moment of great stress and concern.

I was conducting a primate community assessment at my study site, at the Private Protected Reserve of Natural Heritage — Feliciano Miguel Abdala in Caratinga, Minas Gerais, following the yellow fever outbreak that hit the southeastern region of the Atlantic forest late in 2016.

This site was once known for having one of the most important subpopulations of the species. However, the forest had become eerily quiet, and after several months of intense field work there were no signs of the groups that used to range this 4 square mile (1,000-hectare) forest fragment. I began to suspect the worse and to fear that the marmosets had been decimated and perhaps become locally extinct.

Fortunately, while I was conducting this monitoring, I finally managed to locate a couple of groups. It was a tremendous relief to me to see these animals and to know that they had not become locally extinct. Since that time I have been keeping track of these primates and I hope that our work will lead us to new findings and benefit their conservation in the wild.

Sarisha: I’m currently studying the buffy-headed marmoset at Macedônia Farm, a private natural reserve in Ipaba, a small town located in central Minas Gerais. Here I lead a population survey to contribute knowledge about the species locally and to develop conservation strategies.

There hadn’t been any previous studies focusing on the species in this region, and we only had a few reports of their historic presence. Nevertheless, we managed to discover a few healthy and large groups, bringing a positive perspective for the species in the area.

For me, my favorite experience with this species has been observing these animals in the wild, in what remains of their natural habitat. The buffy-headed marmoset is a remarkable little primate, so for me it is these moments during fieldwork where I can appreciate their beauty and witness their dexterity in the trees.

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

To effectively conserve this marmoset we need urgent studies concerning the occurrence of hybridization, interaction with the invasive species and the impacts of deforestation and yellow fever.

On top of that, there are significant knowledge gaps regarding their general behavior and ecology that we would like to fill by conducting further research.

Key research:

Ferrari, S. F. (1988). The behaviour and ecology of the buffy-headed marmoset, Callithrix flaviceps (O. Thomas, 1903) (Vol. 1988). University College London.
Ferrari, S. F. (2009). Social Hierarchy and Dispersal in Free-Ranging Buffy-Headed Marmosets (Callithrix flaviceps). The Smallest Anthropoids, 155–165. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0293-1
Hilário, R. R. (2003). Padão de Atividades, Dieta e Uso do Habitat por Callithrix flaviceps na Reserva Biológica Augusto Ruschi, Santa Teresa, ES. Ecologia, May 2009, 1–115.
Malukiewicz, J. (2019). A Review of Experimental, Natural, and Anthropogenic Hybridization in Callithrix Marmosets. International Journal of Primatology, 40(1), 72–98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-018-0068-0

Laws Must Adapt for Climate Refugees

As climate change pushes people and families across international borders, they’ll find few protections. That can be fixed.

By Katharine M. Donato, Georgetown University; Amanda Carrico, University of Colorado Boulder, and Jonathan M. Gilligan, Vanderbilt University

Climate change is upending people’s lives around the world, but when droughts, floods or sea level rise force them to leave their countries, people often find closed borders and little assistance.

Part of the problem is that today’s laws, regulations and international agreements about migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees offer few, if any, special protection to those forced to leave because of climate conditions.

National laws focus primarily on violence and conflict as drivers of forced migration and rarely consider environmental stress. In fact, no nation’s immigration system currently has environmental criteria for admission. International agreements such as the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Global Compact for Refugees mention the impacts of natural disasters and environmental degradation, but they are not legally binding.

The Biden administration has started exploring ways to identify and assist people who are displaced by climate change. But climate-driven migration is complicated.

Often, the environmental stressors associated with climate change are only one factor pushing people to migrate. For example, many migrants from Guatemala trying to enter the U.S. have struggled under severe droughts or storms, but many also fear crime and violence if they move to cities in their homeland to find work. Others are seeking opportunities that they and their children don’t have.

As experts in migration and climate risk, we have been studying how climate change is displacing people within their own countries and often pushing them to cross borders. Here are some of the key challenges the Biden administration faces and reasons this effort can’t wait.

How many climate migrants are there?

No one knows exactly how many climate migrants exist now or how many people will become climate migrants in the future, but current estimates are high.

In the coming years, the rapid pace of climate change combined with a global population nearing 8 billion people is likely to create unprecedented stress around the world. Recent studies show that dry spells and drought are already associated with increased migration.

As that stress intensifies, the need to escape hazards and threats is replacing the desire to seek opportunity as the key driver of international migration.

Two women carry small children and water jugs across a dry, empty landscape — *Drought displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Ethiopia in 2016. The vast majority stayed within the country’s borders.* *UNICEF Ethiopia/2016/Tesfaye,* *CC BY-NC-ND*

Disasters caused more than 23 million people a year to relocate over the past decade, the majority of them within their own countries, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Global Climate Report. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that this will increase as global warming intensifies. The World Bank projects that climate change will drive 143 million people in Latin America, Africa and South Asia alone to leave their homes by 2050. Many come from poor regions that have contributed little to global warming.

Legal definitions of ‘refugee’ are narrow

Until recently, scholars identified wars and conflict as principal sources of displacement.

Starting in the 1980s, some scholars began using the term “environmental refugee” for those forced to leave their homes because of disruptions related to human or naturally produced environmental events, such as desertification, deforestation, land degradation and rising sea levels.

But the international definition of refugee doesn’t include climate change.

The U.N.’s 1951 Refugee Convention establishes the obligations and responsibilities its member nations have to refugees. It defines refugees as people who are forced to flee their homelands because of fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.

In contrast, international law does not clearly define migrants or climate migrants. Thus, all migrants are subject to the immigration laws of their destination countries. Since these immigration laws also lack environmental criteria for accepting migrants, climate migrants often have nowhere to go.

Changing views of climate migration

While climate migrants are not legally considered refugees, many are highly vulnerable.

Lacking resources, climate migrants are likely to be poorer than most other international migrants. This may put them at a disadvantage as more countries’ policies scrutinize the economic prospects of immigrants before permitting them entry.

Yet climate migrants do not fit cleanly into categories of those who migrate voluntarily and those who are displaced by factors beyond their control.

Take the case of Ioane Teitiota, a man from the island nation of Kiribati who sought refugee status in New Zealand in 2013. He was ultimately deported on the grounds that his life wasn’t in immediate danger in his homeland. But while Kiribati isn’t underwater yet, it is under stress as habitable land becomes more scarce and water supplies become contaminated by saltwater.

The U.N. Human Rights Commission rejected Teitiota’s appeal in 2020, but it also warned that governments could be in violation of U.N. agreements if they send people back to situations where climate change has created life-threatening risks.

Rethinking the role of disasters

Climate change and other environmental stresses have increasingly become drivers of displacement, but in ways that do not fit neatly within the bright dichotomy that law and policy use to distinguish between refugees and other people on the move.

We believe it’s time for countries worldwide to rethink the role of disasters and climate change in migration, recognize the rights of those displaced by environmental causes and reform international and national laws and policies, which are out of date with what’s known today about climate change and displacement. Nations may be reluctant to offer what may seem like a new portal for migrants, but evidence suggests those numbers will only rise, and countries need to be prepared.

Katharine M. Donato, Donald G. Herzberg Professor of International Migration, and Director, Institute for the Study of International Migration, Georgetown University; Amanda Carrico, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, University of Colorado Boulder, and Jonathan M. Gilligan, Associate Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Vanderbilt University

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

The Big Threat of Fences Across the West

The American West contains 620,000 miles of fencing, threatening the migration of pronghorn, mule deer and other species.

With the arrival of spring each year, pronghorn that winter in the Upper Green River Valley of Wyoming begin a journey of more than 100 miles to their summer habitat near Grand Teton National Park.

It’s one of the longest migrations of large mammals remaining in North America. But their trek — and a similar one made by mule deer — is made more difficult by human developments along the way, particularly fences.

“The total length of fencing around the world may now exceed that of roads by an order of magnitude, and continues to grow due to a global trend towards land partition and privatization,” wrote researchers of new U.C. Berkeley-led study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

Wyoming is no exception. There the researchers found nearly 3,800 miles of fences in their study area alone — twice the length of the U.S.-Mexico border. Their research tracked GPS-collared pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) and mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) during two years of their migrations to better understand how fences affect the animals’ movements and which kinds of fences may be most difficult.

Fences aren’t always bad for wildlife — some can keep animals off roads, for instance — but they can also pose threats.

For animals like pronghorn and mule deer, fences can halt or change migration routes. Animals that attempt to go over or under also risk becoming entangled and perishing. Juveniles are particularly at risk. A 2005 Utah State University study of ungulate migration across Colorado and Utah found the youngsters died in fences 8 times more often than adults. Many others died of starvation or predation when they weren’t able to cross fences and were separated from their mothers.

dead pronghorn caught in fence — A radio-collared pronghorn perishes after being tangled in unmodified barb-wire fencing while trying to cross. Photo: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Borderlands Research Institute (CC BY 2.0)

Most of the fences the animals encounter run along the edges of livestock pastures, private property lines or roads, and are composed of four or five strands of barbed wire. Some have woven wire at the bottom, the most common type of fence for corralling sheep but also the most lethal to wildlife.

“A better understanding of wildlife responses to fencing is … critical to conservation,” the researchers of the U.C. Berkeley study wrote.

But here’s what we do know: The study found that both pronghorn and mule deer “were extensively affected by fences.”

Each year an average mule deer encountered fences 119 times and pronghorn 248 times. In about 40% of those encounters, the fence changed the animal’s behavior. And that behavior, they found, was more complex than simply crossing or not crossing the fence.

Often the animals “bounced,” or rapidly moved away from the fence when they couldn’t quickly cross. “Such avoidance of fences can drive animals away from high‐quality resources and reduce habitat use effectiveness,” they wrote.

Other times the animals paced back and forth along the fence line, a behavior that could strain energy resources. And occasionally they became trapped in areas with a high concentration of fences, like livestock pastures.

This can create other problems.

“Constraining animal movements for prolonged periods within limited areas may trigger human–wildlife conflicts,” the researchers found. Pronghorn, for example, have been seen in new developments in Colorado Springs, where they’ve been hit by cars and shown up at the airport.

Mule deer and pronghorn also behave differently when encountering fences. Mule deer are more likely to jump a fence, and pronghorn to crawl under.

“The reluctance to jump means that pronghorn movements can be completely blocked by woven‐wire sheep or barbed‐wire fences with low bottom wires — the two most common types of fences across their home range in North America,” the researchers found.

Considering that the American West may have upwards of 620,000 miles of roadside and pasture fences, “fence modifications for conservation might be more urgent than currently recognized,” they wrote.

Efforts are underway to encourage or require more “wildlife-friendly” fences that “are very visible and allow wild animals to easily jump over or slip under the wires or rails,” according to recommendations from Colorado’s Parks and Wildlife agency.

Further guidance from Sustainable Development Code, an organization that works on sustainability issues with local governments, recommends using smooth, instead of barbed wires; limiting the height of fences 42 inches; allowing 16 inches of clearance at the bottom; and including wide spacing between wires.

person working on fence — Raising net-wire fencing to a height that pronghorn can crawl under. Photo: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Borderlands Research Institute (CC BY 2.0)

“There are other forms of wildlife-friendly fencing, including ‘lay-down’ or temporary fences that permit wildlife crossing during critical migratory seasons,” the group reports.

Making fence lines more visible is also helpful to other animals, including birds. Low-flying birds, like grouse, also die in fences across the West’s rangelands.

That’s why wildlife managers are beginning to push for removing or modifying fences, but the effort can be costly. To address this concern, the researchers developed a software package, available to wildlife managers and other researchers, that highlights fences posing the biggest threats to animal movement. They hope it will help make the best use of limited conservation funds and help protect critical migration pathways.

“We demonstrate that when summed and mapped, these behaviors can aid in identifying problematic fence segments,” they wrote. And that could help save a lot of pronghorn, mule deer and other animals.

Fisher Rewilding: How Washington State Is Restoring a Native Carnivore

Years of work in the Pacific Northwest is paying off. It started with preserving the ecosystem so native species would have something to return to.

There aren’t too many animals that will eat a porcupine for lunch, but fishers are at the top of the list.

Fishers (Pekania pennanti) are members of the mustelid family and a relative of otters, minks and martens. Quick on the ground and agile tree climbers, these forest dwellers couldn’t out-maneuver trappers in the 1800s, who relentlessly pursued the housecat-sized carnivores for their high-value pelts.

This overexploitation, combined with a loss of habitat from logging and other development, drastically reduced fisher populations across their ranges in the northern U.S. and Canada.

Some populations have rebounded, but on the West Coast, critically low numbers persist today. Despite that, most fishers lack protection; so far only one population in the Southern Sierra Nevada is federally listed as endangered.

A legal battle by a coalition of environmental groups (including The Revelator’s parent organization, the Center for Biological Diversity) seeking federal protections for Pacific fishers has dragged on for more than two decades.

In the meantime, the state of Washington has taken fisher recovery into its own hands. And as new trail cam footage of four kits in the Northern Cascades showed this spring, there’s cause for optimism.

I was able to extract some audio of one of Luna’s kits! Volume ⬆️. That’s the sound of a baby fisher at night in the North Cascades🥺

The still image shows her holding one up to the trail cam! Best guess is 4-5 weeks old.#restoration #carnivores pic.twitter.com/REdikxouNC

— Jason Ransom (@wildequids) May 20, 2021

Building a Recovery

The emerging population of fishers in Washington has been years in the making.

A wildlife survey in the 1990s confirmed that fishers had likely been extirpated from the state decades ago.

But some people refused to give up on the species. In 1998 fishers were added to Washington’s list of endangered species, and a few years later a feasibility study affirmed that local forests still held adequate resources for fishers. After that, the nonprofit Conservation Northwest, the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, the National Park Service, and other federal, tribal and nonprofit partners developed a plan to reintroduce the animals.

“We had the habitat, but we didn’t have the fishers. And there weren’t any nearby that could move into Washington and occupy these historical habitats,” says Jeff Lewis, a biologist with the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife. “We identified three areas in the Olympics and Cascades that we really wanted to get fishers restored to, which were the bulk of their historical range in state.”

Between 2008-2010 biologists relocated 90 fishers from British Columbia into the Olympic mountains. Then the effort moved to the South Cascades with 81 fishers, mostly from British Columbia and a handful from Alberta. Finally, another 89 — this time all from Alberta — were released into the North Cascades beginning in 2018.

Researchers tracked the animals for the first several years with radio transmitters, then set up camera traps on the ground once potential dens were identified to see if the fishers were reproducing.

“What the data tells us for the Olympic population, for which we have the most information so far, is that the fishers are widely distributed, which is good,” says Lewis. “They’re reproducing, which is good. And they’re consistently occupying what appear to be good areas and they’re even using areas we didn’t expect.”

While the results are encouraging, it’s not a total slam dunk yet.

“The founding population involved fewer individuals than what would have been desired to have the level of diversity to ensure long-term sustainability,” says Dave Werntz, science and conservation director at Conservation Northwest. “So we plan to put another handful of fishers into the Olympics this winter.”

The researchers are still gathering long-term data on the two other Cascade populations. “We’re hopeful, and there are good initial signs,” says Lewis.

One of the reasons for that optimism is the fact that so much suitable habitat for fishers remains. But that’s only the case because conservationists stepped up in the 1990s to protect the northern spotted owl and the old-growth trees that fishers need, which resulted in the creation of the Forest Service’s Northwest Forest Plan.

“The plan set up a system of old-growth forest reserves and reserves along riparian areas for spotted owls that essentially caused the end of logging of the fishers’ preferred habitat,” explains Werntz. “That’s usually areas that have suitable den sites, which are generally big trees — either dead or live — with cavities. Those are typically found in their highest abundance in old-growth forests.”

Ecological Niche

Washington’s fisher rewilding effort has involved a partnership of different government and non-government agencies, years of work, and lots of public and private resources.

Lewis says the effort is worth it, for a number of reasons.

First, fishers are native members of the ecosystems and have unique qualities that can only be partially replaced by other carnivores.

“One of the most noteworthy things is that fishers are the most efficient carnivore of porcupines,” he says. “Where fishers have been eradicated through over-trapping or the loss of habitat, porcupine populations can explode and foresters get upset because they keep eating all the trees.”

Fishers also do all the other things that carnivores do: They poop; they spread seeds and pollen spores; they themselves are scavenged when they die, allowing their nutrients to come back into the soil. They also eat a number of prey species and can contribute toward ecosystem stability through all of those roles, he says.

Fisher runs through the snow — A fisher in Olympic National Park. Photo: NPS / Kevin Bacher.

“But to me,” Lewis adds, “there’s a bigger reason to do this work. Ecosystems are complicated and interconnected and we have a really limited understanding of how all the pieces work together,” he says. “So until we fully understand ecosystems, the best approach is what Aldo Leopold suggested: Let’s just make sure we keep all the parts when we’re tinkering with them. Let’s make sure we haven’t eliminated a role or a piece that’s important to the stability of an ecosystem. That to me is how I think of it relative to the fisher’s role.”

And there’s one more reason to restore fishers, too, he says. People overharvested fishers because of the value of their pelts, and now it’s possible to right that wrong.

“We have an opportunity,” he says. “We can bring this critter back because we have the habitat. When you look at fur-bearer conservation success stories, the bulk of those are ones where the species recovered after over-exploitation. Because you can fix that, you can stop trapping. You can move animals and restore populations in areas where they were extirpated.”

That’s harder to do for animals that have lost significant portions of their historical habitat, though.

“It’s awfully hard to restore habitat across the historical range of a species like the swift fox,” Lewis says. “That’s just a harder thing to do. You can’t restore grasslands to where they occurred in the 1700s and 1800s. But we can help fishers.”

Public Perception

Fisher restoration also presents an opportunity for public engagement in conservation — especially because many people haven’t even heard of fishers or seen one before.

“We try very hard when we’re doing the releases to make sure that kids are involved and it’s an educational opportunity and that they can experience the thrill of being involved in a recovery effort,” says Werntz. “That’s going to lead to an appreciation and a continued sense of wonder at nature that will carry with them throughout their lives.”

Child looking at fisher — A child peers into a box holding a fisher before its release in Olympic National Park in Dec. 2016. Photo: NPS / Kevin Bacher.

He says he’s encouraged by what he’s seen so far with the re-establishment of fishers in Washington.

One of the things that’s made the effort so successful, he says, is the partnership between nonprofits, government agencies and tribes. “Different partners can do things at different times,” he adds. It allowed them to raise money for a variety of sources, carry out work across the border in Canada, and get through some challenging political obstacles, including a government shutdown.

“That kind of diversity in coordination with partners really allowed us to be a resilient recovery team,” says Werntz. “And I think that cooperative coalitions may be an important model for future recovery work.”

And some of that work is already underway. Returning fisher populations to the state, it turns out, is just one of multiple efforts to restore native animals in the region. Conservation Northwest is also involved in other recovery efforts for grizzlies, gray wolves, Canada lynx and wolverines.

And like the spotted owl protection efforts benefitting fishers, there’s hope that native species reintroductions and restoration can have ecosystem-wide value.

“The notion is if you provide for those wide-ranging species, you’re going to be providing habitat and conditions for a whole suite of other organisms,” Werntz says. “And then you’re really enhancing biological conservation across the landscape. And that’s the underlying goal.”

Life After Wildlife Trafficking: What Happens to Rescued Animals?

A serious lack of data about the fate of wildlife saved from illegal trade leads to calls for better information and accountability.

In 2013 authorities at Bangkok’s main airport busted a smuggler carrying 54 ploughshare tortoises from Madagascar crammed in a suitcase. The seizure of what amounted to about 10% of the critically endangered species’ wild population made news around the world.

What happened to those animals later did not generate as many headlines, says Jan Schmidt-Burbach, head of wildlife research and animal welfare at World Animal Protection.

Half of the tortoises died soon after their rescue — a surprise, he says, because the animals are tough and should have been able to survive. The rest went to a government rescue center in Thailand, only to end up among a group of animals that later disappeared and were suspected stolen. That second suspected crime was possible, in part, because there was resistance from center managers, he says, to marking the tortoises’ shells to make them traceable.

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Cases like this illustrate two of the biggest problems with the fight against the illegal wildlife trade: the scarcity of regulations for the treatment of animals after they’ve been rescued, and the lack of data regarding what happens to them.

“That lack of transparency with confiscated wild animals opens doors to laundering and just inappropriate handling,” says Schmidt-Burbach.

International pressure to tackle the illegal wildlife trade has increased in recent years. But a resulting increase in successful seizures of live wildlife also means authorities are often overwhelmed with animals, including species that require specialized care or are dangerous.

Falcon cage — A trafficked falcon seized in Spain during Operation Thunderbird. Photo: Interpol via USFWS.

A recent paper published in the journal Animals examines what happens to these creatures, and why. Focusing on Southeast Asia, a wildlife trading hot spot, the researchers found that illegally traded wildlife are often not handled in a way most beneficial to the animals due to a combination of corruption, exploitation, and lack of policy, funding, expertise and capacity.

“Yes, they were essentially rescued,” says conservation scientist Shannon Noelle Rivera, the paper’s lead author. “But seizure does not mean rescue by any means, and a lot of times they end up right back in the trade.”

Handled correctly, some of these animals could be successfully returned to their home habitats and help replenish populations of threatened species. Instead, they are often kept in captivity, in centers that lack the expertise, funding or the will to care for them properly.

Others disappear back into the wildlife trade. Sometimes it’s because corrupt officials sell them back into the illegal wildlife market. Other times it’s because directives to care for seized animals often lack the resources to do so. Many are released en masse, whether the environment is suitable or not, because that’s the easiest thing to do.

As Rivera’s research found, large amounts of lizards, snakes and birds are being released haphazardly and not in their native habitats: “The wrong species are getting dumped all over the place,” according to a source quoted in the paper. This puts the animals at risk of dying, becoming invasive, overwhelming the ecosystem, or carrying new diseases to other fauna and humans.

The Vagaries of “Disposal”

Other researchers say the paper, although limited to Southeast Asia, reflects a global problem.

“The key themes they’ve identified definitely ring true,” says Neil D’Cruze, global head of wildlife research at World Animal Protection and an academic visitor at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford. The best outcome, he says, is not just about following laws but ensuring the animals’ wellbeing.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, an international agreement to regulate wildlife commerce, has guidelines for what it terms the “disposal” of rescued animals. The three options include returning them to wild, captivity or euthanasia, with the latter, as the CITES resolution states, “the simplest and most humane option available.”

But tracking which option countries choose has been difficult. D’Cruze co-authored a study in 2016 that found 70% of CITES signatory countries didn’t provide any data on animal disposals on their mandatory animal trade reports because they weren’t required to do so at the time. CITES finally added a field for this information in 2018, but it’s still not compulsory. Indeed, more recent research found that only 32% of CITES signatory countries had even submitted the mandatory reports.

Once an animal is trafficked, it’s often considered lost to conservation, says Rivera, who also points out that the term “disposal” comes with the connotations of discarding.

“Just ethically looking at the exploitation and corruption that can continue after the confiscation is really important,” she says. “We’re trying to stop [wildlife trafficking] through a lot of enforcement measures,” but what happens to the animals next “just kind of slips under the radar.”

Many animals end up in various forms of captivity of extremely varying quality of care. Some sites that position themselves as true sanctuaries are actually little more than thinly veiled tourist attractions, or are reliant on tourism dollars for funding, which can create a cycle of keeping animals in perpetuity. There is also a lack of transparency about the source of these animals — some facilities have been linked to the illegal wildlife trade.

“Trying to understand where these facilities are getting their animals is extremely difficult,” says Rivera.

Stronger legislation, political support, a reduction in demand, global participation, and wildlife seizure management are among Rivera’s recommendations. A registry of rescue centers, with licensing, oversight and inspections would be a good start, she says.

D’Cruze agrees that any care centers must have strict guidelines to follow that mean they are genuine sanctuaries and lifetime care facilities.

“That means no selfies and cuddling with the cubs, no performances or tricks or unnatural behaviors, no walking with them on a leash,” he says.

The Complexity of Releases

Of course, if at all possible, an animal rescued from the wildlife trade should be returned to its native habitat.

But releasing a trafficked animal is much more complicated than finding an open field or a forest. These animals are often wounded, malnourished or dehydrated, or they’ve potentially been exposed to pathogens when they were held in close contact with other animals and species. They often require quarantine or specialized veterinary care, expensive prospects that require expertise and commitment from governments.

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“Even if there is expertise and funding, the next biggest hurdle tends to be doing it properly and mitigating the risks of harming wild populations,” says D’Cruze. That includes minimizing other animals’ exposure to diseases and releasing animals in areas with enough territory to sustain populations. Also, some captive animals have imprinted on humans to the extent that they can’t take care of themselves in the wild, can be come nuisance animals, or are particularly vulnerable to hunters.

One success story is the Wildlife Alliance’s work with the Cambodia government to create a protocol for animals from seizure through to release or lifetime care. Thomas Gray, former director of science at the nongovernmental organization, calls the repopulation of native animals around the UNESCO World Heritage site Angkor Wat “a fantastic success story.” But, he cautions, “only a tiny proportion of the animals from the wildlife trade have been able to be released there.”

Over the years, says Gray, thousands of snakes, turtles and other reptile species have been released into the wild in Cambodia by the Wildlife Alliance and the government. Yet there is no post-release information on whether they survived and what, if any, effects they had on their environments.

“We’re assuming that they are surviving,” he says. “We’re assuming that we’re returning them into the right places ecologically. And we’re assuming that they’re not having an impact on the ecology of the places where they are released. And I think those are all safe assumptions, but there’s no hard data that supports that.”

Can This Problem Be Solved?

Much of the burden to manage the results of the illegal wildlife trade is on the countries where these animals were seized or sourced, says Rivera. But the market demand for these exotics comes overwhelmingly from elsewhere. According to recent research, wealthy nations are driving this trade — the so-called WEIRD countries: western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. The biggest market by far is the U.S., with France and Italy trailing.

That’s why one of Rivera’s recommendations is for global participation in managing seizures, particularly when the source or intervening countries don’t have the resources. “We can’t just leave this up to countries that are doing the most seizures, or countries that have the most wildlife trade demand.”

D’Cruze agrees. If countries allow the legal importation and trade of exotic animals, he says they should help manage the consequences, especially as the legal and illegal trade are linked with, for example, poached animals being passed off as legal, captive-bred animals.

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And law enforcement and seizures alone aren’t enough — what happens afterwards is equally, if not more, important, according to the experts.

“All interventions need to be designed in such a way that the care of any live animals are explicitly built into your interventions,” says Gray. And it’s particularly important for any entity funding this work to encourage governments to create protocols for these animals, he says.

The process of developing those protocols starts with better information. The current lack of data means we’re missing the opportunity to develop and refine approaches for post-seizure release into the wild, and for finding ways to repopulate endangered species’ populations.

“I think if we were able to show how to do it successfully, or even how to do it unsuccessfully, then we can start rehabbing these animals a lot better and have that be a more viable option,” says Rivera.

The Race to Build Solar Power in the Desert — and Protect Rare Plants and Animals

As development of large solar projects speeds up, researchers race against the clock to study the ecosystem implications.

The Biden administration greenlighted a major new solar development in May. The Crimson Solar Project will stretch across 2,500 acres of public lands in the desert of Southern California and provide enough electricity to power 85,000 homes.

The 350-megawatt photovoltaic facility takes the country another step toward meeting the administration’s stated goal of slashing greenhouse gas emissions in half in the next 10 years. A White House statement in April proclaimed that when it comes to tackling climate change, “The United States is not waiting, the costs of delay are too great, and our nation is resolved to act now.”

Already Biden’s team has approved the first utility-scale offshore wind project in the Atlantic and taken a big step in the more complicated effort to develop wind energy in the Pacific Ocean’s deeper waters.

Expect the pace of new renewable energy projects — including utility-scale solar like Crimson — to continue to accelerate. That’s a good thing — except when this urgency collides with the glacially slow pace of life in desert ecosystems that haven’t experienced much previous construction, roads or other development. There, researchers say, we may need to proceed with more caution and more information.

“In the desert, you’re really talking about going into an undeveloped ecosystem,” says Steven Grodsky, assistant unit leader of the USGS New York Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and a professor at Cornell University. “And anytime you have a major disturbance in an ecosystem that has a generally low frequency of natural disturbance, you might shake things up a bit.”

Grodsky and colleagues have spent years researching how solar projects could affect soil, plants and animals in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. Some of that research has been published, more is forthcoming, and much, much more is still needed to better understand how the region’s ecosystems will fare.

“All of those [greenhouse gas reduction] goals entail really aggressive buildouts of renewable energy, which is a great thing in the sense that we can supplant and displace fossil fuels,” he says. “But that also gives us an opportunity to be able to guide the sustainable development of these renewables.”

And to do that, we’ll need to better understand how solar developments may affect various plants and animals.

Desert Life

Long-lived and slow-moving, the desert tortoise is perhaps the poster child for the pace of life in the desert — and an example of the threats that disturbances can cause.

Road-building, urban development, livestock grazing and off-road vehicles have devastated the tortoises, which spend a large chunk of their 80-year lifespan in burrows. The combination of threats has led to the Mojave Desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) being listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

A Mojave Desert tortoise. Photo: USFWS

Now more solar development, and the bulldozers and fences that come with it, have added another threat. And it’s one that will be felt by more than just tortoises. The area is also home to burrowing owls, kit foxes, desert iguanas, kangaroo rats, and hundreds of rare plant species.

Grodsky is currently conducting a study on federal land run by the Bureau of Land Management in the Riverside East Solar Energy Zone, an area designated for large-scale solar development about 250 miles east of Los Angeles in the Sonoran Desert. “We are working to get a better understanding of how the solar facilities might affect animal movement and their use of corridors,” he says. “So things like desert kit foxes, coyotes, bobcats, badgers.”

He and colleagues have already been studying the interactions between pollinators and plants, including queen butterflies (Danaus gilippus) and Mojave milkweed (Asclepias nyctaginifolia), in other areas with solar developments.

“What we found so far is that solar development is likely affecting soils, which is in turn affecting where and how Mojave milkweed can grow, which is affecting butterfly species that lay eggs on, and have caterpillars that eat, Mojave milkweed,” he explains.

A lot of the research is ongoing, and findings are preliminary, but one thing is clear already: Disturbing desert soils is a big deal.

“If you disrupt soils and then remove vegetation, that can have effects on ecosystems,” he says. “The more intensive the disturbance of desert soils and plants, you’re really opening up an opportunity for invasive species colonization.” So solar developments could stamp out native plants and also cause invasive ones to proliferate.

How the sites are prepared for development can make a difference in the ecological impacts. Some sites are bulldozed. That’s the worst-case scenario for all native plants.

Other times plants are mowed, which can be less disruptive. But it really depends on what’s growing.

Cacti and Mojave yucca (Yucca schidigera) respond poorly to both those scenarios. “In our study, we found seven years after site preparation they hadn’t recovered,” says Grodsky. Creosote bushes (Larrea tridentata), however, appear to grow back after they’re mowed, but it takes a while. Again, desert life is slow.

Site preparation isn’t the only factor that can affect soil and plants. A study led by Karen Tanner of the University of California, Santa Cruz examined how the shade and runoff from solar panels affect common and rare plant species. The seven-year investigation found that in good rainfall years the shade suppressed plant growth for the rare Barstow woolly sunflower (Eriophyllum mohavense). In contrast, additional runoff from the panels increased the population of the common Wallace’s woolly daisy (E. wallacei), which was unaffected by the shade.

“There’s a need to reconcile rare species conservation and green energy goals, and our work highlights some pitfalls that can hinder effective management of rare plant populations in the desert southwest,” the researchers concluded.

Design Changes

It’s possible that tweaking some of the way solar facilities are constructed and managed could aid more plants and animals. Preliminary research suggests that leaving some habitat patches within solar projects could have positive conservation benefits.

“I think that there could be alterations to the design of desert solar facilities, the spacing between individual arrays, and the creation of habitat passes within solar fields at varying sizes,” says Grodsky. “If we are going to put solar facilities in these ecosystems, let’s try to make sure they have the least impact on soil, plants and animals.”

At a solar facility built in Nye County, Nevada in 2017, fences around the property’s perimeter were built with openings in places to allow desert tortoises and other species to pass through and access the habitat within the development. Panels were also placed 18 inches higher off the ground than the industry standard to better help vegetation return.

Fence opening — An opening in a perimeter fence that allows wildlife to access habitat inside the solar facility. Photo: USFWS

“Research and monitoring studies are underway to investigate the ability of native plants to persist under solar panels and how well the project area functions as habitat for wildlife,” according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Other projects are experimenting with combining pollinator-friendly plants and solar projects to create more ecological benefits.

Location, Location, Location

Of course there’s another option for reducing the harm to desert ecosystems from solar development — don’t build there in the first place.

A 2107 study led by Madison Hoffacker of the University of California, Davis focused on other options in California, including using the built environment — such as solar panels on existing rooftops, arrays on salt-affected lands that can no longer be used for farming, and “floatovoltaics” on the surface water of reservoirs.

The researchers found more than 3,200 square miles of available surfaces in just California’s Central Valley that would be good for solar development and not in conflict with agricultural uses or protected conservation areas.

“There’s this competition for finite land resources between all these competing land uses, including renewable energy development, agriculture, conservation and urbanization,” says Grodsky. But finding ways to co-locate projects for multiple benefits or using marginal lands could help reduce the need to dig up more of the undisturbed desert.

Inevitably, though, more solar projects will be built in the desert, and it will be important to understand where they’ll have the least impact and how to best manage them with desert species in mind, he says.

“Now’s the time for researchers in the ecological community to do our part, to conduct the research and to ensure that the development is as informed as possible about the ecological effects,” he says.

That will take buy-in from developers, incentives, policy and much more funding.

There’s also a disparity when it comes to timing. Life and science move slowly in the desert, but progress does not.

“Renewable energy development is growing faster and faster,” he says. “But scientists need to go and collect field data for at least a couple of years to get anything worthwhile, and then you have to analyze it and write it up. So you’re talking about four years, and within those four years you could have another 20 large-scale solar facilities built.”

Trying to ensure research and information keeps pace with development will remain a challenge. But more and more companies are realizing that building projects sustainably is better in the long run, he says. That may be because of better PR, lower mitigation costs down the road or environmental ethics.

“But I do think that in the end, the most sustainable solar energy development will end up being a win for everyone,” he says. “Industry, the general public and natural resource managers will all benefit.”

Species Spotlight: The Large-Antlered Muntjac Faces a ‘Quiet Extinction’

This critically endangered, fanged deer species is losing out to the snaring crisis in Laos and Vietnam.

First recognized as a new species in 1993, the large-antlered muntjac is already critically endangered and heading fast toward extinction. As muntjac go, the large-antlered is the largest species, but muntjac in general are small members of the deer family Cervidae. The species is facing a “quiet extinction,” hidden away in a miniscule global range in the Annamite Mountains of Laos and Vietnam.

Species name:

Large-antlered muntjac, also known as the giant muntjac (Muntiacus vuquangensis)

Description:

Large-antlered muntjac are a rich, dark brown overall and stand approximately 2 feet (60 cm) high at the shoulder. In common with many deer, they have a white underside to the tail, which is typically raised when alarmed. Like other muntjac they have simple, two-tined antlers, long pedicels and unique paired frontal glands on the rostrum between their eyes. Males, like other male muntjac, have long, sharp canine teeth they use in fighting.

Where it’s found:

Annamite Mountain forests of Laos and Vietnam

IUCN Red List status:

Critically endangered

Major threats:

Widespread intensive snaring throughout their small range is the number-one problem. This snaring is driven by a booming wildlife trade that encompasses the derivatives of many species — from well-known products of tigers and pangolins to gelatin derived from primate bones, turtle shells and medicinal plants. The large-antlered muntjac isn’t a particular focus of the trade, but snares are indiscriminate. Trade is booming because of the economic and population growth of East Asian countries. Roads, dams, mines and other infrastructure investments make things worse, and because of sustained economic growth these are on the rise.

Illegal wildlife snares in Laos. Photo: Bill Robichaud/Global Wildlife Conservation (CC BY 2.0)

Notable conservation programs or legal protections:

NGOs are trying but have no concrete success yet. Foundation Anoulak and Asian Arks are potentially poised to make a difference, but unfortunately even the species’ legal protection does little to help.

My favorite experience:

In 2015 I saw my first wild muntjac. I was so enthralled by its cautious yet gracious movements and the delicacy of its existence that I immediately knew I wanted to do all I could to save the species from extinction. Going to the forest in Vietnam had always been sad, knowing of the challenges facing distinctive wildlife from rampant poaching. So seeing an animal, especially a large mammal, is always an exhilarating experience when, for a moment at least, I can forget about life’s problems.

I love observing animal behavior, but seeing it in the wild, from a muntjac, is almost an impossibility. More often I get a sense of joy looking through camera-trap photos thinking about the behavior I might be observing in a series of photos — perhaps a fawn chasing back and forth around its mom. These are the moments that I’m hoping to see more often in my camera-trap photos; hopefully, when their population has recovered, I can see them in real life.

Key research:

Understanding and linking proportional protection efforts to the scale of the threat (my Ph.D. focus).

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

Following the advice of leading conservationists in Southeast Asia, I’ve been pursuing research to better understand the dynamics of the snaring and the impact it has on the large-antlered muntjac. Currently there’s no data on how parameters such as snare density or spatial distribution affect population viability for any Annamite species. So, questions like “how large an area can a patrol team effectively cover?” simply can’t be answered.

Better informed, strategic in situ conservation management is needed to save the species. The species has been disappearing so fast, however, that “just in case” ex situ conservation breeding has been recommended.

3,000 Shipping Containers Fell Into the Pacific Ocean Last Winter

A rise in container-ship accidents adds to the growing marine plastic pollution problem and poses risks to ocean health, wildlife and mariners.

You’re right if you think you’ve been hearing a lot about container ships lately. One off the coast of Sri Lanka that was carrying 25 tons of nitric acid and other cargo suffered an explosion after containers caught fire on May 20 and burned for more than a week, littering the beaches with plastic pollution. And in March all eyes were on the Suez Canal, where a 1,300-foot-long container ship turned sideways and gummed up international trade with a six-day-long traffic jam. Maybe you’ve also had your shoes, bike or other online purchases delayed because of backed-up ports near Los Angeles.

But less attention surrounded a spate of container-ship accidents in the Pacific Ocean this past winter. It included one of the worst shipping accidents on record, which occurred near midnight on Nov. 30 as towering waves buffeted the ONE Apus, a 1,200-foot cargo ship delivering thousands of containers full of goods from China to Los Angeles. In remote waters 1,600 miles northwest of Hawai‘i, the container stack lashed to the ship’s deck collapsed, tossing more than 1,800 containers into the sea.

Some of those containers carried dangerous goods, including batteries, fireworks and liquid ethanol.

“This is a massive spill,” says oceanographer Curt Ebbesmeyer, who has tracked marine debris from container spills for over 30 years. The ONE Apus lost more containers in a single night than the shipping industry reports are lost worldwide in an entire year.

More photos from the ONE APUS, set 4 pic.twitter.com/DAbmXln0hA

— Maritime Cyprus Intl news forum (@maritime_cyprus) December 8, 2020

It was also only one of at least six spills since October that dumped more than 3,000 cargo containers into the Pacific Ocean along shipping routes between Asia and the United States. They include the loss of 100 containers from the ONE Aquila on Oct. 30 and 750 containers from the Maersk Essen on Jan. 16. Both ships encountered rough weather while delivering goods to the United States.

Experts say these types of spills, which tend to fly under the public’s radar, put containers into the sea that pose potential hazards to the health of the ocean and put everything from mariners to wildlife at risk.

“They’re like time capsules of everything we buy and sell, sitting in the deep sea,” says Andrew DeVogelaere, NOAA research coordinator at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in California. Those lost containers may harm wildlife and ocean health, he says, by crushing aquatic habitats or introducing new seabed features that change biological communities or even aid the spread of invasive species. They can also release hazardous cargo such as the 6,000 pounds of sulfuric acid that went into the sea when the Maersk Shanghai lost containers off of the North Carolina coast in 2018.

Despite that potential for danger, no one is tracking the lost containers in the Pacific and opinions vary about where they will come to rest. Many are likely on the ocean floor, but an unknown number may have ruptured and disgorged their contents, which typically include many thousands of consumer items made of plastic. They could float for years in the ocean or wash ashore in Alaska, Hawai‘i or other locations.

To date, the only debris known to come ashore from this winter’s accidents are giant waterlogged sacks of chia seeds, which hit Oregon beaches in December following the loss of six containers from a ship near the California coast. Federal biologists were still cleaning smelly globs of the seeds from threatened snowy plover nesting habitat in April.

The accidents come at a time when the container shipping industry we all rely on is under unprecedented strain. In April the National Retail Federation reported a 10th consecutive month of record-high imports from Asia to the U.S. West Coast, driven by skyrocketing online shopping tied to the pandemic.

It’s led to backed-up ports, delayed deliveries, and shortages of empty containers, conditions that are forecast to continue. But in a trick of the pandemic tied to both U.S. shopping patterns and Chinese factory schedules, it also put more cargo ships on the water during fall and winter, the stormiest time of year in the Pacific.

Some experts say the changes may represent a new normal for trans-Pacific container shipping. If that’s true, more spills may lie ahead — prompting calls for greater transparency and accountability from shippers.

Decades of Debris

“I’m considered persona non grata by the shipping industry,” Ebbesmeyer says when asked if he knew anything about what was aboard the ONE Apus or where it might be headed. “They blackballed me years ago. They didn’t like me shining a light in a dark place.”

That dark place is the inside of a shipping container. Back in the 1990s Ebbesmeyer began applying his oceanography skills to tracking debris from what seemed like an ever-increasing number of container accidents. One year it was 28,000 rubber bath toys shaped like ducks, beavers, turtles and frogs that spilled from a single container lost in the North Pacific. Another year it was 61,000 Nike sneakers from a handful of containers, also in the Pacific.

With a friend at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, he calculated how far the flotsam would travel. Over close to a decade, beachcombers around the world confirmed their predictions with reports of debris from Texas to Australia to the United Kingdom.

“As an oceanographer, I want to know how the ocean works,” Ebbesmeyer says. Following the debris helped him understand ocean currents and the destination of the marine debris that even by the 1990s was on the rise. But as Ebbesmeyer’s work gained notoriety, he says the industry went mum. And what little light had been shed inside shipping containers flickered out.

But the accidents didn’t stop. In 1997 a single container lost from a ship in near England spilled 5 million Lego pieces, which still wash ashore today.

There were 8,100 of these Lego links or ‘axles with eyes’ in the shipping container that fell off the Tokio Express back in 1997. This one washed up on the North coast of Cornwall yesterday. It’s still in pretty good condition, though a little distorted. pic.twitter.com/Ev0HVzgUP9

— Lego Lost At Sea (@LegoLostAtSea) May 10, 2021

In the early 2000s, it was computer monitors landing on beaches from California to Alaska. Ebbesmeyer says the shippers seldom disclosed how many items were lost, and he suspects the same silence will surround the ONE Apus and other recent spills.

“If they’d share what’s in the containers,” he says, “we might predict where the debris will land and possibly organize a response.” Spilled goods travel the waters differently depending on their weight and materials; if the scientists know those details, they can anticipate where the products will eventually land. By tracking this trash, oceanographers could learn more about where currents and winds carry other debris, too. And, says Ebbesmeyer, it might compel shippers to help pay for cleanup, an expense coastal residents and agencies usually absorb today.

But shippers seem as tight-lipped as ever. Beyond reporting the presence of certain hazardous materials, they have not released details about the 3,000 missing containers.

Who’s Minding the Ship?

According to the industry trade group the World Shipping Council, 6,000 container ships traverse the oceans every day, moving 226 million containers annually. The ships sail a dizzying array of routes among more than 200 ports and are registered in countries around the world. But because they spend much of their time on the high seas outside any one nation’s jurisdiction, governance is a mix of regulations and voluntary best practices that don’t require tracking or recovering debris from lost containers. That only happens when losses occur in nearshore waters where the United States or another country claims jurisdiction.

Container ship on the open watern — The Panama-flagged Ever Given causes disruptions in the Suez Canal in March. Photo: National Ocean Service Image Gallery

“We usually read about it in the news,” says Catherine Berg, scientific support coordinator at

NOAA’s Emergency Response Division in Alaska. Berg says no formal mechanism is in place for reporting high-seas shipping container accidents like the ONE Apus to the U.S. government. And no funding exists for NOAA scientists to track the debris, although they occasionally perform informal modeling.

Officers with the U.S. Coast Guard Joint Rescue Coordination Center in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, tell a similar story. They say shippers report container spills as a courtesy but that the agency lacks authority or funding to investigate, unless containers directly threaten U.S. shores. Instead, following the ONE Apus spill, the Coast Guard issued a notice to mariners about the hazard of floating containers, which some sailors call “steel icebergs” for their deceptively low profile on the water. The notice expired after a couple of weeks, with the assumption containers had sunk, ruptured or dispersed.

On the open seas, the shipping trade is primarily governed by the International Maritime Organization and other United Nations groups. Among their primary tools is the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) treaty, originally signed in 1914. It was last amended in 2016 with new rules on weighing of containers, intended to lessen spills.

In 2014 the IMO also endorsed an updated code of practice for cargo ships, which addresses packing, stacking and lashing of containers. Although shippers frequently blame losses on rough weather, as happened in each of last winter’s Pacific Ocean accidents, investigation often reveals underlying problems in lashing and other practices that occur before a ship even leaves port. That happened in May 2020 when the APL England lost 43 containers near Australia, forcing popular Sydney beaches to close as authorities cleaned a debris field of appliance parts, plastic boxes and face masks.

The updated code of practice is only voluntary and does not include provisions for tracking lost containers or revealing their contents. But continued cargo accidents may be forcing a change.

In 2019, when the MSC Zoe lost 280 containers in heavy weather between Portugal and Germany, volunteers and Dutch troops spent months cleaning Wadden Islands’ shores of toys, furniture and smashed televisions. Following the accident, which investigators also blamed on poor lashing, the Council of the European Union submitted a draft proposal for a new IMO rule requiring better reporting of containers lost at sea. If passed, and depending on the rule’s terms, it could one day address Ebbesmeyer’s decades-long concerns over shipper transparency.

Also following the MSC Zoe, the Dutch government commissioned a review of shipping practices and technologies that could aid in tracking containers, including equipping them with satellite tags. Echoing Ebbesmeyer’s experiences, the report said it is “hard to track down” what lies within lost containers and that improvement would require industry cooperation and investment.

Industry support may be gaining. The World Shipping Council, which has supported past amendments to SOLAS, is a cosponsor of the proposed new rule, according to the organization’s spokesperson Anna Larsson.

“We really support all and any fact-based measures to improve safety,” Larsson said in an email.

Environmental Cost

Although springtime’s calmer weather has replaced the winter storms that battered cargo ships, it’s likely whatever debris from recent spills that has not sunk to the bottom of the Pacific is still floating out there somewhere. But with so little known about the containers and their contents, it’s unclear where the debris is headed.

“Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s on the seafloor,” says Ebbesmeyer.

He gives the example of a container full of plastic telephones in the likeness of the comic-strip cat Garfield that spilled from a ship along the European coast in the 1980s. For decades, cables and shards of orange plastic mysteriously washed ashore from the phones. The mangled container that once held them was finally discovered in 2019, wedged deep in a French sea cave that’s underwater much of the year.

Thousands of other containers must lie on sea bottoms along the world’s shipping routes, says NOAA’s DeVogelaere.

In what is possibly the only study of its kind, DeVogelaere keeps his eye on a shipping container lying in 4,000 feet of water at the Monterey Bay sanctuary. It was one of 24 that toppled from a Taiwanese cargo ship in 2004 and was serendipitously discovered by one of NOAA’s remotely operated vehicles conducting unrelated research. Since 2011, DeVogelaere has monitored ecological change around the container, noting colonization by species not typically found in the immediate area. This year his team will investigate whether the container’s anti-corrosive paints, which can be toxic, may also have an ecological effect.

“We’re impacting an environment that we haven’t even begun to understand,” he says of the seafloor.

DeVogelaere’s container, which has so far remained latched shut, holds more than 1,100 steel-belted radial tires. He knows this only because it happened to land in a nearshore federal sanctuary, putting it under U.S. jurisdiction. Through a lengthy legal process, NOAA won a $3.25 million settlement from the shipper.

Such settlements take time but can occur when containers spill in nearshore waters. For instance, when the Hanjin Seattle lost 35 empty containers near Canada’s west coast in 2016, officials won a modest settlement to help pay for removal of foam insulation that littered wildlife habitat along miles of national park and First Nations beaches.

After the Svendborg Maersk lost 517 containers in the Bay of Biscay in 2014, French officials ordered the company to map sunken containers to identify commercial fishing hazards. And a settlement following the 2011 wreck of the MV Rena in New Zealand, which also caused an oil spill, included cleanup of tiny plastic beads that still wash ashore today.

Dead bird with plastic — Birds, fish, and mammals can eat plastic. Photo: USFWS

Those beads, like the Legos, computer monitors and Garfield phones, hint at the unknown contribution of container spills to marine plastic pollution, which is increasingly understood to harm birds, whales, fish and other animals through both ingestion and entanglement.

Although the World Shipping Council tracks cargo accidents, which it says lose an average of 1,382 containers annually, no one knows their true ecological impact.

But Ebbesmeyer remains concerned. He likens each spill to dumping a big box store into the ocean.

“That plastic never goes away,” he says. “It drifts around in the water or flies overhead in the stomachs of seabirds. It haunts you over time.”

When Did the Fabled Barbary Lion Go Extinct?

It wasn’t the Roman gladiators that did in this black-maned beast, but the exact date of its disappearance remains a mystery.

History books tell us that the last wild Barbary lion was probably killed in 1922 by a French colonial hunter in Morocco. But in repeating the story of this well-documented death, the history books may have left a chapter or two out of the story.

Barbary, or Atlas, lions once roamed throughout the deserts and mountains of northern Africa, ranging from Morocco to Egypt, far to the north of their sub-Saharan relatives. Previously thought to be the largest lion subspecies, they’re now considered a unique population of North African lions. Regardless of their species status, Barbary lions were once upon a time admired for their size and dark manes, although those two qualities have become more mythical over time. Many of these big cats were even kept by the royal families of Morocco and other North African nations.

It wasn’t just Africans who admired them. In Europe the lions famously battled gladiators in the Roman Colosseum, were displayed in zoos and parks, and even lived briefly at the Tower of London.

But that exploitation took a terrible toll. The Romans killed thousands of lions in their games, the Arab empire that followed squeezed the remaining animals into smaller territories, and the influx of European colonialists in the 19th century polished them off. Europeans hunted and killed so many of these animals that they quickly vanished from most of their remaining historic range. None were seen between 1901 and 1910. By the 1920s Western scientists assumed that they were gone.

Or were they? According to research published in 2013 in PLoS ONE, Barbary lions may have remained alive in the wilds of Algeria and Morocco — hidden and safe from most human eyes — for several decades, possibly as late as 1965.

The authors — including Simon Black and David Roberts of the Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology in England and Amina Fellous of the National Agency for Nature Conservation in Algiers — combed through published and firsthand accounts of lion sightings in the years after their supposed extinction. They also spoke to dozens of people who said they’d seen or heard stories about living lions well after 1922.

“Our interview work was with old people from remote Algerian communities,” Black told me when the paper came out. “We are fortunate in developing a rich data set since several colleagues have been collecting this information over 10 to 20 years, so our sources are first- or secondhand accounts.” Some of the witnesses they interviewed recalled childhood sightings of the lions. Others recounted tales told by their parents or other family members.

With those sightings in hand, the scientists set out to infer when the lions really went extinct in the wild. That was tough, because the moment of extinction for any species is rarely, if ever, witnessed by human eyes. To develop their dates researchers turned to a 2005 paper published in Mathematical Biosciences that reviewed statistical models using a species’ last sighting to pinpoint when it had most likely gone extinct in the years after the final observation. Black and his co-authors calculated that the Barbary lion probably died out in Morocco in 1948 and mostly likely went extinct in Algeria in 1958. Because we’re talking about statistical probabilities, there’s a confidence interval on that number, suggesting that the extinction date could have been slightly earlier or as late as 1965.

Of course, statistics don’t always account for human behavior. The last sighting the team was able to uncover occurred in 1956 in a forested area in Algeria, when several people on a bus saw a lion just north of the town of Sétif. Black reported that the forest “was destroyed in 1958 during the French-Algerian War, so it is possible the last lions disappeared at that time.”

If ever confirmed, that would make the Barbary lion one of the few proven extinctions caused by the ravages of war.

Why does it matter exactly when Barbary lions went extinct in the wild? Black and his co-authors said this research has relevance for the conservation of the rest of Africa’s lions. Small, fragmented populations in certain regions — typical of lions in areas throughout their range — could require additional attention to ensure their survival. “The diminishing micro-populations of lions in West Africa today mimics the decline of the Barbary lion in North Africa,” Black wrote last year.

They also advocated against declaring any species extinct too quickly. Doing so, they say, could remove any incentive to keep looking for and conserving that species.

But the fate of Barbary lions, as it turns out, is not entirely decided. They may have gone extinct in the wild decades ago, but its genes persist within around 100 captive lions scattered across more than a dozen zoos. These animals, probably none of whom are pure Barbary lions, include descendants of the big cats once owned by Morocco’s sultans and kings. That makes them historically, culturally and genetically important, and they may yet have a role in the conservation of the North African lion, especially the animals in captivity. The lions in Morocco, Black wrote, “may represent nearly half of the captive collection of all northern lions. If we ignore these animals, it will be to our peril.”

(Adapted from an article previously published by Scientific American.)

As Tourism Returns, We Can’t Allow Cruise Companies to Destroy Coral Reefs for Profit

The COVID-19 pandemic put much of the tourism industry on hold. Once restrictions are lifted, we need to be wary of what comes next.

As summer approaches, reports of the return of leisure travel are beginning to emerge following the unprecedented shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic. Many of the world’s most popular tourism destinations have begun to plan an eventual reopening, exploring what their “new normal” will look like.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused most of these sites to fall silent, including one of the world’s busiest cruise-ship ports: the docks on Grand Cayman Island. In April 2020, the global pandemic shut down the island’s port, which normally saw the arrival of dozens of cruise ships and thousands of tourists every month. The Cayman Islands was the only Caribbean nation to voluntarily halt its cruise economy, prioritizing the safety of its residents. Local businesses, hurt by the loss of tourism dollars, have already started going under; iconic local spots that make up much of the community’s social fabric, for tourists and locals alike, are being lost.

Soon, though, the ban on cruise ships will undoubtedly lift, and tourism will slowly return. And when that happens, the residents of Grand Cayman and nearby islands may find themselves worrying about another major threat posed by these cruise companies, one that runs the risk of being drowned out by the disruption caused by the pandemic.

In 2019 the Cayman Islands government announced a plan to move forward on a massive new port project in George Town Harbor, supported by two major cruise-ship operators. Without this project, cruise ships visiting the island must anchor offshore and shuttle passengers back and forth with smaller vessels — an important aspect of the local economy with historic roots in the coastal community.

The new project, estimated to cost $200 million, would allow cruise ships to come all the way to shore by building deep new docks capable of accommodating four cruise ships at a time, each of which could bring thousands of additional visitors to the island, according to the cruise companies and government supporters.

But getting to this point would require dredging 22 acres of George Town Harbor’s seabed, destroying 10 to 15 acres of fragile coral reefs in the process.

If that happens, another vital part of the fabric of Grand Cayman life would be lost.

Coral vs. Corporate Influence

Given its role in the global financial industry, the Cayman Islands may seem like the last place in the world where rule of law and good governance would be a problem. Yet even here, the ever-growing power of multinational corporations to transform environmental policy is starting to be felt.

It didn’t used to be this way.

As I wrote in my recent scientific study on the Cayman Islands, their effective marine park system has stood out as a model for coral-reef management since it was put in place in the 1980s. This area is known for its vibrant coral reefs, well-protected through the ever-expanding network of marine parks. The Cayman Islands have strict constitutional provisions and laws for protecting coral reefs, as well as international environmental policy commitments. Caymanian history and culture are also closely tied to the reefs. The first dive tourism spots in the Caribbean blossomed from Bob Soto’s little backwater dive shop on “Cheeseburger Reef” into today’s multimillion-dollar dive tourism trade.

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Despite the history and good governance, the cruise industry — notably Carnival and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines — had, prior to the pandemic, announced plans to move ahead with their plans to build the new docking facility on George Town Harbor.

Fragile Reefs, Questionable Science, Vague Promises

Those docks would devastate the local ecology. A 2015 environmental impact assessment estimated that the project would not just destroy 15 acres of reef but also negatively affect another 15 to 20 acres of adjacent habitat and pose risks to the 26 coral species in the harbor — two of which are critically endangered.

Coral disease and bleaching from elevated surface temperatures have already put the Cayman Islands’ coral reefs on the ropes; this could be the knockout punch.

The cruise companies pushing the infrastructure project have argued that there’s a way to mitigate this damage, but their proposed solution doesn’t hold much water.

They worked with the government on a plan that would pay an engineering company and a Florida-based NGO to relocate every coral lost or replant lab-grown corals in place of the ones they can’t relocate. By my estimation, the partners would need to replant and grow more than 3 million corals to make up for this destruction — triple the stated replanting goal.

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The government’s replacement goal is based on the absurd notion that a reef is simply an independent collection of corals humans can easily re-create — a bold assumption, and one yet to be supported at the proposed scale.

The reality is that reefs are slow-growing, highly complex assemblies of living and non-living things that take centuries to develop. This promised “replanting” technology is scientifically unproven at best and greenwashing at worst — meant to soothe the conscience of those troubled by the grave choice to destroy a beloved coral reef with deep meaning to its community.

The government has promised vague jobs and economic benefits if the project is built. And the CEO of Royal Caribbean, Michael Bailey, promises no taxpayer money will be used to pay for the dock.

This is not true. The Caymanian government will hand over $2.32 in tourism taxes per passenger to the cruise lines that it would otherwise collect for the citizens of Cayman. Caymanians are, therefore, paying for this infrastructure, despite mounting environmental problems on the island including a trash pile so large that locals call it “Mount Trashmore.”

Votes and Courts

There is some hope in this case, thanks to Caymanian community organizing.

Two years ago, Caymanian citizens successfully organized and secured a referendum through a robust people’s movement. Community groups like Cruise Port Referendum Cayman (CPR Cayman) implemented an aggressive ground campaign with no outside financial backing, organized only by volunteers. They focused on educating the public on the risks and uncertainties underpinning this project. Their efforts triggered a public referendum, originally scheduled for Christmas 2019, the first in Caymanian history.

The status of the referendum is currently being worked out in the courts, and it’s important that we pay attention. Currently, prominent members of CPR Cayman are acting as watchdogs to ensure the referendum, if it is ultimately held, will take place in a fair and impartial way. Before the court challenge, activists protested the original referendum, which was intentionally scheduled at the holidays, a time when many are simply not on the island — an incredibly cynical move, since under the Cayman constitution a missing vote counts as a de facto “yes” for the port.

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Despite community opposition, cruise corporation leaders are actively speaking out in support of this project’s resumption, with Michael Bayley, the CEO of Royal Caribbean, saying that they will make a decision to resurrect the pier project in the coming months.

That’s why it’s so important that we follow this ongoing case — CPR Cayman makes regular updates to their Facebook page — as local community activists continue to contest the project in court. Should our “New Normal” following the COVID-19 pandemic allow companies to break environmental laws for private gain?

Democratic Reefs

Why do these reefs matter so much? They’re what we would call “democratic reefs,” easily accessed from the shore by the public using free parking lots and open stairs. Multiple generations of Caymanians have taken the quick swim out and snorkeled with their children. One man who spoke up at a 2019 community meeting told the story of how his father, he, and now his son all took the name “Eden” after the iconic Eden Rock Reef, which will be wrecked by this project.

For people like Eden and his family, this isn’t just an environmental issue — this is about social justice. Coral reefs come with benefits for communities. They protect islands from hurricanes, provide food, attract tourism dollars and have deep cultural meaning. Lower-income people feel the loss of these services more intensely than those with more. Will the “replanted” reefs replace natural ones effectively? Or will low-income communities bear the consequences while foreign companies and scientists-for-hire sail home with increased profit? The losses for locals will stack up with eroding beaches erode, exposed homes, empty fishing grounds empty, and an end to their snorkeling trips with their children.

New Normal

The number of people standing up to this project continued to grow in 2020, even during the pandemic. This drew scorn of powerful government leaders such as McKeeva Bush, the speaker of the Legislative Assembly, who called community organizers “rascals” in public.

What happens next? Premier Alden McLaughlin hinted back in mid-April 2020 that he had grown weary of this dispute, suggesting that the vote will not happen during the current political term due to the pandemic.

That doesn’t mean the port project is dead. It’s just been pushed down the line for the next people who take office. “It will be another government that deals with that,” McLaughlin said. Given the support expressed by leaders in the cruise industry, many believe this project will resume when cruise tourism resumes.

It may seem odd to talk about this while the world is just beginning to emerge from the pandemic, but the attention we pay to COVID-19 may distract us from closely watching corporations that stand to gain from the proposed destruction of coral reefs. This may be the window of opportunity the government needs to quietly move ahead while we’re distracted with recovery.

We must unify as “rascals” to oppose corporations that continue to push their anti-environment agendas forward around the world. We must reject the false promises of scientists-for-hire.

If being a “rascal” means opposing the immoral destruction of coral reefs, consider me a rascal.

When and if the vote happens, I encourage the people of the Cayman Islands to vote no on the referendum. Likewise, I urge the people of the Cayman Islands to unite against companies violating their environmental laws. The returns are not worth the risks, namely the loss of their iconic reefs.

I encourage the U.S. public, and the wider world, to hold the cruise industry accountable for these types of immoral bypasses of domestic and international environmental policy. The industry’s shocking record of customer safety amidst the pandemic remains in the news, but this is hardly its only sin. You only need to look to the industry’s poor environmental record in the Bahamas to see what might happen in the Caymans moving forward.

If the reefs are destroyed and the restoration fails or even partially succeeds, the Caymanian people will be left to clean up, while the cruise industry continues to rake in record profits.

It is unethical to destroy coral reefs because they do not belong to us. They belong to everyone, and that includes future generations. If the project goes ahead, I hope that corporate leadership from the cruise industry will explain to young Eden, and other young Caymanians, why they cannot snorkel the reefs that their parents once did.

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